Look Back

It’s a good idea when traveling through country you’ve not been in before to stop frequently and look back over the terrain you’ve just come through. If you do this, if and when the time comes that you need to retrace your steps and come back the same way, there will be a familiarity to it all and give you more peace of mind that you’re heading in the right direction.

One Cold Summit

As we reached the mountaintop at 20,700 feet, we were hit by a blast of cold air. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind was blowing at 50 miles per hour. Fortunately, we were dressed for it. Still, we didn’t linger. Back home, a chart showed that the wind chill was minus 31° F. Not the kind of place you’d just hang out for any longer than you had to.

Corneal Abrasion

Many years ago I was climbing in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the summer. One day my eye felt irritated. Fortunately, in the nearby village of Lake Louise was a lone doctor who saw me the same day. He put some drops in my eye which made a scratch across my cornea show up very clearly. No problem, he said it would get better within a few days. He sent me back to camp with some healing eye drops, and a patch to wear over my eye for a few days. It worked, and the irritation went away. Argh!

Cold Starter

It was the dead of winter, February of 1980. I was living in a city in northern British Columbia and working the afternoon shift for the telephone company. My old van was having problems with its starter motor, and I knew it would have to be replaced soon. The day came where I could wait no longer. I bought the new motor, and was given detailed instructions on how to install it in place of the old one (I couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic to do it for me). Anyone who knows me understands that I am the least mechanical person who ever lived, and that was certainly the case back in 1980.

The old starter finally crapped out, and I had no choice but to replace it now. I got up early that morning and checked the thermometer – it was brutally cold, minus 41 degrees F. The van had quite a bit of clearance, and I could actually lie on the ground beneath it and work there. I dressed as warmly as I could, went outside and wrestled with the old starter for a while until I finally removed it. The cold was so brutal, though, that I could only stay outside for a few minutes at a time. The tools were painfully cold to handle, and it was hard to work in gloves, so it seemed to take forever to get the new starter motor into place and secured, especially because I had to keep going back into the house to warm up. Eventually, I had it done – I turned the key in the ignition and it started right up! It was nothing short of a miracle that I had actually done it.

Heaviest Loads Ever

We were saying goodbye to the camp which had been a home for 3 days. From this point on, we’d be heading north through the remotest of deserts, climbing everything along the way. The problem was that we’d have to carry all our water, as there was none ahead for the next 6 days. Each of us would need 53 pounds of water, a bare minimum for drinking and cooking for all of those days. Added to 47 pounds of camping and climbing gear, as well as food and other necessities, we walked out of that first camp carrying 100 pounds each. We’d stop along the way every time we came to the next peak, then move on once back down to our packs. With that crushing weight, we couldn’t do more than a few miles each day. How well I remember stopping at the end of our first day on the move. The only place we could find to camp, well after dark, was on a rocky slope we nicknamed Camp Misery. At that time, I weighed 155 pounds, so carrying 100 pounds on my back pushed me to my absolute limit of endurance. There’s no way I’d ever abuse myself like that again.

Speed Sew

In the summer of 1967, my first season of employment in the bush, my fellow workers introduced me to an amazing little product. If you tore your clothing, you could glue it back together with this stuff called Speed Sew. It came in a tube – all you had to do was squeeze it out on to the area that needed repair, press the torn edges together, then let it dry, which didn’t take long. Once dry, you could wash the garment just as you had always done and the repair would hold beautifully and the repair wouldn’t come apart and remained flexible, even through many washings. The stuff was a lifesaver. I became curious about it and looked it up online, and lo and behold it is still sold today!

Jaguar Sighting

The world’s 8 largest cats by weight are these, in descending order: tiger; lion; jaguar; cougar; leopard; cheetah; snow leopard; clouded leopard; Eurasian lynx; bobcat. The jaguar is found south of the US border and then south down through the Americas. In the last 30 years, there have been 8 verified sightings of jaguars here in Arizona, although at the present time none are known to be here. In 1996, one was positively identified on the eastern slope of the Baboquivari Mountains by a rancher on horseback, accompanied by his dogs. This was only 47 air miles from my home in Tucson.

On November 26, 2002 I made my way to a ranch in that area, for the purpose of climbing a peak known as Mundo Perdido (you’ve gotta love that name!) It was a grey day and the weather was threatening. The ranch caretaker gave me some helpful directions to speed me along in my quest – I was to follow an old road west, until it became a trail which climbed up through the forest on the east side of my peak. Google Maps nowadays shows something called Jaguar Canyon Trail – that would have been the one that I used. The trail ended at just under 5,000 feet elevation, where I found something the caretaker had told me to keep a sharp eye out for. There, attached to a tree, was one of those digital wildlife cameras used by the Fish and Game folks – it is triggered by motion and also works at night by infrared. This was the exact spot where the jaguar had been seen in 1996. There was also a comb-like thing attached to the tree, infused with jaguar scent, the idea being that if the cat returned it would rub up against the comb and leave a sample of its fur for DNA analysis, as well as pose for a picture.

Jaguars have a bite force of 1,500 pounds / square inch, which is double that of a tiger. In fact, their bite is the most powerful of any cat. They often kill by crushing the skull of their prey. One seen in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson was known to have killed black bears that way. I must admit feeling a sort of chill standing at the very spot where that magnificent cat had been, and it gave me something to ponder as I climbed up to the lost world as the snowflakes swirled around me along the summit ridge.

Dump Trucks

How well I remember the day! It was November 25, 1988 on a Thanksgiving weekend when I got my truck stuck in deep snow high up in the Pinaleño Mountains. I foolishly waited too long to get out of the high country and the snowfall became so deep that I couldn’t drive back out. I had to abandon my truck and get down the mountain before the winter storm did me in.

A week later, some folks working at the site of a new telescope at Hawk Peak helped me out. They drove me in their large snow-cat along the snow-covered road and dropped me off at my truck with the supplies I’d need to dig myself out. I had decided that since the road wouldn’t be ploughed until the spring, I’d better get my truck back any way I could. And that’s how the digging began.

For 5 days and 4 nights, I used a shovel to dig 2 tracks, one for each wheel, to make my way out. The snow varied in depth, but was an average of a foot or more deep, and none was in good-enough condition to drive along the top of it (God only knows I tried every trick in the book – different gears, adjusting the transfer case, etc…). Well, to make a long story even longer, I eventually made it out to where the road was snow-free and I could drive home.

When all was said and done, I sat down and calculated that I had shoveled 140 cubic yards of snow to clear my path to freedom over those 7 miles. That’s enough to fill 14 average-sized dump trucks. Or, a room 30 feet long, 16 feet wide and 8 feet deep. I’m just glad I didn’t injure myself by doing it, and I vowed I’d never shovel any more snow as long as I lived.

Axe-Man

One summer long ago, I was working in the bush in northern British Columbia. We had a camp which had a rudimentary airstrip, enough that a single-engine Otter could land, but just barely. The pilot asked if we could remove a patch of trees at one end of the strip so he could fly in and out more safely. No problem, we set to work with chain saws and axes. One of the guys said he could cut down a tree faster with an axe than we could with a chain saw. Well, that was too much of a boast to go unchallenged – the game was afoot. We picked a couple of trees near each other, each about 12 inches in diameter. Someone gave the signal to start cutting, and lo and behold, the axeman had his tree cut down before the sawyer. He chopped with a fury, chips flying everywhere – it was quite something to see. Our hats were off to him.

Urge To Sleep

I’ve read many accounts saying that if you’re freezing to death, it can actually be quite comfortable to just lie down and close your eyes and fall asleep to meet your maker. Back in 1967, I was climbing a peak in the middle of winter. My partner and I decided to lie down at around 10,000 feet on a snowy slope to take a much-needed rest. It was very cold, but lying down felt really good. We soon realized how easy it would have been to just lie there for a long time – we weren’t freezing to death, but it was easy to see how just lying there and falling asleep in the cold could have done us in.

Falling Pebbles

I had driven deep into a remote part of the desert, as far as I could thrash my truck down the no-longer-existent road into a tight canyon. Parked, I started walking towards my peak, a couple of miles away. The final stretch saw me scrambling up a steep slope towards the summit ridge. It was steep enough that I was facing directly in to the slope, watching the placement of hands and feet, not looking up. A pebble rolled past me as I climbed, but I didn’t pay it any mind. Several feet higher, another rolled past. What the …..! I looked up, and there, sitting on the crest of the slope, was a young man. He was the source of the pebbles, and had been rolling them down to me to catch my attention. Once I spotted him, I knew right away that he was an undocumented immigrant. I called up to him in Spanish, telling him that I was a climber there to climb the peak just above us. I told him I was familiar with the area and could give him helpful advice as to best continue north, if he wished. No sooner said, he disappeared from sight. Puzzled and a bit wary, I continued to the crest, but upon arriving, I saw that he had disappeared. Looking over the area of the mountaintop nearby, there was only one place he could be. In fact, I was sure I could see his meager possessions tucked into a bit of outcrop a hundred feet away. He must have been hiding there, and obviously didn’t want to talk to me. Too bad, as I could have shared information that could have made his trek easier, even though it was only 4 miles to reach the Interstate. He was waiting for nightfall to continue, as was the wont of travelers of his ilk.