in•teg•ri•ty
inˈteɡrədē/
noun
1. noun: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
“he is known to be a man of integrity”

2. the state of being whole and undivided.
“upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty”

“We forget that if defending the integrity of our native soil is a question of national honor, then it must also be a question of national honor to grant this soil its full value, and thus forestall the need of having to defend its integrity.”
Perito Moreno

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Aldo Leopold

Yes, integrity of native soil is a matter and question (?) of national honor, and the integrity of each individual, national honor and the state of the biotic community are not separate entities. Integrity is wholeness—within a person, a nation, a biotic community, the earth itself. Honor is esteem and the human recognition of the privilege of life which require humility of the individual as a part of the whole in a never-ending, organic process much like that granting the native soil its full value.
Knowledge of the value (and cost) of personal integrity is not gained without effort and experimentation and, more often than not, some failure. In a long life (82 years) of knowing a lot of people across a wide range of cultures and persuasions, I’ve yet to meet an innocent person of impeccable integrity. Have you? I like to think about many things, including integrity, in terms of the Lotus Flower. In Buddhism the Lotus is a symbol of purity of the physical, mental and spiritual actions of a person, its beautiful flowers nurtured by and rooted in the mud and muddy waters of attachment and desire. Confucius said: “I have a love for the Lotus, while growing in mud it still remains unstained.” Integrity is a process, not a certificate, a beautiful flower rooted in muddy, nourishing soil rather than a pretty blossom with cut stems in a sterile vase. Confusing integrity with adhering to a particular set of beliefs, code of conduct or standard of achievement does not honor either. Instead, it encourages the sort of fundamentalism in thought and action personified by people like Cliven Bundy who recognizes neither national honor nor any value to native soil that does not serve the self-interests of, in his case, Cliven Bundy, at the expense of the larger human and biotic communities. Integrity is organic, encompassing both the personal and the larger community and does not grow from the barrel of a gun, adherence to dogma or crisp salute to the power of authority which to Bundy (and others, alas, too numerous and well known to list here) is himself.
We live on a planet experiencing the on-going extinction of 53 complete species, the deforestation of more than 60,000 acres and the desertification of 30,000 acres of its soil every day, day after day after day and compounding. That is: 12,000 species a year are becoming extinct; almost 22 million acres deforested each year, and 11 million acres turned to desert every year, year after year after year and compounding. However one thinks about the reality of these statistics, their causes, consequences and possible actions of healing, those thoughts are more likely to include words like ‘corruption,’ ‘crisis,’ and ‘collapse’ than ‘integrity.’ A portion of those extinctions, deforestations and desertification are occurring in the United States, and as Moreno indicates it is “…a question of national honor to grant this soil its full value, and thus forestall the need of having to defend its integrity.”
Extinction is forever. Integrity is wholeness. There is no ‘other’ in integrity.
Every national quality, including honor and integrity, begins (and, one could argue, ends) with the individual citizen. That is you, esteemed reader, and me individually and, one hopes, together or at least contiguously represent the honor and integrity of our national soil. Not them, us. You and me. Questions arise: What can the lone individual do to contribute to the national quality of granting the soil we all live upon and from its full value and forestall (eliminate?) the need of having to eventually defend its integrity? What influence has one person among the more than 320 million Americans and nearly eight billion human earthlings on the real and practical spheres of economic, military, imperial and political power driving the disintegration of the world’s biotic and other communities under the umbrella term ‘progress’? Does it matter that we as individuals speak truth to and place our bodies and thoughts and actions in the way of those powers, risking, (inviting) alienation and much more? Other questions arise and there are nearly 8 billion reasons for the individual to feel inconsequential, as if standing alone in the center of 11 million acres of freshly desertificated soil lacking the nutrients and water to grow a weed, much less a lotus flower. But the better question is, if not you, who? It is the better question because there is no one more qualified to answer.
You are both the question and the answer. Think of that.
Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and one of the great environmental thinkers and writers, wrote: “We must also develop a way of thinking about ‘progress’ that would include the entire earth community. If there is to be real and sustainable progress, it must be a continuing enhancement of life for the entire planetary community…True progress must sustain the purity and life-giving qualities of both the air and the water. The integrity of these life systems must be normative for any progress worthy of the name… If the industrial economy (which has well nigh done us in) in its full effects has been such a massive revolutionary experience for the earth and the entire living community, then the terminations of this industrial devastation and the inauguration of a more sustainable lifestyle must be of a proportional order of magnitude….we have before us the task of structuring a human mode of life within the complex of the biological communities of the earth. The task is now on the scale of ‘reinventing the human,’ since none of the prior cultures or concepts of the human can deal with these issues on the scale required.”
The process of personal, national and environmental integrity demands reinventing the human in much the same way, at least metaphorically, the lotus flower grows from mud at the bottom of a pond. It will be the most challenging expedition into the unexplored territory of human adventure since, perhaps, Homo erectus reinvented itself as Homo sapiens. Let us start the journey, or, rather, take the next step.

Human spiritualism and the enduring physical presence of mountains have been conjoined since the first Homo sapiens first asked “Who am I?” and made the first move towards an answer. That connection is acknowledged in the surviving literature and tradition of all major spiritual paths, including but by no means limited to Christianity, Hinduism, Bon, Native American, Jain, Buddhism, Transcendentalism and Lemurianism. As a long-time climber and practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism the relationship between the two has been part of my experience of each. Eihei Dogen Zengi (1200-1253), founder of the Soto school of Zen, wrote: “Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains.”
Petrarch, Italian Poet, on the summit of Mt. Ventoux in 1335, said “I looked back at the summit of the mountain, which seemed but a cubit high in comparison with the height of human contemplation, were it not too often merged in the corruptions of the earth.”
American literature is filled with depictions of the spiritual dimensions of mountains by Emerson, Muir, Snyder, Whalen and others, including this by Thoreau, “You are not in the mountains, the mountains are in you.” For many years before I began climbing or practicing Zen I was an avid student of that literature, and as a life-long skier mountains were integral to my life. I was an adult before acquiring the awareness and skills to articulate that mountains were also Cathedral of a growing spiritualism. My college advisor as an English major taught a course titled “The Bible as Literature” which I passed over, despite my high regard for the advisor as teacher, scholar and person, because of my cynical (immature?) prejudices of the time against any church or ‘organized’ religion. I had been raised with no religious training except for six weeks when I was sent to a Christian Brothers boarding school in a strange city 100 miles from home in the mountains at the age of 12. My parents were not concerned with spirituality but, rather, determined I needed more social discipline which a Catholic friend assured them the Brothers would provide. Fortunately, my young spirit asked, “Who am I?” and I ran away from the Christian Brothers, creating a family crisis when I refused to return, a move I consider the first step towards the answer to my question and one of the best I ever made. Father was an atheist, Mother, perhaps, an agnostic, though a friend sold her a spiritual insurance policy by convincing her to be baptized a Catholic on her death bed. I definitely was not a Christian Brother. Still, one cannot read fine literature without encountering religion, church, spirituality and the question “Who am I”, and I embarked on a personal study of the matter while attending college by buying Huston Smith’s “The World’s Religions,” the first book I knew of that covered them all.
Studying all the major religions as literature was intellectually and spiritually nutritious, and the one that most resonated with me was Buddhism. A few years earlier, a high school student in Reno, Nevada, I was drinking beer with a couple of friends in nearby Virginia City. While strolling along the main street of that historic mining center turned tourist town, a foot high ceramic head of Buddha caught my eye from one of the second-hand store windows. On a teen-age inebriated impulse I bought the Buddha head, spray painted it gold (no idea why) and set it on my bedroom dresser where it remained as long as I lived in that house.
More than 30 years later, much of them spent climbing up and skiing down the mountains of the world with a gold painted head of Buddha lodged in my memory and subconscious, in 1990 I began the practice of Soto Zen Buddhism at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center with Jakusho Kwong Roshi. During the eight years I was associated with Sonoma Mountain I participated in many sesshins and five 30 day ango retreats (not the more traditional 90 day ango) and received the precepts and lay ordination through Jukai. I was shuso at the last ango in 1998 and am grateful to Kwong Roshi and the Sonoma Mountain Sangha for the fine foundation of a life practice they gave me, including my first true lesson in climbing dharma from Dave Haselwood, one of my favorite people there. Dave, who first practiced Zen with Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco in 1963, had been a leading publisher of Beat generation poets, including Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, William Burroughs, Lew Welsh and Diane DiPrima. He left Sonoma Mountain in 2000, a couple of years after I did and became a revered teacher at Stone Creek Zen Center and leader of the Empty Bowl Sangha before his death in 2014. During my first ango I was dealing with a recent personal and professional betrayal by an old friend, and I was having a difficult time letting go of my anger, sadness, confusion and disappointment. I sat on my zafu in a half lotus with a straight back, relaxed posture, hands in Dhyana mudra, following my breath as well as possible, but inside I was far from peaceful, unattached or forgiving. I was pissed and it must have showed.
During one of the breaks Dave, who was shuso, came over to me and said with a smile, “It looks like you’re climbing some really hard mountains in the zendo.”
A moment of insight (enlightenment?) lit up my mind, the first awareness of climbing dharma, eloquently expressed by Sir Edmund Hillary: “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” Yes, on the mountain and the zafu and with each breath of daily life, and you can’t take another breath until you exhale the last one, nor make another move until the last one is completed. Thanks, Dave.
That awareness of climbing dharma served me well since then as I continued practice on my own, with a couple of different sitting groups, a few sesshins at different Zen Centers and some retreats with different schools of Buddhism. For the past several years I have practiced with the Bozemen Zen Group, taught by Karen DeCotis at the Bozeman (Montana) Dharma Center. Another member of the Bozeman Sangha, Michelle Palmer, is a climber, and a couple of years ago she came up with the idea and proposed that she and I give a talk to the Sangha on “The dharma of climbing.” We did and it was well received and led to a subsequent talk open to the entire Dharma Center and the general public.
Climbing dharma continues. Insight (enlightenment?) grows. Last year after the first dharma talk I wrote an article published in Climbing Magazine (check here: https://www.climbing.com/people/the-last-lead-aging-out-of-climbing/) about the process of reaching the decision (at the age of almost 78) to retire from leading as a climber. It was not written with dharma or Buddhism in mind, though it clearly reflects the spirit of this from Gary Snyder:
WE SHALL SEE
WHO KNOWS
HOW TO BE
It was written for climbers, each of whom will confront the inevitable decline of physical skills that accompany the aging process. Nelson Foster, teacher at Ring of Bone Zendo on San Juan Ridge in California and Dharma heir of Robert Aitken Roshi, read “The Last Lead”, and wrote me that he had “….passed it along to a group considering, in the context of precept study, the issues that arise out of old age, sickness, and death – which echoes the legend of Gautama’s turn to the Way, of course. You address in a beautifully direct and thoughtful way one of the problems of aging that has impressed itself on me in recent years: knowing when it’s time to give up activities we’ve engaged in for many years. We don’t want to give up prematurely, but even worse is to give up too late. So, we included issues that arise out of old age, sickness and death in the next talk on Climbing Dharma. We discussed some ways in which the body, the mind and the emotions in climbing are practicing the dharma, which means “protection.” In climbing, as in sitting, as in daily life, the manner in which the body is positioned affects what in Zen is referred to as “the right state of mind,” staying focused on the present moment and not letting the mind wander. The necessity of a climber being focused in the present moment is obvious to even non-climbers. Simplistically, climbers use feet more than hands, as a human can walk all day but the strongest cannot do pull-ups all day. The climbing mind that wanders is heading for a fall, as the sitting mind that wanders is climbing some really hard mountains. The every-day mind that wanders is prone to delusion. And in climbing as in all aspects of daily life fear must be addressed. I like how Thich Nhat Hahn describes it: “The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.” In climbing, on the zafu, in the home and on the street it is crucial to be aware of fear of sickness, old age and death and look at them clearly and deeply. During the 2nd talk a middle-aged woman in the audience (who told me later she was a mother of three who had recently completed a 600 mile solo hike in mostly desert country) asked the appropriate question: “Are we able to practice the dharma in other aspects of life in the same way as climbing dharma…..parenting, business, teaching school, fighting fires?” “Yes, of course,” I replied. “It is the same dharma, and compared to parenting climbing is a piece of cake.” That quip inspired a good laugh and an engaged discussion among the group concerning how body, mind and emotions are practicing the dharma (or not) in every moment of every endeavor in life. The evening expanded my personal appreciation of the dharma at work that began all those years ago when Dave Haselwood noted that I seemed to be climbing some really hard mountains in the zendo.

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Edward O. Wilson

“I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.”
Walt Disney

People whose wilderness instincts haven’t been ground into pabulum by the daily grind and who still know and acknowledge the differences between a forest and a tree farm, a meadow and a lawn, a river with and without dams and the relative values of long-term environmental health and short-term profits, also know that homo sapiens is a part of nature, the ecology and the web of life of Planet Earth. As E.O. Wilson succinctly points out, mankind is neither master of life on earth nor essential to its existence. Members of our species who are incognizant of this reality are, at best, deluded. Words are insufficient to describe those who appear incognizant but in reality are not. Among the many precious, irreplaceable treasures of life, including clear air, clean water, life sustaining seas, mountain glaciers, healthy soil, jungles, forests and democratic economy already being sacrificed to their delusions and addiction to greed are the quality and security of the lives of your grandchildren and mine.
That pisses me off. In my view it should piss off everyone at a deep gut level. Every human, with or without grandchildren, is inextricably connected to everything that lives past, present and future and every individual thought, word, action, inaction and standard of integrity affects the whole. I wish for my grandchildren the best of healthy, vibrant, engaged lives guided by wilderness instincts and compassion. Anthropogenic global warming climate change deniers and other adherents of/participants in the anthropocentric anthropocene sham/scam (AASS) don’t give a shit about your grandchildren or mine or about the other irreplaceable treasures of life. Deniers are the 21st century’s mental/emotional/spiritual/ethical descendants of European Medieval inquisitors of the middle ages and the perpetrators of the Salem Witch Trials of 17th century America. These people, literally, do not think twice about sacrificing the living and the unborn to the status quo of dead and discredited superstitions. The AASS’s standards of honesty, intelligence, morality, ethics and compassion are perhaps best exemplified at this writing by Donald Trump and a few years ago Dick Cheney, who was happy to take time out from justifying his better known wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to serve as point man in AASS’s war on reality and scientific consensus.
It’s been 500 years since the inquisition placed Galileo Galilei under house arrest for the rest of his life for the ‘heresy’ of publishing his accurate scientific observations. Galileo, honored today as the “Father” of modern observational astronomy, physics and modern science, observed, among other things, that the Earth moved around the Sun and could not be the center of the universe. This reality was in conflict with “the” church’s dogma that the sun moved around the Earth which was the center of the universe. Galileo’s observations also threatened the anthropocentric delusions about mankind’s place in that universe on which “the” church thrived. The good news in the obtuse, cruel violence of the inquisition is that Galileo got off easy, relatively speaking. The bad news is that anthropocentric craziness is alive and well in the modern world.
500 years later AASS has replaced the inquisition with something more sophisticated and amorphous but just as brutal, stupid, parasitic and destructive to the best potential of mankind and the ecological health of the Earth.
Anthropocentrism is the fallacious idea that human beings are the center of the universe and the most significant creature on Earth. E.O. Wilson puts that self-absorbed idea in perspective.
Officially, the majority of scientists agree that earth is currently in the Holocene (meaning ‘recent whole’) marking the period since the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago. The so-called Anthropocene is a proposed term for the present geological epoch since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century began to impact the climate and ecosystems of Earth. As such, it is a recognition of the destructive influence humans have had and a backhanded, unintended denial of the deniers, but as currently used it conflates the power of destruction with the gift of creation All of the older and more traditional ‘cenes’, as in Holo, Plio, Oligo and Paleo, took millions of years to form, but the anthropocene sham/scammers don’t have millions of years. 300 years is plenty of time to build an AASS cene for those whose quarterly profit reports, particularly from those extractive/polluting/poisoning industries too well known to need listing, are the center of their universe. Irony weeps.
AASSers have embraced the famous anthropocentric quip/quote by Stewart Brand “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” (Which he later updated to what might be termed the AASS motto: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”) But a simple deconstruction of Brand’s flippant if tempting solution to, for instance, human caused global climate change reveals it to be a shameless/shameful sham/scam. “We are as gods” is anthropocentrism at its most deluded and dangerous. The natural world, the environment, wilderness and the wild existed on earth for millions of years before human beings appeared. The very concept of God or gods is a recent human invention, a projection of the human mind no one has ever seen and which is a very different reality from the creation of a blade of grass which everyone has seen. “We” cannot create so much as a blade of grass, though since inquisition times we have discovered how to better destroy, genetically modify, domesticate and turn blades of grass (temporarily) into vassals instead of members of the biotic community of the web of life, their rightful place.
We are not as Gods any more than we are as Martians, and we cannot get good at being whatever it is that gods do as we cannot get good at living on Mars. And it is telling that some AASSers are already talking about colonizing Mars after our reign of being as gods on Earth has ended. Details about our future on Mars haven’t been worked out, but we are as good at pretending that details don’t matter as we are not at being as gods.
AASSers cloak themselves in a green mantle synthetically dyed by such organizations as The Nature Conservancy that consistently and oxymoronically insist that nature is dead and gone and that they are protecting nature by the very science and economic policies and dogmas that are killing it. It is worth remembering that the Koch brothers have given millions of dollars to The Nature Conservancy, and the many mantles covering the Koch brothers are the green of money not of grass.
The Anthropocentric Anthropocene Sham/Scam and its supporters like Trump, Cheney, the Kochs, the Nature Conservancy and others less well known have allowed greed, dogma, superstition and hubris to blind them to what Lau Tzu pointed out more than 2500 years ago:

“As for those who would take the whole world
To tinker as they see fit,
I observe that they never succeed:
For the world is a sacred vessel
Not made to be altered by man.
The tinker will spoil it;
Usurpers will lose it.”

Don’t lose it. Keep your wilderness instincts along with the world. Even if you don’t care about them, your grandchildren will. Just ask Greta Thunberg.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In 1981 at the age of 42 I embarked on a week-long solo ski tour in California’s Sierra Nevada, a remarkable and beautiful experience which has served me well. This from the essay about that tour in my book “The Perfect Turn” describes my thoughts at the end of the first solitary day in fine mountains and snow: “The last words in my notebook that night: ‘It is extremely beautiful and peaceful here. How do I get so far away from this feeling when I’m in civilization?’
“That question alone is worth the trip.
“Another question: What is the answer worth?’”
Having lived almost as long since that solo ski tour and writing those words as I had before it, I still don’t have a definitive answer but the question has inspired a few observations, reflections and life directions. First of all, alone is not lonesome in the backcountry as it sometimes can be in what is called ‘civilization.’ And, the answer is not worth losing your life, though, as every backcountry skier knows or at least should know, the search for it could and can and, for some, will end lives. That awareness is part of the beauty, peace, wild and wilderness of the backcountry that reminds us, among other things, to be wary of civilization’s hubristic veneer of guarantees. On the 2nd night of that tour I jotted in my journal: “I haven’t spoken a word since yesterday except a tight-spot grunt and a loud squawk when I fell once. Unlike Don Juan, I haven’t mastered turning off the internal dialogue other than on rare, special times. My mind goes into the past and then jumps ahead to a possible future, and when it stays in the present it enjoys itself. My mind right now is out to enjoy, not necessarily excel, though certain standards will be maintained out of pride. And today I noticed that every decision was not made by me alone. ‘We’ made the decisions. ‘We’ is here. Being alone in this state is never lonely.
“Colors and lights change continuously. White, grey, blue and then orange and gold. There is wind and an occasional airplane. I keep thinking I hear a large engine or generator, but it must only be the sound of my own head.
“That night a coyote called for a long time and I woke. Stars filled the black sky and the snow sparkled.”
Nearly 40 years later my moment by moment awareness and pleasure in recent backcountry solo ski experiences has been better than ever (or at least so it seems to my old mind), the standards and pride in excelling have plummeted (how could they not?) and the soloing is no longer a personal choice but is usually my only option if I want to play on skis in the backcountry. Those plummeting physical capabilities inescapably affect the technical standards and capabilities on skis. While I am able to keep up with some backcountry companions on descents, I can only keep up with a few possessing gargantuan amounts of patience, kindness and time on the ascents. For some reason, those few are usually unavailable after one day, sometimes after one run. I don’t blame them, but it limits my options and expands my thinking about beauty and peace—-and ego—-in the backcountry and elsewhere. I am 81 this winter and am forced to contemplate (and deal with) the reality that backcountry experience at my convenience is going to be solo. Something about those decade birthdays encourages serious contemplation of the organic reality only hinted at by the abstract science of mathematics. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: 80 are 80 are 80.
I have skied for 70 years all around the world, the majority of those uncountable miles of pleasure and thrills attained with the aid of ski lifts. That is, I have never been among those ‘earn your turns’ puritans who ridicule the effortless ride up and disdain riders as lower class citizens of the ski world. I have always been an alpine skier who dabbled as a Nordic skier and even a ski jumper in competitive days, while the backcountry, even what is now sometimes called ‘side country,’ was never my first skiing priority. However, I do admit that as a longtime ski instructor (both legally within the system and underground) I had a few wealthy clients who hired me to accompany them helicopter skiing, and after my first week at CMH I determined that if I were wealthy I would spend 10 or 12 weeks a year living there and skiing every day. Alas, I was and am not in that economic bracket. Still, the backcountry, some of it accessed with sno-cats and helicopters, has long been a significant aspect of my skiing life, but I also earned a lot of puritan turns and miles over the ski touring years. In 1970 I was one of a group of six on an early attempt to ski from the summit of Denali. Four of the party reached the summit, but had to leave their skis far below. Doug Tompkins and I were stopped well below the top by severe high altitude sickness (HAPE and HACE), and I consider myself lucky in two ways: I got home alive, and one of my all time best mountain memories is Doug and I retreating off Denali with our skis beneath our feet (if not our tails between our legs) telemarking down the Kahiltna Glacier with 80 lb. packs in beautiful powder snow and clear, cold weather. But in many ways the longest and best was in 1975 when we did a 200 mile tour from the southern end of Wyoming’s Wind River Range to Jackson Hole. There have been lots of tours of various lengths, but it never crossed my mind to compete in any of those torture-fest randonnee uphill/downhill races on a pair of skis. Still, I always felt strong and proficient enough to be confident of getting up and back down anything I chose to ski.
That erroneous (hubristic?) perception changed quickly in 2001 when I was 62. I had a magazine assignment to write about a gathering of fine skiers, including Daron Rahlves, Danielle Crist, Reggie Crist and Zach Crist, to heli-ski in Haines, Alaska which has some of the best skiing and steep extreme lines on earth. Support crew included Pete Patterson, one of America’s great ski racers and mountain man extraordinaire; Roger Crist the father of Reggie, Danielle and Zach; Gerry Moffatt the well-known Scotsman climber/skier/kayaker/writer/photographer/bon vivant/philosopher; and Greg Von Doersten (GVD) a fine skier/climber and mountain photographer. Haines is at sea level on the Gulf of Alaska at the north end of the Inside Passage and the combination of northern latitude temperatures, low elevations and sea level atmosphere causes the wet snows of Haines (and other Alaska sites) to stick to cliffs that would not hold snow at lower latitudes or higher elevations more distant from seas. The original plan was to ski bigger mountains away from town at higher elevations and more spectacular scenery, but the weather kept us hunkered down in rainy Haines for several days until time and financial constraints limited our options from plan B to C to D. When weather cleared we went immediately to the close to town cliffs that would not hold snow at higher elevations. My job was to observe, stay out of the way of the cameras, gather material for my story, post daily updates on the magazine’s website and, of course, a few turns of my own. I had been a speed skier and had skied a few steep lines in earlier times, but Haines introduced me to a new concept of steep including new basics…..like making two turns before moving to a new line so the sluffs from the two turns don’t knock you down so you fall rather than control the descent to the bottom of the cliff, and then making two more turns and quickly moving to a new fall line, over and over and over. One morning in the company of Roger Crist, an old friend the same age as me, and Danielle the helicopter dropped us off on the spine of a ridge that dropped more than a thousand feet on both sides of the steepest skiing I have ever seen, imagined, or will ever again ski. The helicopter backed off so the photographers aboard could film the stars and senior guides skiing outrageous lines down beautiful cliffs, and so they did. We—Roger, Danielle and I—were left on top with a guide we later determined was not among the most experienced to make our way down. (Danielle, unlike me and Roger, was completely capable of skiing steep lines with her brothers, but sluffs of chauvinism rolled down the magazine’s pages before they could be turned, burying her skiing skills and depositing her with the two elders.) We dutifully followed the guide a short, steep way to a small ridge between two lines where he stopped. He instructed us to ski the line to the right, one at a time, while he was going to ski the line to the left. He said he’d see us at the bottom and took off.
As a long time climbing guide and ski instructor, I was more than surprised the guide would tell us to ski one line and he another, but we had bigger and more immediate issues to ponder. I had (and have) never stood on skis on a slope so steep and to say that I was scared shitless is an injustice to organic shit. It was bad. Just above the bottom of the thousand feet slope we were to ski was an open crevasse, a covered possible crossing on the left side of it. It seemed a lot further than a thousand feet away. Danielle went first, skiing with elegant care and precision and made it down with no mistakes. Roger went next. He was slow and steady and seemed okay until halfway down he made a mistake and took one of those falls no skier wants and never forgets. He was tumbling (literally) towards the crevasse and managed to stop just before dropping in. He was uninjured if shaken. Then it was my turn. My attention must have been complete as I made it down without mishap, but it was neither enjoyable nor satisfying. It was not a success but only a run of survival. Later that day we watched Zach take a 600 foot fall down the aptly named “Tomahawk” run. He was beat up a bit but had no serious injuries.
I wrote in my journal from the perspective of a 62 year old lifetime skier: “The energy spent on this is enormous, a revealing display of the contrived adventure documentary. These films are not documentaries about adventure; they are adventures conceived, orchestrated and made to fit into the limitations of the film. This is not adventure in the classic sense. It is a business (entertainment business) that is more interesting than being a lawyer or selling paint or stocks. The thought occurs to me that because of its very nature it is more dangerous and prone to bad judgment calls than more traditional adventure situations. Where the focus is fitting the situation into the film instead of making the film conform to the situation many things can go wrong. When the situation is inherently dangerous, this scenario is one that needs constant monitoring.”
I am reminded of Susan Sontag’s astute observation: “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say ‘no’”.
The day after leaving Haines we received word that our friend Hans Saari, one of the finest extreme skiers in the world had been killed after falling down the Gervasutti Couloir in Chamonix. The Haines experience and Hans’ death combined to illuminate ever-present perils of the backcountry and the personal reality of being past 60 and no longer that which I once was, or at least thought I was.
Still, through my sixties I had some fine backcountry ski adventures, including using skis to climb part way up and ski back down both Mt. Kennedy (13,944 feet) and Mt. Steele (16,644 feet) in Canada’s Yukon. There were many fine day and overnight ski tours in the Sierra, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming Argentina and France, including some beautiful solo day trips in which consciously adapting to the day’s feelings of strength and proficiency kept the experiences enjoyable and nutritious.
And then came the 70s, another of the decade birthdays. The first couple of years were not too bad, but by the mid-70s back country skiing was just one of many aspects of the physical life that were showing my age. I continued to make backcountry ski excursions without a partner, but more and more of them were in places like History Rock and Mt. Ellis near Bozeman and Durrance Peak and Titus Ridge near Sun Valley where there are always plenty of other skiers within shouting distance. A few true solo tours were as spooky as they were satisfying, and when finished I felt like I’d gotten away with something more than accomplishing anything besides a good workout. That is, alone in the backcountry was starting to feel lonesome. And then last Christmas at the age of 79 I went with my partner Jeannie Wall and our friend Kim Hall for a couple of nights into the Woody Creek Cabin a couple miles outside Cooke City, Montana where there was lots of snow and fine skiing. It is an understatement to say Jeannie and Kim are far stronger and faster than me, and I seldom saw them except in the parking lot and at the cabin.
The track into Woody Creek was well trod and by the time I reached the cabin Jeannie and Kim had the fire going, water melted, cabin warm and hors d’oeuvres prepared. Backcountry luxury at its best. For the next two days we’d get up, build a fire, breakfast and then Jeannie and Kim would leave for a larger adventure and I’d tidy up the cabin and putter around the woods close to the cabin on moderate slopes until I’d had a good workout and enough good turns. On the last morning we agreed on a time to meet at the parking lot and Jeannie and Kim left for a morning’s adventure. I cleaned up the cabin, shoveled the porch (it was snowing 6 to 12 inches each night), chopped enough firewood for the next guests and locked up the cabin. It was minus 10 F which contributed to an instinctive change of plan to just take my time getting to the parking lot instead of a short tour before. The track from Woody Creek to Cooke City is gentle, easy skiing, but I kept skins on my skis in order to slow the descent, acutely aware that a fall and broken ankle in the lonesome woods of the Beartooth Mountains in minus 10 F temperatures could be really ugly. When I reached the parking lot I was far more fatigued than expected and was happy for the feeling of survival and missing that of success.
For my 80th birthday gift to myself I took solo backcountry ski touring off the list of options, except, maybe, every now and then in places like History Rock or Mt. Ellis.
I am reminded of this from Leonard Cohen’s beautiful “Anthem”:

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

One needs to pay attention to the crack in everything and then to be able to look into the light.

It had to happen. The signs leading (sic) up to the last lead had been clear and chronic for several years, but with a mind fueled by denial that was stronger than an aging body trapped in reality, I had been somewhat able to ignore one of life’s more stubborn realities so poetically expressed by Robert Frost: “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” Though I was nearly 30 before I started to climb, climbing immediately became and then remained integral to my life for the next 40-plus years—vital as personal endeavor, as a profession, as inspiration for my writing and vital because it let me be part of a culture in which I was comfortable, at home and a member of the tribe. Every climber with a decade or three of significant time spent moving up and down rock and ice and snow features—20 to 29,000 feet high—will recognize the attraction (addiction?) of this lifestyle, known to be sometimes fatal.
Though never—in morning or afternoon—able to climb at the technical standard of, say, my old climbing partner Hermann Goellner (who always took the harder leads), I climbed as well as I ever could into my 50s before signs of ‘afternoon’ began to appear. The first sign was major back surgery for a disease physically unrelated to climbing (though it’s possible that disease was picked up in Tibet or China or elsewhere while climbing). The second sign, shortly afterwards, was when my shoulders ached and wouldn’t work properly, an irritation solved by a horse liniment called DMSO, illegal for human use at the time but readily available, like so many illegal substances, to those who need them.
Then, on Memorial Day, when I was 60, I tore my Achilles tendon without completely severing it. I avoided surgery, just barely, but was on crutches with a removable Velcro cast for several weeks. I hired a physical therapist and followed her regimen to the letter, pumped iron, and worked out in a gym nearly every day, all summer long. The somewhat ironic result was that by Labor Day when I returned to the stone, my aging body was in the best climbing shape it had enjoyed in several years, and my climbing improved. Another consequence of the injury and long rehab was that I was unable to work at my long-time summer job as a climbing guide for Exum Mountain Guides in the Teton mountains, a significant financial hit somewhat softened by working as a newspaper reporter. There’s nothing like recovering from an injury to make one better appreciate the delights of physical activity, and that autumn’s rock climbing, the next winter’s ice climbing and the ‘afternoon’ knowledge of now being in my 60s convinced me that whatever time remained would be better spent pursuing the personal satisfactions of climbing for myself rather than the illusory security and real satisfaction of being paid to take other people climbing. As a Buddhist, I tried to find the middle way and just work as a guide part-time, but only full-time guides can live on Guides’ Hill in the Tetons. And that meant either spending most of my part-time guiding wages for rent in the ridiculously inflated Jackson Hole rental market or embracing a dirt-bag, car-dwelling lifestyle that I knew all too well from earlier climbing days. Dirt-bagging for climbing had been both acceptable and enjoyable for me, but for guiding it was neither. My guiding days were over.
For the next ten years into my early 70s I climbed hard and made some of the most enjoyable climbs of my life, both on the crags and in the mountains. During those years my hands gradually began to look and feel even older than the rest of my body as the signature curlicues and protuberances and aches and pains of Dupuytren’s contracture arrived. Its contributing factors include Dutch ancestry, drinking alcohol, and simple aging, each of which describes me even though I’ve not had a drink or other recreational drug in 30 years. But before that it was a different story. As it became gradually impossible to straighten my fingers or place a hand flat against a smooth surface, I adapted. The old hands continued to climb a bit less than as well as ever . . . until one day when I was 72 and leading a route I’d done many times—Kevin Pogue’s typically well-bolted (some say over-bolted), beautiful 5.10b Mantle Dynamics at Idaho’s Castle Rocks—the strangest thing happened. As I was mantling the crux move and inspiration for the route’s name, with my body and brain filled as usual with the bliss molecule anandamide (the human hormone equivalent of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC—see “The Alchemy of Action” by Doug Robinson) and completely enjoying the present moment of the climb, both hands suddenly quit functioning, and feeling in my right hand completely vanished. In that instant both my hands changed from tools of controlled precision to claws of insensitive clumsiness. I managed to make the move and, after a rest and vigorous shake out, finish the climb. At the top I was unable to make a fist, but, as so often happens in life, habit obscured clear evaluation of a new reality and I began the rappel down. Fortunately, only another old habit and practice of NEVER rappelling without a Prusik saved me (and my climbing partner) from a potentially ugly incident. As I started to rappel, my right and lower hand could no longer grip the rope with sufficient strength to exert enough friction on the ATC (Air Traffic Controller) to ensure a safe landing, and I began to move faster than was comfortable. Adrenaline quickly flooded what was left of my anandamide oasis and I immediately cinched the Prusik above me with my left hand and stopped. When my heart slowed down and both anandamide and adrenaline went home for naps my mind cleared a bit and I wrapped the rope around my leg a couple of times, creating enough friction that my clumsy claw was able to grip strongly enough to get me to the ground in one piece. I was grateful to end up with both feet on the earth in the upright position.
For the last couple days of that trip my hands hurt too much to consider climbing and I didn’t trust my grip enough to belay with an ATC, so I took morning hikes around the beautiful City of Rocks while my friends climbed; pondered with ‘afternoon’ wisdom my new reality; and soaked in Durfee’s Hot Springs in nearby Almo each evening. Upon returning home I consulted the local hand specialist physician—an interesting encounter with the frustrations of reality. After many questions, much prodding and manipulating of the hands and the mandatory X-rays she asked me, “When did you break your right hand?” “I never broke my hand,” I replied. “Oh, yes you did,” she said, showing me the X-ray proof of her assertion that at some point my hand had been broken and my denial-fueled mind had carried on as if reality was of secondary concern. I doubt I am the only climber who ever treated reality in such a cavalier way, but these thoughts offer neither comfort nor justification. She also recommended against surgery, politely and with circumspection hinting that at my age surgery could create more problems than it might cure and that I should consider a life without climbing.
Naturally, I sought a second opinion with a hand surgeon in a different state who, for an exorbitant fee told me he completely agreed with the first physician’s conclusion. Since my overall physical health and capabilities are better than many my age, he had little empathy with my desire to continue climbing and told me, “I suggest you take an Aleve a day and get on with life without climbing.”
I don’t like what Aleve does to my system and I continued with the climbing life by dropping the grade standard a couple of notches, pushing the standard a bit on days when my hands felt good and backing off when they didn’t, and learning to belay with a Grigri. That worked well enough and climbing continued to be a satisfying adventure, though climbing partners were harder to find. My former partners (most of them 15 to 30 years younger) only became available when they were desperate for a belay slave or when their good will towards an elder, the pleasures of companionship, or basic kindness overcame their personal climbing ambitions for a day or a pitch. At the age of 74, in the company of the kind and patient Scott Smith, I made what is surely my last ascent of one my favorite pieces of rock, Idaho’s Elephant’s Perch, by the standard Mountaineer’s Route. When we finished the route I felt a deep gratitude for a long life in beautiful mountains, none more beautiful than the Perch. I continue to be called upon to belay my partner, Jeannie Wall, who climbs 5.12 on good days and who climbed Fitz Roy in Patagonia nearly 50 years after I did, but I often can’t get off the ground on the routes she picks.
And then, a month before my 78th birthday, I was climbing for the first time in Bear Canyon near Bozeman, Montana, with my friend Jason Thompson, the fine photographer. I was leading what the guide book rated a well-protected 5.8, presumably within my comfort zone (I had put out of mind the reality that Montana is well known among cognoscenti as the rating sandbag capital of American climbing). I don’t remember ever falling before without some warning that the fall was coming, but this time I was unexpectedly and suddenly in the air. About 20 feet later I stopped with a rope-stretch bounce. I was completely surprised, more stunned than scared and not at all injured. “Holy shit,” Jason said, “what happened?” I didn’t know, but I climbed back up to the point of the fall and discovered that I was unable to complete the lead. It was simply too hard. I retreated and let Jason finish. Then I did it with a top rope and barely made the crux moves even with that top rope. We climbed a couple more routes before calling it a day. And I spent the next several days contemplating that fall from the perspective of the late afternoon of a long, good life, lived as well as I have been able, and came to a decision that I consider better than some others I have made: leading was immediately off my list of options as a climber.
It was the last lead.
I continue to climb, filled with top-rope courage and gratitude to still be able to do something I love, so satisfying to body, mind and soul. Yes, there is noticeably less anandamide (and adrenaline) coursing through my system, but I’ve recently discovered that CBD hemp oil helps my hands and every day I better appreciate Robert Frost’s wisdom.