Category Archives: Mountains

AMIE ENGERBRETSON: More than a pretty face

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Like every avid (addicted?) skier past a certain age, I am impressed, awed, mind-boggled, inspired, sometimes alarmed and always intrigued by the exploits, standards of skill and commitment and thin lines of error in the lives of today’s best skiers. (Note: not the best ski racers, a separate category.) Their lifestyle has evolved into a media savvy/GoPro/self-promotion culture whose members ski outrageous lines down unskiable mountain faces with a few unbelievable inverted aerials thrown (sic) in to keep the incomprehensible interesting. I don’t speak for all skiers past a certain age, but evolution of a lifestyle is fascinating—even if you not entirely facetiously refer to yourself within that culture as a dinosaur.

Last week this old ski dinosaur had the pleasure of coffee and conversation with one of today’s high profile professional skiers with sufficient sponsors to support her passion for skiing and its traveling demands in comfortable style. Amie Engerbretson is 28, began skiing at 3 in Squaw Valley and is pretty with a smile to melt glaciers. Her intelligence and demeanor of satisfaction and joy in the life she has chosen are obvious. We had never met, but I coached Amie’s mother, Nancy O’Connell, when she was a young ski racer in Squaw more than 35 years ago and knew Amie as one of those inspiring, mind-boggling skier/athletes who has made visible the continuous evolution of skiing and, thereby, skiers.

An hour with Amie eased my alarm and increased my respect and appreciation of the modern culture that skis so well along those thin lines of error. What we see in magazines and film is the edited version of considered thought, the judgment of experience, the skill of training and the on-going process of learning from mistakes. I’ve long maintained that skiing is a metaphor for life, and Amie was a reminder that life both on skis and off is a continuum. It is worth contemplating that the under 30 generation is expanding the limits of the possible, nourishing the culture with vision, hope and passion and are the group of eligible voters least likely to vote for Dinosaur Don the Trumpster.

On her website amieski.com she writes in a blog post titled ‘Free Spirit or Homeless…, “My only master is Mother Nature and I am free to make moves completely at the whim of the NOAA forecast.” In another, ‘Blind Spot,’ she and an entire film crew overlooked the obvious and she was completely buried in an avalanche that could have easily killed her. “I knew that the accident report was going to be one that if I had read it about someone else I would have thought, ‘Wow. Those guys were idiots.’… I realized that I had just been a primary witness to the most dangerous aspect of backcountry travel—the human factor… I have always thought I was too smart to make that mistake, but I did. At some point we all have. I am truly grateful that the situation was not worse. Most importantly, I am grateful that this can be a wake up and a lesson in humility for me, and everyone like me, to stay smart, not forget to use our brains and to always check our blind spots.

The first words on her website are: “Amie Engerbretson is more than a pretty face.”

WILD RUMINATIONS

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An old friend who is a long-time falconer recently wrote: “High in the consciousness of falconers that I would choose to keep company with is the knowledge that one does not ‘train’ a raptor. A captive-bred raptor is assisted to become self-realized; a wild-trapped raptor (such as I work with) is exposed to our learned ability to conduct ourselves in such a manner as to encourage them to believe in themselves, yet also believe that it is in their best interest to remain in our company. Either way… they are already perfect… we are the ones who must become worthy of their partnership. With few exceptions, the great falconry works allude to the value of applying the lessons we learn from our exposure to the wild creatures to our entire lives.”
One does not train a raptor, tame wilderness, conquer seas and mountains, or control the forces of nature, but the lessons we can learn from exposure to them are invaluable. We need the wild. We need the wild creatures. We need the lessons they can teach us and, more than at any time in our history, we must become worthy of their partnership. Right now, every week more than 150,000 acres of the earth’s forest are leveled, 70,000 acres are turned to desert and 127 species become extinct. Week after week after week, a litany of abuses of the planet and all that lives upon it continues, driven by a disregard of the value of partnership with the wild.
That is, we need the wild. Those whose thinking and emotions are bound up in the dogmas and delusions of anthropomorphism, who view themselves as masters rather than members of the natural order, are unaware of that need. The wild, however, does not need us (humanity) and at an exponential rate is exhibiting signs that it is growing weary of and responding to our presence. In this regard it is worth noting that earth is about 4.5 billion years old, the first primates showed up about 6 million years ago and the first homo-sapiens evolved from them and were in evidence about 2 million years ago. What we now consider humanity began to survive and thrive about 200,000 years ago. Human civilization is about 6000 years old and industrialization is about 300 years old. 2000 years ago the human population of earth was around 300 million. Since 1950 the human population has grown from 2.5 billion to 7 billion and growing exponentially. Global warming is just one of many signs of the wild’s weariness with its human partners and, as Pope Francis recently wrote with great (and wild) cognition, courage and compassion: “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases…given off above all because of human activity…The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”
We need the wild. Neither the wild nor humanity needs blind faith, indifference or resignation.

THINKING OF DOUG

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Two months ago my friend of nearly 50 years, Doug Tompkins, died of hypothermia after his kayak capsized in a very cold lake in southern Chile during the last adventure of an audacious existence. His well-reported death ended a life lived large, deep and meaningfully. He experienced and accomplished as much in life as anyone and cared about and gave to this world even more. He will be remembered for his environmental legacy in South America, as is only fitting, an inheritance that will persist beyond the memory of man.
The loss of a cherished friend is a different matter than the loss of a public figure, no matter how justly admired and honored, even when the two are the same person. Anyone curious about Doug and/or the environment of Earth can Google his name, Deep Ecology, Conservacion Patagonica or Tompkins Conservation and find enough information, inspiration and urgency to make the most devout capitalist understand and perhaps embrace the values and integrity that led this self-made (Doug never graduated from high school) multi-millionaire co-founder of The North Face and Esprit to abandon the comforts of bourgeoisie materialism for the challenges of environmental activism.
As a friend, Doug had a huge affect on my life, starting with the first of many long, deep conversations about knowing one’s self and living according to that knowledge rather than by an imposed expectation, cultural norm or material standard. In the winter of 1967, after a full day of skiing on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain, we had an early dinner and drove through the night of that first conversation to Reno, where I lived. He dropped me off before continuing to San Francisco to his family and fledgling business, The North Face in North Beach down the street from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. North Beach at that time was a central meeting ground for, among other things, those individuals and social forces that would become the 1967 Summer of Love. The morning after that all night conversation I began the process of removing myself from graduate school. By the Summer of Love I was living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco before heading back to the mountains where I belong and have remained, and Doug’s friendship was instrumental in those organic, healthy changes.
There were many other drives, conversations, adventures, challenges, lessons and camaraderie shared with Doug over the years. For the past two months I’ve been revisiting some of them, thinking of Doug. There are books to be written about the life and times and legacy of Doug Tompkins, but part of it comes down to this: Doug was a relentless advocate for Deep Ecology, particularly the first plank of its platform: “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” He lived by these values and had a grand life and a great time in the process, and all his friends and the Earth itself are better off for his presence. We should all heed those values and have a great time in the process.

OLD AND NEW THOUGHTS ON RISK TOLERANCE

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Like many older people I find in recent years that I learn more from those younger than from my peers. I recently gained a new sliver of insight into the matter of risk tolerance from my youngest son, Jason, who lives in Santa Cruz, California and is an avid surfer. Several years ago I heard about Mavericks, the famous, big, dangerous wave an hour north of Santa Cruz. I asked Jason if he knew about and had been to Mavericks. “I don’t do that kind of thing, Dad,” he replied. As a parent I was understandably relieved. A couple of  years ago the fine biographical film “Chasing Mavericks,” about two Mavericks icons, was released. It is, in my view, a superior film about the human quality of risk tolerance and much more. After I saw it I asked Jason if he had seen it. He knows some of the people portrayed in the film but his busy life as a parent, husband, firefighter, surfer and mountain bike rider had left him no time for the film. But he said something that resonates with lessons for those willing to learn them. He said, “You know, there are only a handful of surfers in the world capable of riding Mavericks, and within that handful there are only a few who want to.”

About 20 years ago I was talking about the latest casualty of the mountains with a friend, a fellow climbing guide. It is a theme that people who live, work and play in mountains return to all too often. Our discussion that day veered away from the specific most recent death of a climber we knew to all the people we had known who had died in the mountains over the period of our lives. Some of them had been friends, a few close ones. For reasons I’ve forgotten, we decided that we would search our memories and each make a list of all the people we knew who had died in the mountains. The next day we resumed our conversation with our respective lists which totaled more than 70.
We were both surprised. We should not have been.
There are more names on those lists 20 years later, but neither of us have kept track, nor shall we. People die and are injured every day in the mountains of the world, and it is both easy and practical for mountain people to acknowledge the inevitability and constancy of such events. It is not nearly so painless to move beyond acknowledgement to acceptance. Death and injury, untimely or not, and the questions and diverse answers that arise from them are often neither common nor sensible to everyone, and they are never painless.
Nor are they limited to people and activities of the mountains. They are integral to human life, regardless of where or how lived. There is a usually accepted perception (belief?) that people who engage in such mountainous activities as climbing, skiing, hang gliding, paraponting, kayaking, snowmobiling, snowboarding and the like put themselves at more risk than the general public. A physician I know who views climbing and, I suspect, climbers with jaundiced eye once showed me an article in a medical journal claiming that, statistically, a climber on Denali was more likely to be injured or die than a soldier in combat. I have no idea what data was used to determine that statistic, but that it appeared in a mainstream medical journal illuminates the aforementioned perception. When confronted with such a factual overview of an aspect of life you care about, it is always good to keep in mind the Disraeli adage “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” For me, conflating the unnecessary degradation and horror that war brings to humans with the fundamental beauty, pleasure and spiritual uplifting that mountains instill in them is tasteless in the extreme and a disservice to human understanding of the process of the life, which, inevitably, encompasses death to skier, climber, soldier, housewife and spy alike. I don’t know how to determine such a thing, but I suspect that, statistically, physicians who have climbed on Denali lead healthier, happier, and more creative and perhaps even longer lives than do battlefield and more mainstream physicians. And, yes, it is tasteless and an impediment to both understanding and appreciating life to conflate the two, a risk and a choice I am not willing to take. My suspicion is neither a certainty nor a statistic, only an affirmation of the integrity of each person’s preference of how to live and of the individual tolerance for risk that choice entails, whether in mountains, cities, battlefields or industrial farms.
I am reminded of Tom Patey’s well known verse:

“Live it up, fill your cup, drown your sorrow
And sow your wild oats while ye may.
For the toothless old tykes of tomorrow,
Were the tigers of yesterday.”

Patey, a fine climber (and doctor), made a simple, human mistake and died in a rappelling accident at the age of 48.
Like all people who have spent a significant amount of their lives engaged in mountainous pursuits, I have dealt with, thought about, observed, engaged in and been affected by the risks and the simple human mistakes inherent to that life. The operational human quality in dealing with those activities I choose to call, for a reason that will soon be clear, ‘risk tolerance.’ Personally, I am more comfortable (and, I will argue, safer) pursuing a day of any mountainous endeavor with which I am familiar than, say, driving the congested freeways of southern California, walking the streets of many neighborhoods of any large city on earth, dining regularly in the best known fast/junk food restaurants or, needless to say, engaging in violence, whether personally or patriotically inspired. This implies that people are more comfortable (and safer) with the familiar than with the exotic and unrecognizable, but even that does not insulate them from death and injury. Every year more than 30,000 people are killed in car wrecks in America (in 1972 it was 54,000). Every year more than 2500 people are killed in house fires, almost all of them caused by nothing more complicated, risky or unusual than cooking a meal, and more than 13,000 are injured in these fires. In 1978 more than 6,000 people were killed and more than 20,000 injured in house fires. These statistics do not include the firefighters killed and injured trying to save the lives and homes of American people engaged in an activity no more exotic or exposed to risk than cooking dinner for their families. Cooking a meal and driving to the store are not considered high risk activities, at least not statistically, but every day people die and are injured in their pursuit because something went wrong.
And after nearly every accident in the mountains and elsewhere there is a search for answers to why it happened, seeking lessons to be learned to prevent the same mistakes being repeated, sometime assigning blame, always striving to make tidy and comprehensible the complex and often inconceivable. And more often than not those searches turn up human error as a primary factor, sometimes incomprehensible error, sometimes completely conceivable. That the lessons are not learned is self-evident. As mentioned, people die and are injured every day in the mountains of the world, and so they will continue to be.
That people often act like sheep and will follow the herd even when knowing they are walking toward the wolves is well established. There are enough well-publicized avalanches that resulted in multiple deaths to illustrate this. In instances like these, personal tolerance for risk, personal judgment and personal integrity itself are sacrificed (sic) to herd bravura. This dynamic can be observed every day from small groups in every walk of life to entire counties including but not limited to our own. This does not imply that the herd is always wrong just because it is a herd. Sometimes the herd avoids the wolves while one of the sheep goes to them.
Four experienced, competent, knowledgeable backcountry skiers were at the top of a steep bowl covered with a foot and a half of fresh snow draining into a long gully with a couple of flat spots along the way. Three of them skied, one at a time, down skier’s right of the bowl, into the gully and to the bottom where the snow ran out and they were safe. The fourth skier waited for them before moving left to the center of the bowl and jumped off a fifteen foot cliff to land on the steepest part of the bowl covered with new snow. Naturally, predictably even, the slope avalanched immediately and took the skier for a 1500 foot ride that temporarily buried him in one of the flat spots before a second wave of the slide pushed him along until he wound up at the bottom partially buried, a bit beat up, but very lucky and alive. His friends dug him out and they all went on with their lives. Nice story that easily could have ended not so agreeably. At the end of the official report of this incident was a section titled ‘lessons learned.’ Not included in those lessons was what seemed to me the obvious one of avoiding jumping off cliffs onto steep, freshly snow loaded terrain. When I queried the writer of the report about this exclusion he replied, “Some people have a higher tolerance for risk than others.”
While the statement is true, it seems to me in this and other instances it sidesteps the onerous task of learning the lesson which, as human history illustrates, is quintessential human behavior. This dynamic is succinctly summed up by Kurt Vonnegut’s response to the well known George Santayana insight, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”
As a species, as a culture, as a lifestyle, as members of communities of mountaineers, skiers, firemen, housewives, school teachers, politicians, writers, sky divers, bartenders, bankers, clergy, drug addicts and thieves we are, as the great Vonnegut noted, doomed to repeat the past. That is what it is to be alive. The silver lining in being alive is that as individuals we are sometimes capable of learning, sometimes without even remembering the past, much less having to repeat its mistakes. As a group, any group—-any group—-that capability is not so evident.
There are always those individuals in every adventure and aspect of life who stand out from the group by their ability to learn the lesson, gain the insight, raise the standard and in some small or large way expand the limits of the possible by example. Sometimes these individuals learn from their own egregious mistakes, sometimes they learn without them. (The skier mentioned earlier who jumped off the cliff onto a loaded steep slope reportedly told a good friend, “That will never happen again.” Good for him, the individual who learned.) Usually, those who raise the standards become the stars, the leaders, the ones to emulate and, eventually, exceed. They become the beacon and the authority, and they do not last long. It has been only 60 years since Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first humans to climb Everest, a milestone in mountaineering and human endeavor. Now any person with $60,000, a modicum of fitness and the desire for a piece of the action can climb Everest. My old friend Yuishiro Miura, who climbed Everest when he was 70 years old and again when he was 75, climbed it again at the age of 80. Ueli Steck, arguably the finest climber in the world at the time, and his two climbing partners were attacked by an angry mob of a hundred Sherpas whose profession involves getting those $60,000 clients up the mountain. The Sherpas were angered by a perceived violation of ‘etiquette’ on the part of the climbers.
Risk tolerance and etiquette delineate boundaries and, like fences, create good neighbors. When they are crossed some of the dynamics of accidents and high achievement in the mountains and elsewhere come a bit more into focus. I will argue (admittedly without having been there) that Steck’s personal experience, focus, knowledge and unusual skill provide him a risk tolerance and security for both himself and those around him not available to any of the professional Sherpas who were so offended by and, according to reports, violent toward him and his climbing mates. But the Sherpas do not and should not be expected to understand that. Unlike the intention of etiquette, risk tolerance is not democratic. For the Sherpas, Everest is for clients, not climbers, and one ignores that cultural reality according to one’s own tolerance for risk. Ho ho.
In an age when personal and professional spraying and promotion via films, I phones, the internet, GoPros, You Tube and Facebook are both immediate and endemic to the mountain culture, the latest exploit of the standard bearers, the super stars and the icons of the edge is immediately known and available to the world. The levels of achievement and risk tolerance of every super star of the mountains, seas, plains and cities in history are connected to and built upon the efforts of their respective communities. But those levels, no matter how well sprayed and promoted to the general populace, are only available to a few. Just because one sees a film of someone jumping off a cliff onto a steep slope and carving great turns in powder does not mean that every other similar mountain slope will not slide. Every slope, like very person, is different. The reasons for this are complex and obvious and, for some, difficult to accept and impossible to learn. As the good Kurt observed, we are as a species doomed to repeat the past. As individuals we can make some progress.
The level of risk tolerance for, say, Ueli Steck, Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell, Hayden Kennedy, Shaun White, Kristen Ulmer, Will Gadd and others who came before and more who will follow, is different in both kind and degree from those of less commitment and effort, mountain intelligence and instinct, attention to detail and that indefinable quality that some are born with and most are not that can be polished and enhanced but never earned. It can be called ‘genius’ but might be nothing more than having been born with better vision or hand/foot-eye coordination than others. However one chooses to define it, that quality keeps some alive in mountains where others perish. As standards move up so do expectations, personal and cultural, but in all things there are only a few who are capable of living on or close to the edge. And none of them can live there for very long, time being as relative as levels of risk tolerance. And when the many push to where only the few can, with luck, survive there will be accidents remarkably similar to those in the past.
Jason’s insight is always worth keeping in mind. That is, always listen to yourself—not the herd, not the promotion, not the cameraman, not the super star, not the comparison, certainly not the expert or authority—just yourself, your trusted friend who is the only one who can differentiate between wanting and thinking you should want to. Only you know what a tolerable risk is for you, and usually, not always, that risk is made more dangerous to the degree that it is comparative.

THE ALCHEMY OF ACTION

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Foreward
By
Dick Dorworth

The premise of this book and the larger issues it encompasses are common to every human being, not just the climbers, skiers and other high level athletes you will meet in its pages. It is crucial to an appreciation of “The Alchemy of Action” to hold in mind that just as every person is different from every other in obvious ways, they are much more alike and have much more in common in ways both palpable and, at first glance, invisible. This includes similarities and differences in culture, time and place, which are often enough examined and discussed in the popular media, and our common human metabolism, which is not.
I mention this because this book grew out of a particular place in climbing and a specific American time and culture in which that place (Yosemite) was a high-pressure, free-form, colorful laboratory for the experiments of the culture, the rebellions of the time and the expansion of consciousness of its lab rats. The time was the late 1960s and early 1970s and the turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out culture was counter to the mainstream, rebelling against, among other things, Viet Nam and the American mentality and values that allowed it. Consciousness altering drugs—LSD, peyote, marijuana, psilocybin and others were an intrinsic aspect of that culture, and several (not all) of the finest rock climbers of that time were icons and leaders in the process of both expanding consciousness and raising climbing standards.
One of them was Doug Robinson, who was/is prone to pay more attention to the on-going experiments of his own person than most, and whose tenacity and curiosity as a researcher, philosophizer’s breadth of thought and literary skills have delivered to the fortunate reader “The Alchemy of Action.” This book has been a lifetime of the author’s in the making. As a young teen-age distance runner Robinson noted a shift in his perceptions, a different clarity of thought and, of course, a physical heightened awareness during and just after long runs in the hills around Los Gatos, California where he grew up. Later he came to climbing and noticed similar alterations in his being. And then came the 60s and the cultural changes and the drugs and the (sometimes) purposeful exploration of consciousness, which had nothing to do with climbing. Or, at least, so he thought for awhile.
By 1969 he was confident enough that the act of climbing could and did alter consciousness that he wrote the seminal essay “The Climber as Visionary.” It was published in Ascent and caused a stir in the climbing community for suggesting that “There is an interesting relationship between the climber-visionary and his counterpart in the neighboring subculture of psychedelic drug users” and that climbing and its attendant fear “…produces a chemical climate in the body that is conducive to visionary experience.” And the climbing literature from John Muir to Yvon Chouinard to Ueli Steck is filled with beautiful descriptions of that experience.
Doug Robinson knew he was on to something meaningful and little explored. He spent the next 40 years—along with climbing, guiding, writing, raising children, continuing his own laboratory experiments with various drugs and expanding consciousness and the other demands of responsible citizens of planet Earth—investigating that something which he describes as: “…effort plus a degree of fear shifts yours brain in the direction of seeing more sharply, more clearly. And feeling more deeply. It does that by shifting the dynamic balance of hormones in your head. And then, transforming some of them. The upshot is a change in metabolism that becomes literally psychedelic.”
Human metabolism is too complex to be described in a few words or an entire book, and “The Alchemy of Action” is certainly not the final word, but it is an invaluable step, a beautiful and important addition to the literature of human consciousness. As one of the lab rats of Yosemite in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a member in good standing of the counter-culture of the time (as well as being a long-time friend of Doug’s and presented in the book as an example of its premise) I immediately identified with it and am grateful to him for a better understanding of consciousness (they are not the same thing). It has been nearly 30 years since I became aware that I didn’t need psychedelics in order to expand my consciousness and center both mind and being, and I quit using them. I also quit using alcohol which is certainly a mind-altering substance but, so far as I have been able to determine, has never produced clarity of thought or expansion of consciousness among its many users. Au contraire.
Doug Robinson was the right person in he right time to take the experiences and lessons of Yosemite in the ’60s and ‘70s and turn them into a metabolic exploration of a state of being common to all people that has been described as ‘flow,’ ’the zone,’ ‘peak performance,’ ‘self-awareness’ and the like. “The Alchemy of Action” is a metabolic guide to that state, and, as Doug writes, “We’re all metabolic voyagers, every day.”

SIERRA STARLIGHT: The astrophotography of Tony Rowell

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Until recently astrophotography was a word I don’t remember hearing or reading and if I had it vanished into the vast depths of unconsciousness like a shooting star. Too bad for me. There is in astrophotography astonishing beauty and subtle and sheer reminders of the connections between all things in the universe. When I read and viewed “Sierra Starlight,” the fine book of astrophotography by Tony Rowell I was treated to some of the best of that beauty as well as moving reminders of those connections, in this case some of them personal.
Tony’s father, Galen Rowell, one of the world’s finest mountain/outdoor/adventure photographers, was a close friend and I knew and liked Tony as a bright, energetic boy and young man but never maintained an adult connection. After Galen was killed in a plane crash in 2002 Tony and I had no contact. I heard he was pursuing photography but didn’t follow his career. When I learned Tony had published a book with such an intriguing title for one like me who has spent much of his life in the Sierra (some of it with Galen) I decided to catch up on Tony’s calling. I ordered his book.
It blew my mind.
Astrophotography, according to Wikipedia, “…is a large sub-discipline in amateur astronomy where it is usually used to record aesthetically pleasing images, rather than for scientific research, with a whole range of equipment and techniques dedicated to the activity.” The whole range of equipment and techniques is as complex and demanding as the images they produce are intriguing and nourishing, and the discipline is not for the impatient, inattentive, unadventurous or fragile. Almost every image of astrophotography is taken with a long exposure which accumulates the small amount of light photons that reach the earth from distant stars. Urban areas as well as some not so urban ones produce light pollution (thus the Dark Sky Ordinances of the towns of the Wood River Valley where I live) which makes seeing or photographing the night time sky a sullied experience.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and Nevada (also known as Sierra Nevadas and Sierra) is a pristine environment for Tony Rowell’s work. He has written, “I joke with my friends that I’m putting in 9-5 days but my hours are 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.” I have spent countless days and nights in those mountains, including many hours of inspiring, nourishing, healing contemplation of its nighttime stars, but “Sierra Starlight” showed me a completely new dimension and perspective of some of my favorite places, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Mammoth Mountain and Mono Lake, among others.
The foreword is written by Kenneth Brower and includes, “Malcolm Margolin, our publisher, is smitten by Tony’s astrophotography, seeing it as a new way of looking at the Sierra. So it is, and yet at the same time it is very old. If there is nothing new under the sun, then there is also nothing new under the stars.” I, too, am smitten, and if there is nothing new under the stars we are all still learning (we hope) and in addition to Rowell’s images I learned two new words, astrophotography and moonbow.
Check them out.

THE INDIVIDUAL MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

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What power or even influence has an individual against the behemoths of big business, big brother, big government, global warming, global terrorism, species extinction, starvation in Africa, obesity in the U.S., quagmire in Afghanistan, drought in western America, habitat destruction and eco-system collapse everywhere, and the exploding population of Homo sapiens on planet earth? Can one person alter the course of these and other runaway trains of destruction and tragedy? Do the actions and thoughts and example of an ordinary individual matter?
The answer is yes, but not enough people ask the question.
To judge from such indicators as the less than 50 percent of eligible America voters who vote, the burgeoning market in anti-depressant drugs, and the average number of hours a day most Americans spend watching mindless television it would seem that hopelessness reigns. If it isn’t hopelessness most Americans don’t view the aforementioned behemoths as problems. Another possibility is that many people see them as part of the price of doing business and are not wallowing in hopelessness, but, rather, are filled with hope that such problems will eventually go away before affecting their lifestyles too severely. Either way, the individual who chooses not to be engaged in issues larger than immediate personal survival, happiness, convenience and comfort is still involved in and affected by those issues.
That is, an individual can choose to not engage in the large issues of the time, but no one can choose not to be involved or unaffected. Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out of here alive.” And no one gets out of here uninvolved. An individual who doesn’t cast a ballot votes with his absence. The individual who remains a silent witness to oppression and injustice and corruption speaks volumes. The man who surrenders passion to propriety has nothing more to say that hasn’t been said before, and he who gives up propriety for passion usually never shuts up about it but often has something worthwhile to say. Those who sell their integrity to the highest bidder are never paid enough, never satisfied or truly engaged.
It takes a whole individual to be engaged.
The whole individual is humanity’s elemental building block. Humanity is the sum of its individuals, each one is inescapably connected to the lives and deaths of each of the others. The unengaged individual is incomplete, and humanity strains to support the spaces the unengaged cannot fill. Humanity suffers, groans and breaks along predictable fault lines of unengaged individuals.
Do the actions and thoughts and example of individuals matter?
Gandhi broke the back and spirit of British imperialism and created modern India.
Martin Luther King broke the back (but, sad to say, not the spirit) of institutionalized racism in America.
David Brower kept the Grand Canyon from being dammed.
Renee Askins got wolves re-introduced into Yellowstone and the American west.
An unknown Chinese man stopped a tank in Tienamen Square by simply standing his ground.
Daniel Ellesberg shortened the war in Vietnam by many months, if not years.
Someone leaked the photos of American military personnel torturing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.
Jon Marvel started what has become the Western Watersheds Project which gives the landscape of western America and all its flora and fauna a chance to survive.
Maria Montessori started a school based on the wisdom of children helping themselves and their peers and, in the process, learning to feel (and be) competent and self-assured.
Robert frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon followed their conscience, maintained integrity, remain whole.
Each individual matters.
To vote is to be engaged.
Write a letter to the editor.
Protest what you oppose.
Support what you approve.
Adopt a child from a Russian, Chinese or Nicaraguan orphanage.
Speak your mind without fear.
Take a walk in the woods, along a beach or by a river.
Walk across the room, unplug the television and throw it away.

THE MYSTERIOUS MASS OF METHANE OVER OUR MOUNTAINS

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The largest cloud of methane gas in the atmosphere above the United States is sitting above the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It’s been there for several years and scientists have been aware of it since at least 2003. SCIAMACHY’s data from 2002 through 2012 consistently tracked the methane mass hovering above the southwest during that time, but it was concluded that SCIAMACHY’s (European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography) data was “…so extreme scientists still waited several more years before investigating the region in detail,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said Christian Frankenberg from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.
Since NASA is far more focused on things like the slim possibility of finding life on Mars than dealing with the abundant bovine sized threats to life as we all know it on planet Earth, it is not shocking that it took their scientists 10 years to bother checking the data for error about a cloud of methane too extreme to investigate. But it is surprising that scientists outside NASA lacked the curiosity to check out a known 2500 square mile area (about the size of Delaware) of methane gas hovering above the Southwest. Perhaps the National Ski Areas Association should begin promoting Scientists Ski Weeks at western ski areas to help introduce the scientific community to the joys of skiing and the environmental and spiritual pleasures of mountains buried under snow rather than drying out beneath mysterious masses of methane. NASA scientists appear to be more familiar with interpreting data indicating that the dry winds of Olympus Mons blow 350 mph than with dry powder snow in the face coming out of a turn in the back bowls of Vail after a classic (remember the classics?) Rocky Mountain dump. NSAA has a potential market in NASA and NASA might find a perspective not too extreme to investigate in NSAA. More mysterious things have happened.
Frankenberg co-authored a study published last year in Geophysical Research Letters that concluded the mass over the Southwest contained atmospheric methane concentrations equivalent to about 1.3 million pounds of emissions a year, about 80% higher than previous EDA estimates. There is less methane in the earth’s atmosphere than CO2, but methane traps significantly more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. That is, methane is known to be a significant (perhaps the major?) contributor to human caused global warming and climate change.
A CBS news report last year was titled “Scientists Puzzled By Methane Mystery Over Four Corners.” The Christian Science Monitor story about the same matter carried the title “How scientists overlooked a 2500 square-mile cloud of methane over the Southwest.” In that article Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University in state College, noted that it can be hard to determine how responsible industry is for methane emissions in certain areas and is quoted as saying “….we really don’t know to (sic) the extent to which the coal industry and coalbed methane increased and aggravated an existing, natural condition.”
Science is a difficult and exacting endeavor and finding mysterious clouds of methane, much less determining where they came from, cannot be a simple task. But it seems to me that whether one is a scientist with NASA or a professor of one of the sciences at a prestigious university a good place to begin any investigation is with the obvious. For instance, in the case of the mysterious mass of methane over the Four Corners it is worth noting and very obvious to the folks living there that the states surrounding that area—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Texas—are home to some 33,000,000 cattle. Any scientist worth a cow fart could easily determine that a cow contributes approximately 220 pounds (POUNDS!) of methane to the atmosphere every year. Each cow’s yearly methane donation to the atmosphere’s rising temperature is the equivalent of an automobile’s CO2 gift to global warming after being driven 7800 miles. Even a non-scientist with a calculator can determine that every year the cattle of those eight southwestern states donate 7,260,000,000 pounds (POUNDS!!!!) of methane to the atmosphere above those states. Every year. 7,260,000,000 pounds every year. Year after year after year after year after…………
That’s a lot of methane and the fact that it is a mystery to NASA scientists how a cloud of it the size of Delaware formed above an area with 33,000,000 methane factories gives an added dimension to the old saw, “It’s not exactly rocket science.”

SECOND SUNS: A Book About Vision

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Everyone reading this who has had cataract surgery appreciates the second chance at vision that surgery provided, and they as well as readers with the good fortune of good eyesight cherish the opportunity to see goodness in the world. That’s one of several reasons why “Second Suns,” a book by David Oliver Relin is a nourishing read for everyone who endeavors to see the world more clearly. The world as it is, with more than seven billion imperfect humans struggling to survive on a planet that cannot and a human community that will not sustain them (us) in dignity, equality and good health, is a better and more inspiring place because of David Relin and the two central men of this story, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin.
Ruit was born into poverty in a remote mountain village of Nepal, a week’s walk away from the nearest school. Ruit’s obvious intelligence as a young boy inspired his family to arrange for him to be schooled in India, an education they could not afford without help and that began with an arduous 15 day walk with his father from his village to be left alone in a foreign land. He chose medicine as a field of study because of three siblings whose early deaths could have been prevented with access to medical care in developed countries, and within a few years of becoming an ophthalmologist Ruit had revolutionized cataract surgery in the poorest countries on earth.
Tabin, an American, is Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. He graduated from Yale where he was captain and a star player on the tennis team, earned a Masters in Philosophy at Oxford and received his MD from Harvard. He is a well known and highly accomplished climber and the 4th person to have climbed the seven summits, the highest points on each continent, including, of course, Everest. He dropped out of medical school several times to go on climbing expeditions and somehow managed to get back in, and, according to Relin, “…tended to dance along the border of socially acceptable behavior.” He once recited an obscene poem to a group of medical school students, and his life experience, culture, personality, athleticism, opportunities and private life are as different from Ruit’s as, say, Kathmandu is from Cambridge.
Still, the two of them managed to team up (Ruit as mentor, Tabin as acolyte) to change and redefine the meaning and possibilities of modern medicine in the undeveloped countries of the world. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries has one of its highest rates of cataracts, and since Ruit opened the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu in 1994 nearly 200,000 (mostly) destitute Nepalese have had their eyesight restored. Ruit and Tabin have trained hundreds of ophthalmologists and established centers in India, China, Tibet, Bhutan and Africa and thereby restored sight (and hope, smiles and life itself) to hundreds of thousands of people.
“Second Suns” informs, inspires and resonates for several reasons at multiple levels, including the examples of two doctors and the writer who tells their story of living according to the human ethic of how much they are able to contribute to the world rather than the material standard of how much they can extract from it.

DAVE McCOY: A Man For All Seasons

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When Dave McCoy first saw the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I loved the snow: I started dreaming about it. I said, ‘This is where I am going to spend my life.’”
Many people reading this understand that experience and subsequent path.
That same year McCoy received the foundation of what he called ‘…the best possible education.’ He told Leigh Buchanan: “When I was in the eighth grade my folks separated. It was during the Depression, and so my mom and I got on a Greyhound bus and went to meet my father’s parents in Wilkeson, Washington. We got acquainted, and she left me there. I stuck around for two and a half months, but I didn’t like the rain, so I took my knapsack and headed back to California. I rode with the bums on the trains, ate at their campfires at night, and listened to their stories. It was the best possible education.”
At the time Dave was 13 years old. His formal education ended with high school, but with that best possible informal education, his love for snow and mountains, hard work and fun he built Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from a rope tow on the side of hill to one of the largest and best ski areas in North America. Many people reading this already know it but for those who don’t Dave’s influence on skiing and skiers is incalculable, and that story is best told in Robin Morning’s fine book “Tracks of Passion.” Dave, who I’ve known since 1953, will be 100 years old in August. I hadn’t seen him since his 90th birthday party but a few weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a few hours in conversation with him.
That talk illuminated and reiterated why I am among many, many people who consider Dave McCoy among the most remarkable, decent, genuinely good human beings we have ever known, a great man by any measure. That is, his successes, accomplishments and positive impact on the community of Mammoth, the larger world of skiing and thereby the world at large did not make him a great man, but rather, the other way around. We reminisced about several people, events and dynamics of the life and lives we know and consistent perspectives and themes kept surfacing in Dave’s narrative:
“Most people are essentially good,” he said, “and if you give them the right chances they will show you that goodness.”
“All of us make mistakes. That’s part of learning. The thing is to learn from them and to move on and not repeat that one and don’t be afraid of making a different one.”
And there is this as told to Leigh Buchanan: “In 1991, we had to lay off 150 people, because we had six years of very light snow. Instead of keeping all the best people, I looked at the people that were really able to take care of themselves and let them go first. It worked out, because they ended up doing greater things than they had been doing. It may not have been wise, but that’s the way it is with me.”
Thanks, Dave.