.: LarsonsWorld :.
just another persons waste of time

.: The Library :.

Hunting and gathering through 100 issues of Mountain Gazette

Several years ago, some of you may remember, we released a book called "When in Doubt Go Higher: The Mountain Gazette Anthology," which I edited. In order to get that book out the door, and, thus, get my advance check, I took upon myself the task of going through some 3,000 pages of old Gazettes, picking and choosing a representative group of articles and culling them down into 30-some-odd "chapters." If you read the introduction to that book, you may remember me trying in vain to describe the glassy-eyed cerebral implications inherent in wading through what, when you get right down to it, might be the deepest pile of bullshit in the history of modern language. Understand that's a compliment, but, still, it took months for my brain to return to a degree of normalcy that allowed even superficial interaction with things like sports sections.

That was child's play compared to this. When putting together the anthology, I didn't really need to read every single word of every article. To put together the 14,000-word monster you are about to encounter, much the way you encounter waterfalls while paddling down what until that point has been a tranquil river, reading almost every syllable ever included in the Gazette was necessary.

Jees-us H. Christ. What a cool way to spend a couple weeks!

Fortunately, I was able to cajole two chums, Curtis Robinson and Patrick Quinn, to help me out, which might explain some of the inconsistencies (length of segments, stylistic penchant, spelling) herein included. My only criteria for choosing which outtakes, sentences and paragraphs to include in this 100th-issue retrospective was: Get the beast done and to me by next week. When you lay that sort of instruction on people you have no intention of paying (and they know that), you take what you can get. I won't say which of us chose which years, mainly because I already can't remember. Anyhow, hope you enjoy this segment-by-segment journey down Mountain Gazette's memory lane. If you've got any extra thorazine, send it along.

- MJF

1. There will be another layer to the publication that is more diffuse, vague, difficult to define. We want to use the publication as a tool to poke around in some of the odd corners of the mountains and see what there is to see.
   
   - Mike Moore, "Why Mountain Gazette? Why Not?"
   
   
2. It is usually a well scrubbed group of three or four that once a year or so walks proudly the half mile up the valley and across the creek to my house. They are straight, forthright and earnest, and they have an important message: the world is soon coming to an end. And they have biblical proof of it. I always listen to them and accept their literature. It's not just manners that makes me do so, for I'm outrageously impolite to encyclopedia salesmen; it's that these folk believe their message with such obvious faith and comfort that, for the moment anyway, I believe them too.
   
   - George Stranahan, review of "The Limits to Growth" and "World Dynamics"
   
   
3. One night in the bar - the brass eagle atop the espresso machine squinting down on apres-skied-out couples nestling in dark horsehair sofas, the dance band half-asleep in the corner stretching out a long break toward midnight, outside the windows, giant slowflakes frozen in the anti-gravity glare of the lodge floodlights, drifts of midnight powder piling up beneath invisible trees while the cocktail waitress slips like a shadow beneath drowzing tables ...
   
   - Lito Tejada-Flores, "One Night in the Bar"
   
   
4. It would be uncharacteristic and unlikely to expect the 18 Cistercian monks at St. Benedict's Monastery in the old Snowmass Valley to break their silence with a loud wail of rage as a new ski area is developed at their doorstep.
   
   - William Rollins, "Anachoresis and Aggioramento at St. Benedict's"
   
   
5. The Ski Hut is open every day of the year, and, in summer, well into the night. In recent years, long hairs have come to rate with the best customers.
   
   "You can't help but like them," Chris Larson, 19, a mini-skirted Swedish clerk, said. "They've never bounced a check on us. In fact, they nearly always pay cash. I've often met them on a mountain trail. They love the Sierra, but they still take their pot with them - as if the scenery isn't enough to thrill them."
   
   - Jim Scott, "Happiness is a Mountain Shop"
   
   
6. The uniqueness of Alaska's Brooks Range lies in the fact that it is a wilderness that is relatively intact - that it is a whole unto itself. It is a land that is fulfilling to the adventurer, the aesthetic and, regrettably, the exploiter. Last April Jack Miller, Wayne Merry, Jed Williamson and I crossed this range of mountains on touring skis. We had a chance to see the country as many others will hopefully see it. I say hopefully, because the airplanes, helicopters, bulldozers, and drill rigs are closing in fast.
   
   - Ned Gillette, "30 Days in the Brooks Range"
   
   
7. His steps soon reached a rhythm; it changed to the pace of the terrain, but the rhythm maintained its eternal beat with the timeless message. He had long before discovered that the harder his body labored, the deeper his mind opened, the more he knew himself. It was a correlation within his observation, beyond his understanding. The harder you push, the deeper you must go in order to maintain the rhythm.
   
   - Dick Dorworth, "Medicine"
   
   
8. People like myself who climb almost exclusively with professional guides are treated to a continuous stream of flack to the effect that, whatever we are doing, it is not real mountaineering. I have no quarrel with this point of view nor do I give much of a damn. An athletic activity that gives one pleasure and satisfaction has validity even if others would not themselves engage in it.
   
   - Jeremy Bernstein, "A guide to Guided Climbing in France."
   
   
9. On the first Friday night in April, in some basement on the outskirts of Aspen, they had this wall-to-wall scream. Every ski racer on the pro tour, every manufacturer's rep from Rossignol and Head and Siderol and Lange, hundreds of members of the working ski press, scores of ski-area marketing directors ... and every goddamn race-chaser, amateur hooker, ski instructor, hanger-on and freeloader who could con an invitation ... maybe a thousand souls just yelling and howling. Glasses-in-hand, hors d'oeuvres turning greasy on tables where they were deposited to allow for the pressing of flesh as hazy acquaintances were renewed ...
   
   - I. William Berry, "A Professional Conclusion"
   
   
10. Michelin X Blister Boots: Excellent walking traction with good cornering characteristics is provided by these radial, steel-belted soles with Michelin hecho in Mexico lugs. The welts on the rough-out leather upper provide space for all of the blisters it is possible for the hiker to develop. Advanced poisson distribution equations were used to determine where welts were to be placed. The boot is seemless apparently. Apparently so it seems.
    
    - Bill Rollins, "Boots"
    
    
11. I made a trip to New Mexico last spring, just after renewing a five-year-old acquaintance with don Juan Matus by reading Journey to Ixtlan. (No, I don't know don Juan except from the books; yes, I do think Ixtlan may finally indicate that the series is a hoax, but a hoax the hoaxness of which doesn't matter.) I picked up another book to read on the plane: Peyote by Marriot and Rachlin, a popular study on American Indian sacramental use of the root of the cactus Lophophora williamsii Lemaire, a natural occurring hallucinogen. Interesting.
    
    - John Jerome, "Enchantment"
    
    
12. Readers of my occasional efforts in these hallowed columns will recognize me for a rabid British chauvinist of the worst type. On the other hand, nobody can accuse me of being anti-American. This is partly due to the fact that I've never gotten over my amazement that Americans speak English - or, at least, a brand of American English which is just as rich and valid as English English.
    
    - Brian Dunning, "The Origins of Pedestrianism"
    
    
13. I guess what's bothering me is that the ecology movement seems to be the only coherent means of resisting the immediate and total technologization of the available world, and the specific tool that the ecologists have to work with is Planning. And Planning - the way we do it, with the technologized training we seem to have to bring to bear - is totalitarian. Is technologization.
    
    - N.E.D.
    
    
14. Having lived for the past five years in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona - and the previous 25 in rural Southern California - I have cultivated a pervasive loathing for cities and city life. However, the idea of saving energy and relieving land and space is so attractive that I secretly harbor the desire to see the worst cities become arcologies - for the perverse reason - I admit - that city people deserve them. But it occurs to me that despite the wishful-thinking of having the urban sprawls of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, San Diego, Phoenix and Denver arcologically compacted, the real arcological process will work best on a small scale and in the thinly populated areas.
    
    - Chuck Simmons, "Arcosanti, Pueblo and Acropolis"
    
    
15. Welcome to Montana.Speed limit: Prudent and reasonable.
    
    It's not prudent and reasonable to ask people to be prudent and reasonable. We sped forth to Billings, Bozeman, Great Falls, Shelby and Sweet Grass to the Canadian border at Coutts. More wild empty space wherever we raced. Manifest Destiny is pleasingly unmanifest here.
    
    - Barry Corbet, "Speed Trap"
    
    
16. Trail mapping is time consuming. Had I been backpacking along the Pacific Crest Trail for the pure enjoyment of it, I would have been averaging three miles per hour - not counting long stops like lunch. But to really enjoy nature, one needn't hike far at all. Some day, I would like to stop beside a small trailside pond, spend the entire day examining and identifying all the animals, plants and rocks in its vicinity, and piece together in my mind the dynamic interrelationships among them within that microcosm.
    
    - Jeffrey P. Schaffer, "Thoughts on Mapping the Pacific Crest Trail"
    
    
17. If you start down a bowl a mile wide, with perfect snow and no one except Wayne Poulson and you on the mountain; you can count on him smokin' up alongside you at about 50 mph and 2 feet away ... his way of being friendly ... but I could never quite get used to it.
    
    - Dick Dorworth, "Europe: Fourth Time Around"
    
    
18. Coming to a particularly fetching piece of statuary, she suggests, "Let's nick it, it would look lovely on Mum's mantle." The presence of an armed guard inhibits the felony and we ascend to the second floor of the museum.
    
    - Jeremy Bernstein, "Pakistan 2: In the Path of Alexander"
    
    
19. Ho ho ho, it is all a bad conspiracy. It is not even necessarily a bad conspiracy, between government and oil companies (how they've gloated since they changed their monikers to "energy" companies five years ago) and banks and the rest of those bad folks. It is a conspiracy to keep the product off the market and keep us all just short of real inconvenience while the price goes up, sure, we all know that. It is not a bad conspiracy because it is a massive attempt to shake the transportation industry back to some sort of congruence with reality.
    
    - N.E.D.
    
    
20. First of all, the editor of this book, Galen Rowell, is a friend. He has shown up on my doorstep of a Friday evening with merciless regularity in recent years and has managed to shake the country comfort out of me often enough to get us on a number of climbs and a few ski tours up and down the east side of the Sierra, and even in Yosemite. Worse yet, one of the seventeen articles collected here, a description of the mood of Camp 4, where the Yosemite climbers live, is mine. So much for objectivity.
    
    - Doug Robinson, in a review of Galen Rowell's "The Vertical World of Yosemite"
    
    
21. I'm not going to blame the degradation of Nepal on "large groups" or on "hippies" or on "the Germans" or on the "fat-assed bastards who come in by helicopter." Nepal gets ruined or saved by me alone. Regardless of what others may do, I won't contribute to inflation; I'll carry my own supplies or stay out of areas where food shortages exist. Regardless of how many people who have shit in the trail or alongside the stream banks and, irrespective of the fact that this may be the local custom, I will get well away from towns and trails and campsites, and I will burn or bury my paper.
    
    - Bob Swift, "Thoughts on a Changing Nepal"
    
    
22. We had run with Tom's stretcher. For twenty miles we ran, alternating positions on the mile. Our buddies who weren't on the stretcher team would double up their packs and carry the gear of the guys who were. This meant that we had been carrying about one hundred and forty pounds each when we weren't carrying Tom. I don't know how I survived. My heart felt like it was going to burst, my legs ached and my eyes were blinded by the sweat which poured off my forehead. The damned horseflies had a taste for the salty seasoning of our sweat and ate us alive. They draw blood in Idaho.
    
    - John O'Conner, "Solo"
    
    
23. It has probably been a long time since anything as exciting as my visit has happened on New Year's Day in Touet. It seemed to turn out most of the townspeople. The women came slowly wearing wool scarves and dirty cloth aprons and stand at a respectable distance in a loose semi-circle behind their men, who have walked up a little closer - close enough to look over my arms and into the vitals of the engine. Nobody says anything. Not much to say I guess to a red-bearded American in knickers and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt.
    
    - Geoffrey Childs, "Mountain of Magic, Mountain of Marvels"
    
    
24. a battlefield here, me trying to bend the desert to my vision. I have spotted a dozen possible positions where pieces of sculpture would feel good. the only problem is the gnarl of cholla to the west. so I'm burning it. green succulent cholla fingers literally screaming in agony! i rationalize these funeral pyres by telling the desert spirits there will be a shopping center here next year. and didn't I cut away an old dead mesquite bush from around the barrel cactus to reveal its inner beauty earlier today?
    
    - Chuck Simmons, "Butterfly tracks in the caldera. Notes from the overground plus an integral interview with a friend, Ed Abbey."
    
    
25. Like the fall of the Roman Empire, the disintegration of the Golden Age of Mountaineering is gradual to observe but historically sudden. The mental wilderness of pre-war climbing has now been mapped, explored, homesteaded and subdivided. A few mountain men remain, but the scene resembles the false tranquility of post-pioneer America, ready to change - all too quickly - into token pastoral art on a condominium wall.
    
    - Galen Rowell, "Creativity"
    
    
26. Telluride, Colorado became the site of an international film festival August 30-September 2: the first Telluride Film Festival, a big one, with Julie Christie, Francis Ford ("The Godfather") Coppola, Dusan ("Sweet Movie") Makavejev, Gloria Swanson, Stan Brakhage and many more. Put together by Jim Bedford and Bill Pence to be "a film festival for people who love films," it was mostly (miraculously) just that. The quack stars, glitter freaks and media groupies were there by the dozen, like crows at a deer kill, but the films and filmmakers kept shining through.
    
    - Rob Schultheis, "Film Freaking in Telluride"
    
    
27. There is disillusionment too: a small gully on the east side of the summit is nearly half-filled with rusting tin cans and other debris. Slobbus Americanus, it seems, roams far and wide. The price, I suppose, for increasing crowded wilderness. Crowded wilderness? The summit of Grand Teton? Impossible. But there it is in black-and-white: according to the summit register, ten other people have been on the summit today. Make that twelve; two more climbers join us. Let's see, counting us that makes sixteen people on the summit today, in an area of roughly forty by forty feet. I make a mental calculation, find that sixteen people in an area of sixteen hundred square feet is equivalent to a population density of 280,000 people per square mile! That's forty times the population density of Los Angeles.
    
    - Boyd Norton, "The Grand," excerpted from Norton's "The Grand Tetons"
    
    
28. Another possibility, of course, was fire. Why not as a farewell salute set fire to the tractors, loaders, skidders et alii, et cetera, one and all? Hayduke was a pyromaniac, fond of fire. He liked the warmth and he liked the purity of it, he appreciated fire's quick cleansing action. But he couldn't do it tonight. Not here. Why not? Because George Hayduke, like Smoky the Bear, had a horror of forest fires. Because he, Hayduke, had worked too many summers as a firefighter in too many national parks and forests. The idea of deliberately setting fire to a number of large oily paint-covered objects upwind from a forest of living trees - even though these objects were set in a clearing, even though he knew the loggers planned to cut most of the trees down anyhow, even though he knew that fires are really good for forests (hadn't Doc Sarvis himself said so and explained, at great and technical length, why it was so?) - despite these considerations, George Hayduke could not do it. Could not bring himself.
    
    - Edward Abbey, "Where's Tonto?" excerpted from "The Monkey Wrench Gang: A Novel About the Wooden Shoe Business in America"
    
    
29. The remedy to the debate over rating systems and books like Messner's is, of course, to do away with them altogether. To climb in silence. To go and do what you would and come back... and not tell anybody. The underground word-of-mouth has it that people are already beginning to see it that way in the Sierra. Of course, Reinhold is not ready for that kind of anarchy, ladies and gentlemen, and neither is the climbing industry. The first thing you know, you start encouraging people to go out and climb just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and they're going to start asking themselves how badly they need a pair of $85 Super Guides, or a day-glo rope that floats in yak dung, or a $30 rugby shirt with pre-patched elbows and factory-conditioned sweat stains under the arms or guide books, for godsake.
    
    - Geoffrey Childs, from his review of Reinhold Messner's "The Seventh Grade: Most Extreme Climbing"
    
    
30. We careened along the Idaho/Nevada desert night, through Contact, Wells, Elko, Battle Mountain, Winnemucca - drinking, eating, pissing, laughing and talking our way into some of the first, full-on-but-faltering-steps toward knowing ourselves - and sometime in the morning, after the harsh sun had turned the just-dark land into a glaring sea of changing desert colors, which brought out the shades, we gave our friend Jim Gilbert his worst moments of the trip. Somewhere around Lovelock we emptied the last glass bottle of the case we front-seaters had between us. At this point, we had been driving for about ten hours, drinking for eighteen and awake for nearly thirty; and our fifteen- and sixteen-year-old minds must have seemed pretty strange to our back-seat friend, completely sober and the elder at seventeen. We called to the back for the second case of beer. Jim didn't like that at all, but he eventually passed it over. This presented us with more than fifty bottles in the front seat, since there had been a few beers besides the cases, half of them empty. A crowded situation. Warren, blond and chubby, with an uncombed flattop, saddle shoes, Levis and a T-shirt, peered silently through chic prescription shades into his own endless highway, puffing on the constant cigarette of his habit. As the driver, he had the heaviest responsibility; and it takes a lot of concentration to destroy yourself and still keep things on the road. No company there at the moment. Gilbert, trustworthy and a friend, was on an entirely different track. What to do? What to do? What to do with yourself and a front seat full of empty bottles when you're fifteen years old and blasted out of your brains and barreling down the great American highways of being a teenager in the 1950s when you know - even though you are on your way back to your boyhood home - you know because you can feel you are going to spend long, hard miles on these endlessly lost asphalt paths that appear to lead everywhere but end nowhere and answer nothing because there is no time to change on that lost highway taken by the human mind sighting down a hood ornament at a world moving by so fast it can only be aimed along, never perceived or touched or felt or merged with or learned from. Even at fifteen, you know there are lots of dues to pay on the roads of America and the rest of the earth before the last key is inserted in the last ignition and turned on for the last, last time.
    
    - Dick Dorworth, "Night Driving: The Invention of the Wheel and Other Blues"
    
    
31. Lake Powell indeed possesses a stark beauty. The walls themselves, largely submerged, have lost much of their grandeur, but the water sparkles blue and clear, and the light thrown from its ripples into the dark of an overhang spreads a visual music that is truly hypnotic. But despite some stocked fish it is a dead world, reduced to water and stone. Where the two meet, the former zone of life, is at best a meaningless line and at worst, during drawdown, the inevitable bathtub ring of the reservoir. Shorn of variety Lake Powell soon pales, and today's visitor must turn for entertainment to the speed of his boat and the flush of his six-pack. The more adventurous, who might have relished the Glen as it was, motor up the side canyons, their engines reporting like jackhammers in the financial district, to hike what's left. Unless they are lucky they will first strike Dominy stew, named to commemorate the former czar of the Bureau of Reclamation. Flexible in its recipe, a typical dead-end might feature styrofoam cups, Olympia cans, outboard motor oil, dead trees, film cans, filter tips, rotting animals and mud. The latter can stretch, past the other ingredients and the stopped boat, up the canyon, dubious as a spacewalk.
    
    - Bruce Berger, "There Was A River"
    
    
32. Did you have pity on the Avocado Man? Poor old bastard stomped off across the bar to the crapper, and while he lingered there, beset amidst the brown-stained porcelain by vampires or plaster-casters or shivering fears or one of the other delays you have learned the flesh of aging alpine heroes is heir to, you laced his double geritol-and-gin with fifty thousand micrograms of Owsley's finest. And three-quarters of an hour later, when the recognition of the inexorable proverb burned behind his eyes and thickened his throat, you stage-whispered: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi; and the bar was summit silent as you turned and stomped out, your crampons leaving werewolf tracks on the hard wood floor.
    
    - Tad Hall, "Found By Hidden"
    
    
33. I have had the mingled pleasure and misery of the Great American Motorcycle Tour myself - on an ancient pre-war German Zundapp out of which I nevertheless managed to squeeze some five thousand miles at an average of forty-five or forty-six miles per hour when moving. I will verify practically everything Pirsig says about motorcycle touring, including the fact that truly the romantic and classical worlds meet in a most intense manner when your machine just stops running on a rainy afternoon in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, had I been more consciously aware of the classical forms underlying my romantic aspirations that summer, that ancient machine might not now be sitting abandoned, in an abandoned Illinois barn, with a hole in the head of its obsolete piston. I mention this mainly because the way in which Pirsig interprets and assembles his own experience works better for my experience than anything I've come up with. And he does it so brilliantly and honestly that I can't even resent it.
    
    - George Sibley, from his review of Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
    
    
34. I suppose things can't always be this nice down in Bisbee. It's going to change, probably get worse, but too fast. The mine has cut employment down from six hundred men to one hundred, which means that land will stay cheap. There's a chance that Occidental Minerals will open another pit, the edge of which will front on O.K. Street, just above the Gulch, but that chance is slim, and the town has survived mining ravages since its beginning. Things won't change that much - not for me, at any rate. I'm not looking for another Aspen, where I can get in on the ground floor. I'm just looking for a place where the living is slow and easy and cheap. And where my mind can run to fantasy. Out in front of Wallace's (where you can always go for a Worstburger, if you can get the cook's attention away from the checker game), I once spent two weeks, off and on, looking among the cigars and candy and girlie magazines for a Time magazine. That is, before time became irrelevant.
    
    - Steve Wishart, "Bisbee 2: Another View"
    
    
35. And now, temporarily frozen beside us, with the blurry out-of-focus speed lines still streaking backwards in the air, and there at the wheel, waving to us, is a mysterious and equally out-of-focus character in leather coat and cap, bug-eyed goggles and rakish scarf... but no, we won't be fooled again - this guy must be Lartigue's brother Zou-zou, or someone else from one of his mud-spattered photo masterpieces of early motor-car racing outside Paris - and now, this fantastic car is actually, right this instant, rushing by at twice our speed, braking and squealing as it skids 'round the corner behind us and disappears, while I look over to Edgar and ask, "What kind of car was that anyway, a Pierce-Arrow? And above all, is it in?" And while Edgar checks down the long list in search of an open category ("Brazil is in, honesty is in, big dogs instead of children are in, pinball machines are in, Panama hats are in...") we drop down to the valley bottom, shoot across a sagebrush flat, speed past a roadside dump of incomprehensible and functionless machinery, a stagnant pond, and now we're in sagebrush city - yup, down out of the mountains and into the high-scrub valley country. The other-side-of-the-pass country, where the road unkinks itself into long straight lines, or, sometimes, two intersecting lines, like this fork where Highway 82 dead-ends, and where we swing left onto US 24 toward Leadville. Our little VW is behaving, at last, like a real car and on we roar, still looking for the Big Cliche....
    
    - Lito Tejada-Flores, "A Short Drive With Edgar"
    
    
36. "Poetry is doing alright. It never does its work up front, but goes like an old beggar, so to speak, to the back door and sticks in people's dreams."
    
    - Chuck Simmons, "A Short Talk With Gary Snyder"
    
    
37. While it is obviously not within this brief article's scope or intentions to even scratch the surface of the last decade's finest debacles, it is important, I think, to throw a little light on the subject by means of example. And what better place to begin than with the Causilli/Beonotti fiasco on the South Face of the Dru? Even now their bold attempt at being the first rope to lead a blindfolded sheep up that precipitous wall is a much-discussed event and the source of any inquiry concerning bestiality on the continent. The attempt, as is well known, successfully failed only a few hundred meters short of the summit when Causilli became enraged over some incident during the bivouac and quit the climb, thereby ending the group's plans for a film career. Disheartened by his failure on the mountain and his subsequent divorce from the sheep, a penniless Causilli later committed suicide thus inspiring Beonotti to try downclimbing the entire route using only a Swiss Army knife and "several dozen elastics" as a fitting tribute to his late partner. Beonotti's demise, which is said to have surpassed the famed "Whymper Descent" of the Matterhorn, ended what is now known as the "Ewe Era" in the Central Alps.
    
    - Geoffrey Childs, "Mountaineering: A Few Brief But Substantive Notes On Failure"
    
    
38. I'm not equating 'est' and a lobotomy, understand. But on a scale between a chocolate sundae and a lobotomy, 'est' is closer to the latter than the former.
    
    - Mike Moore, "Breaking Free From The Human Potential Movement"
    
    
39. And I remembered that Emery Kolb lived, lived not only before the interruption of the telephone, but knew the man who invented it - Alexander Graham Bell - and, of course, he knew too Thomas Alva Edison, the man who invented artificial light, the feeding of which may soon eliminate by a power dam his Grand Canyon, as a dam has already vanished the Glen Canyon above. And Kolb knew Zane Grey ("a bitter man"), who invented the artificial West peopled with non-cowboys and non-Indians galloping across the purple page; and he knew Cecil B. DeMille, who conquered the West with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in Cinemascope and Panavision for Our Lord and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And it is important to note and long remark that it is an honorable and fair reckoning that they knew Kolb; not that Kolb knew them. Because it is a fair reckoning too that the Grand Canyon was not set down by eons to be conquered by mere man but - and to crouch there on the edge of the world with Kolb was to know this - to ennoble the human spirit. That is what the Canyon does. That is what it was wondrously made for. That is why Kolb has explored its delights and camped on its edge for seventy-three of his ninety-four years. Can anyone conjure up a time more magically spent?
    
    - William Eastlake, "That's Emery Kolb"
    
    
40. Watching the sun set was sacred to the glacier ritual. I doubt if I have forgotten any of the thousands of nightfalls I have seen. As the air stilled countless times on the point of the setting sun, I traveled the length of the Puget Basin in the stillness. The lights of Victoria and Vancouver would gradually emerge. The Pacific coastline sometimes broke free of fog, the Tatoosh Island echoing the constancy of my sunset awareness. My vision could be entirely different each time, and yet the same mood would flow over me - the sense of being on the edge of eternal time.
    
    - Randy LaChapelle, "Growing Up High"
    
    
41. My bright spots, like the echo, always seem to come when the shadows around me still measure longer than their objects. As the sun climbs in the bland, flawless sky, the morning shine and sparkle seem to burn right off the world, and even the echo loses its quality, although it might continue in a desultory and perfunctory fashion. In the morning, I bellow, "Why?" and a great chorus sings, "Why not!" But at noon, a committee routes down a memo saying, "Why bother...?"
    
    - George Sibley, "Part of A Winter, Part IV: Our Life in the Woods"
    
    
42. Collie spent his last years on the hauntingly beautiful Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast, scene of his early climbing experiences. During the Second World War three Royal Air Force pilots were enjoying a brief leave at Skye's Sligachan Hotel. Young preserves an enduring portrait of the elderly Collie. The pilot and his companions were alone at the almost-deserted hotel, "save for one old man, who had returned there to die. His hair was white, but his face and bearing were still those of a mountaineer, though he must have been of a great age. He never spoke, but appeared regularly at meals to take his place at a table tight-pressed against the window, alone with his wine and his memories. We thought him rather fine."
    
    - Chris Jones, "The Heroic Age" excerpted from his book, "Climbing in North America"
    
    
43. The significance of Billy Koch's silver medal - the first U.S. medal in the Nordic disciplines - is that cross-country skiing in the States is now bound to change. And despite the chauvinistic cries, the joys of the individuals who worked hard for the moment, it may not necessarily be for the good of cross-country skiing in the States at all. I suppose I'm a snob, and I like my peace and quiet, and I'm worried that cross-country skiing is going to be commercialized in the same way that Alpine skiing has been commercialized. There will be more people on cross-country skis, more depth on the teams, more money to pay them for their efforts and certainly increased support from American industry. But once cross-country skiing becomes big business, there will be fenced-in tracks you will have to pay to enter, hordes of cross-country skiers to battle with and a tremendous rise (this has already begun) in the cost of equipment (and the resultant snobbism that goes with being 'on top' of the mode).
    
    - Harvey Edwards, "Olympic Diary"
    
    
44. Later though, for weeks following my abortive flight, I suffered from a shade of disappointment and loss. Some ancient way remembered but not found. The trail not taken. For myself, at least, it now seemed clear - there was not going to be any magic shortcut into wisdom, understanding, peace. There would be no easy way.
    
    - Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road, Take The Other: Death Valley Acid"
    
    
45. Unfortunately, getting drunk always make me forget that I am not much of a drinker. I have never had very much elan at picking the right time and place to vomit. In this case, I hit VanLoon with the first wave, catching him across both legs, then spreading the rest of my stolen lobster over the floor of the coat room for everyone to see. Apparently, no one notices that they are shorts, as I feel several people patting me on the back, impressed with my work and shouting encouragement. The second wave gets most of them. Outside, staggering, I step on something soft between the porch and the ground that moans and twists wildly underneath my foot, but I am heading to the swing set now and blind to everything else. My friend is kind enough to hold my head, but refuses to drive over me with her car. I tell her that I do not want to live like this; but she refuses to be swayed. Inside the schoolhouse there are screams and thunderous applause. John, she says, is eating a tube from one of the amplifiers.
    
    - Geoffrey Childs, "Lobster Fishing in America"
    
    
46. Ferocity among dragons has been on the decline for the last three or four centuries though, and eventually dragon behavior became fairly meek stuff. John and Thomas Tinner, two common peasants, managed to kill a dragon with a crude gun in 1668. Only seven feet long, it was blackish-gray with a head like a cat, and no feet. Sadly enough, the dragon's only offense had been to sneak about sucking the udders of local cows dry. By that time dragons were actually friendly animals. Legend claims they welcomed absent-minded travelers who were giddy or drunk and had lost their way in the mountains. The dragons would entertain them through the cold winter, and with the arrival of milder weather in the spring, they would fly their guests to a spot conveniently near home.
    
    - Jeff Long, "Mountain Monsters"
    
    
47. The monument was spruced up today, grass mowed, guestbook open, plaques shined. Floral wreaths - funeral wreaths - from UMW locals lined the front of the statue. A trapdoor I hadn't seen before was open, ten feet in front of the statue. It was the "death pit," a rough-shoveled hole that two women and ten children had died in sixty-two years ago. Today the pit was a neat, grey concrete tomblike box, with cement steps leading down into it. Inside, it was small and dank and disquieting. An 80-ish woman with sprightly eyes and modest dress was standing there, talking to two dark-skinned men with wayward hair and psychedelic t-shirts. "A few days after the deaths here," she was saying, "I came to this place with my parents. They had filled this pit all full of fresh carnations. The smell of the carnations mixed with the smell of mud. For years after, I couldn't smell a carnation without feeling a little sick."
    
    - Meg Lundstrom, "Ludlow Revisited"
    
    
48. But having left across eleven states and three provinces a trail of empties that piled in a heap would rival the Pyramid of Cheops, I insist on everyone accepting as axiom that after the first pitcher or six-pack there's not a damned bit of difference among the American Standards - and it goes without saying that if you're stopping after a single pitcher or a six-pack you're not drinking beer, you're farting around.
    
    Harvey Manning, "Shut Up and Drink Your Beer: An Outsider's View of the Rocky Mountain High, and a small prayer that John Denver gets warts on his nose"
    
    
49. Joel and I climbed then, more warily appreciative of the risks than we might have been had Lee not been hurt. There is still something harebrained about climbing. It's nothing but a pursuit, and it's not that it's any more irrational than most pursuits. Most climbers don't get concussions trying to recover a fumble. Still, it's crazy - a novelty attractive in part because it is so radical. My anxiety won't ever be subdued. I have to let it be out-mustered by sun, good rock and the sense of climbing well. Precision, economy and control, all are part of uncommon concentration. I'm not chasing an empty trophyless summit. It's the single-mindedness I'm after.
    
    - Chip Brown, "Some Valleys Away"
    
    
50. Things went well for several hours. The trees were becoming sparse as Hooker neared the ocean, and the land flattened. Then, as the team broke over the crest of another valley, a shadow blocked the sun and it was lost in a whirling snowstorm. Hooker grimaced - the sudden snow meant slower going and maybe another night on the trail. As the team began their descent into the valley, Hooker took a second look at the snowstorm and blinked: it wasn't snow but a swirling mass of birds. The blizzard of birds - thousands of pure-white arctic ptarmigans - fluttered up the valley en masse.
    
    - Mark E. Clemens, "Iditarod: An Alaskan Odyssey"
    
    
51. What white man, I wonder, would smile at a tree, especially a dead tree, and call it "good." It occurs to me, though, that Fred's perception of a forest - or a river or a moose - is entirely different from my own. His is practical. Mine is aesthetic. In fact, it now dawns on me that I have never heard any Indian person exclaim over the beauty or looks or smell of a landscape the way I might. Fred, despite the many ways in which he has become civilized, is still dependent upon the bush for his well-being, and this is what shapes his outlook. He necessarily prefers big fish; I prefer colorful ones. He prefers moose with big bodies; I prefer moose with big antlers. He needs dry, dead trees to heat his home; I prefer living, pitchy trees because they look and smell nice.
    
    - Jack Hope, "The Yukon"
    
    
52. As I turned my attention north I was aware of the Grand Teton (the great tit of the great mother earth) overlooking all. I saw the coyote increase the rate of its struggles and thrash about between the bales as if seeking shelter among them. The hounds closed distance as fast as they could run, howling the whole time, the thrill of the kill driving them dog crazy. Suddenly, not fifty feet from the coyote, I saw a second coyote crouched down behind a bale; and even from my perspective I could see the grin upon his face and the life within his eyes. He waited until the hounds were about 70-80 feet from his partner before he broke cover. At that instant the crippled coyote, like Lazurus springing from the grave, blossomed into full-stature coyote and turned on the hounds. One of the grand sights of my life was seeing a couple of full-grown mongrel hounds exchanging assholes for noses while involved in a full stride known only to the heat of the hunt, and get that stride headed in the opposite direction. One of them tried to back pedal, causing his rear quarters to come underneath, and he wound up skidding on his back; but he came up in a scrambling sprint with the greatest actor I have ever seen right on his ass end with the coyote's own magnificent tail laid flat out behind, floating like a flag of coyote wildness in the wind of the newly directioned chase. The other hound just put on the brakes. He tumbled end over end in a couple of good head-first rolls before he, too, could get back up with his powerful legs moving in the other direction, the hidden coyote of patience right on his ass. Those coyotes chased the two hounds around that field at full speed and the farmer went about his work without paying the slightest attention to the whole spectacle, as if he had seen it a thousand times before; and I laughed aloud with the show and at my new knowledge and at the pattern of education; and I watched the coyotes chase the dogs without catching them around the field and around the field and around the field and around and around and around and around.
    
    - Dick Dorworth, "Coyote Song"
    
    
53. It does; the glow starts. I can almost hear the blood hum as it seeps back up near the surface of my skin. I saunter up the path collecting the sweaty rags I shucked as I plunged down to the creek, strolling naked to the house with a handful of clothes. Prickly path on still tender feet, summer air drying the water on my ass, skin beginning to turn pink, my body a blast furnace overcompensating for the shock. I get to the house, dry off, slip on something thin and soft. Pad about the cool kitchen linoleum barefoot, newly opened windows and doors swirling the house full of bee sounds and hot growing odors. Still glowing. Damp hair on the back of the neck. Still glowing. Oh, there is a mellow electric humming in the world on an early summer New Hampshire day. And it is going to be summer all summer long.
    
    - John Jerome, "Truck: On rebuilding a worn-out pick-up in rural New England, and other post-technological adventures" from his book, "Truck"
    
    
54. Collecting butterflies is something like masturbating. Each time you do it you feel relieved and somewhat ill at ease. You try to do it in private, away from roads, from people, from casual onlookers. You would never do it at a party or in a stadium except in the most extraordinary circumstances. The rationalization is that you want to collect butterflies in untouched areas, areas unaffected by man's pollution and presence. The truth is you would rather not be seen collecting butterflies by other people. And the worst part of it all is that after you are finished collecting, like masturbating, you know you are going to do it again.
    
    - Rob Pudim, "Confessions of a Butterfly Chaser"
    
    
55. Cowboy humor, according to the idolizing history books, consists of tall tales and wild yarns. In Texas, for example, people put bells on their children to keep hawks from carrying them off. A cowboy in a Kansas City restaurant liked his steak so rare that the waiter had to drive it in, tie it up and serve it on a plate just like that. One cowboy claimed he had wrestled a bull so huge that by the time you stepped back far enough to see all of it, you could not see any of it. All this sounds very quaint and Mark Twain-ish, but it is bullshit: Black Angus, Brahma and Texas Longhorn shit. Cowboys get their kicks scaring ignorant, wide-eyed city folk out of their genuine faded Levis.
    
    - Allan Rabinowitz, "Overnight to Taos the Long Way"
    
    
56. Run. God oh run. Don't breathe. Don't sweat. They'll drink their water and go back. They're right on the road. What are they? OK, man. Don't worry. You're alright. They're drinking, aren't they? One's coming. Don't breathe. One has left the rest and is coming. See its eyes? Yellow. Large. You see its size. It sees you. Maybe. What the hell is it? It's turning circles by the starlight. It's squealing frantically under the moon. What's wrong with it? Others coming. Yes, it sees me. They're all howling. They smell the scarf. Oh god, the scarf. They smell me. They're all howling. Smelling me. Leaving the water. The road. There's a hundred yellow eyes surrounding me. Don't cry. No. Please. No. Ohh run. Run, jesus, run. No. Don't move. Jackals. Throw sand at um. Do something. Do something dammit. One's got my leg. It's not playing. They all smell me. Stab it with your pen. Throw desert at um.
    
    - Michael Tobias, "Desert Part Two"
    
    
57. Now, a not-inconsiderable fraction of the local diurnal social life takes place around and in Mornay's pool. Since Mornay's brother-in-law is a guide, Mornay's sister has taken to bringing her girlfriends - more often than not wives of other guides - and their girlfriends to the shores of Mornay's pool. They are an attractive lot, trim and athletic - many work as ski instructors in the winter - bikini-clad, some with small children, some without. What they have in common is that their husbands are off in the mountains practicing the very dangerous metier of teaching amateurs alpine climbing. I often wonder what the girls' real feelings about the mountains are as they bake themselves in the sun near Mornay's pool. Any rumor of trouble in the mountains flutters among them like a squall over a lagoon. My guess is that their worry about their absent men must lie just below or just above the surface of their consciousness all of the time, a barely suppressed pain. The wife of one guide I knew said - in an instant, and unguarded reflex - "Thank God" when she was told that her husband had been buried under an avalanche: Thank God the question had been decided once and forever.
    
    - Jeremy Bernstein, "Les Choses Qui Arrivant"
    
    
58. Wolfe accidentally stepped on the rope and a loop wound around his ankle, jerking Weissner off the slope. Soon both men were sliding and their combined weight pulled Pasang out of his steps. Weissner tried to self-arrest with his ice-axe, but the others slid past him and he began to somersault with rapidly increasing speed. Righting himself, he forced his axe into the slope with the strength of desperation. For long moments nothing happened. Then he luckily crossed a small area of softer snow and stopped the fall. below him, Wolfe and Pasang dangled from the rope against a hard surface. Only two hundred feet farther down, the great ice cliffs from the summit snowfield dropped off 6,500 feet toward the Godwin-Austen Glacier. During the fall, all three men had given up hope of surviving.
    
    - Galen Rowell, "An American Tragedy On K2," excerpted from his book, "In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods"
    
    
59. There were accounts of other strange deaths as well. There was a Swiss couple who fought each other with their ice axes and later died, and the priest from Mexico who, upon reaching the summit, held out his crucifix, made a little speech about being close to God and then flung himself off the edge. Aconcagua was known to have strange effects on some people's minds, due not only to lack of oxygen, but perhaps also to the quality of the atmosphere and the air pressure. Hallucinations were a common occurrence among climbers. We were advised to to refrain from making jokes on our climb since some people can be especially susceptible to irritability at high altitudes. An innocent joke may develop into a serious fight, even among the best of friends.
    
    - Erica Elliot, "Aconcagua: An American Woman's Journey"
    
    
60. Hobbled by the forelegs, they made only a half-hearted attempt to escape my approach. I rode close. This was the first time I'd ever seen camels outside of a zoo. They raised their heads to stare at me, the loose jaws moving with a sideways, rotary motion as they chewed their feed. Strange beasts out here in central Australia. "You fellas are a long way from home," I said. They blinked, nodded, lowered their heads again. Anna Creek is a long way from Afghanistan, their ancestral stomping grounds. But the camels have been here a long time, too, nearly a century and a half. Their breed has adapted well to the unbelievable emptiness of Australia. As have, come to think of it, a number of other exotic creatures. Rabbits, for example. Donkeys, horses, sheep, cattle. Pigeons and housecats. Englishmen.
    
    - Edward Abbey, "The World of Anna Creek"
    
    
61. There is some design to our apparent periods of unsettled direction, however. The mountains extend into the cities as surely as the cities into the mountains. The topographer defines finite mountain boundaries; we try to see the "mountains" as being everywhere. It is a modest attempt to maintain some perspective on our place in a living world.
    
    - Gaylord Guenin, "Editor's Note"
    
    
62. But Prince Faisal is convinced that fresh water from icebergs, which are salt-free, will prove more economic than desalinating sea water. To promote his belief, he spent $1 million to form Iceberg Transportation International Ltd, a commercial venture, and donated $65,000 to the conference. He predicts that a towed Antarctic iceberg will reach Saudi Arabia by 1980, at a cost of $100 million.
    
    - Mountain Notebook
    
    
63. But Galen Rowell, one of the best of mountaineers, photographer par excellence and gifted writer of mountain prose, has written a book that deals with so many levels of physical and psychological experience that it is hard to know where to begin. "In the Throne Room of the Gods" is simultaneously a history of mountaineering in the Karakorum (that stupendous collection of mountains west of the Indus River), the chronicle of a failed expedition, an analysis of the strange chemistries that seem to bind men together or put them at each other's throats in the context of large scale mountain endeavors, and finally, a photographic documentation of a mountain region and its people that is of the highest and most subtle standard. The marginal photographs would profit as enlargements, but they become a sociological tour de force in their own right.
    
    There is a context which Rowell explores which has hardly been touched by literary mountaineers in the past: the impact of multiple expeditions, financial and physical, on the delicate balance of people, ecology and customs in places such as the Karakorum. Some of Rowell's reflections may seem exaggerated, but for anyone who has visited those remote villages and valleys, his observations seem chillingly close to the truth: expeditionary mountaineering could very easily destroy the basic elements of Baltistani life.
    
    - Robert Craig, Review of "In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods," by Galen Rowell
    
    
64. This walking stick is an industrial broom handle. Hardwood. Enduring. Being only two years of age, it is comparatively young for its kind. The two walking sticks belonging to my father are ages 20 and 15. Both also of the same mundane material. My brother once carved rough designs into the youngest of them as a gift for my father. On the first walk with my new walking stick, I carved an encircling notch into it while squatting beneath a juniper in a morning drizzle in the San Juan. The notch represented nothing of course, and disturbed me even though well hidden, all this time since, in the corner behind the door. The notch mocked though I could neither see nor hear it. The knife had been ahead of my walking. It now stands for this long stroll. I now have a true notch.
    
    - Greg Harris, "Waxing"
    
    
65. ... Perhaps the troubles and the worries that pertain to town life are not apparent in the mountains, but there is instead a sort of stupor of dull, continuous suffering.
    
    The summer is short: the rest of the year is winter, and the mountain dweller patiently awaits in his closed stable the sun's return; the time for harvest is short, and the work of gathering it in is heavy; the placid joys of labor do not seem to brighten men's lives in these high places, but hopeless resignation to fate shapes their course.
    
    Today, one would have to go a long way in the Val Tournanche - the valley that Rey is writing about - or any other Alpine valley to find a mountain dweller patiently awaiting in his closed stable the sun's return. That mountain dweller is needless to say, teaching skiing or working in a bar in Cervinia or some such place for what his parents or grandparents might well have regarded as a fortune, and who can say which offers a more attractive prospect - the tent colonies and motels of the modern Val Ferret or the closed stable? Such is the peculiarity of human beings that it is this comparison, vividly apparent in the mountains, that confronts us in different guises wherever the automobile has been allowed to proliferate.
    
    - Jeremy Bernstein, "A Sense of Something Forbidding"
    
    
66. On the morning of July 19, 1977, I headed up a 3,500-foot couloir with a 60-pound pack as fast as I could go. It led to a col separating the Great Trango from the first tower, and it acted as a funnel for every avalanche from the massive south faces of both peaks. We camped under the Trangos for five days and on every one of them gargantuan slides of rock and snow swept the couloir. I felt like a snail on a city sidewalk, carrying my home on my back in the presence of forces that could squash me without warning.
    
    - Galen Rowell, "Topping the Trango Towers"
    
    
67. The long gray-yellow sack begins to rise; I detect some night ceiling, the air seems to be turning drier. Then I am in black night; I run free of the convoy, am away from the soft yellow ambience of the light from cities and towns. The theme of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" comes over the radio as I travel past signs for Muncie. The yellow cast returns, but is now topped by a ceiling of stars. The heavens expand as I listen to the five-note variation; space creatures reconnoitering the snowy plains in rockets as large as cities, a matrix of lights hurtling through the galaxies. I look to my right; there is a Volkswagen buried under five feet of snow.
    
    - Robert Collector, "I Drive By Night"
    
    
68. After I opened with a summary of the Tucker article, I was going to sail into, and perhaps this might have been seen as something of a polemic backwater, unnecessary to the mainstream of profound thought I had planned for the piece, nevertheless, I had it all planned then to launch into the tiniest bit of libertarianism, wherein I would attack the central government, and by association, those who do things to hand over more power to the aforementioned entity - asking my readers whether or not they truly wanted to hand over more of our precious, and already nearly hemorrhagic personal liberties to the same bastards who gave us Amtrak and the Post Office and Watergate (thank god for Watergate), etc., etc. Listen, I was going to write that more and more the government in this society grows like a junkie's monkey, more and more we can't live without it and we can't peel it off our necks and then, I would have said, the only way to get free is to shoot for it, Cold Turkey, sweat it out the hard way before the monkey comes to own us.
    
    Shit I'd trade off a view of Wyoming sagebrush for two hundred bureaucrats out of work any day - don't you see I was going to write that these bastards have jumped onto what to some of us are spiritual concerns, and are enlarging their empire by seeming to stand behind us - here, dear editor, I was going to paint yet another of my humble little word pictures - the scene would have been the penthouse office of the beloved minister of Health, Education and Warfare, Environmental Hygiene and Right Thinking - the scene is set - this guy is five-eight and weighs 240 pounds; he hires a Filipino male prostitute to cook breakfast, lunch and supper for him, little goodies like baked lizard pineal gland, sautéed camel lungs, fine wines and things like that, you get the picture and here he reads this article in Mountain Gazette see, they read these things to get new ideas, somehow they grasp ideas as important, they don't quite know why, but empirically have intuited that the guy with the right ideas gets to hire Filipino faggots to cook lunch, and play with their thighs, see and here's this lovely little piece, unspeakably sincere and from the heart: "Entelechy," see, about a guy who spends more time than most of us have to make doodoo, running and eating bean sprouts and twigs and feeling so utterly fucking clean inside, he makes you want to run into the bathroom and waterpick your pancreas or something; but when the Minister reads this idea piece, he takes it as his own see, and the very next week (this happened) this jowly bastard stands up in front of the Congress of the United States, a body not noted over the past 200 years for its personal devotion to Zen asceticism and he tells these old farts that half the problem with Americans is that they (they) eat too much and don't get enough exercise and the congress bleats and cheers and gives this guy five trillion more pesos, and another Filipino faggot ...
    
    - Gilbert Preston, "Lady With a Baby"
    
    
69. When aether rules, life becomes greater than it is. Yet after seven months of living the unexpected I begin to suspect that reality is a dimension of perception. By allowing winter to become what was within its power to be, and promising vision in return, we entered a covenant of wonder. My expectations rose to greet the impossible in a world where walking on water was the rule rather than the exception. There was a decisiveness to the season, an honesty of intent and a purity of purpose. Therein lies the problem. I begrudge spring its weeping. I am disgruntled at having set aside my moosehide slippers for rubber soles. I do not like having to leave the cocoon of my parka, the sheltered nest of my ruff. I am reluctant to make the transition, to make the metamorphosis into spring. I feel like the grizzly, whose presence is once again a source of anxiety. Eyes did not have to be darting from path to thicket to blueberry patch then.
    
    - Diana Scesny Greene, "Spring: Desertion of a Season"
    
    
70. To be injured at the Oklahoma City National Finals Rodeo, in front of 10,000 spectators and a nationwide TV audience, is acceptable. But to have your skull caved in or a lung collapsed at midnight in Oakley, in front of 300 yawning Mormon potato farmers, is somehow not the same.
    
    In a dark corner next to the catch pen, a cowboy was urinating in the dirt. Two others walked by, saddle bronc riders by their gear, wearing high school letter jackets. Behind the chutes no one was left now except a dozen or so tight-jawed bull riders, their rosined ropes hanging carefully on the weather-beaten catch pen fence. Their average age was probably 19. At 30, a city-bred English honors graduate, I was amazed at having allowed myself to become a part of this scene.
    
    - Dave Baldridge, "Riding Bulls"
    
    
71. A sign of growing Indian scrappiness in energy policy (Indians control over 12 percent of the nation's coal reserves) was evident during the Apollo space project. Two astronauts were testing a moon buggy on the lunarlike reservation lands of the Navajo, when an old medicine man asked what was happening. After being told, the medicine man related that according to tribal legend, Navajo ancestors came from the moon, riding down on its rays. One of the astronauts then asked the Indian if he would like to put a message on a cassette recorder which they would take to the moon and play should they met any of the tribe's relatives. After some hesitation, the medicine man muttered some Navajo words into the microphone. Translation? The old Indian greeted his distant brothers and warned them to beware of these "suspicious-looking" white men, especially if they tried to get lunar mineral rights.
    
    - Mountain Notebook
    
    
72. Too much success is creating problems in two of Colorado's most famous and opulent ski towns, Aspen and Vail.
    
    Both spas discovered this past winter that the number of individuals willing to perform the "menial" labor in their communities rapidly was diminishing. This is due, in large part, to the lack of inexpensive housing. To dramatize the point, last month, residents of Vail's last low-cost apartment complex had a "tent-in" after it was announced that Apollo Park would be sold and made into condominiums. The demonstrators, many of whom are Vail employees, will have to commute from another town, pay higher costs for housing or leave altogether.
    
    "People had a problem last year getting employees; it would have been worse this year anyway, but this [the sale of Apollo Park] makes it catastrophic," said one demonstrator.
    
    Both Aspen and Vail have reputations for innovation so it should come as no surprise that solutions have already been offered; a group in Vail wants to import Filipinos and in Aspen, it has been proposed that Vietnamese refugees might be trundled in to buttress the local labor force.
    
    According to a member of the Vail Employee Housing Task Force, as many as 500 Filipinos might be working in Vail within two to three years. Housing would be built in a nearby mountain town, and employees would be bussed back and forth.
    
    The American Civil Liberties Union has attacked both Vail's and Aspen's plans. Also, the importation of labor must first receive permission from the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Immigration.
    
    - Mountain Notebook
    
    
73. The sun woke me. Or was it the stillness, the train stopped again? Far to the east I could see, beyond a rocky ridge, some of the high red dunes of the Simpson Desert. Far beyond, out of sight and a hundred years ago, the Aussie explorers Burke and Wills had died out there, of starvation, at a place known as Cooper Creek. To the west lay a few low, flat-topped hills. Mesas - to me a reassuring and familiar sight. But no mountains. No rivers, no canyons. A stone building half in ruins, stood beside the tracks up ahead. A rusty tank nearby. "Abminga" it said. Another watering stop for coal-burning trains, abandoned since the advent of diesel. A man could live here, perhaps. How? Sell boomerangs - made in Hong Kong - to the tourists. Raise a few beef cows, maybe. Meditate. Starve - like Wills and Burke. You can always do something. Anywhere. There appears to be nothing else to do in any case. But why would anyone want to live here? Why not? But why?
    
    Pondering the question, I realized the answer. Who would want to live in Abminga? The answer was that nobody lived in Abminga because nobody wanted to live in Abminga, or could or probably ever would. Not even me. Satisfied, I enjoyed my usual Central Australian Railway breakfast - an orange, a bag of peanuts, another orange, another bag of peanuts, some warm water from my jug and a couple of slugs of bourbon for a chaser. The train crept on, have paused long enough to allow me to complete my ruminations on nothingness.
    
    - Edward Abbey, "Back of Beyond, Australia Down Under, part 3"
    
    
74. I have always hated to step on a flower in bloom, and will avoid it if I can, but it is impossible to cross one of those tundra meadows without crushing thousands. I can think of nothing more luxuriant, richer, than to wade calf-deep into those deep purples, delicate violets, small rubies, fire reds, great splashes and dashes of yellow and white, leopard patches of yellow and brown daisies. On a still, blue day, with the sun frying your face in Sea'n'Ski, it's the kind of a place that makes you want to take off your clothes and roll naked, happy as a puppy in a pasture-pie.
    
    - George Sibley, "A Place "Unrememberable," from "Part of a Winter"
    
    
75. In my mind's eye, he had left it at the bar the night before to be cleaned and spit-polished.
    
    But wherever it was, there he sat at the table across from me in the restaurant, monocularly gazing and contentedly smiling at his eggs and jam.
    
    Silverton, Colorado, after Last Day is not the kind of place for trivial niceties like wearing your fake eye to breakfast, gaping socket or not. Hell, if I could have reached up and pulled out one of my own orbs - or, for that matter, any part of my throbbing noggin - and placed it next to the sugar bowl, I would have in a minute. Headache pain relief via cranial disassembly. Worth a try.
    
    I believe this guy went through most of the previous evening with two eyes in his head, except, of course, for those times when he had three.
    
    My memories are hazy and uncomfortably distorted.
    
    Last Day in Silverton hazes and distorts the best of us.
    
    Jesus. Last Day. The words make the feint-of-heart faint.
    
    - Crazy George Cline, "Last Day in Silverton"
    
    
76. Language can be a strange weapon. Unlike a sword or a bullet, its power is unpredictable. There are millions of otherwise intelligent men in this country who will go all to pieces and start swinging hysterically on any stranger who calls them a "sonofabitch." Others can't stand the word "fuck." It rips up their nerves and scrambles their brains; within milliseconds after hearing that word, their knuckles turn white, their ear-lobes are gorged with wild blood and their lymph nodes start vibrating in the manner of laboratory rats on a raw electronic grid.
    
    - Hunter S. Thompson, "Politics & the F-Word"
    
    
77. So the day went: eat-sit-yakyakyak-jump in the river-sit-eat-yakyakyak-jump in the river-sit-eat-yakyakyak-go to bed. The outfitter supplied five rubber duckies to play in; so we traded them off, ran some of the fluffy water, stayed wet a while; back in the scows-dry off quick-jump in the river-sit, etc. R&R no longer stands for rest and relaxation, it stands for Rules and Regulations. How not to "feel" a river is rule number one: Live in a harness all day long. On the rafts, in the duckies, swimming; fast water, slow water, no water, you gotta wear a goddamn lifejacket. Try swimming in one! Once upon a time we wore the things when common sense told us to. For swimmers, feeling the river's moods and currents; its eddies, tug and flow, is the real joy of being there. Wearing a life jacket is like making love with a condom, and freedom is a word no longer synonymous with rivers. I need a tattoo, or a permanent river tag attached that reads: "If I drown on this river because I refuse to wear a lifejacket, it's MY FAULT. Any asshole who tried to interfere, or thinks he will be sued for my freedom of expression (to die or not to die) WILL BE SHOT."
    
    - Katie Lee, "The Cottonwood Leaf"
    
    
78. Things are better in the woods. Water is sweeter. Men are wilder. And it's pickup trucks that get us there. To the back bowls, to the Divide, to that nameless peak along the gulch road. Edward Abbey says, "Wilderness is the only thing left worth saving." That includes me and you, wildness embodied in human form. Read and you discover that the Wild is strong in the equation of biological imperative. It's the primitive, dark horse deep river, the pheromal unpredictable lucky star, that wins the evolutionary race to transcendence and the perpetuation of thankful genetic shifts nearing the Ultimate Sphere. Everything I've ever loved has happened in the wilderness, in remote cabin shangri-las or in pick-up trucks. Some fortunate beings are even conceived in pickups, the most auspicious vehicle for the continuation of our species.
    
    - Lacey Story, "Wild Red Dharma Pick-Up Truck"
    
    
79. Looking back, I can see that, at that moment, in my etriers in the middle of that overhanging wall, I was in a place most people would say is dangerous - scary, risky, hazardous. Yet I wasn't gripped. I was relaxed, confident, in control. Master of the rock, I had become the climber of my dreams.
    
    - Royal Robbins, "Realm of the Overhang"
    
    
80. The West is my corner of the world, but the question is the same across America. How do we live in balance in a place? I don't mean we should all wear dreadlocks and hemp and make our meals from seeds and tofu. I mean, what are we supposed to do in the here and now, with real lives and ambitions and desires?
    
    - Hal Clifford, "My Generation: Threat or Menace?"
    
    
81. It should come as no surprise that, here at Mountain Gazette, we feel it's necessary to dress oneself with stylistic aplomb. In the heart of the High Country, where we coif ourselves, fashion and fashion sense are important on several levels, not the least of which being that, if you commit an attire-based faux pas in certain venues, you can find yourself socially shunned, or, worse, socially having the nasal excretions thumped out of you by folks who take their fashion seriously. And who among us looks good with facial lumps and contusions?
    
    - Introduction to "Dressed to Drink," the first-ever Mountain Gazette fashion spread
    
    
82. In any case I feel no apology for my awe. With each hour the mountains show a new aspect of themselves, a new color, a new mood. Clouds gather, then shred apart under blinding blue sky; water trickles everywhere, fresh from the snowfields; yellow pasque flowers and purple gentians poke through the glistening soil; occasionally, a slide of rock and ice rumbles down from above, echoing between the buttresses. And greedily, I drink it all in. So many wonders are coming at me so rapidly from so many directions, I can't turn my head fast enough. I see myself becoming this caricature of a guy whose spinning head has become a blur of lines.
    
    - Moss Campion, "Decaf: A Heartbreaking Encounter with the Real Swiss Miss"
    
    
83. So there I sat in the eddy on the Payette. I had pulled in there because I had seen the cluster and thought "Kayakers. Hey, I'm a kayaker, too." But as I sat there wedged against the shore, battered by the stream of wave surfers, I started wondering if I really might be one of the last of the old brontosauri, lost in a stampede of these new hairy mammals, still lamely thinking that it was all about boating and being there, when it is really about things, and about tricks, and about outfits, and about wave-time. I felt my joints creak and my spirit sag. I slowly worked my blue dirigible backward down the shore, out of the bottom of the eddy, and floated around the bend.
    
    - Brad Dimock, "The Old Man and the Sea of Plastic"
    
    
84. Come here in July and Silverton, Colorado, will play you for a sucker, as I sometimes fear it has played me. Summertime here is wildflowers and rhubarb festivals and sticky-faced children gorging on funnel cakes, long days and laughing locals playing soccer in the soft twilight at the park, next to the gazebo, down the hill from the century-old cemetery. It is instant gratification and endless possibilities and an abiding, sun-drenched belief that little mountain towns can save lives.
    
    - Steve Friedman, "Why Paradise is Such a Dangerous Place"
    
    
85. When you're that scared, it's all about adrenaline, instinct, blind luck, stupidity. I scrabble-rabble down the slope, stumbling into the krummholz trees, almost yanking my arms out of their shoulder sockets by grabbing branches as I careen past helter skelter in splashes of water, mud, and hailstones, squealing at every lightning flash, my freaked and freaky heart jumping around inside my rib cage like Mick Jagger on a small stage, my knees wailing at each lurch and twist: We are out of control.
    
    - John Nichols, "Old Man on the Mountain"
    
    
86. My pockets bulged with coins as I walked the quarter-mile strip of Main Street. Half an hour earlier, I emptied the contents of the pink ceramic pig where I deposit the nightly shrapnel, picked out $6.25 in quarters and $2.45 in nickels and drove to Central City for a night of research. I came to see what had transpired in the decade since casino gambling was legalized here as a way to preserve Central City's mining-era brick buildings, which tower over Main Street like sheer canyon walls. The laundry money chink, chink, chinked like Clint Eastwood's spurs as I sucked one last breath of fresh air and entered Easy Street to breathe others' smoke, lose my money and watch others lose more.
    
    - Paul Tolme, "Fear & Loathing in Central City"
    
    
87. There were pickled chicken giblets, pickled cow tongues, pickled turkey heads, pickled pig's esophagi, pickled seagull spleens, pickled chicken feet, pickled snakes and, down there at the end of the pickled row, was a jar of pickled something gray and sludgelooking. I inquired of the nature of the sludge to the barkeep. He mirthed a little grin, cigarette dangling. He walked down, and with a mighty effort, unscrewed the rusted-on scumlid and brought the pungent package down to me. I knew, as he reached his burley, tattooed arm into the vat that I was about to face down some sort of northern Idaho acid test; I could tell by the way the conversation suddenly stopped and how everyone was eyeballing me from the safe side of their bottles of Bud and beneath their Elmer Fudd lumberjack hats, which they were wearing despite the heat of the season and the stuffiness of the bar. I certainly comprehend both the concept and the application of acid tests, it's just that I prefer them to actually include acid, even if it is stored in pickle juice in a never-ever-washed jar long forgotten on some bar, served up by a guy named Phil with yesteryear's grit beneath his well-chewed nails.
    
    - M. John Fayhee, "Things in Jars"
    
    
88. But back to the free beer. What's the best thing about gender imbalance in mountain towns? Not beer. It's that a girl can score herself tune-ups for her bike, pro-deals on gear, kayak rentals and a belay partner happy to gaze up at her ass for hours without complaining. Not to mention free lift tickets, the most coveted resource of all in the so-called New West. This is how fairy tales would go if the patriarchy hadn't rewritten them: Eastern girl gets fed up with the city and moves West, finds the right guy(s) ... pretty soon she's skiing, climbing and biking her brains out, pretty soon she's better than he is at most of it, and then she lives happily ever after in a darling Victorian house in an enchanted mountain town that looks just like Crested Butte.
    
    - Nichole Gordon, "Woman with a Pulse"
    
    
89. We get drifters here in Jackson Hole. The Hole is Point Nadir for some people. It becomes a black hole, where not even light can escape its gravity. The line in the country song by local Bruce Hauser, is "She left me cold in Jackson Hole ... Jackson Hole, Wyoming is the coldest place I know." It refers not only to the weather. Seven young men for every hatchling leaves lots of hormones raging. (The Hatch: the newest batch of fresh-faced young women taking a year off to sow wild oats.) One young guy walked up Cache Creek, went off trail, set up an IV drip with something that killed him. His body was there for a year before a meandering hiker found him last spring, less than a mile from town.
    
    - Cal Glover, "The Night Drivers of Jackson Hole"
    
    
90. Under the Bush economy, growth in the trendy enclaves of the Mountain West has all but screeched to a halt, and local growth control advocates are under increased attack. But over the long haul, the debate will continue: How shall we balance respect for property rights against respect for the environment and for quality of human life? My theory is that Coloradans are responding as much to the god-awful quality of the growth as to the amount of it. They wonder why so much of all this new stuff has to be butt-ugly, ramshackle and casually sprawled.
    
    - Jon Kovash, "Why Architects Are Tools (A Rant)"
    
    
91. No one knows why morels appear in such profound abundance only in the wake of what we have termed "catastrophic wildfires." People have tried for years to domesticate them, without success. It is believed that the fungus survives, without fruiting, in a symbiotic, perhaps mutually crucial, relationship with the roots of certain, or all, plants of the living forest, waiting with a kind of patience beyond all human comprehension for the liberating gift of fire. The life cycle of the morel suggests worlds as alien to our own as anything in the far reaches of space, a quick lesson, perhaps, in humility, that all around us lies this unfathomable nation of fungus, in motion, inexorable and complex, transcending by leaps our concepts of death and birth and the "destructiveness" of fire. The morel growing there in the ashes brings to mind Thomas Hardy's quote, that it, like the calypso orchid, or the spots on a cutthroat trout, could well be "but one mask of many worn by the Great Face beyond."
    
    - Hal Herring, "Morel Harvest"
    
    
92. John could not face being average. He had grand dreams, lovely dreams, which were distorted in the misty intersection between thoughts and brain chemistry. The thought may be father to the deed, but is it also father to the tidal surges of brain soup or the other way around? Maybe a desperate yearning for greatness can set off a biochemical tsunami, which washes ashore in the form of grandiose delusions. Maybe the ebb and flow of chemistry is first cause, carving some angry channel which makes average detestable. Thoughts swim in the murky brain sea - they can be grand and lovely, can be father to terrible deeds, can be both. John went to college, and college told him "average." Scripture advises, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." What do you do if your life offends you? I recently read a piece of Hemingway fiction that Hemingway would not, did not, publish. His heirs pulled it from a trunk to wring another dollar from the franchise. The Hemingway piece was flat and tedious. Imagine a dull and lifeless Mozart composition. Hemingway, like Mozart, had an ear for music, and there came a time when there was no longer any music in his writing. He had lived with the knowledge for most of his life that he was the repository of a great and mysterious gift. The gift left him, and left him with words that offended his ear so he plucked it all out with a shotgun. Mozart might have done the same had he ever had to face the shock of his gift departed. Hemingway killed himself because his gift departed, and perhaps my nephew killed himself for some resonating reason. It is a hard thing to be average.
    
    - Mac Griffith, "Strong Hills Rising in the Distance"
    
    
93. Like Kim, I was an ex-soldier who shared his uneasiness with the national glee about our one-sided military victories. Nobody begrudged the troops their homecoming. It was the tacit assumption that war could be as painless as a video game that we could not abide. Kim only avoided Vietnam because he was an Olympic hopeful who fought his way to a boxing championship at Fort Bragg, N.C. My own unit, the U.S. Special Forces, was also based at Fort Bragg and I didn't avoid the war at all. Both our units, the 82nd Airborne and the Green Berets, figured prominently in Operation Desert Storm, Somalia and Afghanistan, and we had watched the action unfold with considerable interest. What had driven us down here was the absence of dialogue about the price of war, the unburied dead, civilians caught in the cross-fire, the refugees, the incinerated tank crews.
    
    - Doug Peacock, "After the War"
    
    
94. To merit the cheek-to-jowl trucks and satellite dishes and custom-built quasi-celebrity display perches installed by the major media across the street from the Eagle County Justice Center, to give reason to the electrical cables that could run to Alpha Centauri and back several times, and to explain why the hell anyone would wear a coat and tie at 2 p.m. in August in Eagle, Colorado, one would have to speculate mightily. I do not advocate hallucinogenic drugs, but it would appear that at least a small amount of LSD would be called for here, in order to fathom how any one thing could be such a damned big deal.
    
    - Tara Flanagan, "The American Way: The Scene at Kobe Bryant's Advisement Hearing in Eagle, Colorado"
    
    
95. What will remain is this common moment, one that keeps dreamers and wanderers warm in their old age. The promise of one of these moments will fill the next generation's Aspen‚ Sun Valley, Telluride, etc. (fill in the name of your favorite lost and lamented ski town here) with bums and drop-outs enough to serve all the money-dropping tourons the ski corporations can lure in. Twenty, thirty, forty years from now, you may be too used up by life to leave fear at the town's edge, but you will be able to turn aside from the latest technology for a while, and quietly re-live this one night. Tell your story to anyone who can hear you then, to make sure that the young will know what is still out there in the moon's shadow, beyond guidebooks and fear gear, for each of them to take in his or her own stride.
    
    - B. Frank, "Beyond Fear Gear"
    
    
96. Maybe that's why I kept going back up into the maw. Alone, I felt sure I was doing something that hadn't been done before - at least not here, not today, not in this storm. Even when I knew my metabolism had dropped dangerously - my breathing short, my heart slow, my body temperature dipping, I kept going back up. I felt sure that this storm, these conditions, would never come again, or if the storm did come again, it would return like an old half-forgotten comet, to indicate the end and death, when all I could do with my thin will and thinner bones was watch it pass in the distance.
    
    - Wayne Sheldrake, "The Face, Wolf Creek"
    
    
97. We take a dirt fork in his monster diesel truck, his two-year-old daughter asleep in her car seat. He's got his P.G. Wodehouse volume of tales of Jeeves in the door pocket, his collection of music at hand also. But all the tools of his contentment seem much too feeble at the moment. He's talking Australia, a fresh start. The land he's dreaming of has a nice house, a pool, even a tennis court. Everything there is green and he will make it better. He's got to get out from under this place. He says it is lonely out here, real lonely.
    
    - Charles Bowden, "Craps"