My Cousin

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Mountaineering has been my life's great love. It can take the form of hiking forested trails in the hills, backpacking deep into the mountains to summits, bivouacking on airy perches high above the world, pure rock climbing on short walls and pure ice climbing on short frozen waterfalls, or the long desperate mixed climbing on the rock, snow and ice of high mountain walls, i.e., alpinism. It is the craft of movement through the mountains.
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I want to honor and thank my first cousin for his influence on my mountaineering avocation. He gave me the focus to really start climbing. He introduced me to the world culture of mountaineering, and he made the dream of climbing real to me. To him I am eternally indebted.
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I had always seen adventure and romance in mountain climbing, but it also represented some sort of unique twisted spiritual quest. The great French mountaineer, Lionel Terray, referred to himself and to all others with a similar calling to be "The Conquistadors of the Useless." If you haven't been addicted to the sport, you won't understand its allure.
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As a young boy, I watched Lowell Thomas Adventures on TV. I remember seeing a documentary on the 1953 British Mt. Everest Expedition, the one that put Tenzing and Edmund Hillary on the top of the world. I saw men struggling under huge loads up immense mountains during horrendous storms. It was heroic in a crazy sort of way, and very fascinating.
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But it was my cousin who introduced me to the world of real climbing. He was a world traveler - from a family of world travelers. (My uncle and aunt had traveled to many exotic and far-off places in the world, my cousins grew up in the world at large, and I learned a lot from all of them.) He had been to the Alps and the Andes. Although not a radical technical climber himself, he knew the culture and the spirit of the craft. He told me of alpine places and peoples that fired my imagination.
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He would often stop at our farm on his way through the area, especially at the time when I returned home from Viet Nam. I was always into Dharma Bum things like hiking to hilltops and bivouacking under the Moon. He showed me the real gear for the first time: heavy European mountain boots, rucksack, down bag and jacket. He told me of Alpine culture when describing the places he had been. He was a man completely at home in cold, rocky, snowy environments.
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Then, he gave me a book, which I still have: "The Sierra Club Guide to Ski Mountaineering," ca. 1950s. (This was when the Sierra Club actually still climbed mountains.) This gave me the technical knowledge to navigate safely in the winter environments of America. It also had a good explanation of the rope techniques of rock climbing and rappelling, and it was the first technical manual I ever had. This lit the fuse for me: I became a climbing fanatic.
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Climbing was the greatest medicine I ever took. For sure, it is risky, but it was the healthiest activity I have ever done. Many personal demons were exorcized after I aggressively pursued my passion for mountaineering. It is a clean and pure craft, and it makes one really know oneself.
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Thanks, Rex. You really lit a fire that has enriched my life.
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-Zenwind.