Home (for awhile anyway)

7,500 miles, 28 days in a tent; Babe’s first real camping ever.  We saw license plates from every state (32 in one day) except Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Hawaii.  It seems like we only met nice people with the exception of a waitress who tried to scam us in Almo, Idaho.  We took it out of her tip.  Our trip brought us within a few miles of both the Mexican and Canadian borders.  I sold my house on Bainbridge Island and on Father’s Day received a very special gift.  My oldest son Colin graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor of Science Degree.  He is graduating debt free with my 2008 VW GTI as a graduation gift and a good job.  Colin is a lucky kid who is smart and hard working enough to appreciate all of it.

Perseverance, Courage, Adaptability

This will be the last blog of this journey as we decide whether to go back to work or buy an RV and head out on a multi-year road trip to Argentina.  

Over the previous two weeks we visited Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.  We also attended a family wedding north of Spokane where we spent time with my brother Drew and I did my best to make Banditos out of my nephews.

Carson - Bandito in training

I had planned to climb the Grand Teton but the weather was uncooperative: snowing and cold the days we were in the Park.  This is a rock climbing trip and we did not come equipped for mountaineering as the conditions dictated.  Babe also lacks the necessary glacier experience so we treated ourselves to the luxury of the Teton Mountain Lodge at the base of Jackson Hole ski resort.  Fabulous, luxurious, elegant and a welcome change from our tent.  The forecast was for more of the same so we decided to spend a day in Yellowstone and then head up to Bozeman.  Majestic is the best word to describe Teton National Park, but we saw little of it this time because of the low cloud ceilings.

Mother Grizzly and cubs

Hot Springs

Yellowstone Park is as close as you can come in this country to a wildlife safari.  We sat for 30 minutes watching an osprey hunting fish in a small, meandering stream.  It flies around looking for fish, then hovers silently with little movement before falling like a spear to the water from a height of 50-75 feet.  As long as we watch it comes up empty, only to start the cycle again and again.  We spy a black bear foraging, several big horn sheep on steep cliffs, a coyote hunting moles, countless bison and mule deer, several moose, a pronghorn antelope, bald eagles, great blue heron, and some large elk.  There are baby animals everywhere.  The highlight comes at Lupine Meadows in Grand Teton Park where we come across a mother grizzly bear with three cubs.  I have seen dozens of bears in the wild, but have never been so close to a mother grizzly with her cubs.  As she starts to come toward us I make a beeline for the car while the rest of the tourists edge closer to get a better shot.  I call out a warning to no avail, learning later that the mother had previously charged a group of gawkers in the same spot.

Osprey

Big Horn Sheep

 Bison

Lunch meat

Hunting

Moose

In Bozeman we stop to have dinner with two friends that I have known for over 35 years, Joe and Robin Sharber.  There is no one I have more looked forward to seeing on this trip than the two of them.  Joe’s mom, a Babbitt, was the first woman graduate of Harvard Medical School.  She put that to good use by practicing medicine for a whole year before proceeding to pump out nine kids.  Joe’s uncle Bruce was governor of Arizona and Secretary of the Interior under Clinton.  Robin, an observant Jew, managed to convince a bunch of us heathens to practice kosher rules while floating down the Green River for two weeks.  She now owns and runs a successful candy business.

Joe was the person who first took me climbing and kayaking.  We have spent countless hours together in the wilderness but I haven’t seen him in two decades.  In the meantime, he raised two daughters (poetic justice if there ever was any), while I raised two sons.  We were both smitten by Robin when she came to Flagstaff working for Gore, and bet a case of beer as to who would first get into her pants.  Joe cheated by asking her to marry him right off the bat.  She was crazy enough to say yes and they have been together ever since. 

Dinner is fabulous and we tell numerous stories which his daughters relish.  They are remarkable girls who love each other and their parents.  One attends the University of Washington the other goes to Montana State.  In particular, they like hearing about the time Joe was stopped on the Navajo reservation and cited for driving under the influence (he was).  While Joe was sitting in the back of the police car I got out to piss.  The cops were berating me over the loudspeaker to get back in the vehicle and asked Joe if I was always so uncooperative.  His response, “Only when assholes are fucking with him”, didn’t exactly endear him to the cops.  They haul Joe off to a local hospital where he is forced to give blood to measure his alcohol content after he failed a field sobriety test.  I am told to drive his truck because I hadn’t been drinking.  I was, however, totally stoned.  Joe gets out of a DWI by leaving the cap off the blood sample, thereby allowing the alcohol to evaporate before the technicians notice the mistake a few hours later.  

While in Bozeman we go sport climbing on excellent limestone at Bozeman Pass.  Walking into the climbing area we see several parties carrying the longest clip sticks (used to clip the first bolt on sport climbs to avoid a ground fall) I have ever seen, easily telescoping to 20 feet.  The reason becomes apparent when we get to the climbing area and note that the first bolt on all the routes is way off the ground.  My version of a clip stick is 36 years of runout lead-climbing experience and a clear understanding that falling is not a good idea.  I make it to the first bolts and decide this is a good time in life to buy a 20 foot stick clip.  5.10 feels comfortable but Babe decides she would rather belay than climb.  

The wedding takes place in Elk, Washington, another beautiful location.  My cousin Kent’s youngest son marries a beautiful girl named Mary whom we had met several months earlier in Coeur d’Alene at the wedding of another cousin’s son.  After the wedding I take my sister Colleen, brother Drew, sister-in-law Paige and my nephew Cade pistol shooting.  We shoot the shit out of a bunch of targets until it gets dark.  It just doesn’t get any better than hanging out with my brothers and sister unless it includes doing so with my many cousins of which I am the oldest.  The cousin’s love reading the blog and we all love seeing each other.  My extended family is simply awesome, and I continue to be perplexed by families that are anything but close knit.

Our last drive is to Eugene for the graduation, but we have two important stops along the way.  The first is to watch my nephew Brady play baseball at a tournament in the Tri-Cities.  My brother Mitch is one of the assistant coaches and he typically does a good job, but Brady’s team is poorly coached and plays with no discipline and little hustle.  It hurts to watch them play and I worry about the lessons Brady is learning on that team.

Our last stop is in Hood River to see John Harlin and his wife Adele.  John and I have climbed numerous big walls together including the Salathé Wall on El Capitan.  My biggest and best adventure with him was climbing the 4,000 ft. face of Mt. Asgard on Baffin Island, north of the Arctic Circle.  We flew my Cessna T-210 there from Boston and had one escapade after the other, definitely an epic journey.  It included being forced to land in northern Canada at night on a lonely runway with a 40 mph direct crosswind that greatly exceeded the demonstrated crosswind component of my airplane.  We had no choice.  There wasn’t enough fuel to get to the nearest alternative: the airport we had left hours earlier.  Surviving that, we found ourselves icing up over the Hudson Strait while I kept changing altitude to keep from going down.  We finally broke out of the clouds low over the water and encountered hundreds of icebergs below us.  It was a magnificent sight that I will never forget.

Mt. Asgard (center) from my plane

After landing in Iqaluit we flew off to land on a dirt strip in Pangnirtung where we leave my plane for a month.  From there we were taken by boat to Auyuittuq National Park to begin hiking 25 grueling miles up the Weasel River with 100+ pound packs.  The hiking will be treacherous with endless creek crossings and descents of unstable boulder fields, so we have the brilliant idea to drop a climbing haul bag with half our food and much of our climbing gear on to the glacier near the wall.  We fly up a very narrow canyon with granite walls towering above us on both sides and the river raging below.  After several miles we head left over another glacier only to find that the terrain is rising much faster than we are able to in the plane.  Surrounded by granite looming thousands of feet above us, I make a 180 degree turn about 200 feet above the ice while we close in rapidly on a huge wall that gets so close we can almost reach out and touch it.  Time virtually stops while we complete the turn, hanging from the prop and expecting to die any second.  We don’t, but our hearts are both pounding out of our chests as the plane climbs out of the canyon and we regroup.  Being slow learners, we change seats to take another pass so John can shove the haul bag out of the window while I fly the plane from the passenger seat.  We are so nervous that John pushes the bag out of the plane prematurely, right into the river, never to be seen again.

Treacherous hike into Asgard

Our goal was to climb a new route, but that was no longer a possibility after we lost so much of our gear.  Instead, we climb the Scott Route, called by some the greatest rock climb in the world.  Despite weeks of bad weather and numerous treacherous obstacles we complete the climb, only to have John get swept away on the walk out while we are attempting to cross one of the myriad glacier creeks.  These creeks are fast, deep, extremely cold and deadly; you can hear the rocks being pushed down the bed by the force of the water.  Fording these creeks is like walking over bowling balls while being hit by a monster fire hose filled with ice water.  I am able to run down the bank and pull John to safety but he suffers from hypothermia.  Guess he was just looking for an excuse to get naked with me in a sleeping bag.  We have no food and won’t for another day and a half until we find some Jell-O in a hut at our pick up point. 

John found this underwear on Baffin

Needless to say, John and I have discussed about every topic under the sun.  I remind his beautiful, 16-year old daughter Sienna that she owes me for her existence as I spent hours extolling the virtues of fatherhood to John.  She is unimpressed.  Sienna is poised beyond her years, speaks three languages (two fluently) and is extremely talented.  The last time I saw her ten years earlier she was sitting on my knee, engrossed in the book I had written for her as a Christmas present.  They all have to leave for Sienna’s dance recital, while Babe and I make one last stop to see another old friend, Arlene Burns. 

Among Arlene’s many accomplishments is being Meryl Streep’s stunt double on the movie The River Wild and running the Telluride Film Festival.  I lost touch with her after learning that her husband died of cancer.  The fallout is a sordid story that includes the heiress to the Beretta fortune.  It is awesome to see John and Arlene, and I leave Hood River feeling like a million bucks.

As we roll back into Ashland I realize that I am the luckiest man in the world; living in an awesome country, blessed by a magnificent family, wonderful friends and Babe.  Throughout this trip she has been a phenomenal traveling companion, partner and lover.  A true Bandito.

Bandito Babe