On December 27, I flew to Mexico City with my dad and brother Adam for a six-day vacation, and we fit a lot of great experiences in! Here are a few photos:

<– Adam on Pyramid of the Sun (MUCH bigger than I expected! Awesome!!) with the Pyramid of the Moon in the background at Teotihuacan.

–> walking up the steep stairs up the Pyramid of the Sun.

<– Adam and I at a taco stand in Amecameca. We LOVE the atmosphere in Mexico and enjoyed walking around downtown at night.

–> Inside the Amecameca cathedral. With two 17,000′+ volcanoes towering over the city, think of Amecameca as Mecca for alpine pilgrims.

<– We left the trailhead at 5:22 a.m. and 13,000′ feet above sea level. An hour or two later, the sun rose and showed Popo behind us as we made our way up the steep, rocky trail up Iztaccihuatl. The Popo half of this national park is closed since it’s an active volcano. It had a major eruption a month earlier. I was kinda wishing we’d get to witness that again!

<– Dad’s school. Looks fantastic.

We went to mass next to a 600 year old cathedral and welcomed in 2012 with the family of the pension owner where we stayed. Great people! All very nice. ^ note the Mayan calendar t-shirt.

I caught the bus back up to the DF and flew home the next day.

More and more, I’m getting excited about the possibility of leaving the country indefinitely. As I’ve investigated various options, here’s my current ideal plan:

1. Cruise ship from Florida to Spain. The best rates go for about $700 right before and after spring semester finals. If my students really come along, we could spend part of the 7-9 days studying creative writing (which some want to learn) and we could write and publish a book about our trip so anyone can follow us later.

2. Once in Spain, we might as well take a $40 ferry to Morocco and spend a day or two, just to add another continent to the itinerary.

3. Maybe catch Barcelona for a couple days, just to check out Sagrada Familia cathedral and the bizarrely awesome Parque Guel. Plus hike up to a dilapidated Roman castle above any old town.

4. For sure stop in Paris for a while. And maybe Germany where I have three friends and relatives I could stay with…though probably not if we’re a large group. If students really come along and “hire” me as their tour guide, I’ll spend as long as they want anywhere they want to go!

5. Make our way to Moscow and catch the Transiberian railroad all the way over to Irkutsk. While living in Beijing way back when, Transiberian tickets went for $113 and I really, really wanted to go. But I was quickly running out of money saved up from working in Taiwan and had a return ticket home through Hong Kong. Now is my chance!

6. It’s also my chance to spend a few days riding horses in Mongolia and staying in yurts (gors), another activity I missed in Beijing and promised to return for someday. Continue Reading »

It has been a very slow year for technical rescues in Utah County. I think today’s was only the fourth! We usually have at least 3x that.

In this photo (click to zoom in), I’m the top left bright green dot. A girl fell 30′ and tumbled another 60′, and luckily stopped on a steep scree slope just down and right from me. You might call that a miracle.

She had serious injuries (but is expected to be okay) and no one knew exactly where she was. Her boyfriend, who had earlier hiked down the trail, got worried and borrowed a cell phone to call 911. The people who lent him the phone hiked up and, when the wind was blowing toward them, heard her screams. She had probably been there for an hour or two before they found her and tried to keep her warm while waiting for SAR and North Fork Fire to arrive. She was found high on the mountainside and far from any trails. Another miracle.

We set up 6 lowering stations to bring her down, including one I built with five pitons set in tiny cracks in the cliff just above her with water flowing over them. The operation went smoothly (of course), and a waiting Life Flight helicopter flew her away.

Maybe you’re thinking that none of these events are really miracles. It was just people doing small things. Like lending a cell phone. The bystanders who found the girl were hiking in the area anyway. SAR and NFF have rescued dozens of people along that stretch of mountain, and we consider it simple and easy. But that’s how most miracles come about, with just people, usually doing just small things.

If you were thinking these are no miracles, try looking at it from another angle, like the girl’s, who lay in pain for hours and who now recovers safely in a warm, soft hospital bed rather than dying on cold, hard rocks.

Now look around. Who do you see who needs a miracle? What small thing can you contribute? What are you waiting for?

I’ve taken the neighborhood kids rappelling twice in the last two weeks. Here’s a picture from Battle Creek Canyon this week. Two weeks ago, I sent them over an 80′ cliff in Dry Canyon a mile from my house.

Some of the boys had very little fear and thoroughly enjoyed the whole adventure, which is great; but the ones who impressed me most didn’t start out that way.

Two 12 year olds were visibly shaken as they eased over the first awkward cliff. One – after hanging just over the edge and trying to get started for a few minutes, glancing down repeatedly despite everyone’s admonitions not to – started to cry.

But neither one ever backed out! One moved steadily downward despite his shaking knees, and the other did the same once I tied a piece of webbing around his harness to offer an extra belay (a fireman’s belay on the end of the rope could stop them at any time).

When’s the last time you did something that scared you? Have you ever done anything that TERRIFIED you? I highly recommend it. It changes your life as you discover that you’re more capable and courageous than you ever knew.

I’ve long believed that courage is one of the most underrated values in the world. We sometimes speak of it as if only daredevils and heroes have a right to it. Not so. Courage is for everyone.

By the second outing, the kids were running laps up the trail and down the rope as fast as they could go, loving nearly every minute. They made me proud. With determination and courage like that, what can ever stop them?

This thinking about leaving the country indefinitely is having a good and unexpected effect on me – it’s teaching me to let go of everything and I’m finding it very liberating. If there’s something that’s just not working out the way I wanted, it’s okay. I may be gone by next summer anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Just let it go and move on. I like this. I should have done this years ago. Stop holding onto things that don’t cut it. Move on and find things that do.

The point is no longer to collect things that may be useful, the question is now how to get rid of everything so I don’t have to find a place to store it. I wonder if I could reduce everything I need to a single backpack. I’ll need a small computer and a camera, a few clothes that don’t take up much space, and that’s about it, right? That plus my favorite water bottle and a passport. A Kindle so I can study the languages I’ll need and read the classics I haven’t had time for for too long. Sunglasses and sunscreen, running shoes, credit card. Continue Reading »

Do Hard Things

If you ask me to list my all-time favorite call outs, the list will include two types of missions: fun and hard.

Fun calls include zipping across the lake on a PWC on a bluebird summer afternoon and pulling an attractive girl from the water moments before she sinks below the waves where her boat sank. She would catch her breath, discover a brand new perspective on life, and we would become fast friends on the ride back to the marina with her arms wrapped tightly around my waist. We would go on a picnic that weekend, fall madly in love, and live happily ever after.

Nothing remotely like this has ever happened, of course, but I won’t complain if it ever does.

Hard calls are not always fun. Their rewards come at the expense of fatigue, endurance, and technical challenges. They may include rushing up tall, steep mountains in dark, inclement weather, carrying a heavy pack filled with ropes, hardware, medical and survival gear on my back. They may include severely wounded victims who we must quickly transport through challenging terrain, knowing they will die if we don’t. They may include ————.

I didn’t always like hard things. I wanted everything easy and comfortable – who doesn’t? But then something happened. I did hard things because I could not avoid them, and I learned. I changed my mind. I discovered the deep, exciting, satisfying appeal of the word “challenge.” Continue Reading »

Last week was declared National Search and Rescue Week by the US Senate. We kicked it off Sunday night with an exciting rescue just outside Timpanogos Cave National Monument up American Fork Canyon.

Three men in their 20′s went hiking up the extremely steep, rocky, precarious AF canyon, then decided to hike back down. They downclimbed a 200′ cliff that was a big mistake for two reasons: they could have fallen to their deaths, and once they reached the bottom, they couldn’t get down the next 200′.

So they called 911. Good call. It’s easier to walk people out than carry them.

We got paged out around 7:30 p.m. I was assigned team leader for the top team, and I picked three other members of the Singletrack Special Team – Bryan, Jake and David. This was partially because Jake is a ranger and read in the manual this week that certified motorcycle riders from another agency can use the NPS motorcycles in an emergency. Continue Reading »

I went for a walk up the street late tonight as I often do for some fresh air and to mull things over. The trees are in bloom, filling the night air with their deliciously sweet scents. I could almost taste the fruit that won’t appear until July or August. A light breeze rustled their new leaves with a sound that I had forgotten over the winter. Mule deer strolled down the road a block ahead of me.

After staring out over the valley for a while, at the black hole cut in the center of all the lights by the lake, the red radio antenna lights flashing atop Lake Mountain, and the aircraft fading in and out of the low clouds, I turned around and headed toward home.

A few rain drops sprinkled on my forehead accompanied by a gust of cool breeze and the dusty smell that often precedes a downpour.

So I did the only sensible thing.

I walked more slowly.

I walked outside this morning and enjoyed the refreshing sensations of the first day of autumn.

The sky was filled with high, dark clouds spreading an even, muted, shadowless light; a stiff breeze tousled my hair; and a few rain drops darkened the ground.

With a few pleasantly warm days behind us, this cold front reminded me of the reprieve from summer’s heat that usually arrives sometime in September. Its cool slap in the face has a way of waking you up from the stupor of sizzling August afternoons and making you feel ALIVE again.

It reminded me of a cool summer I spent in a wood-framed tent, running the climbing program at a scout camp near West Yellowstone.

Every morning we walked quickly through the brisk air alongside a clear stream to an outdoor shower, breakfast, and flag ceremony. Snow-white weasels with black-tipped tails sometimes trotted along the trail before us. Continue Reading »

Day before yesterday I decided I should drive to California and climb Mount Whitney. Immediately.

Whitney is 14,500′ tall and the highest point in the US outside of Alaska. A significant portion of book three of my Christmas fiction trilogy happens there and as I reached that point in writing the book, I realized that I needed to know the mountain first hand to continue writing.

So this trip is really just a research project.

We leave Sunday afternoon, if all goes according to plan. Back Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll let ya know how it goes….