Male, 63 years old

Fort Collins, Colorado, United States

Power = 274 (Vote Weight = 92.26%)

Occupation: Retired Software Nerd

Website: http://www.pbase.com/mangoman

A Few Words: I enjoy non-technical, off-the-beaten-path scrambles and rambles. No goals or lists, just enjoy being in the backcountry. Will return to the same place again and again, it's always new. Have been known to stop for a minute to examine a bird or flower. I don't move real fast.

Quote from Charles Lind, An Afterclap of Fate
At moments like this you can really savour the wry humour of Donald Robertson's remark 'climbers are always trying in self-defence to maintain the fiction that they are enjoying themselves'.

Mummery was surely right in his observation that 'the essence of the sport, lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties...'

People are always asking me to explain or justify the sport of climbing ... but climbing, just like life itself, has no narrow rational purpose ... all its sense lies in the doing. ...

A reawakening to what it means to be alive, the unaccountable miraculousness of being ... and that feeling of sheer delight in it.

Quote from Jonathan Neale, Tigers of the Snow
I ask Khansa Sherpa, in English, why foreigners climb mountains. He laughs and says to his wife, Lhakpa, in Sherpa, "You know what he just asked me? Why do foreigners climb mountains?" Lhakpa laughs, too.

Then Khansa tells me he has been reflecting on this matter since 1953. He's finally concluded that foreigners climb mountains because they like to. Unlikely as that seems, no other explanation makes sense.

Quote from The Beatles
Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles



Andy following me (a rare event) on Dragon's Tail Couloir. May, 2006. Photo by smudge.

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Member Since Sep 6, 2001, Last Active: Apr 25, 2013

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