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Brrr... after listening to that and watching that, I'm glad I'm inside where it's nice
and warm, and I'm sure you feel the same way. Hi, my name is Bob Villarreal. Thank you very
much for joining me for this video presentation of my book and the associated website.
The book is Clawing for the Stars: A Solo Climber in the Highest Andes, and the website
contains visual and audio content that support the book. Now, I call this—and it is unique,
it's a unique pairing of a book with a website—I call it Read and View: A New and Exciting
way to Enjoy a Book. You read the book, and as you're reading the book, you can go out
to the website and hear and watch and see what's really going on in the chapter. It
really brings the book to life. Well, before we go to the website, I'd like
to take a moment to talk about how I got involved with high-altitude climbing, and what prompted
me to write the book. Now, while I'm talking we're going to be running a slideshow. That's
just to make sure you don't fall asleep. Well, OK. Let me talk about how I got involved
with high-altitude climbing. Now, the Andes—I started in 1988, and the Andes at that time
were not unknown to me. My wife and I had gone on a tour, a two-and-a-half-week tour
of Peru, years before that. We had traveled to Peru and also to Ecuador to adopt our two
daughters down there. Of course, I'd seen the peaks from a plane and up close from the
towns and cities that we went through. So I was aware of the beauty of those peaks.
But one day I was reading a National Geographic magazine, and it had this pictorial spread
on the Andes. And the photography was stunning; I mean, it was just absolutely beautiful.
That's really what launched me on my climbing career; I looked at those peaks and I said,
"You know, I'd like to climb some of them." I had no idea that this would set me on my
way with thirty climbs over twenty-one years! Just a simple little thing: seeing pictures
in National Geographic. Amazing. Well, I began my climbing career with a guiding
company, and climbed with this company in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. After that,
I felt I had the experience to go my own way, and so I did. Clawing for the Stars is a collection
of accounts of my most memorable climbs, taken from my climbing journals in some of the remotest
parts of the Chilean and Argentine Andes, where the nearest human being was oftentimes
fifty to ninety miles away. And back then we didn't have phones or anything like that,
so if I got into trouble, I had to get off the mountain.
I never intended to write about my climbs. They were just precious memories to me; I
didn't have a desire to write about them. But when I returned from my last climb in
November of 2009, my grandson Alex asked me about the trip. So, you know, we talked for
a while, and then he said, "Grandpa, I wasn't even born when you were out on many of your
climbs, and the rest of the time I was too young to have an interest. Now I would like
to know what happened out there and how everything went down. Why don't you write a book?" Well,
how could you turn down a request like that, you know? This was all I needed to see that
yes, there might be some value to telling some of my stories. Thus the book. I wrote
it for Alex, and for the general reader also. In my stories, I always set out on a climb
not knowing what I would find along the way, except the silence and solitude that I really
like. Of course, one goal was to reach the top of the mountain, but early on, I came
to know that reaching the summit was secondary to me. It was the journey that mattered most:
the journey from home to the peak, the climb up the mountain, and the return once more
to home and family. And it was always high adventure. Every moment was high adventure.
OK. Now let's go to the website and we'll see how all of this works.
Well, here we are at the website, and you'll see there's two separate screens here. One
is for the second book, Chronicle of Pedro de Merida, but that doesn't concern us right
now, so let's click on the Clawing for the Stars screen, and we're immediately taken
to the site that supports that particular book. And if we go to the top here, you see
we have the obligatory Home; About the Book, I tell how the book came about; next is Table
of Contents and Selected Chapter Passages. For each chapter, you can click on it and
see some passages from the particular chapter; you get an idea of what's going on there.Next
is Take a Tour. These are Google Earth tours for each chapter. I take you out to a particular
peak in that chapter, take you up the mountain and then bring you back. Next is Photos, and
here are anywhere from twenty to thirty photos by chapter. So as you read a particular chapter,
you can come out here and access the photos and see what's really going on out there.
Next is Panoramio and Earth; Panoramio is a software adjunct to Google Earth. And I've
loaded pictures out there, and tagged them so that they're in categories, by mountain.
And you can click a particular picture; it enlarges, and right next to it on the right
is a Google Earth box, and you can go right down into Earth and find out where I took
the picture. Next is Watch a Movie. This is several camcorder movies I shot in my later
career, and they've been professionally edited. And this is a way for the viewer to actually
see what it was really like out there as far as the terrain around a particular peak. And
then we have Acknowledgements, About the Author, and that's it.
Well, that's it. I hope you now see how the Read and View approach will enhance your enjoyment
of the book. And thank you very much for joining me.