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Well, now I'd like to take a few moments, and talk about how I got involved with high-altitude
climbing, and how did this book come about. Now, while I'm talking, we're going to be
playing a slideshow of different Andean mountain scenes, and that's just to make sure you don't
fall asleep while I'm talking. 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.