You spend time with people, you climb with them, you share interests and aspirations, and then you don't see them for years. I aint been to the states for a very long, things keep changing over there, but my friends are still the same. Those great states with huge space, great rocks and big sky, and hardly any people are largely the same. Steve and Cynthia are two of my favorite people, Steve is a boyhood friend, we share mates, climbing partners, it spans oceans, and much of the history of British climbing. Ten years have gone by, he's going tomorrow, when will I see him again. In another 10 years?
Steve went to Birkinhead School, a peculiar source of many of my friends, Liegh Maginly, Tim Caruthers, Alan Rouse. How many people know of the great Alan Rouse, and his historic ascent of Positron with the unforgettable, unforgivable and unrepentant Peter the Mad Molecule Minks.
This is Steve on an under graded mistress of the perverse at Sabart, temperatures are hideous.
Steve's a philosopher prof who likes to climb.
We used to find it strange that old people climbed, now we find it unpardonable that old people don't.
If the ring had been mine, that hairy little hobbit Bilbo would never have got it out of my fist, and of course the whole history of Middle Earth would have been different! My friends saw some of the climbs we have here, visited some cliffs and sampled our strange grades, they approved. I now long to to go back to Utah and the Colorado Plateu, I want to see Towers again, Gandalf. Not Dark towers, but Red Towers of Windgate sand stone, and splitter cracks, humming birds, and eat some spicy Mexican food before going to sleep in the sand under a sea of stars.
