Shirt-on-Fire

Personal Social Responsibility Statement: WATER

2006-11-26T21:18:00.000-05:00

The following represents an assignment prepared in partial satisfaction for the requirements of the Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility course - MBA 292-T11 under the direction of Professor Kellie A. McElhaney, Center for Responsible Business, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley - Fall 2006

When I was in my early twenties, a very close friend who was advising me on college choices had suggested that I consider a school in Pittsburgh. I rejected the idea without consideration. He knew immediately that my decision was based on one simple thing: proximity to water. I recall him saying “I never lived near water, so it never enters in to my thought, but I can see that you, like many people, have some primal need to be close to water.” This was notion not hard to deconstruct.

Berkeley-Columbia Mates on the SFO Bay

My parents moved to a lake community when I was born. I lived there for the next eighteen years, and returned there after my children were born. There were several reasons, but being near water was one of them. Myself and all of my siblings attended our local community’s summer camp where we spent eight weeks each summer for eleven years each, earning colors on our shields. After the eleventh year we were awarded a bronze shield for athletic achievement. More than a third of the time would be spent in the water each day learning various swimming and live-saving techniques, canoeing, water games, and other made-up pursuits on the twenty two small lakes that made up our community.

I think the subtleties of living near water shaped many of my friends growing up. My friend Russell Sparkman entered a very specialized, resident scuba diving program and became an instructor for many years. Later he went on to found a web-based photojournalism company and has done some amazing work in creating awareness of nature and our environment using some spectacular parts of the world as his stage. Two of his most recent journeys involve water systems: the Palmyra Atoll and the Florida Aquifer system. http://www.oneworldjourneys.com/ Their current project is now on location in Bermuda for another online water and environment journey.

Another close friend, Christopher Jones, has spent his career chartering, racing and rigging sailing vessels. Chris spent years in Saint Lucia, U.S. Virgin Islands running a charter service as the captain of several pleasure sailboats, and he now makes his home at the Liberty Yacht Club in New York Harbor.

My father spent time on an aircraft carrier during the Korean War. His experience on a naval ship further impressed on us the importance of water. He never spent a lot of time lecturing us about it, but we all knew to take care about wasting water around the house. Later, when a few of my friends were officers on Navy ships, I learned about how precious fresh water becomes while at sea, and also about the great energy that is required to create it from seawater.

Our entire town uses private water wells for all domestic water. We live above a rich and clean aquifer, the Cohansey. The Cohansey runs deep below the protected pineland region of Southern New Jersey, and it is a source of clean fresh water. Many people assume that well water is free, but that is not quite true. A new well, or well extension, costs between $7,000. and $10,000. Operating a well pump uses electricity. Both of these costs remain hidden to most homeowners, since they do not associate the first costs or electric utility bill with their water. Some people opt for further filtration and softening systems that add additional costs. In the end, we likely pay more per gallon consumed than do our neighbors who have a municipal water supply.

The other hidden cost of water waste is the costs that are incurred to treat sewage. With the exception of landscape irrigation water, most water gets flushed into the sanitary sewer system eventually. This is the double whammy. You pay first to pump it, clean it and deliver it through pipes. Then you pay again to clean it before it is returned to rivers and oceans. Sewage treatment is also very heavily dependent on electrical energy and chemical resources. So, every drop of water saved is a double savings.

The externalities of water waste are almost never considered in my community, since we generally have abundant water supply. In the South and West, however, the externalities are becoming clearer to average citizens. Water must first be secured from the limited and tightly regulated rivers and aquifers, and then pumped and transported for treatment and delivery to customers. More and more areas in the U.S. are facing demand in excess of available supply, and also the long-term depletion of giant aquifers that will not recover for many generations.

Over the past few years, we have converted our home to be extremely water efficient. It is hard to eliminate all water waste, but I have made great strides toward that end. We started with the purchase of a front loading clothes washer that uses about 7 gallons per load, versus the 30 gallons consumed per load in our old washer. Once that project was completed, we installed double water restrictors on all of our faucets and shower heads. I had expected complaints, since this reduced flows from around 5 to 7 gallons per minute to fewer than 2 gallons per minute. After the first few days, I never heard any comments. It became the norm very quickly.

A later project involved decommissioning our brand new, underground, landscape irrigation sprinkler system. That was hard. We had installed it ourselves with quite a bit of back-breaking labor. In the end, we still miss having a perfect lawn and landscaped yard, but it was a real drain on our water system while it was in use during the hot summers. We did attempt some drip irrigation, but the final outcome involved planting more drought tolerant, native plants and grasses. The solution is far from ideal for our desired landscaping intentions, and we may eventually install some underground rainwater collection and storage system to use for limited irrigation.

The Great Niagara Falls in New York

The last and final water conservation project in our home involved the replacement of the old water closets with new high efficiency units. I saved this for last since it seemed the least necessary, and also the least proven of the conservation methods. While teaching a building energy efficiency course a few years ago, I had a plumbing engineer tell me that low water use toilet fixtures were not feasible in the U.S. as a result of the slope used in our sanitary sewer systems. This sounded odd at the time, but it did make some engineering sense. I recalled from my own civil engineering coursework that sanitary flow was dependent on a certain slope, and the standards and tolerances were tight in order to maintain long piping systems without the need for pumping stations. That paradigm ended for me about a year later when a colleague in our Washington, DC office informed me that he had just built a 700 room hotel using an Australian fixture called Caroma. I recalled seeing the dual-flushing fixtures on my several trips to Australia over the past few years. With that new information, I ordered and installed the fixtures immediately. My wife thought that I was taking this a little too far. The cost was over $600. per unit, and the payback was nowhere in sight. That project was completed quickly and there have been no problems whatsoever. I estimate that we save about 100 gallons of clean well water per day as a result of the switch. Over the course of a year, that is enough to fill a large residential swimming pool.

I once saw an exhibit in Philadelphia where a local artist created a sculpture to demonstrate how dependent the city was on the river water and reservoir system. The point of the exhibit was to show that every drop of water entering the public water treatment system had been through a human body or a manufacturing process three times from the mountain headwaters down to the city’s intake pipe. That was the first time that I had really considered the resiliency of water, and how we sometimes take it for granted as an unlimited natural resource. Soon afterward, I found myself wandering grocery stores and big box retailers gauging which items would become sewer and which ones would become landfill. It is fascinating to consider not only the volume, but also the short lifespan from store shelf to waste stream of most things that we buy. Water is not only what keeps us alive, clean, healthy and recreated, but it is also the vehicle that we have chosen to carrier away much of our waste.

SoCal Aqueduct - Narrow but Deep

This week, I watched the Al Gore movie titled An Inconvenient Truth. Part of my responsibility in my new role as Sustainability Executive at an international real estate and construction company is to make sure that others in our Americas business unit see this film for general awareness purposes. In Australia and Europe, the staff were taken directly to cinemas in groups during working hours, but here in the U.S., the theater run was short, likely because the issue of climate change has become so politically polarized.

The one thing that struck me the most about the film was the constant water theme in the subject of climate change. Water is capable of storing so much heat that it is the engine of our Earth. Whether in liquid, gaseous or solid form, the volume of water on our planet is what keeps all of our critical climate cycles alive and moving in the ways that we expect. The notion that this life sustaining H2O molecule can in one instance bring irrigating rain and drinking water, but in another result in hurricane formation or flood, causes me to think about the amazing physical and chemical properties that make water the essence of our planet.

Incalculable volumes of water circulate at the surface and depths of Earth’s oceans in many shifting currents, the largest of which is the global thermohaline current. Seawater is transported in this global current system carrying heat energy, debris, gases, pollutants and sea life. The round-trip transit time is estimated to be up to 1600 years. The impact that we are having is just now coming to light. Just last week, someone sent me an article about the Pacific Gyre current system, which has trapped plastic debris and floating garbage from the entire Pacific Rim. The size of the floating plastic mess is estimated to be as large as Texas, and is thought to be incapable of being cleaned-up. All of the millions of tons of plastic garbage slowly degrade in the sun and salt, only to become part of the ocean food chain.

My Personal Social Responsibility Commitment involves making a continued and focused effort to conserve clean water and the energy resources and carbon emissions associated with it. In addition, I plan to extend my commitment to education others through a personal awareness campaign, beginning right here on my blog, and extending through my role at work and my influence in the community I live in.

Paul King's Top 15 Ways to Conserve Clean Water

* don't buy bottled water (plastics pollute)
* filter drinking water at home and bring to work
* don't wash car at home
* use water saving dual flush toilets
* install water restrictors on all faucets and shower heads
* don't irrigate landscaping except when necessary
* recharge storm water on-site
* don't pollute with yard chemicals or fertilizers
* use water saving clothes washer
* run dishwasher only when full
* shower faster
* brush teeth without water running
* shave from a cup or basin
* dispose of household, automotive and office chemicals properly
* dispose of batteries properly to limit damege to undreground aquefirs

G-LOC

2006-04-21T09:32:00.000-04:00

I was on the way home from work yesterday, and it was another perfect Spring evening with great visibility and temperatures in the low 70’s. As I drove onto the taxiway toward the hangar, I remember that my partner was taking some friends to diner in the plane, so I pulled up to my friend Morton’s hangar instead. He was running around in a bit of a hurry and said, “I have to go. We are going up to do some photography in the CJ’s. We’ll be right back, though.” I assumed that he already had a passenger, so I was looking around for a comfortable chair. He came darting out of his office and on his way past me said, “You can probably go with me, now”, as if to indicate the intended passenger was a no-show. “Quick, get the chute on and get in, we’re going right now before the light goes.”

By the time I had all of the chute and seat harness straps and buckles tight and my headset on, we were departing abreast another CJ, with a Cessna tailwheel photo plane in front of us on the departure runway. We took off all three at once, with the two CJ’s side-by-side, and just a few feet apart. Once airborne, we changed frequency and the photography plane pilot called out instructions for turns and altitude changes as he shot pictures of the formation against the sky, the farmland and the airport. This went on for about ten minutes, and then we headed off, solo, to an aerobatics area while the other two planes completed their photography mission.

At this point, I knew that the routine would soon begin with a gradual climb to three or four thousand feet and then immediately go into a series of loops, rolls, hammerheads and the like. This was not what I had planned to be doing tonight, but I figured it would be over in five minutes.

The first inside loop was a bit unpleasant, as I have not done too much aerobatic flight for a few months. I grunted hard and had a bit of red out or grey out at the top of the loop. Five minutes turned into thirty and I started to get exhausted with the back-to-back-to back grunting to keep the blood in my head. I have never puked, but I was definitely feeling it in my stomach. Just when I thought I couldn’t do another, we headed back to pick up the other CJ. Near the airport, they swung in tight under our left wing and I thought we were landing.

In the backseat of the other CJ is the female passenger and partner of one of the photography plane occupants. I guess she wanted to do some aerobatics, so the call comes across “Let’s go back to the area for a few loops.” Then a “click-click” in my headset. Damn!

We did the usual climb, then a steep descent, and then I start my breathing and get ready for the grunt. The smoke machines are on in both planes and we are side by side. As we plow through the 12 o’clock position in the loop, I get really tired and let go. The blood flows out of my head, but there is just a bit of grey-out. Before I know what is going on, we are already directly into the second loop. I am still recovering and as we approach the top I feel the blood rushing out of my head and in an instant I am out cold before we hit the top.

The next thing I remember is hearing a very loud noise. It sounded like a thousand jackhammers blasting on steel plates in my ears; the loudest thing I have ever heard. Imaging waking up from a deep sleep with the loudest rock concert sound system blasting feedback into your head, then times it by one hundred. I open my eyes and do not know where I am. There is an instrument panel in front of me and it is vibrating and blurry. It seems that I am in an airplane. The sound is getting louder. I look up and see that we are heading straight for the ground and the cockpit is filled with smoke, but the plane seems to be frozen still in the air. I am trying to think where I am. Did we crash? Am I dead? Where am I?

In the next instant, I become aware that I am in some state of consciousness, but I don’t know if it is a dream, death, hallucination or otherwise. I do know that I was flying before this happened. Maybe we crashed. Maybe I am dead. Why is there so much smoke? Emergency Death Checklist: Tranquility? NO! Quiet? NO! Tunnel with light at the end? NO! Out of body? NO! Seeing dead relatives? NO! 72 Virgins? NO!

Then something tells me that we have to pull up. I reach for the stick, but my arms don’t move. This is not good; not good at all. Why is there so much noise?

Suddenly, my hand moves to where the stick was, but the stick has just moved back into my crotch. When I look up, I see Mort’s head in front of me and start screaming “Mort!, Mort!, Mort!, Mort!” But, there is no sound of my own voice. Then I recall in a flash the violent ripping from my head of my headset and glasses. I grab the headset cord, follow it to the floor, and pull the thing to my head. We are entering another loop. As I jamb it over my ears and start yelling again, I realize that it is on backward and the mic is behind my head. The noise level has dropped in my head as if my brain has taken control of the volume and adjusted it to normal. The noise is now clearly a giant radial engine at full throttle. I pull the headset off and start screaming into the mic “Blackout, blackout, stop, no, blackout, stop”.

The nose levels at the ten o’clock position. The smoke machine goes off and I crack the canopy to clear the air. I spend the next five minutes trying to figure out some way to prove I am not dead. My watch is running. I recognize some landmarks. I see three people that I know. I remember that I was wearing prescription sunglasses, and that they are missing. The time on my cell phone and watch are the same. But, I could still be dead.

When I get home, I am sure that I have just had a NDE (near death experience). The first web article I find on flight physiology and G-LOC (gravitational force induced loss of consciousness) is compared in excruciating detail to a NDE. This whole event took place in a few seconds, but I lost all recollection of what happened or how I got there. One thing that definitely occurred was the total slowing of time, or at least its interpretation. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he describes a police shooting that occurs in the same slow motion. Mili-seconds are expanded to still frames of some semi-aware state that allows thought, analysis and decision.

I have to practice my grunting, I guess.

Viking Flight

2005-08-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

After a short flight with Chris Bartels in the Cardinal on Friday night, we discovered a small oil leak that has to be checked out. Chris is home for one day before heading back to Atlanta for the start of his first real job in the right seat of a Delta Canadair RJ. The passengers will never know that the co-pilot hasn't ever flown a jet before Monday morning's flight.

Later on Friday, Mort asked me to go out for some formation and aerobatics on Saturday in the Nanchang / Yakalov CJ-6. Since I don't have another plane available at the moment, this is worth getting up early for.

We depart N14 for Ocean City, New Jersey where we will meet Marty and Phil, two other CJ owners. The air is really still and clear above the New Jersey Pine Barrens at this hour. You can see Philadelphia, Manhattan and Atlantic City from this amazing glass canopy in the CJ.

The CJ is a place that clears your mind like nothing else. Every flight starts with the same drill about use of the parachute. "Open the canopy; unlatch the harness; stand up; headset off; jump toward the center of the wing; pull the D ring." I am pretty sure that this is all for show, as I have momentarily lost consciousness in this plane three times now, and always at the exact moment that I would need to jump.

I flew down at 900' MSL to stay below the Atlantic City Class C airspace. Mort landed, since I don't have a tailwheel endorsement, and I can't see too well from the rear seat either. The CJ is a beast to land compared to the 177RG. During the approach to Ocean City, I cracked the canopy for some air, but I didn't know that Mort was about to put the smoke machine on to let Marty know that we had arrived as we made a low pass over his house. The cockpit filled with smoke, but quickly cleared.

After some breakfast, we flew about 45 minutes of close formation along the Southern NJ coast between Atlantic City and Cape May. It was early still, and the beach crowds had not become too large yet on this next to last weekend of summer. I am always glad to be making this trip by plane instead of a car and beach chair.

Marty let us know that the ceiling had come down below 3,500' as we headed back toward the Flying W, so there was not enough vertical space for any real aerial combat practice. We ran into some rain squalls forming ahead of a front pushing up from the DelMarVa peninsula. This was really good news to me, as my breakfast was not very well secured and I had no desire to be decorating the canopy with eggs and coffee. The protocol calls for puking into your own flight suit on such an occasion, so that no one has to clean the nooks and crannies after you fall out on the tarmac.

Damn-Yankee Naval Operation

2005-03-22T17:13:00.000-05:00

Ginny:

Belated congratulations on your new granddaughter, Sophia.

Beth and I made an impromptu lunch visit to Bo & Terri at their Leesburg, Virginia home last Sunday by plane. They look well and seem to be enjoying their retirement.

I was telling a story about your father while there. A few weeks ago, while searching for something in my attic, I discovered a box of old letters that my mother saved when I moved away to college, forever. At the very bottom of the box, I found a letter from your father, with a postscript from your mother.

Dyess Hartley Letter

Uncle Dyess had a framed print of Washington Crossing the Delaware in his office for as long as I can remember. When I visited your family a few years ago, I could not find anyone who remembered that print, but I did remember that it was important to him for some reason. One summer evening, he asked me "Does that river really get ice like that?" Noticing the confused look on my face, he advised that it was the Delaware River in the painting. 'Still no response from me, he explained that it was right near my house in New Jersey.

Later that year, hopefully not on a day that I should have been in high school, I must have been driving near the Delaware River at Washington Crossing and took a photograph, showing no ice as I recall. I must have sent him a letter, and he responded with some interest (this does appear to be a big, damn-Yankee Naval operation of some sort).

Washington Crossing the Delaware

Attached is a copy of the letter I found, along with a copy of the painting. I won't ruin the surprise, but if you are ever in Manhattan, please visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where there is a room dedicated to the display of this painting. You will see why your father admired it.

PS: I drive along the Delaware River daily to my office in Princeton, and I have never seen the river frozen. However, there have been several occasions when the upper river freezes and becomes covered with several feet of snow. When the pressure builds behind the ice dams, the ice and snow break loose and flow down-river in pieces, creating the exact conditions depicted in the painting.

'Hope you are all well.

Regards,

Paul A. King

DogFight

2005-02-05T16:29:00.000-05:00

Today I was supposed to be studying, but Mort asked me if I wanted to do some aerial combat with a group of CJ6 pilots. The weather was mild for February, and the sky clear blue. I'll study when it snows.

There were six CJ's, but they flew in two groups of three today for safety reasons. I guess it is more difficult to coordinate the actions of six pilots versus three when flying wing to wing. I spent an hour glueing the battery door back onto my Nikon while I listened to Rob, Marty and Mort brief the hand signals, radio frequencies, call signs and airspace limits for the flight. I rode back seat in Mort's plane. The CJ is certificated as an experimental aircraft since it is of foreign manufacture. That, and the aerobatic nature of the flights, requires the full time use of a parachute. That is subject for another post...

Formation Flight

We flew some tight formation flight for about 30 or 40 minutes at 4,000' MSL, and then Rob's plane departed the formation so Mort and Marty could have a dogfight. Marty is an ex-Marine fighter pilot, and since there is no such thing as an ex-Marine, this was a real dogfight. I have been flying aerobatic training flights with Mort for some time now, but nothing could have prepared me for the 5 minute dogfight that followed. After the first 30 seconds, I realized I was not going to be able to shoot photos, as I almost lost consciousness in the first engagement.

Pre-Combat

I was trying to look through the viewfinder of my camera when I realized that I was having some vestibular irregularity. I put the camera away, but it was too late. I was just a few seconds and one maneuver from decorating the canopy with some porkroll and omelet. As my very good luck would have it, Marty's son puked up his breakfast and they called the match "guns off". We pulled Rob back into formation and headed for home.

Encounter with Ice

2005-01-28T22:53:00.000-05:00

Today I took my Australian friend Gary Cullen on a flight to New Hampshire. Gary has been here for a week-long knowledge sharing workshop at our firm's New York office. We left NYC and got underway from N14 airport mid-day on Friday.

"I've never seen ICE on top of a lake like this before..."

Alton Bay iceport is a seaplane base in fair seasons. I have always wanted to land on ice, but there is no way you would ever tell a passenger that this was the destination. Today was the day. Gary was a good sport about it.

When I told him where we were going, which was on final approach to Alton Bay, he didn't seem too shocked. I later found out that he had never seen a frozen lake, snow or any kind of atmospheric ice. I don't think he knew we landed on a lake until he saw a little water gurgling though the cracks in the ice while we chocked the wheels. I poked my key in the crack and asked Gary what he thought about the ice thickness. He replied "I've never seen ice on top of a lake like this before". Having been reassured with that expert opinion, I decided to head for cover from the 5 degree temperatures by walking to a shoreline store for some homemade turkey soup.

nICE Landing

Arriving at the Alton Bay Iceport a few weeks early or late in the season could certainly earn you a Darwin Award, but we were already down, chocked, and parked in a spot that had been cleared by a snowplow (possibly a Darwin Snowplow Award nominee).

Alton Bay Iceport

In the shadow of the Presidential Range, Alton Bay Iceport on Lake Winnipesauke was the ultimate place to practice my soft field technique. The fact is, ICE is the smoothest runway I have ever encountered.

Mentor

2001-01-19T08:22:00.000-05:00

On the 19^th of January, I received my instrument rating after about one year of study, instruction and flight training. I did have to do a re-test on one of approximately twenty-five competencies required by the FAA, after having performed an Unsatisfactory holding pattern entry on my first test one week earlier.

Martha's Vineyard Pre-Flight

All in all, it is a bit anti-climactic. Having spent about 60 hours in ground school, 30 hours watching videos, about a hundred hours reading various textbooks, and 65 hours of actual and simulated instrument flight, I suddenly find myself with nothing to do when I get home from work now.

Many years ago, when I completed my primary flight training (private pilot certificate), the FAA Examiner asked me “How did you get interested in aviation? Who is your mentor?” Since I hadn’t really thought about it, I said, “I don’t have a mentor”. The examiner then said, “Well, then I am you mentor”, and he proceeded to give me a one-hour lecture on all of the things I could NOT do with my certificate. I took careful notes, and realized that I had done, or was planning on doing, each and every thing on the list. It was a good list, and I think I have now mastered all of the skills to put that first list behind me.

The instrument rating is many things. Officially, it allows you to fly in clouds, under very strict rules. Some say it is a license to kill yourself, others say it doubles or quadruples you aeronautical skills and knowledge. I have heard many people say it was the hardest thing they had ever done in their lives. It is another stepping stone if you are serious about flying. At a minimum, you always have someplace sunny to go when it is cloudy outside.

Pouring rain 2000' below - Sunny on top

Lots of people ask, “How did you start flying?” or “Why would you want to fly in a little plane?” I don’t know. I don’t understand the question. And, it is not a small plane!

I cannot remember ever not wanting to fly. Most recently, I have been inspired by several people, including my colleague, Mark Napier, and my cycling mate, Rusty Potts. Mark is also a pilot, and urged me to get back flying again about 3 years ago. Rusty is waging a brave battle against ALS and reminded me how important is to do things now. But that is not the beginning…

There was my friend and neighbor, Jack Wilson, who used to let me fly the Mooney up and down the New Jersey Turnpike every once in a while. Before that it was Scotty Sparkman taking me on a few cross-country flights to the Chesapeake. And long before that, my Uncle Jack filled my mailbox with specification books from the Boeing Vertol helicopter division where he worked as their in-house legal counselor.

Last month, I finally remembered how I got my start – “My dad is a pilot!” That’s right, now I remember; my dad is a pilot in the Marine Corps. When we where little children we all remember dad telling us about the aircraft carrier, the planes, the flying, and of course he had lots of pictures.

My Dad in his Banshee

Just recently, though, I found out my dad is not really a pilot. My sister said he was a schoolteacher and principal. I guess that explains why he never took me flying in his plane.

My dad next to his Corsair

Seriously, my father was based on the carrier USS Leyte during a 1951 to 1953 Mediterranean cruise. From what I can gather from the ship’s cruise book, it was the Club Med cruise. How my dad ended up there is anyone’s guess, but he worked as the executive orderly for one of the ship’s most senior officers, Commander Hank Miller.

Rear Admiral "Hank" Miller

The official Naval bio for (later) Rear Admiral Henry Miller lists his credits as having “…trained all of the Doolittle Raiders and delivered them to their departure point on the USS Hornet for their raids on Japan.”

If I understand the story correctly, Commander Miller occasionally let my father accompany him and fly the plane while at sea, not including carrier take-off or landing, of course.

Now, having trained the Doolittle Raiders, Commander Miller was a close associate of (later) General Jimmy Doolittle. And, as all instrument pilots know from having read the first chapter of the Jeppesen Instrument – Commercial handbook, General Doolittle is the father of instrument flight. Doolittle is cited as having conducted the very first documented flight of an aircraft solely by reference to instruments.

The Younger Jimmy Doolittle - a Cal Berkeley alum - Go Bears!

Now this part I cannot explain: My dad is about 22 years old, he is working on an aircraft carrier, he is not in a war, he is touring the Mediterranean, he wants to get back to civilian life, but instead, he ends up meeting one of aviation's greatest pioneers and heroes, General Doolittle. That is my dad on the left pointing to the North Pole. General Doolittle is on the right in the grey suit.

Pointing out the route of the Club Med Cruise

Now if you are familiar with the parlor game called The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, you will see that the point of all of this is that I have one degree of separation from the Father of Instrument Flight. So, do I still have to name my mentor?

Thank you to all of the flight instructors who have provided assistance over the past 24 years:

Dan Greever; Bob Bate; Don Haughtling; Bob Wood; Damien Crockett; Walter Stocker; Steve Denty; Juan Cubas; Alan Wrigley; Mike Wilson; Anthony Larsen; Morton Stoverud; Steve Koza; Chris Bartells and Bob Brodwater.

PAK

Boot Spur

1999-10-28T01:02:00.000-04:00

Steve Fischer and I just got home on Sunday night from our trip to Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. We had planned on having three or four people in our party, but work schedules eliminated a few at the last minute. That turned out to be a blessing, as we would have certainly had more problems with a larger group.

We had a simple goal of getting up to the summit quickly and safely, and then getting back down before we ran into bad weather. As it turned out, we started out in mild weather heading up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail for about three hours to the rescue shelter at Hermit Lake. Steve had skied at Tuckerman some time ago, so he wanted to use that trail on the way to the summit. While at the Hermit Lake shelter, the caretaker / ranger advised us that it would be dangerous, and possibly deadly, to proceed further up Tuckerman Ravine because of expected bad weather.

Warning Sign

After some private discussion, we decided to go on cautiously, since we had prepared well and had plenty of gear, clothing and food for the worst conditions. In Fisher's words "I think he's just trying to cover his ass".

Steve and Paul at HoJo Patio in Tuckerman

About three hours later we arrived at the Tuckerman Ravine headwall, which was very icy and required a left traverse to continue on the trail. At this level everything was covered with rime ice and we were in complete fog with about 50 feet of visibility. The wind really started to pick-up here and we quickly found ourselves above the treeline in icy fog with darkness coming fast. We had plenty of lighting, but never used it on this afternoon. As we finally got to a saddle to the south of Mt. Washington and to the north of Mt. Monroe, we realized that we were in an ice storm with very limited visibility, about 15 to 20 feet. Again though, we had ski goggles and continued over the saddle.

Our plan had been to get down almost 1 mile on the other side of the mountain to a wilderness tent-site just below tree line, but that quickly became less desirable as we realized how dark it would be on the rocky and icy trail. We had always had a back-up plan to get to the winter emergency shelter in the basement of the Lakes of the Clouds hut. Although the hut closed in September, the basement shelter is open for winter emergencies. After about a half-hour of following the summit markers in the storm, we stumbled onto the outline of the hut and Steve found the basement door as if he had lived there.

We slept for about three hours and then ate diner. By that time the door had a few inches of ice on it and Steve was worried that if the storm continued we might be stuck there for a while, as neither of us had crampons to get down. Six hours later I awoke to find that it was pouring rain with a least 80 mph wind. Opening the door a crack was like taking an ice cold shower.

Hermit Lake Shelter in Tuckerman Ravine

By breakfast it was snowing hard, but with pretty good visibility. We decided to pack up and get moving toward the bottom. Too late though; by the time we left, it was whiteout conditions with almost a foot of snow on the ground. We thought that we should hike North for about 1 mile, ditch our packs and make a quick run up to the actual summit. It was never a good plan, and we had several turnaround points timed out that would allow us to a least get back to the hut if it got really bad. We did make it to the summit trail and buried our gear in the snow. But as we got about 10 minutes into the final summit trail, which was less than a half-mile long, we hit one of the turnaround times and decided to observe our plan. The snow was waist deep and we didn't have snowshoes. The climb was taking four times longer that it should have, so we bailed.

We knew that the Tuckerman trail would be too dangerous in the new snow and ice, so we took a trail called Davis to a trail called Boot Spur. I should have realized that there was no quick way down, but we were now just at the beginning of the big adventure. The wind was easily 80 to 100 miles per hour. The two trails followed a completely exposed ridge for about two miles above tree line. I had never seen anything like this in my life. All of the US Forest Service signs warning about the worst weather on earth started to make sense right here. I also started to understand why the stone cairns marking the trail were 8 feet high and only 20 feet apart.

I looked back a least five or ten times to see Steve blown of the trail and holding onto the bare rock. I tried to get him roped-up, but he was afraid that we would be blown of the ridge together, so we continued un-roped for the next two hours. We only stopped about four times to drink and to make sure that the other was still warm enough to continue. We certainly could have dumped some gear in an emergency, but we never got to that point. Steve asked me at least ten times "Aren't you glad we didn't just stay at the Hermit Lake shelter like the ranger suggested?"

The Boot Spur trail looked easy on the map, but it was really a treacherous and steep, rocky descent for another two hours. Steve was complaining about not having crampons the entire way down the Boot Spur. I just wanted to get below the tree line and out of the wind, so I kept moving as fast as I could. When we got to the bottom, I expected to find the Hermit Lake shelters right

there, but it was at least another half-hour of climbing and descending in wet snow before we arrived. The place had completely changed since the day earlier. It was in the mid-teens and completely snow covered. Steve wanted to continue all the way down to the Pinkham Notch hostel, since we had both gotten wet feet during the last portion of the Boot Spur.

I would have preferred to stay the night at Hermit Lake since that was all I had been thinking about for the previous six hours, but Steve was determined to keep moving down, and we did. Below the base of Tuckerman, it was just wet snow and running water for almost two hours. I became really fatigued and cranky.

When we did get to the bottom, I crashed in the pack room of the hostel and made Fischer go and get the car. After some hot showers, we feasted on prime rib in North Conway. On Sunday we drove home, straight through, questioning each other the entire way to make sure that any of this really happened.

We might go again next month.

Dangler

1999-05-03T09:36:00.000-04:00

I have come to learn that the most important thing to bring on trips with Steve Fischer is extra batteries for my headlamp. Steve likes to sleep late, get started late, and finish the day late. This is not a problem if you are going out to dinner or the movies, but it gets tricky when you are rock climbing or going on a winter mountaineering trip. I can honestly say that I have never been on any trip with Steve that did not end in putting my pack down before midnight, and usually without a working headlamp.

Steve on Lead at the 'Gunks

In May of 1999, Steve asked me to go climbing with two of his longtime climbing partners, Paul Pan and Alex Marx. It was a 2 hour drive to the Shawangunks, and we arrived in the nearby town for some pastry at noon. I recall starting the first climb by around 2 in the afternoon. Steve lead the first climb with just me on the rope, as Paul and Alex were off to another route nearby. We climbed a route called "High Exposure" for about two hours, up and down. "High Exposure" is probably the most classic climb at the Gunks, for good reason. Afterward, we climbed a route called "Something Interesting". I should have asked what the "Something Interesting" might be, as I now know, and it will be the subject of another post.

After we were back on the ground at the base of the cliffs, we radioed Paul and Alex to meet us. Steve and Paul immediately began searching a guidebook for another climb which all four of us could do together, me being the least experienced. All I remember is that I was noticing the sun going down while the three of them disappeared high onto a ledge on the cliff face above me. They eventually yelled down for me to "climb", and after a short and not-too-difficult effort, I arrived safely on the ledge. I was tired, and Steve tied me off tightly so I could rest while he worked.

Steve, Paul & Alex

The first thing I noticed was that Alex was gone. Paul Pan was belaying him on the route above, which evidently extended to near the top of the cliff. I decided that I had had enough, but staying on the ledge was not an option, since the others were going to need all of the climbing rope available to belay down from the top. They explained to me that there was a slight right traverse, meaning that they would not be coming back down this way. Continued ascent became a requirement for going home.

Within a half hour I found myself on another small ledge, this one smaller than the first. Again, Steve tied me off tightly so I could rest while he worked. It was dusk, and I knew I was in deep when a Cessna flew by in the adjacent Hudson River Valley at eye level. Steve told me that we would rappel down from this spot, but that Paul Pan and Alex wanted to make a try for the top by way of an overhanging ledge. When I turned around, Paul was already well underway. I watched for thirty minutes as Paul and Alex, two spidery rock climbers, worked the overhang with hands and feet. No one made it past the overhang's end, as it was far too dark too see the hand holds.

Dangler

I was one of the middle climbers rappelled down in pitch blackness so as to have someone control the rope at the top and bottom for me. It was only at this point I realized that the only reason we came down is that they ran out of headlamp batteries.