One Pair of Boots

I’ve been climbing frozen waterfalls for nearly thirty years now. The first few years were characterized by a lack of individual equipment because ice climbing requires special gear; crampons for your boots and hammer-like picks for each hand, not to mention the usual mountaineering stuff like a rope, a harness, ‘biners, slings, etc.

Crampons are the claw-like devices which attach to the bottom of your boots and allow you to stand or climb on frozen snow or ice without slipping. There are two types of ice crampons, flexible and rigid. Flexible crampons were originally designed for glacier travel, moving across low-angled surfaces of frozen snow. They have a hinge in the middle so that they can bend with the sole of your boots. Rigid crampons, like the name implies, have no hinge, do not bend or flex and like ski boots, are uncomfortable to walk in. Rigid crampons were specifically designed for steeply angled or vertical ice so that a person could sink only the front points into the ice or snow and still stand comfortably.

In the late seventies my brother-in-law gave me a pair of leather hiking boots he bought on vacation in Switzerland while he was in the US Navy. Turns out for some reason these boots had a wooden midsole which made them perfect for rigid-style ice crampons. Most hiking boots are unsuitable for rigid crampons because the soles flex & bend to some degree. The only other boots available for such a task at the time were the plastic mountaineering boots that expedition members wore on trips to Denali and the Himalayas. Their outrageous cost prohibited any of us ‘normal people’ from owning a pair.

John, Tim, Dave, Dana and I, along with Peg, Michael, Greg and others soon began to spend nearly every winter weekend on the ice somewhere in Colorado. I would set up a suitable anchoring system at the top of the waterfall, either to established bolt anchors or with rock gear. Depending on the location, sometimes I used bushes or trees for anchors. Once set, I rappelled back to the bottom where everyone eagerly awaited their chance to try something new or improve their existing skills. I would sit down on a rock, unlace & take off my boots and someone else would step into them, hook into the rope and start climbing.


After a few seasons we all acquired our own set of tools and crampons. With a huge increase in the popularity of ice climbing in the early 1990’s, getting the opportunity to climb an ice waterfall on the weekend soon became an issue of who got there first. Over the years, we proved to the Colorado ice climbing community time and again that we were the most dedicated climbers, leaving our nice warm beds and partners at 2 or 3 am (oh-dark thirty) so that we could be the first ones on the ice before sun-up. Occasionally we let latecomers join us, if they seemed nice enough. Otherwise they got to sit and wait, sometimes for hours, till we were done hacking up the ice with our tools.

Even though the original group has splintered apart for various reasons like advancing age, injuries from other sports and geography we still keep in contact with one another. Protecting someone on the other end of a climbing rope quickly builds a bond between those two people which is not easily broken. We lost the first member of our group, Dave Brooks, when he was killed in a tanker truck accident in California in 2006.

Now, as I sat at the memorial service for Tim this past week I realized that half of the people who came did so because of a bond that had been forged over nearly three decades and how it had all started with that one pair of boots.

I reflected back on all the adventures and good times we had shared together over the years and I realized just how amazingly fortunate I’ve been to have that kind of lasting bond with so many wonderful people.

Toxic People and Trolls Under the Bridge

I just got laid off from a temporary design position that instead turned out to be simple manufacturing labor and I can’t remember the last time I felt such overwhelming joy in leaving a job. The owner and CEO was easily the meanest and most toxic person I have ever met in my whole life. I have never seen one person take so much delight in making other people miserable and be so successful at it.

Mean people suck!

There is a Chinese saying that venom comes from the head and it was certainly true at this company. The owner felt that people were just meat that she could exploit at will, while paying the very minimum because as she explained, she could fire whoever she wanted and simply put an ad on craigslist and have two hundred new people to choose from the very next day. Her evil attitude and demeaning contempt for everyone else permeated the very air like a sickening stench and contaminated everything in the office and manufacturing area. Her negativity trickled down to everyone who worked for her and it was evident in their faces, their defeated spirits and their actions. For some reason that I couldn’t understand, it was easier to endure the misery of working there than it was to go get a decent job somewhere else.

By the end of the second week I was almost overcome by my own negative attitudes and self-talk. I had been reading books on leadership at lunch and a quote by Viktor Frankl stuck in my mind. He said while he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, that one day, standing stark naked, hungry and filthy dirty before the Nazi guards, he realized, “No matter what they do to me, I still am in control of my feelings and how I choose to respond to them and to life.” That’s when it hit me that the purpose of me being there wasn’t about my skill-set; it had everything to do with mastering my self-talk and being in control of my own thoughts. I resolved right then and there that she could jerk me around like a circus pony or shit on me however she wanted but it wasn’t going to affect the good attitude I held within me. Some days I had to stop my thoughts several times each minute, hundreds of times an hour and replace the negative, self-defeating thoughts with a positive focus and a smile.

At break time and whenever I had the opportunity to talk to someone I started to share what I had learned with the other temporary workers. I explained that they were in charge of their own feelings and that no one could make them feel worthless without their permission. I also convinced them that the best thing they could possibly do was to go find another job and then quit as soon as possible. Ultimately, I learned a valuable lesson: in every negative situation or environment, no matter how bad it might seem, there is something positive to be learned. You might have to dig quite a bit to find it but it is there.

From my brief encounter with this nasty woman I will always remember that there are mean and nasty people in the world who enjoy being that way and like trolls under the bridge, they may want to bring me down but - I am in control of my own thoughts and I will choose every time to not let them ruin my day. :)