Today I feel....

I might be able to take a breath today, the days work looks attainable. I'm going to the Eastern Shore today so the drive will be nice. Several proposals, walk a punch-list in St. Michaeles,Md. and then back to Brandywine, Md. All in all, a good day. Happy feet today.

Howdy pard......

I have started another attempt to grow the "stranger" mustach. I start fairly well and then something happens to make me cut the friggin' thing back to a "regular" 'stach. I think my desire to have this stach has something to do with the ties to New Mexico. Real or imagined, I will go for a period of time with no thoughts of New Mexico and then all of a sudden, I can't stop thinking about "Burque".

Oh well.....whatever.

"On belay?" "Belay on"

Rick and I seen here climbing "Square Dick" in Venezuela some time back.

The other pictures are of some dude and some chick doing some 'class 3 and 4 climbing.

I used to actually do this stuff. (not like the first photo, I was kidding about that). But Mark and Ricky and I started something known as the Raleigh Climbing Club in Memphis, Tennessee in the 70's. We would actually have meetings and collect dues to buy climbing gear. Mostly we would spend the money at Pizza Hut after the meetings and then scrounge around for coin to buy gear. When I moved to New Mexico in 1974, I began collecting caribiners, rope and petons and slings. RCC kept most of the gear since we had bought everything together, but I did have a sling and a couple of 'biners to tide me over. I even made the move to the "new" stuff, 'chaulks'. It seems that even in the 70's there was a thought of petons not being good for the rock. Petons were used to hammer into the stone to create an anchor to tie off or slide your rope into until you reached the next spot to place another peton. The chaulks simply slid in between the rock and could be removed without permanate damage to the stone. New Mexico had a great array of boulders and rock to climb with every level of difficulty. I became a fair 'free-climber' and had only one spill that changed my mind about free-climbing. I was showing off for the guys from Memphis who had come out for a week of camping and climbing. (Rick has the photo of us in the Sandia Mtns. hamming it up while camping). I took them to Tridens Hole for some entry level climbing 'New Mexico' stlye so they could get used to the rock. I got up about 30 feet when I felt myself slip. In my mind I just said, "three points on the rock, three points on the rock". Now I was moving down with the tips of my boots scrubbing down the rock and my fingers weren't gripping anything. My boot finally stopped on something solid and stopped. The only problem was that the rest of my body kept moving down the stone face. I think about that point, my chin hit my knee and then the whole pile of me came off the face and as they say, "away we go!" The last 15 feet went by pretty quickly and I hit the loose gravel at the bottom and shook it off real quick like nothing happened. "Jesus, Deniston, are you alright?" the all asked. I laughed, ya know the laugh when you know that you just fucked up real bad, that laugh.

We took a ten minute break and then went back to climbing, with the ropes.