Those foolhardy moments in time

Someone asked me what was the most foolhardy thing I’d ever done. Where to even begin? How about rappelling down inside the inner dome of a decommissioned church of atheism and religion in Leningrad, mid-winter, never having rappelled down anything before? Or working on a fresco, while dangling from a rope 40 feet above the floor on dodgy equipment while helping a Soviet artist to restore it, using razor blades to scrape away debris. 

The singlemost scariest part was climbing an ancient pre-Revolution rickety iron ladder to the roof on the outside of the building, to get to the window that led to the inner dome. Of course the artist gave us a 360* tour of the copper-clad outer dome during a snow flurry. I grabbed the handrail only to have it come up from the lip of the dome in my hand, and the lip was slick, my boot slid to the edge...

It reminds me of the time I came down Half Dome and accidentally pulled the rope rail pipe out of the granite, only to have the 2x4“ plank skittle to the side, with me holding up the loose pipe in my right hand like a cane, while admiring the steep curvature of the dome, wondering how the hell John Muir managed to come back down the dome sans any guardrail at all.

And then there was. the time John Oliver Simon and I decided we needed to climb Huyana Picchu to get to the temple of the sun and moon using a dodgy rope to pull ourselves up a slope that far surpassed the angle of declination. Made the world’s steepest stairs seem like a piece of cake. No fn way was I going to take that rope back down that peak—all this while in the middle of a forest fire, having hiked 42km in, the only way out was through.

There are more stories... it’s a wonder I ever made it out alive. and now, here we are playing hide and seek with an invisible enemy. To be felled by a virus....