Q: What’s your sign? Do you believe in this astrology stuff?
A: Virgo is my sign. If I have nothing else to think about, I may read my horoscope just to see how wrong they’ve gotten it again. 

There might be something to our relationship with this vast universe in which we find ourselves born, and there might be something to how small we are in view of the universe, or where fate has positioned us, and such things might well affect us, but how we are affected is too complicated and mysterious to put into words, as do those who seek the financial benefits of pretending to have special insight. 

Q: What lives under your bed?
A: Every bad dream I’ve ever had is there, under my bed, waiting to haunt me again. I sleep lightly and keep watch. 

Q: Who’s hiding in the closet?
A: When I’m not watching, my coats come out and dance about the house. I have the sense that everything has some form of life. The world is far too scientific. It was Carl Jung who said it was detrimental to our mental health to be too sterile and factual, too grimly realistic about the world. 

Q: Biggest epic ever?
A: One that comes to mind was my adventure with Kor in the Black Canyon. He had taken a freak leader fall on the Bastille Crack, sailing past me, the rope burning my palms to cinders. Because I loved climbing so much, instead of spending the needed month to heal, I let the madman talk me into trying a huge new wall in the Black Canyon. I could not hold my piton hammer without agony, was leaving pitons and saying I got them, couldn’t haul the pack, had trouble touching the rock to pull on handholds, was dying for lack of water, and that wasn’t the half of it. The whole epic is told in my first significant article, in Mountain Magazine. 

Q: Have you ever had a climbing partner die on you?
A: Fortunately I have never had a climber die on me, other than to gas out or psyche out, or be unable to make another upward move. Fortunately a little rest and refreshment has resurrected a few, and we try again another day. I have rescued bodies of people who were in some terrible accident. A fellow human might be viewed as partner in this world. 

Q: Where was your favorite sunset viewed from a cliff?
A: I still see the yellow vertical rock of the Yellow Spur, or the clean, orange-green-gray-yellow sandstone of Super Slab, those climbs in Eldorado, turn slowly brighter and then darker as the sun disappears. I used to walk up the canyon just to see that happen again. For the forty years I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I often took note of the late sun illuminating the yellow rock of the northwest side of the Third Flatiron, and the west side of the First Flatiron. The Third especially was a realm of sandstone that utterly captured my imagination all through my youth. I knew climbers had ascended that rock, yet it seemed formidable and almost impossible to my young eyes. It still thrills me to look at that steep rock. 

I remember a lovely sunset across the Cathedral Rocks, in June 1967, when I was on the last couple hundred feet of El Capitan. Normally those Cathedrals are huge rocks you see towering above you as you drive into Yosemite. We were gazing down and across at their summits, as the light changed through several degrees of yellow and orange. We were the only people on El Capitan that evening. Those days are sacred. 

Q: Cowboy coffee – yeah or nay?
A: I have never tried Cowboy coffee. 

Q: Wag bags – yeah or nay?
A: I do not know what a wag bag is. 

Q: Tricycle or unicycle?
A: I loved my tricycle when I was maybe three years old. 

Q: Footwork, power, or tenacity – what makes for a good climber?
A: A little bit of everything makes for a versatile climber. Footwork, balance, strength, creativity, tenacity, judgment, and a calm mind combine, but (more often than not) technique over strength.