Kitty must have recently returned from Makalu, where she led a small team which summitted via the extremely difficult West Pillar Route. An equivalent in golf might be if someone who had never even picked up a four iron wandered into a golf shop one Saturday to hire a pro and walked out for a morning's round accompanied by Tiger Woods.

There Kitty and I were at the classic ice climbing area, Frankenstein. I was outfitted in what I considered state of the art gear — second hand foot fangs, a clunky Joe Brown ice helmet bought third hand, boiled wool mittens, and boiled wool socks.

Someone at Frankenstein snapped some fuzzy photos, one of which I kept on my desk at work as a memory of a happy day. A co-worker, whose outdoor experience was limited mostly to après skiing hot tubs, happened by my office one day and peered at the photo of my very first ice climb — or very first climb of any kind, for that matter.

“Wow,” he said, “I might have trouble skiing down that.”