Abdominal Curls
Lie on the floor with your knees bent and your feet 12 to 18 inches from the buttocks. Lightly clasp your hands behind your head with your elbows wide open. Next, press your lower back into the floor, and lift your upper back off the floor while keeping your eyes focused on the ceiling. Be careful not to pull on your neck. Then return slowly to the floor. Start with one set of 10 to 15 repetitions every other day. Try to add one or two repetitions each week until you reach 40.

Calf Raises
Stand with the balls of your feet on the edge of a step or stair. Stretch your heels down as far as you comfortably can. Hold for 10 seconds, then raise up as high as you can and hold for 10 seconds. Keep your legs straight, knees slightly bent, throughout the movement. Repeat eight to 15 times. Add one to two repetitions each week until you build up to 30.

Stretching
Follow each workout with a series of stretches. The 10 Basic Stretches provide moves for the entire body. For skiing, you will want to concentrate mostly on the lower body stretches. Be sure to perform them at the end of each day of skiing as well. You will reduce post-ski soreness significantly!

Remember to perform the resistance exercises after your body is properly warmed up, such as following a cardiovascular activity. As with all exercises, the movements in this plan may not be suitable for people with certain physical limitations. Check with your physician if you are unsure.

Just like a football player has to prepare for the football season, skiers have to properly prepare for the ski season. They would be foolhardy to hop off the chair lift and expect their body to respond with ease to the challenges of the hill. Knee strains and tears are especially common because skiing requires pivoting motion that stresses knee ligaments.

The best way to protect the knees is to strengthen the muscles and tendons that surround them. Resistance exercises that isolate the quadriceps and hamstrings are crucial. Skiing involves the lower legs, too, so you will want to target the calf muscles as well.

Equally important are the back and abdominal muscles, since they are working double time to hold your body upright when you ski. You not only want these muscles strong, but flexible, too. Tight muscles are vulnerable to injury and cannot move through their full range of motion.

If you start now, you can get into shape for your favorite winter sport. Here is a pre-season exercise plan you can follow that requires no equipment:

Cardiovascular Activity
Engage in regular cardiovascular activity, three to five times per week, for at least 30 minutes in duration. This will help prepare your heart and lungs for skiing so you do not get as winded as you would otherwise. Stepping and bicycling offer the double benefit of strengthening the quadriceps muscles.

Quadriceps Strengthener
Standing six to ten inches away from a chair or bench with your back to it, rest one foot on the seat, sole up. Balancing on the other leg, squat slowly. When your thigh is nearly parallel to the floor, push up. Repeat eight to 15 times, then switch legs. Add one to two repetitions each week until you build up to 30.

Wall Sit
Stand with feet shoulder width apart and your back against a smooth wall. Slowly slide down the wall as though you are lowering yourself into a chair. Stop before you reach the 90-degree mark. Pause for one second, then slowly push back up to a standing position. Perform 10 to 15 repetitions. Add one to two repetitions each week until you build up to 30.

Hamstring Strengthener
Lie on your back with your heels up on a chair. Your thighs should be perpendicular to the floor, shins parallel. Lift your pelvis about two inches off the floor. Hold for five seconds, then slowly lower. Repeat eight to 15 times. Add one to two repetitions each week until you build up to 30.

Another intangible asset that smart companies are eyeing is the hard-to-quantify area of “corporate culture.” Navision Software, a Copenhagen-based company, recently completed acquisitions of three of its distributors in France, Sweden, and Holland. But before doing the deal, the company did a values-check on its targets, according to Johnny Jensen, director of information management. Did the companies have similar core values to Navision, values advocating innovation? Or were they more bureaucratic?

Hannah Lund, the corporate cultural manager of Navision, keeps an electronic record of stories commonly told within Navision about the company’s core values. The company was founded 14 years ago by a trio of 22-year-olds. “Our message is that if they can do it, any employee can do it,” she says. Navision examined the companies it wanted to buy, to make sure there was a cultural match or at least a culture similar enough that it could be shaped. There is “no way” Navision would acquire a company with a core-values clash, says Lund.

The new-style M&As are not a one-way street, however. Acquired companies do receive substantial benefits. Pharsight’s “asset” Weiner, who is now VP and general manager of scientific products at Pharsight, says his software company, SCI, “had the opportunity for VC funding.” But he decided to forgo that route because acquisition by Pharsight would furnish enough money for him to develop ideas, expand his market share, and open new avenues to sell his products.

The fact that no metrics exist for these kinds of deals may scare away some traditional investors. Academics at Harvard University, such as Robert Kaplan, the co-creator of the idea of the “balanced scorecard” — a metric for measuring some intangibles — are trying to figure out how to attach a concrete value to intangibles. “In the past, the accounting profession looked at this too simplistically: ‘Should we capitalize this or expense it?’ But that’s not the issue,” Kaplan argues. “Even if you capitalize it, you’re not understanding the value you’re getting or what you’re creating.”

And in the coming years, perhaps, a tool similar to the financial performance indicators, such as discounted cash-flow analysis, will emerge to assuage the skittish. But for now, M&As in the knowledge industries realize that “value is really in the eye of the beholder,” says Larose. “Which is why you have wildly different valuations of firms in the financial services and high-tech fields.”

There are some emerging rules of thumb for M&As today, as outlined above, but they all must be adapted to individual situations. Determine whether the target company’s strategy is similar to your strategy. Ascertain what the company offers — whether talent, technology, or customers — that will help you reach your goals more quickly. Sign key talent, technology, and customers to long-term deals to ensure they will help you reach your goals.

Remember, though, that intangible assets don’t show up on a balance sheet, says John Allen, a lawyer with Bullwinkel Partners in Chicago, which represents an array of high-tech startups. Many companies may not get credit for this kind of value in the marketplace. Would-be acquirers are going to have to do a lot of creative thinking before jumping into bed with a prospect.

Allen notes that intangibles have always been key to business acquisitions, but they are becoming more imperative as technology plays a greater role and as the economy becomes ever more information-intensive. “These kinds of deals will become more important and more numerous in the future,” Larose adds. “You have to be creative in an M&A. But you have to be thorough, too.”

M&A insiders say that over the next few years these intuitive acquisitions will become the norm for corporate M&As, mostly in the knowledge industries. Objective data, such as price-to-earnings ratios, dividend yields, and cash-flow projections are on the way out, while subjective data — a gut instinct about the value of a particular piece of software or service and the contribution a particular person or team can make, for instance — are on the way in. “The type of M&A activity you see today goes well beyond the buy-’em, bust-’em-up, and reap-the-profits activities of the 1980s,” says Larry Larose, an M&A lawyer with the Wall Street firm Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft. “High-tech companies tend to have lots of intangible assets. Though they have capital, the best assets go home at night. These M&As are very much an art, not a science. That is true for intangible assets across the board.”

These new-style M&As are not without conflict. But the drama is decidedly different from the RJR Nabisco and KKR deals of lore. Take the Lycos acquisition last year of Tripod for $58 million. The primary reason for the deal was to “round out Lycos’ audience, enabling the company to reach the highly desirable 18 to 34 demographic,” Lycos said in a statement. Lycos also wanted to tap the expertise of Tripod employees, who built the online community for that particular market.

M&A Rule Number 1: Keep your assets happy

Larose notes that companies buying Internet firms such as Lycos have to “keep an eye on keeping their assets happy” during and after the acquisition process, to ensure that the deal comes off. To do so, dealmakers offer the employees long-term contracts, creative freedom, and financial incentives to perform. “It is not enough just to buy majority control of the stock,” says Larose. “You have to retain the key players. That takes a lot of finesse. That takes a lot of legal analysis. And it takes a lot of heavy negotiation, because you have a lot of parties to talk to.”

Careful research remains essential when selecting a merger partner. But the research performed today is increasingly different from traditional M&A research. Pharsight, which specializes in helping some of the top drug manufacturers to repurpose drugs for new markets and speed new drugs to market, is one such example. Pharsight purchased software competitors Scientific Consulting and MGA last year in private deals for several reasons.

First, the niche was small, and finding talent to fill top jobs was difficult. “It was easier to acquire a small company with eight employees than it was to hire each of those eight individuals separately,” notes CEO Reidel. One typical “asset” acquired in the deal is Daniel Weiner, founder of SCI, with a doctorate in statistics and 17 years of experience working on drug development. “That kind of talent is pretty sparse,”.

M&A Rule Number 2: Reduce time to market

Pharsight also wanted to expand its range of contacts in the customer community. SCI and MGA each had a database of clients that Pharsight coveted. Buying both companies gave Pharsight instant access to those clients, and relationships that would otherwise have taken years to cultivate, says Robin Kehoe, chief financial officer of Pharsight. The target companies each owned intellectual property — specifically, software to test drug effects on the human body — that Pharsight could have developed on its own. But, again, that would have taken several years. And in newly developing niche markets, a year saved can translate into substantial earnings, says Reidel.

The not-so-subtle message: Companies are worth more broken up than intact. Employees are expendable. Damn the customers.

What a difference a decade makes.

Today, smart companies and the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) experts who broker them are not merely interested in acquiring a company’s tangible assets. The emergence of profitable online information, or “knowledge,” companies has changed the M&A market forever. And with the emergence of electronic commerce, the digital marketplace is fast becoming more pricey than downtown office real estate or a hanger full of airplanes. M&As are rooting out companies for their intangible assets — those subjective, unquantifiable qualities such as employee brainpower, technological innovation, and a strong customer base. Talent, technology, and contacts.

The real value of these knowledge companies — such as Infoseek, America Online, and CNET — is in the ideas they generate, the people who develop those concepts, and the clients who want to use the final products for their own edification.

“We have done two acquisitions in the last year,” says Kolin Reidel, a former venture capitalist and CEO of Pharsight, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based software maker for the pharmaceutical development industry. “In neither of the acquisitions did we even do a traditional discounted cash-flow analysis based on future earnings. We didn’t care to. We wanted their talent and their intellectual property and access to their customer base.”

Although Reidel’s company is small — with 50 employees and sales at about $10 million — his fascination with intangibles is no mere quirk. Rather, intangible value is rising at M&A houses, and often the most sought-after companies now are information technology companies.

A flurry of deals made early this summer supports the trend:

In a multimillion- dollar deal, the Walt Disney Company acquired a 43 percent stake in online search-engine developer Infoseek, pri-marily for company talent and online customer base. The “combined audience of our leading Websites gives us a strong foundation for future growth,” Jake Winebaum, chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Internet Group, said during a telephone news conference.

America Online purchased Israel-based messaging-software company Mirabilis for about $300 million. CEO and co-founder Steve Case said in a statement that the reason for the acquisition was basically because the company’s 12 million customers represented a captive, untapped audience for AOL services. By offering existing Mirabilis customers — most based in Europe — access to AOL, the service would, over time, “look more like a Web portal business and less like a stand-alone messaging service,” Case said.

What you’ll need:
Large-square graph paper
Scissors
Cardboard or oaktag
Glue
Small plastic bags

Background:
This game requires children to spend time outdoors collecting game pieces, but it can then be played either outdoors or indoors. Kids must use logic and critical thinking to solve this simple brain-teaser.

What to do:
1. Cut a section of graph paper five squares wide and five square long.
2. Cut a square from the cardboard or oaktag that’s the same size as the graph paper.
3. Glue the graph paper onto the cardboard to make a game board for each player.
4. Take a nature walk to collect game pieces, such as small pinecones, pebbles, shells, acorns, or pods, and put them in the plastic bags.

Rules of Play:
1. The player arranges nine game pieces in the center of the game board.
2. The object of the game is to remove eight pieces, leaving the last one in the center of the game board. Game pieces may be removed by jumping over them onto adjacent unoccupied squares.

The piece that was jumped is removed.
3. The player may jump in any direction and make any number of jumps with one piece. The challenge is to leave the last piece in the center square in as few jumps as possible.

It has been recognised within the community that according to Matty Saimond, Flockrman of Preston Road New Deal for Communities was quoted as saying

“Since the late 1995′s , the pastime of skateboarding has become something of an art form, often to the annoyance of residents – in particular, pensioners, who feel threatened by youngsters racing past them. Gone are the days when skateboards were just an accessory, and it didn’t matter if you could stay upright on one – it was just about having fun. Now, skateboards, in-line skates and bikes are almost necessities to young people. And it is not just about the practicality of getting from A to B more quickly – but also getting there with style…the skateboard has stood the test of time.”

Trax already have over 258 people signed up to use to new facility. Membership costing ?2 per year. Members receive T-shirt and membership card. Those members wishing to use the BMX facilities do so with supervised sessions.

The park, which has been almost 4 years in the building, at a cost of ?538,000 forms part of the re-generation of Preston Road under the Government’s New Deal for Communities. As a result such a prestigious occasion for the skating community warranted not one senior Government Official, but two. Matty Saimond was also in attendance, but admitted in the Hull Mail that he thought that he was slightly confused, as he had thought his invitation was to join the  Prime Minister on ‘Prescott Road’.

Such high profile guests might make you wonder if skating in some way is to form part of the Government’s Transport Policies?

Hull also has great resources for in-liners, mile upon mile of smooth tarmac cycle tracks. Mostly built on the routes of disused railway lines throughout the city, provide a traffic-free environment to develop and practice skills.

People are generally continuing on with their lives here – the bombings are mentioned in passing, and a few opinions are offered, but on the whole everyone seems more concerned about terrorist retaliation. I, for one, am grateful to read that we are at least dropping food supplies for the Afghani people, and I pray that we are not murdering innocent civilians but rather doing the world some good by cracking down on terrorism. Only time will tell, and I am certain that our country will be fraught with more terrorist activity before this whole thing plays out.

The natural world here offers respite from greater fears about the future – slim, bright green snakes and red-spotted chameleons, giant spiders and leaf bugs provide fascinating diversions, as do the fall colors that have suddenly burst into full splendor – fiery reds, every shade of orange, burning yellows.

Tennessee

October 12-15

Due to a poor weather forecast for the New River Gorge, we changed plans and decided to head for Tennessee and the Obed Wild and Scenic River, about an hour outside of Knoxville near a little town called Wartburg.

Stunningly gorgeous with its tremendous array of fall foliage, the Obed offers little in the way of developed recreation – no real hiking trails, one developed camping area, and miles of beautiful sandstone cliffs with tiers of roofs and dramatic, dead horizontal overhangs the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else. The remote beauty and isolation of the climbing and camping here makes for a welcome change from the Red – there is no scene to speak of, just hundreds of stellar routes to try, mostly in the 5.11-5.13 range.

Already I’ve sampled the world of climbing upside-down here – on Solstice, a 5.12a with a 15-foot horizontal roof on enormous handholds. Despite the disorienting sensation of being completely inverted while climbing, I enjoyed the feeling of cutting my feet loose and campusing (climbing with no feet on the rock) for a couple moves before swinging my feet back onto the rock into a huge pocket near my head.

After climbing until late last night, we drove into Wartburg for food…and of course read more headlines about Anthrax and bombings. American flags line the streets here, and red-white-and-blue ribbons adorn nearly every mailbox in town. Signs along the road scream out at us: “WARNING: Jesus is coming. R U ready?” along with various other frightening messages about the wrath of the Lord. Our fellow campground inhabitants last night sported an enormous Confederate flag with a flaming skull and crossbones in the center of it. My dreams were littered with moments of fearful wakefulness, thinking about how our enormous and multifaceted nation is like an unwieldy patchwork giant slapping futilely at tiny yet deadly mosquitoes.

October 19

Today, Matt, Ryan and I climbed in the Obed for the last time on this trip. It was our third day of climbing. After hiking out to Tierrany Wall, the baking heat and our tired muscles made it difficult to psych up to climb – not to mention the “ladybugs” swarming the cliff face. They turned out to be a strain of malevolent, biting relatives of real ladybugs – hundreds of thousands of them. I tried to maintain a sense of calm, but eventually the constant peppering of biting beetles got to me, and I found all desire to climb gone. Thwarted, we returned to the Lilly Bluff Overlook for one last night of free camping before Ryan left to return to Iowa, and Matt and I left for the New River Gorge.

Tuesday and Wednesday we climbed at the Motherlode again – I am drawn to return to this phenomenal formation, despite the fact that I’m not very good at the steep, continuous climbing there. The weather has warmed up to near-perfect fall conditions, and I’m excited by the prospect of traveling for five more weeks.

The walnut tree lurking above our home in Miguel’s Tarpland threatens to crack someone’s skull soon. Walnuts, encased in their tough, fruity packaging, plummet down at random times with breathtaking force to pound into the tarps and tents. It seems almost inevitable that someone’s head will get clocked by one of the near-baseball sized packages at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet.

October 4-8

The crowds started to roll in on Thursday and continued to pour in over the course of the day on Friday. This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and Miguel’s overflowed with the tents of our Northern neighbors. We climbed Sunday and Monday, enjoying the company of the remaining weekenders who turned their four-day holiday into a longer vacation.

Monday evening, I chatted at the crowded campfire first with a psychologist from Philadelphia who bore an eerie resemblance to Sigmund Freud. Ironically his climbing partner was by far the most bizarre fellow at the campfire – a fidgety, loud and somewhat crazed-looking guy who drove everyone who sat down next to him to move within five minutes. After the psychologist went to sleep, my newly made Swiss friends, Mark and Ben, sat down for a talk, only to be interrupted by the psychologist’s partner, who began to loudly and excitedly reminisce with another person about G.I. Joe cartoons, complete with an off-key theme-song rendition.

“Are you going to go back to Switzerland and tell all of your friends about the sophisticated conversations around American campfires?” I quietly asked Ben, as the guy across from us continued to assail people with vivid descriptions of various G.I. Joe action figures.

“Ja, ja,” Ben choked out before he burst into a long fit of laughter. “This is true.”

Annie, a climber here from Quebec, told us that the French speakers refer to us in such instances with scorn as “Les ’Ricans.” At times like this, I can’t really blame the Euros for finding us a tad – or maybe more than a tad – “unrefined,” as a woman climber from Germany put it to me once.

October 9

Today is the final rest day here in Kentucky – we plan to climb for the next three days and then to drive to the New River Gorge in West Virginia to set up camp at Roger’s, the Miguel’s of the New. Hopefully the weather will hold…

October 10, 2001

Tonight I was embarrassed to witness yet another “stupid American” incident. My friend Brian from Canada, whose parents are from India, fielded a series of inane questions at the fire, starting with, “What are you, anyway?”

“Canadian,” he said.

After finally establishing his Indian heritage, the original asker of this line of questioning persisted to ask, “So are you a Canadian Indian or an Indian Canadian?” and “Is Bangkok in India?”

Thank God that Brian has a really good sense of humor and could laugh about it later. Nonetheless I was again put out by yet another example of American ignorance. It brings home even harder the reasons why other nations dislike or even despise this country – as a whole, we lack knowledge, awareness and sensitivity to others’ cultural and religious differences.

to be continued…

Climbing in the cave at Sinks Canyon today, another climber, Dan, suddenly exclaimed, “Look – an airplane!”

We all stopped and watched the jet soar above us, its sound ripping through the quiet canyon after it was already out of sight.

Brilliant sunlight kept us climbing until dark, when we headed back to Ally’s for the real celebration of my birthday – a raucous gathering of about 15 friends. After playing the craziest game of Scrabble in my life – climbing terms only – we had an all-out jam session in Ally’s living room to the tunes of Eek-A-Mouse and Sublime. Beating on drums, bottles, cans and even barbells, we played late into the night.

“It’s nice to see this room this way,” shouted Dave to me at one point, working to be heard over the cacophony. He was thinking back to Tuesday, when we’d watched the destruction of the WTC in the same place. “It’ll help me to remember it in a better way than how I’ve thought of it since earlier this week.”

Iowa

September 19

Exhausted from our 15-hour drive from Wyoming to Matt’s parents’ place in Iowa, I picked up my email – and read a harrowing first-person account from a friend in high school who was on the scene at the WTC attack. Her former sense of safety and security was yanked away without warning, probably for the rest of her life. Reading her vivid account, I felt almost as if I was with her as she wandered around the streets in a bloodstained lab coat after aiding victims, early in the morning after the attack, unable to get home as the ferries were full of dead bodies.

September 20

Today’s scenery brought with it a startling contrast Wyoming’s windswept, natural landscape, as we drove through cornfields and past silos, bumping down dirt roads until we reached Iowa’s premiere climbing area – Wild Iowa, where Matt learned to climb about four years ago. Short, pocketed limestone cliffs about 30 feet in height with wet finishes and lush vegetation proved entertaining for a couple hours of climbing.

Since we’ve been on the road so much, we’ve missed out on much of the constant media coverage of the WTC attack. After a real dinner – with grilled meats and a ton of fresh salad – we watched television with Matt’s parents. Scenes of daily living in Afghanistan splashed across the scene, and a former aid worker described how mothers feed their children with moldy crusts of bread mushed up with dried, crushed locusts. Sitting there with my full belly, topped off with a shared pint of rich ice cream, I realized that I could never even begin to comprehend what it’s like to live in such a country, under such a regime and in such abject poverty. I hope and pray that whatever the United States decides to do in response to the WTC attack that we won’t respond to evil with greater evil.

Kentucky

September 21

Driving today to the Red River Gorge through the heartland of America, I noticed the abundance of American flags flying – all at half-mast, of course. Here and there, a car drove by with an American flag flapping from its window. At a truck stop, I caught a glimpse of a newspaper headline – “We will meet violence with patient justice.” But will we? What is “patient justice,” anyway?

September 22

Home for the next two weeks or so is Miguel’s Pizza, alongside Kentucky Route 11, which snakes its way through numerous small, southern towns. This roadside restaurant, with ample flat space around it for tents, has become the climber’s campground for the Red River Gorge. Since we arrived on a weekend, the parking lot was packed with cars from all over the place, from Colorado to Ontario.

For our first day in the Red, we decided to check out Torrent Falls, one of the place’s many destination crags. Awesome, steep and pocketed routes soon sent our muscles into severely pumped mode. It will take a few days to get accustomed to the different style of climbing here, not to mention the different climate – hot and humid. I feel soaked, or at least damp, all of the time.

Driving to and from the cliff today, we passed a number of small local stores – one with a Confederate flag hanging outside with the slogan “The South Will Rise Again” printed in its center. In my liberal nai”vete’, I often forget the wide rifts in opinions and beliefs within our own nation, not to mention the rest of the world. There are so very many churches here, too – all Christian, of course – at least two to a block in many of the towns. I think about “patient justice” again, about what this can possibly mean when justice and the right course of action in one person’s eyes so often represents the utmost of evils in another’s.

September 24-26

On Monday, it poured nonstop, so we visited Stanton for the first time, the closest “big” town to the Red River Gorge. Thankfully, we found a library with Internet access, although the connection there is so very slow that it makes checking email seem like a meditative activity. The remnants of the rain remained all day yesterday, despite our desire to rock climb. Never one to enjoy the cold, I spent most of my day shivering instead of climbing.

Today, however, the sun’s rays finally soaked up the last of the clouds, leaving us with brilliantly crisp fall weather that is slowly causing a color change in the jungle-like tangle of deciduous trees that chokes all of the cliffs here. We went to Roadside, a sun-blasted cliff with a number of 5.10’s and 5.12’s.

Late in the day I hopped onto one of the area’s classic routes, despite feeling tired and sore. Digging two fingers into the small, eroded pockets and pulling on those for several moves proved taxing to me. Thankfully they gave way to bigger pockets – easier on the hands and easier to hang on to as well. After another committing section with smaller holds, I clambered up the final few feet of the route to clip the anchors.

After today, I need a couple days off from climbing. My skin hurts, scraped raw from the Red’s rough sandstone, and my tired muscles could use a break as well.

September 27-28

Two days of much-needed rest. In an effort to avoid further dampness in the event of more rain, we shifted our tents to “Tarp-land,” a series of permanently fixed tarps created originally by Christopher, a heavyset, twenty-something climber from Detroit who arrived Thursday. Christopher, along with his buddy Mike, a.k.a. Tunaboy (called thus due to his predilection to eating tuna straight from the can), spend many, many months at Miguel’s every year, in between stints of earning money. A former Jehovah’s Witness, Christopher (not Chris, unless you ask his permission to call him that), set up camp near us in Tarp-land, welcomed us to his food, and pulled up his chair to converse with us about everything from fundamentalist religions to the latest news from the electronica music scene in Detroit.

Yesterday I sniffed out a local newspaper to find out the latest information, but found instead that reading it gave me a bizarre feeling of the role reversal this whole affair has brought – it no longer feels like I live in one of the safest places in the world. Though out here in the middle of Kentucky I feel an odd sense of detachment at times, the assortment of climbers passing through tend not to shy away from discussing world issues with one another. It’s inescapable; it’s on everyone’s minds. Nonetheless in so many ways the disaster and its aftermath take on an aura of unreality – what, if anything, has changed in our daily lives, besides something inside of us or our concept of our nation’s place in the world? Thursday night I dream about World War III.

Today, the 28th, I find a place to plug my laptop in – in the Monastery, a small cedar-sided one-room shack behind Miguel’s Pizza. It’s cold and dark, but private. The showers and toilet share the same back wall as the shack, and I can hear the constant running of the toilet as I write. Paws, the six-toed campground cat, pokes her head around the door, looking in to see if I have any food for her. Things are quiet around camp right now, but only temporarily, I know – soon the place will be transformed by the weekend crowd into a colorful village of tents as another transient group of climbers from everywhere moves through.

September 29

Destination: the Motherlode, perhaps the Red River Gorge’s most famous wall. This dramatically overhanging sandstone amphitheatre almost defies imagination. With routes ranging from ultra-overhanging to moderately overhanging, the pocket-riddled cliff rises some 100 feet up from the tangle of trees around it. Such steepness and continuously overhanging rock lends itself to routes no easier than 5.12, with few exceptions. Hanging on is the key to succeeding on these routes. It’s a continuous struggle to fight the pump, and I finished or fell off of every route with aching arms.

After only six routes, I was completely worked and ready to call it a day; Matt was, too. Climbing in the Lode fatigued me tremendously – I just spent so much time hanging on to the rock. At one point, despite the cool weather, I could feel waves of heat emanating from my body as I tried to discern which holds to grab next. Tonight I was good for little but eating and crawling into a warm sleeping bag.