Belief

"I don't believe in human caused climate change" he said. I didn't respond. As we walked I pondered what he really meant.

For Christians, "belief" is a strong word. We are told to put our faith, hope, and trust in the Lord, not in earthly things or people. I read a good article recently about how teaching climate science was not about facts, but emotion.

It didn't snow, at least snow enough to warrant a shovel, plow, or any snow removal equipment, this winter in Independence. It's an anecdotal data point, but people who have lived here for a decade or more say that it does in fact snow here, which makes it an interesting, four month long data point.

The glaciers are melting. Andrew's Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park, just below Taylor Peak was the first time I wore crampons in the summer of 2004. I returned in August 2010 to climb Sharkstooth, and the glacier was totally melted. Again, I was there later in the season in 2010 than 2004, and it's one anecdotal data point, but for me that was a tough pill to swallow. I can't take someone else to that glacier to teach them snow technique, at least not toward the end of the summer.

The Khumbu ice fall on Mt. Everest seems to take more ladders and have more crevasses than it used to, according to the locals who have worked there for many years in a row.

The Khumbu glacier in 2016 was lower than in 2014.

In September 2015 I visited Mt. Hood, and apparently it was one of the lowest snow years, in decades, and with modern snow making machines and weather forecasting it was a surprise. We hiked up rocks and dirt for hours before reaching the snow.

Belief is not about facts, and facts are not about belief. The recent Tangier Island incident is a perfect example. The town believes one thing, in a person, yet there are facts affecting their life and future, which do not perfectly line up with what they are being told to worry about. Similarly when the "costal elite" scream that people should believe in this or that, it's a failure of vocabulary. Are glaciers melting, yes or no? Are sea levels rising, yes or no? In other words, it doesn't matter what you believe, the truth is the truth. The reasons for the facts... well, I suppose we have to leave something for us to argue about.

I'm not saying you should "believe" in human caused climate change, in the same way that you do not believe in the speed limit, airport security, or corporate benevolence as the purpose of life, or the answer to a given problem. I am saying that examining the evidence, and respecting the evidence and likely outcomes is just as wise as respecting the speed limit as you drive down the highway. The speed limit is not going to save you in the way that you believe Jesus has saved you; however, ignoring the speed limit might very well get you killed in the same way that ignoring climate change may cause dramatic coastal flooding.

I Bought a Car on eBay: Replacing 1st Gen Honda Insight Battery

There is a reason I bought a 2002 Honda Insight with 144,000 miles in good condition for only $2,400, I knew I was going to have to replace the hybrid battery. Replacing the battery is a $2,000 to $3000 adventure. When the IMA light came on initially, I didn't think it was a huge deal, and I continued to drive for a few weeks normally. Then came a day when the battery drained to zero, and didn't immediately recharge. At that point it was like the computer was commanding electric assist, and thinking it was happening, but there was no electric assist. I basically had to floor the accelerator pedal at every stop sign and red light to start moving again. Needless to say, this wasn't going to work forever.

I took my 2002 Honda Insight into the local Honda dealership in mid September to have an oil change, my first while I have owned it, although I did only put about 5000 miles on it in the last year, and also to have them look at the IMA battery light. They confirmed that the battery was bad and needed to be replaced and told me it was in the neighborhood of $3000 for parts and labor. I knew that going in, actually, I was surprised that their estimate wasn't higher. In fact, getting a little mechanical and electrical experience by personally replacing the hybrid battery was part of the reason I bought this old car. I told the service manager that I would like to do the replacement myself and he seemed surprised, I think it was the first independent hybrid battery replacement he had heard of. All told I made it out of the dealership with a bill for $155 for the oil change and labor time inspecting the battery and controller, which they confirmed was working correctly. Which is a reason I typically don't go to bar dealerships for service, it's expensive. It is worth mentioning, in ten months of ownership this is the first service bill I had on my Honda. Other than this I have only paid for gas, and a $30 or so kit to clean the headlights which were clouded from 12 year old plastic.

The next step was to purchase a battery. I bought mine from Bumblebee Batteries out of Portland, OR in early October. They advertised more battery capacity (8 amp hours versus 6.5), a 20 minute video above on how to remove and install the battery, and they had positive reviews. The cost came to $2,770, which is more than I paid for the entire vehicle, that that also included $500 which would be refunded when I return the old hybrid battery core, or rather enticement module. I sent the module back before Thanksgiving. There was a delay because I wanted to tear down the actually battery before I sent it back. I also had to buy some tools, about $40 worth of sockets and wrenches.

An 80 pound package beside a car!

To be honest, following Bumblebee's video, the extrication went really smoothly. The worst part was the big 12 mm socket bolts behind the passenger seat. I just could not quire reach it and get more than 15 degrees of wrench movement with my three inch socket extension, and had to go back to the store and get a 6 inch socket extension, which I then used a cheater bar on to get a little more leverage.

Under the Carpet

I don't like getting dirty. The concept of digging into a bunch of oil and grease for fun isn't that fun for me. However, I really like turning wrenches and seeing how things work, and doing physical work. In other words, electrical and structural work, which is relatively clean, like the work to replace the hybrid battery, was great fun for me. Sure I can have a good time working on an engine or hydraulics system, and I like the physical experience of working on things that I sit behind a computer all day starting at, but I am just not a fan of getting covered in oil.

Under the Cover

The battery went in very smoothly. I think it took me around three hours of work in the back of my car, plus another hour going to the store to buy tools. The battery took maybe 1:45 to get out, and the new one went back in the car in just over an hour. Like any other project, the first time you do it is the hardest because you have no idea what you are doing.

Disconnecting the Battery Control Units

Two hybrid batteries beside a car.

Before I sent the old battery back I wanted to tear it down too. I heard that it was made with basically D cell batteries, planning that future third party after market companies could service the battery pack. I wanted to take it apart because if I could in deed just replace the batteries the next time the battery goes out in 2022, that would probably cost a whole lot less, maybe several hundred dollars. Typically, the more work you can do yourself, the more money you will save. Well I took it apart in this order:

Disassembling a Honda Insight 1st Gen Hybrid Battery

The Battery Pack

Removed white plastic cover and several bolts.

Remove Three Bolts

Removing More Bolts

Remove the Bolts Behind these Rubber Plugs

Don't loose these spacers!

Remove these six screws, I think...

Remove the bolts and screws on both orange plates, the screws are very small.

Pull out a battery. I bolted small plate to it and pulled it out with a wire.

One six cell "Battery"

When I finally pulled out the actually batteries they had a plastic shrink wrap over them, and the only way I was getting in there was with a knife, and frankly, I wasn't ready to do that. My concern was that the shrinkwrap probably keeps the six batteries together and I might have trouble keeping them together if I go at it with a knife. Six 1.5 volt cells in each "battery" and 20 "batteries" in each module connected in series is 180 volts, most much higher than the 144 volts rating of the battery pack. In other words, if two cells within a "battery" are not touching, the whole thing might not work. Of course, once bolted into the battery frame there is pressure on the batteries so it probably would not be an issue, especially I returned this to a guy that is probably going to tear them apart and replace them anyway.

The end connection has a threaded hole and thin electrical tab.

Looking Inside the "Battery" tube, notice the four rubber flaps to help stabilize the "battery".

Be careful aligning the electrical tab on each "battery" with the slots in the orange plates, it took me several tries, because I had to straiten them all before putting the orange plates back on, then bend them all to screw them back into the orange plates.

The 20 "batteries" shown with their electrical tabs bent down, and the hardware I took off to get that far. All the battery pack required for this much disassembly was a 10 mm hex socket and a phillips screw driver.

When you put it back together, watch out for the four bolts that go from the control panel into the batteries, the ones hidden behind the rubber plugs, I shocked myself by holding the lower left bolt and then the bolt closest to the middle. It was definitely more than a standard 9V battery shock, but way less than sticking a knife in a 110V 15 Amp outlet. Honestly the dead battery pack might only have like 3-4 amps at this point at 144 volts, assuming that I got the full brunt of the battery pack, not some subset. Remember, it's the amps that kill not the volts.

Showing the recessed bolts that might shock you.

The process to replace the battery itself was very strait forward, it followed the Bumblebee video exactly, there were no design changes that were different between the video and my car. Would I do it again? Well, my parents recently bought a 2014 Prius C and I would be interested down the line to try and replace that hybrid battery. In other words, yes I would do it again.

What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century? (1 of 4)

In the summer of 2014 after returning from Everest I was feeling lonely being single, and I wrote a series of four articles exploring my singleness. This is the first in that series although I doubt that I will publish the rest of those articles. I have added updates as other events have occurred. In particular this past week, Malala Yousafzai coming out as a feminist including saying “…because feminism is another word for equality.”  Specifically, I have considered myself a feminist for the better part of a decade, but in the last year I’ve begun to wonder if I can really stand by that. First the original article.

Original article:

I’m going to do a miniseries of four articles talking about my views of being a man, or at least an adult male, and being single. While I am typically rather revealing of my personal life, I think these four articles may take it a step farther. It is important to note that some of the things I say will probably be rather negative and not the most optimistic, perhaps even offensive, but I aim to be me, and present the world as I see it. The second article is, “More Scary: Mt. Everest or a Beautiful Woman”, the third is, “My Trouble Dating Women”, and the fourth is “Letting Go...”

With all of these tech companies releasing their employment demographics and the relative push to get more women into STEM fields, I feel we have done a fairly decent job of at least opening the doors to the old boys clubs. As we motivate women to take on more  technical jobs and motivate men to do more at home, we are really redefining the roles of men and women. To be honest, this is a stumbling block for me. Men and women are different. I believe that as different, complementary humans, they do have different roles. But what is the truth, what is best or ideal when it comes to the roles of a man or a woman? I don’t know. I hear stay at home dads do really well at raising kids. 

A woman I know told me, she will not ask out or approach a man, in the context of dating. He must come to her and make a move. Diverging for a minute, why do women date jerks and the “bad” boys? Simple, those guys are the ones that ask them out. I know a lot of great guys, awkward engineers, that would bend over backwards to make a woman happy, they are single because talking to strange new women is really difficult. The point being, if women can do everything a man does, why does he still have to lead in a relationship setting? Taking it a step further, if women can do everything a man can do, why do men have to stand up for women?

I don’t know. I mean, I know what it means to be an American in the early 21st century, which to me is paying it forward to all the less fortunate, six billion people in the world, and pushing the limits of “possible”, interpreted as pushing the limits of what has been done. I suppose the ideal person to define what it means to be a man is his significant other. By that I mean that in any individual case the expectation and the ideal might be different. Yet, simply by his actions before even meeting or getting into a relationship with her he is already defining the type of woman he is looking for. It seems a positive feedback loop, or a escalating spiral. In other words, the way a man acts defines the kinds of people he meets and woman he becomes involved with, which in turn define and encourage those traits he started that led him to that woman in the first place.

The above is great, yet, men can’t have babies. We cannot achieve that miraculous opportunity to grow another pre-born human inside of us. In that way women and men will never be equal. At least it’s going to take a long time before scientists figure out how to put a functioning uterus in a man. Frankly, I’m not sure it will ever happen.

I’ve been thinking about this for over a year, ‘what does it mean to be a man?’ I must say while I have considered the question, ‘what does it mean to be a woman?’ I’m not in the best position to really say, although to define one is to define the other. On the men’s side I’ve come up with a word to describe a man: strong. It’s difficult to further refine that because physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually there are exceptions to every generalization. Yes, many men can be emotionally expressive, and also emotionally stable, with an emotional strength. Similarly, men can be physically strong, yet I know a dozen female track athletes that can out lift me in the weight room, and that's just in Dubuque, Iowa. Yet there is a certain male strength that all men seem to have in some form. One good article defined it as strength with restraint. The challenge with calling men strong is what it implies for women. 

I’ve realized that we young males have trouble expressing our strength and masculinity in the 21st century. How are we supposed to express our masculinity? Wars rarely beckon, and their purposes are not so clear. Women are graduating with more college degrees and getting good jobs, while many men are taking the lower skilled jobs, so being a family provider is not as clear as it was in the recent past, although perhaps more like it was in the distant past. That is to say, what it means to be a woman has changed significantly over the last 150 years in the view of society, but if you go back 200 years or more, it might have been more like it is today, at least from a day to day economic sense. I mean, when 95% of the world were farmers, the women did plenty of work, right along with the men. Even early industrialization involved women weaving in factories.

Two months ago a 66 year old woman was sexually assaulted and killed by a 19 year old boy here in Dubuque, basically in public at 5 AM, along my commute. It’s heart breaking. Sure we can blame a lack of male role models, mental illness, lack of community, and other factors, but I think some small measure of responsibility is that we as a culture or a society don’t have a great way for men to express their masculinity. In the past men were protectors, warriors, often leaders, very defined roles in what were often violent times. Keep in mind, we are living in the safest time period in recorded human history. A man no longer needs to be the protector, even though we want to be.

What I’m saying is, “…feminism is another word for equality.” and it can be, but what defines equality? Because again, men and women are different, to deny that is the scientific equivalent of saving the Earth is cube shaped, not basically spherical. So how does different but equal exist?

In Bible study the past year we read from Ephesians 5:22-33. We as a 21st century  society always get hung up on the “wives submit to your husbands” because how can it say that in the context of equality?! Yet after that short passage, there is a much longer passage about husbands loving their wives, as their own body. After reading that the married woman sitting beside me said, “I feel fortunate to be the woman, that sounds so much harder for the man.” Which stuck with me, and obviously I had no response, because in today's world asking a woman to submit to me, is bewildering. I've certainly never done it.  

I’m 29.5 years old. I don’t own a house. I still have student loans. The five traditional signs of adulthood are: a stable job, owning a home, being married, having kids, and finishing your formal education. I have only two of the five, and the other three don't seem likely to happen soon. Am I not a man? It seems ridiculous, if I am not a man, who is a man?

It's such a luxury to contemplate this kind of question. People in poverty don't have the luxury of taking hours and hours to research and write this article and talk with friends and family about intangible issues like this. I am a man, at least in my own eyes. What does that mean? It means I have to pay it forward, to sacrifice, for those that don't have what I have. 

How to Plan Realistic Timelines

In 2004 I decided I wanted to try to attempt to climb Mt. Everest within 10 years. In 2014, I attempted Mt. Everest, sort of. I never took a step above base camp, but then again unless you tried to climb on April 18th or earlier, no one went above basecamp. How in the world can a teenager set a goal, a decade in the future, and reach it, on time? I will tell you.

• Set a goal you want to achieve. Sure it's a pretty basic idea, but if the end result isn't something you really want, quit wasting your time. Because regardless of the goal, there will be times you want to quit, do something else, are plain sick and tired of thinking about it, and just want to escape. If you are fully committed, then when these times come you can acknowledge them and then promptly ignore them and continue with the plan.
• Do your research. If your goal is something that other people have done, it's a known quantity, it can be repeated. What did it take for the first person to achieve that goal? What does it take for the average person today to achieve that goal? How long does the planning and preparation for the actual event take? How long does the preparation leading up to the event take? For example, it takes a month or more to actually buy a house, but leading up to that you need good credit and a big cash downpayment which might takes years of saving and paying bills on time.
• Be realistic. My definition of realistic involves world records, space travel and a host of other things most people laugh away, but even then I know of plenty of things I am not going to do. Anything is possible, and it's important to remember that, yet we each have skills and talents and sometimes after frittering away at something it makes sense to say, "not going to happen for me" and move onto the next thing. There is a reason I run and climb mountains rather that try to do something I am terrible at, I would rather be extremely good at something, and use the gifts I have rather than waste time at something I will never master. 
• Give yourself more time to achieve the goal than you think you need. Everest is expensive. More expensive than many new cars. More expensive than a decent downpayment. I knew it would take time to save the money. I also knew I needed more experience before I attempted it. Going to Broad Peak in 2009 was the expedition I felt I needed to gain experience. It cost around a quarter of Everest, and would give me a lot of experience, and it did. I figured after that that 2012 was the most likely year for me to be ready to go to Everest, but unemployment in 2010, delayed that to 2013, and then a variety of money related factors delayed that to 2014. Knowing what I know now, with the skills I have, I feel I am less than two years away from doing any of the major endurance or high altitude challenges in the world be they row across an ocean, swim the English Channel, ski across Antartica, or whatever. In fact, if I put my mind to it, I could probably prepare for and do some of these events in less than a year. 
• Experience counts for a lot. In my opinion people that plan timelines that run past their milestones typically are inexperienced, work with inexperienced teams, or as I mentioned above aren't being realistic. So if you are trying to plan some sort of timeline, and you want it to be realistic you absolutely must take into account the experience of the team, or of yourself. Less experienced people = more mistakes and a longer learning curve. I almost died three times between 2003 and 2009 while learning mountaineering. I never want to repeat any of the those three circumstances. Now I know what to look for and what little signs led up those mistakes. Obviously many goals do not have the death risks of mountaineering, but death clearly illustrates mistakes better than poor engineering datum structures. 
• Create intermediate milestones. One of the requirements for swimming the English Channel I have not fulfilled yet is a six hour swim in waters below 60°F. It's something that must be done before hiring a guide boat and assembling a crew. Much more manageable than actually swimming the channel. With Everest I learned rock climbing, ice climbing, snow skills, camping skills, money saving skills, weather skills, team work, and persistence. Each little skill had to be learned before I felt confident attempting the highest mountain in the world. Unfortunately many people do not learn these skills before attempting Everest, and that is why people go there to die. Oh they don't think of it as going there to die, but they expect a certain level of support at 8000 meters that is just plain unrealistic. 
• Be patient. It is so easy to be impatient and want to achieve things as quickly as possible. This is not the way life works. There will be setbacks in any goal worth achieving. My dad had to ask my mom several times to marry him before she took him seriously. The first time he asked, my mom had not even told her mom, my grandma, that she was seeing anyone. After that kind of rejection I would probably go running for the hills and never talk to her again. So it was with Everest as I planned trips to Mt. Rainier, El Pico de Orizaba, Denali, and numerous times to the Presidentials in New Hampshire that fell through, and I did not gain experience as fast as I wanted. We might want to list patience as something to exercise after missing a milestone in the lead up to a big goal, but patience is necessary in the setting of timelines and goals. You can't whip this stuff up in an afternoon. I was reading about Mt. Everest and mountaineering, and starting to climb and mountaineer for two years before I decided on attempting Everest within two years. It took me two years just to come up with the plan! Just ask about my 30 year plan sometime, I'm still working out the details, and to spoil the question, no I won't reveal anything even if you ask. 

That's all I can think of at the moment. To me these apply to bussiness as well as they do to climbing Mt. Everest or running on Team USA at the world championships. 

What it's like to drive a 300,000+ mile car...

Sometime in the next week I will go over 322,000 miles on my 1993 Toyota Previa minivan. Every thousand miles is another little astonishment for me, because cars don't last to 322,000 miles! The engine should have siezed up years ago. The transmission should have broken. I should have at least rusted something apart in the last 21 winters.

If I had to categorize the experience of driving a 20+ year old vehicle in the rust belt every day with 300,000+ miles I could use two words thankful and fearful. I am thankful that it has come this far and fearful that tomorrow something is going to break and I will be stuck by the side of the road. Really neither should be surprising. This whole experience, driving this the last seven years, has shown me that people often buy new cars to really drive down that fear. We don't think of it that way, but certainly people buy new cars rather than used because the repair costs both in time and money will hopefully be less. It's true, as an engineer I know how things fail, and the newer you get it from the factory, statistically the less likely you are to have a major problem. 

The flip side of it is, we aren't as thankful for the new car in the way we are thankful for the old. When I see my van in the parking lot I smile sometimes because it just keeps on running! Oh sure, you can be thankful your new car smells new, has no problems, that you can afford it, etc. but you aren't thankful it still drives, because for the amount of money you paid for it, it had better work. 

Another highlight for me is that it gives me perspective on appearances. You can dent my van and I won't care. Also, I know that my value both intrinsic and economic has nothing to do with the car I drive. 

I have realized only recently how much this van has shaped my views on quality. Now that I have taken one vehicle over 300,000 miles I fully expect other vehicles to go the same distance with only minimal repairs. That, and I have no problem using zip ties and duct tape to keep it running. Some may view that as a low quality strategy, but they are economical and widely available. There are multiple levels of quality, but for most vehicles, getting safely from A to B at the desired speed trumps every other aspect

Sponsorship

With the recent news of Clif Bar dropping a couple climbers it has sponsored for years because what they do, what has made them famous and brought Clif Bar publicity (free soloing), is too dangerous for Clif Bar now. I have not seen the movie “Valley Uprising” but my friends and I have planned a party to watch it when one of us ultimately buys it. Basically, Clif Bar didn’t make the right move, at least not at the right time. 

The issue of sponsorship has come up a number of times in my life. Most recently after I became a 24 hour runner. Before that it was going to Mt. Everest. Before that, I have been wearing my Isaiah Janzen jersey for nearly two years. I realized at the time when I switched to sponsoring myself that while I had been “sponsored” it was for a total of about $100 in free gear only, which I received at the beginning of the sponsorship, and had for 18 months. The benefit to the company and the cost to my chest in races was a little too lopsided. So I became my own brand. I already had the website under my name, why not a racing vest? (Oh I’ve thought about mugs, t-shirts, polos, luggage and bumper stickers too.)

Building a reputation, which is all a brand really is, takes a long time. It can be wasted in a short amount of time, just ask any of the fallen stars, or jailed people who made one mistake. Or thinking bigger, just ask Kodak and US Steel why their companies are not as impressive as they once were. So I decided, if I am going to build a brand, my brand, which is to say my public reputation, I’m going to do it. When I do things, I tend to do them all the way. 

I read a lot. I read articles, books, magazines, tweets, blogs, and all sorts of random stuff. Much of what I have read is about mountaineering, particularly in Nepal, China and Pakistan. One of the big things people write about, or did 10-15 years ago was climbing all 14 8000 meter peaks. Ed Viesturs did it. I have two of his books, he is famous for doing them all without oxygen bottles and being an American. (Being half decent at anything and being a US citizen usually means higher earnings than only one or the other.) Climbing 14 8000 meter peaks is dangerous. For the record I emailed back and forth with Ed before my Everest attempt asking advice. His advice: don't go for the summit in the first weather window, too many people usually do. If we say there is a 2% chance of dying on each 8000 meter expedition, and you only summit one out of three expeditions, that means to get 14 summits you have roughly a 43% chance of surviving. The list of people with 10 or more 8000 meter peaks who have died on an expedition is long. The list of people with less than ten, but more than one, and thus at least some experience, is much much longer. So this is my background. I know these numbers. It is a dangerous game. You can read in Ed’s book the conflict in him returning to Annapurna to get his 14th, after multiple failures on that mountain. Did he go back for himself? Or did he really go back because the publicity was high and he was sponsored by 20+ companies including Rolex who wanted to be part of the first American and sixth person without bottled oxygen? I don’t want to have to make that kind of choice. Lists get people killed. There is a list of 14 mountains that has killed many people, probably dozens by now, who were captivated by that list. People who had sponsors who expected something in return, summits. 

While sponsorship interests me, I don’t think I can separate the sponsorship from the external expectations, which may nudge me into making a poor decision that is a little too risky. I didn’t tell anyone but my parents what my goal was in the 24 hour race (160 miles) until I was about 12 hours (and 83 miles) into the race and I had lots of evidence it was possible. Few people here in Iowa knew I even climbed mountains until I announced I was headed for Mt. Everest. Listen, I have big plans, big, ridiculous, outrageous, stupid, dangerous, unrealistic, “impossible” dreams that I desire to chase. For me to keep a clear head I need to shun external expectations. 

When a child first rides a two wheel bicycle on his or her own, the child wants to ride that bike. If the child did not want to ride the bike, he or she would stop the pedals. When one starts to ride there is also the question of how to stop, put your feet down or fall over? Similarly, how do you turn the bicycle without training wheels? This is complicated stuff for a five year old. The child is not going to do his or her best if there are distractions like yelling siblings, or even yelling parents, cars, or other local hazards. I am like that five year old child. God is like the parent, it feels like he is still there pushing me along, but I can’t see him and I don’t hear him yelling. External expectations might be like the sibling, that is yelling while I first try it on my own, who I glance at just before I hit a curb and crash. Maybe that sibling is not yelling, but wants to help push while I learn, or give me his old bicycle. Maybe that sibling wants me to learn to ride my bicycle so that we can both race the neighborhood kids down the block, and hopefully not get hit by a car. Sponsorship can be the car driving down the road not looking for five year olds on bicycles. Get on board and ride, or get out of the way.

I am in the business of risk management. I am rather good at it. The risks scare me, and they may kill me, so I can not ignore them. Anything that may contribute risk to the program is a candidate for elimination. Cotton clothing when the temperature is below freezing? No, that’s too big of a risk. Continue to push my body when workouts are already going poorly? No, that’s a sure way to setback months instead of just days. Drive faster? Usually not a great choice. Sponsorship comes down to much of the same. I want to do what I want to do, and I don’t want people that fund my fun to expect success because success is not the goal. Oh success is the goal, but it pails in comparison to doing the right thing. When success becomes the sole focus, you see Rita Jeptoo taking EPO, and beating me at Chicago last year. She probably would have beat me without taking EPO, but the fact that she probably was taking it makes it worse for me. I want 148th place in Chicago last year!

In mountaineering, the discussion is not about taking drugs, it’s about climbing the day after a snow storm, when avalanche conditions are terrible, but the sun is out and it’s a beautiful day. If your sponsors expect you to climb the mountain you may be more inclined to climb when avalanche danger is higher.

To expect success, at the really hard, really dangerous stuff, is ignorance of the previous failures. Yes, we went to the moon, but we had the Apollo One disaster, and numerous pilots died in airplane crashes, not to mention the probable fatal industrial accidents that occurred during production of the vehicles. You don't just go to Mt. Everest and climb it, sometimes unexpected things happen, and no one summits.

My reluctance to take on sponsors has to do with other factors as well. I have worn shoes by seven different companies in the last six days because of different applications, even within running alone are four of those seven brands. Going with one company may limit me from using the best possible tool, which may be made by a competitor. No, the shoes that I wear in a marathon aren’t going to make a 10 minute difference on my performance, maybe one minute tops, probably more like 10-20 seconds. Mountaineering, maybe one sleeping bag or tent, or ice tool is the best, and another may break the second day in a five day storm and leave you exposed. The point being, in the pursuit of best, it’s a risk to lock yourself into one product line up. I will say, knowing both mountaineering companies and running companies, you can have success with any particular company, the vast majority are of quite a high quality. The risks I am talking about are almost insignificant compared to not even bringing an ice axe on a trek over a 19,000 foot pass and a 21,000 foot mountain.

So that’s where I am. I spend a lot of money on shoes and other outdoor clothing, race fees, and equipment every year, not to mention my $70 weekly grocery bills. Perhaps I could find sponsorship for all or some of the products and services I use. I just do not want to do something half way and open myself up to a risk, however small, of not having the best tool for the job, or pushing myself into a situation that is far beyond my comfort zone.

How do you lead?

Seth wrote an interesting article a few weeks ago I haven't been able to get out of my head. For those that don't know, he's the author of the most popular blog in the world, and it focuses on business. The article in question is about how going around the room to see what everyone has to say is a waste of time. I'm not sure that I agree with him totally, but I have been trying to come up with an argument to dispute the idea, and the one time from my experience when it really makes sense was in grad school when our lab group had our weekly group update. We were all working on similar projects, so when someone had a breakthrough or needed help, he or she could share that and likely enlist help of others, or help others through the same breakthrough. I liked it because we didn't all sit by each other so we didn't talk about our research every hour, which is to say physical proximity is a huge benefit for collaboration. Plus, rather than unexpectedly going around the room people often had a slide presentation to show to prepare for a conference, and you knew that every week you would have to give an update on your progress.

What really intrigued me was the thought that leaders fail when saying, "let's go around the room". In other words, meetings are usually not the best use of everyone's time, everyone knows that, but the idea that a leader can fail... I just don't think in those explicit terms. I mean, for the leader of a meeting the meeting is most helpful and not a waste of your time, afterall you called it, you want everyone in the room at the same time. Yet this reminds me of my favorite Lao Tzu quote,

"Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, “We did this ourselves.” 

In other words, calling a meeting, and having people actually show up, means you are something of a leader. If you were not a leader in some manner, they would not show up. (Shoutout to W.L. Gore organization studdies, and Gary Hamel, for making this explicit for me!) Yet at the same time a good leader is not necessairly the one getting the credit. Much of today's organization in many organizations is based on military efficiency, platoon leaders report to the company leader, who reports to the battalian leader, who reports to the regiment leader. In that way, status reports go up the chain and orders go down the chain. This structure ultimately rewards much of the credit to the generals at the top. This structure works, it has been around a long time, but just because you are a leader, and you get the positive credit for your team's work, does not mean you are a very successful leader. If we say that people work a 40 hour week, one hour is 2.5% of that time. Two hours is 5% of that time. The point is, getting the best out of the team usually means letting people do the things they are skilled at and not slowing them down with bearaucracy. 

Sunk Costs versus Opportunity Costs

Sunk costs are the time and effort we have put into something already.

Opportunity costs are what we are giving up to do a given activity in the future.

Most people value sunk costs more than opportunity costs. In other words we value the past more than we value our future. Yet, is that really the best way to go through life? I mean, the future opportunities could be very positive from making a change. This is the tension of change. The pull to continue the way things always have been or the pull to do something different. The point is, life has hard decisions about your future. Change can be very difficult. Yet it is change, and a new opportunity that can redirect the course of your life. Sometimes the opportunity costs of doing what we always have done become too great to ignore and we need to make a change.

Capital in the 21st Century: The Question of the Public Debt (Chapter 16)

Funny story, many of the people who say we need to reduce our public debt, at least in the United States, are the same people with millions and billions of dollars lending money to the United States and earning some interest off of that money. While we think of the public debt as money spent on services for the poor, at least that’s how it seems to come off in the media, the reality is the rich are lending to the government to do a service and earning interest on that debt. You are welcome to disagree with that assessment, and I am paraphrasing from the book, but please don’t try to convince me that foreign governments own all $14 trillion of our national debt.

This was a wide ranging chapter, from the national debt of European countries and their repeated failures, or procrastination toward a central government for the Eurozone, to climate change, the Cyprus banking crash, and discussing central banks in general. In fact, I will just summarize this chapter by sub section.

Reducing Public Debt: Tax on Capital, Inflation, and Austerity

Basically, there are three ways Piketty suggests to reduce the public debt. And before I go any farther, since this book is being touted by the tax reducing crowd as communist and liberal, it is worth say Piketty seems against any national public debt, although the reality is some number, maybe 10% of GDP, maybe 50% of GDP (but certainly not 90% or 100+% of GDP) may be appropriate. He does say that the way to decide on the level is through democratic debate in a parliament or congress, which is how the USA has arrived at our enormous national debt. In short first is the tax on capital he previously suggested, although he suggests in this chapter a one time, or maybe annual for five or ten years, a large tax with top marginal tax rates of 10% or even 20% on those with many millions or billions of euros. This is a no brainer because in Europe there is roughly six or seven times the amount of private wealth as public wealth, which is about equal to the public debt. In other words, In other words, the public debt in Europe could be erased and for every $6 of private wealth there would now be $5. Of course this progressive tax on capital would affect billionaires a lot more than people like me who have a net worth closer to the value of a Ford Focus. The second way is through inflation, which is the most common method, and quite effective. Inflation helps people (or governments) who are in debt. However, runaway inflation can happen rather easily and that is why most central banks are focused on not letting it happen. In a high inflation environment people can suffer from “minor” setbacks like not getting a raise that keeps up with inflation. There are many other issues with inflation, most of which I have trouble relating to because they happened before my time. The third way is austerity, which is not pleasant either. Apparently England in the 1800s had a lot of austerity because after the Napeolinc wars in 1815 they had debt that was around 200% of GDP. In short, austerity hurts because all of the services we like, grind to a halt. 

Does Inflation Redistribute Wealth?

Inflation can be an issue because some people, usually those with the most money to invest have the ability to move their money around when inflation is happening and mitigate the effects of it. However, the person with only $1000 in the bank, in a saving account will be losing money each year earning a lower interest rate than the rate of inflation.

What Do Central Banks Do?

Good question, they lend money to governments and companies out of thin air. Now, the actual amount of wealth does not change. They loan another $100,000 to a company, who suddenly has $100,000 in cash, and a new $100,000 debt. The sum is zero. That’s essentially what central banks do. And they do it in a way that inflation will not increase more than 2% a year. This was a long section like eight pages, I’m not going to cover it all. A strange thing about central banks is that they are part of the government, but independent of the government. In other words, every time they have had an increased role in the world has been during a time of crisis where the solution and role of the central bank has not totally been thought through. When the government closed last year in the US for a couple weeks, the month before the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) had resorted to emergency measures, which people didn’t even know if they were legal or not. As an example of what the Fed or any central bank can or cannot do, when the US bailed out General Motors, it was the federal government who made the loans and terms, not the Fed, who simply processed the loan you could say.

This goes back to the rich lending to governments who pay interest and then provide services to the poor. In other words, Wal-Mart and McDonalds surely have some money in US Treasury Bonds and then encourage their workers to take advantage of US government programs like SNAP (food stamps). In other words, instead of paying each worker $100 more a year, they lend $100 to the US government who pays, maybe $1 or $2 in interest (at current rates) back to the company. For the record, I made up those examples, they may not be true, but I would expect both companies do own US bonds and pay workers minimum wage. Although it is a stretch to encourage workers to use governement services for the poor.

The Cyprus Crisis: When the Capital Tax and Banking Regulation Come Together

This section is about an off shore banking haven for Russian Oligarchs and a one time tax on capital that was challenging due to very little transparency in banking. In short, most of my readers are US Americans and for better or worse might not know that last year Cyprus had a banking crisis, but the point is transparency in banking is a good idea and a tax on capital has happened recently, without the world falling apart.

The Euro: A Stateless Currency for the Twenty-First Century?

Piketty is amazed at the Euro, that it was created, without any sort of central parliament or democratic government. Which leads into the next section...

The Question of European Unification

The author is French, so I must apologize that this is not centered wholly on Americans. I’m kind of joking, because we live in a global society and we all know that, right? But I’m also not joking because a large number of Americans, maybe 65%, do not have a passport and are somewhat ignorant of the global economic environment we inhabit. This is a four page section where he argues for a central Eurozone parliament and a collective national debt instead of debt being done by individual countries. This is due to Greece, Italy and Spain taking out loans at low rates because they were in the Eurozone, but then running into trouble because their taxation and spending were not in line with other more fiscally conservative countries in Europe (cough, Germany, cough). Piketty seems to think that greater European unification is coming, although it may take decades. Of course, he says that as a Frenchman, and from my point of view the French and Germans, more than any other two countries, want a common currency (and maybe even budgetary government, but I haven’t thought that out...) because they do not, absolutely do not, want to go to war again.

Government and Capital Accumulation in the Twenty-First Century

The rich are going to get richer. As long as the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the growth rate (g) and I mean the compound growth rate of population and productivity together (which equates to the GDP growth rate), the rich will get richer. However, if a tax on capital can bring r=g, oh boy... now we’re into the “golden rule of capital accumulation”! Which leads into...

Law and Politics

This is a short section, despite the title, about how parliaments, and not judges, should decide on matters such as the public debt, through open democratic debate representing the will of the people. Matters like hundreds of billions of dollars of public debt, and new debt, are too important for one person to decide.

Climate Change and Public Capital

This is what everything usually seems to come back to, energy. For example, of all the oil and natural gas that comes out of the ground, how much should be owned by the citizens of the country (or county or city or state) that it comes from? Alternatively, assuming that there is a hurricane like Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Katrina that happens again (and there will be, I will bet on it) and in the next 100 years many hurricanes, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters related to climate change, what is the discount rate we give to those scenarios today? I love the concept of a discount rate! I’ve written about it before, the basis is, what do you expect the change to be per year on average over a long time, 1%, 3%, 5%? Because that figures into your planning. The point being even the economists agree with the climate change scientists that climate change will cause expensive damage to the world we know today, but they disagree about discount rate we should give ourselves when planning for that future (good thing economists don’t sell insurance). I mean, given a discount rate of 1%, we need to make major changes today to how we deal with climate change. Given a discount rate of 5%, we can expect that only a small effort is needed today to prevent the tragedies of the future. (So that this makes more sense, think of it like this, a discount rate of 100% would mean that it will not happen this year, but will definitely happen next year.)

Economic Transparency and Democratic Control of Capital

Again, I feel that the idea of transparency of capital is a critical feature of this book that most people are ignoring, maybe because very few people have finished reading it. My dad never wanted door locks within our house because he did not want us keeping secrets from each other. It made me mad at times, but now I openly blog about my life five days a week, and I understand that transparency and honesty are values I hold dear to me. It is the same with capital, wealth, money, etc. Once we know what exists we can decide as a group, as a country, or as a world, what we want and who might have the ability to pay a little more for such things, but of course the first hurdle is even knowing what exists.

Well, only a few pages for the conclusion left. I have to say, finishing all of the chapters I mostly agree with the author, financial transparency (honesty) and a global tax on capital both make sense to me.

Women in Engineering and Technology

First of all, my sister is an engineer, and it's just the two of us kids in our family. So if what I say comes off sexist or racist, I'm probably more feminist than my sister, and for the record, being an even mildly feminist man doesn't help at all wooing the ladies. My sister just wrote a blog post on being a woman in engineering and it inspired me to write this. Only about one in seven engineers is female and that has pretty much been her experience.  As for the racist part, you are welcome to call me racist if you want, but then again I'm trying to start Sustainable South Sudan, and you're not helping me. I am afraid that whatever I say as a white American male, anything I say will come off racist and sexist. Hey, I didn't pick my parents. On the other hand, and the reason I am going through with publishing this, if I don't talk about it, how will we ever encourage more women, and minorities, to get into engineering and technology?

I have been thinking about this for some time since Google released it's employment demographics a few weeks ago. When I first heard that Google was 30% female I was stunned! I was amazed! I thought, 'how in the world did they get so many women?!' It was roughly the same for their ethnicity, I thought, 'only 61% white?! Where did they get all the other ethnic groups?' That being said, 30% Asian actually makes a lot of sense between Japanese, Indian, and Chinese citizens or descendants. I think my reaction was actually somewhat opposite the mainstream media's reaction to "diversity" in the technology sector.

Since I originally wrote this post, I was letting it simmer so that I had time to revise it again before I publish. In the last week Yahoo came out with it's diversity numbers. Once again, the details, directly from Yahoo, are not actually that surprising to me. Basically 15% of the technical staff is female.

The company I work at is roughly the same person count size as Google, and from my experience has far fewer than 30% women. In my limited experience it seems we have about 10% women, but my experience is nearly all direct engineering, not marketing or supply management or manufacturing. When I was part of the FEA group, we had one woman, out of like 40 employees. How's that, a 2.5% ratio? For the record, it's a little hard to directly compare statistics at a place of work when accounting for contractors and contingent personal, also for a global company like mine with several working groups split into several countries but effectively reporting to the same person. Now, it's not that 40 people in several different countries actually report to the same person, but effectively they do. Global organizations are complicated to say the least. Yet as W.L. Gore has shown, clear organization is not necessary to stay in business. The point being, of those 40, maybe only 10 (including the one woman) would show up in the official statistics because the rest are contractors or work in a different company and have a different official reporting structure.

In college in my aerospace engineering class of 2008, I think of about 40 graduates three were women. Those are approximate, because I'm not 100% sure who was aerospace versus mechanical engineering with aerospace concentration, but you get the picture. Materials science was very different, maybe 30-40% women, pretty stunning actually. In my graduating class at semester there were only two of us, and the other graduate was a woman. These are all anecdotal of course, your experience in engineering and technology will vary of course.

Why is it this way? Well, first of all, I think that there will never be an equal 50% split between men and women in science, technology, engineering and math fields. I feel that way because I know enough women and their husbands, and a lot of women make the decision to stay home and raise the kids. Yes I know two stay at home dads too, but they are in the minority. Still, why is it not 45%/55% women to men or at least 40%/60%? There were always more girls than boys in my high school advanced classes like calculus and college biology and physics. In fact, in my high school physics class of about 18 people, only two of us were male. Why did the two of us go into engineering while I think all the ladies in that class went into less technical careers? I feel that it has to do predominately with cultural expectations, and to a lesser extent the college support structure. Men are engineers that go to the office and do math, by themselves, and sit at a desk. Women work with people and collaborate in team environments, like a nurse on staff. Honestly, I think that cultural expectations are the major reason for the disconnect. There is also an attitude of competition in science and engineering, not necessarily direct, but the curriculum is tough and teaches you how to solve problems. A lot of people, men and myself included, often dove into the work alone for hours at a time, and while obviously working in teams and getting help from others is necessary, I am afraid that women see the system and don't want to do the solitary number crunching that college presents as "engineering". Now, actually in industry as a design engineer I spend probably 15 hours a week in meetings, another 10 hours a week talking to people informally about my projects, and then maybe 15-20 hours a week actually doing work at my desk. It is so different than college, there is very little on your own technical work, at least in my view. Design engineering is more like art meets sales. We create some art and then try to sell it to the rest of the team, making changes as they recommend until it is very functional art.

On the college support side, classes are not like the real world. There are similarities, but the differences are dramatic. I am afraid that throughout the formal college education process many possible engineers are not supported well enough. In other words, people skills don't get you strait A's in an engineering college, but they might get you CEO in a company.

I should really have high school job shadows now, because some days I feel like all I do is go to meetings and talk to people, Thursdays especially. True story, today I was running a machine in the morning to show a function to some South Koreans then in the afternoon I was running an impact gun changing worn bolts on one of the designs I am responsible for. I always enjoy asking women in engineering how we can get more women in engineering. I mean, I think in some small way I helped motivate my sister into it and I would like to get more women to try out science and technology. The way I think of it is, with an engineering degree, you can teach school, you can go to medical school, you can get an MBA, you can go to law school, you can start a business, and oh yeah, you can be an engineer too. Without an engineering degree, you certainly can't engineer, and chances are your degree will be much more limiting.

A standard argument for a liberal arts degree is that it expands your mind and shows you different ways to think about things, no one says that about a science or engineering degree, but those people obviously haven't sat through Compressible Fluid Dynamics or Intermediate Physics Mechanics II, not to mention studying relativity. I'm biased of course because I have two engineering degrees. I feel that there should be more engineers in the world. We get stuff done. Science is just amazing! Gears for example are simply fascinating.

Looking forward, I won't always engineer. At some point I would like to teach. I also have some other career goals which don't involve engineering. Yet, engineering is fulfilling, and often social, and there is no other education path which I feel would have developed my career and progressed my life like engineering has. For those of you that think, 'people like me don't go into science, technology, engineering, or math.' We want you! We want you to come to our meetings and say something we had not thought of, yet was actually realistic.

There is No One Else

Sometimes I see a need, a void, and incompleteness, and lately I have seen two. While I would like to just support those causes, I can't because they don't exist. As I look around at the plethora of people in the world, I think, 'well, no one else is actually going to get behind these causes.' If I don't do it, no one else will.

That is not limited to me, every single person has issues that no one else will deal with. The teacher who tries to help one student who is struggling. If she doesn't help, no one else will. The police officer that pulls over the swerving teenage driver. If he doesn't intervene in that person's life, no one else will. The one person in the company that says, 'this product flaw is not okay.' If that person does not speak up, no one else will, until it is too late.If Jimmy Wales didn't start Wikipedia, maybe no one else would have.

I don't know what your "mission" or purpose is in life. I wonder what mine is sometimes too... But we all have skills and talents that make us the only person to do things. If you don't do that thing, that hard, tough, stressful thing, no one else will, and we will all suffer.

Break Up Big Goals

If you have a long term goal, a big goal, or anything that at first thought is maybe out of your reach, you have to break it up into smaller pieces. I say this thinking on the long process of training and exercise that brings me to Mt. Everest. June 2006 when I hiked Longs Peak solo without sleeping all night. I didn't need to do it. It wasn't very challenging. It was really just an eight hour hike. Yet I was so tired on the way down and on the drive down to Boulder, I almost drove off the road.

That is one specific example about how I did something physical while pushing through tiredness and when I am late coming down from my summit day in Nepal, and the sun goes down, it won't be one of the first times I have had to descend while extraordinarily tired.

I'm being more specific than I want to. The point is, if you want to go after something big you have to break it up. There are the technical aspects. There is often a physical component. There is the social, mental and emotional aspect. There is the financial cost. There is most certainly a timeline. Within those broad categories there are sub categories. On Everest, from a technical aspect, there are mostly snow and ice sections, but there are also rock sections too. To race a marathon, it helps to know you can run 27 miles, and know that you can run much faster than marathon pace at least for a short time. To become CEO of the company, well you have to get there before you retire.

If the goal is big, challenging, all of the things a good goal is, is must be broken into smaller pieces.

Short Term Sacrifices, Long Term Rewards

As I make the rounds and people ask, "are you really going to climb Mt. Everest?" I have to answer that I am, and after they ask I tell them it is expensive. A fair percentage of people are saying, "that makes sense why you drive that van." Yes it does.

We all make sacrifices. We sacrifice one thing to have another. We sacrifice time with this group to have time with that group. Time with this person to spend more time with that person. Money on this thing instead of money on that thing. You can't have everything. You can have more than you can use, but you can't have it all. Honestly, if you live a long life you have maybe 2.5 billion seconds on the earth. That is not enough time to tell everyone in the world help in their own language one at a time. We are all giving up time with those people we have never met to spend more intimate time with those we have.

The idea of today is that short term sacrifice often come with long term rewards. Skipping one night of watching reruns to watch a friend's kid for an hour is a small sacrifice if it might mean I can positively influence a young person. Driving around in the second worst vehicle in the parking lot for a few years may be humbling when my coworkers are getting into much newer and nicer vehicles, but if it means I get to spend nine weeks at Mt. Everest trying to climb to over 29,000 feet, it's a good deal.

The world is full of things like this. I don't always want to go out and run, but running day after day has consistently allowed me to run races faster as friends retire their racing shoes. Saving a little money every paycheck in the case I get layed-off is a huge benefit. Going to the dentist to get fillings is not pleasant, but compared to having a root canal or a tooth fall out (neither have I experienced) is a small sacrifice.

Success, at relationships, running, engineering, speed skating, and just about anything is based on frequent small sacrifices of other things that in the moment might be more interesting, but in the long run do no compare at all to the success of a larger goal. That's what I want to encourage, going after the greater goal even, and especially, when it means you have to give up a whole bunch of little satisfactions. Hang in there! Go running on the day you don't feel like it! Tell your significant other "I'm sorry" the next time you neglect her, and then take her out for dinner. Don't go buy a new car the month you get your old car paid off. I find, that delayed gratification often makes the experience more memorable. In other words, I appreciate my job more than many, maybe even most, engineers because I know that it took over 400 applications and 57 weeks to get here. I also enjoy my running so much because it has taken me so long to see the level of success I see.

Make short term sacrifices and receive long term rewards.

Mountaineering Solo

Mountaineering alone is hard. First of all, there is no one else to break trail. Every single knee deep step in the snow has to be done alone. Secondly, if anything goes wrong there is absolutely no one within hearing distance. Yesterday I was probably one to two miles away from the nearest human the entire day over very rugged terrain. There is a mental challenge to being out there that is both rewarding for every step that I take, and also scary because I know I have to do things perfect. No one would have even attempted to find me until today had anything gone wrong.

The South Face of Mt. Quandry's West Ridge January 2nd, 2014

I have some interesting videos I took and I'll get around to editing and releasing them this weekend probably. The point is, it's hard climbing alone. Both from the mental difficulty and physical safety point of view as well as the physical work point of view. I turned my GPS watch on when I left my car yesterday, the battery died after four hours, but in that time my heart rate averaged 137, including the stops I took to put on more clothing and my crampons. I like to imagine I kept close to that intensity the whole eight hour day because I was post holing up to my waist on the descent just like on parts of the climb. That's a pretty sustained hard effort.

Mt. Quandry's West Ridge

I really enjoy a solo adventure every now and then. I like the feeling that it is just me responsible for the climb. I have been thinking about Mt. Everest all week, and I thought about it a lot yesterday too. I had to break trail, climb without ropes, route find, and carry all of my own equipment. Mt. Everest will be totally different. I doubt I will ever, in the whole nine weeks, be more than 100 meters away from multiple people, have to break trail, climb without a fixed line, or carry much more than my clothing and sleeping bags.

In climbing and mountaineering the ability to do something is largely based on the confidence to just try it. Confidence is typically increased by having other people around, by having ropes, by a beaten trail, and not having to carry all of the equipment. As I compare this past week of training to the likely experience of Mt. Everest, in some respects, yesterday was harder. There was no fixed line for me like I anticipate on Everest, a fall might have been 1000 feet down. I had to do all the trail breaking. On Broad Peak one day I did about 200 meters of breaking trail up the fixed lines that had been buried by a snow storm a few days before. It was terribly exhausting! You try breaking trail at 19,000 feet! On Everest there will be so many climbers that I do not anticipate ever being the one out in front breaking trail. I would enjoy it if I was, but the reality is I doubt I will be. At the point yesterday when I pulled a class four move over some blocks and knew I was in the wrong place, there was fear about which way to go. On Everest I really really doubt I will ever get off route. In fact, I have heard that in places they even have two up (ascending climbers) fixed lines and one down (descending climbers) fixed line to accommodate all the people. The Hillary Step has an up and a down line. Try getting lost with three ropes all going the same direction. Finally, for every hard section I anticipate crossing there will be someone else around me to discuss with, probably to watch that person tackle the difficult portion, or at least to help me if I screw up and get hurt. That is so different from being at 13,000 feet more than a mile over rugged terrain from the nearest person.

Mountaineering solo is hard, but in the hardest endeavors we often find the most satisfaction. Don't only do what is easy, do what is hard.