In order to share my interest in the California back-country, I would often persuade various Hillsdale High buddies to join me on backpacking and climbing excursions into the wilderness of the highest Sierra during school breaks. In those days, it was a relatively obscure recreational form. Modern light-weight gear and rations were not then to be had, so we would strap some bulky supplies and surplus gear onto crude packs and head out, hoping for good weather, which was not always the case.
Fifty years later, I can still envision the silhouette of Ken Lavezzo, hunched into wind-driven sleet, his poncho flapping ineffectually as we retreated off the flank of 13,000-foot Mt. Lyell in Yosemite during a late summer storm. The lasting vision of Dave Bean, en route to Young Lakes at 10,000 feet, wading nude across an icy, swollen, snow-bound stream with his dry clothes tied on top of his pack is priceless.
After a week or more, we would emerge from the mountains with a renewed appreciation of the majesty of nature, wherein I became inclined - with the encouragement of Frank McGraw and William McMullin of the Hillsdale faculty - to pursue a career in the natural sciences, graduating in geosciences from the University of Arizona.
I served as a park ranger/naturalist for a few years, then joined a prominent geotechnical engineering firm as an engineering geologist for many large dam, tunnel and mining projects throughout the country. For the past 40+ years, I have had my own engineering geologic consulting practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, providing site-specific evaluations of geology and geologic hazards for a broad base of clients in the western U.S., a region of earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes and tsunamis, to name a few. As a member of the executive board of the International Landslide Research Group, I have had the privilege of traveling to scores of remote areas in other countries including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Swiss and Italian Alps and several European countries, as well as then-Soviet Russia and Czechoslovakia.
Since discovering how to make a living pursuing my passion of roaming and exploring the out-of-doors, retirement has never been in my vocabulary. Kris, my lovely wife of 40 years, is an active, outdoor-loving girl from Utah. She trains and shows quarter horses professionally and has been very successful competing on a world-class level, riding and showing in western performance classes at events around the country. We truly enjoy accompanying each other during both of our endeavors.
