Having lived now in Wyoming for nearly 2 years, I’ve come to really appreciate and love the climbing history that surrounds me. I recently finished a wonderful book called “Teton Tales and Other Petzoldt Anecdotes“, which is a brief memoir of sorts from Paul Petzoldt. It was a quick read, but only because the stories were so close to home, and so comfortably shared by the man who lived them. Petzoldt started climbing pretty early and had a good common sense approach to safety and order which manifested itself in the climbing commands still in use by climbers today around the world. He pretty much set the standards known today as minimum-impact camping, and taught those principles to thousands over the years through the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and the Wilderness Education Association (WEA). In the introduction to Petzoldt’s book, his friend Kevin Cassidy summed up the simple lessons Paul shared: know where you are going, watch your step, look around the bend, and pay attention to what you have left behind. I think we need more people like Mr. Petzoldt, now so more than ever. Anyway – having just finished the book and done a little reading up on the guy, it made my day when I came across this footage of Paul along with a wonderful overview of his work with NOLS. The video below was recently found at the NOLS headquarters and cleaned up and posted online. It’s a bit rough, but the message comes through clear enough.

See also: An article on Paul Petzoldt from Life Magazine in 1969.

That’s one heck of a resume.

Seattle’s own Dick McGowan was (among other things – see above) the first employee of REI, the first American to set foot on Mt. Everest, led the first guided climb of Denali, and obviously an accomplished backpack model.

“Mountains,” said United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, “have a decent influence on men.”

I would have to agree. Mr. Justice Douglas spent more time on the US Supreme Court than any other Justice, and and in his autobiography “Of Men and Mountains”, he shares a lifetime of stories and anecdotes that probably put him in the lead for the Justice with the most amount of time outside as well. His ties to the Cascades are what initially piqued my interest, but he’s actually quite a character worth spending some time reading about. Consistently liberal, he became known on the court for his fervent support of civil rights and liberties, particularly the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press.

I am particularly impressed however, with his commitment to the environment and outdoor conservation, in an era when it wasn’t yet at the forefront of the public consciousness. His prescience in making the environment an important part of the issues of the day helped preserve access to wilderness areas that otherwise might have been lost. Regardless of his politics, his eloquence in writing about the relationship between men and mountains is enough for me to keep him on my bookshelf.

See also: Time Magazine’s 1950 review of the book…