Climb long enough and you’ll have a close encounter ... or several. Mine was in 1986 at Arches National Monument, five minutes up the black- top north of Moab.

As far back as I could remember I’d wondered which of mankind’s faiths and illusions I could choose as my sustaining light, and I’d chosen the greatest existential pathology of them all: that if I worked hard enough, and smartly enough, my greatest challenges would someday flow effortlessly under my hands like glassy Malibu swells.

On a late afternoon in November 1974, Hunt Prothro stared up at the sunbaked overhanging West Face of the North Peak, Seneca Rocks. Above him a proud, unclimbed line connected cracks, corner systems and a blank face.

Bill Stall, who died November 2 at age 71, won two Pulitzer prizes with the Los Angeles Times. The first was a team prize, for spot reporting on the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, California. Stall won an individual Pulitzer in 2004 for his perceptive editorial coverage of complex governmental issues in California.

Joe Josephson phoned with an interesting proposal: Fred Beckey had come to town for a reunion of Montana's Dirty Sox Club, a guild of Montana climbers from the 1960s through the 1980s.

If anyone has earned an honorary membership in a group named Dirty Sox it is Washington's Fred Beckey, sovereign of American DirtBag Climbers.

If you think your harness is safe, check out the test results for 227 used rigs