climbing encounters

A nice if easy climbing morn on Éperon de Bouchier (à ne pas confondre avec Crochet de Boucher!) a week ago with a local guide, François, who happened to be a formidable character (even conditioning on him being guide). He left school at 14 to become a car mechanic, join the French Navy at 16, caught tuberculosis on a Navy basis, was sent to the Alps for recovery, caught a fatal and definite mountain attraction while there, got training supported by the Navy for an higher mechanic degree, took qualification courses to become a French mountain guide, started being interested in learning techniques and abilities through his training ski schools, experimented new teaching methods with kids from the Marseille suburbs,  eventually joined a Master in biomechanics and ergonomy at Orsay and ended up with a thesis on the topic, worked with French ski federation and a French ski brand, and is still guiding, training and researching despite having passed the retirement age! A wonderful chance encounter, with the facility of the route making chatting not an issue. (Except that some puritan ayatollah had recently removed most of the bolts, which did not make things harder in the end but exhibited an absurd degree of self-righteousness on a route that easy…)

And then an even more rewarding climb today with another local guide, Cathy, who gave me a great and profitable climbing lesson for over three hours, allowing me to reach a higher climbing level than I had previously achieved on an outside route. With a high degree of pedagogy and support. I ended up fairly tired, but exhilaratedly so!

ski with deviation

I just learned that a micro-brew brand of homemade skis has connections with statistics and, who knows, could become a sponsor to the next MCMSki…  Indeed, the brand is called deviation (as in standard deviation), located in Gresham, Oregon, and sell locally made skis and snowboards with names like The Moment Generator or The Mode! The logo  clearly indicates a statistical connection:

As it happens, two of the founding partners of deviation, Tim and Peter Wells, are the sons of my long-time friend Marty Wells from Cornell University. When I first met them, they were great kids, young enough to give no inkling they would end up producing beautiful hardwood core skis in a suburb of Portland, Oregon!!! Best wishes to them and to deviation, the most statistical of all ski brands! (Here is a report in The Oregonian that tells the story of how deviation was created.)