Travel Articles and Photographs
World-wide travel
"Life is the process of turning dreams into memories" -- Inuit Saying
Brad is an avid traveler. He has written many articles on travel and on climbing. On the left is a sample of the published articles and photos. Some of the countries visited include Yemen, Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam, India (Kashmir / Ladakh), Namibia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Myanmar, China, Morocco, Jordan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Egypt, Russia, Ireland, Guatemala, and extensively in Western Europe. I have told stories about some of these trips at Moth Open Mike StorySLAM competitions in Portland Oregon and New York City.
In addition, he has been on several big wall climbing expeditions in Yosemite.
(Create your own visited countries map)
Travel, climbing, art, ...why?
Mallory in an effort to explain mountaineering has often been sound-bited to "because it's there." Here is the much more insightful full quote:
"What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?" and my answer must at once be, "It is no use." There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it.
So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.
- -- George Leigh Mallory, 1924
Deep Plays
"Climbing is a strong example of what is called 'deep play.' The phrase is Jeremy Bentham's and he, as the father of utilitarianism, profoundly disapproved of the concept. In deep play the stakes are so high that, in Bentham's view, it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose. In our case the gain was the dubious satisfaction of having climbed a difficult route in difficult conditions; what we stood to lose was our toes, or our fingers, or even our lives."
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-- Al Alvarez "Feeding the Rat, Profile of a Climber." New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988