PLEASANT POINT Oct. 17, 1992 Doug Mantle, Duane McRuer, Bob Hicks

Private Trip List Finisher: Doug 3X, Mac 2X, Bob 1X

This event had been in the works for some time. Doug patiently waiting while Mac and Bob worked the list down to the last one. Mac probably gets the record the "longest trip" since he had to fly back from Cambridge, Mass (Fall semester teaching at MIT) to make the finisher. Too many unknowns to put this one in the Schedule so it went private. Most folks camped Friday and Saturday nights at the campground 7 miles up the Whitney Portal road. Some opted for luxury and stayed in Lone Pine motels. Sat AN we collected 13 hikers and consolidated in four cars for the drive down to Lone Pine and then southeast to pick up the Cerro Gordo Mine road. The desert road gods exacted their toll on tires - Bob's a silent blowout (drove a mile before we knew it was flat, SHREDDED) and Doug's a flat (cut sidewall) when we got back to the cars. I would take mild exception with the DPS write-up of "... 7.5 miles of good dirt road". We parked at the mine and. walked up the road past the locked gate. Upon our return we were told the gate is not locked and vehicles should continue up the road and not trespass on mine property by parking where we did. The write-up does say the gate is unlocked, but should be revised to modify parking instructions. We took the easy trail/no trail route to the summit. We had 8 list finishers on top for the obligatory photos and champagne. Back down to Lone Pine and new tires. Things at the campground were in good order, with more champagne well iced down and vast quantities of food appearing a bit later (total group approx. 25). Pleasant campfire on a lovely, not too cool evening. Sat night Vi Grasso left for LA to prepare for a Sun departure on a Nepal trek/climb. Sunday saw the group disband, some to climb and others a leisurely drive home on a bright sunny day. Great outing and what milestones!

MT. TIPTON TRIPLE LIST FINISH OCTOBER 31, 1992

Halloween Day dawned bright and clear in the desert of northwestern Arizona as twenty climbers assembled for an ascent of Mt. Tipton, highpoint of the Cerbat Range. Apart from the beautiful weather, which was a marked contrast to rain storms the evening before, this was a special day for three climbers in the group. DPS'ers Richard Carey, Les Hill and Ken Olson, each with 96 DPS listed peaks to their credit, came to Mt. Tipton to finish the list and claim the first, "first-time" triple list finish in DPS history. Actually, it was to be a quadruple list finish with my wife, En Lee as the fourth person, but a minor detail called pregnancy (8½ months to be exact) changed those plans. In any event, these three intrepid climbers were accompanied on the climb by Mark Adrian, Suzanne Booker, Fred Bright, Paul Freiman, Russell Glavis, Gail Hanna, Sue Wyman Henney, Vic Henney, Charles Hummel, Rob Langsdorf, Witold Martynowicz, Dennis Richards, Judi Richardson, Rheta Schoenman, John Strauch and Glenn Torbett and myself. The climb to the summit went well, with Glenn Torbett checking our route with a Sony PYXIS Geographic Positioning System. Glenn's expensive "toy" was a hand-sized device that received signals from an orbiting satellite and fixed our latitude and longitude on the earth to within a 300 foot accuracy as well as giving the elevation above sea level! That sophisticated little gadget was quite a conversation piece and set the basis by which the climb would be thought of as a day of great contrasts. On the one hand we all witnessed the extreme precision and reliability of Glenn's satellite positioning system, and on the other we marveling at the low-tech breakdown of Vic Henney's boots which came untied three times in the span of about five minutes. Some in the group cast doubts about Vic's shoe-tying skills. Hey, anybody holding two master's degrees must know how to tie his shoes, right?

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