I started my first blog in early 2002, and I ran a decent show until about 2006. Somewhere around in there I disengaged from the warblog community and made Crooked Timber my internet home.

I wanted to know what the academic left were saying to each other, and I wanted to engage with the most opposing viewpoints I could find.

Smart Progressives can actually be pretty cool people, and not all their ideas are bad. But Leftism subsumes Progressivism.

Leftism is not ideology. Leftism is will to power. That will tramples ideology, reason, persuasion, compassion. That will discards conscience and truth as impediments.

Leftism binds its adherents in unbreakable social bonds, demanding always greater mental and moral abdication, to enable ever more antisocial conduct towards non-adherents. Virtue and grace are not earned by spiritual gratitude, nor by creative or constructive effort. They are earned by an inflated sense of grievance, by pointless demonstrations of rage and cruelty, by harming non-adherents to the cult of Leftism.

Because Leftists have no intellectual or moral integrity, they are triggered into extreme cognitive dissonance by rational, fact-based appeals to what ought to be shared values. They can’t argue back, so they get mad. At Crooked Timber in the old days, comment moderation was almost non-existent and the place was a sewer full of feuding monkeys, gathered from every point of the compass to fling shit at one another.

I learned some interesting Progressive ideas, and I had some fun poking those poseurs up in an infuriatingly polite way. But the fun came to an end when John Quiggin took over discussion policy.

Quiggin’s an admirable character in some ways. He’s a gifted mathematician, a highly-compensated and prestigious informer of public policy, and an accomplished athlete. He’s also a cult leader, a snake-oil salesman. So yeah, kind of like Anthony Fauci, except Quiggin’s head points in the other direction. Quiggin tightened the comment toleration like a garrote over the course of several years, leaving about six survivors and a website with the feel of a dead mall.

One name that flashed up on my radar while I was desperately searching for someone to disagree with, was Fredrik deBoer. I don’t remember what he was writing at the time or whether I engaged with him. But I remembered his name, and that he seemed interesting.

The other thing I remember about him is he got crosswise with the Crooked Timber people. They laced into poor Freddie with a ferocity and obscenity that I myself could never have triggered. They really tried to gut him.

Anyway, it turns out old Fred’s still around, and he’s got a blog. Now, our Freddie is guilty of Progressive Piety, clinging bitterly to certain risible falsehoods. But he is not Left in the sense of being antisocial and unreasonable. He retains some integrity, some individual conscience.

And he says the unthinkable. He can point out precisely the moral failings of victim culture. He can doubt whether BLM is a good thing. He’s a fine writer who evinces sincerity, even if you have to wince at some of those sincerities. To the Left this guy is a heretic, a blasphemer, worse than a mere non-believer.

I’ve added his site to my blogroll.

In my childhood, I had a book called Peter Piper’s Practical Principles for Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.

Most people are familiar with the verse, “Peter Piper picked a Peck of pickled peppers”. That’s the title and the most famous one.

What you may not know is, the same author penned a verse for every letter of the alphabet. Every verse was a four-liner with the same structure: one line of Assertion, one line of Question, and then two lines of Investigation. Here’s the one for the letter “D”:

Davy Doldrum dreamt he drove a Dragon.
Did Davy Doldrum dream he drove a Dragon?
If Davy Doldrum dreamt he drove a Dragon,
Where’s the Dragon Davy Doldrum dreamt he drove?

The illustration shows a kid herding a dragon along with a whip. Here’s “A”:

Andrew Airpump asked his Aunt her Ailment.
Did Andrew Airpump ask his Aunt her Ailment?
If Andrew Airpump asked his Aunt her Ailment,
Where’s the Aunt whose Ailment Andrew Airpump asked?

The idea was to recite all the poems out loud and thus gain Eloquence in speech. Notice also that the last line always turns the verbiage around, requiring a little agility. They aren’t tongue-twisters on the Dr. Seuss level, but they’re fun. Here’s “C”:

Captain Crackskull crack’d a Catchpoll’s Cockscomb
Did Captain Crackskull crack a Catchpoll’s Cockscomb?
If Captain Crackskull crack’d a Catchpoll’s Cockscomb,
Where’s the Catchpoll’s Cockscomb Captain Crackskull crack’d?

Complete with an illustration of some guy hitting another guy with a bat.

So in this spirit let’s talk about our dear and departed Colonel Jeff Cooper:

Colonel Cooper concocted a Curious Coinage
Did Colonel Cooper concoct a Curious Coinage?
If Colonel Cooper concocted a Curious Coinage,
What Curious Coinage did Colonel Cooper concoct?

By “coinage” is meant linguistic coinage; the invention or definition of new words. Colonel Cooper, rest his soul, would likely reject the idea of himself as a linguistic originator; he would say he learned the definition from someone else. Nevertheless, he insisted on some definitions that nobody else seemed to share.

Col. Cooper bristled at the use of the word “shrapnel” to describe things like shell fragments and broken glass. Shrapnel, the Colonel informed us, was a man’s name and the name of the artillery shell he invented. It was World War One, and Shrapnel wanted to blast the enemy with grapeshot, but the enemy were all in trenches, in defilade. Shrapnel figured, if he could only get an artillery piece high enough, he could fire grapeshot at a steep angle over the parapet and enfilade those enemy trenches. So he developed a kind of artillery-launched artillery; a thing like a loaded cannon or shotgun shell, launched from a cannon, with a secondary charge to deploy a load of grapeshot in a downwards direction. People learned to call this weapon shrapnel.

Then they started calling any kind of flying debris shrapnel. Col. Cooper wasn’t having it. Call it fragments or nails or whatever it is, it’s not shrapnel unless it comes from a genuine Shrapnel projectile.

Is it proper to call a revolver a pistol? Col. Cooper certainly didn’t think so. To his mind, a pistol is a hand-held firearm where the chamber and the barrel are the same piece of metal. Semiautomatics, derringers, and single-shots are pistols. Revolvers are not. Now you know.

Col. Cooper scoffed at the idea of DAO (Double-Action Only) pistols. Double action, in his view, meant two ways of operating the trigger; either you cock the hammer first or you don’t. Double action doesn’t mean the trigger pull always cocks the hammer; that’s single action, and kind of crappy single action to boot. Finally Col. Cooper threw up his hands and said don’t bring a gun to school that can’t be cocked. The only exception he would allow was the Glock.

You can learn a lot by fucking up.

They are not educated; not taught how to think.
They are not indoctrinated; not told what to think.
They are mutilated; trained not to think.

This is my new favorite series on this website. I think about it a lot and I’m very happy about it because I want people to live.

Specifically, the people I want to help live are those kind and gentle souls, the reasonably thrifty and law-abiding, the sensitive, intelligent and decent people who happen to have little or nothing in the way of culinary skills. In the current climate, I consider these fine people to be at-risk.

I’ve worked in the foodservice industry, and I’ve read long and learned books about the economics and ethics of food. Food has a way of making fools of the wisest philosophers. There are a million ways to produce food, and every single one of them is wrong. In the end, nobody cares about economics or ethics; everybody still needs food.

One way of looking at the food problem is, you need sufficient calories and essential nutrients. Suppose you had a candy bar that boasted 1500 calories and a full day’s supply of every essential nutrient? In theory, that’s food for a day and if you had 500 of those candy bars you could go 500 days. In practice, your appetite would soon fail and malnutrition set in. Food isn’t mere nutrition; food is flavor, variety, novelty, maybe a bit of spiritual or artistic investment.

This is not a recipe thread. You can find millions of recipes on the internet. Instead, this is about fundamental cooking technologies and techniques. There will be recipes, but only to illustrate cooking techniques. If you acquire just a handful of home cooking techniques, your options for survival increase exponentially. This series will focus on those skills which are easiest to acquire and which do the most good. (I assume no prior knowledge or experience. If it come across as condescending, relax. I’m not condescending to you, I’m condescending to someone other than you.)

Just about every kitchen has a range, an oven, and a microwave. You’ll also need a cutting board and a kitchen knife. The first knife you need is what’s called a French knife or Chef’s knife. It looks like this:

A stiff blade with a curved cutting edge, and room under the handle for your knuckles. Typical blade length is around eight inches. There is little advantage to a longer blade, unless you want to chop huge quantities. My personal favorite French Knife has a seven-inch blade and is very handy. There are other specialty kitchen knives used for boning, filleting, paring, or slicing bread. In a pinch, you can do anything you need to do with the French knife.

(Knife Safety: All people who earn their livings in kitchens have suffered cuts and burns to the hands. These injuries are generally not consequential, but they hurt. I can’t think of anything more discouraging to a person taking his first timid steps into the art of cookery, than getting a nasty cut. If you haven’t worked with a French knife on a cutting board before, it’s not rocket science but there are things to learn. Proceed slowly and thoughtfully as you learn how to move the knife.

The toe end of the French knife remains in contact with the cutting board at all times. It works like the blade of an ice skate to guide and position the knife on a cutting line. The cutting is done by the middle and heel end of the blade by working the handle up and down, always keeping the toe of the knife in contact with the board. With each cut, the toe end of the knife is used to steer the knife to the next cutting line. By getting these motions into a rhythm, you can rapidly produce regular slices/strips/chunks/etc.

Never Swing The Knife In A Chopping Motion! It blunts the edge, batters the cutting board, and it’s the prime cause of really bad cuts in the kitchen. Keep that toe end down on the board.)

Pro Tip: If your cutting board slides around when you’re trying to work, lay a damp dish towel under it. Solid!

Now you can cut stuff up. It still needs to be cooked. Your range and oven give you various options, but if you’re tired from all that cutting and you don’t really feel like working over a hot stove, get a Crock-Pot aka Slow Cooker:

It’s a heavy ceramic vessel that sits in a little electric heater on your countertop. For someone with an extremely limited budget of knowledge or patience, the Crock-Pot is a game-changer. From one session of prep work, a crock pot can produce several meals’ worth of food. Student Stew is a favorite of college attendants on a budget. Dice some meat and cut up a bunch of vegetables: onions, carrots, potatoes, celery, broccoli, green beans, asparagus, etc. Pile all that stuff into the Crock-Pot, cover with tap water, activate the switch and forget about it. In a matter of hours, it will be food to last you maybe a week.

In addition to making stew from just about any ingredients you can scrounge up, the Crock-Pot is excellent with beans, dried peas, and lentils.

The Crock-Pot works by maintaining a simmering temperature just at or below boiling. Because it doesn’t get to a real rolling boil, it cooks foods gently and never boils over or boils dry. It cooks so slowly that overcooking isn’t much of a concern.

Crock-Pots range in capacity from two to five quarts. Five quarts is a lot of food. If you live alone and cook five quarts of beans, they’ll go slimy long before you can eat them all. Of course, you can freeze cooked beans for later. But the smaller pots are about right for day-to-day use.

One thing you can’t cook with a Crock-Pot is rice. There’s a special appliance for that, and you’ll never guess but it’s called a rice cooker. Like the Crock-Pot, the rice cooker is a countertop appliance, available in various sizes, inexpensive to buy amd foolproof to operate.

Now you have a way to cook rice and beans, and that’s a bit of a survival breakthrough. Rice and beans can be bought cheaply in bulk and stored indefinitely without spoilage. Best of all, rice and beans together provide every one of the essential amino acids. In theory, you can get by without any other protein.

One more common countertop appliance that can give you lots of options is the Instant Pot. The Instant Pot runs considerably hotter than a Crock-Pot; without liquid, its cooking surface can sear meat or caramelize onions. With liquid, and the lid latched shut, the Instant Pot works like a little pressure cooker and probably tops out around 240 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve barely encountered this thing in the wild, and I don’t own one, but I know there are unlimited Instant Pot recipes on the internet, so you can cook a wide variety of delicious meals with a minimum of doubt and difficulty.

Circling back to that Student Stew, the basic concept is put meat and veg and liquid in the pot, and turn it on. Here are some refinements that will make a better stew:

• Use a store-bought broth or stock instead of water. This goes whether you’re making stew, beans, rice, anything where the liquid won’t be discarded. I like an unsalted bone broth, and I have several gallons of the stuff in my larder. Check the label when you buy; some store-bought stocks, especially chicken, are too salty.
• Roast root vegetables and onions. You can cut small potatoes into eighths and toss them in oil until coated, with maybe some paprika or black pepper. Put them on a sheet pan skin-side down and roast at 350 for about half an hour. Onions and carrots can be roasted in the same way; they don’t need to be oiled. The potatoes develop a slightly chewy “skin” and all the vegetables develop more sweetness than they would from being simmered. Of course, the roasted vegetables will be cooked before they go in the pot, so put them in at the end, when the liquid is fully simmering and the meat is almost done.
• Sear the meat. Next week, we’ll talk about Sizzling and Searing.

That’s Slice and Simmer 101. We’ll cover more specific knife techniques later, and we may hear more about the Instant Pot. I mentioned stock here, some other time I’ll explain how to make your own.

See you next week for Sizzle and Sear!

Lawyers rule the future
Technology determines the future
Lawyers don’t understand technology

(Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck! Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck!
Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck! Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck!
Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck! Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck!
Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck! Ka-Doom-Boom Chuck!)

I
Rest my case, you Got a ugly face
Now I gon’
Steam yo fat ass in some Bouilla-fuckin-baisse

Whatever you
Think your argument is not sufFIcient
Your breath
Stinks like a fermentated Fish head

What’s
Up with your reading compreHension
Is your brain in an alternate diMension?
Oh yeah you Mentioned…you got deMentia
Now go
Back to your pimp, the one who Sentch ya.

You
Think the corporations got to Toe the line?
Now they
Limit all the rations and you’re Feeling fine?

I’m
Tellin’ you it’s time to pump the Markets
What I’m
Sellin’ you ain’t muthafuckin’ Star-Kist

You be
Playin’ in a state of disarRay
You like a
Stank-ass mule, the way you buck and bray

Well…
You wear your mother’s fuckin’ Undies
You got a
Smell like a damn trust-Fundie

(Double-time)

May your wife grow fat and stupid!
Get her hooked on OkCupid!

May your Portfolio
Involve Imbroglio!

(etc.)

Let it be stipulated up front that the election was stolen, and everyone knows it. Maybe next Friday I’ll do a Final Word on that specific topic, but you know in your heart I don’t need to. The election was stolen and everyone knows it.

The result will be the shredding of the greatest, the best, the most human formal social contract ever devised, to be replaced by an era of tyranny, terror, and folly on an historically unprecedented scale. That’s a big crime.

So some people stormed the Capitol building as that crime was being consummated. They didn’t have much in the way of unity or purpose. There were almost certainly some provocateurs and false-flaggers in that crowd. The Q Shaman had a nice bod, but he was pretty wince-worthy. At least one nondescript black guy was basically a gawker, wandering around looking at stuff.

Idiots, Patriots, Infiltrators…it doesn’t matter. They had every right to be there. The Capitol belongs to the people, and mostly those people treated their own property with respect.

A respect, by the way, which the Capitol doesn’t deserve. The Capitol is a sewer pipe clogged with Spray-N-Foam, a fecal backwater unfit for human habitation. It is a den of corruption, obscenity, and crime. That is what it is; that is all it is. Any “Government” issuing from this sordid pile of pus is illegitemate; its laws and edicts themselves unlawful and odious to any free man. Punish Law and license Crime, and the People be damned. Then they say this is the Temple of Democracy.

Compared to the Capitol, your local Wal-Mart is a sacred institution. I say that as a man who despises Wal-Mart, who loathes their early capitulation to the mask madness and the way they profited from the demise of America’s Main Street. But Wal-Mart is definitely better than the Capitol.

Wal-Mart provides economic opportunity in the communities which most need it. Idiots who loot justify their conduct on the basis they’re owed it or they need it, and anyway it’s all insured and it’s evil corporations so whatever. But they are actually stealing from their neighbors. Looting the Wal-Mart deprives law-abiding people of livelihood, dignity, and economic opportunity. The cost to Black communities has been disproportionately great.

Spare me this bullshit about how the Capitol is sacrosanct and its Members are on some superior plane. They are the worst people in America, maybe the worst people in the world, possibly the most evil people in human history. Part of me regrets that the people who came in to have a look around turned out to be mostly dumb and obnoxious. Another part regrets they didn’t burn the whole thing to the ground. That would be a smaller loss to America than even one looted Wal-Mart. Now they’ve fortified the place with razor wire so those filthy demos won’t show their faces in the Temple of Democracy ever again.

People on the Right were quick to condemn the Capitol incursion and equate it with BLM/Antifa rioting. This condemnation proves that people on the right are decent; unlike leftists, we police our fringes, and we really don’t like to see people who are ostensibly on our side behaving like animals. But by equating the Capitol break-in with arson and terrorism, these commentators gave up a lot of moral ground. They should have been saying, yeah, this conduct is bad, but BLM/Antifa is worse, and worst of all is Congress. They deserve to be terrorized a little.

But then some on the right went farther than condemning the rioters. Whether out of sub-retard moral confusion or simple cowardice these people accepted the election result as legitimate. They literally dropped the whole argument on which civilization briefly hinged, because some guy in a horned helmet showed his ass at the Capitol.

David Bernstein at Instapundit posted to this effect:

• The riot at the Capitol was totally unjustified.
• There is no evidence the election was stolen.
• The rioters must be punished for their crimes.
• Everyone on the right should be ashamed, especially Trump.

If I was Glenn Reynolds, I would yank that post, blackball Bernstein, and write a groveling apology to my readers. But Glenn didn’t do that. Then Day By Day Cartoon called Instapundit a cuck, and Glenn came back with something along the lines of “That’s what they want you to think.”

Here’s what I want to think. I want to think that Glenn Reynolds was and remains a staunch, loyal ally of the right. I want to think he is grateful for the fame and fortune he garnered from hundreds of thousands of readers. I want to think Glenn Reynolds could never be intimidated, would never waver in his principles.

You can’t always get what you want. I don’t think any of those things.

Glenn Reynolds is a coward, a traitor to his readers and his country. He’s a grifter every bit as bad as Bill Kristol. He’s a shameless, psychopathic midwit with pretensions of grandeur.

I’ve removed Instapundit and PJMedia from my blogroll and rotation. Sorry guys, you are nowhere near interesting or funny enough to put up with this kind of shit. If I want to raise my blood pressure, I can always go to Salon.

Fuck you, Glenn. I won’t be back.

Final Word!

When I was kid, I generally lived in ghettos. The North Valley was pretty nice, the Student Ghetto had its charms. North Portland was interesting.

Up there in NoPo I had two friends. Jeff was brilliant and ruthless, Derek was dumb and clumsy and had zero conscience. We lived in a three-bedroom, two-story house that rented for $250 a month. Why so cheap? No furniture. No appliances. No lock on the front door, no back door at all. No heat. The previous tenant had been a hooker who wrote filthy stuff on the walls with a Marks-A-Lot. We found that pen in a drawer (built-in, remember no furniture) with pubic hairs on it. Probably the landlord had rendered the place uninhabitable just to get rid of her. When we moved in, they saw no reason to make the place habitable again. The first day or two, if you wanted a bath (there was no shower), you had to go out the front door, walk around back and go in the nonexistent back door, go down in the basement and reset the breaker on the water heater (okay, there was one appliance), which usually resulted in a shock.

I got the prime upstairs bedroom. I slept on the hardwood floor in a sleeping bag. One time, I vomited in a peanut butter jar until it was nearly full. I put that jar on the windowsill and forgot about it. For all I know, it’s still there.

Anyway, we were living like that, and there was a Butthole Surfers concert on Halloween, and we went. I’ve seen the Butthole Surfers live three times. This was the second time.

The venue was miles from where we lived, and our only transportation was on foot. We dropped acid and started walking. After about 45 minutes we came to the Denny’s and I fancied I felt hungry. There was a huge illuminated sign that said ALWAYS OPEN. That made no sense to me at all. How can something always be open? What about the age of the dinosaurs?

We went in the Denny’s and were seated at a booth table which could have accommodated about nine people. The staff all snarled at us, and the whole place was so shiny and geometric and kind of oscillating, we all realized we can’t handle this, so we bugged out leaving our place settings and glasses of water behind.

We walked about 45 minutes more and came to the venue, and we got our tickets and got inside. There were about three hundred underage punks jammed into that tiny place, and everybody, literally everybody under that roof was tripping balls. No eye color to be seen, just gigantic, cannonballed pupils.

The opening act was a band called Smegma. Smegma’s signature act was to toss animal heads into the audience. On this occasion they presented the audience with a couple of skinned sheep heads. One guy tried to gouge an eyeball out of one of those heads while his friend egged him on. I don’t think he succeeded.

Then the Butthole Surfers came on.

From the point of view of a musical connoisseur, the Butthole Surfers are pretty much indefensible. Their music (if you care to call it that) evinces talent, but almost any noise can evince talent. What really makes the Butthole Surfers tick is the drummer, King Koffee.

That and the spectacle. That Halloween show was probably the most spectacular they ever played. There was a gigantic screen behind the stage, with a powerful overhead projector, on which were situated two layers of plastic with drops of various-colored food coloring between. Someone was smearing the food coloring around in time with the rhythm, so it looked as though the music was splattering all over the wall. The light and smoke effects were insane in that small space; people reached up to grab the rays of light.

At one point I was milling and moshing around, and a rather sharp and heavy blow landed on my right eyebrow. Recovering my balance, I saw the stage-diver whose boot collided with my head. That is, I saw his boots. I didn’t care much about the rest of him. I moved to a different part of the dance floor.

We were walking home, savoring the experience, and we passed through a small park in a business district. It was a shadowy Halloween night, and Derek remarked something to the effect that this was the perfect place for a criminal ambush, a place someone could make into our worst nightmare.

We reached Broadway Boulevard and walked along by a parking garage next to the Safeway. A fellow crossed the street in front of us, towards us, walking rapidly on an agressive diagonal. Instinctively I checked my six, and there he was! I squirted out of there like a watermelon seed just as the trap closed. I guess I must have sprinted, but it was more like I teleported. I came to my senses and turned around about half a block away.

Derek screamed my name twice, and I felt honor-bound to help him, so I ran back. His assailant was the one who had come up from behind. He had Derek by the hair and was dragging him around saying “Gimme your money!” He paid no attention to me at all as I circled around him. I got behind him. He was in a crouching position with knees apart, totally ignoring me. So I carefully curled my toes back and let fly with the hardest kick my acid- and fear-soaked brain could drive. I hit that dude square in the asshole and I hope he needed dental work as a result. He wilted; he deflated; every muscle in his body lost tone. He dropped Derek and looked over his shoulder at me with the most woeful expression.

Jeff had to contend with the attacker who came from the front. I didn’t witness any of that action, but Jeff says he punched that guy in the face, receiving no damage himself. Somehow or other, both our assailants were neutralized if not exactly incapacitated. An overweight black male security guard came out of the Safeway. I yelled at him, “call the cops!” He sized up the situation and said, “are you sure?” All he had witnessed was three wild-eyed white kids beating the shit out of what turned out to be a couple of scrawny, unarmed Mexicans. Gotta hand it to those guys, whether from psychopathy, desperation, or hatred they tried it on against superior numbers and force. And now they put on a Cheech and Chong act, like, why were you looking at me, man? So everyone just kind of moved on. That guy I kicked went away with a noticeable limp.

We strolled along another block and stopped for refreshments at a convenience store. In the parking lot we were accosted by another overweight, black male, stylishly but rather lightly dressed for the weather, with a chrome-plated 1911 tucked in the elastic front of his athletic shorts. This dude witnessed the attack and he wanted to recruit us. There was some rival gangster working the streets and he wanted us to find that dude and kick his ass or kill him or something. Yeah, we’ll be in touch, we said.

It didn’t get any weirder after that, until the next day.

Derek said, “Man, I did the best stage dive!” and he told us all about it. I looked at Derek’s boot.

(Posted Thursday morning. Discipline!)

I have lived a varied and somewhat adventurous life. If it ever flashes before my eyes, I’d have to be like, wait, this is all the same guy?

But I read about men in books, whose lives dwarf mine in their scale of accomplishment and adventure. There’s a certain feeling, a kind of envious horror, you get from reading about people like that. On the one hand, you wish you could boast of their accomplishments and experience some of their fantastic moments. But you’re honestly grateful you don’t have to go through their adventures.

One such book is Annapurna by Maurice Herzog.

Herzog was the leader of the 1950 French expedition which successfully summited Annapurna. It wasn’t the highest that men had ever climbed, but it was the first peak above 8,000 meters ever to be climbed to the summit, and it forever remains the only “eight-thousander” to be climbed on the first try.

Herzog led a climbing team of eight men, plus an emergency physician by the name of Oudot. The climbers were all world-class experts recruited from the community of Chamonix, a climbing Mecca on the order of America’s Yosemite.

The primary objective of the expedition was a mountain called Daulaghiri. Should that objective prove unattainable, Annapurna was the fallback option.

1950 is within living memory for many, but the world has changed so that the experiences of Herzog and his team are no longer possible. They had only crude, inaccurate maps, and they faced significant challenges just trying to find the mountains they intended to climb. They had some kind of quadrupeds, mules or horses. So they split up and ranged all over the countryside, scouting and reporting their observations back to Herzog. Daulaghiri wasn’t where they thought it was, but they found it pretty quickly.

Then they had to reconnoiter. People without mountain experience may not intuitively understand just how big a big mountain is. If you take a hike around Mount Hood to have a look at all the approaches to the summit, you’ll walk 38 miles. Mount Hood is a midget compared to Daulaghiri, and the terrain would have been untracked, steep, extremely rugged, and at an altitude that exacts penalties on the human body.

They ranged around Daulaghiri and had a look at everything. They didn’t like what they saw. There was one line that looked vaguely possible, so they tried it. And they beat a hasty retreat after one of them said, “this is not healthy”.

That left Annapurna, and they had only the vaguest idea where that mountain might be. Once again they ranged all over the place, scouting the highest ridges, trying to make observations. Finally one of them reported he saw a mountain peak over there somewhere, so they all went over there somewhere, and there was Annapurna. They soon found a line on the North side that they felt would be an assured success.

In the old days, when men set out to climb a really big mountain, they did it in “siege” style. That meant establishing camps higher and higher on the mountain, shuttling supplies and manpower to support a final summit push from the highest camp. In recent decades, siege mountaineering has fallen out of fashion, and the cutting edge is “alpine” mountaineering, where a small team or even a solo artist, traveling extremely light and fast, tackles the objective in a single prolonged effort without logistic support.

Herzog and his team besieged the mountain, establishing four camps. But even a hardened alpinist who sneers at that kind of thing would have to admit that expedition worked lightning-fast with a minimum of support. They didn’t have a safari train of Sherpas to haul their gear. It was just eight very stout, determined guys.

And they were in a hurry by this time. The Himalayas may be an icy wasteland, but the climate is tropical, and that means monsoons. Once the monsoon starts, the high peaks become unclimbable, unsurviveable. It’s just too much fresh snow; you sink into it up to your neck, and then it slides down and buries you. Herzog and his buddies had spent weeks of the precious climbing season just trying to find their objective. Now they were in a deadly race against time, climbing almost into the teeth of the storm.

And they made it. Herzog and Lachenal flew the French flag from Annapurna’s summit. Then, as they started back down, Herzog made a little fumble. The tiniest thing, but it put his life in danger and he panicked. Of course acute hypoxia and fatigue are well-known to cause fatal lapses of judgement. Herzog had what he needed to save himself, he had it right in his backpack with him. But he panicked and forgot. The monsoon hit that night, sealing his fate.

Maurice Herzog survived, thanks to the emergency interventions of Oudot. Herzog went on to be Mayor of Chamonix and lived out his life with great honor.

But he paid for that mistake on Annapurna. He would never be the same again.