In late October of 2008 I went to Nepal to do some trekking in the Annapurna Region. The trip was a private one, organized for me by Geographic Expeditions in San Francisco. The time of year was right – post-monsoon – and the towering, snow-covered Himalayan peaks were all clear as a bell. Early one [...]

Last week I returned from a whirlwind trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was honored to be a keynote speaker on the subject of petroleum legislation at a UNDP-sponsored conference on “Fueling Poverty Reduction with Oil and Gas Revenues”. The conference was attended by well over 350 participants from Cambodia, the neighboring countries, international oil [...]

I strongly support the current Tibetan movement for cultural independence! I am shocked and dismayed at the recent brutal events of repression in Lhasa and the outlying provinces – Gansu, Xinjiang, Sichuan and Yunnan – all heavily populated by ethnic Tibetans. I have been to Tibet several times and I identify and empathize with both [...]

There are still at least three places that I intend to visit in the Himalayas. They are Sikkim (India), the Annapurna Region and the Khumbu Region, both in Nepal. Sikkim was an independent state, but is now part of India. It sticks up like a thumb between Nepal to the west and Bhutan to the [...]

I wrote this entry in April, 2006, right after I had returned from Argentine Patagonia. But somehow I lost it from my Blog. A friend kindly sent me a copy electronically so that I could restore it. ********************************************************************************************************* This entry fittingly invokes the name of Greg Crouch’s epic book, “Enduring Patagonia”. I just returned from [...]

Last summer we had to say goodbye to the old “Victor” powerboat in Maine. It was 19 years old and feeling its age. Nice as it was – a 1987 Stingray bow rider with 120 hp Mercruiser inboard/outboard engine – the damn thing increasingly just wouldn’t start! I would spend more time trying to get [...]

Three weeks ago I camped my first night at 17,000 feet beside the Rongphu (Rongbuk) Monastery in Tibet. As the sun went down a real chill arose in the oxygen-thin air. But to compensate, right outside my tent door flap, was the North Face of Mt. Everest, bathed in late evening “alpenglow”. I could hardly [...]

I just returned from a glorious week of hiking in Chamonix/Mt. Blanc in the French Alps. The weather was superb all week – better than I ever saw it during the 2 years in which I lived nearby in Geneva in the late 60s. Each morning as I walked out of my hotel to go [...]

The C & O Canal runs 183 miles from Georgetown in Washington, DC, to somewhere in Pennsylvania. It is a national park and it is very well maintained. Fortunately, it is easily accessible from almost anywhere along the DC, MD, VA border along the Potomac River, which the Canal parallels for the most part. My [...]

We just returned from a week’s skiing at Wolf Creek, CO. It was awesome! Wolf Creek gets the most snow in Colorado. We saw a graphic demonstration of this fact – it snowed every day and dumped 33 inches of fresh powder on the slopes! The result was the best skiing conditions we have ever [...]