Coming from a family that was active, but not adventure-sport oriented, I caught my interest in mountaineering and canyoneering from the New York City Public Library, as an 8 year old, looking at the pretty pictures and reading adventure stories. I spent the summers of my youth in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, hiking and scrambling, first as a camper, then as a counselor at Camp Idylwold. I moved out west in 1974 and continued climbing; I began canyoneering when I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1975. Most of my partners came from my old summer camp, allowing to cojole them into misadventures near and far. Before settling down in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1983, I clocked 105,000 hitchhiking miles from Alaska to Mexico, and many peaks, canyons, and quixotic surprises along the way. In 2001, I found a whole new collection of adventure partners through the Yahoo! Canyons Group, a canyoneering discussion forum. I have been blessed with many fine friends and adventures, some of which I have written about on the Latest Rave and also on Canyon Tales, a canyon story site.