Fun Stuff

In 1960 I took my first trip overseas, to Europe, in a four engine propeller plane. Since then I have been back to Europe a number of times,but have also branched out to other places. To date, I've been to about sixty countries. This includes a big chunk of Africa and of South America, including Peru and Patagonia; most countries in the Middle East, most countries in Asia, including Tibet, Cambodia, and China ; several island nations in the South Pacific; Australia, New Zealand and most of North America, including three trips to Alaska that involved, among other things, kayaking(1963), canoeing(1990) and rafting(1997) three wilderness rivers.

In the process I have flown around the world several times, using just about every conveyance known to humans, from dugout canoes in the Amazon to a Russian Tupolev 47 piloted by Chinese, the latter being perhaps the most dangerous . I have been shot at a couple of times; been an involuntary participant in a riot that was attacked by tanks and machine guns; waked to hear the neighborhood in which I was sleeping being dynamited by terrorists; had an automatic weapon shoved into my stomach; matched wits with the Khmer Rouge while visiting the ruined city of Angkor; attended funerals that were orgies and orgies that ended in funerals; climbed an erupting volcano at night; received (in the third world) several impromptu suggestions of immediate marriage, delivered by the fathers; learned to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; flipped a raft in a river populated with crocodiles; hiked, climbed and backpacked in some of the larger mountain ranges of the world, and have run fifth class rivers on several continents, including the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in North America, the Zambezi in Africa, and the Bio Bio in South America.

My latest around the world trip started in South Korea in the Spring of 1998, and went on to Australia,with the usual melange of hiking, backpacking, diving, sailing, and snorkeling; then to Thailand, the Greek Islands, and London.

White Water River Rafting

Starting the run through Jugbuster,

a fifth class rapid in the Nirdeco canyon

of the Bio Bio River, Chile, January, 1995

In 1962 I journeyed from the East Coast to Berkeley, California and discovered a life that I didn't even know existed. Soon I was a member of the University of California at Berkeley Hiking Club, going out on trips all over California and the western U.S., hiking, rock climbing(a skill I had learned in Colorado) in Yosemite and elsewhere, mountaineering, and caving. I was disappointed to learn that the Hiking Club didn't do river running(to which I had become a convert as a kid while reading Huckleberry Finn), so -having never run a river - I decided to organize a trip. I bought a two -man Japanese yellow raft at the local variety store and with three others drove to the Russian River at Cloverdale, an hour north of Berkeley, where we also rented a canoe.The first day, we turned the canoe over twelve times, but only once on the second day. I was hooked. I also heard that kayaking was better than canoeing.

I got a copy of twelve pages of detailed instructions from the Sierra Club on how to make a fiberglass white water kayak and with three other members of the Hiking Club, started to build three fiberglass kayaks. None of us knew anything about fiberglass or kayaks. Two weeks later , after many crazed and frustrating hours,they were finished , and -on a trip organized by Phil Pennington-we drove to the Glen Canyon of the Colorado and launched the kayaks on their maiden voyage. The Colorado was in flood and running at 80,000 cubic feet per second, but the kayaks worked! I took my kayak down the Glen Canyon three times before it was dammed in 1963. What can I say about the Glen that hasn't been said? It was awesome, of a transcendant beauty that was unique; its damming and flooding was one of the major ecological disasters of the 20th century.

From the Glen to some of the white water rivers of Northern California was a logical next step in kayaking; my adventures were various, including a near-death experience on the Feather River (this run is now flooded by a dam.) Just after this I loaded two kayaks on a VW beetle and -with a friend-drove to Whitehorse in the Yukon, in Canada, where we launched our kayaks and floated through a great wilderness 250 miles down the Yukon River, in the process crossing Lake Lebarge.

With the Glen dammed, I checked geology maps for other rivers that might have interesting canyons; and eventually organized kayak, canoe, and raft trips down various canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers , including Westwater Canyon of the Colorado , Split Mountain Canyon, and others.At about this time I began to run rivers with a group of people connected with Sonoma State University, where I had joined the faculty in 1966. Terry Wright, Gordon Parker, Willie Marchenko, Walter Kieser , Paul Judge, and I were soon taking our own rafts and equipment down third and fourth and fifth class rivers in California and the Western U.S., including the Tuolumne, the Middle Fork of the Salmon, and a twenty six day trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

From here, I branched out, and -and with a friend- arranged to be dropped by small plane(our canoe strapped to one of the pontoons) onto a lake near the headwaters of the John River , in the Brooks Range in Alaska, north of the arctic circle; before setting us down, the pilot circled the lake once to see whether the resident grizzly was "in" ; we floated down river in magnificent wilderness (and perfect weather) for a couple of weeks.

In 1997, I flew back to Alaska with a group of friends, to raft the Tatshenshini-Alsek rivers; again we floated through magnificent wilderness for a couple of weeks; but the weather unfortunately was mostly cold, rainy, and foggy.

While in Sumatra in 1994, I organized a rafting trip down a fourth class river in Sumatra, the Wampu, with some friends I had made while drinking beer at a German bar in the Orang Utan sanctuary at Bukit Lawang; just after we shoved off into the Wampu to begin the trip and rounded the first bend to hear the roar of a big rapid, our native guide, who was in the front of the boat , and whose boatmanship-we discovered- was little better than his English, turned round to us , his face constricted with terror and screamed " The river, she is one hundred percent crocodiles!"

On a trip to New Zealand I ran a fifth class river near Queenstown, the Shotover; in 1995: on a trip to Patagonia and Chile, I rafted a fifth class river, the Bio Bio; on a trip to several countries in Southern Africa in 1996, I canoed the Orange River, which forms tthe boundary of South Africa and Namibia, and rafted the Zambezi ( known to have a crocodile or two) where it forms a series of fifth class rapids just below Victoria Falls. On the Zambezi trip the raft flipped in a big rapid called Oblivion; where in fact I nearly met personal oblivion, since in the fierce hydraulics I went down for a while, in the process having sufficient opportunity to consider some of my past sins before I was spat out..

Mountaineering

Sunrise on the summit of Mt. Kinabalu in Borneo,

after a night climb; June 30, 1996;

at 13, 445 feet, it is the highest point in southeast Asia;

on the right is Emma Persson of Sweden (see story below).

During my brief career as an office boy on Wall Street in New York City I conceived the idea of canoeing alone around Lake George, a large lake in upstate New York. The only problem was that I had only read about canoeing in books, but eventually I got to Lake George and, from a dubious outfitter, rented a canoe for a couple of weeks. Once I had spent some time figuring out how to keep the canoe upright and make it go in a more or less straight line, I started paddling around the lake. After a few hours, with wilderness along the shore, I could see a mountain rearing up from the side of the lake and decided to climb it. Although I had never climbed a mountain before, I had read that this could be an interesting thing to do.There was no trail , so it would be all bushwhacking, and the thick forest came right down to the shore, so that the canoe would be invisible from above; the question then was, how would I be able to retrace my route exactly, so that I could find my canoe again when I came back from the top? Luckily, I had brought along a compass, as I had read that this was a good thing to have , the only problem being that I had never used a compass before.As an amateur compass user, I decided I had to sight in the peak from the point of landing and follow a straight line to the top, and having reached the top, I then merely had to reverse my direction by 180 degrees and, proceeding in a straight line again, I should come directly back to the boat. A great idea; the only problem was, as I was soon to discover, there were a series of cliffs in the straight line route to the top; I had never climbed cliffs before, but I had spent a lot of time in trees as a kid practicing being Tarzan, so I figured I would give it a try. After a number of interesting adventures, and after I had climbed for hours, the sun was starting to get ominously low. Although I was nowhere near the top, at this point I decided it was time to head back to the boat; it would be a race with nightfall, and the only gear I had with me was a quart canteen. As planned, I reversed my direction by 180 degrees, and put my trust in my compass. Now I had to descend the same cliffs I had just climbed, and in much less time; I did not realize that descending a cliff was much harder than ascending it. I made it down the first cliff o.k., but fell halfway down the second; my fall was broken by thick branches so I wound up with only a few cuts and bruises. After this I realized it was better to get back to the boat after dark than not to get back at all, and I descended the rest of the cliffs with great care. When I reached the lake the sun had set and as I peered into the failing light it was with great joy that I saw the silver sheen of my aluminum canoe, only one hundred yards away! Magnetism lives!

Years later, in Colorado, after I had become a rock climber, I made it to the top of a number of peaks over 14,000 feet.. After I came to California in 1962, I climbed and hiked to the top of various peaks in the Sierra Nevada and made it to the top of peaks in other mountain ranges around the Western United States. Later, while traveling overseas, I climbed an occasional peak in whatever country I happened to be. In 1996, after hearing for years about Kinabulu Peak, a 13, 500 foot mountain in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo and the tallest peak in Southeast Asia., I decided to climb it. The climb started from 6500 feet , in the soft luxuriance of the orchid-studded high tropical jungle, and making our way slowly upward through numerous carnivorous plants and wildly varying foliage that was changing steadily from tropical to alpine, we spent the first night-a cold one- in a climber's lodge at 11,000 feet. At 2 am the next morning we set out for the peak in a driving rainstorm-the idea was to experience sunrise from the peak; the granite of the mountain was slick from the rain, and as we climbed, navigating by flashlight, the tropical warmth of the starting point at 6500 ft was replaced by the biting cold of high altitude. In the course of the climb I had met a 22 year old Swedish girl who had been left behind -without a flashlight-by her traveling partner as he raced to the top. As this was her first essay at mountain climbing, she was naturally a bit perturbed at the prospect of wandering off the route in the dark , particularly as the route was surrounded by 2000 foot cliffs. She was not slow to accept my offer of help, and eventually , dawn saw everyone on the top; there followed a spectacular sunrise, and we could see for hundreds of miles in every direction over the jungles of Borneo and the sea: an awesome experience.

After night climbs, I have also seen the sunrise from the top of Adams Peak, the tallest mountain in Sri Lanka, where Buddha left a footprint as he ascended to Nirvana, and on the top of Ayer's rock (Uluru) in the center of Australia, one of the most sacred spots for the Australian Aborigines, and on the world's tallest sanddunes near Sossusvelei, in Namibia; but I have to count the sunrise from Kinabulu Peak as both the hardest won and the most rewarding. As the famous female Colorado River runner Georgie White used to say: the average can't imagine.

Skiing

I started skiing when I was a graduate student at Syracuse University, in northern New York State; there was a German post-doc in the department who was willing to show me how to ski if I would drive him up to the ski area 100 miles north of the university; when we left it was a very cold morning with snow : our windshield kept tring to ice up and only the windwhield wiper on the driver's side of my VW bug worked, so that the post-doc could not see through the windshield and was continually expecting we were about to crash . When we got to the ski place he took me to the beginner's area which had only a rope tow; knowing nothing about rope tows, as the rope slid past I grabbed it with a death grip and was jerked about ten feet and ended in a heap of poles and skis , much to the amusement of the tow operator and the post-doc. After ten minutes of showing me how to snow-plow, the post-doc took off for the expert slopes and I didn't see him again until the lifts closed. I fell about 50 times that day as little kids whizzed past executing perfect turns that I later learned to call Christies. When I got back to the university I went out and bought a book on how to ski and for the next few years with the aid of the book managed to get some very bad habits firmly engrained into my skiing psyche. Later, when I moved to California, I skied in the Sierra Nevada , cross-country as well as downhill, and later in Utah, Colorado, Washington, Montana, Wyoming-where cross-country skiing in Yellowstone in winter was a great experience- and Canada and Austria.

Hiking

Finding a yak horn at 16,000 feet;

above Nam Tso Lake, near Tashiy Do monastery,

Tibet, June, 1995

I was an office boy with a firm on Wall Street when I heard about something called backpacking. At about the same time I heard of a trail called the Long Trail that went for more than 100 miles through the wilderness along the crest of the Green Mountains in Vermont. After buying a book on backpacking , I resolved to spend the two week vacation I had coming doing the Long Trail, alone. I took a bus to Vermont and after many adventures completed a big chunk of the trail. After that I was hooked on backpacking and the wilderness. When I finished my undergraduate degree I bought a German 200cc Zundapp motorcycle and on it spent two months and 8000 miles touring the western United States, camping out the whole time, and hiking in the Grand Canyon , in Utah's Zion Canyon, Yellowstone-where I had an interesting encounter with a grizzly-and other places. A couple of summers in Colorado allowed me to hike up some of the 14000 foot peaks there.Later when I moved to California I learned a lot more about backpacking and did a bunch of stuff: the John Muir Trail which runs 200 miles along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, many trails in the backcountry of Yosemite and its vicinity; several winter backpacks in the Grand Canyon, a number of trips to what later was to be Canyonlands National Park, at that time a remote wilderness, a trip into grizzly country in Glacier National Park in Montana, featuring some very interesting encounters with grizzlies, and several trips in the Glen Canyon of the Colorado, as well as a number of hikes in Canada,Alaska, and Hawaii. Since then as I've traveled around the world I've hiked wherever opportunity afforded: from the Australian outback to the mountains of Tibet to the tropical jungles of Borneo, Thailand , and Sumatra.

Scuba Diving

In 1994 I was traveling around the world and one day, in Sri Lanka, ran into a guy who had just come back from Scuba diving in the Andaman Islands. As I listened to him rave about it , I decided to learn how to dive, and on asking around, was told that the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was a great place to learn how . Well, that was already on my itinerary, so when I got there, I signed up with a dive school in Cairns. The school, recommended by a travel guide book I had, turned out to have mostly equipment that was either falling apart or defective; the instructors seemed to spend more time on the phone looking for other jobs than they did in class, so I missed some critical things I should have learned, and some of the things I did learn, I didn't learn properly. So, after some bumbling sessions in the pool, we were taken out on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef , where we spent the night. I had been in many boats on the ocean before this, and had never gotten seasick, but the next morning I had a horribly queasy stomach and kept wanting to vomit, without actually doing so. However, I did not tell the instructor this, as I was afraid he would not allow me to dive, which would mean I would have to come back next week and try again-and I didn't want to do this. That morning we were taken down to a depth of sixty feet where the instructor motioned for us to sit in a semi-circle on the ocean floor and wait for instructions on taking some tests. As I sat there trying not to vomit into my air hose( I had no idea what would happen if I did that) I had a vague recollection of something he had said in class,and decided to let a little air into my buoyancy control device, the result being that I let in a little too much, and soon I was heading rapidly for the surface, sixty feet above, with the instructor chasing after me. I learned later he expected to find that my lungs had exploded, but for some reason I remembered my training: never stop breathing underwater; soon I was back down on the ocean floor. I was feeling very nauseous at this point and don't remember much of what went on, but I must have passed the tests, because we were soon heading slowly up to the surface, where now the waves were kicking up a bit, which made me even more nauseous; at this point , instead of my buoyancy control device being overinflated, it was underinflated, and I took a little water into my lungs, which sent my instructor into a frenzy; finally it was my turn to climb back up onto the boat, where I stood for a moment feeling triumphant, and then vomited all over the back of the boat. Despite all this, or perhaps to just get rid of me, my instructors gave me a certificate.

So annoyed was I at my performance that I decided to really learn how to dive, and when we returned to Cairns, I immediately signed on for a week trip on a dive boat that sailed 200 miles up the barrier reef from Cairns, diving three to four times a day, including two night dives; finally, by the end of this trip, I started to feel a little bit at home under water. Although since then I have dived at various places around the world, including Fiji and the Carribean, I still haven't figured out what happens when you vomit into your air hose underwater.

Photography

Hunza , Northwestern Pakistan, July 1996

My photographic career started as most of my other careers have started: inauspiciously. Before a motorcycle trip around the US , when I was a beginning graduate student, I bought a used Kodak camera in New York City. Knowing nothing about photography, I didn't realize that it was more used than camera. It did however record relatively recognizable slides of places I had been, and for a while that was enough. When I got to California I was invited to slide shows where the slides had been taken by good cameras, a humbling experience. Soon I had my own new Japanese camera, and after a while began to take some fairly decent pictures. About this time I decided to lead a Thanksgiving climb of Mt. Shasta with some members of the University of California Hiking Club and decided to record it with a movie camera.The only problem was, I knew nothing about ice or winter climbing but a guy described to me the basics of self-arrest with an ice axe and since we would be climbing the Avalanche Gulch route which would involve about 2000 feet of exposure on an icy 45 degree slope, I decided to invest in a set of crampons. After we got up to our camp at frozen Lake Helen at 11,000 feet I took the group a couple of hundred feet higher up on the ice and by throwing ourselves down the slope at various angles we taught ourselves how to use an ice axe for self-arrest. I knew nothing about taking movies, but had bought a how-to book; and a member of the hiking club loaned me a movie camera. So I took both slide camera and movie camera up Mt. Shasta and-being unexperienced at movie making- didn't realize how much I had to learn. After that I bought my own movie camera and for years lugged both slide camera and movie camera on all my hikes, climbs, and backpacks-a substantial amount of weight. Later I went down the Glen Canyon of the Colorado and got some good pictures of that incredibly beautiful place before it was flooded - the flooding being a great ecological tragedy. I have been back to the canyon country many times since then, and it is a magical place for a photograher. Later I recorded trips I took to Alaska , Yellowstone-both summer and winter-and many other wilderness areas around the Western US and Canada. My interest was never to make money selling photographs-I just enjoyed looking at the slides and remembering. In my travels around the world, I continued to take a camera, but since I like to travel backpacker style, which puts a premium on weight, I eventually got rid of my heavy cameras and replaced them with a slide camera that fits into my shirt pocket. Around this time I got the idea of traveling around the world and personally checking out -and also taking slides of-various ruins , artifacts, and pictographs claimed by some to represent evidence of extraterrestrial involvement in early Earth civilizations. I've had a lot of fun doing this, and the slides have been useful in my SSU class, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Interstellar Travel.

Rock Climbing

After my first year as a graduate student, I was spending the summer in Boulder , Colorado and heard about a course in rock climbing. I didn't know exactly what rock climbing was, but it sounded interesting, so I signed up; the first session was at a local cliff, where on the first day, a motley group assembled; after a look at the cliff which we were supposed to slide down on a rope (this is called rappelling), several of the group immediately left. Over a period of some weeks the rest of us learned how to belay each other , rappel, go up a cliff on small holds, lead a climb using pitons and carabiners for protection, etc. Later I climbed at the Shawangunks in New York State, and when I came to California in 1962, climbed in the Pinnacles and in Yosemite Valley. I also discovered that there were female rock climbers, some of whom were very good indeed. In 1962 there were a group of climbers in Yosemite Valley who mostly hung out at Camp Four, because it was near the lodge, and you could go over in the evening (and sometimes with the help of a sympathetic female lodge employee) sneak a shower, or have a burger in the lodge cafe. Some of these climbers later became world famous (Yvonne Chouinard, Royal Robbins, Galen Rowell), but at that time they were known only to a small fraternity of fellow rock climbers. In the evening around a campfire in Camp Four the cheap jug wines would come out and after a few gallons of the stuff we would go over to one of the house-sized boulders around camp and try our luck at bouldering. Bouldering is free climbing (that is, unprotected by a rope) , and people frequently fell off the routes, but there wasn't far to fall, so injuries were not as common as you might think. But it was always interesting to watch the mesmerizing fluidity of a great climber on small holds and overhangs, even after the climber had imbibed a quart or two of Sneaky Pete.In the daytime we would try our luck at various routes up the walls of Yosemite Valley. I did climbs such as Washington Column, Royal Arches, Bishop's Terrace,Cathedral Peak (in the high country), etc., both as belayer and as leader, but I never got beyond average in my rock climbing ability. Later I had a lot of fun using the skills I had learned in Yosemite to get into remote areas such as the canyon country of southeastern Utah and elsewhere around the world.

Poetry Writing

Writing Writing

To be filled in later.

General Consciousness Raising and Lowering

To be filled in later.

Sam Greene Home Page

[These web pages of Samuel L. Greene, Jr. (1931-2007), Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University, have been reconstructed by his colleague, JST. There were originally links to course pages and to larger images, but these have been lost.]