On the road again......

Ethan Becker

Ethan Becker

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I am on my annual trip to the west........ I love the drive across this incredibly fair land( well, some of Nevada is a bit unfair),there is one incredibly grand vista after another and I cannot help to speculate on what came before....... Day before yesterday I was following the emigrant trail which later became the Union Pacific rail line and now I-80 parralels the two..... If you are interested in wilderness survival it is hard to traverse what is now Donner Pass( over 7,000 ft.) with out speculating on the fate of the Donner- Reed Party and the decisions that caused the untimely demise of a large percentage of them and the ingestion of some of their friends and family by other friends and family. There are lessons to be learned....

As an unrepentant gear whore, I know how easy it is to think that good gear can be a substitute for good judgement and good skills...... The Donner story is instructive...... There was one screw up after another and compounded by more poor decisions....... Just the Wiki entry will tell you a bunch...

When I was an active climber, I was running a small climbing equipment manufacturing company and I pored over the AAC accident reports for clues about what gear contributed to what accidents...... That led to changes in what I did several times.......

One of the best non manual survival manuals I have ever read is Laurance Gonzales' Deep Survival which uses a series of disparate events to break down what behaviors cause us to survive or not..... A damn good read it is, too.....

Anyway, I have hopes that Bladeite will be kind enough to post the pic I took yesterday from the west toward Donner pass..... Must be one damned bleak evironment with several feet of snow cover....Brrrr.. It was cold enough for the snow to be powdery and that area tends to be windy.... Brrrrrrrrr, shiver.....

More later
 
Brrr shiver? Seems like a distant memory as of late lol.

Thanks for the update and safe travels my friend!
 
bladite fax machine

beep beep beep

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beep

donner party of 4! now serving! donner party of 3! please to be seated... part of 2?

that old rudolph, eating the deer
 
Be safe out there and watch out for all the crazies on the road!
 
Safe travels to you Ethan. Love the picture! Reminds me of some of the "hills" we drove through in Alaska.
 
If your near Spokane let me know and I'll buy you lunch of your choice. Tell your son hello.
 
Thanks Bladite.... One can always count on you to be scrupulous in your adherence to the proper PC attitude..... LOL....

E
 
Travel safely. I look forward to more stories.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G800A using Tapatalk
 
more from Ethan: Rombauer Vineyard and my edc 16 gazing out over the Napa Valley

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My Rombauer Cousins make wine in Napa and every year he has a fund raiser for pancreatic cancer research and I come out and sign cookbooks and pretend to be important...... The event has raised over a million dollars for research over the years....... The Rombauer cousins are a fun crew and btw, they make really good wine..... Yum...... I have lots in common with them..... They love good food, good drink, and good conversation.... Always a good time in one of the truly loveliest settings God ever made......

I wish you all were here to share a grand time.....

Ethan
 
Bring your Amex and all the gold in the safe..... Might cover lunch..... Seriously, it would be a good time but probably not a place if you want to practice primitive skills..... If I hit the big lottery it will be party time for sure.... We will even import Coote and the Aussies.... And the Nords too, and gshark of course...... Big party.....
 
Safe travels Ethan. Thanks for the pics and, of course, your informative if not inspirational anecdotes.

The American West, Napa ... and to think I always thought of South Jersey as God's Country.
 
Was driving up I-5 this afternoon and it runs thru Applegate Country which, is named for the ancestors of Col. Rex Applegate....... Check out his Wiki page... And that of his collaborator W.E. Fairbairn, also Eric Sykes.. What is there is a mere outline of a long and heroic life, much of it spent in the shadows...... I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Soldier of Fortune get togethers in Vegas, where he and I talked briefly about small mfg operations as he was trying to get his modernized Smatchet off the ground........I became better acquainted with him when I was honored to spend several days with him in the BJ booth at the '94 blade show when he was inducted into the Cutlery Hall of fame and a day shooting afterwards.... All who participated were first timers at sporting clays and at times frustration caused tempers to be a bit short..... Not the Colonel mind, but a few others..... I was a newbie to shot gunning at the time and was quite amused at the irritations of some of my betters.... The dinners were fascinating......

He was, of course, the co-designer of the Applegate-Fairbairn Commando dagger and later the more Applegate than Fairbarn A/F blade currently produced by Boker which,I believe, was heavily influenced by his modern era design collaborator Bill Harsey....... Harsey is mum on the subject, btw but I believe he did the protos and he ramrods the Colonels knife projects today...... Speaking of today, I hope to spend a bit of time with Brother Harsey later and,if possible a cuppa Java with Faller........

The Colonel built on the knowledge he gained during the war years in his training regimens which have morphed into modern point shooting and modern 'Combatives' and his book on Riot Control is extremely instructive...... Not terribly PC but marvelously effective.... One of my favorite techniques is to use a marksman to use a small caliber rifle to painfully wing a ringleader or two..... Nothing fatal but, painful....A shoulder perhaps....... Oh, well probably not gonna be used this week!!!!.....

A lot of his post WWII work is still not talked about much outside the community but, suffice it to say, when I inquired as to why there was no definitive biography I was greeted by knowing chuckles and, "There just isn't that much unclassified to talk about.".......



The A/F blade was briefly marketed by Blackjack........ When Mikey quit paying the Colonel and, of course, me I got almost weekly calls from The good Colonel on the path Mikey was trodding thru the Federal Courts in Effingham....... It had taken the Good Colonel no time at all to establish a line into the courthouse in Southern Illinois from his base in the Rogue River Country........ I treated these courtesy calls as if I was a good Catholic getting briefings from the Pope...... A very nice gesture from a very thoughtful and honorable man.....

More later......

E
 
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