My daughter Mary-Ann is a senior buyer for Symbol technologies in San Jose. They were just bought out by Motorola.

Susan used to work for Anderson consulting. Now she is a housewife. She graduated from Berkeley. Her first job with Anderson put her on a project to Melbourne, Australia. That was where she met her husband.

For fun, I like to sail and bicycle. I used to backpack. I led a Girl Scout group for the better part of twenty years. As a child I was active in boy scouts. When we first moved to Sunnyvale, I worked with teenage kids. Then I did some merit badge counseling work that included outside work hiking and backpacking. I did some merit badge life saving type stuff.

I did that until my oldest children was about twelve years old. And there was a guide on the street, Ray Walght and he had a daughter in girl scouts and didn’t think that that was what scouting should be so he started a backpacking group.

For a long time I was one of two male leaders in all of Santa Clara County. And we would go out backpacking once a month and each summer take the girls on a trip to the Sierras of 56 miles.

We had a cadet senior troop and set up a program for the high school kids to go on this outing and younger girls said “Hey, this isn’t fair,” So, we set up another hike for the younger girls of 58 kilometers, about 30 miles. And we would keep the younger girls under 8,000 feet elevation.

The older girls we would take to 11 or 12,000 feet. Part of that was that there was a high level of altitude sickness in adolescent girls. All of their energy is going to growing and they are more susceptible to altitude sickness. I did this over twenty years. The last one I went with them was 2001.

The troop and I made fiberglass kayaks in my home garage. We used them to kayak around the lake at Mount Shasta for a week. When I was in high school we made fiberglass canoes and we put them in water and went down to Tahima. There was no white water, and right off the bat a few canoes tipped over.
Right now I do bicycling. I bicycle four days a week and average over a hundred miles a week. So, each ride is about thirty or thirty-five miles.

Getting Lost in the Woods

When they mentioned that thing about getting lost in the woods, they were referring to our last backpacking experiences in the woods.

I always hung behind because I didn’t like to eat the dust. Everyone was a couple of yards ahead around a couple of corners. I came across a nice little spring that the forest service had made for nice cool water for backpackers. I filled my canteen with water and started following the trail. It turned out to be an animal path. I got to a point where I realized that I couldn’t get back up.

I decided to walk my way out, and I kept yelling “where is the trail?” There was no answer. I was literally sliding down on my back for fifty or sixty feet. Sometimes I would fall. Five or six hours later I found my way out, I came to a road, started hiking up the road, hitchhiked, got picked up and went back to where I was supposed to be. I was probably three thousand feet below and five miles from where I was supposed to be. The group had called search and rescue.