Why Did I Create this Book?

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. – John Muir

I wrote this book because I wanted to “inspire before I expire.” My dog Emme got me started hiking up the “easier” high mountains in the Rockies, but as they got more difficult it became apparent if I was to continue with this new-found passion, I was going to have to solve challenges of my over-65 age, my weight and certainly my level of fitness. That seemed overwhelming. But as I have learned during many years of running a complex technology business, I would go after it by breaking the total problem down into smaller pieces and solving each one in its turn.

I couldn’t do anything about my age … or could I? I thought, maybe I could turn the clock back to achieve a weight and fitness level to where I was decades before. The book goes into how, and indeed I was able to go on to summit all 58 of the mountains over 14,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies.

The Best of the Stories (Links)

Aspen Times Article: https://www.aspentimes.com/news/local/aspen-climbers-book-recounts-poochs-prowess/

Next to Madison Interview (find the link by searching for Madison Malloy and find Next to Madison Podcast and scroll all the way down to episode 28 and link to it.

The Jerry Bovino Show: https://archive.org/details/grtvco-The_Jerry_Bovino_Show_-_Dog_Mountaineer

The Trigger

The trigger for doing a book happened just after summiting Wilson Peak in the San Juan range.

It is a highly visible peak from the ski-town of Telluride and tops out at 14,023 feet. Eleven miles roundtrip, 5300 feet of vertical. Class 3-4 scrambling.

The Inspiration

I was with Rick Peckham, one of my most important climbing buddies. He was (and is) a great companion on these adventures, but one of his habits that would embarrass me was that whenever we ran across other climbers and stopped to chat, he would unfailingly tell them how old I was. He loved to see their reactions.

But this time the reaction was quite powerful and moving. We had just come off summit, down only about 100 feet and two climbers in their 30’s were coming up. They were rugged, weathered and had big smiles on their face. We find that a lot – climbers love climbing. When Rick told them my age, one of them nearly fell off the mountain. He was momentarily speechless and perhaps I imagined or actually saw a tear in his eye. When he regained his voice, he said almost exactly this to me:

“Wow and I’ve been worrying about getting to age 60 I’ll have to give up my passion for climbing, with nothing left to live for – you are proof you can still do stuff. You have right now just changed my whole outlook on life!” He went on to say something like, I will stay fit, I will eat well, I will do what it takes. I want to be like you. Thank you – you should write a book.

Climbing Led to Writing About It

That was a turning point because it happened right on a mountain, but I have heard variations of that all along after each story I write. After each high-mountain climb I write a blog story with photos, route directions, lore about the mountain and more. It is at www.RickCrandall.net

When I completed the 58th and final fourteener, it wasn’t long after I was signed up with a literary agent, the Doug Grad Agency. He got me a publisher, HCI Books, publisher of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

The Book

The paths I followed are not the ones I expected to take, but the outcomes have been better than anything I could have hoped for.

It is with this sense of wonder that I’ve wrote the memoir, The Dog Who Took Me Up a Mountain, about my adventures with an Australian Terrier named Emme. She was responsible for my starting to hike in the hills around Aspen, Colorado. An occasional activity became a serious hobby, then blossomed into a full-blown mission and passion. Before long, I would go on to climb every mountain over 14,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains – all fifty-eight of them. This was after not climbing my first fourteener until I was sixty-four.

I have come away from these experiences in the mountains with deep conviction. Finding and pursuing a passion – any passion – is as important in one’s later years as it is all through life. That new-found passion for me took the form of mountain climbing with my friends and my dog. But the point of this book is to inspire readers to find passion anywhere and in anything that stirs the emotions.

How do you find a passion? From anywhere – mine came from following a dog.

As a scientist and engineer, I had been a deep skeptic of books about inspirational pets, particularly dogs who speak. But that was before I learned how to listen, if only to a tilted head, an angry stare, a wagging tail, or some very human-like action. Emme’s enduring spirit is what finally nudged me into the chair to share our story.