Rock & Ice

In Puerto Natales, Chile, I came across some issues of a magazine called Rock & Ice.

I looked at two issues, from eighteen years apart.  Both had incredible stories.

Take, for example, the story about Basque mountaineer Edurne Pasaban, the first woman to climb all fourteen eight-thousand foot mountains in the world (the first one she did was Everest).

What about her affair with her mentor, Silvio Mondinelli?

Ladies, do not let your man attempt Kangchenjunga with this minx.

There was another great story about Hans Kraus, King of the Gunks, who as a boy in Switzerland had James Joyce as an English tutor:

“Ya,” says Kraus, whose sharp wit is still expressed with a thick Austrian accent.  “But he didn’t do a goot chob, dit he?”

As a young doctor Kraus adapted remedies he learned from circus performers.  Later he lunched with President Eisenhower. From wiki:

Kraus’s medical records show that by the time of Kennedy’s death in Dallas, using exercise, Kraus had virtually cured Kennedy of his lifelong back pain.Kraus’s White House medical records also contain several entries about Kennedy’s back corset, which Kennedy had worn since Harvard. As Kraus wrote in the medical records, Kraus had grown convinced that the corset was impeding Kennedy’s recovery and that Kennedy needed permanently to stop wearing it. Finally, in October 1963, Kennedy told Kraus that he would stop wearing his corset permanently in January 1964. Several leading presidential historians, including James Reston and Robert Dallek, have theorized that Kennedy might have survived Dallas if he had not been wearing his corset.