WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

That second day in Upper Lyman Basin was like something out of a fairy tale. We all wandered over to the glacier, and I had my life’s biggest mountain blueberry along the way, as it grew in the rich glacial soil. Brent and I wandered to the edge of the upper basin, to look down on the lower basin and lake, and picked blueberries. Our camp was about as spectacular as I have ever experienced. The day was perfect weather, warm and sunny, like the previous two days also were, right after Labor Day. For many years, I have led trips right after Labor Day. We usually would go in on Labor Day, as everybody else was going out. Trips taken immediately after Labor Day had these virtues:

• The weather was usually still nice;
• The crowds were gone;
• The bugs were gone;
• The berries were ripe.

In the late afternoon, it was time to meditate, and I lied down in that meadow, attached, and prayed for help for an hour. The previous four years were those of nearly unremitting emotional agony for me, beginning with 9/11. The attacks from the crazed American public, combined with a criminal attack on me and my relationship with my mother by that former friend, finally spurred me to take my email address private and stop interacting with the public. A couple of months later, Mr. Professor died, which sent me over the edge into the darkest phase of my midlife crisis. My wife began insisting that I finish my website, and I did, in September 2002. I lost my part-time consulting gig around the same time (another software start-up went down, which was normal in those days) and I was unemployed for several months, to only have a front-row seat to the war drums’ beating for the invasion of Iraq, which, as Noam says, is the greatest crime of the 21st century so far, and may well be seen by future historians, if there are any, as the beginning of World War III.

There was also compensation in those days, such as being introduced to Uncle Bucky’s work. A month before I resumed my career at a software company, Brian invited me to co-found NEM, and I was its primary financial back for its first year. That experience, in the end, was a disaster, and Brian was soon kicked out of NEM led by a mutiny by a board member who replaced me, after Brian fled to South America in the wake of Mallove’s murder.

It was only as I was writing this that I realized that those prayers were answered, as the next few days were about the best ones of those years of my life, and was a prelude to the coming end of my midlife crisis a year later.

Best,

Wade

[Bill Ryan]

Not wanting to derail anything here at all, but I must say, I've been more than totally enjoying all the graphic hiking anecdotes. (Wade, I think you know I'm a seasoned mountaineer myself, but you sure got yourself into some interesting situations I'd only have nightmares about. )

[Wade Frazier]

Bill, I’ll bet you have never derailed a thread in your life. That is not what you do. I know that you love nature, but I don’t know what your climbing CV might be like. I have never technical climbed. I drew the line there when I was in my 20s. That is simply too dangerous. Oh god, the dead climber stories I know, and having a friend of the family go that way last year was sad.

For the record, Chuck was known as a careful climber. That is like being a careful motorcycle rider. The chances of your number coming up are just reduced a little. I later heard what happened with Chuck, in rather vague terms. He died coming down, which is normal. I heard that his protection failed when he fell (about 200 feet), and he might have been using a pre-existing anchor, not one that he put in. It was an understandable choice, but one that cost him his life. Oh boy, lots more to tell on the hiking front.

Best,

Wade

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
I know that you love nature, but I don’t know what your climbing CV might be like.

On Makalu in winter in the Himalayas, Mount Kenya, Alps, Yosemite, lots of roped climbing to 5.10, lots of ski-mountaineering. I was the first person to ski the Italian High Level Route solo in winter (which I only learned when the Zermatt guides threw a party for me on my descent ).

Three lifetimes ago I was Sandy Irvine, the second person (a few feet behind George Mallory) to successfully climb Everest in 1924. (All recovered in recorded regression, and wow, what a story. Of course, we perished on the way down, in the deep frozen night, with no our oxygen long gone. Sandy's body was never found, and he still has the little camera in his jacket pocket with which he captured 3 pictures of Mallory on the summit. If it's ever found, Kodak technicians say the photos might still be retrieved from the frozen film.)

Here in Ecuador I go up to 14,500ft regularly with my dog, looking for the Wawa Grande (Ecuador's Bigfoot). But no danger there apart from sheer high remoteness and no maps. Never seen another hiker in years. No snow!

Yes, descents are where things get dangerous. So sorry about Chuck. I really understand. Over the years I've literally led a charmed life: never an accident or injury of any kind, wherever I was.

[Wade Frazier]

Well, Bill, that is quite the climbing CV, and yes, you are lucky to still be here, but maybe one climbing death was enough for your soul. This is as close as I got to the Matterhorn. As you know, Brian climbed it as a young man. We’ll see if we live to see that Everest mystery get solved.

My uncle knew Fred Beckey, and he was as unpleasant as the stories say. Beckey was Chuck’s inspiration, unfortunately. There is a Sherpa community here, and they say that Rainier has everything that the Himalayas do except for the altitude.

The first son of the first rocket scientist in my life I still keep in touch with. He became an MD after life as flying off of aircraft carriers in the Navy. He became a big-time climber, spending summers climbing in Yosemite and the like. He tried Denali a couple of times. The first time, he got weathered out while on the mountain, and the second time, two members of his party got a thousand feet of air and he had to help carry out one of the bodies. He said that he tried to not look at the body as he carried it down the mountain. That may have been his last expedition like that. Man, I never want to have any stories like that.

You are hiking in a part of the world where you can still get remote without having to work too hard. The success of Microsoft and Amazon is making Seattle into a metropolis, and the trails are increasingly thronged with hordes. Trails that I hiked even ten years ago with hardly seeing a soul are now filled with throngs of people. The old man knows where and when to go to avoid them, but it is not nearly as wild around here as it used to be. As I get back to that Lyman trip in 2005, I’ll describe how it has changed since 1986. In 1986, after we left Spider Meadow, we did not see a soul, and in the 2005 trip, in three days in the upper basin, we saw exactly one person come by. When I took my nephew there in 2017, there must have been a dozen people at Spider Gap when we were there, and on the way out, we must have encountered a hundred people coming in. It was Labor Day Friday, but geez! So, your hiking for years without seeing a soul is a special kind of hiking on this planet anymore. Plenty of Bigfoot tales up here, and I am a character in a Bigfoot book as a Bigfoot hunter.

Happy trails,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The peak above Brent’s head, with Lower Lyman Lake in the background, is Cloudy Peak. I attached a pic that somebody took from the top. After the 2005 trip, I wanted to get to the top one day, but I now realize that it may never happen, after my disaster of a trip in 2017.

So, on the third day in the basin and the fourth of our trip, while my brother nursed his feet, in his old army boots (I bought him hiking boots the next year), Brent, a friend from my teenage years, who came up for three trips over the years, and I took the hike to Cloudy Pass and over to Suiattle Pass. On that post that I made right after Brent died, you can see pics of him and me at Spider Gap and Cloudy Pass. Those are the money shots of Lyman Basin. Downstream from Lyman Basin about ten miles is Holden Village, which my wife and I visited a couple of years previously, and my grandmother and cousins spent a week there each summer, as my grandmother ran her Lutheran Church for 50 years. While visiting Holden, we met longtime friends who were coming down from Lyman Basin. We were able to plan the trip so that we met at Hart Lake. She had lived in Southern Germany for years and had been all over the Alps, but had never backpacked in the Cascades and was skeptical that it could rank with the Alps. As they hiked out of Holden, she retained her skepticism – until they got to Cloudy Pass, which blew her away.

Hoary marmots, which only live in high meadows, are some of the few species on Earth without an instinctual fear of humans. They are my totem animal, and hanging with marmots is always special. You can be in camp, and a marmot can brush up against you as it hoovers up the vegetation in camp. Attached is a picture of a marmot in our camp from when I took my nephew to White Pass in 2013, which hooked him on the Cascades.

As we hiked to Cloudy Pass in 2005, a marmot came waddling down the trail at me, to stop about five feet away, just looking up at me, to satisfy its curiosity. To say that I was charmed is an understatement. I also had what I believe was my first digital camera then, and was able to take photos that I could not previously do, and I photographed those bumble bees on the trip up to Cloudy Pass, attached. To my dying day, that was one of my life’s best days, and because Brent was there, it will always be a bittersweet memory. More is coming on that glorious day.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be a short post to put up some more pictures on just how spectacular our camp was in Upper Lyman Basin. The red in the meadows means blueberry bushes, and ripe blueberries. Blueberries on bushes turning red are always the ripest. So, we all had purple mouth disease on that trip, too. In one attached pic, you can see Brent down by the water’s edge, taking a bath.

The way that you take baths is to have a pail of water, fill it, and move away from the edge and pour the water over yourself and use biodegradable camp soap to wash up. That keeps the soap out of the water, for environmentally friendly hygiene. On backpacks, I took usually took baths every other day.

I have a titanium pail (it weighs less than steel and is better than aluminum; is pricey, too, but well worth it; you get the best that money can buy if you can, as when you are deep in the wilderness, you only care if it works, not how much it costs – it is a classic situation of paying for performance) that I use to filter water, cook in, and for my baths, and it contains the fragile purifier when it is in my pack. It is about my most versatile piece of gear. I use one pail to wash up, and one to rinse off. It is bracing but refreshing. I used to use a solar water bag when I was younger and did not mind the weight. If you left it in the sunshine for a couple of hours, it got lukewarm, but that was a luxury that I have not indulged in for 20 years.

Down by the water next to camp, marmots also scurried around, and made footprints in the mud.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

So, on the third day in Lyman Basin, it was up to Cloudy Pass and over to Suiattle Pass. It was the same route as on my 1997 trip. I survived a charging marmot, bumble bees, views that are some of the best that this world has to offer, and we got over to Suiattle Pass. You could see Glacier Peak from there, and as we sat in that meadow, eating our lunch, here came the clouds. Four days of perfect weather was about to end.

We all headed back, with ominous clouds heading our way. But when we got back to Suiattle Pass, Brent and my pal from my teenage years kept going, as I stopped to pick blueberries. They were the “quart-per-hour-of-picking” berries, which is as good as it gets in the meadows. In an hour, I had picked my quart of blueberries, and literally raced the clouds back to camp, so that I could take my bath before the weather hit.

From Cloudy Pass, you can see the outlet from the upper basin that feeds the lower one. There is a trail to the right of that stream/waterfall, and that is how I returned to camp. With a record low snowfall, the stream above to the falls formed a pool that had stepping stones across it, to easily return to camp, picture attached. I had a much different experience in 2017.

That evening, the wind gusted fiercely, but we were warm and dry in our tents. Then the next morning dawned…

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The next morning, we awoke to snow, attached. Summer was over in the mountains. Compared to our ordeal on the Azure Lake trip, it was a trivial inconvenience. But it was the only time that my brother was snowed on in his lifetime, as he will spend his entire life in Ventura County or Hawaii, and my pal from my teenage years also has spent his entire life on the California coast. The snow freaked them out. They saw themselves risking injury or death going back over Spider Gap, which was in the clouds that morning. Well, they could just go downhill 11 miles or so to Holden, but my car was at the trailhead to Spider Meadow. If it was just Brent and me, going back over Spider Gap would have been no big deal, but even Brent was a little concerned. Also, he and I were the local boys, and Brent essentially chaperoned my brother and friend down to Holden, as I went out over Spider Gap to my car. It was about ten miles out to the trailhead from our camp.

So, we packed up and headed out. As I got into the clouds, pic attached, I amazingly saw fresh boot prints in the snow, and size 15 boots at that. I looked up the mountain, to see who made them. I didn’t see anybody, and I did not see anybody pass by as we broke camp, but we weren’t looking for anybody, either. So, I sped up the mountain, and decided to see how fast I could get out. At Spider Gap, I saw who made those boots, and it was a man and woman, several hundred yards ahead of me. I caught up to them in Spider Meadow, as I recall. They were in their late 20s, and the woman was carrying a pack that had her infant son riding on her back. We chatted for a minute. They had spent the night at Lower Lyman Lake. I told them that my pals chickened out because of the snow, and when I picked them up, I would tell them how a baby made it over Spider Gap that morning.

I power-hiked my way to the car, and got there four hours after I began at our camp. I drove home the three hours to Seattle, and the next morning I was driving three hours to Lake Chelan. The other three had a wonderful time. Holden is the epitome of mountain hospitality. They met the director of Holden Village at Hart Lake, who promptly welcomed them, they spent the night in Holden Village, and Brent mailed them a check when he got home.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This post will wrap up the 2005 Lyman trip for now. I am known as somebody who says that I will do something and then do it, and I will always be where and when I said I would be.

Lake Chelan is one of the world’s most beautiful lakes. It is essentially an inland fjord. At the southern end is the town of Chelan, which is a resort town. The southern shoreline, on both sides for a dozen or so miles, is settled with homes and resorts. The rest of the 50-mile-long lake is wilderness. I led a trip on the Chelan Crest in 1996. We took a float plane (the only float-plane ride of my life) to the trailhead at Prince Creek, and 40 glorious miles later, we came down Purple Pass to Stehekin (to a wonderful lunch and a shower) to the Lady of the Lake fast boat back. We didn’t see a soul for the first three days, and only three groups the entire trip.

When I made the high-tech money, my wife and I would take a three-day weekend to go to Chelan in early June, and stay at Campbell’s Resort. Attached is a pic from the balcony of our room at Campbell’s one of those years. Lake Chelan’s water looks like something out of the tropics, attached, but that color comes from the glaciers that feed the lake.

I attached a selfie that I took, looking over Spider Meadow, on that day out from Lyman Basin. I just looked up the day, and it was September 9, 2015, four years to the day after coming out on that first White Pass trip with Brent. Both were among the few high-points of my life during that monster of a midlife crisis. It felt like I had a spike in my chest the entire time. If I had not quit drinking at the end of 2000, just as my midlife crisis was cranking up, I might not have survived my midlife crisis or been so debilitated that I would be gone by now or on my way out.

So, on that Saturday morning, I drove three hours to Chelan to rendezvous with the boys coming on the Lady of the Lake from Holden (the landing is at Lucerne), and I arrived at the dock just as the boat came into view a couple of minutes from the dock. We had a celebratory lunch at Campbell’s, and I took everybody home. They had a marvelous time hiking out, staying in Holden, and taking the boat back.

One little Twilight Zone moment will end the Lyman trip. That friend from my teenage years stayed with me in Seattle for that Lyman trip, and as we prepared for the trip, I talked about my friend who was nearly killed by the truck-line, and he is the person who said, “Hey, I think that I know who you are talking about.” I showed him a picture of us, attached, and he said, “Yes, that is him.” My life is so full of “coincidences” like that, as I constantly feel the heavy hand of my “friends.” Time to go to work, as I work the seven-day weeks these days.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Let me take a brief break from writing about Brent, and cover some current events. Washington State was where the first American coronavirus patient was, and now, the first death in the USA has happened, literally a few miles from my home and across the street from where my wife works. So, an interesting week is coming up, as a state of emergency has been declared in Washington.

For the record, I began my fast back in January with the coronavirus also in mind. I wanted my immune system to be in tip-top condition for whatever might come on that front. The fast has gone well. I am no longer a fat old man (down 25 pounds from my peak weight, and 15 more to go), and I plan to keep the lard off permanently. I plan to fast for another month, and we’ll see how it goes.

The obscene farce that is the Assange extradition trial reminds me of when I read King Leopold’s Ghost. Key figures in bringing the Congo genocide of more than a century ago (and the USA has sponsored another one in the past generation, after murdering its first head of state) to public awareness were subsequently kangarooed into prison, such as E.D. Morel, as the British notion of “justice” was somewhere around China’s today. It not just Assange that is on trial today, but journalism itself, make no mistake about that, and Trump’s hypocrisy knows no bounds, but he is really just building on the work of Obama, Bush, etc. Crucifying whistleblowers and publishers of the leaked documents is the primary goal of the imperial class, so that they can commit genocide with impunity, and the media has been licking the hand that feeds them. Ed would have had a field day with what is happening, as would Orwell. Of course, I saw the media’s tender mercies during my first stint with Dennis, and nothing that the media could do since then could surprise me, but even I have been impressed with the steady stream of lies on Assange for the past decade.

For the record, I consider Assange to have been highly naïve (we all started out that way), playing rock star with his groupies. When you walk onto that stage, your behavior has to be far above reproach, and the way that he played rock star, with a groupie or two in every town, as he swashbuckled his way across the West, was just asking for it. If it was not a honeypot operation from the beginning, it was a great gift to those tasked with silencing him. You just can’t behave that way and play the game that Assange did. New Age gurus virtually all do that as a matter of course, but they are harmless to those in power. Assange was playing a different game. Nothing that Assange did was “wrong” or a crime, and certainly not publishing the Wikileaks docs, all the media’s smears aside. He has engaged in the journalism that the hacks attacking him can barely comprehend. He was playing the journalist game at the highest level, in the best tradition of holding government accountable, which in the USA was the point of the First Amendment.

The Bill of Rights has been under steady assault ever since it was written, going all the way back to the Sedition Act, and Assange is literally being prosecuted under the Espionage Act, which was odious when it was written more than a century ago. We have never really had freedom of speech in the USA, and even the pretense of it is under siege today. If the French come to the rescue, it will be ironic indeed. Here is a good place to read up on the Assange trial. Consortium News was one of Ed’s favorite sources late in his life.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I’ll attach one last picture of Brent in the many meadows of Lyman Basin. Trips just don’t get much better than that. Our trip was only a few months after my first visit to Gilliland’s Ranch, and I took nine of us there the next year, including a Boeing pal who was never the same after that first trip. He and his wife came along, and also the next year, as did Brent. Brent’s wife came along on that 2006 trip, and a picture of them in swings, at the llama ranch that we stayed at the year before, is attached, with Mount Adams in the background. Other than not seeing much, except for James and myself, it was a nice little weekend getaway from Seattle.

You can see a pal in various photos with Brent, and I attached some more. I took him on a backpack in 1993, and we have hiked ever since. That woman in one attached picture was an Argentinian ultramarathon runner who did stuff like run over the Andes, running for more than 100 miles. On that hike, a month after our 2006 visit to James’s ranch, where that attached photo is from, she asked me about the safety of being a woman alone on the local trails, and I told her that I never heard of an issue. Trailhead robbing of cars is all that I had heard of, so she had nothing to worry about. Well, as my “friends” often do, as I spoke those words, a mother and daughter were murdered on a trail the day before, and it made the news the day after that I spoke those words of assurance. For the rest of that summer, if I met a woman on the trail, she would not make eye contact with me. That is still the only incident like it that I ever heard of on the trails up here, but it spooked hiking women, and to this day, seeing women alone on the trails, without big dogs with them, is uncommon, even on today’s conga line trails.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

In 2006, I was in a bad place, for a number of reasons. Professionally, I was doing fine. I had stopped drinking several years earlier, but the relentless pace of my high-tech job took its toll. The NEM disaster was a couple of years previously, and I had no contact with Brian since he moved to South America, had not interacted with the public in four years, and had not spoken to Dennis for five years, ever since I saw him wrestling with a cameraman on what Dennis later called his “anger and bitterness” tour. Dennis actually made the local papers a year or two previously, on another barnstorming tour that came though Seattle, but he played to maybe 50 people that time, not the 500 that accompanied his 1996 tours, so the papers said (some pal let me know about its being in the papers – otherwise I would not have known), and I was kind of glad that I did not hear from him. As I stated, I was in a bad place.

In the spring of 2006, a close colleague’s wife suddenly died, just as they were about to begin a family. We will be close for life, and I helped him recover. Sometime around then, I wrote what was my most positive essay from those dark years, on what abundance really is. I eventually realized that virtually nobody could understand what it meant, and that essay was intended to help people understand. I also came to understand that almost nobody wanted to understand.

In July of 2006, I engaged Richard Stallman for about a month, after Krishna kept on me about the Free Software Movement for several years. Boy, was Stallman stuck, but it was typical, and I had been fielding reactions like his for many years by then.

One thing about Brent was that he always got Wade’s World, from the very beginning, and that had a lot to do with our friendship. There was none of that “skepticism” of the “smart,” no challenging the veracity of my experiences, which are admittedly hard to believe for most people, he was hip to Noam, and nothing about my ride stretched his worldview out of shape. Oh, he learned new stuff from me – who wouldn’t? – but it was just more grist for his mill.

However, there is a cost to understanding Wade’s World, as almost none of it can fit into cocktail conversation or what I have called “the braying of the herd” of American society, as virtually all that my fellow Americans seem capable of is parroting the propaganda, the kind that we all got from our cradles. It is just way too far out there for people to begin to wrap their heads around. Understanding how our world really works, and how almost nobody really cares how it really works, much less expend some effort to make it better, is one of the loneliest feelings on Earth, and I wonder how much that had to do with Brent’s suicide.

So, there I was, struggling with my monster of a midlife crisis, getting ready for another trip to White Pass with my brother and Brent, when my wife called me at work and announced that Dennis was at our home. I am going to write about that visit in a way that I have not done before.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

If I was at liberty to tell my entire story, it would be far more “unbelievable” than what I have publicly disclosed, but many of those “unbelievable” aspects of my journey are easily verified with just a little gumption. I mostly do not publish that information to protect both the innocent and the guilty, but I also do it so that the idly curious don’t get into trouble. In these lazy days of the Internet, most people seem to believe that “research” is surfing the Internet for ten minutes (or a Wikipedia article ). There are sanity-threatening and even deadly hazards for dabblers in this milieu.

Dennis’s story is far, far more dramatic than mine is. He should be dead dozens of times over, has been the subject of numerous smear campaigns, replete with TV shows that feature the lying Mr. Skeptic, etc. I am one of the few people on Earth who has even a vague understanding of Dennis’s journey, what he sought to accomplish, etc. There is a lot that he will likely never tell me, and that is OK. Those revelations wouldn’t change my journey’s primary lessons much, if at all.

When Dennis comes into my life, it is like a hurricane arrives, as he has never given up, and he keeps trying to get me to sign back up with him, even when I saw him in 2013. When my wife called me at work, to tell me that Dennis was at our home, my heart sank. I knew that he wanted something, and I was in no shape to provide whatever he was looking for. I left work a little early to go deal with him, and as I walked in the door, Dennis sat at my desk, talking with my wife and brother.

We had our obligatory bear hug, and it is always good to see Dennis, but within ten seconds, I asked what he was doing there, and I obviously meant business. He replied with his invitation to the White House, and I instantly declined it. I am also about the only person outside of his wife that he trusts, and he asked me to be on the board of his new company, and I instantly declined that, too. Dennis got the message. For the rest of his visit, we just talked, mostly about his adventures since we talked last. If Joe Average heard 10% of what we talked about, his head would explode. The life of Indiana Jones is not easy to comprehend.

I’ll get into his adventures a little more than I usually do in these posts.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

What Dennis and I have is closer than family, and closer than friendship. What we shared really goes beyond words. He is the 800-pound gorilla of my life, and Mr. Professor and I carried Dennis’s spears through the darkest days of his odyssey, and rescued him from the clutches of Mr. Deputy and friends, who were compensated very handsomely to take us out. Dennis considered me his protégé long ago, but I could never do what he did. You really had to see him in action to believe it. There is a great deal that Dennis will never tell me, which is part of the game that he plays. Those secretive ways really cost me long ago, I decided that playing secrecy games was antithetical to any effort to make a dent, and I do my best not to play them. However, those around me don’t want to be in the global spotlight, and I keep a lot private, to protect them and the innocent and the guilty that I encountered on my journey, from the hit men and women to those relative few who comported themselves honorably, etc.

Dennis attracted the attention of the GCs at least in Seattle, and perhaps earlier. He also attracted the interest of the national oligarchy and local ones. He has had a United States Senator standing in his living room, trying to advise him in his battles with the local oligarchy, American presidents knew him by name, and so on. Billionaires would swarm him when he was riding high, national TV shows would smear him, etc. I would later see similar encounters with people such as Greer and Brian. When you put on UFO or free energy conferences, the GCs and other interests will be in the audience, as well as hit men and women, opportunists, groupies, gawkers, and so on. There will be sting operations that target you, raids, murder attempts, etc. In a gathering of a thousand, maybe one or two will have the right stuff. Those are just the numbers. It is not for the faint of heart, and I really began wondering what the point was, other than going through the meat grinder.

Over the years, a few times, Dennis and I have sat and talked about the events of our journey. Mostly, it has been me listening to Dennis’s latest adventures, but not always, and there were times when it was me talking for hours. My journey was educational, too, in ways that Indiana Jones could not slow down for long enough to experience. Being on the sidelines could be as educational as being on center-stage, in ways. But Dennis’s odyssey provided most of the key data points for how I learned how our world really worked. Studying the work of Noam and Ed was just icing on the cake in ways, from an academic’s perspective, on aspects of how it works.

I have written a little about Bush’s energy advisor, who was arranging for Dennis’s eve-of-the-election demonstration of his technologies. For me, it was a bizarre contrast. Bush is the greatest war criminal of the 21^st century so far, and some choir-boy academic was his energy advisor, writing his speeches for him. Dennis had Bush’s attention, then David Rockefeller got involved, and Dennis was run out of the USA by the Obama administration, not Bush’s.

During his visit in 2006, Dennis talked about some of the attention that the Black and White Hats gave him. He said that that was the strangest of all. I am not at liberty to describe all of their machinations, but I’ll just acknowledge that they are very real, and Greer’s tales, and those of his Disclosure Project witnesses, dovetail very closely with what Dennis encountered, and as with Greer, we did not seek out the Black and White Hats, but they sought us out. All in all, we could have done without the attention, but it comes with the territory. Usually, they hang in the shadows, and if they mess with you, you rarely even know that you have been messed with. It is the extremely rare aspirant who survives the lower-level activities to become somebody that the White and Black Hats will openly intervene with, in which they essentially unmask themselves, to a degree, and let you know who they are. Dennis had several encounters like that over the years, and one day, I may be able to discuss those events in more detail.

Dennis should not have survived what happened in Ventura, as the prison officials repeatedly put Dennis in position to be murdered by the inmates, and we will never know how much was just the free-lance evil that has a happy home in such environments, and how much was intervention from the higher levels of the game, but the White Hats took notice. Dennis became one of their “contenders” to use as a front man in righting humanity’s ship, if it ever came to that.

The billionaire stories are common enough. Geez, could they talk big, and had billions of dollars to back up their talk, but not one of them ever came through with a penny, even those so-called “philanthropists.” They are a bunch of phonies. “Rich philanthropist” is an oxymoron, like saying “capitalist democracy.” At best, those billionaires are waiting like vultures, looking for the opportunity to swoop in and take over the effort, and become the world’s first trillionaire for bringing free energy to the world. In Brian’s early days in the free energy milieu, one zillionaire openly stated exactly that, and Dennis told me story after story over the years of the billionaires who talked big but never delivered. Greer told similar tales, and I encountered them regularly amongst other fellow travelers. It is seductive to think that some billionaire is going to cut the big check and take us all to Oz, but it won’t work that way. When a rich man does sincerely get involved, he gets set straight, and pronto, and goes scurrying back to his mansion.

During that 2006 visit, I heard more stories like that, heard about Bush’s energy advisor, and so on. In ways, I was more interested in hearing how his daughters were doing, and it was the first time that we talked since Mr. Professor died. Those were more important issues to me than those hot-air billionaires or what the White and Black Hats were up to.

So, Dennis’s visit ended, and he began raising hell once more. In early 2009, when I read the FTC’s charges, with their artful lies and the rest, I just thanked my lucky stars that I declined Dennis’s offer to get involved with him again. The feds would have arrived at my home if I had, and I did not need any more of that in my life.

Dennis’s visit was kind of the last straw for my midlife crisis, and a few days later was my trip to White Pass with Brent and my brother. I am attaching some more images from that trip, and that picture of me in the meadow at our camp is from that trip, as is that picture with Brent and me, with Glacier Peak peeking over the ridge. While I always wished Dennis the best, his visit left me in agony, and being at White Pass with Brent helped, exactly five years since our previous trip to White Pass. I am also attaching a pic from the 2001 trip, of my haul after picking blueberries for a few hours. Brent was a man’s man, strong and silent, but his presence was a helpful one, as we sauntered around the meadows around White Pass.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Not long after Dennis’s visit and my return from White Pass, my wife began doing what she also insisted on in 1991: that I get trauma therapy. I did, going to the same therapist that I sent my widowed friend to, and it worked. The clouds soon began to part on that monstrous midlife crisis, and by end of 2006, it had finally ended, after about seven years of constant emotional agony. It probably began during that summer of 1999, as I studied World War II and the Holocaust.

I saw the Savings and Loan Scandal from the inside, before it became a scandal, and in early 1990, I had my future wife sell her house just before the bottom dropped out in the real estate market. I tried to talk a colleague out of buying a house then, but he just had to, and lost his life’s savings in the collapse in a few years, and got a divorce as his life unraveled. I got my first Internet job in 1999, as the dot.com boom was reaching insane levels, and I told everybody who would listen that the shakeout would be brutal. It was. In 2004, when I began seeing bumper stickers that advertised buying houses with no money down, I knew that another real estate crash was coming, and told everybody who would listen. Some did. These manias and crashes were primarily caused by the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve, and this time, all of the world’s central banks are involved, and the coming crash will dwarf the previous ones. It is all literal insanity, and we are on the brink of the next crash.

In the Fifth Epoch, there won’t be money, speculative manias, and the like, but in our world of scarcity and fear, and economic systems that run on greed, this craziness will continue. By 2007, my midlife crisis was over and I began to engage the public again, to only find that trolls dominated all Internet forums that I participated in, where I saw my work being discussed. Not only did the trolls dominate, they worked with the forum admins to kick me out of those forums. It was surreal. In 2007, I began the studies that resulted in my big essay, although in 2007, I was not sure what that would look like. I decided that I would not participate in forums, unless it was one that I ran, and devoted my “spare” time to studying and the occasional essay, while I prepared for something, but not being quite sure what it would be.

I wrote this essay in the summer of 2007, which brought Brian back into my life, and in early 2008, I did my first public interview, thanks to Brian. As an aside, it looks like Brian’s site is gone forever, after my offers to host his site were repeatedly rejected. Well, his work will live on in his books and in my work. Nobody else is carrying his torch that I can see.

By the summer of 2007, the collapse had begun, and my company was one of the first to feel the pain, losing $32 million on “good as cash” investments that Lehman Brothers sold us on, to get another half percent in interest. If I had been allowed to snoop into that area, as an expansion of my duties, I could have prevented it, and that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

In that summer of 2007, the previous four years of unending frenzy at my day job took their toll, and I began to burn out. But I hiked as much as I could, and Brent and I got out pretty regularly, but it was in those days, I believe, that Brent began leading larger groups. He led an Internet board that had more than 15,000 members by the time of his death, and hiking with groups of 20 people was not my style. I did it a few times with Brent, but that was about it. However, we still got out for backpacks, and Brent would take me out a few times a year, with just the two of us, or sometimes with a few other buddies.

In 2007, I went to James Gilliland’s ranch for the third year in a row. The first night, I was there with that Boeing pal who was never the same after the 2005 sighting, and we got to see the “flash on the mountain” for a few hours. It is another “anomaly” that the debunkers have a hard time explaining away, so it is best ignored in debunking circles. Brent did not see what I did on the 2006 trip, and he came for the second day on the 2007 trip, and also did not see anything. The next day, I led a trip to Indian Heaven, for our annual backpack. Salt is the bane of my diet, and if I have much salt, I will get sick, usually with a sore throat, sinus infection, and sometimes the flu. It would often hit around Labor Day, as the summer waned, and it happened that year, and I led the trip while sick. That was not the only time like that, leading a trip while sick with a fever. I hope to avoid doing that again. Getting too old for that.

The second day was crappy weather, while I stayed in my tent, trying to stay warm, but the rest was glorious and might have been my brother’s favorite backpack, and that is saying something. That first picture of Brent in my raft is taken from that first day on that trip. That picture of Brent and me at the Indian Racetrack sign is from a few days later.

We camped at stunningly beautiful lakes, owned all of them, had supreme views at times (I saw Mount Adams, Mount Hood, and Mount Saint Helens on that trip, and once saw all three on the same day), the berries were ripe, I saw more mushrooms on that trip than I ever saw before or since (white people should not pick mushrooms, but those fly agarics could be nothing other than those), and it was another fabulous trip. It was also the last backpack that we took during Brent’s heavy days.

Best,

Wade

[amor]

I once worked for a man who engaged me on the subject of Free Energy devices, and he finally said there is no such thing possible as FREE energy. I replied, "you are wrong, it is the Universe."

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Amor:

150 years ago, during the USA’s Gilded Age, as it industrialized and was beginning to realize the benefits of oil, if you had mentioned nuclear energy, everybody would have looked at you like you were crazy. Heck, Edison was lighting up Menlo Park with his lightbulb while the world’s scientists called him a fraud and his lightbulb an “idiotic idea.” A generation later, scientists were declaring human-powered flight “impossible,” and more than two years after the Wright Brothers first flew, Scientific American semi-ridiculed the persistent reports of their flights as a “fable” and said that if they were really flying, they would have read about it in the newspapers.

Late in his life, Brian said that the blindness and denial of scientists today was worse than it was in the Wright brothers’ time. The human ego likes to be right, and scientists like to think that they know it all (the new priesthood), when we have barely scratched the surface of understanding how the universe works. Every generation has its self-satisfied intellectuals who think that they have it all figured out, or are close to it. In the Fifth Epoch, that conceit might finally die. We can only hope. The truly great scientists knew that we hardly know anything at all, while the hacks think that we have it all figured out. The ranks of organized skepticism are filled with hacks like that, and I consider organized skepticism today to be a criminal enterprise.

When I hear scientists and others declare free energy “impossible” and “contrary to the laws of physics,” I am not sure whether I want to laugh or cry at their stupidity. If they ever got out of their armchairs and actually tried to do something in the free energy field, they would soon begin to learn how the world really worked, if they survived the experience, not the TV or science-class version that they have guzzled like Kool-Aid, and they might begin to lose some of their naïveté.

Free energy and antigravity technology are older than I am, and quite a few people in my circles have seen it in action, both at the garage inventor-stage, like Sparky had, and underground technology shows of commercial-ready stuff, like my friend got.

The principles behind the technologies that my friend saw renders the corpus of today’s physics into quaint notions of how the universe operates, and future scientists will look at today’s state of science like how we look today at the state of science 150 years ago.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

So, in 2007, my midlife crisis was finally over, and Brent had turned 42 just before our Indian Heaven trip, which was my age when my midlife crisis began going into overdrive. I also began to have problems with my weight, and it may have been on that Indian Heaven trip that I told Brent that those 35 extra pounds that he carried around would begin to catch up with him in his 40s. The next thing I knew, he lost those 35 pounds and kept them off for the rest of his life. He had to make a serious and permanent lifestyle change to accomplish that, and his wife did, too, and lost maybe 25 extra ones and kept them off. Years later, I asked Brent what inspired him to do that, and he cited my observation.

As I have been writing this series of posts on Brent, I have realized that in no small measure, Brent helped save my life. When I met him, I was still drinking heavily, as my midlife crisis began to really take off, and as I look back, that weekly hiking that Brent and I began in December of 1999 helped me finally defeat the bottle a year later. If I had not defeated the bottle, I might not be here today, and if Brent had not introduced me to year-round hiking, my hiking career might be finished by now. So, while Brent helped save my life, I couldn’t help save his, which will haunt me for the rest of my days.

The next summer, I took my brother to Surprise and Glacier Lakes, and Brent and his newest hiking pal surprised us by hiking in from the east side and meeting us at our camp. I am attaching a picture from the shore of Glacier Lake, and you can see the new, slim Brent. Another shirtless photo of him is here and attached, as he took me to a new hiking spot. Not long after that, our day hikes declined in their frequency, as Brent began leading those large groups every weekend. Around the same time was that disaster of his introducing his young relative to me.

In 2009, I was busy with trips to New Mexico and Hawaii, visiting family, I got evicted from my house in June of that year, in the mayhem of the Financial Crisis, and sprained my ankle hiking in the Sierras, which ended my hiking season early, and I did not get out for a backpack that year. I took my Uncle George on his last hike that year. Brent always made time for me each year, for some day hikes and backpacks, even in his rising celebrity as a hiking guide.

Brent seemed to have licked his midlife crisis before it began. The job where I met him he had for his entire career, and around 2009, he began looking for a new job. I advised him that it was a good idea, as he could get “typecast” by having the same job for so long, and that office environment was the epitome of what comics such as Dilbert depicted.

I am attaching one last picture of that glorious Lyman trip, and a trip to one of my favorite meadows, in the years before Brent lost that weight.

Best,

Wade

[Bill Ryan]

Wade, here's maybe an interesting question for you. I've been thinking about asking you since your recently posted very interesting and sometimes exciting hiking adventures. (Many of them!)

You must have thought about this many times. Hiking presents so many analogs to life. You check the weather forecast, make sure your companions have all the info that you have, maybe including their own maps and safety equipment, and you probably tell someone where you're going, especially if you're on your own. But unexpected things still happen. (All the time! )

So — how have you managed risk in your life? What are your strategies, and what have you learned?