Clueless Shopping

Among my many deficits when it comes to climbing real mountains is a nearly complete lack of equipment. I have some nice, heavyweight Merrell boots (and they're in remarkably "like new!" condition) that I bought fifteen or twenty years ago, but JohnTheClimbingMentor says they are not really stiff enough to wear with crampons and, oh, I might end up with a touch of frostbite. And, as my brother-in-law will attest, my little tent (a state of the art lightweight tent in 1977) has such a foul smell that, when he borrowed it back in 2000, campers in adjoining campsites were making jokes about it.

This was in Michigan, where smell is no laughing matter.

And then there's the question of sunglasses.

From what JohnTheClimbingMentor says, spending time on a glacier at 14,000 feet without special mountaineering glasses is asking for a fine case of snow blindness. This is not always a good thing when you're walking around on icy inclines somewhere up in the jet stream, surrounded by bottomless crevasses.

In fact, the intensity of ultraviolet rays increases 5% for every 1,000 vertical feet of elevation gain. So, you know, I'm convinced.

So I get my eyes examined, by a real eye doctor, and I start shopping for "real" mountaineering glasses, ideally ones that I can later use when I'm, you know, turning the compost pile and stuff. So now I've narrowed it down to two fashion choices: the Denali and the Zermat.

The denali says: modern fellow, reads a little non-fiction, hopes to drive a Miata one day.

The Zermat (which sounds like the Swiss town of Zermatt, one of my father's most memorable ski destinations) says: retro fellow, James Joyce on the mountaintop, hopes to eat pemmican and whale blubber one day, prefers "Touching the Void" to "Into the Wild," uses archaic diction about modern subjects ("I brook no quarrel with Thom Yorke's approach to popular music"), hopes to own a vintage pickup truck one day.

Guess which one I'm leaning toward?