Word: cliff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Frederick L. Dunn '51 was trapped last month on the vertical wall of a 700-foot cliff in British Columbia. Below him was a 500-foot sheer drop to a pile of avalanche rock and above him a 200-foot granite face; he had nothing to stand on but a rock ledge two feet wide. The sun had set and a blizzard was tearing about him, and there was only one thing Dunn conld do. He rolled out his sleeping bag and went...
They had more trouble getting back--like the two-foot ledge. "It was too dark to go on," says Dunn. "We tried to sleep on the side of the cliff. Nevison huddled into the wall and Scudder crouched by a crack. I stretched out on the ledge and lined up four rocks to keep me from falling." The cliff was no place for sleepwalkers...
...Sunday afternoon climbers, averaging half experts and half dudes, toss on backwoods clothing and 120 feet of coiled rope and ride the subway to Quincy under the disapproving glances of Bostonian eyebrows. The quarry itself is a city of rock cliffs and groundwater lakes, where engineers built America's first cog railway in 1836 and a local murderer dumped a dead salesman in 1948. Old-timers in the Har- vard crowd simply sidle up to a cliff and start, walking up the wall in a manner that is quite disconcerting to observe...
...mountaineer reaches two feet above his head and pulls himself up by his fingertips; he stands with one foot on an inch-wide ledge looking for another-inch-wide ledge; he jams his fist into a crack for a hold fast. From the top of the cliff another mountaineer, who has gone up the sane way, "belays" the climber with nylon rope in case he should fall. From the bottom of the cliff the rest of the party offers verbal encouragement...
They rode up & down the cliff in ancient funiculars (the "Inclines"), jammed the buses and trolley cars which filled the cobblestone, alley-like streets. The luckier and better-paid lived in nearby suburbs. Most of the wealthy had fled to the distant suburbs of Sewickley Heights, Fox Chapel, or to Rolling Rock, 50 miles to the east in the mountains near the Pennsylvania Turnpike...