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I am a retired business analyst who recently decided that 35 years designing production management software for the oil and gas industry was enough for most practical purposes, and it was time to just hang out in the Rocky Mountains and ski and hike for the rest of my life.
I have university degrees in chemistry and computer science, and professional certificates in petroleum production accounting, and petroleum contract and land administration, among others. At this point in my life they qualify me to baffle people with facts on topics they know nothing about.
Over the years, I worked for companies in Canada and the U.S., plus a brief but interesting stint in the U.K. I worked on a research project trying to find ways to produce the Athabasca Oil Sands. I helped design an emergency shutdown system for a poisonous gas field near a major city. I helped design an ice flow monitoring system that predicted when a billion dollar drilling platform in the Arctic Ocean would be crushed by ice. I have worked in a lot of remote places with really bad roads and really cold winters. I have also worked in Houston, which is the other extreme.
I grew up in a very different world. It was the (sort of) wild west. I learned to shoot a gun at six, and bought my own rifle at eight. My first school was a one-room country school with an outhouse out back and hot and cold running mice inside. (They later turned it into a museum). Then they struck oil and the oil companies built a pipeline right past our little school. Little did we know how it would affect our lives.
As my moniker would suggest, I spend most of my time in the Rocky Mountains. In this case, the Canadian Rockies as distinct from the American Rockies. (For details on how they differ, see Handbook of the Canadian Rockies by Ben Gadd). I'm active in the Alpine Club of Canada, but mostly I do backcountry skiing rather than climbing. When I'm out skiing, I carry a transceiver because of the avalanches and sometimes a rope because of the crevasses in the glaciers. I'm happily married but my wife goes places I don't dare so while she's out mountaineering I'm usually home adding some new features to the house.
There is a 9000 foot mountain behind the house I can be at the top of in three hours from the back door. There are grizzly bears in the back yard, and elk roaming the streets because the woods are full of wolves. I carry bear spray to go jogging because a grizzly killed a jogger on a local golf course last year, and a cougar picked off a local cross country skier a couple of years before. I've shot myself three times with the bear spray so I can confirm that it has no permanent effects, but it does bring tears to your eyes. Thank goodness I don't own a gun anymore. RockyMtnGuy 00:37, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
