Beginning with a single step on the journey of many thousand miles

Tomorrow morning is when I to head to Beijing. This is much of the same trip as I did last year, including going to Mount Everest (29,035 feet); my dad was a geologist, so I grew up with him explaining why the world looks the way it does. He became sick when I was 12 and died when I was 16, so I could only hope that somewhere in the ethersphere, his spirit knew how much those early lessons meant to me as I looked at the folded and crumpled landscape of the Himalayas.

When we stopped at the road side, little children often came up to our Landcruiser, looking to sell ammonites they’d found. What a amazing thought: the fossilized remains of sea life, lifted up to 17,000 feet and more, found casually on the ground 50 million years later to be offered up in tiny, dusty hands.