A Colorado dad says his 8-year-old is the youngest to scale El Capitan, but did they really climb it?
I found the idea quite funny that an 8-year-old can do it. He’s the youngest but I don’t know at what age you actually hit the peak.
Kirk S. Anderson
San Diego
BAD: How does your 8-year-old climb the Great Wall?
I always thought I had a kid who would be the youngest, but my 8-year-old is the youngest. And he didn’t climb it. He did a little rock climbing. But climbing is the easiest thing you can do, except for driving and having babies.
I don’t know whether you can get the full experience from a rock wall, but it would be fun to be 8 years old and go up the Great Wall.
Climbing is the closest you can get to a spiritual experience. You have the thrill of conquering a physical challenge, but you also have the spiritual experience of conquering something bigger than you.
I don’t think we know enough about mental development to say there is a cutoff age, but no one under 20 is going to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. You will get a lot more into it as you get older.
Bob Weil
Gresham
Is America’s top outdoor sportsman, Michael J. “Mike” Schumacher, a hero to you?
No, he’s not. Like most Americans, I am apathetic about America’s national sport — this American institution of auto racing that we call motor sports. It is a sport in which I have no great interest, no affinity for, and no place in this national sports hierarchy.
It is a sport in which, though there are times and places to admire the man who was driving that red convertible as it made its way through the narrow streets of Detroit, we can’t allow ourselves to do so because it seems so petty when compared with what we are seeing.
I
