A few words about how Rich and I met and some of the things I remember most: We met in the early 1970s on a construction job site in Jasper Alberta. As time went along, we settled to our jobs and shared a rental unit (that's the best description I can come up with for what may have been called an apartment) in a building at the east end of town I think called Fort Point Lodge. I met Rich's cousin Don (a ski lift operator) and a couple other guys from the Jasper job pool. We split the rent and food costs among the four of us. I can't quite remember when Wayne came on the scene. A ski buddy Rich met on the slopes and invited to sleep on the floor to save money I guess. Rex Harrison was another construction worker staying in a different room # at the lodge. We all got along well enough to hike and ski the mountain parks for several years. Rich even taught me to down hill ski. I mostly did cross country because it was cheaper. Rich said "sure I'll show you how, its easy, I even have a pair of skis you can borrow". The skis were loooong Head or Hart skis. Almost as tall as I am and I'm 6'5". After two painful runs on the beginner slope of Marmot Basin ski area, Rich says "ok lets take the chair lift to the top". Am I ready for that, I asked with shaking knees? "Sure, you can't spend your whole life on the bunny slope with the kids". What takes a normal skier, a regular skier, a good skier, ten or twenty minutes of a fast, and fun, run down the mountain, took me more than two hours to do. My skis crossing, poles smacking me in the face, swearing out loud, falling, getting up, more swearing, falling. I'm no quitter, if this is what my good friend says I have to do to be as good as him, then by gum, I'm gonna do it! So after a couple hours of wilderness torture I fell one helava airborne spill that landed me face down, both skis stabbed into the snow side by side with my boots about two feet off the snow. I reached around and tried to hit my boots to knock them from the bindings but couldn't quite hit hard enough to do it. While staring strait down figuring my next move and cursing Rich, who was nowhere to be found, the boots of a ski patrol showed up in my side vision. Bending over to catch my glance, he asked if I were alright. He told me he witnessed the crash way up on the slopes and had to meet the survivor. "Why haven't your bindings released"? he asked. I mumbled how I was wondering the same thing myself. He side stepped over and with a hard slap to each boot, knocked me out of the skis. "You better get those bindings adjusted better or you'll break both legs". Thanks, I said, I know just who to talk to about that. I went to Rich when I got down to the ski lodge and told the story. "Sure I can loosen them up a bit". "I was wondering what happened to you". "Did you have fun"? The next day we went up again and did a little better taking only 2 hours and 29 minutes to make a run instead of 2 hours and 30 minutes. This time my skis released on almost every turn spilling my butt onto the hill. Those were the days we had to have each ski tethered to our legs so as to not have a runaway ski zipping down the slopes. Rich was a great guy but not a good teacher. I was learning fast though and met up with Rich's cousin Don's future wife, Annelle, who was a ski instructor. She asked, as I was adjusting my socks, why my leg shins were all cut up and bleeding. I told her the part about how Rich loaned me his 305cm skis and how the bindings were too tight and I stuck in the snow and the ski patrol guy rescued me and Rich loosened the bindings too much and the skis came off and windmilled around and chopped me in the shins with the sharp metal edges and cut me to ribbons and please can you help me please please please? She took pity on me and in a few lessons taught me how to make a run from top to bottom in...well...a lot less than two hours I'll tell ya! Rich had a funny way about him getting so picky and so technical on every topic. We started calling him "Too technical Rich", how he would make mountains out of mole hills. On one of our hikes we stopped for a break along side a fast moving creek. Wayne, Rex and I started skipping flat rocks across to see who could make it to the other side. Everybody knows how to do it, ya know? Rich wouldn't join in, stating how if everyone came along and did that, it would dam up and change the course of the creek! After we all looked at him like he had two heads, we pointed out that except for the four of us, "everyone" would probably not show up to re-engineer the water shed. We also pointed out that , we, the un-technical types, noticed how the snow and ice and glaciers and tectonic plate shifting had been doing exactly that for....BILLIONS of years! We kept on skipping our rocks. Rich, after much mumbling and thinking his technical thoughts, picked up a few rocks and said, "oh what the heck" and joined us. All and all, he was a good hearted friendly guy.....Bob