Denali was spontaneous folly. If I had been going about this business in a logical way, El Popo and Pico de Orizaba would have preceded it. In truth, my choices were dictated for the most part by the availability of a competently led expedition to a suitable peak at a convenient date. These factors in combination brought me in August of 1991 to Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains. These were the dying days of the Evil Empire, and Moscow even in summertime was a cold, gray, dismal place. Bizarre, too. For instance, strict foreign-exchange restrictions complicated the simplest purchases. On a visit to Moscow’s Olympic Stadium I encountered a man selling lacquered boxes displayed on a blanket. After the usual haggling to set a price, he gave me my box and an empty cigarette pack and instructed me to walk around for a while before placing the agreed-upon amount of U.S. currency in the pack, which I was then to discard in some nearby bushes for him to retrieve. The leader of our climbing group was an unusual character named Sergio Fitz Watkins, who claimed to be part Mexican, part Apache and part something else.
