Humans are scouring Planet Earth right now looking for unclimbed mountains, cliffs, and boulders. In the last couple decades, even the most remote corners of the globe have been explored and new climbing routes established. What will quench our desire for virgin rock when everything has been climbed and the new adventurers just being born now will want to leave their own mark?
Well, for starters there is the Moon, which last night hung almost full over the eastern Colorado horizon, shiny as a well-worn peso in an illegal immigrant's pocket. Right now the Chinese are making plans to send people to the Moon, so will America be far behind? Americans were, after all, the original Moon colonists.
We need NASA to get us back there to the lunar surface and establish a presence like Clavius Base in the classic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. From an underground base like Clavius, astronaut-climbers could explore the barren surface, finding all kinds of ancient rocks to climb on the edges of craters and in the mountains of the Moon. Plus the decreased Moon gravity--83.3% less than on the Earth's surface--would undoubtedly make dynos easier and landings softer. Gravity, after all, is not always our friend on Earth.
Here's a great photograph taken almost 40 years ago by an Apollo 17 Hasselbad camera of astronaut-geologist Harrison H. Schmitt in December, 1972, next to a giant Moon boulder. Schmitt took a ride in the lunar dune buggy, driving around the Valley of Taurus-Littrow landing site. Schmitt spent 75 hours on the Moon with fellow astronaut Gene Cernan and were the last two astronauts to visit it.
Astronaut Schmitt called the views "awe-inspiring" and later wrote that it was only when he left the safety of the Challenger module "that the full and still unexpected impact of the awe-inspiring setting hit me: a brilliant sun, brighter than any desert sun, fully illuminated valley walls outlined against a blacker than black sky, with our beautiful, blue and white-marbled Earth hanging over the southwestern mountains." The astronauts drove as far as seven kilometers away from the module. On one excursion they studied "the large boulders that had rolled and bounced down the north wall of the valley."
Okay, so who wants to be the first lunar tourist-climber? First, you better be rich, really rich. Second, you better be young because it's going to be awhile before there are commonplace tourist trips to the Moon. A few years back a company in Virginia was trying to sell fly-by trips to the Moon for a cool $100 million aboard a Russian rocket by 2008. Uh, didn't happen. If you want to be a Moon climber in the forseeable future, better get scientific training and become an astronaut. If that doesn't happen, maybe going to Craters of the Moon in Idaho will be the second best thing....
Photographs above: In 1972 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt wanted to go bouldering on the Moon's surface but, unfortunately, was wearing the wrong kind of rock shoes...er, Moon boots. Photographs courtesy NASA
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