Mountaineering

The sight of any soaring bird - an eagle, hawk, or even a gull - is a special thrill that always stops me in my tracks. The hope that I might see an Andean condor, the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere, was a major incentive for my travels to Patagonia. In North American, the condor was nearly extinct by 1964. Our forefathers murdered them wholesale, out of sheer whimsy, or the mistaken thought that condors killed livestock. The only use of a dead condor, that I've heard of, were the quills of the large feathers that miners collected for stashing their gold dust.