How would we climb if we saw the rock, itself as sentient, what would it mean to touch the skin of deities?

into the realm of grey rock, pale dusk, and translucent stillness--into what I've come to call a glasslike clarity of being--that he first showed me, as a child, on trips to granite ranges.

Harvey, whose own satires were partly aimed at the destructive fallacies of dominant groups, would certainly have approved of such ingenious forms of resistance.

People responded with an outpouring of memes, T-shirts, songs, and mock memorials parodying the false story and demonstrating, as folklorist Timothy H. Evans observes, that at times the “lies of those in power could be mocked in a carnivalesque way.

In 2017, Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway cited a nonexistent “massacre” by Iraqi terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to try to justify a travel ban against immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Yet while Trump derided any realities he didn’t like as “fake news” and while right-wing conspiracy theories still surge across the internet, pro-democracy activists have also figured out ways to turn some hoaxes against their perpetrators.

False claims by then-president Donald Trump and others about widespread election fraud became a catalyst for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building in Washington, DC.

During the Trump era, Americans confronted avalanches of fabricated information designed to undermine the credibility of journalism and the survival of democracy itself.

A year after the 2016 US presidential election, Kevin Young wrote in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, “Today the hoax mostly traffics in pain.”

“I don’t think many people get the chance to feel that way about anything,” [Mike] Layton recalled. He felt fortunate to have been a part of the history of Southeast Mox, to have been immersed in that “excitement of adventure, the beauty of such a remote area and the camaraderie of friendship.”

..Compared to the pernicious false stories of our current time, Harvey [Manning]’s 1960s hoaxes have an aura of innocence. The climbers lured to Harvey’s “Great Wall of No Name Peak” had an unforgettable experience of a wild and beautiful mountain.

Excerpt of one of the brief modern US political sections (in what is otherwise a mountaineering hoax and imagination book, though dealing with larger historical issues of colonialism, mapping and counter-mapping, and so on) below:

Anyway, my book still appears to be selling--I noticed today it was back in the top 100 for Amazon's Mountaineering Kindle list (perhaps briefly, but perhaps it will return again), though I think the hardcover version is better.

While he created hoaxes, he also left clues to solve them and hoped that they might serve as forms of resistance against serious, misleading ideas that devalued wild places, put ego above nature, and threatened public lands.

What would Northwest mountaineer and conservationist Harvey Manning [my protagonist] do? I often ask myself.

www.mountaineers.org/books/books/...

until I feel small and aglow, a brief light flaring at the edge of autumn, at the ending of the day.