"Got one!" he said one morning, as if snatching a trout from a stream. "Canyon's called Oronga." Which inaptly means "sleep" in the Aborigine language.

No one had successfully completed a descent into Oronga. Even today, in our nothing's-left-everything's-been-done world, the Blue Mountains are still not explored-out. No matter that they're a mere two-hour train ride from four million people. Five years earlier, Rick and some mates had attempted Oronga but had been turned back by a drop so deep they couldn't see the bottom.

"Was one a them misty mornin's," Rick said, "and the stream fell over the cliff and just vanished into the clouds."

Rick and I did Oronga, top to bottom and back to the car, in a big, eight-hour loop. It started with a short rappel through overhanging vines, followed by a rap from a limb into an abyss, a dozen passageways as dark and dank as dungeons, four consecutive long rappels down overhanging rock, and an unbelievable bushwhack out in which Rick's legs were so severely gouged and scratched that I could follow the drips of blood.

"Whut a bahgain," Rick roared, tossing me a beer from behind the car seat.

During the hike out I learned that Rick had been a freelance computer programmer since the dawn of the damn machines. "Don't like to work more'n couple days a week." Which left time for raising two sons and one daughter, reading voluminously, and writing books on subjects other than canyoning, including A Religion Without a God (a treatise on the faith of atheists) and Let's Spel Lojicly: Wi Stic tu the Hard Old Way ov Spelling? (an argument for the simplification of English orthography). He had also managed to lead 13 trekking expeditions to the Himalayas, climb the Matterhorn twice, and drive overland from Munich to Cape Town.

"We got ourselves into heaps of pickles in Africa. Mighty! Spent a whole month in jail in the Congo. They thought we were bloody mercenaries. Ten days in a hole in Brazzaville, and they shipped us down the big river—Pygmies would paddle out and give us bananas—to Pointe-Noire, where we spent another three weeks in jail before gettin' out. At any one time we were always in at least two pickles. Tryin' to get ourselves out of one of 'em while straightaway pullin' ourselves into another."