After a long night’s drive, it was time for coffee-and to make a decision. Stump, a muscular 23-year-old with shaggy, dark hair, climbed stiffly from the driver’s seat, bent at the waist, and massaged both knees. Just over the horizon, crews were laying the blacktop for Interstate 40, which, in bypassing the unincorporated community, would reduce Glenrio to a ghost town by year’s end. The day prior, he’d departed Aspen, Colorado, after a winter of ski bumming. ![]() On a raw spring day in 1972, Terry “Mugs” Stump pulled his Ford panel van off the road, his bald tires pawing for traction. 30)-or a nearby border town, depending on which of Stump’s contemporaries you ask-was the scene of a significant moment in American alpinism. Even its name is a pastiche of half English, half Spanish that means “valley river.” But unassuming Glenrio (pop. With a surveyor’s mistake in 1859, Glenrio was cleaved down the middle by the border. The town of Glenrio, sitting astride the boundary of Texas and New Mexico, is a model of confliction. The individual breakages increase exponentially until the ligament explodes with an audible “snap.” Slowly, at first, the ligament’s millions of tiny collagen fibers begin to fray. When strained by 485 pounds of force, the ACL is stretched twice as tight as a piano string. For the late, legendary alpinist Mugs Stump, who almost became an NFL football player, that thing was the body itself-in his case the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. ![]() If you pull on something hard enough, it breaks. This story originally appeared in Climbing No. Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members!
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