Editor:

Years ago I wrote Robert Redford a letter and he replied. That’s a big event for nobody who writes a somebody. Word was going around he was planning to make a movie about a mountain climber friend I knew in Europe in the 1960s.

Gary Hemming was a colorful figure, especially in France where he appeared on the front of Paris Match a few times because of a daring solo rescue of three German climbers stuck on a ledge in Chamonix, beating the local Mountain Rescue team by about a day. Gary was a climber’s version of Henry Miller, living under bridges in Paris when not getting fit in the Calonques in southern France, climbing and visiting friends all over the continent. He’d breeze in unexpectedly, stay a while and pay his way by helping with chores or like a bard, regaling his hosts w

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