S�p������ September 2016
www.MoonValleyTattler.com
VOL 36 No. 9
Taylor King - Humanitarian Trip to Tonga B Y TAY L O R K I N G
This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Tonga with a group of kids from all over the country. It was one of the coolest experiences of my entire life. The culture in Tonga is not what I originally anticipated. When we first arrived in the country, we drove through fields of palm trees and little houses. The homes there are nothing near our luxuries. They’re extremely small and modest. Most of them do not have doors. Most people walk around without shoes and appear to be pretty dirty. My first thought was, “how sad that
these people have to live like this”, but I was completely wrong. The people of Tonga are the HAPPIEST and FRIENDLIEST people I have ever come in contact with. Driving through the town, people just smile and wave! Others greet you with a “Fefe Hake!” Which means “hey, how are you?!” It was nearly impossible to be in a bad mood while I was there. Tongans are extremely humble. We visited a man who was going through some tough times, and all he could do was apologize for not having anything to give us. Our main service project was to build a home for a family of 6 boys, 1 girl, and the parents. They were previously living in a little wooden shack with palm leaves and trash bags as their roof.
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Pointe Tapatio Hiker Lives to Talk About It B Y S U S A N M E R C E R H I N R I C H S , R E P O R T E R , T H E M O O N VA L L E Y TAT T L E R
He created a recipe for a potential disaster. • Take one solo hiker. • Add in the fact no one knew where he was going exactly. • Mix in a cell phone that had just one bar of connectivity in time of need. • Fold in some steep terrain on a cold-to-cool January day. • Sprinkle the mixture with some loose rocks on an 8% grade. This was a seemingly terrible recipe. But he left out one key ingredient: inexperience. But what a great ingredient to omit. Its very lack proved to be what possibly saved his life. Pointe Tapatio retiree Rick Kamel possessed the critical hiking know-how that allowed him to live through a harrowing experience. So he lives to share his story about what could have been an untimely end to his time on this planet. “It was the fastest and hardest I’ve ever fallen,” Kamel says of his tumble during a descent from Turtlehead Peak in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, about 35 miles west of downtown Las Vegas, NV. “I stayed in control; I never panicked. I knew the best way to get off that mountain was to stay calm.” The former Michigan and Chicago resident credits some five decades of hiking experience leading him to become “very prepared.” So turn back the hands of time to that January day. Kamel says he felt ready for Turtlehead Peak hike.
Those many years of personal training for what is described as a difficult, strenuous climb, in hiking literature, assisted him in climbing up to the mountain’s summit, with an elevation gain of 2000 feet from its base. Kamel works out regularly with free weights; logs in about 35 miles of weekly hiking in and around our Valley of the Sun, among other locales, and he does yoga, too. In addition, he says he’d already hiked Turtlehead Peak with a group of mountaineering enthusiasts. And for this excursion, he says he felt “more than confident in my ability to reach the peak,” during the course of his annual personal physical-fitness assessment. Starting out on a somewhat overcast, 24-degree Fahrenheit morning that January 14th Thursday, The former journalist and public-relations agency executive says the climb up the mountain was a good exercise and that he felt confident in his trekking abilities. He says he’d brought all the provisions an
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