Gerard Fay

My first recollection of Ken was in the winter of 1989, the season after I moved to Connecticut. A group of us met at the Peoples Forest one evening after work for some ice climbing, he must have recognized I had some competency to climb ice as a couple of weeks later he invited me on a trip up to Smugglers Notch in VT for a weekend of ice climbing with himself, Jim Church and Mark Meany. I teamed up with ken that weekend, on the way up to the first climb of the weekend, talking, Ken remarked that he was thinking of replacing his ropes. We roped up for the climb and I was offered the first lead which I accepted. I took off up the climb and after only about five feet of climbing nailed the rope with the front point of my crampon, embarrassed, I struggled to disengage my crampon point from the rope and backed off. After retying into the rope above the damaged part I completed the climb to the first belay, Ken followed with no trouble until about ten feet off the belay where he nailed the same rope with his ice axe, apparently that was a first for both of us. On the way we laughed about it, Ken had his justification to replace his ropes since one was now about 20 ft shorter than the other. That weekend was the beginning of long friendship and over the next 10 years we had many rock, ice and mountaineering trips together and as a group.

One of Kens strong points was his ability to organize and he organized and ran some great mountaineering trips with meticulous planning and multiple objectives and backup plans. Many of the present CCM group had there first experience of the bigger mountains on one of Kens trips and I for one have great memories of those trips. They were intense, no sooner had one objective been achieved it was down, back to the cars and onto the next objective the same day. Although group size was limited ones ability to climb did not discount them and Ken welcomed and nurtured those with less experience.

Being in Ken’s company while climbing was always a trip, the sick jokes and when the climbing got tough the explicits came fast and furious, for those that didn’t know him they didn’t quite know what to do, for those that did, it was part of the game. I’ve missed Ken’s company, sharing a rope and his great trips these last couple of years and will continue to miss his company in the future years.