Get them when they are young then, so they get used to climbing.  I used to
have a guy who was in his late fifties who climbed everything.  He helped me
with things I didn't feel safe doing.  Our club had its own personal owned
tower on top of Squaw Mountain which is 35 miles south west of Denver.  Tons
of commercial repeaters, and about six ham repeaters at 11,500 feet.  When A
T and T bought the mountain top, they told everybody they had to take down
their personal club towers.  They would provide one tower.  All six ham
clubs, at that time, also had to use the same antenna because they wouldn't
allow separate ham antennas on their tower.  So, a bunch of guys went up to
Squaw one day.  It was fine down here but the wind was like a hundred mile
an hour gusts up their.  They had to take the tower down that day because
the company said they would dynamite any remaining towers the next day.
When you have a hundred foot tower and a couple hundred feet of hard line
and two antennas, one for 70 centimeters and one for 2 meters, you don't
think of just throwing it all away.  Well, I would, but I'm an appliance
operator and not a real ham.  Oh, I have my extra but I could always
memorize well.  Anyhow, this older guy, older?  Who am I calling older?  I'm
his age now.  Anyhow, Russ was the lead man up the tower.  It was, of
course, a guyed tower.  He, and a couple of other guys who stayed down at
the third set of guys below him for assistance handling ropes, tools, and
guiding tower sections down once Russ had jacked one off, I probably
shouldn't say it that way but that's what he did, he literally had a special
made jack he made to pry tower sections apart and at 11,500 feet plus 100
feet more, thinks can get stuck pretty easily.  Perhaps I should have worded
that differently, too.  Anyhow, when you are at 11,500 feet, plus another
100 feet, with a jin pole sticking up above that, and with the wind blowing
to gusts of 100 miles and hour, and you drop that top set of guys, things
get pretty shaky.  Russ told me that the tower began to tork so much as he
was up there jacking each section off, there, that sounded a little better,
he would look down to yell instructions to the man below him concerning
which side of the tower the section would be lowered based upon how
difficult jacking the sections apart was at any given point, and he said one
time he would look down to find his man and the man would be gone.  At first
he thought the man had fallen but looking on the other side of the tower,
there he was.  The tower was torking that badly.  He really wondered if they
would make it without somebody getting hurt and or killed.  Like I said, I'd
let them light the fuse.  No tower is worth that much trouble.  Anyhow, they
got it down safely.  During the winter, there was a house with a basement up
there that a man, W0WYX and his wife, used to live in year round.  Usually
about three months out of the year, they were snow bound.  He helped
maintain the computers.  Now, since no one lives up there, if you have to
work on your gear in the winter, you normally have to hire a snow cat
because from the gate far down the mountain, that road to the top isn't
passable in any other type of vehicle.  Squaw Mountain comes in handy on 2
meters and 70 centimeters as a reflector.  Back when I did a lot of simplex
on 2 meters, in this part of town where I live, beaming directly at towns 50
and 60 miles to the north, unless running loads of power, could not be
copied well.  Turning our beams to the southwest and using Squaw Mountain to
bounce off of, we could work those northern Colorado towns fine.  I won't
even go up there on top of Squaw and not even if you paid me.  I was on top
of Mount Evans near Denver twice.  The road goes up to something like 12,300
feet.  Colorado has, as I recall, something like a dozen mountains over
14,000 and Pikes Peak, down by Colorado Springs, 65 miles south of Denver,
has had a ham repeater on top of it for years.  You can work it with a hand
held running one watt from Denver.

Phil.
K0NX