Jean Vives
Author | Boulder, Colorado |
Website
Jean Vives’s grandfather, Albert, was said to have left France when he was 15 years of age and traveled by clipper ship to Rio de Janeiro where he became a car mechanic near Ipanema Beach. His grandfather said that he returned to France when the first world war broke out to fight for France. He became a driver of an ammunition truck and dr.... more
Jean Vives’s grandfather, Albert, was said to have left France when he was 15 years of age and traveled by clipper ship to Rio de Janeiro where he became a car mechanic near Ipanema Beach. His grandfather said that he returned to France when the first world war broke out to fight for France. He became a driver of an ammunition truck and drove through the worse battles of the war. Afterward, it was said that after the war he decided to sail to California. He drove a truck on the Silk Road across Europe and the Gobi Desert to China and the port of Shanghai. There he boarded a clipper ship and crossed the Pacific and reached San Francisco. There he again became an auto mechanic. It can be safely stated that the tradition of adventure was inherited by Jean Vives, our author.
All of the adventures in these books come from his own experiences as a wilderness guide in Aspen and from years of traveling under many strange and unusual conditions throughout the world. He hitchhiked through Central American during a war in Nicaragua. His bus was boarded by guerillas with machine guns who arrested several other travelers. He had foreseen this and had cut his hair and dressed up in a sports coat and carried a suitcase instead of a backpack. After getting his doctorate in sports physiology with a specialization in high altitude physiology he taught same to students from CU - Boulder Abroad briefly in Kathmandu than took his students on the original 100- mile approach trek to Everest Base Camp. While in Nepal he made the acquaintance of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest. He also met the famous Italian physiologist Paolo Ceretelli . In addition, he worked with Igor Gamow, the inventor of the Gamow Bag used to treat those suffering from Hypoxia at high altitudes. In China, he was one of the last people to raft the Yangtze River and the famous Leaping Tiger Gorge before being flooded by the huge Three Gorges Dam. Meanwhile in America, he established the longest alpine ski touring route in America by skiing from Winter Park to Crested Butte in 28 days of snow camping in the worse blizzard in a decade.
His love for dogs made this story a natural. As a child, he grew up with hunting dogs. At age 14 he used to walk up the street carrying a shotgun over his shoulder on his way to the hills around his house in Northern California to hunt game birds. He dog "Duke" was a German Short Hair pointer gifted at finding quail and dove. His family dog "Dexter" is a street dog that was found wandering the streets of Salt Lake and was picked up by a dog rescue group. He is the inspiration for the present book: " The Epic of Dexter The War Dog: Getting Out of Afghanistan Was Just The Beginning."