The Storr is a huge outcropping of rock on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides. I was lucky enough to get to climb it with a Scottish friend and an English friend about fifteen years ago, as part of a driving and hiking trip around the Highlands.

The thing that's really neat about the Storr is that it almost looks like an alien planet when you're up on top, with all the giant boulders and the rock pinnacles of different shapes and sizes. I've seen it described as a “lunar landscape,” which seems about right.

While we were up there on the Storr, my Scottish friend decided it would be fun to go off the path and climb right down the face of the rock through a narrow corridor in which plenty of handholds were visible. He got all the way down, and waved up to us from the bottom to encourage us to join him. I got about halfway down before getting stuck, unable to find another handhold I trusted enough to commit my weight to. My English friend didn't try at all- maybe he felt the Scottish Highlands had claimed the lives of enough of his countrymen.

I ended up tearing my pants on the way back up, which turned out to be an even worse problem because Scottish people don't call those pants. They call them “troosers,” reserving the word “pants” for sexy underwear. So when we went to the pub after we got back down, and the barman asked me why I was wearing a sweater around my waist, I inadvertently told him it was because I had torn my lingerie while crawling around on some rocks with an Englishman. It was a long, long evening.