Gary Toebben had a noteworthy sighting on his first Rim-to-Rim hike through the Grand Canyon.
The 63-year-old chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce joined veteran canyon trekkers on the trip, chamber Senior Vice President David Rattray and his wife, Terri, and Ron Gastelum, a former chamber chief executive. Last month, they took Toebben along. But his wife, who had been on the trip with a different group last year, decided she didn’t want to repeat the experience so soon.
The 23-mile hike starts with a 5,000-foot descent along the South Rim and continues with a climb up the 8,000-foot North Rim. Since summer temperatures at the bottom hit 110 degrees, Toebben said the hike started at 4 a.m. so they could reach the floor by 9 a.m., when the temperature was still in the 80s.
The most memorable part? That occurred at sunrise, when a pack mule train passed them by on its way to Phantom Ranch at the canyon’s bottom.
“It was right out of an old western,” he said. “I half expected to see John Wayne ride by.”
As for Janice, he said, “Now that she’s heard about my experience, she wants to go back.”
Keep It Simple
USC Lusk School of Real Estate Director Richard Green has spent years teaching students about the risks and rewards of real estate, but last month he lectured a different type of pupil: the mayor and city council members in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
The International Monetary Fund asked Green to warn Brazilian officials about the risks of a proposal to create government-backed mortgage entities similar to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
So Green, 52, who has consulted on international real estate for the IMF and World Bank since the mid-1990s, flew to Sao Paolo last month to address the municipal government.
“The government in a very sincere way wants to improve the housing conditions of the people. … One of the issues, however, is that very often (governments) get sold on using complicated financial instruments to finance the housing,” Green said. “I said, ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t do it.’ It sounds like a simple, obvious message but if you’ve watched this country, it’s clearly a message that isn’t said often enough.”
Green said he was glad to see Sao Paolo for the first time.
“You’d be stunned,” he said. “It’s so vast that it makes L.A. seem small.”
Staff reporters Howard Fine and Jacquelyn Ryan contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
