As of last Friday, your humble Travel correspondent took leave from the Star Tribune to spend nine months at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I’m a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which is another way of saying after 22 years of working, I’m a student again.

Today is Freshman Move-in Day, so the streets are filled with moving trucks and concerned looking parents. I moved into a cabin at Chautauqua Park, on a hill overlooking the city. The cabin, and the whole Chautauqua complex, are National Historical Monuments, which means that for the first time in my life, I’m living in a tourist attraction. The Chautauqua was built in the 1890s as a place for mass education and entertainment; it was the internet of the day. Here, travelers came to hear great thinkers, musicians and to exercise in the clean mountain air. That’s exactly what they do today, too. (Last night at the Community Hall there was a discussion of “What exactly constitutes a sustainable diet?” And tonight, Bruce Hornsby is playing the Auditorium. ) Tourists walk across my yard, tourists stand and gape at me on my front porch, tourists talk on their cell phones much too loudly; Alice didn’t make it to the park because couldn’t find her way out of paper bag with a flashlight.

So there’s some poetic justice involved, since much of the last 22 years I’ve been a tourist in other people’s yards. I’ll continue to blog from the Rocky Mountain Bureau here on Gaillardia (not giardia) Lane, on the same eclectic mix of topics and, on my area of study here, which is mainly on how tourism helps and hurts the environment. As always, the floor is open for discussion.

St. Paul climber Mike Farris called from Base Camp on K2 in Pakistan last night to say he had waited long enough, and he’s going to walk away from the mountain. “It’s time to come home,” he said.

Farris, an associate professor of biology at Hamline University, spent the last 10 days waiting for a weather window to open so he could make a second summit attempt, but high winds are forecast for the higher altitudes, and Farris said he was starting to worry about his physical condition.

“The winds won’t be low enough for an attempt for at least 10 days,” he said via satellite phone. “I’ve been doing a lot of sitting around the last 10 or 11 days, and my fitness isn’t coming back to what I need to summit.” Farris had a bout of food poisoning on Monday, and he’s been living at 17,000 feet and above for nearly two months.

Farris was part of an expedition group of seven men attempting to summit K2. He had started a summit attempt but was waiting for an inner ear condition to clear at Camp II when the events of Aug. 2-3 unfolded. A large group of climbers had reached the summit and upper slopes of K2, the world’s second highest mountain, but an avalanche struck a set of fixed ropes as they were descending. Eleven climbers died, and the course of events still isn’t clear, Farris said.

“I and the other climbers here have spent a lot of time trying to piece together what happened,” he said. “It’s very complicated — more complex than what happened on Everest in ‘96. There it was pretty clear, a storm hit. Here there appear to be multiple causes, and it’s going to be some time before we know.”

Farris stayed at Camp II and assisted surviving climbers in their descents. He decided to stay on at K2, hoping for a second chance to summit. He said he’s disappointed, but that he was prepared for this eventuality.

” On K2, the weather rules the kingdom,” he said. “You have to take what you’re given. So far this season there have been two days where it was possible to attempt to summit. The chances are small to make it even when the conditions are good.”

Hamline associate biology professor Mike Farris called from Base Camp on K2 last night at 9 p.m. (8 a.m. Tuesday Pakistani time); he was suffering from food poisoning and exhaustion. Also, his sat phone was down on minutes. He said he’d call back tonight to answer questions about his condition and the expedition. Stay tuned.

Minnesota climber Mike Farris continues the waiting game on K2, hoping for a clear spot in the weather. Over the weekend, his wife, Kathy Shea, a professor of biology at St. Olaf, gave me a call. She said that Mike is healthy and still hoping to get his chance to attempt the summit of K2. If the weather gives him a window, his small group will make an attempt.

She said that at the time the events happened leading to the deaths of 11 climbers, she knew Mike was OK. “He was at Camp 2, pretty far from the summit,” she said. “But he was able to help other climbers down from that point.”

Shea also said it has been difficult to watch the events of the past couple weeks from afar. “It’s tough, except he can call using a satellite phone — I’m really grateful for that sat phone.”

Mike Farris’ original K2 team has now departed, leaving him on the mountain with a group reconstituted from several expeditions, he writes in a new post Saturday. They’re waiting for a suitable weather window to make an attempt on the mountain, which is several hundred feet shorter than Everest (or perhaps “less tall” we should say) but is much more technically difficult and unpredictable. That more than 70 climbers have died (including 11 last week) on K2 testifies to the severity of the challenge. That knowledge is even more sobering when you consider that on K2, there are not many wannabes, climbers who pay big bucks to have a guide usher them up to the top, as has become common on Everest. Generally speaking, those who have the guts to climb K2 have developed the mountaineering skills to make it seem feasible. When I interviewed Farris two years ago, I asked him the question that is probably most often put to high-altitude climbers. Why do it? His answer: “The British have an expression about the “rat in the belly” as a way to talk about why people climb. They say some people have a small rat that gets some food and is satisfied, while others have a rat that gets bigger and hungrier the more you feed it. When I am coming down from these trips I always think I’m never going to do it again. But after a while I start to remember the good experiences — which are hard to relay in words — and then there’s that rat in the belly, that challenge to try again. It looks suspiciously like addictive behavior, but I guess you can be obsessive about anything.” I think of that answer now, him sitting at the base of the mountain, waiting for another chance to climb. He’s been living there for most of the summer under trying conditions. He’s seen 11 people die, and still he’s waiting.  I don’t know if it’s heroic or foolish. But I know that I’m one of those people whose rat is more easily quieted, and I’m glad for it.

Farris has climbed in the Pakistani Himalayas several times: This photo is from a previous trip at K2.

Hamline associate biology professor Mike Farris has decided to stay behind at base camp on K2 as the rest of his six-climber team heads home.

“The calculus that went into this decision is both simple and complex. I want to explain my thinking so hopefully you aren’t convinced that I’m an utter idiot,” he wrote on his personal blog this morning. He goes on to say that he will only make the attempt under certain conditions. He said there is a group of competent climbers at base camp, and that his equipment is already set up at Camp 2: He’ll only have to carry food up the lower mountain. He said he’d only make a single attempt, assuming he is part of a group effort, then come home.

As for the series of accidents that led to the deaths of 11 climbers, Farris said it’s too soon to know what happened. “I know as much about the details of what happened as anyone does, and believe me, NOBODY knows just what happened yet.”

The title of his blog entry was “Back to the Dragon’s Lair.” “The title refers to the scene near the end of the Hobbit where Bilbo creeps into the dragon’s lair and steals a gold cup while the dragon sleeps,” Farris writes. “Ascending K2 involves stealth and intelligence, not a massive military style attack. My goal is to see if the dragon is asleep, then maybe, just maybe, steal a trinket and escape.”