Outdoorsman Extraordinaire

Story and Photos by Tom Lopez

When I came into my house in Boise after shoveling the driveway one day in February 2022, I had voicemail from my friend Art Troutner: “Tom, I have bad news. Give me a call.” I pondered the possibilities, and an oblique social media post from earlier in the day popped into my consciousness. Say it’s not true, Art, I thought. I returned the call, and it was true. John Platt was dead at sixty-six.

Over fourteen years, John and I climbed mountains from the icy slopes of Denali in Alaska to the desert peaks that bake in the sun of the Mojave National Preserve, and from the edge of the Great Salt Lake to the juniper-covered ridges of eastern Oregon—but our love of Idaho’s mountains was what cemented our friendship.

Finding climbing partners is not as simple as finding someone who wants to hike. I’ve been fortunate to have partnered with a lot of outstanding climbers, but a few times I dragged hapless wannabes up a mountain, only to be told at the end of the day that they were never going to climb another mountain as long as they lived.

It seems climbers cross paths and diverge more frequently than marriage partners. Often they get together to accomplish a specific goal but once that goal is achieved, they go their separate ways. Because most climbing partnerships are ephemeral, the ones that last are especially valuable and memorable. In my fifty years of climbing, John Platt was my most reliable partner.

Long before I knew him, John had established himself as an institution in Boise. His first athletic love was bike racing. He competed with a Boise racing team in his teens and when he graduated from Boise High in 1972, he was hell-bent on becoming a bike racer. For three years straight, 1976-1978, he won the Bogus Basin Hill Climb from the city to the Bogus Basin ski area.