With a passport full of stamps and completed goals few dare to dream, a Garland resident has returned home having skied on every continent.

There’s seven continents, so that works out to one continent for every decade the adventurer has lived when he celebrates his 70th birthday later this month. However, Dick Fennell completed his mission in about seven years, having started his goal in 2017 and finishing this past July. Even more impressive has been how he conquered the continents.

Fennell didn’t catch a ride on helicopters to the peaks, some over 14,000 feet. Instead, he participates in ski-mountaineering.

“You really have to work at it,” he said. “Your whole body gets a workout because all this stuff is back country. So you put a skin on, and you climb up and then take your skins off, ski back down and start back up again.”

Ski skins are a strip of fabric that’s cut to match the length and width of skis. One side has adhesive that sticks to the base of the ski while the skin side features short hairs that are angled, enabling them to “grip” the snow to keep it from sliding back down the steep pitches. It’s one of the most difficult sports at any age, let alone picking up the sport at retirement age.

Ski mountaineering combines the physical endurance of long, strenuous ascents with technical climbing and skiing skills in variable, often dangerous, terrain. It requires a high level of fitness and experience, including proficiency in areas like rope work, belaying and avalanche safety, to navigate steep slopes, rock, ice and mixed conditions. Fennell simply calls it cross-training.

But on at least one trip the elements weren’t the only danger. Fennell returned from Gulmarg, Kashmir, India earlier this year as the country fended off threats from Pakistan and, to a much lesser extent, aggression by China in the north. The State Department advises avoiding travel to Kashmir due to “terrorism, violent civil unrest, and potential for conflict,” including in Gulmarg, and recommends caution near the India-Pakistan border.

Fennell had already skied in Japan, which solidly put a checkmark on the continent of Asia, but the experience was too inviting for the adventurer to miss. Fortunately, the Kashmiri and Indian military are “friendly, polite and respectful,” according to guide reports and do their best to ensure that international tourists are safe in Gulmarg and the Kashmir region.

Africa

The State Department also issued a strong warning about Morocco, advising terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in Morocco. Terrorists may attack with little or no warning. They target tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets, shopping malls and local government facilities. However, the High Atlas Mountains are great for ski mountaineering, so Fennell, unfazed, booked the trip.

In an extremely concerning twist to the trip, two Scandinavian women were savagely murdered, their beheadings documented by one of four men who were alleged to have been looking for westerners to kill. According to a New York Times report written after their trials, the killers, poor and uneducated, became absorbed in a violent Islamist universe they saw on the screens of their cellphones, then sought their own place in it.

“Their overriding aim was to impress the Islamic State, earn the status of soldiers in its apocalyptic struggle and see their own recording distributed across the group’s propaganda platforms,” the story said.

The men were later executed for their parts in the murders and the Moroccan government issued requirements that groups hire guides for their trips in an attempt to shore up security for the country’s important tourist industry. However, Fennell’s guide wasn’t much for ski mountaineering.

“The Moroccan guide was a hard smoking guy,” Fennell said, adding that it significantly slowed their progress. “He wasn’t a mountaineer. He said he was, but I don’t know many mountaineers that chain smoke.”

King Mohammed VI, in power since 1999, set a group of his personal guards to police the tourist destination. Fennell said they were forced to check in every day and had to get his passport stamped at every stage of the climb. On the way down he failed to get a stamp and was forced to head back up hill to get the proper documentation.

On top of all the security concerns, the peak Fennell wanted to ski didn’t have enough snow, so he was forced to select an alternate route. While there were visitors at the resort, Fennell and his guide were basically alone on the mountain.

He had previously canceled his trip twice due to lack of snow, so he was intent on making the trip. His wife Gail was along for the ride and while Dick stayed in a “resort” on the mountain that smelled of “urine and feces,” Gail hired a guide to take her to the ancient district to various historical and modern sites, including the fortified Casbah of the Udayas in Rabat.

Gail has been on six continents with her husband and she loves to ski, but she said Dick is at too high of a level of skiing for her to go on many of the skiing adventures. But she has had many experiences as her husband pushed through the continents, some that few have witnessed, like the return of the penguins in Antarctica. The species’ breeding cycle is extremely difficult to predict — increasingly threatened by declining sea ice due to climate change, which can cause breeding failures and starvation. She arrived at the perfect moment and shared time on the ground with scientists and National Geographic photojournalists.

Antarctica

Seen by many as the “last frontier” for skiing due to its remote location and difficulty of access, expeditions to Antarctica are life changing experiences for the few people who have traveled there. Fennell was enveloped by the sheer magnificence of the only continent without a country.

“It was unbelievable! We were all alone. There were a bunch of tours and stuff, but, you know, they didn’t want to get stuck in pack ice and things like that,” Dick said.

Despite arriving towards the end of winter on the continent, there was great snow; that is if you don’t mind an occasional avalanche.

“It was perfect timing,” he said. “You have to let the snow settle because of avalanches. It is true of all ski mountaineering; you have to be careful where you go.”

At the same time, the skiers who were there made for fascinating conversations around the dinner table.

“One night I had dinner with a captain on a nuclear submarine. The next night I had dinner with Bob, who invented [medical machinery]. It was just this amazing, like if an atomic bomb hit and you had to have a group of people around you that were resourceful; we were on that boat.”

South America

The couple combined the skiing trip to Antarctica with another adventure in South America. There is awesome skiing in Chile and Argentina in the Patagonia region. The region provides a wide range of experiences, from large, well-equipped resorts with extensive slopes to backcountry touring and volcano skiing, especially from June to October. Of course, Dick couldn’t make it all the way to Patagonia without adventure, but this time adventure arrived at his hotel.

“I come back to my room and there’s a guy sleeping in the other bed in my room. I said, What’s the deal? He says, ‘Well, I’m on my way to Antarctica, and they just put me in this room.’”

Of course, everything Fennell needed for his two-tiered adventure, much of which was irreplaceable until he returned to a big box civilization. Yet, as he shared his thoughts with management, they showed him where he signed off on sharing a room if the hotel had become overbooked. One tip for a successful trip abroad; protect your equipment. No matter where you go in life, whether it’s Kashmir or Casper, the trip will be easier with your wallet, passport, cash and cards, and the equipment you need to do what you spent a sailboat-load of money to finish your dream trip. However, sometimes it is the specialized transceivers and avalanche vests that get you in trouble.

As Fennell traveled through New Delhi, India, airport security became very suspicious of his avalanche equipment, something yet to be commonplace in the area. Despite arriving at the airport three hours early for his flight, he was pulled out of line and told to demonstrate his vest in the busy airport.

Avalanche vests instantly deploy an airbag, instantly inflating them with a loud bang. The deployed airbag helps you rise to the top of an avalanche debris field, minimizing rescue time. However, in an airport — no matter where you are — loud bangs aren’t welcome. Fennell was able to use his phone to show how they work on the manufacturers website, but it wasn’t soon enough to catch his flight.

Europe

After watching the James Bond series film, “The World is Not Enough,” starring Pierce Brosnan, The Fennell’s had to ski at Chamonix, Germany. While Gail was along for the trip, the skiing was too technical for her so she found her adventure in Switzerland, France and Germany, all within an hour of each other near the skiing destination. He’s also skied in Italy, France, Slovenia and Switzerland.

In Switzerland Dick skied around the Matterhorn and down into Zermatt.

“I had this vision of this luxurious outdoor adventure and having a nice meal and Zermatt. But you can’t do that because it takes so long to get there, and the lifts are all unionized until they close at four o’clock,” he said. “So we didn’t even have time for a drink of water. We had to get to the top before we could ski back down into Italy. So yes, I have skied around the Matterhorn. I stopped in Zermatt temporarily, got on the lift and left. Well, that’s my Swiss skiing adventure.”

Australia

As far as skiing adventure goes, Mount Hotham in Australia was by far Fennell’s least adventurous trip. The resort is at about 5,700 feet and yet it’s the second highest resort village on the continent. Due to the huge investment to get to the ski areas, Fennell decided he would ski every single run on the mountain in the four days he had at the resort.

“I did all the runs I could do, but a bunch were closed, mostly the double black diamond runs,” he said. “As I got to one, a woman asked if I was going to ski it? If you do, I want to film you.”

Fennell saved Australia for his last continent because he thought to get adventure there he’d have to do the continent “on one leg or something, so I just saved it.”

North America

Of all the travels through sketchy places and dangerous ski adventures, possibly the most danger Fennell has ever experienced (on ski) was in Wyoming on Two Ocean Mountain. Fennell was nearly swept away in an avalanche, due partially to his ski partner’s worried wife making an unfortunately timed phone call.

While the partner — a surgeon he had met at Big Sky earlier that year — answered the phone, Fennell could feel the snow beneath his feet breaking away from the peak.

“We just needed to go, like, another 200 yards and we’d be OK. I couldn’t believe it. He knocked the thing loose and the slide came down at me. It got bigger and bigger. It’s all that slushy s---t and I thought, ‘oh my God, no.’”

Oddly, his first thought was, “this isn’t happening.” Then the avalanche took his feet out from underneath him and he was at the mercy of the mountain.

“I’m just riding the snow down and I think I’m going to work my way over to safety, but as it came down, it propagates, and it gets so I’m coming down and I can see that it’s going over an edge,” he said, a fevered pitch in his voice.

He had no idea what was over the edge at the time, but he then sees a boulder the size of a dining room table. He hoped to get his skis against it.

“I just got my body positioned downhill. I put my skis against the boulder, and I’ll be damned, I was pushed against the rock, and I hung on there ‘til it was safe,” he recounted. “Then I said, we are getting the hell out of here, Buster.”

Fennell had quit racing motorcycles in his 30s because it was too dangerous. Yet he continues as a world-class competitive aerobatic pilot, an avid ski mountaineer and sailing the oceans. And he has no intention of quitting after his 70th birthday on the 27th. Gail worries, but she wouldn’t think of standing between him and his goals.

“There’s risk, but I would never stop him from his adventures,” she said Wednesday while on a romantic sailing trip with Dick off the Pacific Coast near San Diego.

His son, Chad, was the instigator of the planned adventures, he said.