Saturday, 11 September 1999 Rock climber who fell to his death `was always a doer' Boyer's travels included climbing a rock face in Peru By Thomas Stauffer The Arizona Daily Star Jim Boyer never met an adventure he didn't like. ``He lived life for the most real, the most gripping, the most wonderful moments,'' said his sister Leslie Boyer. ``He was always a doer.'' A 35-year-old free-lance writer and second-year UA law student, Boyer died Thursday afternoon after falling more than 100 feet while rock climbing near the summit of Mount Lemmon. Boyer and a companion had finished a difficult climb known as ``Swept Away'' in the Reef of Rock area. As Boyer was being lowered, two climbing anchors that he had clipped into failed. Ray Ringle, a rock climber who had known Boyer for 12 years, went up to the site yesterday to determine the cause of the accident. Ringle said two different pieces of old nylon webbing that connected Boyer's rope to expansion bolts wedged in the rock failed in sequence. Boyer was an accomplished climber who had conquered difficult climbs in Peru, on Alaska's Mount McKinley and many other places. Boyer's zeal for athletic, intellectual and journalistic adventure was matched by his empathy for people, said Jacqueline Sharkey, a journalism professor at the University of Arizona. Sharkey met Boyer 15 years ago when he brought a diary of his experiences as a bartender at the Manhattan Bar to her office. Boyer wanted Sharkey to tell him if he showed promise as a writer, Sharkey said. ``It was a journal of the things he saw and the people he met, and I read it and was just taken aback at the power of his writing,'' Sharkey said. ``I told him that whatever else he did in life, he was put on Earth to write.'' Boyer wrote stories for many publications, including Arizona Highways, Tucson Weekly and the former City Magazine. He went on to write for the Discovery Channel and did work for Discovery Channel Online, including real-time reporting on the unsuccessful effort to raise a portion of the Titanic. People trusted Boyer to tell their stories because he so deeply cared about them, Sharkey said. ``He was a luminous person,'' she said. ``He really did touch the people he worked with and wrote about in ways that most journalists don't.'' ``He was talented, he loved life and, unlike most people, he was able to write about it,'' agreed Charles Bowden, a writer who hired Boyer at City Magazine. ``He had a sunny face and a smart mind.'' Bowden added: ``If you're a desert rat, Jim Boyer was of the blood royale.'' Boyer's great-grandfather Godfrey Sykes came to Arizona in 1886. He was a scientist at the desert laboratory on Tumamoc Hill on Tucson's westside and wrote the definitive book on the Colorado River delta, Bowden said. ``He was probably the single most important reason why the laboratory succeeded,'' Bowden said, ``and he was memorialized by (the naming of) a crater in the Pinacate,'' a mountain range in Sonora. Boyer's grandfather, Glenton Sykes, was a renaissance man much like Godfrey Sykes and Jim Boyer, said Jim Boyer's sister Diane. Bill Broyles, a longtime friend of the Boyer family, said Jim Boyer, a third-generation UA graduate, reminded him of Glenton Sykes. ``He was in that same great tradition because he was totally at home either on a river or on a peak or in a library,'' Broyles said. Boyer's interest in law school was fueled by libel and international contract issues that he encountered while writing the story on the failed raising of the Titanic, Sharkey said. ``He decided he wanted to couple journalism with the law,'' Sharkey said. ``He regarded the law as just another adventure.''