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| Coleman caught this sunrise from Rainier, Emmons glacier, near the top |
The sound of our feet crunching in the soft afternoon snow and the wheeze of my lungs is interrupted every 10 to 15 minutes by avalanche and rockfall. Earlier, when we'd been in the high alpine meadows of the Skyline trail we'd seen a cloud of snow puffing up where a slab had just slid down a corner of the Nisqually glacier. But now, in the Muir Snowfield, we see nothing of the falls, can only hear the sounds of the mountain thawing and crumbling. We’ve been climbing steadily for a good 4 hours and the stone RMI shack of Camp Muir doesn't seem to be getting any closer, bad news for me because under the crushing weight of my pack and the steady pump of ascending 5000 feet over a distance of 4 miles my quads have both just taken to locking up. Inside my head I'm cursing my wife for not pushing me to train harder, for not pushing me out the door on more long, high-altitude hikes (though let's be honest, it's not like she ever stopped me from working out or going on a training trek). I'm cursing Steve John for his proclivity towards beer, which I'd been ingesting at a pace the last few days a bit more elevated than a man should who's about to undertake an activity where hydration can be the difference between summitting or keeling over from HAPE (as if he'd been taping my mouth open and pouring the beer down my throat). Plus I’m a booze man and the beer has been sitting heavy and foul in my gut. And as it is I have regular hydration problems. I'm cursing the fucking 10 pound 60 meters of 10mm Superdry rope and the heavy camp propane tank and stove that are among the various other pieces of gear making up the 50+ pound pack strapped onto my back. And so I just drop to my knees, leaning back to stretch out the burning quads, and as my breath returns and the slight headache clears, I'm left with one simple fact about this whole endeavor - that is, no matter who I try to shift the blame to, the classic tactic of American industry and politics so viable in the flatlands, whatever excuses I reason out in my head, the indisputable truth is that I'm here, in the Muir Snowfield, little more than halfway up the most glaciated and prominent peak in the lower 48, and there's only one person who can get me to the summit. Me.
2 days before Steve and I had been burning fuel on an electric run up the I-5, a drive cutting up the main vein of California and its scrubby sameness, broken only briefly by the looming Mt. Shasta (a need to climb this soon, if not next vibrated through us on both passings) and the rolling of said scrub hills that begins a bit north of Sacramento and ends with the pines of Oregon where we also summitted the highest point on the 5, @ 4300 ft. and some change. We were listening to Clint Willis’ BOYS OF EVEREST, the phenomenal story of British Mountaineer Chris Bonington and his merry band of miscreant mountaineers (quote from book: "Foul-mouthed, vice-ridden climbers") as they launched one astounding ascent after another of European, Himalayan, Andean Peaks - generally, most of the big mountains - amidst the spectres of death and vice known to plague such luminaries. It inspired us both to learn to rock climb and, even more important, helped us put this Rainier ascent into perspective. Yes, people have died on Rainier. And yes, a man died on Rainier in June, in fact a highly-skilled Mountain Ranger. And no, we weren’t going with a guide and no, we didn’t have much glacial experience. Still, it would be a well-traveled route in the Cascades, a bootpack mostly, not some fierce rock-climbing/bivouackonledge/inventingtherouteasyougoalong expedition the likes of which real mountaineers endure. In the world of mountaineers and climbers we’re tourists, though possibly getting a few points for deciding to learn this stuff ourselves and not going the easy route of hiring a guide to worry about everything while we simply walked around gaping like it's a slightly more strenuous amusement ride. Still, we could only imagine what we were getting into. And we would find soon even our imaginations undersold it.
The night before we stayed at the Paradise Inn, a century-old Tyrolean inn complete with big wood beams and hostel-style rooms, i.e. small with a bed and a sink but shared bathrooms. There’s no TV and most of the crowd were wealthy families on vacations at the fringe of nature, content to sit around the big cabin drinking red wine and reading books in silent groups and during the day going on 2 or 3 mile loops through the lower Rainier trails. We’d felt out of place, 4 scruffy young men firmly between the ages of child and parent staying around us. The buffalo meatloaf tasted like a HUNGRY MAN dinner, came out in about 5 minutes, was about double the price it should have been and certainly the only thing not sitting like lead in our stomachs was heavy sodium sapping our fluids. Still, buffalo’s good and we were in some dining room far outside our social scene, catching the stares of admiring teen girls and college-age waitresses. There’s no cell reception there. None. Full radio silence, the window open to catch the alpine breeze. Sharing a full bed with my brother, trying to kill the climbing eve’s anticipation of my synapses firing and running through checklists and questions in my head. The outside world no longer existed as we sunk into the beginning of our hike.
This is the essence of the climb, of nature and expedition. An escape from the complications of our world into one decidedly more primitive. Admittedly we have modern hiking gear, borderline cutting edge, especially compared to the leather boots and wooden axes and heavy ropes used by the great one John Muir. But without cellphones and TV’s we’re downright Neanderthal compared to most of our brethren down in the flatlands. All the background chatter, the interruptions and distractions we’ve come to accept as part and parcel of this noisy restless life, disappears, leaving us with ourselves, the people around us, and the sensations immediately within our reach. The way life was actually meant to be, not as some exercise of repetition experienced second hand through screens but as an immersion in the here and now and as such an endless exploration of our true place in the physical and metaphysical center of it all. Off the grid.
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| Nisqually, looming |
And so it was as the early morning clouds blew away revealing the flowing blue ice and cracked stratas of the Nisqually Glacier ice fall. We stared up at what we were about to undertake, sipping on coffees while children nervously asked if we were going all the way to Muir and old people spoke whimsically about their own adventures in nature after spotting our bulging packs with ice axes and crampons strapped on for good measure. And then we started and, as Willis put it, got caught up in the basic undertaking of a climb – that is you start, then work until its done. One foot at a time.
Deer dotted the winding blacktop road, as did fat marmots and endless fields of grass and alpine flowers like something out of an Austrian romance. John Muir even called it the "most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountaintop wanderings". As it always goes the legs felt weak, the lungs tired but we'd all done enough of these hikes that we knew soon everything warms up, the body adjusts, and the exhaustion of the first mile becomes a quaint memory. You learn to trust your body and, even more, to realize how amazing of a gift this body is when it's cranking at its capacity and adapting from sedentary short walk mode to long-hike. The paved path gave way to dirt path lined by rocks and then eventually dirt and snow until finally the path ended altogether and we were faced with the steadily rising Muir Snowfield. Taking turns setting pace. Soon it was becoming exhausting and, even more, annoying because it was just a vast meadow of white, a bootpack up a steady ascent without much in the way of progress. We started rest stepping and I was extra vigilant in straightening out my back leg, to the point that I was flexing my quad and as such not only defeating the purpose of the rest step but in fact putting even more stress on my thighs. I realized that I'd been doing rest steps for years somewhat subconsciously and thinking about it was fucking me up. Thus the first of many learning experiences we would have on this trip, learning which wouldn’t have occurred or at least would’ve been blunted by the presence of a guide to lead us, wipe our asses, so on.
Not to say you shouldn’t get a guide. If you don’t want to spend months doing training hikes, ideally getting over 10,000 feet more than a few times AND/OR you don’t want to have to read about glaciers and practice as much as possible skills related to glacial travel, roping up, knots, ice arrests, setting anchors, prusiks AND/OR you don’t want to have to lug up heavy gear and food and boil your own ice AND/OR you don’t want the responsibility for anybody else in the group – that is, if you don’t have the time or interest in such things and simply want to put one foot in front of the other without thinking about where the next step or break will be, leaving your mind free to contemplate such things as the scenic vistas and the possibility of high-altitude fornication, go ahead and get a guide. It's still beautiful. To be honest, we were in a strange place - people with our level of experience usually get a guide but people with our level of vigor, confidence and preparation have done something like this before. Still we're all avid skiers, very comfortable on snow and ice from growing up in the icy northeast, I've lived in Steamboat and Jackson Hole, visiting it every other year and at various times I've taken both Coleman and Kyle hiking up the rocky precipices of Cody Bowl for some epic descents. Last year we all ascended Mt. Whitney with several feet of snow leading almost to trail head, an ascent which including an ice axe and crampon climb of the infamous Whitney chute. Steve and Coleman and I had made a few hikes to summits of Mt. Baldy (10,050 ft.) and San Gorgonio (11,500 ft.) as well as regularly going on smaller but steeper hikes. Kyle walked a few miles to and from work in NYC every day and had also taking down the 23-mile White Mountain Presidential Traverse without sleep or pause, no easy feat. As such we chose to tackle this ourselves and no doubt struggled much more than if we had paid a guide but were far more greatly rewarded.
At Camp Muir we spent some time boiling and filtering snow for water, not sure how long the next push to our campsite at Ingraham Flats would take, and relaxed for an hour. I made sure to hydrate, stretch out the quads. If they were tightening already, how the fuck would I go the next 4k as the air gets thinner? The sharing of the weight of the rope with my other 4 climbers and the snow itself would help, sure, but still. A part of me was jealous of all these bastards sitting around, done for the day, enjoying the sun. Reggae was playing. Tents were already up and the guides were getting water and food for their clients. On the other hand, we were up here to get away from people, were doing this on our own to escape the whole guide thing, and, hell, we'd show them when we got a head start the next day from our site 1000 feet higher.
So we walked out onto the Cowlitz glacier to don our crampons and rope up for the first time. It took us a good half an hour at least to figure out our knots, our spacing, our crampons, get them good and dialed in. Then we had to tie our prusiks, essentially smaller ropes we tied onto the main rope. Without complex pulley systems, if one of us fell into a crevasse the only way he'd be able to get out would be to use the prusik friction knots to pull himself up the rope. And I understated the distance we should have between climbers, saying 15 feet instead of the 15 meters I'd read suggested for first-timers, that being the amount of time it might take for a backup to drop into arrest fall position thus preventing getting pulled into a crevasse after the first faller. And then we were off across our first glacier, staring at the crevasses below like jagged slit mouths on an endless white face. And at the end we took off our crampons, stopping short to keep from entering the center of the rockfall of Cathedral gap, an area of loose rock and dirt, another process taking us way too fucking long, followed by an attempt at shortening our rope which mostly failed, leading us to drag our rope through the dirt, getting it caught on rocks, clambering up and over with ice axe and hiking pole as arm extensions.
Up at the top and it was 5 PM and the Ingraham Flats site wasn't in sight. I'd wanted to be asleep by 6 for a midnight wakeup, the alpine start needed to ensure the snow would be hard and easy for our crampons to dig into but at this rate who knew when we'd finally get to stop walking. It didn't help that it again took us way too long to put our crampons back on, leading to my first outburst of the trip. From BOYS OF EVEREST we'd decided Steve was more like Hamish MacInnes, a tough bastard fond of his drink but generally likable and smart, first introduced getting his skull split on a climb, then returning to town to get drunk and climb a church from which he fell, breaking a leg. I was more like Don Whillans, described as a "surly, violent, quick-witted, brilliant climber". Though certainly neither of us will ever be even a small fraction of the climbers those two legends were. Still, the surly, violent aspects fit me to a T.
Anyway, outburst done, we pushed on just a little further, up a narrow bootpack and immediately emerged onto a glacial ledge where a few other tents were up and ready. We'd made it.
Or so we thought. The first day of hiking was done, sure, but with the sun gone behind the mountain we were in eternal shadow. That was compounded by the howling wind to make us miserably cold as we clomped around a site somebody before had left which offered a little wind protection but not enough. King Coleman and Sir Steve John's tent almost blew off as they were setting it up; luckily they caught it and suggested we anchor our tents in with ice axes and hiking poles. Then we set about melting snow to mix with our dehydrated dinners and to fill our water bottles the next day, a task slowed to a painful pace by the howling wind and lack of solar aid.
And we were cold. So fucking cold. Never been so cold. In the middle of this goddamn summer heatwave and my toes were numb, having to ball my hands into fists, full down jackets with hoods up and all as we settled for half-cooked freeze-dried meals we had to choke down since the water was taking so goddamn long and stared at the dying sunlight first on and then beyond Little Tahoma with growing bitterness. At one point I ducked into the tent to dig through my bag and found the journal I'd brought with the intention of writing during any downtime and wrote the only entry I'd write the whole trip:
"Ingraham Flats - cold, miserable, colder than I've ever been, need to retreat to warmth of sleep."
"Ingraham Flats - cold, miserable, colder than I've ever been, need to retreat to warmth of sleep."
Our only respite was when a nice kid staying at the site over, whose group we'd chatted with a few times up the Muir snowfield, came by with some leftover garlic mashed potato and ramen. They'd had leftovers and certainly our struggle to put up our rental 4-season tents for the first time in the epic wind and our late arrival precluding us from any warmth, surely the guy felt bad for us. His friend was having altitude sickness so I proffered a few pills of Diamox. A good Angeleno, what we lack in outdoorsiness we make up for in our access to drugs.
We finally gave up on filling our water bottles around 9:15, not a single one topped off. We bedded down into our cramped tents by 9:30, our wake-up call now pushed back to 12:45. I took off my drenched socks and soaked boots as well as my heavy ski pants, used my down jacket as a pillow, and climbed into my mummy bag, tucking a fresh pair of socks into my crotch to warm up for the next push and leaning forward to massage the numbness out of my feet. The next 3 hours would be spent in and out of sleep interrupted by the coldness of everything at our feet, the buffetting of wind and small stone on the fly of the tent, the feeling of snow crunching beneath my back and the simple lack of space. But that would be better than Kyle, who didn't sleep a wink. 12:45 came quickly and at the same time couldn't come soon enough.
We dressed in the tent, Kyle first, then me, delaying as long as possible our emergence to the cold early morning darkness. A few people were already on the mountain above us, the mountain which, thanks to a cloudless sky and a massive moon and endless stars was almost as clear as during daylight. Still, headlamps were needed and we could see the lights of a few people ascending Disappointment Cleaver above us, a "procession of lights" as Kyle put it, beautiful dots on the vertical horizon. And somehow it felt warmer than it had a few hours ago. It was time for our summit push.
2 guided groups appeared on their way up from Cathedral Gap through the Ingraham Glacier but they'd decided to take their breaks right there. I hurried our guys to get roped in, try to beat these groups, get up first, and led us down one of two paths, Coleman pointing out the guide groups are on the other but I waved it off, obviously that's just their route. We have our own, a shortcut. A shortcut to our first crevasse. I explained this as I casually walked to end-run it and Steve, suddenly met with the seriousness of the situation, decided to retie his knots as he was no longer so comfortable they would hold him should I lead them to certain doom.
The guided groups passed us while we waited and readjusted. We followed on their heels past massive crevasses where it looked like the world had split open, white stones overturned by bomb, as if the smoke of chaos should be rising from the black depths of their icy innards. The Disappointment Cleaver was two stone scrambles at the bottom, these less delineated than Cathedral Gap and I found myself grasping for the guide flags tucked a few meters ahead to pick our way through the maze. We did this with our crampons on, the disarming experience of clambering over large and small loose rocks with steel 1-inch spikes clamped to our boots, roped to 3 other people doing the same, knowing 1 of us falling here would be a sure disaster, not to mention the prospect of accidentally dislodging a rock onto somebody's head. At the top it became snowy switchbacks up a 50 degree pitch and then finally we were at the notch, to rest, put on another layer, and get ready for the final push up the Emmons Glacier. Eat some food. Drink water. We'd had to make a steady burn up the DC to make way for lower people looking to avoid rockfall on the precipice and as such were in need of nourishment and rest. The east was beginning to burn with the simmer of a new day. We watched 2 people head back down with a guide. The only thing I could imagine worse than climbing the DC would be to climb it and then go right back down.
Then it was up. Up, up. Up through snow. Switching and backing and occasionally taking direct bootpacks to a crest. The simmer spreading upward, more like a fire now than an ember, rising to melt the black ice in the sky. Turning behind me every so often to check and make sure the 3 headlamps I knew as Kyle, Steve, and Chris were still moving along fine.
Hopping small crevasses that opened to wider crevasses. Looking for the flags the guides had placed to denote the route, having learned my lesson earlier when I went off the main path and ended up directly face to face with a crevasse.
The sun rising, finally sun so I would no longer have to trade ice axe hands so as to be able to ball up the off one into a fist to bring feeling back into the fingers. Juliet rising to kill the envious moon sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Arguing about pace, Coleman wanting to speed up, Steve and Kyle happy with the pace I was setting as it was allowing for a 2 breath rest with each step so Coleman insisted we move aside for a group of boyscouts whose leader took the time to impress us all with the same repeated phrase about a good bergschrund he knew up a little under which to stop and when I told him we stopped because my team wanted to stop here he nodded and continued on. We passed them where they stopped at the schrund but, when we needed to stop again just below the moraine field where the volcano crater begins, they overtook us. A rope team is unlike anything I've ever been a part of. I don't much like team sports and even when I played lacrosse and soccer I did a lot better viewing myself as a man whose job was done when he handed it off to another versus a rope team where you're all reliant on each other at all times to dictate speed, safety, and motivation.
The rope team was made in a strategic order. As the organizer and one who'd studied the route probably more than anybody (except maybe Coleman) I took the first spot. I'm also a lot more willing to shoulder the risk of falling into a crevasse as the first person usually has the highest chance of a snowbridge collapsing or an unstable or slippery surface appearing out of nowhere. Kyle was next, not only the eternal calmer of any group (that is, I'd scream something back, he'd interpret it in a way that seemed like I wasn't barking orders and being an asshole). He was also probably the strongest in the group and as such would be a good first arrest should I fall into a crevasse. And he was the only one of us with any actual glacier experience, from his semester abroad in New Zealand. Next Steve John, also strong as a bull, also calm and would be quick to help should they need to get to work setting in anchors for me to prusik up the rope. Finally is Coleman, the wisest of the group and the most experienced - lifetime of Outward Bound, certainly read more books on technique and gear needed for glacial travel. As such not only was he a good sounding board, much more logical and conservative while I could be risky and willing to take a chance, but also a good person to get things started should I fall as the end man is the first one to pull up from self-arrest and start the process. One extra thing held true - I trusted all of them with my life. Such is the intensity of a rope team.
But and so it was a final push. Came to a foot-wide crevasse we had to hop, taking extra comical care to make sure the rope was taut as we each stepped across. Staring at the valley far below, the rollovers and so on. So far from everything. And then I stepped over a crest and found a group of climbers milling around, backpacks on the ground. I threw down my summit pack, unroped and screamed for joy, or at least what scream I could under such exertion. We'd made it. At least to the volcano crater.
For at the crater you throw down all your gear. You celebrate and slap high five and undo that goddamn rope. We ate fine sausages and glugged water and sugary dried fruits, celebration foods. Steve videoed some congratulations and exalted exhalations. Then we headed up for the actual summit, the highest point, Columbia Crest across the crater, a walk liberated of bag and rope and all but still far from a simple stroll through an alpine meadow. We didn't need them but brought our ice axes just for the pictures. We made sure to sign the registry, having missed out on that at Whitney last summer. I wrote something about this mountain being truly the land of gods and angels and I felt blessed to have visited. We had celebratory drinks on the summit, at 14,410 feet. I opened my mini of Chivas Regal and took a hearty swig of scotch, letting it warm me, revitalize me, add to the euphoria of success. Essentially 6 months of planning, training, and anticipation all leading to this one glorious moment.
And so began the descent. The problem with summitting a peak is that you're only halfway finished when you celebrate. There's the return which is always lacking the anticipation that just over the next crest is the summit. It's also painful in that you have to go slower than gravity would prefer, adding extra strain to muscles and joints.
I wanted to charge it but Coleman, the sensible one, kept on pulling on us to go a bit slower, be a bit more careful. It WAS steep...
And if you slipped, directly below you was a blind rollover...
and then the gaping maw of some hungry crevasse, just waiting to swallow you whole.
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| Those 2 yellow dots upper center - Those are our tents. |
I coiled the rope half-assed, lashed it onto my pack with the rest of the shit I could cram in and on there, crampons, extra layers, finally the helmet, all of it. 4000 feet lower, warm well-oxygenated air. Snacks and waters. All that was left was the Muir snowfield. And we had a plan - glissading down that bitch, one Mach 2 slide on our asses down to the trails, hell we'll be done by 5 - it was about 4 at that time.
But our packs were heavy. Mine especially seemed to weight me down and after a few attempts to glissade led nowhere and in fact caused me to lose my rope in its poor coil, I realized that somehow I would have to walk down this fucking endless goddamn campo of slush, my body far beyond its limit hours ago.
This would become an etenal analogy for something annoying and seemingly endless. I first described it as this: The hike up and even, to an extent, down the glaciers was like negotiating a big deal. Tough but highly rewarding, yielding a hearty helping of pride upon completion. The Muir Snowfield, especially going down, was like a prolonged argument with Bank of America about overdraft fees. Coleman didn't approve of that, seemingly BofA treats him well or something so here's another one: Hiking up is like a fight where you're in the right but your opponent isn't necessarily wrong - it's tough and painful but the victory's worth it. The Muir Snowfield is like an argument with an angry motorist who refuses to move his car while you scream back and forth, arguing semantics pointlessly as people honk behind you and you just wish you never had to drive anywhere in this fucking place ever again.
Either way, it was a bit of a breaking point. I collapsed, said no way could I get down with this rope, at one point took to punching it when it again fell out, fucking rope, slowed us down all day, had to always lengthen and shorten, made us have to depend on each other for how fast or slow we went, made me go slow while heading downhill, much more stress on my knees than if I'd just double-hopped rock and snow to get down, fucking rope, took us a goddamn half-hour every fucking time we got roped up. At one point Steve, angry with the whole situation and my whining about the rope and the REI rental tent which we were now going to be returning a day late (extra fee) that kept falling off his pack, plucked said tent out of the snow and stormed off, sprinting out of the field and was gone. I passed Coleman and Kyle as they stopped to change from ice axe to hiking poles, setting up for a glissade as they were best at eking out the few slides slippable in this wet snow, and told them I was gonna hurry along the bootpack, try to get to the bottom with Steve and turn in our departure slip and return the fox bag and so on and they just nodded. We were unroped and certainly a bit prickly with each other, especially surly me, and as such a split was inevitable.
Then Kyle and Coleman caught up and we finished it. People passing were all commenting on how destroyed we looked. One guy grinning said "Yup, every time I say this is the last time" to which Kyle said "Yeah but I mean it." Some tourists asked us where we were coming from looking so wrecked, bedraggled and we'd grumble out a few words about the summit and push on. I thought I was lost but kept directing us where my instincts said. Then I'd ask day hikers for directions and they'd just laugh, clueless. Then Coleman would say I was right, then Kyle would say I wasn't, I'd say I remembered it but didn't, we'd pass fat marmots and ambling brooks and beautiful pine, back among vegetation, the trail dipping beyond signs and I was worried it would never end until, finally, around 8 PM we found ourselves back at the trailhead, strode up confidently to Mr. John waiting at the car, already in shorts and t-shirt. And then I threw down my bag. We'd made it.
We'd started hiking at 9 and finished at 6 the first day. During our breaks we drank and during the longer ones we'd melted snow or spent 3 and a half hours putting up tents, cooking dinner, and melting snow. The second night we woke up at 12:45 and started hiking by 2 AM, finally finishing at 8 PM. So that meant over 35 hours we spent about 25 hiking (with short breaks), 6 hours and 15 minutes melting snow, setting up and taking down tents, and roping in, etc... and 3 hours and 15 minutes in and out (mostly out) of sleep. 9,000 feet of elevation gain over somewhere between 7 and 9 miles (adjusting for the changing routes as crevasses dictated). But we'd made it.
The first thing we did after dropping off the fox bag and the hike check-out was to turn on the heat in Steve's Volvo. Amazing, this invention of artificial heat which soon overwhelmed my painful face, neck, and lip burn. I pride myself on my ability to handle sun but Coleman, ever the smart one, had slathered himself in SPF 70 and as such was the only one without a painful glacial burn.
Coleman and Kyle passed out in the back seat. I packed lippers and struggled to stay awake for the ever-stoic Steve John as he drove us back to civilization. We ate McDonald's, enjoying the burn of warm french fry salt on our chapped lips. Got to the West Seattle Grove where we sipped beers, took turns showering, and laid down on the softest beds we'd ever felt. It was done. We'd made it.
The next morning our waiter said we looked like we'd had a rough night and when we told him we'd just summitted Rainier our bartender made our bloody maries extra stiff, came over to share in our sense of accomplishment as he'd done the climb a time or two himself. We were now in a special club. Also, unable to shake the philosophy of the four of us as a rope team, we went drink for drink, pounding 3 each while devouring our meals. We spent the rest of the day stumbling around Seattle, working out the lactic acid, stiff, struggling up the hills of the city, glowing with the incomparable sense of accomplishment that can only follow such a life-affirming ordeal. We spent the afternoon at Alki Beach, swam in the Puget Sound, and found our conversations slowly going away from "never again" to "well next year..." As it always does, the pain and the suffering and the coldness soon leave you. Eventually you're just left with the sense of accomplishment, of being a better, tougher, stronger man than you were before, more sure of yourself, the world, and your place in it. We watched sunset sitting on the seawall, smoking cigars, a job well done. Coleman, ever the brilliant photog, captured a perfect celebratory lineup.
"They had been afraid to die on the mountain; now they feared a return to a world where such matters were misunderstood, where people thought dying mattered more than it did. They were afraid to leave behind the clarity of intention that had possessed them here. They were afraid not to know what to do. They felt uplifted and unworthy at once — they were drunk with confusion and joy and anxiety. They had come here and retrieved something. They worried that they couldn’t protect it, that they hadn’t changed and that they would forget." - Clint Willis, BOYS OF EVEREST
Clarity of intention. It's hard to explain to those who weren't there. To those who've never done something like this, who'd accomplished something so pointless in some ways (we're not curing cancer) yet so important as our world grows increasingly softer, as we as men grow less sure of ourselves, life grows more confusing, and, on the other side, as we begin to doubt whether the way we as a race have chosen to live our collective lives in this foul year of our lord is really what the whole thing we call "being" is all about. That is, standing on a peak, you have an affirmation of your existence much greater than almost anything experienced down in the flatlands. Even more, this was a real, palpable ambition and we realized it. There's no greater symbol of a man's ambition that the summit of some dramatic, daunting peak. We lived it.
And now, just a few days later, there's only one steady chant echoing through our heads, a single line running through our post-glow emails back and forth: time to start getting ready for our next mountain.
- Ryan
And for a little rundown of the anticipation and relief before and after this epic hike, check out Kyle's article LIFE BEFORE AND AFTER THE MOUNTAIN.
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