Cryptofiction award-winning author tracks Lewis and Clark
through Pacific Northwest in search of Bigfoot.
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Cryptofiction award-winning author tracks Lewis and Clark |
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Adventure Log My writing career began when I was a boy, exploring the backwoods of Glacier National Park. In them thar woods be bears--living, breathing monsters! I may not have penned a line of fiction until I began writing Cryptid in 1997, but my romantic sense of adventure was born in those primeval woods of Montana where monsters still roamed and where man was just another link in the food chain. Today my lust for adventure and the search for the unknown is still alive and well, at least as alive as the mythic Sasquatch anyway. So join me as I report back from time to time on what lies just over the horizon. 5:00 AM on July 14th, 2007 at 11,500 feet on Mt. Rainier's Disappointment Cleaver, I was lying face down in the rock and snow in my own vomit. My breathing was shallow and periodic. Several layers of down jackets and sleeping bags were piled on my back, warding off shock and hypothermia. After two hours of fighting the pain I knew this time I was not getting up. I was not going any further. Behind goggles sprayed with vomit spittle my eyes closed, the voices about me faded into eternity, and consciousness slipped away, taking with it any chance of summitting Rainier for the second time. As I lay semi-unconscious, one of my rope team members raced down the mountain alone, through treacherous crevasses, seeking communication with the outside world. My other rope team member was hovering about me feeling helpless, and did the only thing he could: take a few photos for posterity and then call up the trail for two climbers to hustle back down and stay with him until help came. Where had our bid for a second summitting of the Northwest's infamous Mt. Rainier gone wrong? If I had been one to look for omens of our potential success or failure, which all mountain climbers eventually come to do, I might have considered the rare southern flow of warm weather that interrupted our first morning plans of ascending from Camp Muir to the Ingraham Flats with a spectacular thunderstorm. The high winds and lightning drove climbers on the mountain above us down like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I might have thought twice about bringing a book titled The Climb up the mountain with us. Recounting the tragic 1996 climbing season on Mt. Everest where several people died, The Climb may not have been the best good luck charm, as one veteran climber told me. I could have given more consideration to a premonition I continued to receive that second day we spent at camp waiting to summit; that of me not making it any further than 12,000 feet, which is the exact elevation I eventually reached before being driven down by convulsive vomiting attacks. Or I might have pondered the words I spoke to two climbers our first night in camp after they thanked me for assisting an ill member of their party: “You're welcome, but no worries. I'm sure you'll have an opportunity to pay me back.” Those two climbers were the very same two climbers my team member called down off the Cleaver to be with he and I as we awaited a helicopter. But I wasn't seeking omens of failure, because I wasn't planning on it. I was in the best condition of my life. I had organized the strongest climbing team I'd ever climbed with. The weather, other than the thunderstorm, was as good as it gets above 10,000 feet in the Northwest. The route was in great condition. Spirits were high. And I had just pulled off a marathon summit of 12,000 ft. Mt. Adams a few weeks earlier. And even if I had been seeking omens, I never could have foreseen the fate in store for me, not unless I looked seven years into my past. Seven years earlier and a few days after summitting Mt. St. Helens, coincidentally, I had to be rushed to the emergency room due to a freak constriction of my intestine. The constriction had caused the intestine to swell to a point of nearly bursting, becoming life threatening at that point. After abdominal surgery and ten days in the hospital, I left with an eight-inch scar, twenty pounds lighter, and no reassurance from my doctor that this random event couldn't occur again in the future. Well, at 3:00 AM on the morning of July 14th, 12,000 feet atop Rainier on its nefarious Disappointment Cleaver, my worst nightmare that I had feared these past seven years came true. Without warning and over the span of maybe fifteen minutes, my intestine constricted, eventually driving me to my knees with the pain, then face down in the snow as my body was wracked with convulsions, bringing up a pasty, white mucus out of my nose and mouth. I only had time to weakly call out the name of the team member on the rear of the rope team in front of me before the convulsions silenced me. As it turns out that team member didn't hear my call for help. The three of us on the last rope were on our own. I couldn't have picked a worse time and place for it to happen. It would take hours to get me off the mountain, maybe as long as day before I could get to a hospital. As far as I knew, my intestine could burst anytime. So there was no time to waste. As soon as my two rope team members came up the route and found me face down, we were immediately unanimous in our decision. We had to get down now. Of course, I was not able to communicate much more than a few choked phrases at a time as I struggled with the pain that burned through my abdomen, and thus they could only guess as to what had happened to me. There was nothing they could do anyway and no time for conversation. We just had to move. Our haste only proved to be continually frustrated by my inability to take more than twenty or more unstable strides before having to collapse onto my back on the trail, vomit, and seek some temporary relief from the pain. Over the next few minutes, as I gathered my strength and courage to fight the pain once more, my team members would urge me up so we could keep heading down. Other teams on their own bid for the summit would pass in silence. Though I could barely walk, was wracked with convulsions, and wished for death to ease my pain, I nevertheless felt compelled to pull myself off the trail so they could continue on without so much a break in stride. Climbing etiquette dictates those descending must yield to those ascending. I was struck how much like a war zone the mountain became on summit day. It was each man for himself, with the walking dead and those who couldn't even manage that seen as just another obstacle to negotiate. God bless us. Eventually, though, my team members would succeed in dragging me to my feet and I would again stumble down the forty degree slope that was covered in crusted ice which would inevitably catch my crampons and threaten to pitch me head over heals. That is until the ice gave way to the rocky backbone of the Cleaver that nearly assured I was going headlong off a ledge into the fathomless depths of the crevasses that waited open-mouthed below. In those moments lying on the trail on my back, as I instructed my team members on what I thought was happening to me and how they could best offer first aid, I would have an almost dual experience. Part of me was tortured by the pain, regressing deeper inside myself in search of both the strength to fight on as well as a connection with the divine in hope of an intervention. The other part was gazing up at the brilliance of the night sky, in all its clear, star-studded wonder, thinking what a miracle the beauty of both the mountain and sky was and knowing with certainty that the divine was looking down on me with full compassion and design to ease my pain and provide safe harbor. And then I would rise to my feet and return to my own personal hell, descending one unsure step at a time. That is until 5 AM. This time when I went down in another fit of vomiting that was so violent I appeared to be having a seizure, it was at the feet of those two climbers we had helped that first night, a lifetime ago at Camp Muir. And in my pain-induced stupor my own words spoken to these two climbers came clear and present in my mind: "You're welcome, but no worries. I'm sure you'll have an opportunity to pay me back." For that reason or another, I knew I was done. I could not continue. I was not getting up. The pain was more than I could bear. A call to 911 had to be made. I had to be airlifted off this mountain now and I had to get to an emergency room. I told my cousin-in-law where my cell phone was, but he couldn't figure out how to make a call. I gave him directions in short, labored phrases, only to have the phone die once the operator answered. I gave my last instructions, ones which I would only give under life and death circumstances, for my other team member to head down by himself, unroped, through the crevassed Ingraham Glacier to seek help and to get a helicopter anyway he could. After that, I could do no more and could take no more. My life was in God's hands, and part of me wished he would take it. As I retreated deeper still within myself, seeking that divine intervention, I begged for help; my own strength and will had expired. I was going no further on my own power. My eyes closed, the earth went silent around me. Forty-five minutes later I was being gently pulled over onto my back. A magnificent sunrise had burned the dark away and painted the cliffs of Little Tahoma and the gaping crevasses of the glacier below in a heavenly orange glow. A guided team from Alpine Ascents had come across me and my small band of guarding angels. The guide was organizing my rescue, positioning me for an assisted descent down the rock ledges of the Cleaver and the crevasses of the Ingraham. He asked me about my pain level and if I could walk. I took a moment to clear my head and take stock of myself, then surprised us all as I answered, “Yes, I can walk. And the pain… It's gone.” A few hours later, after being checked out by the park ranger, I made my way across Camp Muir to the shelter to gather my gear and prepare for my ranger-assisted descent to the ranger station at Paradise, I encountered one of those two climbers who had been with me during the Alpine Ascents' rescue and who I had predicted would pay me back. He stopped to tell me of this climber they had seen on the trail earlier this morning, who they had helped, but didn't know what had come of him. They were concerned, for he was in terrible condition. I smiled back at him and told him that the climber he was inquiring about was me. He stared at me in disbelief, stating it couldn't be; that climber looked half dead. I just smiled again, patted him on the shoulder as I continued on to the shelter, and said, “I told you that you'd have a chance to pay me back.” Hindsight had brought all the omens into full view for me by this time. And so as I walked along side the ranger down to the ranger station—he and I discussing how it could be that just a few hours earlier I felt on death's door step and now I was walking off the mountain under my own power—I examined them all, studying them from all possible angles. However, instead of the omens showing me that this climb would end in tragedy and that only pain and suffering awaited me, once again in my life they illuminated for me the truth that indeed, as I gaze up into the endless depths of the night sky, the divine is watching down over me. |
Fellow Authors Below is a list of some of my peers. If you're an author and would like to be listed, contact me at mail@ericpenz.com.
Allan Rousselle, Log Archive 
I'm just taking a nap. Note the sole of my boot. (Photo credit: Schuyler Smith) 
Ingraham Glacier. Those dots are tents. (Photo credit: Schuyler Smith) |
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