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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The morning of August 2nd, 2004, seemed to have had no beginning, as if my climbing team and I had been trudging up the northeast face of Mt. Rainier since the dawn of time. Certainly, we had been locked in battle with the mountain since long before the dawn of that bright Sunday morning. And yet, the morning raced dangerously fast toward passing into noon and beyond. We were still a good two thousand feet from the summit and quickly running out of time. Climbers have many enemies, but none may be as deadly as the passage of time. Every mountain has its own window of time in which it is the most safe to climb, and this window is due to various factors of weather and temperature, time of year, and snow conditions. That window of time may be very liberal or very narrow depending on the mountain and the current conditions, but it is almost always best to be off the summit and well down the mountain before the sun passes the noon hour. Combine that window of time with the fact that climbers are not machines, they can only function at such a high level of exertion and under the effects of altitude for so long, time begins ticking down to potential disaster the minute a team of climbers leaves the relative comfort and safety of base camp. The sport of climbing is always a race against certain tragedy--a race that all too often is played out at the pace of a winded desert tortoise. And so as the sun rose high over our heads that morning, time and our short supply of it was indeed on my mind. We had been climbing the Emmons glacier since about 1:30 AM, when we had left our base camp at Camp Sherman, and had finally reached the final traverse. And unfortunately for us, whose greatest enemy that morning was indeed the passage of time, the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a glacier is never a straight line. For a straight line means one would have to climb down in and back out of a seemingly endless number of crevasses, which are large fissures in the glacier that all too often function like cold, icy graves waiting to swallow another tired, unlucky, or plain old stupid climber. Thus climbers willingly spend the precious time required to meander their way through the maze of death traps set in their way by the mountain. So though we may have only been two thousand feet and maybe a half-mile from the summit crater, we were in reality over two miles and over two hours from the summit. Blocking our ascent with mouth agape like a ravenous beast sat a massive crevasse all along the top of Emmons glacier where it had peeled away from the mountain at a point where its relatively shallow slope atop its shoulders turned sharply steeper on its north face. The calved glacier thus thwarted any straight attack on the summit and sent us on a traverse of more than two miles to navigate the crevasse and then traverse back toward the crater rim. And this traverse traveled a narrow path between the upper crevasse and an even larger one that licked at our weary boot heels with every stride, just waiting for us to make that one fatal misstep. As we began this traverse, those of us on the lead rope became aware that a member of the second rope team had begun retching green bile and stomach fluids, having succumbed to altitude sickness. And our guide, ahead of me on our rope, wasn't much better. I had been watching him lose steam for some time and wondered about his ability to continue to think clearly. Thus stuck between two icy fingers of death with the morning leaving us quickly behind, tied to a veteran climber who was loosing his battle against the mountain, and being trailed by a second rope team struggling to just keep themselves in motion, I contemplated once again our very real chances of failure--and not just of failing to summit, but of failing to survive. In this life of immediate gratification, luxurious comforts, and three-layered social safety nets it is rare to actually be presented with the very real possibility of tragic failure. More often we are presented with challenges that are really only half so. The only thing keeping us from succeeding is desire. But this climb, and climbing in general, was different. I had the desire, but did I have the ability, stamina, or proper supporting team? Rainier had already taken the lives of several climbers that season--as it does every season. Could I make it to the top, and if so, would I be able to make it back down with nothing more than a strong desire to do so? Images of my three month-old baby boy being rocked to sleep by my wife while my three-year-old son played in the next room with the world's largest plastic dinosaur collection haunted me with each labored step. I could hear their sweet voices as my crampons bit into the crust of the glacier. With just a glance over my right shoulder I could see far to the north, imagining I could actually pick out my thirteen-hundred-square foot starter home among the wash of urban sprawl. Thoughts of never returning home plagued me, of my three-year-old asking my wife, 'Where's daddy? Why isn't he coming home?', of my baby growing up with no memories of his father, other than the images of faded photos his mother had shown him, and of my wife, sitting alone in bed each night fighting tears and a broken heart. When at last we came to the end of our traverse, there awaited us a nasty little hairpin switchback negotiated on the razor's edge of the upper crevasse. Our guide gathered us all together for a rest. Some 13, 500 feet above the Pacific Northwest with a priceless view of all we had thus far conquered, we slumped into the cool embrace of the glacier. A mere 900 feet still remained--a flat approach to the actual volcano's rim and final ascent to the highest point at 14,440 feet. I could see the same thought playing out in each of our minds: shall we call it good? We knew we were lucky to have made it this far. Most of the teams on the mountain that day had turned back summitless. No one would know or care that we didn't take that final walk to gain a paltry 900 feet after having already climbed 10,000 feet in the past twenty-four hours without sleep. Surprised, but not really so, I listened as our guide was the first to put this thought into words. Time was short. By now it was about 10:00 AM, nearly nine hours from the time we set out from base camp. The window of time for safely summitting had already come and gone. Our guide had five summits under his belt already. He didn't need a sixth, and it had been years since his last. Our guide was going no further. If we wanted those last 900 feet we'd have to go it alone. The rest of us then sat quiet, watching each other, thinking, tasting the temptation to also call it good and get the hell off this rock and never come back. Without the guide there were five of us left--we had started with seven when we left the White River campground at 9:14 AM the previous morning, but one wisely chose not to leave base camp nine hours earlier--and only one of us had summitted Rainier before. Without the guide we were a handful of lost sheep. It quickly became evident in each of our sun and wind burned faces, though, that shepherdless sheep we may be, we sure as hell were not going home without stepping foot on the summit. Over two hours later, we finally rejoined our napping guide. With five photographs safely secured as proof of the less than a minute spent on the barren, windswept crater rim, we headed down, each of us enduring our own personal pain and weariness, wishing to be anywhere on earth but this lonely, Godforsaken peak. On a recent flight back from Montana, as the plane carried us over central Washington State and approached the eastern slopes of the Cascade range, I sat in awe of the view through my window. Jutting up through the clouds, now bathed pink by a setting sun, I could see far off Mt. Hood, the robust shoulders of Mt. Adams, and the mammoth presence of Rainier. Memories of August 2nd, 2004, came to me as fresh as if I now stood atop that crater rim watching the setting sun paint the infinite wash of clouds. I relived the long trek up Inter glacier to base camp, the sleepless few hours spent in my tent as the mountain's wind threatened to hurl me and my tent off its sacred slopes, and the last three miles of trail that brought us back to our cars, myself nearly in tears with the pain. I relived, too, though, the splendor of sitting with my team high up on Emmons glacier as we enjoyed a rare break and watched the world so far below us sleeping peacefully beneath a high, full moon and endless sky. I saw again the sculptured crevasses carved by the hands of gravity, wind, and the sun over thousands of years that seduced you with their iridescent blue faces and cavernous depths. And I felt again the powerful elation of standing the full 14,440 feet atop one of the world's grandest creations knowing I could of quit at 13,500 feet, but chose not to. Appreciating the life one has is often only possible after one intimately experiences the very near loss of it. Climbing gives one that appreciation, and may be one reason I climb, to feel again the crispness of life as I felt during and long after my surgery in 2000. Life is only true and real when it is a life not taken for granted. And when I climbed into bed early the morning of August 3rd, 2004, with my two boys sound asleep in their rooms and my wife breathing peacefully and softly next to me, there was nothing about my life at that moment that I took for granted. Watching Rainier grow ever closer through the window of my plane, though, I couldn't help but consider a second climb of its lofty rim. I never said climbers were smart. |
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  Beautiful but deadly. Watch your step. 
14,440 ft! OK, let's go home now. |
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