Cool and Unconcerned

-or-

See You In Valhalla, Dean Potter

Because I have never met or climbed with Dean Potter, I have no photos of him. In place of stealing something from the internet I have substituted mountain goat photos from an Enchantments trip some years ago. I trust both Potter and the goats would approve.

I am not particularly cool and am rarely unconcerned. I tend to care about things to a pretty uncool degree. Most of our climbing icons right now are the opposite. Guys like Alex Honnold, Daniel Woods, Chris Sharma, and Hayden Kennedy seem to always act like nothing is ever that big of a deal. They certainly don’t live like they don’t care about anything, but to be cool they have to act like it. Climbing right now is pretty centered on this bro-ish stoner vibe, this determined, affected, attitude of unconcern.
Dean Potter didn’t act that way, and in the midst of all the remembrances and commemorations, I want to remind you people how often I heard him criticized for it. We all respected Potter, but in my experience relatively few of us liked him. He was a little odd, a little mystical, kind of dorky sometimes. His manner of speaking was very sincere and open and often quite emotional. He wasn’t cool and he wasn’t unconcerned and to a culture obsessed with these traits he was almost an outcast. And now that he’s gone I hope all the people who called him a douche for caring about stuff are feeling bad about themselves.

Anyways, on to the requiem,

When asked about the name of his band, John Darnielle explained that mountain goats are excellent climbers, but often not as excellent as they think they are, and that every year many of them fall to their deaths thinking they can make some leap of which they turn out to be incapable. They possess a suicidal pride that sets them apart from every other animal, except, of course, humans. This trait, this willingness to pursue the uncertain, even at great risk, is something few of us possess to the same degree as Dean Potter. When I go into the mountains I fight a losing battle against my fear and laziness and complacency from the moment I set out until the moment I return. If we choose to value those who do go after this uncertainty, which we do, we valorize them endlessly, we must also honor their downfalls. A gamble should not be judged by its outcome, it is either worthwhile or not before the die is cast, and death is not a refutation of life, but rather its completion. It is tragic that Potter died last weekend, and I wept for him, but fatal risk was his art and he was among its greatest practitioners, so to condemn his act is to condemn him. It must therefore be a different kind of tragedy than that to which we are accustomed.

 

When a man gets cancer or dies in a car accident we call it tragic, in that it causes us sorrow, but this is not the older meaning of the term. In ancient Greek, tragoida, translated as tragedy, literally means “goat song,” I don’t know what to make of that but somewhere in the concept is an inevitability. Cancer and car accidents are unnecessary in the philosophical sense, they can happen or not, with little prediction. I could easily have died today as I drove down the interstate and there is nothing I could have done to prevent it. How Potter died is very different from this. His death was a tragedy because it was contained in the essence of what he was trying to do. If I could get from home to work and back without risking life and limb maneuvering a steel box at 60 miles per hour, I would. If Potter’s arts did not involve that uncertainty they would be meaningless, they would be banal stunts, party tricks for the rich and famous.

Potter had that most human trait, that suicidal pride, and so his death was a tragedy in the ancient sense: the fulfillment of fate, however awful for those left behind, that brings a man to the home of the gods.

Francine

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The Week I Watched A Chicken Die

-or-

Is It Well With My Soul?

 

Almost a year ago was the first time I killed an animal without an exoskeleton. A mole had been caught in one of our traps but not killed and I dispatched it with a hatchet after my mom had recoiled. It was an oddly unemotional act. I wanted to put the poor creature out of its misery but I also wanted to avoid dulling the blade by hitting it on the trap. I stood up when it was done and knew it was a moment of significance but felt nothing extraordinary. And two days ago I sat next to the laundry bin lined with blankets in which I had placed our fatally ill chicken and cried with a violence that has become unusual for me.

She can’t hold her head up anymore and it lolls to the side like that of a different sort of bird, sleeping. She is limp and has hardly moved since I brought her into the house. I placed a Tupperware container of water next to her and she has not touched it but when i dipped my finger into it and let it drip onto her beak she lapped it up, so I got a shot glass from the kitchen and held her head upright to drink. When she swallowed the water her eyes opened fully for the first time that day and she looked at me as if she only now noticed I was there. Soon after I could here her stomach churn.

When my mom left on vacation she asked me to watch the chickens, to collect eggs and close the coop door at night and open it again in the morning and make sure they had food and water. She had told me that Francine was looking sick but this was the first time I had really taken a good look at her. She was sleeping in the coop but she didn’t have the strength to walk up the ramp to the roost with the others and all day she would sit in the dirt by the water dish. When I offered her a spoonful of the leftover couscous I was feeding the other chickens she pecked at it energetically but then let it fall to the ground.

I stood there looking at her, that afternoon, and knew one thing – I could not let her die like this; she was so clearly suffering I could not just walk back inside and do nothing. She looked badly egg bound but should have died from it weeks ago if she was. I believe she has another sickness, egg peritonitis, that looks similar but lingers. It is curable but not cheaply, and Francine was a $3 chick from the feed store. So I took her inside and put her into a warm shallow bath, hoping maybe I was wrong and she would lay a monster egg and be fine. The water cooled and she was unchanged and so I resolved to keep her warm and comfortable until she passed. I could not think of anything else to do. This was when I sat on a stool next to the laundry bin and began to cry. I told myself, I told her, I would stay there with her until she died. It was good that I decided otherwise since it has been three days and though she is fading she is still alive.

When I check on her, each morning and then periodically throughout the afternoon and evening when I get home from work, I pet her and talk to her, but I wonder if she would rather be left alone. A human, or even a dog, might appreciate the company, but were she healthy she would hardly let me touch her, so it seems likely that her docility is just a sign of severe weakness. The helplessness of it is what strikes me, my own inability to do literally anything to help her. I cannot cure her; I cannot ease her pain; I cannot comfort her. My presence is probably just one more trial to be endured before her death. For all I know she would have been happier out there in the dirt watching her sisters scratch and peck. She might have passed quicker out there, without my help.

–

My freshman year of college I attended the opening lecture of a continental philosophy conference being held at my school. The speaker, a strange, sweating, morbidly obese man, spoke about how when he was a child his dog grew sick; he spoke about cleaning out puss-filled sores while he waited for the animal to die. He spoke about our hostility, as humans, toward other animals, how the animal in us is what is evil. He spoke about the asteroid impact that destroyed most of the life on earth some millions of years ago and how we are accomplishing much the same thing without any interplanetary collision. I sat there, next to a girl whom I loved deeply but would never touch, listening to this, and felt viciously alive. I was almost buzzing with a weird, kinetic, erotic, energy. If it was not spring it was late winter. I wanted to strike out against the coming extinction, rage against the night, kick the darkness until it bled daylight. But I knew no way to do this so I went home and early that morning I found bedbugs in my room. I captured one in a ziplock bag and kept it pinned to my bulletin board for months, periodically prodding it to see if it was still alive. I don’t recall how long it lived in there but it was a long time. We had to get rid of the bed frame my grandfather had made for my mom when she was a kid because the poison the exterminators use can never really penetrate a wooden structure like that.

My grandfather died when I was three from a brain aneurysm during a routine surgery. He had part of the operation, and then a bad headache, and then the rest and he never woke up. I don’t remember it but I have heard about it enough times that I feels like I do. My mom says it was a mercy that he went quickly, that he was a good man but belligerent and bad tempered and he would have made a terrible invalid.

–

I don’t know what to do with death. I read these ancient philosophers and so much of what they say is that death is nothing to be feared, but they say this believing their souls are soon to depart for Olympus, and I have no such consolation. I wish I could believe what Pullman wrote, that the gates of Sheol have been opened and that all we have to fear is the torment of the harpies if we do not have stories to tell them, that we will dissolve into the dust from which we were made and be a part of the world soul forever, but I cannot forget that he wrote this as a fantasy. The dissolution of consciousness is beyond my comprehension. I cannot understand death, I cannot fight it or accept it, I can only sit here, on this stool next to the laundry bin, crying, the object of my mourning incapable of appreciating all that I cannot do for her.

 

Francine died sometime during the afternoon on May 8th, two days after this piece was written. She was a little over a year old. 

No One Cares

-or-

Some Preliminary Notes on the Intersection of Leave-No-Trace and Climbing

 

Most climbers I know consider themselves environmentalists to one degree or another. Before I started climbing I was a hiker and most of the hikers I knew considered themselves environmentalists as well. I think it is fair to say that most people who engage in human-powered outdoor recreation think of themselves in this way. A central part of environmentalism for these recreationists is Leave-No-Trace (LNT) ethics – central to the point where, for many people, LNT is what environmentalism means in practice. LNT is immentantely practical, it concerns how we travel, how we camp, how we cook and clean and defecate, and yet it is ultimately idealistic. To truly leave no trace is impossible, any intelligent person will admit this; LNT is built on the model of Christian or Platonic purity, just as one can never be truly free from sin or the corruption of the body, so can we never truly avoid leaving traces, yet we must strive to none the less, or so goes the ethic.

Backpacking in one of the most heavily regulated wilderness areas in Washington, 2008. Photo by Andy Smith

 

Issues have recently been raised with this version of LNT by a cadre of environmentalists, perhaps the most vocal of whom are Gregory Simon and Peter Algona. Informed by the work of William Cronon, they have questioned the ways LNT redirects environmental impacts from one region to another, encourages a culture of consumerism among outdoor enthusiasts, and is selectively enforced by specific user groups in order to exclude others. In a fuller version of this essay I would examine their work, and Cronon’s, in detail, and explain exactly what their, in my view rather damning, criticisms mean for climbers, but that would necessitate a full examination of the entire history of wilderness recreation in the Western United States, a task which is impossible for me at the moment as I am without university library access. I am therefore limited here to what I can accomplish on my own, which is raise a series of questions about how LNT really applies to climbing, and to human existence in the wilderness more generally.

Traces of human presence in a rather unlikely spot, well off route on the Persis-Index traverse.

Like most wilderness users, climbers believe in a version of LNT that fits the practical requirements of their activity. Just as hikers want well maintained trails, climbers want well cleaned routes, and just as many hikers would be amazed at the amount of construction work that goes into trail-building, so many climbers would be amazed at how creating clean climbs reshapes the rock faces. In some alpine environments climbers can just walk up and set off on perfect virgin stone, but the vast majority of rock climbs, particularly in Western Washington, would be unrecognizable in their original states. The proper degree of this reshaping is, of course, a matter of debate: on one side stands the old-school trad onsight purists, who believe a route description ruins a climb, and on the other are the new wave high end sport climbers, who want every route immaculately cleaned, chalked, and equipped with fixed draws. Most climbers fall somewhere between these two extremes. The critical point that I would like to raise is that LNT is irrelevant to this debate; LNT, and in fact environmental concerns in general, have nothing to do with the controversies that have defined how climbing is to be undertaken. LNT is evoked by one side or the other to give their position a moral dimension – “we climb this way because it’s the right way, for the world,” and to put it bluntly, this is bullshit. To not leave traces is no climber’s goal, and is in fact contrary to the entire endeavor.

Route development at a new bouldering area off Mountain Loop Hwy.

 

The ongoing debate over what constitutes the proper way to protect a climb illustrates my point. Early British crag climbers sound like modern environmentalists for rejecting the use of pitons at their home crags, but a closer examination of their arguments reveals not a concern for harming the rock, but a concern for their own reputations as sportsmen. Pitons and carabiners were a German innovation and the fervor with which the British climbers rejected them always had a nationalistic edge. Eventually, if not in Britain, pitons became ubiquitous and innovations in their design led to the great breakthroughs of the 1950s and 60s in Yosemite Valley. Then came “clean climbing,” a development so mythologized that fantasy and obfuscation intertwine freely. Most climbers today believe that pitons are an obsolete technology, that the world of climbing came to its senses, saw what they were doing to the rock, and found a better way. This is untrue on a number of levels. Firstly, pitons are still widely used, if only in several fringe genres of climbing: hard aid and ice/mixed. Secondly, that they have been preserved in these genres is not a coincidence, for it is in these two genres that climbers either already carry hammers or find it no great inconvenience to do so. This is the critical point of clean climbing – it was never about the damage that pitons were doing to the rock, it was just that pitons and hammers were heavy and inconvenient for hard free climbing and so climbers found a way to do without them.

A close examination of the historical record bears this out; Royal Robbins’ first attraction to the artificial chockstones he learned about in Britain was that they could be placed with one hand, while Yvon Chouinard, whose company manufactured pitons, was very leery of the idea until he realized that he could co-opt the movement to produce and sell a whole new line of climbing equipment. Spring-loaded caming devices, the ultimate tool of the clean climber because they can be placed and removed so easily, were actually rejected by this same generation, who feared that they would remove the psychological challenge of lead climbing. The next generation’s objection to bolting on rappel or to bolting in general, depending on who one asks, was identical. The movement against bolting is especially interesting because it so often uses environmental rhetoric. If according to LNT a wilderness user should leave nothing behind then a bolt is an obvious and flagrant violation, but the actual ecology of cliffside ecosystems complicates the issue. Although the common trad climber may feel that they are leaving less of a trace than the sport climber, the cleaning of cracks that most trad climb development demands is far more ecologically destructive than the placing of a few bolts and the removal of lichen from a few holds. This is where LNT ideals become confused. The goal of LNT is twofold, to preserve the wilderness experience for other users and to minimize damage to ecosystems, yet the common-sense application of LNT to climbing, leaving less stuff behind, makes these contradictory. To preserve the climbing experience for other climbers typically means to leave the stone unchanged but with the plant and animal life removed from it, forcing the two goals of LNT into a collision.

This is an serious dilemma because the application of environmental ethics to non-living substances is deeply illogical. Stone itself is not an ecosystem or a fragile living organism; the ethic of preservation, of look-but-do-not-touch, does not apply to it. A plant is harmed when a hiker tramples it and a bird is harmed when a climber destroys its nest, these things have adverse effects for that organism and for its offspring and ultimately for the species as a whole, but the stone is not harmed by its manual erosion. What this ultimately reduces to is a flaw in the ideological core of LNT. The problem LNT is designed to solve is humans “ruining” the environment and its solution is a sort of sustainable recreation, yet the ethic projects itself as a moral absolute. This allows LNT to be used to justify all kinds of exclusionary practices, from bolt chopping to flagging tape removal. This would be conceivable as a necessary evil if LNT as a moral absolute was justifiable, but at the most essential level it is contrary to the nature of our existence as humans. Our ability to leave traces is how we know we exist, how we root ourselves in the world and justify our lives. We want our lives to matter, we want to be remembered, and this means leaving traces. This is what climbers are doing when they establish first ascents, they are leaving a trace of their existence in an inhospitable place. The drive to explore and conquer, to sort a mountain into routes and variations, to realize it’s “potential,” all of this comes from the urge to leave a trace.

Classic shot of quarrying at the Index town walls, now a much-revered climbing area

There is an argument to be made that this cultural desire to mark the world like a dog pissing on a tree explains much of the damage westerners have done in the last few hundred years but my goal here is to describe, not to condone or to condemn. Climbers do not want a pure, natural world where they can explore and leave no trace of their passage, they want to exploit and develop just as the loggers and miners and construction contractors do; the only difference is that they want to develop climbing areas and not cities, extract recreation and not timber or minerals. LNT ethics, while useful to climbers in order to manage their “impact,” are deeply at odds with the entire climbing culture.

 

Because this is a preliminary essay designed to organize my thoughts on the matter and provide a format for future research, I have not cited my sources as per academic standards.

Those interested in the environmentalists I have mentioned should consult

Uncommon Ground, ed. William Cronon

Beyond Leave No Trace, Simon and Algona

Those interested in the climbing history I have recounted should consult

Unjustifiable Risk?: The Story of British Climbing, Simon Thompson

Pilgrims of the Vertical, Joseph Taylor

Obligatory Gear Review: X4 cams by Black Diamond

-or-

A Preemptive Strike Against My Ever Moving To Salt Lake City

 

I can imagine how the meeting went.

All the Black Diamond executives sitting around a dark oaken table, deep in their subterranean lair beneath Salt Lake City. After the invocation of the dirtbag liturgy and the burnt sacrifice of a 4′ length of tubular webbing stuffed with marijuana, a spirit portal is opened to Patagonia so that the great and venerable Yvon Chouinard can join them from the pentangle drawn in the grove behind his ranch. They say he sold this company years ago but if you ever believed that he ever gave up control you were a fool. Black Diamond’s reach is great, they say, they lead the world of climbing gadgets in every field, only a few companies, fringe players, locally marketed, are superior, but wait, one young marketing representative says, what about the Mastercam? There is a collective gasp. Chouinard averts his gaze. It is a word they do not say. The retorts come thick and fast: Blasphemy! The C3 has the narrowest head width of any finger-size cam! The 000 is the smallest manufactured by any company! They quickly rekindle the sacrificial fire and burn Metolius in effigy. Chouinard, appeased, nods slowly, but the marketing rep is not finished. He opens his laptop and pulls up the Outdoor Gear Lab website, here, he says, read it! They do and despair falls across the boardroom, Chris Macnamara, founder of Supertopo and author of its crown jewel, the Yosemite bigwall guidebook, has named the Mastercam the best of its class. The C3 comes in low on the list, an auxiliary piece, a novelty. There is silence but the marketing rep did not come unprepared, he has been speaking with the lead rock pro engineers and he has a plan. The Mastercam is superior, he says, there is no denying it now, but what has Metolius done? They have taken the CCH Alien and made it sturdier, cannot we do the same? Cannot we make a Mastercam and call it something else and pretend it was our idea all along?

And so they did, and thus was born the X4.

But seriously.

The X4 is much like the Mastercam and the Alien before it, and like the new Totem and FIxe Aliens for that matter. It contains two key features that all of these lack: double-axels like those in the C4 or “stacked axels” in the smaller sizes, and shiny color-coded beads to protect the ultra-flexible cable. The catch is that aside from a narrower head and greater flexibility, the larger X4s are identical to the C4s, while the “stacking” of the axels on the smaller X4s amounts to a negligible difference in expansion range. The other catch is that the ultra-flexible stem kinks horribly. Oh, and that much-touted narrower head? They just squeezed all the components together, giving the lobes a remarkable capacity to become jammed with dirt. Also the trigger wire cables break (to be fair, this happens to a lot of small cams).

Look at how kinked that is, obviously garbage. Photo by Ryan Hoover

When I first started using the X4, because my main climbing partner bought the .1, .2, and .3 sizes, they were my go-to small cams. This was mostly because I spent enough time playing with them to learn the sizes, while with his Aliens it was still guess-and-grab. My excitement wore off quickly once i realized how quickly they became kinked and gritty, while his and my other small cams stayed in good working order. X4s were, not too long ago, the newest shiniest gadget a climber could buy, and I suspect a lot of their sales was driven by that fact alone.

X4s look fancy but don’t be deceived, there is nothing innovative about them. The larger sizes are marginally better in pod placements than their equivalent C4s, but that is about it. With the new Mastercam design looking as wrong-headed as it does, Black Diamond may be well positioned to capture a larger portion of the small cam market, but we don’t have to let this happen, we don’t have to reward their unoriginality and short-sighted design work – buy Aliens.

This review is not supported in any way by Totem or Fixe. If either company would like to see more reviews like this they are invited to send me their products. I specifically need, black, blue, green, and yellow sizes, and offsets, offsets are cool too, any size of offset.

Cryogenics

-or-

Look At Me I Wrote A Short Story!

 

This piece was originally written for a creative writing class I attended my senior year of college.

It has been written that among those who hate your god, the iniquity of the fathers will be visited upon their children to the third and fourth generations, but what sort of fathers and what sort of children are these, who stand like lepers so cold beyond the embrace of heaven?

–

When he first saw him the man was sitting on a park bench across the street from Kay’s bus stop. Every day the man would be there and he would sit and watch unmoving as Kay hopped down from the bus and walked down his easement, walked alone as he was the only child at his stop. This went on for some three weeks and Kay took little notice. What caused him, that day, to not immediately turn and walk toward his driveway he never knew, but regardless there was a day when, as the bus pulled away, Kay stood and watched the man across the street: he looked to be in his forties, his head was mostly bald and he was short and stocky and wore a black wool coat. As Kay stood and examined him the man looked down the road one way and then the other and then hurried across and as he did this Kay turned and began to walk quickly toward his yard, turning his house-key over and over in his pocket. Just as he reached the porch the man called out to him.

Kay paused, the key was in the door and his hand was on the knob, maybe if he had been quick he could have scurried inside and thrown the bolt behind him. Maybe then the man would have walked around to the back but Kay would have anticipated that and checked all the locks as soon as the front door was shut. Maybe the man would have knocked on a window and smiled and asked Kay to let him in and Kay would have found a telephone. But he did none of these things and the man put his hand on Kay’s back and guided him to the bathroom where he turned off the light and closed the door. Before the man left, some hours later, he pocketed Kay’s house key, and so for a time that would remain to Kay indeterminate, every day when he got home the man would be waiting for him.

–

It was Kay’s growing forgetfulness, his skittering retreat into a self-made womb of impassivity, that finally ended the thing. He failed, that day, to flush the toilet and his parents did not know what they were seeing. They knew blood in the stool was a sign of colon cancer or some such thing and so they took him to a pediatrician, who, upon examining Kay, summoned all the authorities he knew to summon.

Years later Kay was much as he had been before. He was now the oldest of three children and played guardian to them ceaselessly. But every so often he would look at his younger brothers and wonder what it was the man had been doing to him, what it was the man had seen that had brought him panting to his door. In the coming years he would learn, and shudder, and start to cry again at night, his sobs as silent as they had been in that lightless room.

Kay’s brothers grew strong and healthy and came to pity their broken older sibling, of what had happened they knew only whispers and shadows, rumors of the crime they had been born to blot out, and so when the eldest of them married and his wife became pregnant Kay was still a mystery to them – a quiet, withdrawn, man who lived alone.

In those days he would sit on a bench in a mall a short walk from his house, and back and forth he would watch people walk: in the morning a young woman with a stroller who bore a neat simplicity that bespoke her harried joy; at midday a young girl who strode ahead of her father by a dozen steps with her head thrown back as if the world was bending to her gaze; in the afternoon a teenage couple who held each other’s hands intently, the clasp a desperation, vain and childlike, of the hope in which they lived. In the evening a woman, perhaps in her thirties, who held herself with a weighty glamour, a posture of mature beauty that seemed more the product of will than nature.

Back and forth they would walk and to him they became one person with one life. All the same warm soul. A heart of health that he wondered, some days, if he might cannibalize, for they walked in that mall, back and forth, and if they saw him they gave no sign and so he began to think that maybe he was a ghost and that if he seized one of them he could possess them and become them and be the seen instead of the seeing.

–

Around the time of his niece’s birth Kay left the city and drove into the desert and lived out of his truck and it was years before they found him. He found a wash some miles from the highway down a dirt road that varied in negotiability as the wind drifted sand across the ruts. He made his camp by a stand of trees so that he would have shade during the afternoon, and down in the wash a small brook ran for most of the year, so that he bought water only for drinking, and he drank little water. There was a liquor store not at the crossroads where he could buy gas and groceries but in the town maybe an hour’s drive farther, and once a month he would drop a couple hundred dollars on vodka and beer; had he known that there were houses in that town where for a fraction of that cost he could have acquired a month’s supply of heroin or cocaine or any other drug he cared to sample, he probably would not have lasted a year in that desert, but he didn’t have the courage to inquire and so he passed his days in half drunk stupors.

In the morning he would wake whenever the sun hit the van and it began to become unbearably hot inside, and then until midday, when he lost all shade, he would lie in a hammock and read or write or stare blankly into the sky. He had only brought half a dozen books but he read them again and again and again, until their covers were bleached unrecognizably and their spines were held together with duct tape. His writing petered out after the first year. There was simply nothing to say. When the sun would strike him as he lay he imagined it burning his skin, as indeed it did at first; he would imagine it searing away his flesh and leaving him pure and desiccated, dry as the sage. Such visions are what had driven him to his hermitage, like the first century ascetics he sought sanctification in the abandoned corners of the empire.

In the heat of the afternoon he would withdraw to the wash and wander through the twisting canyons, growing ever deeper and darker as he ventured upstream, their walls towering cool and overhung, turning the sky into a ribbon-stream above him. One morning in spring he awoke to a grey ceiling of clouds and soon it began to rain, each drop sending up a spurt of dust, and he rose hastily and hurried to the wash. He dropped briefly into the canyon and jogged a short ways upstream before scrambling back out and reaching a promontory overlooking the slot. A few inches of water were flowing through the base of the canyon, a few inches and a growing roar. The violence of the flood was terrible, but he felt only calm staring at the waters surging beneath him, a peace he had only rarely known. He imagined himself carried along by the onrush, riding in the mud and the debris, thrown body and soul into another life. In his mind was formed a psalm: may the sins of our fathers die fetid in our loins; may we find the world to come a city without children; may the great flood find us kneeling in the desert, praying for rain; but it never passed his lips.

–

It was the youngest brother that tracked him down, followed vague clues to vaguer clues until at last he stood in the sand in the shade of a flowering aloe and asked if their parents and his second brother and his second brother’s wife and daughter, now seven years old, could visit. Kay looked at the photos his brother showed him and said yes.

When Kay’s eyes fell upon her he felt the beginning of an ache somewhere in the pit of his stomach that would not cease for days. She was beautiful – they all knew this, she was a child of the high desert, bronze-skinned and fire-eyed, bright against the gloom of all his days, but to Kay her beauty was not of the moon or the stars that turn in the sky and overawe the mind, hers was the beauty that calls, the beauty that demands an action, however loathsome he knew it to be. His chance came when his brothers had gone to re-fill their water jugs and his parents were napping in the afternoon shade. She had wandered off and was engrossed with a lizard she had found that would cling upside-down to her palm and when he found her she was watching it lick its unblinking eyes. As he knelt beside her she held the creature up to the sun and it leapt from her hand to a nearby boulder and scurried away. Kay put his arm around her. His hands were shaking. She returned his embrace, and then kissed him on the cheek and slipped away to follow her pet and he did not follow.

Kay never touched her again. He never touched anyone again. To him every embrace and every caress was an echo of that indeterminate time, and if they thought him cold, his family, they knew it was a cryonic state he was in, a deep freeze to keep his infection from spreading.

The Epic Cascadian Approach Fail

-or-

Obligatory Failed Attempt Post

Every climber who has spent some time in the Cascades knows how this works. You see a trip report on cascadeclimbers or come across an old mountain profile on summitpost and the idea of climbing some obscure, likely chossy, shitpile becomes lodged firmly in your brain. You pour over the Beckey bible late into the night, you daydream about the climb at work or school, you obsessively plan out your route, your partners, your gear, the trip report you will write and you imagine the waves of renown that will wash over you upon your return. And then you wait for the Right Conditions. You want to start out not at the beginning, but near the beginning, of a lengthy spell of clear weather – you want dry rock but still readily available water. You need to be able to drive to the trailhead but above tree-line you really want there to still be snow. Too early and those approach slabs will be slimy death traps, too late and you’ll have to contend with a twenty foot moat that looks and feels like the mouth of some cold Scandinavian hell. In a given year the Right Conditions are typically found during a single 12 hour period, often on the second Tuesday or forth Wednesday of the month.

Anyways, so the stars finally align and you get the Right Conditions, your partners are available, and you set off. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours later you are back at home. The summit was not reached. You are covered with cuts and scrapes and will spend the next four days picking random floral spines out of your hands and forearms. You took a few photos but no one will ever see them. You have had the Epic Cascadian Approach Fail, wherein you give up all hope of reaching your objective long before coming anywhere near it.

The Epic Cascadian Approach Fail has a long and illustrious history. Finding specific accounts from before the age of the internet is rare but evidence of its existence is plentiful. For the first ascent of Mt Olympus, an official club expedition of The Seattle Mountaineers, a road had to be built. One can only imagine the sort of failed attempts that would prompt legends like Asahel Curtis and Montelius Price to conduct a civil engineering project in order facilitate the climbing of a simple glaciated peak. In the late 1950s and early 60s Michael Borghoff wrote a number of articles for Summit magazine that noted the complications of Pacific Northwest brush. He refers to Fred Beckey as the “great pacific pterodactyl” who must have achieved his innumerous first ascents by flapping in over the tree-choked drainages on great leathery wings and he writes in terrified awe of the aptly named Devil’s Club. More recently, I have heard stories of climbers abandoning their fully loaded backpacks in despair of ever escaping the brush and of being forced to scrap plans after being unable to locate their own recently established campsites. Note to future archeologists: these lost gear stashes are presumably still at large.

I have my own stories by the dozen, the Bear Mountain attempt that ended with a trip to the Chilliwack emergency room for some extra-strength antihistamines, the aborted Inspiration Peak climb that never even reached the base of the mountain, the new route I put up on Baring Mountain from the Barclay Lake trailhead straight up the slope to the northwest ridge, the Merchant Peak fiasco the involved some of my best class 4 tree climbing to date, my long and storied Mount Index Hourglass Gully saga… the list goes on. One of the best stories I have heard however, and one that really encapsulates the entire idea of the Epic Cascadian Approach Fail, was told to me by a friend from college with whom I spent a weekend cragging in Squamish last September. This girl and a couple of her friends were trying to do a light and fast ascent of Glacier Peak. I believe their plan was to hike in one day and then summit and death march out the next.

Unfortunately, they were under the mistaken impression that because there was a trail indicated on their map, they would be able to make good time. Whatever trail they were following apparently disintegrated rapidly until they came to a section where the entire hillside had suffered some sort of cataclysm. After that it was an endless series of up the slope, down the slope, maybe over there would be better, route-finding shenanigans until night fell and they were forced to camp more or less where they happened to be standing at the time. I don’t entirely recall but I think they might have been able to pitch one of their tents. In the morning they determined that they were not in a nearly good enough position to go for the summit but in a bizarre turn of events they discovered that they were not actually alone. Not a quarter mile away was another party with an almost identical story. Neither group had been remotely aware of the other’s presence. Somewhat relieved that their failure was to be shared, my friend and her party retraced their steps out of the green hell into which they had strayed. I was told they were able to hold off opening their bottle of whiskey until they reached a maintained trail that would take them back to their vehicle. I was also told that said bottle of whiskey was rapidly consumed and that one member of the party proceeded to spend the entire car ride back to Seattle with her head out the window – a girl after my own heart, I’m sure.

Sometime during my life before Mountaineering-with-a-capital-M, I took upon myself the ill-advised objective of circumnavigating Goat Lake. Although I did not know it, this was as good a primer course as one could ask for in Cascadian bushwhacking. There was sketchy slide alder vegetable belays on 70 degree slopes and bounder-fields covered with Devil’s Club six feet high with an under-layer of stinging nettles. Before any of this I had to fight my way through a brush jungle so thick the air felt hot and stagnant and then wade an alluvial swamp. Something had possessed me that day to wear my utili-kilt. Around hour three of this venture I had an epiphany regarding the nature of bushwhacking that requires a little backstory. When I was a child we had a section of the yard we referred to as the Damage Zone – the one area me and the kids my mom did daycare for were allowed to take sticks and hack apart random plants to our heart’s delight. In a weird instinctual little kid way, it was all very metal. This gave me an unrealistic expectation about my relationship with nature in general and with plant life specifically. The epiphany I had while considering how I was going to descend through a thick slope of Devil’s Club while wearing a kilt without getting stabbed in the crotch, was that it’s not called bushwhacking because you are whacking the bush, it is rather the bush that is whacking you.

This is what the Epic Cascadian Approach Fail is all about, the power of nature to hit back. It’s not always the almighty brush, sometimes it’s an unfordable river or a malfunctioning compass, other times it’s dry powder snow miles deep or slush so wet and heavy your supposedly waterproof boots and gaiters succumb as if they were made of that superwicking synthetic sock material. In any case, it’s not what you anticipated, what you set out to overcome – it’s not steep crack systems or R-rated leads or unprotectable snice or any other similarly respectable Mountaineering-with-a-capital-M kind of challenge. It’s some crazy thing that gets in the way of you being able to grapple with the challenge you thought you were choosing. The Epic Cascadian Approach Fail is about how you don’t actually get to pick your battles; sometimes they pick you and when they do, most of the time they win.

No Shame No Gain

-or-

How I Learned To Stop Bitching And Love The Top-rope

 

I feel like I spend a lot of time writing about how bad of a climber I am. I’m not terribly thrilled about this for a couple reasons. The first is that it’s a little self-involved. The second is that being a climber is really all I have going for me and while self-deprecation can be fun, constantly telling people how badass I am not is unlikely to get me published, or employed, or laid. The third reason is that the whole urge is nothing more than an attempt to head off criticisms that I know are invalid. So what if I am not a talented athlete? Climbing is not about athleticism and if I really think that’s true then I should not feel so insecure about my own shortcomings. In other words, if I really believe what I am saying than I should not feel the need to say it so much.

For the past couple months my climbing has basically been limited to scrambling and top-roping (because back injuries suck and the head game issues that come with experiencing near-catastrophic system failure are even worse). Challenging yourself, pushing your limits, putting yourself in situations where the outcome is uncertain – these are integral parts of the climbing experience, but it is foolish to think that leading is the only way to reach them. I do think that lead climbing is more badass than top-roping, but if I am not, as was mentioned before, particularly badass, and if I am ok with that, I think it might be better to stop talking about my lack of badassery and start talking about the badassery of others.

 –

In my short climbing career I have done far more than my fair share of awesome climbs. There is only one real reason for this, and his name is Ryan Hoover. I met Ryan at a very opportune time: I didn’t know anyone who really led rock climbs, he didn’t know anyone who really wanted to belay him while he led rock climbs. We both had read too much Mark Twight and thought that we could become punk rock alpine climbing gods by wanting it really, really bad. Now, Ryan is well on his way to alpine godhood because in addition to wanting it really, really bad, he is also really, really talented. The guy was leading 5.11 trad within a year and a half of first stepping foot in a climbing gym; he led WI6 his second ice season. I enjoy attempting climbs I’m not sure I can complete without falling, but I get my fix of pure terror pretty quickly; one or two at-my-limit leads and I’m done for the day, or at least ready to meander up some moderates. Ryan will throw himself at the hardest thing he can reasonably hope to top out from dawn until dusk, and then he’ll borrow my headlamp and run a few more laps. I’ve been on truly amazing climbs well above my pay grade all over the western united states and it’s all his fault.

Ryan and I on the summit of Chair Peak, our first successful alpine ice climb

The funny thing is, we really don’t even get along that well. Our relationship is predicated on the fact that almost all of our time together is spent either climbing or drinking. About a month after he taught me how to lead on gear in the basalt chosspile we affectingly call Vantage, we embarked on a three week road-trip through the southwest, spending time at Ouray, Red Rock, Joshua Tree, and then stopping by Smith Rock on our way home. Our vehicle of choice was Ryan’s aging Toyota 4Runner. It was manual and I didn’t drive stick. None of the locks actually worked from the outside but if you jimmied the key in the front passenger side door just right they would open. I never figured out how to do this. The back window would freeze about an inch down for days at a time, preventing us from using the back hatch entirely. We quickly realized that the full intersection of our musical tastes was Jack White and Bob Dylan, and we liked them for entirely different reasons. By the time we got to Smith Rock we were about ready to strangle each other. While we did resolve our issues by the time we got home (we agreed to never take the 4runner on a road trip again), the music issue has proved contentious ever since.

The real problem is that Ryan is an actual musician, as in he plays in a band and used to work at a recording studio, and while quite talkative he’s not always not the most articulate guy, so he simultaneously can’t stand the simplistic guitar work of bands like The Mountain Goats and can’t explain to me what exactly he finds so distasteful about Bruce Cockburn’s voice (he also couldn’t explain to me how to drive stick, but that’s another story). I meanwhile drive him to righteous anger with my disregard for his main musical criteria, whether a group has “soul” or not. I don’t believe in the soul. I don’t like groovy dance music. I want to listen to people who say interesting things in interesting ways. When I tried to explain this to him he said something kind of incomprehensible about it being music and how maybe I should judge it by its musical qualities and not whether I would like the lyrics if they were written in a book. Total nonsense, I know. When we are climbing together a lot we have some iteration of this argument at least once a week. We also often argue about vegetables (he likes them, I have a complex system for determining which ones are ok and which are poop) and women (he likes them, I have a complex argument for why sexual attraction is inherently objectifying and therefore unethical). It’s kind of a mystery to me how we’ve only actually got in a screaming match while on a climb once.

Almost as soon as I met Ryan I realized that I had a limited time before he realized that there were better climbers out there and started climbing with them instead of with me. Our close succession of injuries has prevented this to some extent but the circle has definitely expanded. Although Ryan and I taught ourselves how to ice climb together on that first trip to Ouray, we quickly picked up a mentor, an older Armenian guy named Rafael. If you’ve been to the Seattle Vertical World gym and had a guy with an eastern European accent wearing leggings and a bandana try to traverse under you while you are climbing, chances are it was him. Although Ryan ran into him in Lillooet, the ice season ended early that year and the first time I met him was on an obligatory spring weekend at Vantage. This was the trip where Ryan let his first 5.11s (Jihad and Stems And Seeds) and I led my first 5.10 (Air Guitar). I don’t think Rafael knew what to make of me and the feeling was mutual. At the time I was very anti-crag; alpinism was what it was all about and everything else was training and/or Not Really Climbing (as if I had done any actual alpinism, the closest I had been to an alpine face was having read Starlight And Storm). Looking back I’m pretty sure Rafael thought, quite rightly, that I was full of it. He didn’t come right out and say it, like some other individuals I have climbed with, but he would just quietly, authoritatively, correct me whenever my bullshit was exceeding his tolerance.

Rafael (center) leading Jihad at Vantage

None of this should imply, though, that Rafael is not a weird dude himself. On a Banff trip with him and Ryan the next winter we started calling him the Armenian Ice Sloth, for his extremely slow, methodical, way of leading ice climbs. I didn’t seem to matter how steep the ice was or how well the screws were, or weren’t, going it, he would just crawled up at a nearly glacial pace (pun intended). The only way we figured out to tell how hard it was going to be was by what language he was talking to himself in, somewhere around WI4+/5- he would switch from English to Russian and then at solid WI5 he would switch to Armenian. Of course we didn’t really mind, neither of us was leading WI5 at that point, but it did make for some cold belays. Things got more interesting in the hotel room, where the fact that we were both under 25 and he was over 50 became problematic. At one point he obliquely threatened to fight me over my unwashed dishes. In my defense I was still eating the food I had cooked in them.

Being that he has fun things like a wife and a career, Rafael doesn’t actually climb with us all that much, but there are a couple other guys that have become much more regular partners. I don’t actually know where Ryan met Michal and Chandler but given his propensity for being friendly to the point of aggravation with people he is climbing near, I’m willing to guess it was Index. Michal is the only person I have actually met who can legitimately claim to have climbed out the Index Town Walls. Aside from the small handful of 5.13 pitches scattered around the crag, he has sent every climb of note, which is what happens when you get started in high school and possess an unreasonable amount of psych for scary trad leads. Chandler is a little different, both from Michal and from the majority of people that I have met. He and Michal were childhood friends and they got into climbing together but about four years ago he was in a truly horrific accident and has only been climbing intensively for the last two years. He has actually become quite a strong boulderer recently but every now and again we trick him into roping up and doing something worthwhile, like last summer when I played pack mule for him and Michal while they blasted up Freedom Rider on the east face of Liberty Bell. When I first met him he was introduced to me as Channabis and the title was richly deserved. He smoked so much that you couldn’t actually discern any difference in his behavior after he lit up, although one evening he did ask me three times within fifteen minutes what climb we had done that day. He has since calmed down substantially and even quit for short periods of time, but the semi-permanent stoner aura remains – that weird combination of spaced out and deep that in anyone else would indicate a high degree of inebriation.

Chandler on Water (V6), Michal giving the classic non-spot

The difference between Michal and Chandler is one of focus. Chandler is interested in everything, our conversations range from standard climber bro talk to political debates to discussions of the existence of positive and negative energies in the universe. It’s not that Michal isn’t intelligent enough for that sort of thing, he just isn’t interested. After one time when he decided to go home in the middle of watching Before The Devil Know You’re Dead with me and Ryan because he thought it was boring, we actually had a short argument over how many things Michal is interested in. I counted five, Ryan counted three – it turned out that after climbing and women, Ryan was lumping drugs, alcohol, and food together, while I was counting them separately.

Michal on the summit of Colonial Peak, enjoying interests #1 and #3. Photo by Ryan Hoover

 –

The trajectory these guys are on truly amazes me. Chandler came back from two broken ankles to recently send his first V8. Although at an age when most guys are winding down, Rafael seems to have bigger ambitions every year. Michal is set to become one of the northwest’s most promising young alpine climbers and Ryan isn’t far behind him, despite possessing less than four years of experience and having had a succession of serious injuries. I don’t want to be a remora, feeding on the scraps, leveraging old friendships into marketing opportunities, but yet I find my place in all of this exciting even if it isn’t on the sharp end. I recently watched a youtube clip of Louis C.K. talking about how he got into comedy out of shear desire to be “one of those guys” and that being initially bad at it wasn’t really an issue (if you suspect that this is false modesty look up some early Louis C.K. videos, they kind of suck). I want to lead climbs again, I want to push my limits and find out who I am, but in the end that’s not what I’m good at and it’s not how I’m going to leave my mark. I’ve admitted to my jealousy issues before but to my surprise, I have found that one of the strongest forces keeping me from walking away from climbing is my desire to remain a part of this community, no matter my lowly place within it.

Obligatory Video Compilation Post

-or-

I Really Spend Too Much Time On The Internet

 

Some of my favorite short(ish) climbing films from the last couple years–

Kiss Or Kill was the first climbing book I ever read, so Mark Twight will always have a special place in my heart, but this one is worth it just for the palm sweat.

 

The history of Lander, Wyoming, much of it concerning the great Todd Skinner. Quite long and talky but never boring, see if you can catch the Bruce Cockburn quote!

 

A friend of mine from SU, Ben Neilson, put this together. He’s also got a really interesting one about a climbing bum he met in Squamish that I’m fairly certain I ran into at Index a couple months before.

 

The future of climbing, I’m just sure of it.

 

The best short climbing film I have come across. Quietly, eloquently, unconventionally awesome.

 

If you aren’t familiar with high-end drytooling this one packs a punch, the first time I saw it I sort of sat there stunned for a few minutes afterward, and then promptly ordered a set of Nomics.

Happy As A Corpse

-or-

Look At Me I Wrote A Poem!

 

“Happy as a corpse” was a common phrase in medieval Switzerland, it meant exceedingly happy, as happy as someone who would never have anything to worry about again.

–

When I climb the last tree to a starry dais

raised high on the roof of the world

and see the empaneled universe spinning around me;

when I walk through that eternity of paths,

knotted as a labyrinth,

and am entwined in the fabric of the sky,

its tesseract the hands of god,

I will be happy as a corpse.

 

When I see a girl,

some slight creature blue haired and green hearted,

and she matches my gaze and does not look away;

when we stare at each other

and no veil of shame or fear falls between us

so that our desire is matched

and our doubt is silenced,

I will be happy as a corpse.

 

When my blood is hot but does not boil over

and I know her by her smell and feel,

by the weight of her body in my arms;

when we are each a tool in the hands of the other

so that the covenant of Abraham shall be ours,

instruments for the filling of the heavens

and the shaping of the worlds to come,

I will be happy as a corpse.

 

When the roads are quiet

and the towers are dark,

shadows against the hills and sky;

when the sprawl goes up in one season-long burn

and the ash is washed into great sinks and deltas,

the fire a surgeon

and the rain a scalpel,

I will be happy as a corpse.

 

When I am met as I enter the hall

and offered a bowl of golden mead,

the sip a greeting and a sacrament older than words;

when sit beside my brothers,

men of honor and men of strength,

and food and drink is served

of which there seems to be no end,

I will be happy as a corpse.

 

When before me there stands a god and queen,

whose mother ruled before her,

with eyes like the breaking of the day;

when she speaks my name and I come forward

and am received into the court of the dawn

to bow her vassal and servant,

the least among those seated at her feet,

I will be happy as a corpse

 

When I live in the garden

at the root of the world

and my home is a hollow beneath the tallest tree;

when birds nest in my hair

and worms burrow into my feet

and I drink of waters stained cidery

for the ground through which they have passed,

Then I will be happy as a corpse,

rotting into the earth.

SEYPTINGECF Part 2: Alpine Lakes Wilderness

-or-

Peak-Bagging Tales From an Idiot Near You

This is the second installment of my three part series, Soloing Exploits of Years Past That I’m Not Getting Enough Credit For. The first part concerned my ascent of Sloan Peak.

As this glorified trip report progresses the discerning reader will notice something strange: the lack of photographs relative to my other posts. While I did bring and use a camera on these hikes, about a year and a half ago my laptop was stolen and my backups were woefully out of date, resulting in about a year’s worth of documents being lost.

–

There is a principle in risk analysis to the effect of: people will manipulate their circumstances until they reach the level of risk and difficulty to which they are accustomed. Think the climb might be a little out of your league? Then bring a large group and an exacting route description. Think the climb might be a little easy? Then free solo it or string a couple together. This is the idea behind the link-up, what was once a suitable challenge in and of itself is now regarded as too easy and must be combined with others to reach that magical I’m-not-sure-I-can-do-this challenge fulfillment point. As a scrambler you reach this point relatively quickly. Class 3 to 4 scrambles are like ice climbing, they increase in difficulty to a point but it’s not a truly open ended scale, there is no WI8, there is no 4.9+, instead of getting harder they just get more dangerous. So unless you are up for utter chossfests and all the objective danger that they entail, link-ups are really the only way to make scrambling hard once you get comfortable on class 4. This is the origin of peak-bagging: quantity over quality, as many high points as you can hit in a day, real dumpster diving. I’ve never really gotten into this kind of “climbing,” I’ve been on a couple such trips with friends of mine who are into it, tagging 3-4 “summits” in short succession, and while it makes for a good workout, it’s just not that fun as long as everything goes well. With a couple alterations though, it can be a good day out, you just have to go alone and make sure something almost goes wildly wrong. I have only actually managed this a handful of times.

On the east side of Steven’s Pass, before you get to the more popular hiking destinations around Leavenworth, you pass an area of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness called Nason Ridge. The prime attraction of Nason Ridge is Merritt Lake. In the summer it’s a short, buggy, overcrowded day hike but in the winter, as long as you can drive to the trailhead, it’s a halfway enjoyable snowshoe outing. Above Merritt Lake to the west is am aptly named substantial lump of rock called Mount Mastiff and there is a semi-popular traverse that links it together with the nearby Mount Howard and Rock Mountain. The best way to do this trip involves a car shuttle between to trailhead so, being alone, I opted to cut Rock Mountain out of the mix and return from Howard to the Merritt Lake trailhead. I am aware of exactly how pedestrian all of this sounds; oh look at me I planned a hike! But in order to understand what went wrong you have to understand my intended route.

Red is intended route, blue is actual route as it differs.

 

The essence of what followed was that I never found the Nason Ridge trail. The snow was classic mid-spring, forest floor hard pack and if there were any bootprints I didn’t see them (more on that later). So down Crescent Creek I went, becoming increasingly concerned that I had yet to see any indication of a trail. In the muddy hollows the mosquitos were already vicious. At some point my pocket zipper opened of its own accord and my map was lost. I had about two lines of a random U2 song running on repeat in my head: “You say love is a temple, love the higher law, you ask me to enter but then you make me crawl…” I like that song and still I wanted to rip Bono’s goddamn head off.

Sometime before I lost the map I had actually realized my mistake and had begun to traverse, hoping to intersect the Merritt Lake trail somewhere below where I had originally intended to. At one point I passed though a heavily forested, and therefore snowy, section and although I didn’t see my bootprints from the way up I could not be sure I had not passed them by mistake. Sometime later I reached an old logging slash; none of the terrain east looked familiar but several thousand feet below me Hwy 2 wound along next to Nason Creek. I wasn’t sure where I was in relation to any trail, without a map my chance of going back and finding the Nason Ridge trail was miniscule, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to retrace my steps back up to Mount Howard. After about ten minutes of pondering my options my decision was simple: Fuck it, the road’s right there, downhill all the way.

So I tried to beat my way down to Hwy 2. Most of it was a sort of half-sliding, bush-belayed, controlled fall. By about a mile of this I looked like I had gotten in a fight with a house cat. By another mile I was bleeding seriously enough that had I not been as panicked I would have stopped to patch myself up. I was really lucky there were not any cliff bands. At some point I stopped and realized that I could no longer hear any road noise and the foliage had been too dense to actually see my destination for some time. What kept confusing me, though, were these weird little game trails – loose dark earthen meandering lines of large hoofprints, maybe elk, that would lead past piles of beer cans before disappearing. The valley finally leveled and I resigned myself to the fact that Hwy 2 had disappeared. I wasn’t sure what had happened but I figured I would climb back up the hillside until I could see where I was trying to go.

The real problem with thick brush is that it is virtually impossible to just turn around, you simply have no idea which way you came. I had thought that the slope of the hill would provide an infallible navigational aid but I was mistaken and when I went to reverse my path I found myself stumbling downhill again until I arrived at a barbed wire fence. Not wanting to injure myself any further I walked along this boundary until I came to a point where the wires had rusted though. Just past the fence was an old road and I saw, as I began to trudge along, a man with two huge dogs coming toward me. He was older, maybe in his early 60s, and stocky, and the dogs, white hounds with red ears that must have weighted 200 lbs. each, were attached by lengths of chain to a massive leather belt he wore like a back brace. As he neared the dogs began to bark and strain against him and he leaned back steeply into their leashes. I tried to ask him where I was and how to find Hwy 2 but he just shook his head and told me that these were Caledonian mastiffs and that if they really wanted to get at me he wouldn’t be able to stop them.

The road lead to a tunnel with a sign hanging from the entrance that read “Sunwise Mine” and just as I was about to turn around a man completely covered in leaves stepped out of the forest and gestured toward the black mineshaft. When I tried to walk around him he refused to let me pass, so I dropped my backpack and dug out my headlamp and, with a tightness in my throat, walked into the darkness. The road inside and wide and smooth, like it had been built as a train tunnel but I saw no sign of railroad tracks. Once the light from the entrance faded I turned on my headlamp to avoid making a wrong turn but there were no side passages. In the dust on the ground there were faint footprints and after an indeterminable length of time I began to glimpse a hiker ahead of me.

She was shorter than I was and had shoulder-length brown hair and was wearing a green and white striped shirt. Whenever I would pick up my pace and try to catch up with her she would glance behind and then disappear around some slight bend and it would be another ten or twenty or thirty minutes before I would see her again. She carried no backpack and no light. I recall that her face was striking but I cannot now remember what it looked like. Neither can I remember the tunnel ending. It was like I got lost in some train of thought and when I came to I was walking along the highway with power lines overhead and cars driving past. Sitting on a guard rail trying to summon up the energy to hike the remaining three-odd miles to the trailhead I drank the last swig of my water and began to look longingly at the stream running into the culvert under the highway. With some trepidation I filled up my canteen and took a long drink. Later, while driving home, I noticed a dead mosquito floating in the dregs.

–

Although it was the first, this was not my last ill-conceived descent from an otherwise ordinary peak-bagging trip. Several years later I hiked up to Robin Lakes to spend a couple days tagging summits and generally wandering around enjoying myself. This was some time before I obtained my first smartphone and I had been cragging at Index and Leavenworth for most of the last week. The point being that I had no idea what the weather forecast was. So sometime later the second night, while I was drifting to sleep reading Clash of Kings, the side of my tent started lighting up. My first thought was that it was just some random guy with a headlamp but when it continued every few minutes for something like half an hour, I got out to take a look. What I saw was the sky to the south being lit up by these weird green flashes. As a Seattle native I know what a thunder storm looks like, it starts raining really hard and then you hear thunder maybe two or three times and then if you are lucky you might see a flash of lightning. This was silent and it looked nothing like that. In my half-asleep stupor I found myself seriously considering the possibly that the world was ending. It slowly dawned on me that this could be a major storm and that my tent was the highest thing for a hundred feet in every direction. Then I sort of panicked. I tore down my tent, shoved it and everything inside of it into my backpack and set out for the trailhead.

About the time I dropped beneath the lowest of the Robin Lakes the storm arrived. The wind picked up and I could see the green flashes in the clouds directly overhead. As I scrambled down the granite slabs disturbing thoughts started creeping up, thoughts like, “wasn’t this a well-cairned route?” and “did the trail really hit the lowest lake’s outlet, or was it way higher on the ridgeline?” and then white beams like searchlights began to illuminate the granite around me. I’m not sure why but it seemed very important that I not find myself directly in the light and somehow I avoided them until I reached Tuck Lake, but just as I was descending the final part of the scramble route I slipped on some wet grass and slid into the water. It was so cold I felt instantly paralyzed, like I couldn’t breathe or yell or kick my legs, and the granite slab I had slid down was steep and featureless. As I began to sink, my sodden boots and backpack pulling me down, the white beams found me in a sudden rush of wind something seized me out of the water and carried me into the air. I’ve seen eagles catch salmon in the Puget Sound and although that night I never saw a giant bird that’s the only thing I can liken it to. Strange as it may seem I actually fell asleep almost as soon I had had left the water.

In my normal, day to day, life I sometimes have trouble separating dreams from reality. There are places that I cannot ever remember going while awake that I am still unconvinced do not exist. In this instance I am completely incapable of separating what happened from what I then and later dreamt was happening. I saw a film some time ago about a Jesuit priest traveling with the Algonquin people of Ontario in the late 17^th century and I do not know if this is true, but it described how in their worldview dreams show us the true world and that our waking lives are the passing illusion. I don’t doubt many find this absurd but to me it seems as likely as any other truth.

From the lake I was carried to a high ridgeline on which sat the wreckage of an aircraft shot down in some crime of which my forebears were guilty. Other men had come too, seeking revenge, and to escape them I lowered myself on some old fixed line off the precipice without harness or belay, and as the icy rope began to slip through my finger and I looked downward into the dark abyssal storm, I called out to God, “Why have you brought me here?”

I do not believe in God. I didn’t then and I don’t now but I lost my grip on the rope and fell down the mountainside and landed unharmed on the trail near Hyas Lake, just a few miles from the parking lot.

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The lessons here seem obvious, everyone has heard that eighty percent of all craziness happens on descent. Therefore we must be vigilant, for strange creatures accost us and stranger landscapes surround us and if joyful questing holds back our fear, that shield cannot last us our safe returns.