by Bill Walker
I halfway expected Luna to zoom ahead out of view, at which point I could decide whether to continue, or turn around. But every time it looked like it might happen, she would stop and wait on me.
We ascended a thousand feet to Guitar Lake, which is referred to by mountaineers as a tarn. Many of these alpine lakes remain a turquoise-colored ice, year-round. However, Guitar Lake gets enough sun for it to melt into crystal clear water. I dipped my nalgene bottle in and drank what was undoubtedly some of the best water in the world. Dark-brown marmots, that could be mistaken for raccoons or rabbits, were doing somersaults all over the boulders surrounding the lake. In fact, the next couple weeks I was to notice that the higher the elevation, the more marmots we saw. They are obviously especially well-insulated animals.
“Are all these marmot jackets and sleeping bags we use made of actual marmots?” I asked several people. I was hoping the answer was yes, but nobody really seemed to know.
Several hikers had camped right here at Guitar Lake last night. This would have been hugely advantageous to camp this far up, and I had considered it. But I had worried the extreme cold would overwhelm my lean frame.
Luna and I started up. The trail ran sideways along ridges and was covered with snow and ice. I assumed as low of a crouch (not exactly my forte!) as possible, and tentatively began traversing zigzags up the mountain.
“Luna,” I gasped. “I’m holding you up. Go on ahead.”
“Shut up and keep hiking,” she barked.
I kept hiking, but remained schizophrenic about the entire endeavor. This isn’t part of the PCT. I don’t have to do this.
My head felt like the sun was boring a hole right through my skull. I had just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air. In it, he had vividly described the headaches that oxygen-deprived mountaineers get at higher elevations. Krakauer had mentioned that mountaineers frequently attempted to relieve headaches by putting snow on top of their heads. I loaded up my baseball cap with snow and placed it on my head, which brought some temporary relief.
I had only brought one water bottle from base camp, and was rapidly drinking it down in the glaring, early-afternoon sun. My rationale had been that there was snow everywhere, so why lug a bunch of water up to the top. However, I had also heard, “Watch out for the pink snow.” Veteran mountaineers have reams of tales of violently being laid low by contaminated, algae snow. Nonetheless, I began stuffing my nalgene bottle full of snow and gulping the contents down.
A man and his teenage daughter came from the opposing direction.
“Excuse me sir,” I anxiously asked. “About how far is it to the top?”
He seemed to pick up the concern in my voice and chose to answer in an empathetic way.
“You’ve done the worst,” he said. “Well,” he corrected himself, “actually you have a couple more icy ridges ahead, but then it levels out close to the top.”
“How long ‘til we get to where it evens out?”
The High Sierras rock. Better yet, the PCT hiker
covers the very most wondrous parts.
“Oh, you should be up there in about fifteen minutes,” he assured me.
Some people low-ball you in situations like that, and others (like me) are more likely to high-ball you. Perhaps Freud could figure out why. All I know is that this guy had dramatically understated the amount of time ahead.
Soon, I was exhausted again.
“Luna, honestly,” I pleaded, “If you fall here, you’ve bought it. I’m not a professional climber. It doesn’t make sense to take so much risk.”
“You’re going to the top with me, Skywalker,” she said unflinchingly. “In fact, you’re leading me up there because I’m hiking behind you the rest of the way up.”
Luna was an unlikely trail Nazi. But that’s what this was turning into—a forced march.
“I’ve got to take a break,” I said firmly and lay down on the snow.
I slowly began picking at some food and gulping down Advil. Soon some our comrades arrived in high spirits as they were descending down Whitney. Normally quite voluble in all these shoestring conversations on the trail, I lay there comatose as Luna entertained.
“What did you do to him?” Five Dollar asked.
“Oh, he’s just playing possum,” Luna said merrily.
“Watch out for that right turn up ahead,” Five Dollar said in the first serious comment I’d ever heard him make. “It’s really icy.”
“We’ve got to get going, Skywalker,” Luna said. “Do you want to get caught in the dark on Whitney?”
“I’m going back down with them,” I said, without really meaning it.
“No, you’re not,” she cut me off. “Get your you-know-what moving.”
It was now a matter of just executing the best I could. There were two steep ridges that were completely flat, but iced over. If you slipped, you were home-free. I quickly took to my knees and groveled across the iciest parts. Obviously, I wasn’t going to win the Edmund Hilary Stiff-Upper-Lip-Award, but at least I was through complaining. Luna could only carry me so far.
Eventually, we arrived at the flat area, although every time I saw something resembling an icy ridge, tremors pulsed through me. We bore into the stiff, cutting wind, and there were a couple more snowfields as we neared the top. Finally, we arrived at the summit of Mount Whitney about 3:00. It had taken us five hours.
Mount Whitney, at 14,694 feet, is the most awesome landscape I’ve ever had the privilege to behold. It reminded me of the moving footage of Brad Pitt and company in the film, Seven Years in Tibet— white capped mountain range after range, ad infinitum into the distance. Actually, there had been considerable speculation in the past that Mount Whitney was actually not the tallest mountain in the Lower Forty-Eight. Somewhere in this sea of soaring peaks I was looking at was a lonely mountain a few feet taller. But—so the story goes—the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service don’t want to publicize it because a whole tourism industry is built around Mount Whitney.
Luna sat there celebrating and snapping photos with John Muir Trail Hikers (The fabulous—and highly recommended by this hiker—John Muir Trail ends at Whitney summit). Meanwhile, I just lay there with an awful headache, worried about the coming descent. The only thing that motivated me was I had to take an emergency crap. As we had left Crabtree Meadow this morning for Mount Whitney, Luna and I had passed a receptacle with small sacks. You were supposed to use these to pack out any bowel movements you might have on Whitney. It was obviously desirable that pristine Mount Whitney not look like human-sized geese had invaded it. But Luna and I had hurried right past it.
I walked sullenly over behind the emergency hut on the
Whitney summit. Here, I quickly laid a deuce in the snow. Obviously, that won’t win me any trail good citizenship award, but—believe me—I didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter at this point.
“Let’s go, Luna,” I kept urging her. “It’s almost four.”
But she was a fish in water to my fish out of water on Whitney summit, and kept on socializing. Finally, everybody left except us.
We were quite lucky, to be honest. Violent electrical storms are very common on Mount Whitney late on summer afternoons and have aborted many a climb to Whitney’s summit; several people have even been struck and died over the years. The weather could have changed on a dime. But it didn’t.
Luna and I started down. I didn’t think we would pass anybody still climbing this late in the afternoon. But in the distance appeared a lone female figure trudging to the top. When she got up to us, it appeared this lady was pushing sixty.
“Excuse me,” this woman asked us, “how much longer do I have to reach the summit?”
“Forty-five minutes max,” I quickly said.
“Forty-five minutes,” she gasped, “It’s just right there.”
“Less,” Luna said sympathetically.
“Forty-five minutes max,” I said. I honestly thought it was best to not lead her o
n with a low-ball. She looked worried, but soldiered on.
We soon came up on the John Muir Trail hikers, who were all gathered around a gigantic crevasse in the snow. Worse yet, it was right where we would ordinarily walk.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked.
“It looks like a horse, or something, might have fallen through,” one of them laughed.
“Man, if you fell in there,” I exclaimed, “how would you ever get out?”
All I know is I became especially careful, gingerly planting my steps on solid snow to avoid this most dreadful of possibilities. It was late June after all.
The icy patches and steep falloffs were every bit as daunting while descending. But now I had a psychological tailwind, and we made good time back to Guitar Lake.
“I’m washing my hair,” Luna immediately said, and headed straight over to the crystal clear tarn to submerge her head.
“You’re next,” she announced when she pulled her head out. I put up a tepid argument, but quickly caved. Magically, the bitter cold water devastated my headache, and I was able to hike at maximum speed with Luna back down to base camp.
Luna had obviously found the perfect combination of humiliation and encouragement (heavily weighted towards the former!) to get me to Whitney summit. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not I would have made it to the top without her.
Chapter 20
“Fifty Feet”
If at first you don’t succeed, parachuting is probably not for you.
Old saying
Stupidity can run amok in groups, especially after having been out for so many days and with everybody running low on food.
It was two days later and we were facing Forrester’s Pass, the highest point on the actual PCT at 13,180 feet. The minute a person begins planning a PCT hike, you hear about Forrester’s Pass. Yesterday afternoon, CanaDoug and I had forded ice-cold Tindall Creek and camped with others along its banks. Some hikers had seemed tight as a tick. However, summiting Mount Whitney seemed to have temporarily inoculated me. I was uncharacteristically serene about what lay ahead.
CanaDoug had eagerly bolted out of camp this morning. He seemed especially determined after having missed Mount Whitney. Usually, I could catch up with him. But this morning he was in a fly pattern. So was everybody else for that matter. It made no sense. Speaker after speaker at the Kickoff had reiterated what Yogi had emphasized in her guidebook:
“Try to plan your days in the Sierra so you are not crossing a pass early in the morning. You must give the snow time to soften. If you’re there too early in the day, you will be walking on ice.”
Indeed, it seemed especially important to heed that advice on this occasion. Back at the Whitney base camp, a ranger had told a group of us, “There’s about fifty feet of black ice right at the top of Forrester Pass. That’s where it gets sketchy.”
Sketchy.
I rushed for miles through snow and rock fields trying to catch up with everyone. A giant wall of granite running at virtually a right angle appeared ahead a few miles in front of us. Somewhere in there was an opening—albeit narrow and icy—that was the pass we needed to get through this large monolith. It was difficult to tell exactly where because the sun wasn’t peering over the granite wall yet. But nobody was a waitin’.
A couple days before, a woman named Pepperoni, who was attempting to become the first woman to ever ride a horse the entire PCT, had arrived at the foot of Forrester’s Pass. She actually had two horses tied together (one for carrying supplies). But when she had craned her neck up at this steep, snowy ascent, she didn’t like what she saw. Neither did her horses which became balky and unruly. Pepperoni decided it would be virtually suicidal for her horses to attempt to clear Forrester’s Pass. Unfortunately, she had to retrace every single foot she and her horses had covered the last two days, to bail out all the way back at Cottonwood Pass. It may have been the best decision she ever made.
“This way,” Big John said when I finally caught up with everyone. He then started straight up a snowbank. The big lumberjack boots Big John wore—which would eventually lead to his downfall on the PCT—worked wonders here in the deep snow. He started straight up a steep, icy snow field. CanaDoug went next, followed by me.
I can’t believe this. The PCT isn’t supposed to have climbs this steep. In fact, it doesn’t. But it wasn’t until a couple months later in Oregon when we were recounting the whole episode, that I found out this escarpment we were scaling wasn’t the PCT after all. Big John was as down-to-earth of a guy as you could find; but maybe he couldn’t resist showboating what he could do in his big boots.
“Hold on, Skywalker,” CanaDoug yelled back as I rushed right up on him. “If I go down, I’m gonna bring you with me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I would nervously say, and drop back.
But then anxiety and adrenalin would catapult me forward, and I’d be right on his tail again. A fall would have been disastrous for both of us.
Finally, we got to a switchback and I was relieved to resume its meandering route up to the top of the pass. Our climb straight up the face of the mountain had been a fool’s errand. But it wasn’t as dangerous as what lay right up ahead.
A few days earlier a Canadian hiker named Andrew Dawson had arrived at the sheet of black ice at Forrester’s Pass. Not only did Andrew have an utter phobia of the U.S. government, but he was an unapologetic socialist. He simply did not believe in capitalism. Or at least, he didn’t think he believed in capitalism until he arrived at Forrester’s Pass.
Andrew had an ice axe attached to his backpack and was a skilled outdoorsman. He used it to easily traverse the sheet of black ice. While he had been in the act of crossing, a middle-aged southbound hiker had walked up to the sheet of ice from the opposite direction; he was petrified by what he saw.
“Excuse me sir,” he anxiously said to Andrew, who was half his age. “Now that you’ve crossed over, are you going to need that ice axe.”
“I might need it for a few more of the passes,” Andrew had replied.
“Is there any way I could buy it from you?” the man had suggested, “You can buy one when you get to the next trail town?”
Andrew had about ten dollars to his name at this point, and it had been that way for a couple hundred miles. He was a master at living off the food found in hiker boxes in trail towns.
“Yeah,” Andrew had answered cagily. “We might be able to do something like that.”
“Here,” the man had said fumbling through a wad of bills. “Here’s $100 (more than a new ice axe costs).”
“Uh,” Andrew paused, “I think $200 is probably about right.”
The exchange was made and they headed separate ways.
The world has marveled the last few decades at how adeptly
Chinese communists have learned capitalism. But Canadian socialists are quick learners, too!
“I don’t think you’d die if you fell here,” said another Canadian, Josephine, when she arrived at the ice sheet.
“That’s exactly what I was just thinking,” I responded. Which tells you a little bit about what I was really thinking!
Josephine was now right in front of me, and also the only person who was wearing crampons attached to her shoes. Everybody had bunched up in a single-file line. I quickly saw why. It was the fifty feet from hell—black ice with a steep, bald dropoff for hundreds of feet. And it was all the blacker looking because the sun still hadn’t cleared the granite monolith that towered above us.
Attila was the first to go over and made it without much sweat. One by one hikers slowly made their way across as I watched intently. I was worried that I had only one ski pole to everybody else’s two trekking poles. But my biggest concern, far and away, was my high center of gravity. It’s no accident that great gymnasts are on the lower end of the Bell Curve of height.
“Easy does it, Skywalker,” Attila called over, when my turn to cross came.
I crouched down as low as I c
ould, choked up the grip of ski pole and continually stabbed the ground as I walked very slowly. After about twenty feet I realized the problems wasn’t as much fifty feet of black ice; it was five feet.
I couldn’t figure out anywhere to put my foot on my next step to gain traction. It all looked like either shaved snow or ice. I stood there frozen. If I had young kids, I simply wouldn’t do this. I’d turn around like Pepperoni had and walk backwards for two days. No lyin’.
Normally, you try to step upwards to gain some purchase, but the only spot that looked like it might have some pliable snow was about a foot downhill. But I might not be able to brake after that step. “There’s nowhere to go uphill,” I yelled to Attila. “Should I take a step downhill?”
“No,” he quickly yelled.
That settled it. I wasn’t going to turn around, and I wasn’t going to take a step downhill.
“Sometimes you just have to trust the traction in your shoes,” I had heard someone say a couple days ago.
I would trust my shoes. I bent into the mountain and grabbed at the ice on the bank above with my right hand. Soon I was across the sheet of black ice, although I honestly am not completely confident the result would be the same if I ever attempted it again.
Hikers generally don’t like to show jubilation and they didn’t here. But there was a palpable relief in the air as we stood on the top of Forrester’s Pass taking photographs, even though deep snow fields lay ahead.
The other side of Forrester Pass was packed with snow, but not harrowing, and everyone laboriously postholed through the field. To my amazement CanaDoug, Miles, and Hat Man spotted a gorgeous alpine lake down a hill to the left and decided to jump in naked. Attila, meanwhile, was torn. If there was one hiker on the trail thinner and less insulated than me, it was him.
“Man, I don’t know if I should do this,” he said as the other three were running down to strip off their clothes.
