Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  Ahmet was direct and abrupt. He was also gaining everyone’s respect, mine included. Tension decreased as we realized an experienced mountaineer would be leading our ascent. I was starting to feel more comfortable under Ahmet’s leadership.

  “There is change,” Ahmet suddenly added, in a twist of ironic fate. “My father is ill. I cannot go with you as your main mountain man.” He looked at Nico. “Not, too, as Nico’s group guide. Kubi will be going instead of me. He is here. Get to know him.”

  He looked around. “Kubi?”

  A man put his hand up but stayed standing where he was, away from us. He had been the Armenians’ replacement guide when Ahmet moved over to lead our group in Zafer’s absence. If we had felt abandoned before, how must the Armenian group feel now?

  Ahmet continued. “You all have two cooks with you. Cooking for everyone here. They are brothers; one is Fesih, the other is Niecit. You can tell them apart because Niecit sings. They know mountain. Whenever you see them, know you are OK. You will meet them before mountain time. In morning.

  “For the Armenians, I will introduce you to your guide when he gets here later tonight. Or tomorrow morning.”

  There were mutters of discontent. One Armenian said, “We were told Zafer would be on the mountain.”

  Into the silence, Ahmet said simply, “That is not to be.”

  The Armenians caucused, and a man stepped forward. “Ahmet, we are not satisfied.” Their frustration was palpable. “You know we have come from many places to be here. You need to assure us we will have a proper guide and mountain safety, all meals and proper care.”

  “Of course,” said Ahmet, “of course.”

  “I tell you of thunderstorm weather. Today it was rain. Misty mountain. Tonight lightning. Tomorrow, we don’t know.”

  With a mistaken air of having deflected criticism and discontent, he moved to our group. “I realize you just getting to know other. You sharing tents, by twos.” He smiled at Patricia. “You change mind and want one of these guys instead of Nico?”

  Beside her were four anxious, unshaven faces, each atop a badly dressed body, which would soon court days-old smell. She smiled at Ahmet and us. “I’ll keep Nico.”

  Ian and I were standing together. Goran and Charlie had just returned with their refilled cups of coffee. “You okay as you stand?” Ahmet asked.

  “Yup,” came the collective response.

  When Ahmet left us, Nico was the first to rebuild group confidence. “This is how it is on treks in remote places. We’ll be fine.”

  “Seems they don’t have consistency,” said Patricia. “Makes me uneasy.”

  “I’d sure feel that way if I was in the Armenian group,” said Goran.

  “It is most unfair to them,” I said. “Something’s amiss.”

  Charlie summed it up succinctly: “Kurds. Armenians. Turks.”

  One wall in the room had been tacked with a framed photograph of a giant mountain. “That’s Damavand,” Ian sighed, shifting our attention to a new topic. “It’s in Iran. The country’s highest. It’s over eighteen thousand feet. Maybe that’s next for us?”

  “First Ararat, OK?” Charlie said what we were all thinking: focus.

  Nico looked over Goran’s shoulder to the opposite wall, taking the topic shift a step further, ensuring we didn’t dwell on something we could not change. “I’m feeling more inclined toward that picture right now.” It was a reproduction of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, surprising to those of us who thought of eastern Turkey as fully Muslim. “Is anyone else hungry?”

  * * *

  People drifted up to Ahmet with questions about their gear or to ensure the equipment they’d rented was available. He addressed all requests patiently. He and Kubi worked the room, distributing crampons. Mostly they spent time with the Armenians, aware that additional support and interest would need to be given to their group. Ahmet paying attention to them under the banner of safety helped ease the mood. Kubi tipped up boots and pressed the crampons so they could be sized and locked in place, ready for on-mountain assembly.

  Three people were sent to their rooms to bring back the hiking boots they’d wear. Goran took the opportunity to dance on the stairs, showing off his newly rented boots—the rental was new, not the boots. “I’ve got myself outfitted,” he announced happily. “At least my feet will be warm.”

  He told us that his luggage would remain missing, for the time being. It was scheduled to arrive in Van after we’d left Doğubeyazit for the mountain. Zafer had helped assemble his replacement gear. “I’ve got a nice sweater from Nico, and they also rented me a headlamp. I’m good to go up.” He would spend his mountain nights in a borrowed sleeping bag.

  When the flurry of preparations waned, many of the trekkers went to their rooms for a restless night of anticipation. Ahmet restarted our aborted conversation. “You can stay with my grandfather in his village. I have spoken with him already.”

  “And who will make that happen?” I asked. “When we come off the mountain, you won’t be there.”

  “I promise to meet you at Base Camp on your return down the mountain.”

  His face said he meant it. He put a firm hand on my shoulder, just as I’d earlier watched him do with one of the Armenians, calming a worry.

  Later in the evening, lounging alone on a stuffed chair in the corner of the hotel’s lobby, I reflected on the fact that climbing Ararat is fraught as often with distress and danger as with reward. In my reading, one chilling account stood out as a warning; in nervous anticipation of the climb the next day, I began to fear that we, too, might get close to but not on the top.

  American mountaineer Oliver Sexsmith “Mike” Crosby’s cautionary tale should have been required reading for both our crew and the Armenians. Thirty-one years old, Crosby was vice consul at the US consulate in Tabriz, Iran, from where he journeyed to Turkey with consulate clerk Pierce Bahnsen and a friend, Hermann Dietrich. About their 1951 attempt to summit Mount Ararat, he wrote: “the challenge of the peak filled us with quick, suffocating eagerness.”

  Their arrival at a Kurdish shepherd camp at about eleven thousand feet after a long day’s climb drew unwanted attention. They were up the next morning by four o’clock, dressed, breakfasted, and ready to leave camp before daybreak. Three armed guards confronted them: “the nomads did not want us to climb their mountain.”

  The delay defeated their early start and altered their route, yet they failed to make adjustments to their timelines; they set off to the east as they would have if they’d embarked at their scheduled time, climbing across “countless gullies, lava streams, and fields of jumbled black blocks.”

  Novice Bahnsen was exhausted by noon, admitted defeat, and returned to the nomads. Crosby and Dietrich gained altitude over the coming hours, trudging through slushy snow. The sun’s heat bounced back in their faces from “the great white reflector.” After crossing a glacier they stopped to ponder the dangers awaiting them, complicated by the late time of day and growling weather. Resolving to reach the peak, they continued. By five o’clock they were within 150 feet of the summit but faced a dilemma. They lacked sufficient time to reach the peak and return safely down the mountainside.

  Crosby and Dietrich stared at the summit and had the courage to abandon their ascent. Ice replaced the soft snow on their descent, requiring them to use their ice axes to hack steps before they could proceed. With Crosby not far behind him, Dietrich fell into a crevasse. His arms braced him against the top as he slipped, his extended elbows preventing a terrible plummet and likely death. Extricated from the gaping hole by Crosby, the two moved more cautiously.

  Once below the snowline and free of the slippery perils, the climbers also lost the comparable lightness of the snow’s glow. For much of the rest of their chilling descent through narrow gullies, their way was found “entirely by feel, we traversed buttress after buttress, couloir after couloir.” They arrived at the shepherds’ camp at six o’clock in the morning.

  Crosby’s
experience served to remind all pretenders—and currently that meant us—that even prepared climbers can be tossed about (or down) Ararat, at its will. Modest proficiency in climbing is often sufficient when all goes according to plan, but when it doesn’t, the slightest misjudgment can put everyone in your climbing party in peril.

  After a kebab dinner with our summit team, and sobered by those thoughts, I went for a late-night walk alone along the unlit streets of Doğubeyazit. I’m a stroller, and evening walks are a pensive time for me, particularly if something looms on the horizon. Kubi had stayed with the Armenians as our own group left for dinner, none of us having so much as a handshake with our new leader, a handshake which could have gone a long way to ease anxieties. The night would have to soothe them instead.

  The fresh air, along with the uncertainty of the streetscape, was particularly pleasant. Over Doğubeyazit that night was the “waxing gibbous” phase of the moon, an occurrence which happens a few nights before a full moon. My positive anticipation returned; I thought again of the possibility of seeing a full moon over Mount Ararat, and the mental image acted as a salve over my day’s travels.

  Back in my room, I stripped everything out of my kit and spread it over the bed for a final review. Anything not needed on the mountain went into a stow-bag, along with laundry. I double-checked the headlamp and flashlight batteries as well as an LED tag that hung off my smaller pack.

  I lay down and fell asleep. I might have slept in worse beds, but I can’t remember when.

  12 Turkey’s border with Armenia was blocked in 1993, after Armenian-supported insurgents targeted the oblast—Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, enclave of Azerbaijan, friendly to Turkey; some say visible from Ararat.

  NINE

  BASE CAMP

  “[Ararat] has the appearance of an independent uplift rising abruptly in a single mass, and this isolation lends it an incomparable grandeur which serves to heighten one’s impression that it is one of the highest peaks in the world.”

  —Fernand Navarra, The Forbidden Mountain

  A drummer outside the Hotel Isfahan at 5 a.m. provided the daily reminder that this was Ramadan. Once awakened, at a time earlier than any of us had planned to get up, excitement about Ararat made it impossible to go back to sleep.

  By sunrise, the Isfahan’s forecourt was bustling with trekkers. “Give me your pack, Rick.” It was Ian, wearing long pants with hiker’s pockets and a blue windbreaker. “Mine’s up on the bus roof. Patricia’s loading Nico’s.” When he, the ultimate compact packer, saw the size of my pack, he chided, “Hand me Big Bertha!”

  As I pushed it up to him, he kept organizing aloud. “We’ll be first off, once Goran and Charlie get here. Coffee’s over there. One for me too, please.” He pointed to a hotplate and a pot of boiling water. I went over to make up two hot drinks, well aware that I was getting the easier chore.

  Outside, the loading was inefficient but practical. Everyone wanted to help. Goran and Charlie arrived. A cluster of people and packs gathered alongside the vehicles. Two experienced packers worked as a tag team atop the first vehicle. I took them to be the cook brothers, silent Fesih and a humming Niecit. They moved in sync, taking packs passed up by many hands, laying them out individually by weight so the setup atop the vehicle would not wobble. Once sorted, the dozen bags were strung tight to the roof’s aluminum carrier by elasticized ropes snaked through handles and lashed across each pack before being pulled taut and clipped to the frame with eyehooks.

  Job done, the brothers stood for the first time, a pair of stocky men, keg-chested and with big hands, standing a little less than six feet tall. Satisfied, they turned to the other vehicle’s loading progress. Two trekkers had climbed to the roof of this minibus and packed the bags too high, too fast, resulting in a lopsided, half-full roof rack. Below, hikers kept feeding bags to the rooftop crew faster than they could handle. Anticipating problems on the road, the cooks-turned-porters were off one vehicle and onto the other’s ladder in no time, replacing the well-meaning stackers.

  Kubi worked to get everyone into an orderly calm but had yet to discuss anything specifically with any member of our group. We boarded the mini-buses.

  Mount Ararat’s base was ten miles away. I was the last to get in the bus and sat next to an Armenian from the United States. He reached out his hand. “I’m Eric. Got in late last night. I waited in vain in Van for my luggage.”

  “One of our gang had the same disappointment,” I said—consolingly, I hoped—“but we were able to gear him up. He’ll be good.” Goran had had the foresight to take his daypack of basics with him on the plane. What he lacked were warm clothing, hiking poles, and readily replaceable things like flashlights and toiletries.

  “My boots are not here,” Eric said. “Nor my hiking clothes. I’ve borrowed things but don’t feel they fit. I’m not sure this makeshift approach will work for me.”

  We turned onto a road of rubble rocks. The bus’s engine revved to keep up. We were rising from the Plain of Araxes, a plateau already 2,627 feet (800 meters) above sea level. True to Zafer’s first predictions over email, the vehicle gave up trying to master the road around the 7,000-foot (2,100-meter) mark, on a slope that was quickly to become our challenging mountainside. From here we would trek up to Base Camp.

  Five packhorses were waiting, with two teenage boys and a younger kid to handle them. The horses had blankets across their backs. On the ground was a packsaddle frame for each, ready to take on the groceries, cooking equipment, tents, and our individual packs.

  For Kubi and the six of us, it was an orderly unpacking. The Armenians were a larger party and in need of more organization before they set out. Two were repacking their goods. Zafer had said we’d pace the two groups apart, and our group was soon ready to leave. It was not much of a head start, but we jumped at the chance to put space between us and anyone else on the mountain. The Spaniards were well ahead of us on the climb; the Russians were days advanced. We wanted our affair with the mountain to feel like ours alone.

  The expedition’s first day of hiking began without the eventual steepness that confronts climbers on the second day. Our group spread out in respectful portions of individual space on the open mountainside, yet near enough to provide assistance if needed.

  * * *

  Finally, we were on the trail. Charlie was in the lead, followed closely by Nico and Patricia, then Goran and Ian, with me last in line. I prefer being in the front or the back on a hike or when canoeing; it gives me a clear perspective on what the landscape is and where my companions are. Coming up from behind, aiming to move to the front of the line, was Kubi. It was the first time he and our group had shared space, and we were keen to hear from our leader. Once he was ahead of us, he called for an announcement.

  “The trail is one you’ll see. It is worn. There have been no big rains this low on the mountain, so the trail is obvious if you stay with it.” He hesitated. “I must help the other guide get ready. I will be there for while. I’ll catch up with you.” This was not open to debate. Kubi now became the third person to back away from our team at the last moment.

  We felt leaderless on Mount Ararat.

  “The brother cooks will be with the pack horses,” he said, verbally passing the leadership baton their way. “They are fast. I tell them not take shortcuts. You always have them in sight. If not, they know where you are.”

  Zafer had earlier passed off our concerns about the Zafer–Ahmet handoffs by saying, “What becomes, becomes.” So it was that the brothers Fesih and Niecit became our expedition’s fourth “guide” in less than twenty-four hours.

  Goran had changed from jeans to hiking shorts at the trailhead and laced up his borrowed boots. He moved up the trail without hesitation, and we followed him confidently along the narrow path. Within the first half-mile it curved into long, deep furrows caused by rains.

  The six of us put comfortable room between one another, letting our individual quests settle in. The backdrop ahead was the fla
nk of Ararat, neither lush nor barren, but with occasional stunted shrubs.

  We kept our heads down as we each got used to the feel of our daypack. We came over a high point on a meadow that went on for a few hundred level yards before rolling upwards. Seasonally dry creek beds were at the base of the oncoming rise, and beyond was a nomad camp, watched over by two women. Their men were out herding goats and sheep. The boys who were helping our group with their horses and donkeys had likely come from here.

  A nomad woman in traditional dress goes about her day’s chores, aware she might encounter trekkers. Observing such a settlements in 1856, Major Robert Stuart wrote, “The dwellers therein, with their swart faces, piercing eyes and outlandish dresses, gave the finish of life to the whole.”

  Their homes were fashioned from the land. Cleared twenty-pound boulders provided rocks for the house construction, stones stacked chest high to make three walls. Atop them were blue and green tarps as current iterations of animal skin coverings, draped across and down the respective rock walls to form a roof for the shelter. Ropes secured the tarps to staves and lashed the roof in position.

  A nomad camp has a temporary look about it but is settled in for all eventualities. Stacking dung chips dries them out for later use as fuel in open fires or cooking stoves, such as this one at the front of a stone home.

  With their men absent, the women looked hesitant to greet us. Trekkers represent awkward engagement for the mountain dwellers. They offered us canisters of coffee and milk. We accepted them gratefully and walked on through, each of us nodding our acknowledgement. As we left, Nico said, “We are to them like snow; it comes, it melts, it goes.”

  Our goal of the peak was more in our minds than in actual view, hidden by protective clouds. Our eyes kept to the near trail, which was clear to follow but with rocks that could trip a hiker, and water-washed moguls that needed care to navigate. The steepness was less than I’d expected, but consistent—we didn’t plateau or come to level walking very often, and where we did it was brief.