Pretty Deadly

All that stands between me and my life’s dream is a few mills of plastic.  It’s an off-brand ketchup packet, and it’s going to stay an off-brand until they figure out how to include that little cut which starts the tear in their packet bid specs.  This may set the record (to date) for the earliest introduction of a stray thought, but what must it be like to work for Hunts?  Knowing you’re never going to knock off the top dog in the ketchup wars, no matter what you do.  That’s a tough workplace culture.

I’m not sure if it’s the ketchup packet or the ketchup packet operator.  It’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, at a picnic table in front of the Whitney Portal Store.  I’ve tried tearing it, and noticed my hands are shaking a bit.  I’ve tried biting and tearing it, but that’s a no go. It’s been … oh, don’t make me do math now … since I last ate something.  It was an energy gel on the chute.  About 3:00 AM.  So that’s fifteen hours, and a mountain, ago.

On the list of dumb things to do, how many was it yesterday?  And if you had such a list, wouldn’t you write stop doing dumb things on it?  Maybe near the top.  In a perfect world, I suppose.  But in the world I live in, this pesky ketchup packet won’t open, and neither will this one, or this one.  The freshly-scrubbed day hikers at the other picnic tables with their end of trail craft beers look at me like a madman, wrestling with his inner condiment demons.  I’m a little hazy, but I remember knives and things that slice other things.  I stagger at forever pace into the store, and plead for scissors.  Snip, squish.  Snip, squish.  Snip, squish.  Oh, the beauty of ketchup.  Pollock hasn’t dripped a more artful canvas than my squishing over these fries.   

Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States.  So, you figure out a way to get a permit, and go.  But I can’t recommend it.  I also can’t recommend separation from family but, there you have it.  If you’re going to be alone, a mountain is a good place to be it.  You.  Nature.  Life. 

Have I mentioned the mouse, yet?  I had heard the marmots on Whitney were brazen, but no one told me they were the size of bison.  Seriously, they’re well-fed and big.  So I thought I’d found the perfect bivvy spot at about 11,500 feet.  It was a vast snow field, several hundred feet from any rock outcroppings that marmots would hang out at.  I’d get a good night’s sleep after the long slog up to camp, make a summit bid late in the morning, and return to high camp for the night.  Head on down today.  That was the plan. 

No one informed the mouse.  Sniffing around the bivvy sack and trying to get in, he/she kept me awake until I finally figured out that maybe mice are nocturnal and he/she could play this game until dawn.  So I decided to use my awake time in pursuit of the goal.  Outfit the summit pack as the oatmeal water warms, eat the last real food until man vs. ketchup packet, and head up at 2:00 AM.  A clear night sky, a big moon and brilliant stars, all reflecting off snow remaining from winter.  Brought two lights but didn’t need either of them in the crisp and serene splendor of the bright alpine night.  I also didn’t need a couple layers in the exertion of climbing, so I set them aside (never to be seen again, because things sure do look different in the daylight coming down than in the dark going up).

Summer and winter don’t talk, apparently.  The snow pack from last winter still covers the top of the range.  All trails are covered in feet of snow, and you have to orienteer your way around.  Recent weeks have been warm and the snow melt is making trails and creeks into torrents, below.  But above 12,000 feet, you get two options.  Ice at night.  Slush during day.  There’s probably two half-hour periods just after dawn or dusk in which the snow is pleasing as a climbing medium.  But I missed that window as I traversed back from the summit to the chute.    

The chute is twelve hundred or so feet of icy, miserable work on the way up, and slushy, miserable wetness on the way down.  At night though, it’s transcendent in its beauty.  It’s a cathedral of granite, ice, cold and general hardness.  I’m the first one up, and have the mountain to myself for almost an hour.  Which is probably definitely stupid, I recognize.  But you weren’t there, with a determined mouse keeping you awake.  I had the foresight to pack two ice axes in case I dropped one along the way, and having two is coming in handy, as I claw the new day’s steps into the slope over the span of hours.  My toes won’t fit into dress shoes for the week ahead as they bruise and swell kicking in steps with crampons.  Chucks, then. 

The one question that lingers in climbing is where why when and how will you give up.  It’s the singularity of the entire pursuit, and a bit of a drug, to be honest.  You need to recognize you can over-dose, and die.  Doing so with altitude-impaired judgement is pretty much the trick to the whole enterprise.  Well, that and obsessive foot maintenance.  The Twitter handle has the “low skill, high enthusiasm alpinist” self-eval as a joke, because good Twitter is self-deprecating Twitter (don’t tell the prez).  But like any good joke, there’s truth to it. 

The summit’s a bit anti-climatic.  It’s got the hut, of course, which makes it seem not all that wild, and it’s a huge expanse, which is strange, because mountains are supposed to be pointy things.  The view, or lack thereof, is the real shame though.  There’s been a number of SoCal forest fires so that might be contributing to the haze, but I’m guessing the Los Angeles / Bakersfield smog is bad, regardless.  If you want to climb a California 14er for the view, Shasta is your mountain.     

Try to eat an apple on the summit, but feeling queasy, I stow it back in my pack.  Going from sea level Friday to the highest point in the lower 48 Sunday morning is messing with me some, so I’m focused on getting down.  Until I get distracted by Consultation Lake.  On the list of distractions, beauty leads by a mountainous margin.  Framed by Mount McAdie and Mount Marsh, the lake is off trail enough to be unsullied by the Whitney horde.  And the summer not talking with winter thing has it in a state of open water, melting ice and lingering snow, all at once.  It’s O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds, actually above the clouds, painted in water.  I’m going to have to take a picture of that.  Up close.

Here’s the tricky part.  There’s no lifeguard on duty. 

There’s nobody on any kind of duty, except getting up and down that big rocky thing way, way over there.  So if you’re going to get the melting ice in the foreground, think through ice thickness and water depth carefully.  Back before global warming was the obvious thing it is now (do tell the prez), I was a lifeguard by summer, and pond hockey player by winter.  I’ve fallen through lake ice dozens of times as we stretched the hockey season on both ends, but haven’t ever played on a lake this steeply deep, or deathly remote.  Pound one axe with the other into an anchor, two half hitches to the anchor and a bowline around me.  Leave my backpack, take my poles, distribute my weight, venture out.

Gee, it sure is quiet out here.   

Get my first clear look through the ice, gauge the thickness and oh my goodness this thing got deep in a hurry.  Georgia with her oil on canvas.  Me with my mortality on thawing mountain ice.  This.  This right here is a good spot to take the picture from.  And therein … the crux of the climb. Not the permit hack.  Not the swollen river crossings.  Not the summit.  Not the pre-dawn solo ascent of the chute.  This recognition of risk and reward. 

It’s a pretty picture, and I'm glad I ventured this way.  But I can’t recommend climbing Mount Whitney.  It’s the tallest one in all the states without a “North To The Future” motto.  Its elevation is thus its own attraction.  It has a nice forest with Giant Sequoias to hike through on the way to high camps, ample parking and a sketchy but inexpensive ($3) shower you can order at the same counter as your end of trail cheeseburger.  But the views are less hazy elsewhere, the mountains are arguably more aesthetic and the mosquitos don’t make your back look like Seurat’s first day on a new painting.  The crowds are less dense at the places that don’t have the biggest tallest greatest hugest whatevers, and that’s its own meditation on America.  The big crowds bring permitting hassles and varmits with no sense of decorum, or the food chain itself. 

Been there, done that, and crossed at least two things off the ever-shortening dumb list.  While I don’t recommend climbing Mount Whitney, I do recommend finding the risk / reward ratio that’s at least slightly uncomfortable, and living through it with a grin.  No one owes you a day.  So go make one.   

Oh, yeah … and Heinz ketchup, in a bottle.