Over the Misty Mountains Cold

7 July 2006
I climbed Mt. Ripinsky today, or almost did. Not being a mountain goat, I had trouble keeping the pace of my alpinist classmates and professor, so I wound up hiking by myself most of the way. First, I puffed and panted, trying to keep up. Then, I realized I was alone. I stopped several times to wait for the pair behind me, knowing I wouldn’t catch up to the group about twenty steep minutes ahead. Of course, that only put me farther behind them. I thought about turning around and going back, feeling a little foolish and incompetent about not being able to climb up a little hill without having a cardiac episode. I had run four miles outside the other day, after all, and except for having to pop my knees and hips back into their sockets every once in a while, I was fine. So why was I having so much trouble slogging up this hill? My lunch of turkey on seven grain with cheese product and mayo was weighing heavily in my gut. I would stop periodically on an incline, look up, and decide it wasn’t really worth the aggravation…not because I am weak, but because I felt weak, resentful, especially, of the kayaking, mountaineering, polypro-wearing, geared-out wildeors above me and out of sight. Like I needed a prerequisite in high tech clothing to take this course, or at least avoid the dreaded Bread Loaf B-. Wasn’t the special course fee enough?
I’m not sure why I kept walking. Perhaps it was the fear of turning around and heading to the car without knowing anyone, or the fear of standing in the woods, still and silent, with nothing but a half-empty Nalgene with which to defend myself. Every shadow in the brush started to turn into a bear waiting to pounce on my quietly climbing figure. I started to wonder how my lime green t-shirt would look shredded and covered with blood and entrails (mine). I figured I’d better keep climbing; then at least the bears would hear me panting and sniffling. I trudged up the trail, up a natural staircase of roots and dried pine needles and humus, and cursed the well-outfitted wild in my head.
Then, a fork in the road. Disaster! To the left, what looked like a clearing. To the right, I guessed, the trail. I walked on.
Eventually, I passed a marker that said I was 2.1 miles from the summit (a little more than what I had already done). I paused again, deliberated for an unnecessarily long time, and decided that I must, at one point or another, cross paths with the rest of my group on their way down. I wasn’t so much tired as confused about the best course of action, pondering, again, my Nalgene and digital camera as the pathetic trappings of civilization. I might have also had a driver’s license, you know, in case I wanted to rent a car. I trudged on, and thought some more about bears.
Somewhere after a painted sign indicating an elevation of 2000 feet, the trees started to thin. Almost suddenly, I was in alpine meadow, walking up rocks flanked by low-lying shrubs—mountain heather dotted with lupine and blueberry bushes, shrouded in mist. It was like something out of Kurosawa’s Dreams or Norse mythology. I stopped periodically, thinking about how my knees would feel on the way down, to hear blood pounding in my ears and the faint crackle of mist, and nothing else. Every once in a while, the trees below would whoosh in a gust of wind, the sound like a distant highway. I climbed farther up, deeper into the cloud. I couldn’t see the summit, I couldn’t see my cohort, I couldn’t even see beyond the top of the hump I was climbing. Each thirty foot incline looked like the last stretch, but still nothing except silence and mist.
This story has a happy ending: my classmates did appear out of the clouds, wearing all the clothes they had brought up, fingers numb and hair soaking. Charles’ beard looked like sphagnum moss, droplets of cold cloud water clinging to his face. They had stayed four minutes at the summit—about twenty minutes above where I was when we crossed paths—but lacking a view and worried about hypothermia in the snow up top, they turned quickly back down toward the tree line. I held up half the group with my skittishness on the way down, but we made it home, sticking to our three-hour schedule, more or less, legs achy but feeling invigorated by mountain air. Palmer and I prepped dinner, then we all warmed our bellies and our hands by the fire.