PART OF THE GUNDELBERG SAGA
It gets cold in Bellingham. Not cold by Minnesota or upstate New York
standards, but cold enough to make any sensible person search for reasons to
stay indoors. The coldest of these
occasions are known as “northers”.
During a norther a brisk breeze blows out of Canada, with clear skies. Temperatures of 20o F are
frequent, with wind chills much lower.
Powerful inducement to stay indoors.
It was on one such day, long ago, that Bob Keller’s face
appeared at my door, sporting a suspicious grin. I had bought two pairs of snowshoes recently,
and Bob was volunteering to help me break them in. They were the old-fashioned kind; a wooden frame
crisscrossed by strands of dried animal gut.
Frankly, they were useless on anything but nearly flat-lying snow
deposits. How the old French Canadians
and their Indian buddies survived the winter beats me.
Anyway, Bob wanted to toss the snowshoes into my truck,
drive into the North Cascades, and snowshoe in to Twin Lakes. Wuss that I was, I let myself be persuaded,
and off we went.
People nowadays do all kinds of winter mountaineering. They “front-point” up frozen waterfalls, with
special ice axes in hand. They carry ice
screws for protection against falling.
They ski in, or use special snowshoes with built-in crampons. They wear super warm, super light, super
expensive space age garments.
Presumably they have a good time.
Not us, by God! We put on wool
pants, wool sweaters, leather hiking boots, grabbed our parkas and stocking
caps – and lit out for the mountains.
The highway was plowed to the base of the Twin Lakes road,
but from there in (7 miles) it was unmarred snow, probably two feet deep. We arrived at the lakes in fairly good
condition after a few hours and ate our lunch.
If we had turned around then we might have been home for dinner. Not to be.
For those of you who have not been there, Twin Lakes lie at
the base of the north face of Winchester Mountain. The elevation difference between the lakes
and the summit is perhaps 1000 feet. The
north side of the mountain is quite steep, and at this time thickly covered
with snow. So, naturally, just as I was
packing up to go home, Bob says “Let’s climb the mountain.”
What a stupid idea!
Naturally, I agreed.
There is a lookout atop Winchester, and a very popular trail
leading there. Naturally, the trail was
obliterated by snow, so – naturally – we went straight up. The snowshoes were useless, so we took them
off and floundered our way to the top.
Straight up. And we got there,
too – I remember seeing the building, half buried in soft snow. Although by this time I was so tired that
building might have been an hallucination.
Stop to think of how stupid this was. We should have died in an avalanche. We should have frozen to death. We should have known better, but no rational
considerations were permitted. Some people
believe that the Lord takes care of little children and idiots. Maybe so.
Anyway, we slid back down to the snowshoes, put them on
(that was hard; my hands were frozen) and headed back down the road. By that time it was dark, and our poor
long suffering wives already had reported us missing to the police.
The trip out was a nightmare. I kept falling to sleep and staggering from
one side of the road to the other. Once
I actually fell off and rolled downhill into a tree. I almost gave up at that point but,
fortunately, I didn’t. Each snowshoe weighed 50 pounds. My brain was frozen. Whether Bob experienced any discomfort I
can’t say; he was not one to give in to human frailty.
And then we had to explain it all to our wives. And to the police.
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