Memoir 11: of Mountains and Me

This is not me

Getting to the top of high places has been one my favorite recreational activities since I was about 13 years old.  I haven’t been on the top of anything significant for at least fifteen years now, but that still gives me nearly 60 years of “mountaineering”.  In that time I seem to have accumulated a wealth of “exciting” stories, most of them scrupulously true.  Possibly to stop me from repeating them over and over again, several people have suggested that I write them down.  That’s what I plan to do here.

First of all: I was never a “technical” mountaineer; that is, although I carried a rope and ice ax on many occasions, I did my very best not to need them.  If there was an easy, safe, unexciting way around an obstacle, I took it.  I used ropes and crampons a few times on Mt. Baker and elsewhere, and a rope on a few other climbs where there was lots of “relief” (a long way down, right next to you).  I carried my ice ax nearly all the time, partly as a balancing device (like the cane I use now), and partly to look cool.  Also, I liked to ascend and descend snow fields, and for that one needs an ice ax.  So, to summarize, I was never an intrepid scaler of steep rock and ice; to my regret I never even tried to climb Mt. Shuksan, because it looked too “technical”. The hardest thing I ever climbed probably was Mt. Hooker, in Wyoming – and that is simply a long, difficult scramble.   No one ever tried to recruit me for a Himalayan expedition.

But I spend a lot of time in the mountains.  In chronological order, I have hiked or “climbed” in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, the San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado, the Sierra Nevada, the Alps, the Wind River Range in Wyoming, and the North Cascades.  Working, I spent some time in the Andes, but I never did much beyond dragging the drilling equipment a few hundred meters to the sampling site. Of all these, the memories of the Winds give me the most pleasure.

I have done quite a lot of solo messing around in the mountains (don’t do it, kids, it really is dangerous), but mostly I had partners.  I will describe two of them.

 First there was Bob Keller.  Keller was (and remains) the sub-category of Homo sapiens that I least understand.  In the mountains he was fearless, reckless, skilled, and foolish.  At least 90% of the times that I almost died in the mountains I was with Keller.  Many of the stories below will involve him.

I also hiked and backpacked many times with Thor Hansen.  Hansen was my colleague in the WWU Geology Department.  He was 6 ft. 6 in tall, strong, relatively unskilled, and eager.  He was the anti-Keller; he was at least as cautious as me and sometimes maybe a trifle more so.  He was a good camp cook and carried a big pack often stuffed with good things to eat and drink.

 

Most of the time that I hiked with Hansen he took along his dog, a female German Shepard named Walnut.  For reasons we can ignore for now, I am not big on dogs.  Walnut, however, was a “dog amongst dogs” –nearly the ideal hiking companion.  On backpack trips she carried her dog food in, and our trash out.  She was game for just about anything, although she had to wimp out a few times when her foot pads had been rubbed raw by walking on rough rock.  There were, however, three things I didn’t like about Walnut: her tendency to lick my ear while sitting in the back seat on our trips to Wyoming; her insane delight at finding dead animals to roll in; and the fact that often, while I was puzzling over a way to get up a steep spot, she would suddenly appear above me, looking smug.  Walnut has been dead for a long time, but she still is my favorite dog – and she wasn’t even mine.

Okay, now some tales:

While I was in graduate school at Stanford (roughly 1958-1961) I often back-packed with a guy named Bill Clement, who was a fellow grad student in the geophysics department.  We went into the Sierra Nevada – to catch fish.  We never thought of climbing anything; there are no trout on the tops of mountains.  We usually went early in the season – mid to late June.  The advantage of that time-period is that the fish are hungry, and eating flies, which is how we fished.  The disadvantages, however, are many: clouds of mosquitoes, frequent rain, and flooded river crossings.  We didn’t carry a tent, because Clement prided himself on his ability to build lean-tos.  This led to us getting drenched more than once.  And, of course, we used wood for fuel – I didn’t even own a back-pack stove at the time and neither, I believe, did Bill.  (We also drank the water directly out of streams.  No boiling, no filters, no foul-tasting additives.  Eat your hearts out, all you young mountain bums!)  We caught oodles of trout, and ate them – even though, after my Lake City days’ – I dreaded them.  In the evening we usually had several cups of tea, with lots of sugar, liberally laced with rum.  The negative to all this joy was, of course – mosquitoes.  They had a density of about 1 million bugs per cubic meter.  During the day (they sleep by night, mostly) you didn’t dare expose skin.  Fishing, hiking, camp chores all were done wearing a mosquito net.  Clement used to fantasize about contrivances that would kill them when they got nearby.  We used buckets of repellant (futile).  We cursed a lot.  I am surprised we ever did go into those mountains that early in the summer, but we did.  Repeatedly. 

One trip into the Sierra with Clement and two other guys I fell a little behind, missed the trail, and ended up – lost.  As it got dark I climbed a steep boulder for safety (what was I afraid of?  Bears?  Wolves?) and spent a miserable night.  The next day it began to absolutely pour down rain.  I retraced my errant steps, found the trail, and high-tailed it for the car.  I was there when the others arrived, nearly drowned.  They were relieved to see me, but also thoroughly pissed off.  It seems that the rum was in my pack.

Now why did I start with the Sierra?  My first mountain experiences were in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, while we were at The Cabin.  I had my first back-pack experience there – we went to Crystal Lake, about five miles (and 2000 vertical feet) in.  Big trout.  I climbed nearby Crystal Peak, which was a walk up but over 12,000 ft. high.  I think that was my first real peak.  Many years later I climbed all of the “14ers” in that area.  They were mostly walk-ups, too.  The tallest is Mt. Uncompaghre , at 14,321 ft.  I still love that peak.  I must have been on top of it a half-dozen times.  The view is stupendous.

I should mention that my mountaineering career (and my life) almost ended when I was about 13 and got myself stuck on a rock face about a half-mile above the cabin.  I had to figure out how to get down: nobody would have found me before I had died of thirst or had gone to sleep and fallen.  By dumb luck there was a dead tree leaning on the cliff.  I managed to slither horizontally across the rock and reach the tree.  Then I shinnied down.  I got home very much cut up and bleeding.  I never quite told my mother what I had done.  She would have forbidden me to go off and my own, and I would have been forced to disobey her!

At about that same time I was scrambling around in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California.  Together with Stan Livingston I walked my way to the tops of the two highest mountains in the area, Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto.  No hair-raising tales of near death or stupidity came out of those excursions.  They merely whetted my appetite for getting to the top of mountains.  Stan later did some serious climbing, with some well-known mountaineers of that era.

So now let’s turn to the Cascades.  The weather there is so unpredictable that nobody in his or her right mind plans to use them for long back-pack trips.  That applies to me, too – you could count all the nights I have slept in the North Cascades on your fingers and toes, and have some digits left over.  Mostly we did day hikes, starting very early and sometimes going very, very late.  Most of these hikes were done with Keller or Hansen, although quite a few I soloed. 

Some notable triumphs and near fiascos:

Let’s start with something heroic.  Every year for at least ten years I hiked out to the Copper Mountain lookout in the North Cascade National Park, sometimes more than once per year.   It was considered a three-day back pack, but we would do it in one day.  Nominally it is 23 miles round trip, with an aggregate elevation gain of about 6500 ft.  We would leave Bellingham by 6:00 am, be at the trail head about 7:30 – and start walking, as fast as we could.  I hate to admit such juvenile silliness, but the object here was to do the trip faster than the time before.  Our times usually were about nine hours.  We would eat lunch and drink a beer at the lookout, and we subtracted the time we spent there.  I did the trip with Keller, with Hansen (and Walnut, of course), and a few times solo.  The Copper Mountain hike is a splendid scenic experience, but – of course – we were so intent on breaking records that we scarcely ever stopped to enjoy the view. 

  

The Bear Story certainly needs to be told.  (I have told it orally so many times that it will be new to practically nobody.)  One September Keller and I set out to climb Mt. Challenger, which is a moderately nasty peak in the North Cascades National Park.  This entailed a two-day hike in, followed by a traverse of a small glacier – just to reach the bottom of the thing.  It may not have been very difficult from there, but we never found out – in crossing the Whatcom glacier we were nearly killed by an ice fall.  It was just a little ice fall, but it scared the Holy bejeebers out of me all the same.  Keller, true to form, wanted to continue but I would have nothing to do with it.  It really was too late in the season – but, of course, that just added to its attraction for Keller. 

Anyway, we backed off the glacier and started to set up camp at the first patch of grass.  Bob went down toward the trail in search of water, while I set up the tent.  He came back a few minutes later, looking disturbed, and said “Better move camp.  There is a bear down on the trail, eating somebody’s’ pack!

So, we circled way around, cut down to the trail, hoisted our packs into a tree, and went back up the trail to see what the bear was about.  There it was, furry black, fat and happy, sitting in the trail with a pack in its lap – eating away.  I hollered “Is there somebody here?” and a quavering voice came back “Yes, and I’m in trouble!” So, then a big kid with long blond hair, a pair of shorts, some million-dollar hiking boots – and nothing else – climbed down out of a nearby tree.  He had been up there throwing rocks at the bear, which of course simply ignored him.  He had shucked his pack in the trail and taken a quick detour to a pair of lakes some few hundred feet above.  He left his pack on the ground, near the trail. After all, he was going to be back in an hour or so.   Bad mistake!

Seems the kid had just graduated from USC and was – in the parlance of the time (this was about 1975) spending the summer hiking around “getting his shit together.”  This was to be his last hike of the summer – his sister would be waiting at the trail head to pick him up.  As you will see, it might actually have been his last hike, ever.

So, Kid, as we will call him, immediately grabbed my ice ax and asked “If I hit him with this, do you think he will give my pack back?”  One of us gave the obvious answer, “If you hit him with this you won’t need your pack, ever again.”  Agreeing, Kid took my ice ax and Bob’s metal canteen, went up to within about 15 ft. of the bear, and began banging the two together while bouncing back and forth and yelling “Ho, bear!  Give me back my *&%@#$*& pack!”  And other words of that nature.  Naturally the bear thought this was just good dinner entertainment; he would look on for a while, and then rip open another compartment of the pack.  Finally we persuaded Kid to accompany us to a hut a few miles down the trail, to spend the night.  We fed him, lent him our extra warm clothing (however, he was about 6 ft. 3 in. tall, so nothing fit), built a big fire – and went to sleep.   The next morning he was gone.  While we were eating breakfast he appeared, with what was left of his pack – which was, surprisingly, a lot.  Naturally all the food was gone, but lots of other stuff was intact.  We gave him all the food we could spare (a big block of cheese), and sent him on his way.  He must have found his sister, because I never learned of any dead bodies lying near the trail.  We went on to nearly get killed climbing Easy(!) Ridge and get perfectly stymied by Perfect Impasse, while trying another route to Challenger.  You can look all these geographic terms up in Beckey’s Guide.

Another moral, kiddies: Always put your pack somewhere a bear can’t get at it, even if you’re only going to be gone for a few minutes.\

My God!, this is getting out of hand.  I will strive to be brief – but it is hard, because I enjoy these tales so much.

Bob Keller taught a class on Mountains: how to climb them, how to behave while in them, mountain environment, and the Zen of being terrified – stuff like that.  (He taught at Fairhaven College, where you could teach anything you wanted as long as you could scare up a few students to listen.  Oh, the tales I could tell – but this is about mountains.)  On several occasions he asked me to help (on climbs), and I was so eager to get into the mountains that I agreed.  One time we took a bunch of beginners up the North Twin Sister, which has a safe-enough but nasty-looking west ridge, up which most people climb.  Two girls became so traumatized that they were effectively petrified; neither could move unless there was one of us “instructors” right in front of them.  Bob sent the non-petrified students down with a third instructor, while he and I each took one of the girls in hand and coaxed her, step-by step, off that mountain.  The non-traumatized students got to the cars about sunset, went home, and enjoyed a fine dinner.   Bob and I delivered our terrified waifs to the bottom of the ridge by about 1:30 the next morning.  (Thank God for head lamps!)   The authorities had been alerted, of course – our wives could never believe that we might survive such demonstrations of unmitigated stupidity.   To this day I don’t understand how Keller, and Fairhaven College, survived this and similar episodes.   There were several other trips that should have got both of us killed, or at least fired.  Buy me a beer and ask.

I doubt if either of those girls ever went within ten miles of a mountain, ever again.

One time on Winchester Mountain in the North Cascades (above Twin Lakes), I very nearly lost the boyfriend (of the moment) of my middle-daughter Linda.  Tim Cross was his name, and he was bound and determined to show me that he was man enough for my daughter.  He did this by ignoring my warnings and getting stuck on a steep, icy snow field, about 1000 ft. above the lower Twin Lake – with not a hell of a lot but air in between.  Just as I came up to the scene, he fell.  God must have been in a mood to preserve idiots, because the strap on his pack hooked onto a small rock a few feet down, and stopped him.  This required me to work my way down the damned icy snow field, get below him, get him on his feet, and direct him back to the path.  I am not one to relish steep icy slopes and gigantic relief, so this was very unpleasant.  I hustled him to the Emergency Room in Bellingham: nothing wrong but a slightly bruised ego, apparently.  He was maybe 16 at the time.  If it had been me I would have died of fright.

I should tell a Hansen story.  One character flaw of mine continually got me in trouble: the belief that I could scope out feasible cross-country routes in the mountains using only a topographic map.  On one trip to the Winds I mapped out a heroic big loop, only part of which used trails.  Thor was skeptical, but looked up to me as the wise old man of the mountains.  This “route” required us to climb one pass, branch off and traverse some high country, scramble up what seemed (from the map) likely to be an easy slope, regain another trail and circle back to camp.  Maybe 15 miles, with no more than 3000 ft. of elevation gain.  Piece of cake!

Well, one should always remember that a map with a contour interval of, say, 40 ft. potentially conceals lots of problems that are 20 or 30 ft. high.  And there were many, many of them.  By mid-afternoon we were still not half-way there and we were exhausted.  I really can’t remember how we got back to camp, only that we were too tired to cook dinner.  The rum came in handy, though. 

Well, heck, I have dozens of more tales of adventure and near death in the mountains, but this thing is over 3000 words and climbing fast, so I will stop here.  If you want more, come to my house, sit at my knee, give me a sweet tea laced with rum – and I will oblige.

To end:  Next to my family and to Linda especially, I love mountains more than anything else in life.  One of my principal regrets today is that I have become too old to properly appreciate them.  But I am grateful for the years, and the experiences, that I did have.