During what Ian Burns and I dubbed the ‘Tioga Death March’ out of Tuolumne Meadows up the snowed-over Highway 120, I found myself asking a question I frequently ask while suffering in the mountains – -why?
The view up 120 for the first 4 miles or so
Ian and I were kicking around several ideas for this past weekend. I had three days off work, he had a flexible schedule. We both wanted to play in the hills and the forecast further south in the Eastern Sierra looked pretty cold. Lo and behold, the weather at Tioga Pass, the entrance to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows (high country), was warm and sunny. And to top that off, a trans-Sierra ski trip that was supposed to go down never did. This meant that there was a luxury (by mountain standards) food cache at the ski hut 16 miles from the road closure.
Slogging up that closed road with my feet quickly turning to ground beef from my ski boots, the sun beating down on me, I started to think about the ‘
why.’ I really started my foray into the outdoor world about a year and a half ago because I needed clarity. I needed to clear my head of things that had been bothering me for a while. I’ve always been an over-thinker. Then I found myself looking out over Lake
Tahoe early one November 2008 morning with an atmospheric inversion in place, suddenly the
wheels started to turn a bit slower, and things came into perspective.
View of Tahoe from Tamarack
Fast forward to March of 2009. It is my first trip to the Eastern Sierra with my roommate and good friend Aaron Sieczkowski. We plan the trip to last a few days into the High Sierra to climb Mount Sill and maybe some others, ya know, if we had time. It was our last Spring Break of undergrad. We end up getting our asses handed to us, it was my first time above 12,000 feet, and it was definite ‘Type 2’ fun (read: hell while you’re doing it but in retrospect ‘whoa that’s cool’), and some areas definitely bordered on Type 3 fun (read: what the hell was I thinking?). While we didn’t summit anything, I got hurt, Aaron punched his boot through a not-so-frozen-over creek (doh!), and I’m sure I’m forgetting a litany of other instances of things not going as planned, I totally loved it in retrospect. I was hooked at that point.
Mount Sill meant extended periods of walking in pretty scenery
When we got to the Denny’s in Bishop after we got out of the hills (the only thing we could find that was open), the cheeseburger I ate there was the best I’ve ever had. Getting home and seeing my girlfriend, talking to my family on the phone, sitting down in front of my laptop and mouth breathing for a while, everything you sometimes take for granted, suddenly you realize just how lucky you are.
Jump to mid-May 2009, I am headed out on my first trip with a new climbing partner, Ben Hatchett. He and I are slated to head out on what was described to me as a “dirt road” to climb Mount Humphreys North Couloir and descend on snowboards. Hatchett would end up being one of my most influential climbing partners, and just a fun person to be around in general. The drive in is made in the dark, and the Buttermilk Road deteriorated quickly from being your typical washboard dirt road to having to make some pretty sketchy 4×4 moves through rugged terrain. The next morning I awaken and the view we are treated to is amazing. We got much further than anticipated, sleeping at nearly 10,000 feet according to my GPS. We end up topping out on the couloir, not the peak, I descend the lower part on snowboard, injuring my back due to the fact that I’m an idiot and attempted to snowboard in mountaineering boots. We had planned on climbing the East Arete the next day, to the summit, before I hurt my back. Expect the unexpected. Expect an adventure.
1, 2, 3 drop zone!
In April of 2010, Jeff Devillez and I met up in Bishop and exemplified the adventure aspect I love. Went through the Buttermilks again (more
stable section of that road than mentioned in the first tale w/Ben, thank God) to ski Basin Mountain, went bouldering in the Happy Boulders on a rest day, got shut down driving on 4×4 roads to reach Mount Tom but got a fun consolation prize descent the next day on Table Mountain. We bandit camped (see: did not pay for camping by sleeping in my truck) all but one night, didn’t tag any summits, woke up later than we should have a few of the days, and had a complete blast. A true adventure.
It’s hard to explain these kinds of things to people who haven’t taken their helmets and seatbelts off, gotten off the couch, and lived life rather than merely being alive. The kind of clarity gained through climbing, backcountry skiing, alpinism in general, is unparalleled. The sense of adventure of going into unfamiliar terrain, or hell, even familiar terrain with different objectives or a new twist, with great friends, there’s very little that can compare. Getting to the top of something that looked so impossibly far and big from the trailhead, or getting damn close, can provide the ultimate feeling of accomplishment. Not getting those objectives can provide fuel and motivation for future endeavors, and a sense of humility and a humbling that little else is capable of providing. The grandeur of your surroundings keep the fact that you are just a relatively insignificant speck, and that your problems are even smaller, in perspective.
The mundane days of work, the time spent on the couch glaring at the TV, the daily nuances, those memories will fade some day. What is burned, engrained, into my memory are sunrises seen from a high camp at 12,000 feet looking down into the Owens Valley as the sun sets everything ablaze…
Excellent views of sunrise over the Owens Valley on Sill
