Peak Experience

"We do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

~ John Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, 1962

July 20, 2006

Donahue Pass — 11,056 feet

  

The sky emerging from behind the ridge was black and boiling with angry clouds that towered over the eleven-thousand-foot pass where we stood frozen in place. I don’t know what we had expected to see when we crested the granite ridge, but we had not anticipated the storm clouds would be assaulting the very ground we needed to cross.

Not only did this wall of weather block our forward motion, but charging directly at us on an icy wind, it was moving so fast and furiously that we had no time to retreat to lower, safer ground. Instead, we three women would be forced to play out a scene from a clichéd disaster movie and hope that the experience didn’t end badly.

            Turning on our heels, we scurried back down the rocky path we had just labored up, backtracking to a small patch of green a few feet lower than the top of Donahue Pass, and prepared to hunker down and let the storm pass overhead.

            “Okay, Girls, what exactly are we going to do here?” Cappy shouted over the sky’s wild roar. Her eyes darted about, scanning the terrain.

            “Hell. I’m dumping this pack and anything metal I’m wearing. Then I’m going to that grassy spot to lie down,” I said, pointing with a tip of my head. I threw my hiking poles on the ground beside a waist-high slab of granite, unbuckled my pack, and wrenched it off.

            “It’s not much lower here than it was at the top!” Cappy shot back. She had already tossed her pack against the same broad boulder.

            “It’ll do,” Jane assured us both in her steady voice. Though she spoke calmly, Jane kept an eye on the rapidly changing sky as she rifled through her open backpack.

            I pitched my shiny new pack roughly against the rock slab and dug helter-skelter through its contents in search of any and all warm and waterproof clothing, scattering undesired items about on the ground. To my left and right, my two companions worked on the same mission.

            “All my warm clothes have metal zipper pulls and snaps,” I said. “Is that a problem?” No one answered. Maybe I hadn’t said it aloud. I thought the metal might attract the lightning. In the moment I stood considering, I realized how cold the air and my heart had gone.

Stripping off my shorts, I yanked on long underwear, layered myself with fleece and waterproof rain gear top and bottom, plus gloves and hat. I abandoned my watch and glasses, both metal, and zipped them into a small pouch on my pack.

Huge drops of rain began to splat around us. The wind brought the pungent zing of ozone, a sure lightning identifier, and shoved the rain horizontally with each gust. The black wall of clouds had followed us over the pass and hovered nearly overhead. Gray fingers reached downward from the clouds towards the spot where we dressed.

Together, we dashed to the deepest of the slight dips in the landscape, really no more than a low spot in the dirt. Huddled between a tiny snowmelt pond and huge piles of granite boulders, we ran down our lists of sage backcountry do’s and don’t’s.

            “I know we’re not supposed to stand under tall trees,” I said. Not a problem way above tree line. “But I also think we’re supposed to stay away from water and big rocks!  So, should I be closer to that pond or these rocks?” I couldn’t decide; I couldn’t move.

            “I don’t think it matters anymore. The storm is on top of us! Just spread out and get down!” Jane said. She threw herself down on the wet ground ten feet from Cappy. Unfrozen, I dropped into a shallow dent in the dirt.

Tugging my thick fleece cap down around my ears, I pulled my rain hood up and cinched it tightly around my face, leaving only a small circle for my eyes and nose. I curled myself into the fetal position, drawing my knees to my chest. Around us, engulfing us, the sky was battleship gray — the early summer afternoon had turned to night. The rain grew to a deluge that pounded the ground and drowned out all sound save the roaring thunder. My gloved hands covered my ears.

Lightning rent the clouds. Slivers of electricity, high above us, leaped from cloud to cloud, making intricate webs of light in the darkness. Thicker bolts slashed vertically to and from the twelve-thousand-foot peaks that surrounded us on all sides.

Each time Thor’s hammer slammed down, the Earth shook and the air reverberated with thunder. Light and sound struck simultaneously, not a nanosecond between them.

Flash, BOOM! 

Flash, BOOM!

On and on and on it went, my heart booming in rhythm.

Flash, BOOM!

At the peak of the storm’s fury, icy winds whipped around us, coming from all directions at once. Rain froze into a pelting hail that created a white carpet. Icy bullets shot from the sky, stinging through my layers each time they struck. Encircling us, the clouds grew thick and blinding. Wrapped in a ten-thousand-foot-high fog, I was alone. I could barely make out the lumps that were Jane and Cappy just a few feet away.

            I covered my face with my hands, peaking out between my gloved fingers in momentary bouts of bravery, slamming closed my finger-shutters with each repeated round of Flash, BOOM! Still, I witnessed plenty. 

            “What am I doing here?” I shouted in my thoughts, trying to hear myself over the storm. “What are three smart women doing in this predicament?  We know better than this!” 

            Prayers, pleas, and promises flew like charged liquid from my mind. I urged them upward and outward, hoping they would penetrate the ion-filled sky and find a sympathetic reception with the Powers That Be.  I visualized a golden igloo of protective light arched over and around us three, as we huddled, vulnerable, on that small patch of grass in the sky.  Repeating my words over and over like a mantra, I held the golden image steady in my mind’s eye, the wildness of the weather battering the glowing dome that protected us.

            “Protect us, keep us safe.

            “Protect us, keep us safe.

            “Protect us, keep us safe,” I chanted.

            Cold to the bone, even in my layers of fleece and plastic, my body shivered and convulsed. Gritting my jaws couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering.

            Had it been an hour?  How much longer would I be able to stay curled up on the ground before hypothermia set in? 

            I wiggled and rubbed my extremities in an attempt to raise my body temp, but to no avail. The shivering and chattering went on and on. The weak link was my feet; I was still wearing my Teva hiking sandals with thick, sopping wet socks.

            My ears pricked up. Did I imagine it? Or was there the minutest of pauses between the flashes and the BOOMS?

            I raised my head to watch the sky. The heart of the storm was moving to the north. We remained wrapped in clouds that sat on the rocky pass cloaking the peaks, but the violence and wildness was moving slowly away.

            At precisely the moment those thoughts filled my cold-addled brain, Cappy’s voice rang out, penetrating the storm’s din. “Let’s go! It’s moving north! Let’s go!”

            Galvanized, our three bodies leaped up like one, moving with focused energy. In mere moments, we had packs on. In the same way that distraught mothers are able to lift cars off the crushed bodies of their children, we tossed onto our shoulders, as though they were now filled with feathers, the very packs we had struggled mightily to hoist and buckle earlier in the day. Faster than I could have imagined possible, we scuttled southward across the broad granite pass, peering through the rain to find our way down the other side.

Frozen feet, impossibly sure-footed, rock-hopped downward over a huge ancient talus slope, the remains of an old landslide. The trail lay hidden somewhere among the acres of automobile-sized boulders and vast expanses of snow that spread across the steep slope before us. Hurdling downhill, I scanned the gray and white landscape for any sign of a trail — rock cairns, patches of brown, anything — but saw nothing, not the slightest hint.         

“See that tiny green square at the bottom edge of the talus?” Cappy shouted over the pounding rain and retreating roar of the storm. “That’s our destination, Rush Creek.” A thin gray ribbon of a river sliced through a postage stamp-sized green meadow.

Trail or not, my feet did not care, they fairly flew over the rocky rubble toward the distant spot of green, so eager was my body to “get down off this damn mountain!”

 “I have to stop!” I called out, halting on a flat rock slab. We were only halfway down the mountain, but I couldn’t take another step. My feet had been completely numb for over an hour, and my legs felt rubbery with exhaustion. With the immediate danger of the lightning and thunder past, and my adrenaline surge used up, my feet had become lifeless clubs, and I feared stumbling in the rock maze.

Jane and Cappy, hearing my shout, joined me where I stood.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I said. “I need to put my boots on and warm up my toes.”

The sky, still filled with clouds, had grown lighter and paler. The rain had calmed to sprinkles and showers.

Scanning the sky, and seeing its change, Cappy said, “My feet are freezing. I’m changing, too.”

Cappy and I sat atop a wet rock, the size of a bus, while Jane, who had worn her boots all day, scouted around for some suggestion of a path.

Though the trailing edge of the storm continued to sprinkle on us from high gray clouds, the hour-long run down the mountain had warmed my body. Only my feet remained frozen and unfeeling. I peeled wet socks from my prune-wrinkled feet and massaged my bare toes between gloved hands, encouraging the blood to flow into the clammy skin, but numbness persisted. I tugged on a new pair of plush REI hiking socks and pushed my feet deep into dry boots.

            Before I’d tied my laces, Jane called out, “There it is!” Standing on a broad slab of gray stone a few yards away, like a sailor on the prow of a ship shouting, “Land, ho!” Jane pointed with her whole arm and its attached hiking pole extension towards the green spot we’d been eyeing all the way down the mountain.

            “See how that thin brown line cuts straight across the meadow?” She paused, waiting until our eyes had caught up with her words. “Halfway between us and the spot where it disappears into the rocks, you can see a brown patch of trail… and then another patch a little closer… and a third.” All the while she was pointing downward at a series of brown splotches among the rocks.

            Cappy and I leaped up to see better. Sure enough, like a connect-the-dots puzzle, the trail stood out from the rock-covered slope as a brown dotted line pointing arrow-straight towards our perch.

            “I see it!” Cappy said, a smile growing across her face.

            “Wow! It’s right there!” I answered, breathing a sigh of relief.

            With warming feet, I felt my confidence return as I navigated the leaps and bounds over and around the heaps of stone. In response, my body stopped gripping itself so tightly, and my breath came easier. Pressing forward, we moved steadily toward the square, green bull’s-eye beckoning to us from a thousand feet below.

            Despite the day’s harrowing events, despite our blundering mistakes, and our utter exhaustion, we had survived. We had climbed up and over our first High Sierra pass. We had twice lost the trail, but had found it again both times. We had responded appropriately to a dangerous situation, partly of our own making, and come out unscathed.

            In the days to come, we would find ourselves repeatedly challenged by the physical demands of the wilderness through which we journeyed. There would be more mountains to scale, more rivers to ford, more mishaps to overcome. All that was to be expected, of course. Little did I know that afternoon that it would be my inner journey, where I would face my own personal mountains to climb and secret rivers to cross, that would prove to be the most daunting. 

             [Copyright 2018 - Opening chapter of my in-progress JMT-adventure-memoir.]

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