This is the first post in a new category that I’m attempting to make some sort of regular feature here. For lack of any truly imaginative ideas, I’m calling this section “Travel Stories,” and the basic idea here is that I’ll recount interesting things that have happened to me. These are the sort of stories that I would have a tendency to tell while at a party, or (even better!) while sitting around a campfire during a hiking expedition somewhere in a national park.
My attempts to write this sort of stuff were inspired by reading the latest book from David Sedaris – the oddly titled but wonderfully written When You Are Engulfed in Flames. It’s marketed as a collection of essays and I actually found it in the “Literary Theory” section of Barnes and Noble, but it’s far more interesting than the dippy essays that we all had to write back when we were in high school. Flames reads more like a collection of short stories, but it’s not fiction and there’s no overarching theme. All they have in common is that they all actually happened to Sedaris.
As far as I can tell, there are only two possibly ways that anyone can write a book like this and have the result be worth reading. There are the folks that have done something so interesting that no matter how they relay the story, it is probably going to be interesting – a story like Jim Lovell’s recounting of how he was on Apollo 13 when the oxygen tanks blew up springs to mind as an example, here. His book about this (Lost Moon) is nicely written, but honestly, if it wasn’t, I’d probably still read it anyway.
There’s another category of people, though, that have the ability to write about something completely ordinary and still make it interesting. The skill with which they write and the observations that accompany the stories make even ordinary situations sparkle in the retelling. The story is, in all likelihood, vastly more interesting than the actual event probably was.
This is the category into which Sedaris falls, and the book that results is far more interesting than it sounds like it is. By the end of the book I was strongly tempted to go track down everything else that he wrote.
All that to say: this is a little different than most of the blog posts on here in that there’s not going to be anything in the way of theological weight-lifting or philosophical meanderings – all this is an attempt to get better at the art of storytelling. Like just about anything in life, the only way to get better is to practice, so there may be quite a bit of badly written boring stories on here before I gain any sort of proficiency. We’ll see.
Because it’s me, most of these stories will likely involve some sort of outdoor activity related to hiking our mountain climbing. It’s not that these activities encompass the majority of my life, but they’re far and away the best story material. Because I’m not David Sedaris, if I try to write about the ordinary, at this point it’s just going to be boring.
Without any further disclaimers or introductions, here is the first attempt at this:
*****
Just because the weather is good when you set the tent up doesn’t mean that the weather is going to stay nice for as long as you’re going to be inside the tent. Most people that have spent any amount of time high on mountains have learned this lesson, although I suspect that most people have learned it because someone told them. Those of us that learned this lesson from experience generally manage to get a good story or two out of the ordeal. Here is mine.
Sometime during the early spring of 2008, I decided that I needed to learn how to climb mountains. An abrupt resolution like this isn’t quite as random as it sounds like it is – I’ve always liked mountains and always been into hiking. At the time that I made this decision, I had climbed a couple fourteeners in Colorado, but all of them were of the sort that you just walk to the top. Well, “walk to the top” makes it sound like it was quite a bit easier than it felt like it was – just walking uphill at 14,000 feet is extremely difficult for someone that spends most of their time at sea level, more or less. Still, there wasn’t anything technical about it – a bit of scrambling, perhaps, but no ropes were necessary, and it wasn’t really climbing at all – just a long and strenuous hike to the top, really.
The experience was rewarding enough, though, that I decided that getting to the top of mountains was a hobby that merited continued investigation. As a result, during the spring of 2008, I signed up for a couple of mountaineering classes with the folks over at Alpine Ascents. The introductory mountaineering class generally takes place somewhere in North Cascades National Park, and the one that I had signed up for took place in the beginning of June. The Cascades, as it turns out, are generally plagued with iffy weather until at least the middle of June, and this week was not an exception to the rule. The weather was bad. This made things far less interesting than they would have been otherwise, although (arguably) it also made the trip more educational. Winter camping skills – how to stay warm and dry in bad weather – is a useful skill, although it’s not the one any of us originally thought we would be learning. Near the end of the trip, one of the students managed to hurt his knee, which further increased (among other things) our opportunities to learn another valuable but unanticipated set of skills. In this case, the lesson was how get an injured climber off the mountain without having to summon helicopters and/or park rangers. The solution – at least in this case – involved building a makeshift stretcher out of trekking poles, a tent fly, and rope that was normally used for prussiks. The result of this effort looked like an enormous neon-colored burrito, but we all got down the mountain safely.
Through out the week, though, the bad weather consistently provided us with far more interesting experiences than just trying to stay warm in the tent. Probably the most exciting was that the slushy snow and rising temperatures led to avalanche conditions. This normally is interesting enough, but when combined with the thick fog that we were getting, the end result was that we were able to hear the avalanches – that were somewhere around us – but we weren’t able to see them.
This sort of situation probably doesn’t fit your average person’s definition of fun, but if you know me at all, it probably won’t surprise you that based on this experience, I couldn’t wait to try it again.
The second course that I signed up for – the intermediate course – was about 5 or 6 weeks later, and was a much smaller group. There were just three students, actually, and one instructor. One of the guys managed to get violently ill the first day out, so the instructor got him back out to civilization where someone could pick him up and get him to a hospital, or at least a doctor. The reduction of the group by one person led, understandably, to a general lightening of gear. Mountaineering tents typically hold two people, so it didn’t make sense to take along two tents anymore with only three of us in the group. We decided that we would all be able to cram into the instructor’s tent, which was the larger of the two tents that we had.
The idea of “tent,” actually, is a rather generous word for what this thing was. What this thing was, really, was an enormous blue tarp in the shape of a square. Each corner of the square had a tie-down for attachment to something – a tree, a tent stake, a large rock – depending on what sort of large object was available. The center had a little pocket in it for a big tent pole. There was no floor. The general idea was not that it kept you warm, so much – the idea is that if it rained, it kept you dry. We were climbing in Olympic National Park at the end of July, though, so staying warm wasn’t really a problem. Staying dry, on the other hand, is always a problem in the Olympics, so even if the tent was just a glorified tarp, it was still a pretty important piece of equipment.
A tent pole, however, was not included. What was included was a little Velcro mechanism that was designed to let you tie two trekking poles together. The idea behind this piece of equipment – which is a good idea, really – is that in all likelihood someone in the group would probably already be carrying trekking poles and presumably wouldn’t be using them while inside the tent. If you could use the equipment that you already had as a tent part, you’d be able to reduce the amount of overall gear that you had to carry.
The first couple nights, though, we didn’t have to use the tent at all. The weather was clear and we were still below the treeline, so we all just unrolled sleeping bags in the middle of the campsites. This sounds like a fairly normal sort of situation, but in this area, clear skies are rare: we were only about 20 miles from the town of Forks, which is one of the most overcast places in the continental United States.
Clear skies or no, though, the eventual goal was to summit Mt. Olympus at some point and learn valuable mountain-climbing skills throughout the week. The first day that we got above the treeline was memorable – the trees in this area are huge, and the lower elevations of the park get enough precipitation that it’s actually categorized as a rain forest. (Really! In Washington State!) Big trees mean that until you get over the trees, there’s just not that much of a view of anything except more trees. When we finally started to get above the trees, the views of the mountains that we were heading for were spectacular – just a few puffy little clouds, balmy temperatures, and very little wind. The weather was ideal.
The goal for the day was to get to a landmark high on Olympus that is aptly named Snow Dome. It is nice flatish sort of place, at least on the top. Snow Dome is fairly close to the top of Mt. Olympus and fairly close to quite a few other interesting peaks that are in the general vicinity, so the idea was that we would be able to camp here and leave most of our food and gear here while exploring the surrounding area. Consequently, even though we arrived at Snow Dome by the middle of the afternoon, we all decided that it would be in everyone’s best interests to devote most of the rest of the day to getting settled at what would be – in mountaineering lingo – our high camp.
High Camp on Mt. Olympus
We all dumped our packs, set up camp, and spent a bit of time poking around the area. You would be surprised, during these sort of climbs, the percentage of time that is devoted to what seems like fairly normal stuff: cooking dinner is a project when you have to melt snow to get water, for example. Setting up the tent takes much longer on the top of a mountain than it does in the living room, as the outdoors do not typically come with nice tent-sized flat spots at your pre-selected locations. Because the tent that we were using didn’t have a bottom, and there were little handy rocky outcroppings, we decided to set up camp on the rock instead of the snow. The disadvantage of this is that you get much dustier and dirtier than you would if you were camping on snow; the advantage is that, well, you’re not on snow. It’s not as cold, and it’s for reasons that are easy to understand, it is much less wet. Being dusty instead of being wet and cold was a pretty easy call, so everything went onto the rocks.
Moving rocks around to have a nice flat spot with no large pointy rocks took awhile, and then collecting nice big rocks to hold down the corners of the tent took awhile, too. Still, by dinnertime we were feeling pretty pleased with our progress and looking forward to the next day. The Olympics are pretty far north, so dinner happened well before sunset – the sun didn’t go down until around 9 PM, and because the goal for tomorrow was to summit, we were trying to get to sleep fairly early. Scott and I both ended up in the tent before it got completely dark, attempting – in vain, it turned out – to fall asleep.
At this point, the weather was still great, and the forecast told us that there wouldn’t be anything in terms of rain overnight, but Scott and I decided that we would stay in the tent anyway. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure that we had a good reason to do this. However, the tent was already set up, and the stuff was already inside it . . . well, it just seemed like it would be easier. Dave – the instructor – decided that he would spend the night outside. It’s possible to fit three people in the tent, but it’s a little cramped. In the absence of any compelling reason to do so, he figured he’d just stay outside.
Throughout this entire time- dinner, watching the sunset, and climbing into the tent to get settled – the whole area was eerily still and extremely quiet. The quiet part wasn’t a real surprise – we had, at this point, hiked 20 miles from the trailhead. The trailhead was probably about two or three miles inside the national park, which was in turn surrounded by an even larger tract of forests and designated wilderness areas. The absence of wind was a little more surprising – we were pretty close to the top of a nearly 8,000 foot mountain that’s probably 30 miles, as the crow flies, from the Pacific Ocean.
In any case, we didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Scott and I finished stuffing ourselves into our respective sleeping bags and happily watched twilight turn to dark outside the door of the tent. The tent was aimed right at the peak that we would be climbing the next day. We were both fairly excited about this, and still keyed up from the climb that day, so even in an ideal world sleep would have been awhile off.
Dave, who wasn’t in the tent, had unrolled his sleeping bag about 5 or 10 feet away from where we were. We heard him bonking around outside for a couple minutes, and eventually he was quiet. Asleep, we assumed, although in retrospect he probably wasn’t able to fall asleep due to the ongoing discussion inside the tent.
After a few minutes of this, a slight breeze started gently flapping the front entrance to the tent – which was, at this point, still open. Scott and I discussed this development for a few minutes before we both realized that there was no way that either one of us would be able to get to sleep with such an irregular noise just a few feet from our heads. Normally, the flapping of a tent door wouldn’t be such a big deal – and certainly not something that would keep you awake – but everything else was so quiet that it seemed abnormally loud.
Eventually one of us managed to get untangled from a sleeping bag enough to walk out to the front of the tent and unsnap the flaps and zip the door closed. Scott and I were both optimistic that this would solve the problem and that would be the end of it, but the wind continued to pick up. Within about five minutes, it seemed, and the whole tent was flapping.
At this point, it wasn’t flapping to the extent that it sounded like anything serious would happen. But being inside this particular tent was loud. Because the whole thing is supported by the one trekking-pole combination thing in the center, there was quite a lot of material that’s getting flapped around, because there are no other supports. Being inside it was like being inside a large drum when someone hits it – from the perspective of the person inside the tent (drum?) the situation sounds much more serious than it probably actually is.
Scott and I soon discovered that the situation was exacerbated by the collapse of the trekking poles. As the wind was beating the tent around, the trekking poles – which telescope for easy transport – were slowly collapsing inside themselves. This lowered the center of the tent, which resulted in the entire tent having a lot more slack in it. The slack gave the fabric even more room to flap, which made it louder. In addition, the additional flapping made the tent poles collapse faster.
In retrospect, it’s fairly obvious that this situation could not in any way end well, but Scott and I were not the type to give up easily. The wind continued to pick up and the tent noises continued to get louder, and eventually we developed a pattern where one of us would get up every couple minutes to check the anchors at the tent corners, re-expend the trekking poles and tighten them up as much as we could. The whap-whap-whapping of the tent would subside to a certain extent until the trekking poles slipped or an anchor shifted, at which point the noise got louder and it was time to check everything again.
This went on, I think, for at least two hours. As the evening wore on, the optimism about getting to sleep early gradually disappeared and Scott and I began to speculate if it would be possible to climb Mt. Olympus on no sleep at all. Even if we could fall asleep, it didn’t seem like a very good idea if there wasn’t anyone that would continue to check the tent poles every few minutes.
We had just about given up finding any solution at all, when without any warning whatsoever, one of the anchors let go. There was a disturbing sound of rock piles sliding on other rocks as the piles that had previously anchored the corners of the tent scattered themselves all over the immediate vicinity. With a final burst of flapping the tent ripped away, the trekking poles went spinning away to (we hoped) somewhere close by, and we were abruptly no longer indoors.
This was a potentially serious problem – if the tent blew away entirely, our ability to safely spend more time the mountain would be in jeopardy. Many climbs have had to be abandoned because of tents blowing off the mountain, as Scott and I were both aware. Still, our reaction to this was not one of unflappable veterans. At this point both Scott and I were still completely entombed in our respective sleeping bags, and to attempt rapid action while still encased in nylon and down feathers is to invite, at best, extreme awkwardness and embarrassment. This didn’t, however, stop us from trying.
I didn’t have my glasses on, so it was difficult to see what was going, and accurately discerning the situation was made even more complex because I was still located inside a sleeping bag. However, in retrospect, I suspect that what we looked like, thrashing around while still in sleeping bags, probably looked like something akin to the reaction you would get if you threw a blind and panicking snake into zero-gravity deep fryer. The amount of action that results is going to be impressive, but the resulting productivity is going to be, for all practical purposes, nonexistent.
I was still fumbling around for my glasses at this point (and fervently hoping that they weren’t attached to the tent, which was – as far as either Scott or I knew – half way down the mountain at this point) when I managed to sit up to a certain extent. I was sitting up more than Scott was, anyway, when he decided that this was the sort of situation for which we were not entirely prepared to deal with on our own. Therefore summoning the instructor became, to him, an activity of the highest priority.
The next thing that I heard (and, as it turned out, the only thing I heard for the next couple minutes) was Scott yelling “DAAAAAAAVE” as loud as he could about a foot from my right ear. This eliccited an unenthusiastic response (“Mmmrmph?”) and after checking to see if we were okay (to our surprise, we were perfectly fine) and assuring us that he had he had found the tent and tucked it underneath his sleeping bag, Dave told us to shut up and go to sleep.
At about this point, I finally found my glasses and put them on, at which point a certain amount of vertigo set in, and I felt like I was in danger of falling off the planet. Just to clarify, I should explain, at this point, that this is not a normal reaction for me when I put on my glasses. The view that greeted me, however, was unlike anything that I had seen before.
Spinning in front of me was the view that I would have expected to see only if I was looking out a window of the the international space station, perhaps: stars on top of stars on top of stars. Flat on my back, looking straight up, all I could see was the sky, and the view was so good that it was almost eerie. I’ve seen bright stars before, but nothing that compared to this – the view took my breath away and instinctively made me frantically clutch the ground, just in the off chance that gravity decided to take a sabbatical.
Where I spend most of my time – North Alabama – doesn’t have the best night sky but it’s better than most area of the country, I suppose. Driving an hour or so gets you out in the country enough that constellation identification is easy and, if you’re so inclined to bring even a small telescope, it’ll be worth it. Particularly during the winter, the skies can be clear and the stars plentiful and bright.
In this sky, though, I couldn’t identify constellations – not a single one. There were so many stars that the normal identifiable constellations seemed to fade into the plethora of stars that normally disappear into the background. After a few minutes of trying to identify constellations that I knew, I eventually gave up and just enjoyed the view.
Eventually the vertigo subsided, but at least another few minutes I was unable to stop looking straight up. When I eventually rolled over, I was able to see the lights of Port Angeles low on the northern horizon, even though it was about 30 miles away. Compared to the blueish lights of the sky, the lights of civilization looked orange and reddish by comparison, and at first I thought that there was a fire, miles and miles away.
I was strongly tempted to fall asleep with my glasses on, but eventually took them off and tried to go back to sleep. As it turned out, it was pretty easy to fall asleep after the tent had collapsed. The decrease in noise was, to say the least, considerable, and Scott and I happily discovered that nearly all the wind had been catching the top half of the tent. Both of us on the ground in a sleeping bag managed to completely miss what had sounded, to both of us, like something on the borderline of a storm that threatened to blow us all off the mountain.
*****
Of course, the next morning, the air was perfectly still again so the whole situation felt like it had been some sort of surreal dream. However, some additional facts came to light and made the entire situation, if possible, even more comical:
The copious volume in Scott’s request, as it turned out, wasn’t necessary to wake Dave up, as we discovered over breakfast. Dave had already been awoken just seconds before by the collapsed tent hitting him square in the face. Consequently he didn’t even have to get out of his sleeping bag to secure it – he just reached out, shoved it under his sleeping bag, and went back to sleep. I suppose it’s a good thing that he was sleeping downwind.
We also finally managed to find out why Dave – who is normally a pretty cheerful guy – was so annoyed by the entire situation. “Guys,” he told us, “the worst part about that was that it interrupted a great dream.” Scott and I, I suppose, probably looked somewhat bewildered. That sure didn’t seem like the worst part to us. “In my dream,” Dave explained, “Jennifer Aniston was in my sleeping bag. She was in my sleeping bag with me, and after you guys woke me up I couldn’t get her to come back.”
Scott and I both apologized profusely. What else can you do? It’s not every day Jennifer comes to visit, especially on the top of Mt. Olympus.
*****
As it turned out, we were able to summit later that afternoon, but only after finding a better place for the tent.
the best part was the very end. i think i frightened a roommate with my laughing. but then, it IS 1am… : )