The Reckoning

While not much to look at, the provincial mountain town of Index was, in our unconstrained imagination, a stripped-down version of Chamonix, the famous French commune, a mecca for alpine climbers. Located on the North Fork of The Skykomish River in the western foothills of the Cascades, the little town was not even visible from Highway 2.

There was only a sign. But once you drove into town, you could see the dramatic and easily accessible sheer rock cliffs of the Upper and Lower Town Walls. Those granite destinations hosted over forty vertical rock routes like City Park, Snow White, Japanese Gardens, and Breakfast of Champions.

Across Highway 2, the three peaks of Mt. Index - Main, Middle, and North-jutted prominently skyward. A dramatic rock palisade, clearly visible to the south of Index, their profiles were so classically alpine and visually stunning that they could make a climber’s heart flutter. The desire they created was palpable. Who among us wouldn’t want to ascend those peaks? And the loftiest of goals was the traverse, to climb not only the North Peak but to complete a series of ascents across the summits of the other two peaks, all in one push.

The plan was to climb the North Face of the North Peak, bivy at the top, and complete the traverse of the other two peaks the next day. It was a decent plan, as plans go, but the condition of the route up the North Peak was far from what we had expected. We were naive. We expected a straightforward ascent of clean solid granite with most pitches to be crack climbs. Instead, early on, we encountered long sections with significant exposure that I would later describe as a vertical bushwhack.

Scary pitches of dirty, loose rock and insubstantial vegetation offered no opportunity for roped protection. So, we climbed simultaneously and very carefully. It was both physically and mentally exhausting, as appalling conditions often are. While good rock can inspire confidence and augment your physical enjoyment, crappy pitches suck away at you, both physically and psychically.

It was only near the top, the last three pitches before the summit, that we encountered any decent rock and opportunities to place protection with confidence. We climbed those fine pitches roped, and they were a joy. Would that the balance of the climb had been so satisfying. But no, it was not. It was regrettably a Jekyll and Hyde route.

Mt. Stuart and Dragontail Peak had ruined me. Those north face routes themselves were pretty darn clean, mostly clear of vegetation and soil, and the quality of granite was superb. They were immaculate by comparison. Although there were always loose blocks in the couloirs, most of the rock was solid, and you could depend on it. That was not the case on Mt. Index. The dismal quality of the route led me to despise the climb, and by extension, the peak, even before our summit bivouac.

Beckey’s climbing guide had pointed out the dirty, loose brushy conditions but had minimized them. We did not know that, and even if we had been told about it in advance, we probably would have ignored it since we had a predetermined vision of what this climb should be, and that drove us forward. It had looked so pristine from the little town of Index. We would have been in complete denial.

And we also revered Fred Beckey. He was a legend even then. No, he hadn’t yet achieved national name recognition, but everyone who climbed in the Pacific Northwest either knew him or knew of him. He had climbed this route and so, like other acolytes, we followed in his footsteps. If Beckey had climbed it, we should climb it. Of course, that completely ignored the reality that it might be a scary and unsatisfying event. I didn’t even consider that possibility. Denny probably didn’t either.

Arriving at the top, we unroped and found the summit register, a short section of galvanized pipe with two threaded end caps. Inside was an old curled paper book and a stub of a pencil. We entered our names and smiled at each other. After the momentary thrill of the successful ascent and taking a couple of summit photos, my thoughts shifted to the traverse. I climbed down a few steps from the top to further examine the section that we’d need to downclimb to continue our traverse to the Middle Peak. I didn’t like what I saw.

I gazed at a ragged jumble of granite blocks that appeared to have been angrily tossed down into the saddle by the forces of gravity that continually erode mountains. The whole daunting mess down to and across the deeply knifed Middle-North Peak notch looked highly unstable. I wasn’t a big fan of steep loose rock this size, especially with the kind of exposure we had at that elevation. It was one thing to plunge step down a scree field near a run-out, but this looked treacherous. I couldn’t see riding one of these fractured blocks to the bottom.

Getting from the North Peak to the Middle Peak had all the appearances of a delicate and significantly risky undertaking. Maybe I was an elitist, but I already had mixed feelings about the route we had just completed and found myself rapidly losing interest in the traverse. Even though we had just bagged the North Peak, I felt no enthusiasm to continue.

“So be it,” I said to myself. “There’s nothing more to see here folks, move along.” There were other, much better climbs to spend my time on.

As the sun departed, we slipped into down jackets and half bags over thin foam pads amongst the tumble of boulders at the summit and pulled our nylon bivy sacks over us. We prepared for a sleep that would not come. It was another one of those nights on a mountain bivouac. If it were not for my anxiety about the conditions of the climbing ahead, I might have lay in wonderment looking up at the star-filled universe above us, merging with the infinite, before drifting away.

Instead, I lay awake, silently awfulizing about what could go wrong on the traverse, a continuous disaster loop playing in my overactive mind. I finally made a decision. “Fuck it!” My fun meter indicator had been dropping rapidly and was near pegging zero. I was definitely done. My new game plan was to feign sleeping in and hope that my climbing partner Denny had an interminably rough sleepless night and would agree to abandon the traverse until sometime in the indeterminant future.

“Hey, we can always come back again,” I would say. Well, I lucked out as that did happen.

This is a brief excerpt from ‘The Choices We Make,’ a mountaineering adventure story about our ascent of the North Face of the North Peak of Mt. Index. The story is told in my mountain memoir, Banquet of the Infinite, available as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

The Dragon's Tail

A children’s coloring book of cliffs and crags? Uh, no. Just a quick pen and wash study from a summit photo I took back in 1975. Unfortunately, the smooth Stillman & Bird sketchbook paper doesn’t allow the wash to flow seamlessly like cold press, but even so, I like it. A good experiment, nonetheless. I shall return to this subject again, and see if I can improve. Any guesses where this is? Hint: Gerber and Sink completed the first ascent only four years before we climbed it.

At the summit, we held in our view that wonderful panorama of the Enchantment Lakes Basin, the spiky Prusik Peak, Little Annapurna, and the other peaks of the Stuart Range and the distant forms of the volcanos, Mt. Rainier standing assertively above the rest. Breathtaking! Ebullient, we stood and took photos of each other at the top. Dragontail Peak was no doubt named for the jagged serpentine ridge that dominates its skyline. Not nearly as evident from below, it was prominent and dramatically striking to behold from the summit. The spires were both mythic and medieval in their physical manifestation, like weathered and broken crenellations of an ancient stone castle.

Unfortunately, we could not linger to savor our accomplishments. The original plan was to bivy at or shortly after the summit, not partway up the face. Running against the clock, we cautiously descended the steep snowfields on the backside and hiked down the tedious steep slopes of loose rock from Aasgard Pass to the lakeside boulder field. Moving as fast as was reasonable, we hopped from boulder to boulder, careful not to slip and fall into any void between them and thus suffer a potentially debilitating injury. Accessing the trail on the south side of the lake, we continued out as the sun dropped below the horizon. Dark now, we used our headlamps hiking down the sometimes steep and twisting trail back across the heavy log bridge and the final two miles out to the trailhead.

We were spent, thrashed. Grateful that I was not driving, I gave my fate over to Denny. We clambered into his old VW Beetle and bounced down the potholed forest road, and headed towards home. As we drove through the tiny hamlet of Gold Bar, my head slumped to my chest. It was after 4:00 am on Monday when Denny finally dropped me off. I was not looking forward to the day ahead. And as far as our mountaineering victory, no one at the architectural office would care one bit. Not a whit. And the recognition of that did not cheer me.

This is a brief excerpt from ‘Rolling with the Punches,’ a mountaineering adventure story about our ascent of the North Face of Dragontail Peak. The story is told in my mountain memoir, Banquet of the Infinite, now available as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Photos and mountain art are by the author.

The Magic Mountain

Not long after our incident with the errant careening rock, we got our first view of the West Arête of Eldorado. Sharply silhouetted against the sky, it flowed jaggedly upward from left to right towards Eldorado’s dramatic knifepoint summit. Both the size and shape of the steep dark ridge appeared ominously forbidding. The impact upon my reptilian brain was immediate.

I was afraid. It struck me as the most fearsome-looking ridge climb that I had ever seen. Was I ready for this? Doubt swept over me like a heavy chain mail shroud, forcibly weighing me down, and I became even surer that no, I was not ready to be any part of this climb. Sure, I had climbed the North Ridge of Mount Stuart and other challenging routes, but this was different, enormous in scale, more jagged, steeper, more dangerous, and more damn scary. My mind shifted into overdrive. Excuses, excuses, what plausible reason could I possibly manufacture to avoid this climb? I felt a desperation to bail out from the ridge climb.

“You know, I’m just not feeling very up to snuff today, a bit off my game. I think I’ll sit this one out and enjoy the scenery. I like it out here. It’s quite beautiful. The three of you can rope up together and climb the ridge. That will work out nicely. A threesome. A nice rope. Yes, and I’ll stay here and meet up with you on the way out. I don’t need to climb this ridge. I’ll be fine. Go ahead and have fun. I’ll wait here.”

I blurted this out as casually as I could manage and waited for a response. I hoped for a quick agreement from the group. I didn’t have to wait long. And I didn’t get it. No one took me seriously, and they were having none of my excuses, no traction on my attempt to weenie out. The group mandate was that I was climbing the ridge with Nicolai. He would be my partner, and that was the end of my nonsense suggestion. Darn. I gulped and started trying to convince myself that it would probably be okay. I was still working on that as we crawled into our sleeping bags for the night.

We awoke early, knowing that today was the big day. We’d be climbing a lot of jagged vertical on the fearsome buttress to reach the summit. I tried to assure myself: just another day at the office, rope up, go to work, get moving up, doing what you know you can do. For some reason, I did not bring my trusty little Rollei 35 camera, which I usually carried in a zippered nylon packcloth pocket on a chest sling, so I have no photos of this climb. The images exist only in my mind. I vividly remember the very photo-worthy route, from the expansive view of the fearsome silhouette to the airy pitches along the ridge.  

Looking back, I must have left the camera behind to avoid any distraction from the task at hand. Climbing the lower sections was a work-like affair from a technical and enjoyment standpoint, and I remember little of those pitches. But the climbing around the granite gendarmes in the middle section was nothing short of spectacular. The 5.8 crux chimney traverse on thin face holds required a bit of attention, but we were all on our game. Everything flowed seamlessly as we swung leads rhythmically up.

You can’t say that about every climb, and you feel the gift of the gods when it happens. I paused during one belay, feeding out the rope to Nicolai, and gazed in awe across the magnificent terrain defined by the jagged surrounding peaks of the North Cascades.

As I sat on the warm granite, anchored to the rock by slings and the force of gravity, the shimmering peaks in the distance appeared to float weightlessly before me. In those moments, I had mentally slipped into a form of sitting meditation. My conscious insight was that my reason for doing these climbs, with all of the dirty, strenuous, and dangerous work, was not to rack up a list of summits with progressively harder difficulty ratings to make myself feel good or to tell my friends.

The real reason for the climb, the extraordinary gift of it, was to see the world from a different vantage point, a vantage point that would be gained only by hard work, requisite skill, and the ability to take risks and overcome fear. And to trust and rely on the help from my fellow climbing partners, who were in those moments my very best friends. The stunning views of and from the sharp ridge were the everlasting rewards.

And in those moments, I was infinite. The climbing that day was long and technical, challenging and immensely gratifying, and surprisingly, at the end of the day, over way too soon. The physical touch of the solid granite beneath my feet and fingertips was so reassuring, and that day we savored the rock as if we had attended a banquet. It was sublime.

What I remember most from that day was not the athleticism and challenge of the climbing, but the place and my perceptions of it. The being there was the gift. After entering the perceptual mystic and achieving what had been some of the most satisfying climbing I had yet done in the Cascades, we reached the summit. We stood at the top of the snow and ice that cascaded down the other side. We basked in the epic moment. As I surveyed the scene, I was delirious with joy. With clear skies and unlimited visibility, the views from the summit were expansive and dramatic, Wagnerian in their visual intensity!

What had I been thinking, trying to get out of this? This climb was one of the most magnificent mountain routes that I had completed to date. I was profoundly grateful that my friends had not listened to my nonsense from yesterday. Thank God. There is a unique type of closeness that you feel with your climbing partners. It’s a marriage where you trust your partner with your life. Sure, that partnership can vacillate between love, gratification, aggravation, and hate, depending on the circumstances. But there is nothing like the feeling of celebrating the completion of a successful, great athletic climb together.

It was to be my only climb with Mark Fielding, who was previously Nicolai’s mountain mentor. And I also never climbed again with the young woman who partnered with Mark on Eldorado Peak. Looking back, I do regret that I did not remember her name. I can testify that she was strong, skilled, and confident and moved with a swift gracefulness, dancing upward towards the summit.

I suppose that I was too self-involved with my anxiety around my ability and readiness to tackle the climb to be paying much attention to Mark and his climbing partner. Mark was incredibly skilled, having made many first ascents with the already mythic Fred Beckey, and any partner of Mark’s would have an unspoken, yet irrefutable, endorsement of competence. Nicolai, soon after summiting, exclaimed that the West Ridge of Eldorado Peak was the ultimate alpine climb of his mountaineering career.

At the time, I withheld that appraisal for myself since it wasn’t the beatdown I had experienced on the North Ridge of Stuart or the sensational experience of the vertical ice world of the Black Ice Couloir on the Grand Teton. But looking back, I agree with Nicolai that this climb was among the great ones for myself as well, and perhaps the highlight of my all too brief technical climbing career.

This is a brief excerpt from 'I’ll Wait Here,’ a mountaineering adventure story about our ascent of the West Arête of Eldorado Peak. The story is told in my mountain memoir, Banquet of the Infinite, now available as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Mountain artworks are by the author.