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.