Getting ready

I have a whole adventure written someplace. I will try to dredge up what I can remember now. Adventure is different from just regular living or vacation or most anything a person normally does. When a person sets out on an adventure they have a basic goal in mind and that keeps them moving in a direction. Sometimes that goal can change. The purpose of the adventure is to experience being alive, all of the sensations that go along with it and to witness everything in life that people miss by living just "day to day".A person on an adventure gobbles up every minute by putting themself into a situation for which they are little prepared, have no idea of the outcome, and leave the ending up to the gods discretion. Everyday the sun comes up and the sun goes down, but what goes on in between is up for grabs. Every emotion is valued and expected. Pain, and pleasure, comfort and torture, aggravation and tranquility are all valid and all expected and equally welcomed on an adventure. Nothing is run away from. Time does not matter: it moves differently.

When I heard about the Aconcagua trip I thought I didn’t want to do it because I really don’t like heights. I don’t like getting up on a roof to put the xmas lights along the front of the house. I was attracted to this adventure however. I was drawn to it like a moth to a candle on a table flickering in soft gusts of air and found myself hanging out on cliffs or out on trails that fade into little shelves of broken rock stuck to the edge of the face of a crumbly cliff hanging out over a 1000 foot drop wondering how did I get myself into this mess and why am I here? I was scared and shaking at that point and if I had thought about it I couldn’t have really gone on. I have been at that point and not been able to go on, but forced myself to put a hand out and a foot up and move step by step to the end. If I couldn’t go backward what was left? Just staying there on the cliff fingers dug in toes barely on the crumbly rock and just die at some point? Not an option. I was with my brother and one other guy climbing in the Sierra Mountains. We got hung out on the wrong peak and the guy that was leading was an excellent climber, technical climber and all (I am not a technical climber, just barely a scrambler and a wimpy one at that). We got to a place where there was no way but to trick out this one part and the rock was all crumbly and shitty, the course was not good if we looked at the probability. It was beyond my capacity to do this thing, yet there was no way out. Eric, the lead climber, knew I was tentative. but saw no other way. Dennis, my brother, was ok with it, he has done more than I have and isn’t such a wimp with heights. This was before I had done any climbs really when I was seeing if I had it in me to do Aconcagua. Eric scrambled up. Dennis made it up and Eric came down and I started up scared to death and shaking, literally shaking the rock lose that I was holding onto. Eric stopped me and talked to me. He said he learned to climb by climbing with his girl friend who is a dancer and she gave him the perspective of climbing as a dance. Eric told me to think differently. Step, pull, look where your foot will go because the rock is shitty and is breaking as the weight settles on it, the swing your foot before it breaks and while your foot is moving find the next hand hold. When you foot finds a perch then start moving a hand to the next hand hold as quickly as possible and look for a foot hold for the foot that the rock is crumbling under. Measure the speed of the move and the speed the rock is crumbling. Dance with the rock, hear the music, feel the rhythm, move with it. Continue the dance without looking down, without looking at anything but the rock you are on and the rock you are moving to. The placement of my feet and hands had to be quick and not really thought about but just done. Dance with the rock moving up, moving up letting the pieces fall down, falling down.

There was no other option. I could grab hold of some shitty rock shake it off with my trembling unsteady hand if held too long and come crashing down or I could do something different and use the rock while it was still fused to the wall and pull a bit so I could move up to grab a piece higher then take a step up before the piece in my hand and under my foot pulled off the face. Once starting up I had to go quickly or the rock and gravity would dictate the direction I would travel. Eric encourage from below and Dennis from above and I just moved up scared to death thinking of dancing with rocks, hot-footing it, more like the rock was hot and I had to hot-potato to the next place, watching, a Zen thing, not a dance thing watching myself from just beyond the cliff. Worked for me. There were no ropes and no protection on this climb/scramble and that is very dangerous and not really climbing, it is kind of in the realm of dumb. We did this push in two sprints, or two pitches (the length of two ropes) up sort of a shoot. The shoot was scree full, loose rock that had fallen off the face of the cliff we were trying to go up. There was a resting point half-way up that would allow one person at a time to rest.

Once on top of that three hundred feet or so shoot which was about as far as I could go physically dancing like a ballerina being chased by a wolf, like an all out boogie up the rock without making a mistake, we found that surprise, surprise! We had made yet another mistake. Our goal was to summit one of the "Sierra Peaks" which are all named and numbered. There are about 214 or so of the highest peaks in the Sierra Mountains. At the top of these mountains is a book people sign when they make it. Well this one had no book , just a straight drop off on the other side that fell about 1200 feet to the boulders and scree. On the other side was the nasty rock we had just manage to get up without death or bodily injury. This was not what I had expected for the top of my first Sierra Peak.

I was laying flat on my stomach on the knife edge of the top of the rock asking Eric what do we do now, because I was terrified that we would have to go down what we just went up. This Hog Back (knife edge of rock,that fell away on both sides vertically) ran along for about 500 meters to a point that must have been the summit. Eric said we’d walk over “there” pointing to the place 500 meters away to what must be the summit and check that out. Again I am laying flat on my stomach gripping the rock with my nails dug into the granite while my brother and Eric are standing looking around and talking about it without fear and ignoring me. Lifting my head caused me to get dizzy. What could I do just lay there and die? Big brother had to suck it up, “Oh, I’m ok, just looking at this… ahhh… this… lichen here, it’s pretty cool that it’s growing way up here, yea, cool a lichen.” “I think I will just crawl along here on my belly and look for some more of them.” I think we got down on one side of the precipice and scooted along so it wasn’t like a tight rope walking or something, but I do remember thinking that there was no way I could stand up without something next to me to hold on to and since we were on top there was nothing to hold onto so I couldn’t stand up. Only when we were on a thin sill of rock with a wall of granite next to me was I comfortable in standing. When I sat up on the knife edge I felt like I would fall over. My fear of height somehow made it so bad when I tried to stand up with nothing else around me I could not figure out exactly up and down so I just wobbled on my belly. The rocks we were standing on was uneven and there was nothing else higher than us for many miles since we were literally on the top of the highest mountain. Oh, my god, this is the ultimate in fear of heights since this is the top of the top. I covered this up very well however I am sure, crawling on my belly looking for lichen and hanging on to the granite standing on the tiny ledge of rock digging my nails into the rock and just talking "normally". Yea, Right.

When we were about three quarters of the way I had no sense of accomplishment : I just wanted down. I could see no way down and just wanted a helicopter to come and take me down or to wake me up from the dream and be down on the ground below where there was no 1000ft drop off next to me. Looking ahead all I could see was scary stuff and no better way down than what we had just come up. I was pretty terrified and promised myself that I would not do this again and remembered all the times I had gotten myself hung out like this in the past. I wondered why I hadn’t learned from that. There was a feeling inside my stomach or behind my stomach that swirled like a wave along my back along my spine coming forward at about my heart and circulating towards my ribs then splashing down to my solar plexus to rotate back again in a tight circle of anxiety at this time. Hung out is how I have always described it since I was a little kid because it is me alone with no attachment, exposed, not able to get a grasp on a solution no matter how well prepared I seem to have made myself. I was afraid, but it was not just of dying but of something else worse if that could be possible. The solution is not down, 500 meter vertical at the end of the hog back along the impossible ridge, but right there in front of me. I had to harness all of the emotions and gain control and do something that was inside of me. Each thing I did that brought me one step closer to the goal was one less step that had to be taken even if it is just a half baby step towards the goal and the goal was an eternity away. I took those steps one by one without thinking ahead, but just thinking one step by one step.

On that little adventure I did find lichens and I did crawl along looking for them. I also found that I could just crouch along the edge of the ridge and walk along the edge without standing and balancing, but crouching and scrambling that gave me hand holds and a good rate of travel. When we made it to the actual summit and the signed book the way down was a cake walk so to speak compared to the death climb. We jumped from boulder to boulder, perch to perch no problem and no big deal. It was fun because we were coming down. Every step down was lighter and closer to the ground. I felt relief and accomplishment. I felt I had overcome something I was afraid of and I also told myself I didn’t have to do that again because I made my point. I talked to Eric and Dennis about being terrified; I didn’t try to say I wasn't terrified. We gave high five about doing it and said well done. Now full of confidence and forgetting the panic of the precipice and the 1000 feet of free air below the rest of my body perched on a foot that was only held on three quarters of an inch of rock ledge.

I came back from this Sierra Peaks experience thinking that if I got actually went to South America after spending a year and a half of training and having four people depending on me for a major part of the project then I freak out on them; I am a long way from home and nobody is going to drive up and get me: Better be sure. I talked it over with Joann, one of the Adventurer, and she said that Aconcagua was a “walk up” and we would do shake downs before so we would be sure. So I met the team at an Oriental rice bowl fast food restaurant in Modesto that was closed down the next day when 15 people came down with food poisoning. This was crazy talk! They were saying very strange things, but I liked it. I like being part of it. They were including me. I was their bike man. They sought me out in Modesto because they knew I was the right age, in the right physical condition, and knew a shit load about bicycles. They came to me! How could I say no? I felt pillaged and Adrian is so crazy that he is the pied piper of Adventure, anyone would follow him. Insanity and everyone agreed. Our plan for training was so cool. Climb all the 14,000+ mountains in California and do them in the worst conditions possible and even take our bikes down as many as we could sneak them onto. One climb a month and an outing every month no matter what. High altitude stuff ever week prior to leaving with lots of cold weather stuff prior to leaving. The climb was a year and a half away. There was so much that could happen that the chances of it actually happening were slim to none in my book and the training would be fun to do. I could always bail on the thing and give some lame excuse, but I also thought I would hang in there as long as I could. One step at a time. I would go as far as I could get myself to go. I would do as much as I could do.

You wanted to know about Shasta. That was actually our last climb before leaving for Chile. We left about three weeks after that climb. There wasn’t enough time to really think about that climb or even thaw out from it before we were on a plane winging our way to some really big hills. My tent still had dirt from Shasta in it when I set it up on Aconcagua. By that time I had gotten use to the idea of going up the hill a step at a time. I was very nervous with that churning energy in my stomach. The weather was the big deal on this trip. Adrian is an expert on weather, but an avalanche is something that is a bit unpredictable in my book. I just didn’t know about the cold since I had not been around the cold much. Adrian has sort of a light hearted cavalier air about him, but he is deadly serious about adventure and no one dies or loses toes or fingers. When we needed to know things he told us and let us know why and for that I was grateful and felt safe. I would not have felt safe with just anyone. Still living out there on the edge of what human life can endure, a mistake is fatal so it is very edgy, and I was tense always thinking about equipment and stuff I had with me and where it was. As Adrian says, “On a big climb, you take only what you need, so if you lose one thing, you could die: know what you have and where it is.” Imagine that being on your mind or in the back of your mind all the time. Someone says, “Hey, can I get the knife?” You are in charge of the Swiss Army Knife you had better have it handy or know where it is. If you left it on the rock back at the last rest stop and it the temperature just dropped 40º and iced up and the knife is needed to cut a knot on a crampon because hands are too cold to work. The crampon my not get put on before your friends hand freezes or at all so they can not move anywhere because it is too icy so they will die unless you carry them which you can’t. They may lose their fingers because they had to fiddle with a knot without gloves because the knife was not there. That may cause them to go into shock and die. They may get pissed and kill you because that is what altitude does to people. It is deadly serious, life and death, no joke every minute over a certain altitude or hung out in certain places.

With all of the snow and stuff our trip was turning into one of these adventures. We had heard about a guy that crawled out of a tent in a snow storm without putting on his clothes and before nature got done he was so hypothermic he walked the wrong way back to his tent and died. When we went up Shasta in a storm in the winter we had a laptop computer and a cell phone with internet and got satellite pictures of the storm coming in so we saw what was coming and got prepared which was good. Adrian prepared us well. We were outfitted well with clothes. I liked the challenge of the exercise to see how hard I could work out before I collapsed. That part was fun. Post holing up the mountain like a machine was fun. I just turned myself on and just kept moving like a machine going without feeling the pain or the tired like the machine would do. I didn’t think of the distance down or anything. What scared me was the dark, the fog, getting lost, the wind, the snow, the wind, and the cliffs, the wind. I really didn’t trust Adrian’s navigation at night in the dark, the fog, the snow with only one barely working light and no real trail since the wind had blown it away. I was afraid we would fall off a cliff in the dark. I was so happy when we turned around. I have a terrible fear of getting lost. That is because I don’t have a good sense of direction I think. I sure didn’t know where I was up there on Shasta. Couldn’t see in the fog, the snow and the dark and the blowing snow.

Then there is the tired factor. How tired can a person be? If I got to the limit and I was at the top of Shasta, how would I get back? How would I know when I was just tired enough to have enough energy to get back? That worried me when we reached the shoot up the Red Banks. I was wasted, royally and decided not to break trail anymore. I was tentative about getting back at that time, but was not going to say anything. Push on, push on. When we turned around I got this second wind and though I could run back to the tents. Actually that lasted about ten feet. I soon was overcome with exhaustion. When we found the tents I was again overcome with a second wind and rebuilt my tent and got my place set up to sleep. I was feeling great. The next morning when Adrian said we had to get out of there because there was too much snow and an avalanche was coming if we didn’t get get out I was elated. I felt a real sense of accomplishment having seen that my limit is far beyond what I thought it was. I saw that I could take much more than I was aware of. I figured out that cold was not my enemy and I could dance with it and live with it nicely enough. Respect is all that is needed of the elements. I knew that I could push things with my equipment and get a lot out of it and I could push things with my body and get a lot more out of that too. The line and the limit had to be set way out there for me and that made me very comfortable. Faith in Adrian also went way up. I saw that Adrian was able to make rational decisions and pull out when the going really got deadly. I could count on him.

Heading up the slopes of Aconcagua I was a bit less stressed, but I had never seen anything higher on the planet before. Everyday we went higher than we had ever been before and the conditions got more extreme. I will see where I break. I have ten thousands feet higher to go than I had gone on Shasta. We rested and camped at an altitude higher than the top of Shasta.
The top of the peak is ten thousand feet above us on the glacier. God what a challenge. What have I gotten myself into.