Climbin' Mountains

Although I have climbed the Chapman rock-wall, I want to use this blog to reflect on my experience with mountaineering instead.

At the end of August, 2015 I flew to Seattle with a bag full of camera gear, borrowed hiking boots, crampons, and an ice axe.  I was on my way to climb the highest peak in Washington: Mount Rainier. At 14,109 feet, Rainier is a modest challenge in the world of mountain climbing, but a daunting challenge to a 19 year old from Wisconsin who had no previous experience with glaciers.

On the descent into the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, I caught a glimpse of Mount Rainier from a window at the opposite side of the plane.  Mount Rainier is a volcano and doesn't belong to a specific mountain range so it is very isolated on the landscape.  The next day I would be on the ground, looking up to the summit. In my seat in the airplane I let out a quiet "holy shit".

The next day, my group of 9 climbers drove from the city to Mount Rainier National Park.  We spoke to the park rangers.  They gave us a number of black bags that were to be used to hold our waste if we needed to relieve ourselves on the mountain.  It is against the rules of the national park to leave any feces anywhere within the park.  In the rangers office, there was also a sign warning climbers to keep an eye out for any signs of two climbers that had disappeared earlier in the season.

Our climb took five days.  Initially, we failed to summit one side of the mountain, due to poor conditions late in the season.  After two days of hiking, we descended, drove to the other side of the mountain and started all over again.  The most remarkable part of climbing mountains is the conditions that you sleep under each night.  Although it was freezing cold, and the winds were deafening, it was undoubtedly the most beautiful place I have ever spent the night.

On the fourth night of our climb, we woke at 1:00AM, and began our scramble to the summit.  We climbed through the night, with only the moon and the light from our headlamps illuminating the treacherous terrain of "the Disappointment Cleaver", an infamously rocky pitch.

The sun began to rise as we were crossing a ladder over a deep crevasse in the glacier.

We summited around 8:00AM, and then descended the entire mountain.  In total, we spent 17 straight hours climbing on the last day of our trip.

I have never done anything so difficult in my life.  The metaphor of the parabolic geography and the infinite distance is extremely accurate in describing the never-ending march of mountain climbing. With every belabored step, it seemed that the distance to the summit was only growing larger.
About 500 feet from the summit, the winds were so strong, that when we sat to rest, I began to hyperventilate.  I had an anxiety attack so close to the summit that I could see other climbers beginning their climb down ahead of us.  I began to think about all of the things that could go wrong, and how there was no immediate rescue or help for miles and miles.

Eventually, the guide calmed me down and we trudged slowly to the crater at the top of the volcano fighting the wind and the elevation every step of the way. I was roped behind two grown men, weighing about 200 pounds each.  When we reached the summit, the winds were blowing at over 100mph and I watched as the two men in front of me were picked up by the wind and blown across the ice.  I was dragged behind them.  This scared the shit out of me.  I began to have another anxiety attack.  I don't remember looking out onto the landscape while we were on the summit.  I had my head buried in my coat, wishing I was safe at sea level.

For me, mountain climbing has everything to do with mental strength.  The reason it is so difficult, is because every step of the way, you want to turn around and go back.  You must convince yourself to push on.

Chancellor Struppa spoke to the class about his previous experience climbing mountains, and throughout the class, many of his ideas paralleled the feelings that I experienced on Mount Rainier.

He spoke of how isolating it is to climb a mountain, and how meditative that isolation is.  This is a feeling that I have never experienced anywhere else.

The thing that I struggled with was Chancellor Struppa's sentiment that mountain climbing is selfish.  I disagree.  I feel that in many ways, climbing Mount Rainier was an experience solely for myself, but I never felt selfish.  If anything, I felt that I was punishing myself.  I felt that by testing my limits in this way, I was learning a lesson that was manifested in something much deeper than myself.  Pushing myself to my limit and feeling such great anxiety in such a high place, overlooking the entire state of Washington was extremely humbling.  I did not feel like a hero.  I felt weak.  For the first time, I felt that I understood the scale of the world, and I could see my place in the grand scheme of everything.

(The view of Mount Saint Helens from Mount Rainier)