Year of the Cow

by Jared Stone

  At 8,500 feet, beneath a canopy of stars and towering pines, this rib eye is the centerpiece of our ascent-team reunion. The guys and I banter about the miscellanea of our lives, filling one another in on the two years of trials and triumphs between our last ascent and this one. The moves, the kids, our injuries and recoveries. Finally, after we clean up, we nurse some beers and try to decide just how early we’re going to set out in the morning. The verdict, informed by the lessons of last time: as early as we can.

  As the night winds down, Zac and Rich wander off to stash a few things in the car. Uriah and I hang back to watch the fire slowly die. Over by the tents, I hear my dog, Basil, rummaging through some grocery bags, looking for scraps. “Dammit, Basil.”

  Then I realize: Basil is at home.

  I flip on my headlamp and swivel it to our tents. I see a huge black head, whuffing through an empty paper grocery bag that must smell ever so faintly of rib eyes or almond butter. It’s an adult black bear, standing maybe thirty feet away. Bears must like steak, too.

  The huge black head turns to look at me, green eyes glinting in the darkness.

  I leap to my feet. “Uriah!”

  “Yeah?” He is staring down at the fire.

  “Bear.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. He has a grocery bag.”

  Uriah leaps to his feet and flicks on his headlamp as well.

  “Wow,” he understates.

  “What do we do?”

  “Nothing. It’s his now.”

  “Not about the grocery bag. About not dying.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Do we hold still? Make some noise? Play dead?”

  “I vote noise.”

  In unison, we both shout at the top of our lungs. The bear starts at the sudden ruckus, then throws the grocery bag up in the air like a beagle caught with a slipper. He catches it and races off across a nearby creek into the woods.

  Uriah and I immediately sprint to the site the bear left behind, expecting campsite carnage. Thankfully, my pack is untouched. I’m pretty diligent about not leaving anything with any scent at all in my bag. Uriah’s pack is also untouched. We seem to be good.

  Then, I notice some litter. A single powder electrolyte-drink pack, torn in half, lying about four feet from our gear site.

  We don’t litter.

  I pick it up. “Uriah…”

  He looks over at me. Then asks, “Where’s Rich’s pack?” A moment later we find it. It’s wet and sticky and absolutely covered in sugar and bear spit and generalized biotic slime. The bear must have investigated it after he ate the dry drink mix. However, this is not Rich’s first rodeo, and he doesn’t keep food in his pack. Thankfully, it’s otherwise undamaged.

  Just as Uriah and I are examining the pack, two big green eyes blink in the darkness about twenty feet away.

  I grab Uriah’s arm and point. Both of us freeze, standing over Rich’s sticky, nasty pack.

  The bear begins to walk toward us.

  “Noise now,” I suggest.

  “Yes.”

  Both of us train our headlamps on the bear’s eyes. We throw our hands over our heads. We shout the vilest insults we can think of. I yell stuff about that bear’s mother that’d make Don Rickles blush. We roar. We curse. We bang things. We don’t hurl anything, because that’d involve taking our eyes off the bear to grab something. At this distance, the bear could charge and be on us in a second or two. We need to convince him that’d be a bad idea. Thankfully, after an impossibly long moment, we succeed. The bear lopes off into the woods.

  A few minutes later, Zac and Rich return. They don’t believe our story until they see Rich’s pack, which presents a new problem. Though mercifully undamaged, the pack is unusable. It has to be cleaned and dried for tomorrow’s ascent. That rules out a bear box—the large, steel boxes the campsite provides for overnight food storage—where it wouldn’t be able to dry. It also rules out our cars, which the bear could easily break into.

  Our plan: We wash the pack in the creek, run a bear line between two trees, and hang the pack to dry overnight. In other words, we wash the pack in the creek that we just saw the bear retreat across, thus taunting him with it, and hang the known bear target near our tents. Then lie down and go to sleep.

  Still, Operation Bear Bait is the best plan we have. Rich empties his pack and washes it thoroughly in the stream, while I cover him at high volume with some of my best low-rent, midnight-set-at-the-Ha-Ha-Hole insult comic material. Uriah, possessing actual practical skills, runs the bear line between two trees. Finally, we hang Rich’s pack to dry.

  Before turning in, I patrol our campsite, sweeping the ground with my headlamp. I want to make sure there’s absolutely no food detritus on the ground that could lure our large nocturnal friend back. Frankly, I can’t say I blame him for nosing around here—this campground must be the biggest single source of calories he has available. However, those calories could cost him his life. Bears that become accustomed to eating human food can become more aggressive around people, causing a public health risk. Bears in that situation are usually shot. It’s another example of an ancient impulse in conflict with a modern world. Bears are supposed to crave sweet things. So are we. Once it led both bears and humans to berries. Now, this sweet-seeking instinct leads humans to too much candy, and bears to Kool-Aid packs and a bullet. Unlike bears, we humans can become aware of these urges and channel them to healthier outcomes. Though all too often, we don’t.

  One thing is certain: If that bear charged, I was absolutely, positively going to beat the hell out of it for the few short seconds before my highly probable death. The adrenaline surging through my veins demanded it with a deeply primal urgency. My demise would not have been pretty, or perhaps even especially meaningful, but I would have died brave. For those brief seconds, I was a warrior. I felt alive. I’m not encouraging anyone to pick fights with black bears, but it’s heartening to know that the instincts and biological responses our species developed for humans One Step Back are still there and still ready for action.

  The encounter was a reminder that out here, I’m not necessarily at the top of the food chain anymore. I bought my steer because I felt that the death of one animal to feed another—namely, me—was too important to take for granted. Now, I’m potentially on the other side of that equation. To some extent, the tables have turned, and nature plays for keeps.

  * * *

  The next morning, we start our ascent. We head up the main Mount Whitney trail before veering off to follow the north fork of Lone Pine Creek. The trail is narrow here, slipping along and across and through the creek while gaining steadily in elevation. Overhead, willows lean over to offer shade, their roots trying to claw the path back to wilderness. In my opinion, this part of the Whitney ascent is the hardest. The packs are still unfamiliar burdens on our backs, and our bodies still haven’t quite acclimatized to the elevation. I focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Next step. Next breath. We rest every minute or so. Today is an easy day—we’re only climbing about two thousand vertical feet—but right now it doesn’t feel especially easy.

  Midmorning, we take our first real break in front of a waterfall just below the Ebersbacher Ledges. I look up at the cliffs high above, excited for the views I know they offer of the valley far below us. I nosh on some jerky. A ranger on his way back down squats in the shade next to us and fills us in on conditions higher up. No snow this time, which is exactly what we’ve been hoping. That’s one of the hurdles from our last attempt eliminated.

  I offer the ranger some jerky. He accepts. Up here, we have only the supplies we can carry, the skills of our group, and the kindness of strangers. A little more jerky in the first category helps make up any deficits in the latter two. I brought enough to share freely, but hopefully not enough to become a burden again.

  When it’s time to move, we start the scramble up to the beginning of the ledges. This is when it hits home: I am in far better shape than I was on ou
r previous attempt. This scramble was awkward and clumsy then. Now it’s easy. Even fun.

  We pass through the ledges. There’s a several-hundred-foot plunge to certain death a few feet away, but it’s easily avoided—notably, by not falling off. We keep putting one foot in front of the other, slowly and surely making our way up the cliff face. At this point we have one job: walking. And we’re pretty good at it.

  An hour or so past the ledges, we reach our next campsite at Lower Boy Scout Lake. We’re camping here at elevation 10,500 feet to acclimatize as much as possible to our elevation before exploring the high peaks farther up the range. We also don’t want to miss the forest for the trees, literally. It’s beautiful here, and we want to take our time.

  We pitch our tents, refill our depleted water supplies from the stream, and then—sit. There’s nothing more to do and, without the artificial time pressures of a day in the city, no reason to hurry. I eat a small lunch of sausage and sweet-potato chips and watch dragonflies court above the waters of the lake. There is no phone to check—I purposely left it behind. No e-mails to answer. No appointments to keep. Right now, my job is to let my body adjust to the lower oxygen level in the air and let my muscles recover from the climb in anticipation of the next one. I can’t rush that process. I have to wait for it to happen in its own time. And unlike last night, now that the adventure has begun, I’m able to let that process happen.

  By late afternoon, we’re rested. And we’re ready for fun. I ditch my boots in favor of my now well-used and much-loved FiveFingers. They aren’t barefoot, but they’re about as minimalist as one can get.

  The four of us head out for no particular destination, scrambling over fields of talus as the rocks gradually grow from table-sized to car-sized to house-sized. Without heavy boots, I feel like a gazelle. Atop a boulder, with the choice of a long scramble back down its face and up another boulder, I simply leap across the small gap between them. It’s utterly exhilarating. It may be dangerous, though I wouldn’t say overly so. But then again, what isn’t dangerous? Without distraction, I focus on the next move. Look. Prepare. Jump.

  Zac and I vault from boulder to boulder, carefully lining up our trajectories. Two years ago, I would never have done this. On our previous Whitney ascent, I trudged. I had heavy boots and a heavier pack, and I moved with purpose. This time, after two years of eating differently and starting to think differently, I carry as little as possible and move ecstatically. I’m not thinking about where I need to reach, I’m thinking about where I want to go.

  Finally, we reach a large expanse of rock on a cliff overlooking the valley seven thousand feet below us. The four of us take a seat and watch the shadows of the High Sierras spread slowly toward the horizon. I breathe deep. The air is cold and clean.

  * * *

  The next morning we rise with the sun. Nobody planned it—hell, none of us have alarm clocks. But we pop up like roosters at the crack of dawn. This is especially unusual, because ordinarily I’d rather volunteer for a Justin Bieber tramp stamp than wake up before nine. My philosophy for a good chunk of my life was that no one should be conscious at sunrise for any reason. Yet here I am.

  For breakfast, I eat five slices of my jerky. Here on the mountain, I am once again intensely aware of how much food I have left. There is no grocery store at elevation. There is no other way to replenish lost calories unless I fashion a spear and hunt marmots or something. In a way, it’s refreshing. I just have to worry about this food, this gear, these people. They’re what’s important. Everything else falls away or is literally left behind.

  We begin to hike. Two hours later, even trees fall away, leaving us in a world of granite and sky. We hike ever upward as the mountains transform from distant scenic vistas to sheer stone walls. The day passes too quickly in camaraderie and stupid jokes and gazing awestruck at the vistas around us. After several hours hiking upward, we build our high camp, the last we will make on the mountain. There, the guys and I chat about everything and nothing for a couple of hours until the sun goes down. Then, as a now familiar nighttime silence creeps across the high peaks, we turn in.

  The next morning, we wake just as the sun begins to crest over the granite cliffs. I’m not sure how much sleep I’m getting, but it’s a lot. Ten hours, maybe? All I know is that I sleep when it’s dark and rise when it isn’t. I can’t remember the last time I got this much sleep at sea level. But here at elevation, I can’t remember the last time I yawned. I don’t feel tired in the slightest. Not groggy, fuzzy, or weary. Simply calm and refreshed—a deep rejuvenation I can feel in my bones. I feel like a million bucks.

  Today is Mount Whitney summit. Last time, we enjoyed a long, heavy breakfast filled with carbs and sugar and chatted well into the morning. Today, we are four hard men eating dried meat in the morning twilight. The conviviality is still there, but so is a grim determination that we will summit today. We must summit today. What happened last time will not happen again. For breakfast, I eat two-thirds of my daily food allotment in one sitting and pack my jerky in my daypack. I’m taking my steer to the top.

  I’m in fine form for our hike to Iceberg Lake at 12,800 feet. This place is a scene that should be airbrushed onto the side of a van. The lake is circular and an impossible iridescent blue. Above is Mount Whitney itself, shooting straight up two thousand feet, with the rest of the range slouching behind it like backup singers—a wall of gray peaks, each higher than the last. On the other side of the lake are Mounts Russell and Carillon, two other California fourteeners (i.e., peaks higher than fourteen thousand feet). I am a man in the land of giants.

  We head for the couloir we’ll be following to the top, a fifteen-hundred-foot scramble up a forty-five-degree incline. Last time, this is where we turned back. This time is wholly different. The snow from our last ascent is absent now, revealing enormous boulders and yards of scree. The boulders are spaced in such a way that one can avoid the scree if one wants to, and I definitely want to. I clamber over the boulders, inch across cracks, and lever up onto ledges and higher paths to avoid trudging through the gravel. It’s like playing a long game of The Floor Is Lava—only instead of lava, the floor is covered with barbed, pea-sized caltrops sprinkled a dozen feet deep.

  Fifteen hundred feet above Iceberg Lake, we find what is called “the Notch.” Now, the hiking is done, and the climbing begins. We stare up at five hundred vertical feet of bouldering. Ledge after ledge, handhold after handhold, straight up.

  This is where it really becomes apparent that we’re at the top of the country. We’re above everything. In all directions but one, granite cliffs fall away to glacier-carved lakes far below.

  “Careful here,” Rich advises. “That’s a twenty-five-hundred-foot drop.”

  “Copy that,” I say. “That’s a long way down.”

  We turn away from the view and face the wall. It’s the only thing left at eye level that isn’t sky, Zac, Rich, or Uriah. We begin to climb. No particular maneuver is especially difficult. We put our hands on a waist-level ledge and mantle up onto it. Stand on the foot or two of horizontal space available, look around, and do it again. Easy.

  After climbing onto a dozen or so ledges, we’re four stories above the Notch. A fall would likely mean death—a bouncing, skidding death, perhaps, but still death. And that assumes we’d stop before we hit the 2,500-foot drop.

  As at the Ebersbacher Ledges, death is one wrong step away. The trick is to just not take that step. It’s good to recognize this, but bad to dwell on it. Death is always a step away, really. The trick is to focus on the next move, the next mantle up, the next ledge. I could stare into the abyss, but then I wouldn’t be climbing. I’d be focusing on what could—maybe—be, instead of what definitely is. And what is definitely, incontrovertibly, happening is that I’m perched on the side of a cliff in a heartbreakingly gorgeous mountain range on a beautiful day, surrounded by dear friends. I don’t want to get lost in the miasma of potential futures—I’d miss all this. I’d miss now. Next step. N
ext ledge.

  “This is amazing,” Uriah opines, pausing to admire the view.

  Zac nods. “Yeah. It really is.” He gestures to the vista around us. “It almost seems like a painting.”

  I laugh, giddy. “I’m glad we did this again. I couldn’t leave it like last time.”

  Nods all around. A moment of silence.

  Then, Uriah speaks. “Ready?”

  Rich nods. “Let’s do it.”

  The four of us turn to look at the wall ahead of us. Here, so close to the top, we fan out, each of us picking our own line. Rich heads toward some fat boulders below a ledge and an uncertain ascent from there. Zac slips to the other side of the wall toward a notch at what he believes is the top. Uriah and I clamber straight up toward a stone balcony that looks like the descent point for groups headed back down from above.

  We all clamber over the top of the ledge at about the same time. We step away from the cliff and walk in the only direction available to us: up. Across a broad landscape of granite boulders, toward a rough stone hut in the distance. Summit.

  We did it.

  We stand on the highest point in the continental United States and look down on the world. Everything we’ve ever known and everywhere we’ve ever been is below us now. Though my view is enormous, up here, my world is much smaller. I have only what I need in the moment.

  Last time I attempted Mount Whitney, I enjoyed myself immensely even though I didn’t summit. Then, I wished that my life could always be like this: simpler. Manageable—but exhilarating. Now, on top of the world, I recognize that life is always like this. Beneath the veneer of commerce and productivity and constant competition, there are the fundamental truths of what one really needs. What’s really important. Family. Friends. Health. Appreciation of the small moments that build our lives the way trees build a forest. There is no fundamental difference between my time on the mountain and my time off it.

  To “wish it could always be like this” is a nonsensical statement. It always is like this. The world is a magical place, abundant and full of opportunities for happiness. Moments of joy abound in the simplest of things and the smallest of moments. I just forget, sometimes. I get distracted.