He stopped after twenty minutes. “Short rest. If the mountain welcomes us, the mountain will let us climb. We need not rush.”
“Do not let the tiring tire you out,” said Ian. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by this.
Charlie leaned his pack against a rock and looked down the mountain. “The Spanish are on the climb,” he said. We looked to where he pointed. Their formation kept them tight and moving as a single unit. Their headlamps flickered when the large rocks briefly blocked them from our view, and veered as a trekker looked for footing. Their guide was like a tracer, light steady and pointed ahead. We started up.
In what seemed a little over an hour out of camp, we caught up with the Armenians, who clustered together where the trail widened. They rested as if settled into chairs made of rock. Three of them and their guide were arguing.
Kubi looked back at us and directed, “Keep going. Pass through.”
We breathed hellos. A hundred yards past them, Kubi slackened, and fifty feet later he stopped at a bend in the path, out of their sight. “Wait here,” he said. “I will talk with guide.” He threaded through us and headed back down the trail.
Ten minutes later he was back with us. “They have raging debate,” he said. “They left camp too quickly.”
“Why the hurry?” Charlie asked.
“Anybody can rush. It takes experience to go slow,” Ian said.
Kubi said, “Ian is right. Some struggle soon on the ascent. Others want to continue. They are committed one to all. No one goes ahead unless everyone does.”
“That we understand,” Goran said. “It is the same for the five of us.”
Kubi caught his breath from his ascent, descent and ascent; even someone with so much experience on Ararat was not immune to the increasing altitude. “Yes, but you five …” He said he was worried the Armenian group would spread out. “It dangerous to climb with mixed skill levels. Stragglers could get hurt and take a wrong turn. Fall.”
“Their guide says tonight is not the night for any summit. He says weather probably terrible. He says should all turn back. Now.”
There was a moment of silence, everyone mulling over what Kubi had just said, no one wanting to speak first.
“How terrible is it?” I asked. “If you feel we can make it, we want to keep going.”
“Me too,” Kubi said. He looked down the trail. “Not all of them can. I have to let him know decision.” He looked at each of us in turn, and we nodded.
“We five keep going,” Patricia said. Echoes stirred among us.
“Wait here.” Kubi took to the trail to deliver that message to the Armenians and their guide.
“Hurry!” Goran shouted after him. “The Spanish are closing in on us.”
Goran’s competitiveness was infectious. I liked the sense of focus it brought to our group. It was not about rushing. Rather, it was sport, a sense of bettering another nation—with no prize for success. Intuitively, he knew this gave us a measure of our own progress, kept us attentive and honed on the climb.
And climb we did. The mountain’s demands were sent our way with a path twisting as though the trailblazer had thrown a lash of spaghetti at the mountain map and followed the resulting route.
Night-time climb: Mountain guide Kubi adjusts one of Patricia’s climbing poles as the expedition makes its way up Mount Ararat at 2:30 in the morning, planning to reach the peak for sunrise.
* * *
Our climb continued along a craggy mountainside. The dark distorted our perception of depth and, being on a mountainside, I felt at times like the path might drop off into nothing. It was impossible to gauge the surroundings, and we had only our own steep steps to define the angle of climb. Thirty minutes after leaving the Armenians, we sensed the Spaniards’ presence; it would be prudent to let them pass if they got much closer. Instead, we heard Goran’s admonition: “Onward. Upward.”
I slipped on an icy rock, my foot catching the dry underside of a boulder as a prop. I gripped another rock to steady myself, but the hand I reached with also held a walking pole, and the grasp was tentative, only barely enough to right me.
Gusts of wind whipped us as we searched fickle footings and avoided slippery props. Slivers of ice blew viciously in the air, finding a crevice in my hood where they could slap exposed skin. Snow had fallen intermittently, and the brown rocks below our feet were dusted white.
Over the hours, frozen rain slowed our movement, pelting and chipping at my goggles. Momentarily it abated, so Kubi brought us to a rest against the cold, wet rocks. Patricia fumbled in her pocket, finding a chocolate bar, and shared it. A swift wind cleared the view. Below us the Spaniards’ headlamps were grouped together, shining inward at their own rest stop. Their lights went out in unison. We doused our own headlamps as a cloud-covered dawn arrived. We rested our lungs and legs as a penumbra beat back the darkness. The path behind us was eked out from shadows, and as its significant incline grew visible, it became clear why our legs burned from effort. Looking down, I recalled we’d left a campsite perched on an angle, tents askew. The trail’s vertical abruptness below made that inconvenient setting feel level by comparison.
Day broke, and Kubi led us on. The rocks about us felt closer in the sun’s definition, but shedding darkness did not make the ascent any easier. We climbed without a flat patch. Snow fell steadily for a while, then that cloud passed. The expanse beyond and below opened to view for the first time. The mountainside flashed long and round, and hinted of a precipice. In the daylight, the mountain felt larger—huge, in fact, and powerful. We paused only a moment for the vista, assuming it was here to stay and that wonderment could be digested when we next stopped. Fresh snow crunched beneath our boots, and then we were through it and onto frozen dirt. Kubi stepped off the sharp path. There was a difficult incline just ahead of us, but dawn’s tricky light made it seem like the trail leveled off beyond that.
Kubi motioned that we should go ahead of him. It was the first time he’d done so on the climb. He waited at the side, pressed against a rock, to allow each of us an unexpected moment of discovery.
Ian scrambled up the slope, stopped, and stared. Patricia was next, bracing herself with a walking pole and pushing herself up to where Ian stood. Her gaze was brief, but she looked back at the rest of us with encouragement, flipping up her goggles. Charlie moved hand over hand up the path until he was beside her, as did Goran. I closed the gap and became part of an expedition struck by awe. Big dreams live on big mountains. Against a momentary blue sky, the majestic summit of Mount Ararat beckoned us over a distance and up a striking ascent angle.
On the snow terrace where we stopped to reconnoiter and prepare, we knew we’d been blessed with good leadership, from within and without. We were a strong team of climbers facing harsh elements that had defeated many of our more experienced predecessors.
Kubi, ever about discipline, became a verbal minimalist. “Wait,” he said, flashing his mitts at Ian. “Down,” he said to all of us. “Crampons.” There was no oxygen to waste on sentences. “Quick.” Kubi had now used four of the five English words he’d bother with at this high altitude. The fifth, minutes away, would be “Follow.”
I reached into my backpack to pull loose the crampons, untangling their prongs and tugging where a clip had wedged in the spokes. Despite my pocketing them carefully and individually in my pack, they’d become entangled. My glove flapped open to the wrist and shards of sleet pecked the skin as my fingers went clumsy trying to clamp the device onto the snow-smoothed sole of my boot. My earlier practice routines had not involved clumps of heel-packed snow.
Ian slumped beside me in a red mound of toque, jacket, and pants. Unshaken, he scraped snow off his boot. He heeled his boot hard into the base of a crampon, securing it. He forced his full foot into the metal sleeve—the move of experience. His other one slid in the snow until it flipped over and the prongs took grip outside his reach.
Kubi retrieved the errant crampon and sat between us, lifted Ian
’s foot and fashioned the support onto it effortlessly. With his other hand he stopped my attempt to lengthen my own set of crampons, a sizing chore that we should have secured better back at Base Camp. With a twist of his wrist he got the adjustment perfect and handed it back to me. None of us had brought our own crampons, accepting the outfitter’s promise to provide them, which they did—bent, rusting, and overused though they might be.
Kubi dropped his mitts. With bare hands hardened to the bitter air, he fit Goran’s boots, only once smarting at the metal’s cold against his fingers. Goran stood and pressed the aluminum holder tight with his foot. Kubi looped a lace, buckled another, and then pointed to both of my companions’ feet as if to imply, “Done.” Instead he said, “Wait.”
In misguided imitation, I’d pulled off one of my gloves. Any dexterity I’d hoped for was flash frozen. Numbness swelled my hands. Movement brought a pain that disappeared as quickly as it was sharp. “This must be what arthritis feels like,” I thought in the unfamiliarity of the instant. I was about to pull the glove back on, but instead Kubi reached out, took it from my hand, propped it up as a shield for wind protection, and lit a cigarette. He drew deeply on the thin air and thick smoke, exhaled nothing, and returned my glove. His cigarette’s glow blew orange and out, and then he resumed his work.
Only fifteen hundred feet remained, straight along a snow trail packed down by yesterday’s French and Russian expeditions. It led into more swirls of snow. We moved on the slow climb, glimpsing through the fast-moving clouds what Parrot had called the “icy head of Ararat.”
The Spaniards arrived five minutes after us. Six climbers and their guide continued on a bit before resting fifty yards away from us to strap on their crampons. We sensed stern looks, accented by the rarefied air; we were not the only ones competing for the post position, a lead that was of innocuous benefit. We recognized their stance, their gain of ground. We had yielded command. Kubi did not convey loss of advantage. Fatigue had made most of us indifferent to the competition, but not everyone. Two of the Spaniards talked animatedly, their stares alternating between where our party stood and the mountaintop. They plotted their next move while the others clamped on their footwear with élan then rose in unison, stomping and tugging at their straps and holsters.
Our quintet was nearly ready. Kubi fastened the claws onto Patricia’s boots and adjusted Charlie’s ill-fitting clasps. He jumped from one of us to the other until all our crampons were fastened to his satisfaction. Finally, we traded our snow goggles for sunglasses, a temporary luxury.
Rest for the Spanish was briefer than ours, and it made them appear better trained. Grabbing their ice axes, they formed a line and started toward their final climb, angled ahead of us. Then one climber’s crampon came unfastened.
“Let’s go!” Goran said, seeing them falter.
“We have a chance to be first,” Patricia needled.
“Follow,” said Kubi, before the Spanish Armada could regroup. He took long strides, and although he never said anything, I suspect that with Goran’s repeated urges to beat the Spanish, Kubi had caught our competitive spirit. Within minutes, he had positioned us in command of the ascending path. The Spaniards fell in line a respectful distance behind. Unless we collapsed, the pseudo-race was over. All our attention now was on safety.
What are we doing here? I wondered, not for the first time. We hoped to find in ourselves whatever was necessary to ascend the peak—not to fail, as had many others, but to triumph. Exhausted, the climb up ankle-buckling trails had sapped our strength. But now we were encouraged by the fresh snow at our feet, sunrise, and the summit, less than thirty minutes away.
The snowfield immediately ahead looked deceptively level—it was in fact steadily rising. Where that section ended began a thousand-step incline to the peak. The east side of the mountain brightened slightly as the early sun shone through light cloud cover, coaxing our approach with a muted glow. There were glimpses of blue sky, and I wondered if the view from the summit might well deliver the country trio of Iran, Armenia, and Turkey we all hoped to see.
We were on the rise.
The air stilled as if it weren’t there, and it fought me as I tried to pull depleting oxygen into my lungs. At times our tribe of six slowed to a crawl to catch what we could of the thinning air. I recalled reading Navarra’s telling of his expedition “going forward in bursts of twenty-five or thirty paces, and then stopping for lack of breath,” one among them moaning, “I’m spitting my lungs up,” as another feared aloud, “My heart is bursting!”
We moved to the base of Ararat’s final challenge—an elevation gain of three hundred steep feet to its peak. Kubi retreated to the rearguard position. It was his mandate to watch over us as we climbed. Part of his responsibility was to be below our team should anyone fall and begin to slide off the mountain.
Goran, now in the lead, took the first steps up the sharp gradient. His left foot slipped off the icy path. He knelt into the snow to break his fall, regained his balance, and stood up. He looked at the rest of us with feigned assurance. Kubi motioned him on.
We were now on the sharpest incline of the final ascent. We clung to our hopes as much as we clung to the mountainside, repeatedly stopping to ease our pained lungs, to acknowledge the pinch of cold feet and strained backs. God, where is the air? I thought. I looked at the peak of Ararat and thought of what Crosby had written before returning to his base camp after a failed attempt: “It loomed before us, tantalizingly close.” This was no time to quit.
Ice crystals formed when we exhaled and hung in front of our faces, daring us to breathe in. We caught what we could of the thinning air, nodded to one another, and shuffled on.
Below us was a slope that slipped toward nothingness. The only difference between seeing and not seeing tomorrow was carelessness. Taking his sunglasses off, Kubi winked my way, tapped my ice axe and cocked his head toward the abyss.
An Armenian headwind roared up the mountain’s north side and over the summit, where it coupled with an easterly cousin from Iran before slamming us head-on as we climbed, Turkey at our backs.
“The breath of Ararat,” Kubi informed us.
Its rage wound through and over us. Then everything went quiet.
More steps. Boot toes into the snow, letting the crampons grip. Someone muttered our jitters: “Will we make it?”
It was a god-awful next ten minutes. I didn’t know whether to give up or throw up. White was everywhere and disorienting. Sun made a dawn sky, whisking mist and pallid snow into simple shades of gray. Any denotation of deviation or depth was a blind guess, at best.
Five feet below the pinnacle, Goran stopped and jammed his pole into the snow. He moved off the path and turned to Patricia. “You first.”
One by one, we followed Patricia’s lead over a sturdy brim of snow and mountain. Patricia, Charlie, Ian, Goran, and I stood as one atop Mount Ararat. Kubi joined us and made it a team.
“Think clearly,” he said, reminding us that we needed to preserve our strength for the descent. “The air is thin, the ice is treacherous.”
“Five minutes.” That came with what sounded like the last of his breath. Each of us moved away from the others to have our singular moment, to feel alone at what felt like the top of the world.
“Rick!” It was a grinning Ian, focusing his camera to catch the exhilaration—I had raised my ice axe and taken one of my gloves off to find my own camera. He handed his to me. “Please.” I took the photograph, capturing the mountaineer atop his seventh major summit.
Charlie reached out to shake my hand, but we hugged instead. “Summit,” he chuckled.
Goran found the canister that held a book to be signed by successful summiteers and scrawled his name, appending the date, on behalf of us all.
The wind swirled about us, now more efficient than vicious. It lifted snow at our feet and blew the clouds to the side so we could see the vista, but to my disappointment revealed no remnant moon. I pivoted to take in the expans
es of Iran, Turkey, and Armenia below us.
Goran greeted the Spanish climbers. “Welcome.”
The summit of Mount Ararat, where Charlie and Ian take in the view of Turkey, Iran, and Armenia.
* * *
Whether one approaches Mount Ararat from the north, the south, the east, or the west—the ascent is only half of the expedition’s challenge. One must also get off the mountain safely.
We shared the saddle of the summit with the Spaniards, until Kubi called us together with a warning that corralled our emotions. “We must go down now. Move slowly. Do not trip.”
We’d been at the top of Ararat for ten minutes. The Spanish made the first move to depart. We waited until they’d started down the steep incline and, watching their cautious maneuverings, noticed that two of their trekkers were tethered by rope, ice axes in hand. That sight of experienced caution tempered our own speed. The steps we had climbed on the ascent now had a slim ice glaze from the morning’s altering warmth and cold; our crampons still gripped, but we felt them catching when lifted. Kubi at one point walked sideways down the trail to avoid catching his crampons.
When we reached the base of that steep incline and the trail leveled out, we saw the Spaniards well ahead of us, unbuckling their snow prongs and stowing them in their packs. They lashed their ice axes on their packs and headed over the embankment and out of view.
For me, it wasn’t until our own crampons were off and packed that our accomplishment sank in. Only our poles were left out, to help us balance as we retraced our trail to Camp II. The clouds moved off the mountaintop and the sun took command of the higher skies.
Before moving down from the snowcap onto packed earth, Charlie said to us, “Take it in.” We turned once more in a stomping, irregular fashion and all faced the peak of Mount Ararat. Someone bowed, and we each followed in a humble salute to the forbidden mountain. Then we turned to face the rocky terrain below on our descent.
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