The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  Scrambling is too often deemed an obligatory chore to be dealt with begrudgingly: a means to achieving more vertical, more complicated objectives. No longer. I praise scrambling as an end in itself. Part hiking, part jogging, part clambering, part cowering, part pulling jugs, part pulling shrubs, part dangling above the abyss, part chilling in wild-flower meadows, part badass, part goofball—it amounts, in sum, to a choose-your-own-adventure story, fluid and liberating.

  The typical Cro-Magnon fellow would, I suspect, enjoy spending a day in the hills with me, screwing around, romping wherever we fancy.

  Less than a year after the Scotland trip—having investigated the Camel’s Hump summit in Vermont, met with perverse fascination the Trap Dike’s crux corner in New York, and gotten giddily scared all through Huntington Ravine in New Hampshire—I headed west. According to my parents, the plan was an undergraduate degree in Colorado. According to their son, it was rugged country and visceral thrills.

  Enter my childhood pal Craig—his callused fingertips and stoic grit. The name derives from the Scottish Gaelic creag, meaning “rock,” and indeed he always has been a rock-tough dude, the ideal comrade for peak-bagging road trips. Each August, the Toyota Tercel filled to brimming with beer, mac and cheese, sunscreen, granola bars, scratched mountaineering helmets, a banjo, more beer, and our ever-intensifying sweat-stench, we crisscrossed the Mosquitoes, Indian Peaks, Sangre de Cristos, and Sawatch, seeking out the higher education most overpriced colleges fail to provide.

  The seeking went something like this: sleep in dirt, wake in dark, tape blistered heels by headlamp, chug instant coffee. Sending routes we would inevitably send boulders tumbling and, if only in the uncanny movie theater of imagination, send ourselves tumbling too. Nerves, concentration, fatigue, elation. Then the dazed descent and the delicious hoppy beverages we’d stashed in a creek’s cool eddy. Then the car, the winding road. Then the next massif, its flying buttresses lit briefly with peachy alpenglow. Then five hours of anxious dreams.

  But which massif, there being so many options in the skyrocketing Rockies? Integral to the selection process was Colorado Scrambles, authored by Dave Cooper, a transplanted Englishman (yet another nutty Brit). You wouldn’t think his slim volume could pose a fatal threat to a pair of healthy youths, but by the same reasoning you wouldn’t think it could give them life—give them crackling exuberant aliveness—which is, on numerous occasions, exactly what occurred.

  Take, for example, our excursion to Capitol Peak, a notorious fourteener near Carbondale, a gray terror I’d already attempted twice: stymied by graupel squalls, stymied by a friend who doodied his drawers. With Craig’s quiet confidence as the ace up my sleeve, I figured that finally it was going to happen.

  It did. The dicey contour around a 13,664-foot subsummit happened. The ridge thinning into a taut granite tightrope happened. The tilted grid of ball-bearing pebbles and rotten ladder-ledges happened. A hundred yards of slinking across jumbled blocks, each looser than the last, placed us at the proper tip-top where—ah—nothing happened besides vast distances and hearty laughter and gnawed cheddar cheese and (shouts to the Glaswegian) an immense unfiltered rollie traded back and forth.

  “You remember the deal with getting off of her,” Craig said an hour later, breaking our easy reverie, cinching tight his backpack.

  “Seventy percent of accidents, right?”

  “Yeah, thereabouts.”

  With that, he inched toward the intricate messiness neither of us was eager to reengage, gripped an oddly askew, microwave-sized chunk of mountain, swung his hips wide, and for a flashing second defied the laws of gravity. At least that’s how it appeared from the safety of my perch. In truth, it was the microwave plummeting, and Craig lagging behind, that made him magically hover. I watched my childhood pal palm the atmosphere, arrange himself catlike in swirling space, and—by the grace of the ineffable—land (also catlike) on the only meager shelf Capitol’s plunging north slope had to offer.

  Such encounters with pure physical reality stamp the scrambler, their power like a tattoo—and the ink doesn’t wash off. To the contrary, it seeps in and spreads out.

  The shelf was maybe eight feet down, maybe two thousand feet off the deck.

  Craig looked at me, shook his head, and smiled.

  Passion begets passion. Scrambling leads to more scrambling. Capitol becomes Pyramid, Ice Mountain, Quandary. Teewinot in the Tetons becomes Riegelhuth Minaret in the Sierra Nevada. King Lear Peak, lord of the Black Rock Desert, becomes a weeklong thicket, bears and biting midges, inspired cussing, and eventually the basaltic rubble of Vancouver Island’s Golden Hinde. One day I find myself older, returned to Colorado’s Elk Mountains, countless verts nipping at my heels, a thirty-foot face—ugly, mean—staring me in the face.

  Progression, growth, change.

  Oh, come now, it’s only a wee scramble.

  The voice is … mine?

  A decade out from my Scottish initiation, the method by which I hand-walk has taken a turn for the sketchy. Purple clouds sizzling with electricity. Been there. Knife-edge ridges that are katana-sharp and threaten to split the straddler straight along his perineum. Heck, those are scrambling—its essence, its basic nature. No, the turn of which I speak appears, at first glance, fairly benign. Even its name—small and smooth and round-sounding in the mouth—obscures the potential danger: a shattered femur, a survival crawl, a million stars piercing the night from which there will likely be no escape.

  “Solo,” that’s the word, the turn. Of late, I’ve been going solo.

  What I mean is solitudo, the Latin mix of “loneliness” and “wilderness.” What I mean is bonafide isolation, miles and miles of personal responsibility, of entrancing vigilance. What I mean is a bright-clear morning in July, three shots of espresso awakening the animal impulse to roam, to stitch earth and sky together with the thread of an idiosyncratic path.

  And not only do I routinely avoid companionship, but increasingly I avoid guidebooks, trip reports, topographic maps, tips from seasoned elders, all the various forms of beta that can point a wanderer in the correct direction, give him options, mitigate his outing’s hazardous unknowns. Insane, it might seem, to eyeball a jagged horizon from the valley floor, bushwhack to its base, eat a packet of M&M’s, slurp a melty snowbank for hydration, and then commit, uncertain whether the next half-mile goes at Class 4, goes at 5.4, or goes to waking nightmare: stuck, sans cell phone, no detailed itinerary posted on the kitchen table because, from the outset, moment-by-moment prompts provided by geology and weather have been the sole guide, the sole plan. Probably insane, yes. Haul him off to the padded cirque!

  A Sunday from last summer in the Elks exemplifies my burgeoning solitudo style. I’d been camping on the outskirts of Crested Butte, contemplating the monolithic red slab that forms the southwest aspect of 12,653-foot Avery Peak, hoping it would act as a kind of gateway to the convoluted network of crests and crowns farther east. Because I couldn’t foretell where the uplands would spit me out and didn’t want to be beholden to some pesky trailhead parking lot, I raised a thumb. Go light, as they say.

  One short hitch and one aspen grove later (vicious stinging nettles), I began kicking at a snow-choked ravine, pointy red shards in both fists should, god forbid, I slip and need to self-arrest. The mother of those shards was everywhere above me, then everywhere beneath me, then everywhere inside me—burning inside quadriceps and lungs, humming inside the deepest folds of my focused mammalian brain. Melted dry and not overly polished, the slab proved an easier scramble than anticipated, and by noon I was cranking a flattish ridge. Yonder: a collage of shark-jaws and chainsaw chains that went and went and went, all intimidation and opportunity.

  I paused, tied my shoes tighter, took a piss. I fidgeted, inspected my shoes to make sure they were tied, considered trying to pee again. I spun 360, spun 720, and, from that whirl of vistas, was launched.

  What words to use for the next six (or was it nine?) hours of orienteering, chas
ing options, backtracking, doubting, questing after secret sneaks and untried passages? How to describe the pillars I hugged and the ptarmigans I flushed and the quality of pulsing isolation, the beautiful strangeness of solitudo? Peering at a precipice, listening for a hollow hold, gluing digits to the tiniest details, lowering myself—I grew aware of an invisible line, a safety tether that was itself nothing more than strands of awareness (this pressure, this angle, this balance) braided together.

  Invisible line? On belay? Could it be, I wondered, what the big boys experience, the Honnolds and Pateys, the bold folks who have embraced the timeless scramble and elevated it to an art beyond belief? This attunement? This zone? This sense, fleeting and false, of being protected from the mountain by the mountain? Could this be the trusty Cro-Magnon genes scrambling, as they always have and always will, for survival?

  Step.

  Step again.

  Hello, sun-warmed stone. Respectful nod to you, mind-trembling exposure.

  At dusk, I pushed for the umpteenth time over a lofty knob, a lonely promontory. I pushed cautiously, eagerly. I pushed out of the past and into the future, foot following foot, hand following hand.

  Flying with Birds

  On a bright July evening in Crested Butte, Colorado, the town’s namesake landform towering three thousand feet overhead, two dudes—and “dudes” is without a doubt the correct appellation—parked their trucks between the local baseball field and a flat green meadow, which they referred to as “the LZ,” or landing zone. Bo Thomsen, a plumber in flip-flops and board shorts, ate a hotdog, then smoked a cigarette. Ben Eaton, a blacksmith with a greasy foam cap and gray-flecked sideburns, turned lazy circles, inspecting distant cumulus clouds. The duo possessed a combined thirty-eight years of paragliding experience. Over the past couple of months they had flown fifty times together, most recently that very morning.

  “Twice in a day is good,” Bo said. “Keeps me from drinking at night.”

  “It only looks dangerous,” Ben added. “I mean, until it gets dangerous. Then you’re gripped.”

  Paragliding’s elegance, its poet-writing-cursive-on-thin-air quality, should never be reduced to a mere equation, but here goes: body harness plus twenty-five-foot nylon “wing” plus wind rushing up a mountainside plus faith in that wind’s willingness to catch you with its unseen arms equals silky-smooth bliss unknown to common, featherless mortals. Some folks set records, staying aloft for hours, traveling hundreds of miles, and others compete in nauseating aerobatic competitions. Ben learned in the Swiss Alps, where “everyone does it.” Bo learned in the Rockies from a guy “who definitely should not have been teaching.” They described their personal style of paragliding to me as “flying with the birds.”

  Gear packed and the distant cumuli deemed benign, we piled into Ben’s truck and headed up Mt. Crested Butte, first on pavement, then on bumpy ski-resort maintenance roads. Bouncing along, I was told that “thermals pop off sun-warmed rocks,” that “they’re like invisible tornadoes,” that “hawks show us where to catch them,” that “it’s all about finding lift,” and that “you know you’ve reached sixteen thousand feet because the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks look like tiny bumps.” I also learned that Bo’s parents were hippies, that he was conceived in a teepee, and that his real name—“like, on my birth certificate”—is Bojangles. If these dudes were of the class Aves, I thought to myself, Ben would be a golden eagle, big and steady and mellow, and Bo would be a cliff swallow, slight and manic, utterly nonstop.

  Half a dozen steep switchbacks and two dozen dirty Bo jokes later, we parked on an exposed ridge at eleven thousand feet, the soon-to-be-setting sun washing countless mountains—one for every compass degree, it seemed—in buttery light. An ankle-breaking talus slope plunged toward conifers that could easily snag a poorly launched pilot, beyond which the itsy-bitsy village and its bordering LZ resembled scenery stolen from a model-train set. Plastic flagging tied to metal posts indicated that the wind was “not nuking,” but blowing at an easy, serviceable six or seven miles per hour.

  Ben climbed into the truck’s bed and tugged on Gore-Tex pants, a jacket, and leather boots. Bo lit another cigarette and commenced telling stories, the memories of bygone excitement animating his entire being, sending him into twirling, arms-wide reenactments. He reenacted crows in enormous flocks and Canada geese honking past at eye level. He reenacted red-tailed hawks playfully buffeting him and red-tailed hawks not so playfully attacking with their talons. He reenacted thunderstorms, rainbows, October’s trembling aspen slopes, elk in the lowlands craning their necks, bear cubs like black microspecks, white microspecks of snow geese caressing the stratosphere.

  “I think I’m a badass, but look where birds go,” he said. “Look how they move.”

  Ben glanced up from strapping on a kneepad. “Biomimicry, you know?”

  “Yeah, biomimicry. Fucking Batman, fucking Spiderman—the superheroes are wannabe animals. Birds are the masters, the original pilots.”

  For twenty minutes we discussed—we celebrated—the many life-forms that have evolved aerial locomotion, from soaring squirrels in New England to gliding snakes in Borneo to the millions of underappreciated insects helicoptering around porch lights near and far. “Regular people live in a 2-D world,” Bo said, slowing, making his face go flat. “They think they’re experiencing the mountain, biking or hiking or skiing on a trail, but that’s not the mountain. The mountain is much, much more. There’s swirling air, vultures coring up, energy flowing in ten directions at once.” He sprinted and swerved, stopping inches shy of the ridge’s edge. “When you’re flying it’s totally 3-D. It’s backward, forward, sideways … corkscrew higher, spiral lower … collapse the wing, aw shit … deep breath … pull through.”

  In his eccentric way, Bo was hitting on something thrilling and profound—that what gets called mountain actually swells inside the word until the seams burst and the real thing, the thing that is not a thing at all but rather a web of innumerable, unspeakable relationships, emerges in the mind. And then it bursts the mind’s seams too.

  Triggered perhaps by some subtle climatic cue only the initiated recognize as such, the bird men donned helmets, buckled themselves into harnesses, and prepared to launch. One moment Bo’s wing was spread on the ground, limp and useless and uninspiring, a wad of factory-sewn fabrics. The next moment he was flicking the glorious invention skyward, forming it into a crescent-shaped pocket, turning, jumping, contracting his knees to his chest, slicing off through space. This transition—to intense focus, to air hissing across nylon—was startling, and it left me tingling. Ben followed after Bo, the pair of them coasting back and forth before me, impossibly distant and yet right there, graceful and close.

  For a second, I stood jealous in my sneakers, the ancient dream transformed: to fly not like a bird, but like a paraglider!

  Then the second vanished. It was my job, I remembered, to shuttle the dang truck down that bumpy road.

  Favor the Mountain

  It’s an exceedingly white January afternoon on America’s sketchiest road—white flurries rushing the windshield and swirling in the mirrors, white ridges and cirques disappearing among torn white clouds. Heck, even the road is white, though it won’t remain so for long. Dack Klein is behind the wheel of his eighteen-ton Mack plow truck, laughing his big laugh, navigating yet another lethal curve with all the casual confidence of a man who’s done this some seven thousand times. Or maybe it’s more like eight thousand times.

  An equipment operator with the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), Klein has worked the fifteen miles of US Highway 550 that climb from Ouray to the top of 11,018-foot Red Mountain Pass since 2003. He has worked them at dawn and midnight, on Halloween and Easter and Cinco de Mayo. He has worked them in every imaginable type of blizzard—from the fierce to the downright savage, from the protracted to the neverending—and in blizzards that transcend the imagination’s paltry limits.

  Forty-two years old, with a black buz
z cut, a stout build, and a probably-should-have-died crash under his belt, Klein knows this stretch of pavement better than the backs of his own grease-smudged hands. Ouray’s four and a half drivers—two on the day shift, one on swing, one on graveyard, and a part-time backup for “when things fall apart”—maintain fewer miles of road than almost any of the state’s other two hundred CDOT patrols. Shifts normally last eight hours but will extend to twelve or eighteen when the weather insists. Weekends are more of a theoretical possibility than an enjoyed reality, monthlong runs of consecutive days to be expected. Between late September and early June, Klein hangs with his wife and three kids way less than he hangs with his Mack—“pushing.”

  Milepost 90, passing below an avalanche path named Ruby Walls: “You’ve got to appreciate the dangers when you’re pushing. Last winter we had a chunk of rock the size of a football field detach right here.”

  Milepost 87, entering Ironton Park, the road’s only flattish section: “There have been nights I could barely see past the wipers when I was pushing. It can take twenty minutes to manage this one nasty mile if it’s blowing.”

  Milepost 81, beneath the sensitive Blue Point: “The saying goes that Blue Point will run if you sneeze. Usually it’s a bank slip, but occasionally it’s a giant, and then you’ve got to do some serious pushing.”

  Milepost 80.28, at the summit: “Jackknifed eighteen-wheelers, four feet of fresh powder in eight hours—pushing on Red gets crazy. But that’s what makes it special.”

  The San Juan Mountains average 349 inches of snow annually, and much of it falls twice: first from the sky, then from the crests and headwalls where it tries, and fails, to cling. Seventy named avalanche paths intersect Highway 550 in the twenty-three miles linking Ouray and Silverton, the town on the south side of the pass that serves as headquarters for another CDOT patrol. Some of the starting zones span hundreds of acres, release two hundred thousand cubic yards of snow, and generate wind speeds in excess of two hundred miles per hour. The infamous East Riverside can dump fifty feet of concrete-thick debris on the centerline and has claimed the lives of three plow drivers—in 1970, 1978, and 1992—as well as a preacher and his two daughters in 1963, and two men and most of their mule team in 1883. Since 1935, when the initial attempts to keep the road open through winter were made, dozens of people have perished trying to get from point A to point B, though an exact number is impossible to tally.