Year of the Cow (11 page)

I dip the intake end of Zac's pump into the stream, and Rich slips the output end into his bottle. I begin to pump, actively resisting an urge to check my phone. Little by little, water begins to trickle out into the bottle, passing through a series of antimicrobial filters that should clear out any harmful bacteria that could make us sick. Afterward, a few drops of a water treatment solution directly into the bottle should knock out any bugs the filters miss.

As I'm pumping, a lone figure stalks toward us on the other side of the stream. He sports a bandanna and full beard that would be the pride of Sturgis. But he's also wearing a broad-brimmed hat to protect against the sun. It's the hat that gives away his occupation: park ranger.

“Gentlemen,” he greets us. Without another word, he walks a few feet downstream of our pump site and dunks his Nalgene bottle into the water, filling it instantly. He stands and turns back toward his tent.

“Aren't you worried about disease?” Rich asks.

The ranger shoots Rich a look like Santa shoots to children in movies who ask why their parents don't believe. “Nah. I'm not worried. Not here.” Then he continues toward his tent.

Rich and I exchange a look. “Good enough for me,” I offer.

“Yep,” Rich, the doctor who actually knows something about gut-exploding bacteria, says. We drop the pump and fill our bottles directly.

Bottles filled, we head back to camp. I take a swig of stream water from my bottle. It is the coldest, clearest water I've ever tasted. “Wow,” is all I can say.

I stand silently for a moment, chilled from the stream water and the wind whipping by me. It's very quiet here. The only noise is that which we make ourselves. I'm tired but content, exhaustion momentarily dulling my urge for stimuli. Still standing, I close my eyes and revel in the silence and the wind.

Darkness falls at elevation long before it reaches the town of Lone Pine, visible far away in the valley below. Natalie retreats to her tent, but the rest of us shelter under the windbreak as night falls all around us. Above, there are more stars than I've ever seen.

Uriah stares upward, resting his head on a rock.

I point. “The stars are brighter because they're closer here.”

He looks at me, unsure if I'm serious. I am not. He laughs.

The four of us eat and chat as night spreads from our plateau into the valley below us. Up here, eating is a sacred act. Not only are we hungry on a physical level, but I'm acutely aware that I'll need every calorie I can get. Those calories are the difference between summiting and failing. It's like carbo-loading before a big race. This food is fuel.

But here, perhaps more than at sea level, it's also an event. Really, it's the only event we have. This little ceremony, this small moment in the dark, huddled against a rock in the wind, where our only obligations are to eat and chat. No pack to carry. No hill to climb. Just conversation and reflection. And maybe a joke or two.

After dinner, Rich calls it a night. Natalie still isn't feeling well. She's spent the entire evening in her tent, so he retreats to his tent with our best wishes.

I'm beat. And I'm not alone. With limited entertainment options, night falls hard. Zac and Uriah are ready for bed as well. And it's all of eight o'clock.

“You want to crash over by us, man?” Zac asks me. “You can tuck your bivy up into the vestibule of the tent and get some shelter from the wind.”

“Nah, that's okay. I have my sweet rock shelter all prepped. I should be good.”

I bid my friends well and fight the wind back to my bivy sack under the enormous house-sized boulder. I crawl in and leave the top open, better to watch the slow migration of the stars across the sky.

Except I can't. I'm under a huge, house-sized rock.

That's okay. I need sleep anyway. I can already tell I'm going to be sore tomorrow. I close my eyes and shove the fleece I've been wearing into a makeshift pillow.

But I can't relax. That rock's awfully big. It's not going anywhere, right?

My eyes blink open. I look. The rock is being supported by two boulders that would be absolutely enormous if they weren't being dwarfed by this rock the size of a midrange duplex.

I peer at these rocks through the darkness, looking for scrape marks or any sign that the rock might have slid recently. I can't see very well, so I scramble out of my bivy to look. Nah. I don't think so. This rock's probably sat like this for a hundred years. It certainly isn't going to slip off its perch now and crush me like an overripe grape.

I slip back into my bivy sack. This is stupid. I'm being crazy. Time to sleep.

I pointedly close my eyes. I take a deep, relaxing breath.

Eyes closed, I can still feel the cool of the rock above me. Its presence—leaching heat out of the air. Radiating cold.

That's stupid. That isn't how thermodynamics work.

Another relaxing breath.

Stillness.

I do wonder if this place is seismically active …

No.

No? These mountains have to come from somewhere …

I am sure the High Sierras will not experience a freak earthquake tonight and slam a thousand-ton minimountain of granite death onto my unconscious body. That isn't going to happen. Sleep. Now.

Long, slow, deep breath.

Lotta big boulders down in the valley …

No.

You willing to bet your life on it?

I lie there for a long, pensive moment. I have a life ahead of me I'd rather not miss out on. And if Summer found out I died from falling asleep under a big rock, she'd kill me.

Dammit. My eyes blink open.

Forty seconds later, I am trudging back to Zac and Uriah's tent, my pack on one shoulder and my bivy draped across the other.

Zac hears me coming and unzips the tent flap. “Hey, Jared. You okay?”

“Make room in the vestibule.”

*   *   *

The sun rises in an incredible wash of pink and rose reflected off the high granite cliffs all around us. I stretch. As predicted, I'm sore. But in a good way. I'm sore like I did something, rather than being sore like I didn't.

Zac's cooking like he's expecting in-laws. Bacon. Fresh pancakes. Peanut butter. Eggs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a fruit platter and a tasteful muffin basket around here somewhere.

Uriah pours me a cup of coffee. Natalie and Rich are up and about. She's considerably less green than the night before. “How you feeling, Nat?”

“Better, thanks.”

“Make sure you eat first,” Zac says, dishing a fresh pancake into a bowl. “Today's gonna be a long day.”

I survey my own bowl of breakfast joy. It'd be a feast at any elevation. I nosh happily, my only lament that I have to cut/scoop my bounty with a spork.

Then Uriah earns his genius badge for the day. He smears a pancake with peanut butter, drops eggs and bacon on top along with a little maple syrup, and then he rolls the whole assembly up like a taco. “I call it the McGriddle.”

In a heartbeat, we imitate him. “Yes,” Rich says emphatically. “This. Yes.”

“Uriah, I want to have your genius babies.”

“Well-fed genius babies,” Zac notes.

“This is the single greatest food assemblage ever devised by the mind of man.”

Zac roots around in the bear canisters that protect our food stores from hungry ursines. “We need more pancakes.”

We cook through our breakfast stores, partly from hunger, partly so we don't have to carry them, and partly because we're enjoying ourselves. We will summit with daypacks, leaving the bulk of our gear here at camp. We laugh and joke well into the morning. By the time we turn our faces toward the summit, it's 11:00 a.m.

Buoyed by rest and ample breakfasting, we set out. The weather is some sort of platonic ideal of sunny. We move quickly, but through ever-increasing dustings of white.

Then finally, as we crest a cliff, a broad plateau stretches out in front of us leading to the very foot of Mount Whitney itself. In the distance, a pale gray-blue ring peeks out from beneath a field of white, denoting the edge of the aptly named Iceberg Lake.

And all around us—snow.

As we hike the mile or so to the frozen lake, my trepidation grows. We aren't geared for this. The snow will only get worse as we go higher. And the last five hundred vertical feet before the summit is a borderline-technical climb straight up, over icy rocks, with a twenty-five-hundred-foot drop immediately behind us.

Zac points at the mountain. “Climbers. Coming down.”

I don't see anyone. But then, after scanning for a long moment, I notice several black specks barely visible against the white of the snow. They're tiny.

And they're coming down fast. “They're glissading,” Uriah notes. As I watch, they slide down the mountain on their asses, using their ice axe to slow their speed.

“That is awesome,” Natalie says.

Right about now I wish I had an ice axe. And waterproof pants.

As they hike toward us, the specks resolve into people. One of them is the ranger we chatted with the night before, at the stream. He waves and breaks into a broad grin.

I whip out my bag of jerky. We've eaten maybe 40 percent of it. I offer pieces to the crew.

Rich asks the ranger about the ascent, noting that though we did rent crampons at the last minute, we don't have ice axes. We also have only limited water-resistant gear. Can we make it up?

“Maybe,” he replies. Earlier in the day it would have been easier. But the midday sun softens the snow and melts the ice. Makes surfaces slicker than they would be first thing. The longer we wait, the more treacherous the climb. Our leisurely breakfast may have cost us the summit.

As he talks, I extend my bag to the ranger. “Beef jerky?” I offer.

The ranger smiles. “That's kind of you.” He pulls a stick out of the bag and takes a bite. “Wow. You did a nice job with this. What'd you use?”

“Top round.”

He nods. “Good choice for jerky. I used to be a meat cutter. I love top round.”

“Please, have some more. We have plenty.”

The ranger smiles again. I get the feeling he isn't used to hikers offering him food from their stores—he's the guy who checks for their permits and enforces the rules. Up here, you have only what you can carry. And you can't carry much. You can replenish water on the mountain but not food. Suddenly, I'm struck by how valuable this jerky is. But from the look on the ranger's face, it's something he already knows.

The ranger takes another stick of jerky. “Thank you,” he says simply. He looks up at the mountain, then back to us. “You might be able to make summit, if you hurry. Ice axes would be more valuable than your crampons at this point. You have trekking poles, though, so that's something.

“But if you're gonna go, go now.”

Five minutes later, four of us are hiking as fast as our wobbly post-McGriddle bodies can take us, heading for the tall couloir the ranger came down. Natalie elected to stay at Iceberg Lake and take photographs rather than taunt her recently eradicated altitude sickness with a summit attempt. There's a calm wisdom in her restraint and her ability to listen to her body. To come all this way and not feel the temptation of the summit is something I'm not sure I could do. She may be a Jedi. I'm impressed.

The couloir is a tall seam in the side of the mountain, gray ordinarily, but now solid white with snow. As we approach, the seam grows, looming impossibly large against the eye-searing cerulean of the sky. Distances are tricky to judge here. The mountain was farther away than we thought.

We move from rock to rock as we approach the mountain, like frogs on granite lily pads in a snow-white pond. As the angle of ascent increases, our lily pads fall away. In moments, we are hiking straight up the couloir at a forty-five-degree incline, each of us stepping into the footprints of the person in front of us lest we sink too deeply into the snow. Without waterproof gear, I'm getting soaked.

Rich leads, with Zac and me following ten feet or so back. Uriah takes up the rear, burdened with an extra twenty pounds of climbing rope. He's probably the strongest climber, but he's slowed by the extra weight.

On a whim, I extend my trekking pole to its full four-foot length and jam it into one of Zac's footprints. The pole disappears. “How deep you think the snow is?”

“Twenty feet, minimum,” Zac calls over his shoulder. “At least that's what my research said.”

We keep moving up. Once or twice, I accidentally punch through the compressed snow in Zac's footprint, sinking to my hip without touching any solid ground. Ahead, Rich is increasing his distance from us, while Uriah's falling behind.

I stop to look around. The view is breathtaking. Here, the world is three colors. Blinding white snow, pale gray granite—and above, an impossibly bright blue sky.

This is the steepest ascent we've yet faced, and between the angle and the snow our pace is slow. I check my watch. It's a little after two thirty, but the sun is already dipping low toward the ridgeline. Yesterday, it was dark at six. And our plan—the plan for which we are geared and provisioned—is to hike all the way back down the mountain to Whitney Portal before dark.

It dawns on me: We aren't going to make it.

Zac's the only one in earshot, and he hasn't spoken in a while. That's unusual. “What's on your brain, Z.?”

“I think we have a long way to go.”

“Yeah. I don't think we're gonna summit.”

“Doesn't look like it.”

I pause. “We should stop climbing. We're just making our return longer. We have to get all the way back to the portal today, and I don't want to be trapped trying to negotiate the ledges in the dark.”

“Agreed.”

About this time, Uriah catches up to us. Either he heard us talking or, more likely, his thought process was already two steps ahead. “We need to turn around.”