Two Hundred and Ninety Miles, Then Straight Up

No guarantees

Dance around on top. That’s the mission statement. Two men, seventy-five pounds each, three hundred miles of Greyhound, ninety-seven switchbacks — in order to dance around on top. And a contingency plan that consists of dancing around somewhere else.

“Government problems” means the permit.

A few things that need explaining, because he doesn’t bother. A “Greydog” is a Greyhound bus. Zack Hurley is my best friend, and by 1994 we had already known each other most of our lives — we grew up together in Groveland, California, a small town in the Sierra foothills with Yosemite essentially in the backyard. By that summer he was studying photography in San Francisco and I had just finished a biology degree at UNR and was working at Harrah’s, waiting for graduate school to start in the fall.

Neither of us had a car. Neither of us had money. Both of us had a week.

And notice what he does with the permit problem. He doesn’t consider not going. He identifies that the plan has a hole in it, describes the hole accurately, and then makes the plan anyway. The whole trip runs on that principle, and I want to be careful not to call it stupidity, because it wasn’t. It was a specific kind of confidence that I no longer have and can’t quite reconstruct. We assumed the universe would work something out.

It usually did.

And then, having declared that the expedition holds no guarantees, he turns the page and writes out a schedule.

The Itinerarium

He wrote ITINERARIUM in capitals and then, immediately, put the English word in parentheses after it — as though he’d reached for something grander, enjoyed it, and then thought better of leaving his reader stranded.

“Wait like hungry dogs for a stand-by permit.”

“PLAN B, which can not be known at this time.” A contingency that is formally acknowledged, given a name, capitalized, and left entirely empty. He is twenty-four years old and he has invented the placeholder.

And then the last line. Stay with the journal and see what happened.

He’s talking to someone. Not to himself — to whoever is reading. On the seventeenth of June, three days before the bus, he addresses a future reader directly and tells them to keep going. I don’t think he had anyone specific in mind. I don’t think he expected it to be me, thirty-two years later, standing in a garage in Washington State holding the notebook he wrote it in.

But he left the instruction anyway. So I stayed with the journal.

Here’s what happened.

He was a day ahead on the permit and five hundred feet short on the base camp. Everything else landed on the day he said it would, four days before the bus left, written by someone with no reservation, no vehicle, no permit, and no Plan B.

I’ve spent thirty years doing logistics professionally and I’m not sure I’d have called it any closer.

Go simple, go easy, go Greyhound

That last paragraph arrives out of nowhere. He’s been writing about bus schedules for half a page, and then at twenty past nine at night he suddenly has a thought about the nature of currency, writes it down in the same block capitals he used for the departure times, and goes straight back to logistics.

That’s the notebook in miniature. Everything gets recorded at the same weight. A phone number, a fifty-dollar debt, a small crisis about the meaning of money.

He was also right to feel bad about the fifty dollars, and I’d forgotten entirely that I’d promised Zack a one-way ride and then couldn’t deliver. The guy who was going to drive us bailed for a party on a boat. Thirty-two years later I have no memory of who he was, and the boat has outlived him in the record.

There is the entire friendship in two sentences. I was worried about how we would physically get to the mountain. Zack was worried about whether we would have anything to drink once we were on it.

Both of us were right. Neither of us was worried about the correct thing, which turned out to be rum.

The shit I am going to bring

He then writes out a list of thirty-eight items, in two columns, under the heading MT. WHITNEY EXPEDITION INVENTORY. I’m not going to reproduce the whole thing, but I want to walk through a few entries, because the list is doing something the rest of the notebook isn’t.

Maps: the Mt. Whitney 15-minute quadrangle and the Inyo National Forest sheet. Two guidebooks. A compass. This is a man who intends to know where he is at all times, and who will accomplish that with paper.

Boots. Socks. Long underwear (1). Sweat pants (1). Shorts (1). Parka. Sweater (1). Gloves with liners. T-shirt (2). The quantities in parentheses are the tell. He is counting his clothing.

Then, further down: Walkman with external speakers — (choice tapes). A hacky sack. Sunglasses, listed as “for emergency.” An espresso maker. And two bota bags containing a litre and a half of rum.

The pack, as assembled, weighed somewhere around seventy-five pounds. The pack itself was rented — a blue Snow Leopard internal-frame that I didn’t own and couldn’t afford to own. Zack was carrying an Inca Trails pack with roughly thirty pounds of camera equipment in it: bodies, lenses, film. No previews, no LCD, no way to know whether you’d got the shot until weeks later. Every frame cost money, and he carried all of it up the mountain anyway, because that’s what getting the picture required.

I’ve watched people online agonize over whether to bring a second pair of socks on a three-day trip. We brought canned corn. Actual cans. Potatoes and carrots and a head of garlic, carried up to twelve thousand feet and carried back down again.

And an espresso maker. Which — I’m looking at the list again — I cannot confirm we ever used.

Blamo

They weren’t. The road rash is never mentioned again.

I like this entry because of what he’s afraid of, which is being disqualified before the start. Not the mountain. The forty-eight hours between here and the mountain. He has one week of vacation and a non-refundable bus ticket and he has just been reminded that the plan can be destroyed by something as ordinary as a bicycle tire.

Also: “Good thing I wasn’t drunk.” Hold onto that. He is going to be extremely drunk in about thirty hours, at eight thousand feet, on the night before a ten-and-a-half-hour climb.

Six openings left

Six openings left. We took two.

I need to sit with that for a second, because it is not possible anymore. Today the Mt. Whitney trail runs on a lottery, and people apply months out and get denied. In June of 1994 two guys with no reservation walked in off a Greyhound in the afternoon and were handed permits for the next morning, and the whole thing hinged on a phone call I’d made two days earlier where a ranger mentioned, offhand, that weekdays were less crowded than weekends.

That’s the trip. It shouldn’t have worked. It kept working.

PPE stands for People Pledged to Excellence. It was Harrah’s internal customer-relations training, and I had been through it as a casino employee in Reno, and what he is describing here — with total sincerity, as a transferable skill — is the deployment of corporate guest-service technique on strangers at a gas station in order to move two men and about a hundred and fifty pounds of gear fifteen miles uphill.

It worked on the first try. I have never been prouder of anything.

A second hand

The next two pages are not in my handwriting.

They’re in looping cursive, sloping downhill across the ruled lines, and they are the only pages in the notebook that aren’t in block capitals. I had completely forgotten they existed. When I found them in the garage I actually said something out loud.

Zack wrote that at eight thousand three hundred and sixty feet, at some point after we had drunk most of a litre and a half of rum and a twelve-pack of beer, the night before the hardest day either of us had ever had.

Everything I wrote in that notebook is about logistics. Bus times, elevations, permit rules, dollar amounts. Seven pages of a young man managing a problem. Zack picks up the same pen, in the same tent, and says the thing directly.

“I’m only the photographer.” He is carrying thirty pounds of camera gear up a mountain to document a trip that is not his idea, and he calls himself the photographer like it’s a demotion.

He was the reason there is anything to look at.

High elevations make for high hangovers

Six miles. Three thousand six hundred and forty feet of gain. Ten and a half hours elapsed, seven and a half of them moving, with seventy-five pounds each and a hangover acquired at altitude.

Two days later we would come back down past that same point in one hour.

The Austrian gets one sentence. His name was Ben, and the notebook never says so.

He was travelling alone through the western United States, looking at it, before starting at MIT. That was the whole plan — come over, see the West, then go be a graduate student in Massachusetts. He’d been around us since the Portal, which means he was there for the rum, and he had his own objectives to tend to, so he’d peel off and go do them and turn up again.

The thing I remember him saying, and which is not in the notebook at all, is that in Austria they don’t build switchbacks. You go straight up.

We told him about the ninety-seven switchbacks between Trail Camp and the crest and he seemed to regard them as an American indulgence.

There’s a small discrepancy here I’ll leave standing rather than fix. The notebook records meeting him on the way up, at Trail Camp, as though he appeared on the trail. My memory has him around earlier than that, back at the Portal. One of those is wrong and I genuinely don’t know which. The notebook was written the same week and I wasn’t, so the odds favour the notebook — but the notebook also failed to write down his name, so it isn’t infallible either.

Both versions go on the page. That’s what the notebook is for.

See you when we get back

That’s the last thing he writes on the day it happens.

Seven pages of buildup — the permit, the bus, the hitchhike, the gear, the hangover — and when the mountain finally arrives, the notebook goes quiet. He puts it in the tent and goes climbing.

“See you when we get back,” addressed to a spiral notebook. As though it were staying behind to wait.

Low and behold

“The whole world changed” is the notebook’s entire account of that, and it is the one place I’m going to add something, because he was right and he undersold it.

You come up ninety-seven switchbacks with your head down, and at Trail Crest the mountain simply stops having a west side. Behind you the whole east face drops away to the Owens Valley, five vertical miles of it, the way you came. In front of you the Sierra opens out — the Great Western Divide standing up across the middle distance, the crest running north and south, range behind range behind range. And straight below, on the west side, frozen lakes. Still iced over in late June. Guitar Lake and the Hitchcock Lakes, though I’d be lying if I said we knew the names at the time.

The Pacific Crest Trail runs through that country. We knew roughly nothing about it in 1994 — it was a line on a map and not yet a thing people organized their lives around. We looked down at it and then went to the summit.

That’s the moment, if you want the moment. Not the top. The crest, where you find out the mountain has been hiding half the world from you the entire climb.

Three decimal places.

He is standing on the highest point in the contiguous United States, and he records the elevation to the nearest thousandth of a foot, because that’s what it said on the monument and he was not going to round it.

That number, incidentally, is real. It’s the old NGVD 29 benchmark value, the survey datum in use at the time. The number you’ll see today is 14,505 feet, because the reference sea level was recalculated in 1988 and adopted later. The mountain didn’t grow. The ocean moved.

But he didn’t know any of that. He just read the marker and wrote down exactly what it said.

There’s a photograph of him doing it.

▢img/whitney-1994-summit.jpg

Black and white. He’s crouched down on the summit rock in a shell jacket with the hood pushed back, glasses on, head bent, reading the sign. The ice axe is planted upright in the frame beside him, a foot from his hand. Behind him the peaks run off toward the Great Western Divide with snow still in the gullies.

That’s the moment the number came from. The photograph and the three decimal places are the same instant — him reading, and Zack, standing a few feet away, deciding this was the picture.

Note where the axe is. Upright, planted, within arm’s reach.

It has about two hours left before it’s lying in the snow somewhere above the cirque with both of us already at the bottom.

A hundred and sixty frames. On film. That’s four or five rolls, shot on a summit, with no way to check a single one, carried back down and developed days later.

He carried a Walkman to fourteen and a half thousand feet and ran an FM propagation survey.

I’ve thought about this one more than anything else in the notebook. He is on the summit. The Great Western Divide is in front of him. And what he wants to know — what he is actually curious about, in that moment, standing on top of everything — is how far the radio reaches from up here.

It reaches Los Angeles.

That’s the biology degree, I think. Or whatever the thing is that the biology degree was a symptom of. He couldn’t stop taking measurements. Flowers, elevations, marmots, radio waves. Every environment was something to sample.

I love that he needed proof. Two hundred photographs weren’t enough; he wanted it in the federal record.

Let’s slide down the fucking hill

Read that again, slowly, and count the problems.

Nine hundred vertical metres of snow. On our backs. In under a minute. And the ice axe — the thing you use to stop, the only piece of equipment that makes a glissade survivable rather than merely fast — was not in either of our hands. It was somewhere up on the slope behind us.

So we climbed the whole thing back up. Found it. And then, because that was the only way down, did it again.

The second run was the one where we had the brake.

And I want to be honest about it, because the accounting above makes it sound like a near-miss and that isn’t how it felt. It was exhilarating. It was the most fun either of us had all week. Nine hundred metres of snow going past underneath you, that grinding rush of ice under your back and the axe biting in beside you — if there had been a way to fly back up to the crest and do it again, we would have run that thing all day. As it was, the only way back up was to climb it, and we climbed it, and then we got to do it a second time. We did not experience that as a punishment.

That’s the part that doesn’t survive into adulthood, I think. Not the risk tolerance — the appetite. The willingness to reclimb nine hundred metres of snow at the end of a summit day purely because the way down was fun.

For the record, since somebody is going to ask: no crampons. No traction devices of any kind. There was one ice axe between the two of us and for the first nine hundred metres of that descent it was lying in the snow somewhere above us.

It could have gone differently. Most of that week could have gone differently — the sketchy scene with the Deadheads in the county park, the cops circling, the rum at eight thousand feet the night before a ten-hour climb. None of it did. That’s not the same as none of it being able to.

I still have that ice axe.

Thirty-two years, several states, and a number of houses later, the thing we abandoned nine hundred metres up a snowfield and then reclimbed an entire cirque to recover is still in my possession. It outlasted the Greyhound route, the permit system, the film, and the notebook’s stay in the garage.

We went back up for it once. It seems to have decided that counted for something.

Sky pilot is Polemonium eximium. It’s a cushion plant of the Sierra crest and it essentially doesn’t occur below eleven thousand feet, which he knew, and wrote down, correctly, from memory, at the end of a day in which he had climbed a fourteener and sledded off it twice.

In 1994 he leaned over a cliff for them, and the whole reason he did it was to bring something back for someone who wasn’t there.

Karri was a girl at work. We all worked at Harrah’s forever — 1990 to 1996, in my case — and she’d said she wanted some nice wildflowers from the mountain, and so he got her some. That’s the entire transaction. Someone mentioned in passing that they’d like a flower, and he remembered it at eleven thousand feet with a hangover, and leaned out over a drop to collect it.

I have no idea what happened to her.

Nothing but zombie vision

“Negative utility.”

He’s out of food. He’s out of stove fuel. He’s been awake since half past two in the morning, sunburned and windburned at ten thousand feet, and the phrase he reaches for is an economics term. He is describing, precisely and correctly, the moment a trip stops paying for itself.

This is the low point of the notebook and it’s also the point where I recognize him most. Whatever is happening, however bad it gets, the response is to find the accurate word for it and write the word down.

They got up at 2:30 in the morning and made tea and discussed how bad the situation was. Two people at ten thousand feet in the dark, with nothing left to burn after that pot, having a meeting.

One hundred and ten degrees

Two men who have not slept, sunburned to the point of injury, sitting outside a store at eight thousand feet, watching camouflaged German prototype cars go past. It did not occur to him to find this strange. It goes in the notebook the same way the bus fare did.

And this is Ben again — the Austrian, off doing one of his own objectives, coming back at two o’clock to drive us down.

Which is the part I’d missed for thirty-two years, reading my own handwriting. The notebook calls him “the dude from Austria” on one page and “Ben” on another and never connects them, so for a while I thought we’d met two different people. We hadn’t. The solo traveller we picked up on the mountain was the one person in this entire story who had a car.

Two men who had spent four days solving the problem of not having a vehicle — the Greyhound, the fifty dollars, the hitchhike, the PPE skills at the gas station — got their last ride from a kid from Innsbruck who was on his way to graduate school in Cambridge.

We had come off a mountain. We had not slept in something like forty hours. We were burned red, filthy, drinking in a public park with Deadheads in transit to Las Vegas, in a small town in Inyo County, in a hundred and ten degree heat.

“We didn’t look too hot in the eyes of the law” is, I think, accurate.

I do believe a car would be a good idea.

Four days, three hundred miles each way, a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, a hitchhike, a glissade, and a hangover at altitude — and the lesson he extracts, in one flat sentence at the end, is that it might be worth getting a car.

He also wrote, in the middle of that paragraph, “where we got our picture taken (see photo album of this journey).”

An instruction. Left in a notebook, for a reader he did not have yet, pointing at a photograph in another box.

I have it. It’s a Polaroid, and it survived.

▢img/whitney-1994-jakes-saloon.jpg

Thirty-two years later I found the notebook in the garage, and the notebook told me where to look next.

Light and fast

THE END, in inch-high capitals, and then his signature with a flourish underneath it.

He had been home for a matter of hours. He was sunburned, sleep-deprived, and had just spent seven and a half hours on an overnight Greyhound. And the last thing he does before closing the notebook is book the next one — eleven days out, three more peaks, with a stated design philosophy.

“Light and fast.”

This is a man who carried canned corn and an espresso maker and a litre and a half of rum to twelve thousand feet, and who is now, on the same page, in the same pen, proposing minimalism as a way of life.

I don’t know whether the July Fourth trip happened. I hope it did. I suspect that if it did, the pack still weighed sixty pounds.

424 Pierce Street

The trip didn’t actually end at the Reno bus station.

Zack had a darkroom at the house on 424 Pierce Street in San Francisco, and some weeks after we got back, we developed and printed this stuff together. That’s where the photographs from that week became photographs. Until then they were latent — silver on plastic in a bag, physically real and completely invisible, carried down a mountain and across three hundred miles of Owens Valley in a pack.

I don’t think people quite remember this part. There was a gap. You did the thing, and then you waited, and then some time later in a room with the lights off you found out what you actually had. Two hundred frames on a mountain and not one of them existed yet.

The summit picture — the one of me crouched over the marker with the axe planted beside me — we made that print at Pierce Street. It didn’t come out of a camera looking like that. It came out of a tray.

Which reframes the whole photographic side of this for me. Zack didn’t carry thirty pounds of gear up Whitney to document our trip. He carried it up there to get material, and then he went home and did the actual work, and I got to stand in the dark and watch a week of my life come up out of the developer.

He’s still doing it. Different city, different mountains, same discipline.

We went back

We climbed Whitney again a few years later.

I want to put that up front, because it changes what the notebook is. Reading it cold, you’d think you were reading about a stunt — two broke young men with no car and no permit, pulling off something ambitious once, by luck and nerve, and then dining out on it forever.

But we went back. And we went back exactly the same way: no planning, no reservations, no particular sense that any of this needed to be arranged in advance. It worked again. We got a ride down from Zack’s boss at the time. We went up that mountain considerably faster than we had in 1994 and it was no less epic for it. There was a night in Bridgeport at Rhino’s, and we camped at the hot springs — the same hot springs from the other stories, the ones that turn up in the Groveland material and the eastern Sierra material and everywhere else.

It all comes around. That’s the thing about writing these down in one place. You start to notice that it’s the same handful of roads and the same handful of people, and that you’ve been circling the same country your whole life.

Zack went back to San Francisco after that week in 1994, and kept going. He’s in Vancouver, British Columbia now, which has all the mountains a person could reasonably need. He still takes photographs. I assume there’s a portfolio somewhere that ought to be seen — though that’s his call and not mine. He’s the artist.

We’ve had a lot of adventures since. Some of them are going to end up written down like this one. There is, for instance, an evening in Midtown that turned into a serious and I would say rigorous debate about the merits of R5-D4, which is a story for another day and another notebook.

We see each other. Not nearly often enough.

The last mountain we went at together was Victoria Peak, in North Vancouver, up above Grouse. We didn’t get it. Weather, and — of course — time. Time is the one that gets you now. In 1994 the constraint was money and we had all the time in the world; these days it’s precisely the other way around, and nobody warns you about the swap.

Next time we go light and fast on that one.

Here’s what I actually think this notebook is about, and it isn’t Mt. Whitney.

There is a window in a life, and it’s narrow, and you don’t notice it while you’re inside it. It’s the stretch where your oldest friend can still disappear with you for a week on nine days’ notice. Where three hundred miles on a Greyhound is a reasonable answer to a transportation problem, because it’s the answer you can afford. Where hitchhiking is a plan and not a last resort. Where seventy-five pounds sounds ambitious rather than medically inadvisable. Where the largest logistical risk you’re carrying is whether the batteries will hold out until camp.

You think it’s going to be like that indefinitely. It isn’t. Zack was already building a life in San Francisco and I was about to start graduate school, and the window was closing while we were standing on top of the mountain running a radio survey, and neither of us had the faintest idea.

That’s why the notebook matters, and it’s why I’m not going to fix his spelling. Everything in it was written by someone who didn’t know how the story came out. He didn’t know whether he’d get the permit when he wrote about the permit. He didn’t know whether he’d reach the summit when he wrote “see you when we get back.” That’s a thing you can only have once, per trip, per life, and it cannot be recovered by remembering — only by finding the actual paper.

And here’s the part I didn’t expect. On the last page of that notebook, having just carried canned corn and an espresso maker and a litre and a half of rum up a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, he announces that the theme of every future expedition will be light and fast.

Thirty-two years later, on a different mountain, in a different country, with the same friend — that is still the plan. We still haven’t done it. We’re still going to.

On the seventeenth of June 1994, before any of it had happened, he wrote: stay with the journal and see what happened.

I did. It took me thirty-two years to get around to it, and it was in the garage the whole time — between a Nintendo and some coffee makers, in a box I opened looking for something else entirely.

There’s more in there. I’ve barely started.

The notebook. The Polaroid from Jake’s. A print made at Pierce Street in a room with the lights off. And the ice axe, which we went back up a cirque for and which is still, somehow, mine.