How to NOT Climb a Mountain

by David Safford

At 3:00, he was sweating through his moisture-wicking shirt.

By 4:00, he was lying on the floor of a friend’s tent, shivering uncontrollably with chattering teeth, his hands jammed between his thighs and his feet tucked in borrowed wool socks.

“You alright in there, Noah?” they would call.

And he would sputter, his lips flapping from the cold, “N-no….”

The leader for the trip, Zach, ducked close to him and said, “Think of a Scripture and just repeat it. Okay?”

He shivered and closed his eyes. “Okay.”

And he waited. He waited for the air to warm. For the wood to dry. For a fire to be built.

He could only wait, and after a few minutes, Zach returned and asked, “What verse do you have?”

“I couldn’t think of one,” Noah stammered. “I can only think… of one word.”

“What’s that?”

“Warm. I want to be warm.”

Zach was silent for a moment, then returned to the group that was huddled by the impromptu fire pit, a stack of dripping sticks.

“We’ve got to get him warm,” Zach said.

Noah closed his eyes, and waited.

~

They had hiked into the Sangre de Cristo range of Colorado carrying fifty-pound packs and high hopes of scaling two “14ers,” proud peaks that broke the 14,000-foot ceiling.

Just as he had done for his Tennessee hike the previous November, Noah had trained hard. He learned a difficult lesson from his knees and focused on stability and endurance, and thanks to his rigorous preparation, he found the hike to camp tiring but relatively painless. He had carried a bloated pack on his back and hips, stuffed with equipment and four days of food. Despite his Florida lungs and lack of Rocky Mountain experience, Noah intended to topple the two targeted 14ers: Humboldt and Crestone Peak.

Then came the “thunder hail.”

It piled atop their tents and melted on the warm ground, pooling under seams of canvas and worming its way through any gaps in tiny, icy droplets. Water rose from below and dripped from above, seeping into his sleeping bag and dampening every piece of synthetic or cotton clothing. When the storm finally passed, he unzipped his tent to find drifts of ice layering the camp.

Wasn’t it supposed to be July?

They tried to start a fire and cook dinner, only for a second and third wave of the storm to return and squelch the flames and turn the food cold in their bellies. With his tent practically destroyed, Noah crawled into Tyler’s and huddled there, shivered, and waited.

He lay there alone.

He felt a palpable fear that there would be no fire, no sleep, no relief from the stubborn cold. He wondered if he’d ever be warm again.

There was loneliness. While other tents had been ruined, and other climbers were cold, none seemed as miserable as he. Was he weak? Was his definition of “camping” neutered by modern comforts? Perhaps it was time to face the unfor-giving reality of what outdoor survival really meant.

After all, how could he really expect that climbing two 14ers in the Rocky Mountains would be an easy or plea-surable experience?

And then there was shame as the men discussed chang-ing the trip plans entirely. Instead of camping for three nights, some were wondering if the hike down could be achieved that night, or the very next morning. Most had de-cided that attempting Crestone was out of the question, and a few decided to not even attempt the first mountain, Humboldt, at all. Throughout the whole debate, Noah lay on his side, hands and feet struggling to keep their warmth, trembling in silence and wondering if this was somehow all his fault.

Zach brought him some hand-warmers.

“I forgot I brought these,” he said.

Noah took them and instantly smiled at their hot touch. Suddenly there was another source of heat, a place from which to draw energy.

“Hey Zach,” he said, as loudly as his quivering vocal cords could manage. “I thought of something… but it isn’t a verse.”

“What’s that?”

“God provides,” Noah said. “I just keep repeating it. God provides. God provides.”

Zach patted him on the shoulder. “Yes, He does.”

~

Then God provided the fire.

The three youngest climbers, spirited college kids with relentless energy, had shaved the wet bark off innumerable branches and nurtured a tender flame until it erupted into glorious life.

“Noah! We got the fire going!” they hollered.

He rose and stuck his bare feet into wet shoes, wobbling to the tiny sun his friends had built. Standing there, reaching out with his tingling hands, he wept at the provision of fire.

They took the wet things from each tent and held them around the fire in a beautiful semi-circle. Steam poured from Noah’s saturated sleeping bag and everyone laid their socks and gloves on the stones surrounding the fire. Someone passed a flask of whiskey. Everyone was laughing.

“Feel better?” someone asked.

Noah nodded. “Now I just need to climb that damned mountain.”

“You gonna try it?” Zach asked.

“I want to,” Noah said. “I didn’t come all the way out here just to freeze my ass off.”

And then, in the distance, they heard the soft rumble of more thunder.

They scrambled through the thickening dark to finish drying everything and figure out who had to double-bunk. Noah and Tyler crammed into a one-man tent, barely able to turn even a degree. The noises of the wilderness and soft rain kept their eyes open almost all night.

And the thin air, that humbler of so many aspiring climbers, kept sucking the wind from their hungry lungs and Noah found himself constantly bursting awake, gasping for oxygen.

All through the night, he noted with dread, he was thirsty. Dreadfully thirsty.

For the first sign of altitude sickness is thirst.

He awoke with a hangover from a party he did not attend.

Despite his throbbing skull, the scenery was stunningly picturesque, entirely different from the hell of the night before. The South Colony Lakes valley was an amphitheater of red and orange, the inspiration for the range’s name, Sangre de Cristo: The Blood of Christ. As Noah stood by the trickling stream and filled his bottle with filtered water, he paused to snap some pictures of the glowing spires of crimson rock.

They packed all necessary gear for the coming assault on Humboldt Peak. Noah shoveled oatmeal into his mouth, noting already how it displeased his stomach in a strange way, for he always loved a generous breakfast.

That, he grimly noted, was another sign of altitude sickness.

Out of the whole group of thirteen men, nine set out with the sole purpose of bagging a 14er in spite of the hail the mountain had thrown at them. They trekked up the valley where a series of three pools emptied into a quiet mountain river, fed by the snow piled on the rocky bones of the Crestone Needle. At the top of the valley, their route turned north, up a steep wall of grass and stone. The route zig-zagged along a series of lung-friendly switchbacks. As they soldiered onward, the eldest and most experienced climber, Dennis, announced, “Only 1,800 more vertical feet to go,” and so on, 100 feet at a time.

Every time Dennis made his announcement, Noah wanted to collapse. A mere ten vertical feet were bought with an infinite price in oxygen. He sucked at atmosphere that simply wasn’t there, leaning on his knees and sitting on the hillside.

As the morning wore on and their legs carried them up the diagonal paths of dirt and stone, they finally reached the top of the ridge, a sloping saddle of green grass revealing another valley on the northern side. A pool of water, unfathomably far away and down below, poured into a lake, the sound of the falls floating up to their ears. They sat and ate protein bars and beef jerky, and then Tyler pointed down the hillside. A pair of small, furry animals were playing about.

“Marmots,” he noted, and then began tossing crumbs of food their way. They gave a squeak, and cautiously accepted the gift.

“Only 1,200 more feet to go,” Dennis said.

Noah turned to behold the remaining path and felt the air flee from his lungs at the mere thought of what lie ahead.

He had believed, however foolishly, that attaining the ridge saddle would yield a gentle, sloping walk up a big hill of exposed dirt. That was what the internet had told him about Humboldt Peak, at least, in photographs of it taken from miles away.

What he hadn’t seen was that Humboldt wasn’t simply a dirt hill at all, but a pile of boulders, some the size of small cars, stacked 14,046 feet above sea level.

“It’s one mile to the summit,” Dennis added. “Let’s try to get there before noon.”

Noah stood and a sharp, piercing pain throbbed between his eyes. Half his water was gone. His protein bars and beef jerky tasted of plywood, and he felt sick.

“The altitude is really getting to me,” he said.

Zach came alongside him. “You good to keep going?”

Noah looked up again. The pyramid before them was mind-bogglingly tall and distant. The rising sun hovered above the invisible summit, a golden crown blinding them.

“I’m gonna try,” Noah said.

~

For the first quarter-mile, the path weaved through the rubble and debris of rock, peeking out from the tufty grass. But it rose steadily and soon the grass vanished into a labyrinth of rocks. The path was marked by cairns, and the youngest and strongest took the lead while the elders and weak-lunged fell behind.

Noah was one of those at the back.

The band of nine slowly stretched like a rubber band as the tarried upward, until those at the rear could not see or hear the leaders, and had to navigate the maze of boulders on their own.

“Only 800 vertical feet,” Dennis said.

Noah sat on a rock and breathed as if he had just sprinted. They could not have taken more than 100 steps since their last break, fifty feet below.

“My legs are fine,” he wheezed. “But my lungs… are terrible!”

They resumed and Tyler gave Noah one of his hiking sticks. The rocks were getting bigger, their jagged edges fraught with peril. One slip meant tumbling dozens of feet over the teeth of each jagged stone.

The route grew steeper.

“700 feet, guys,” Dennis proclaimed. “We’re practically there.”

“We’re not… even close,” Noah panted.

And he sat to rest.

So much stopping and resting gave them time to appreciate a sight that most humans would never behold. To the southwest, Crestone Needle and Peak towered like sky-scrapers, their formidable knuckles majestic with white snow and gray granite. The song of water still trickled into their ears from the northern valley, and marmots squeaked and played about, even at this altitude.

As they climbed higher, the cairns were blending in with every other rocky object in sight, disappearing entirely. The leaders hadn’t been seen or heard from in an hour. Noah winced at the headache and sipped from his Nalgene. It was nearly empty.

“Only 500 hundred feet,” Dennis said.

Noah took a deep breath and fought the urge to vomit. He lifted his legs and hoisted himself up the height of another boulder, crawling higher.

He marveled at where he was. Twelve hours prior he had been freezing to death in a tent. Then, after only two hours of fitful sleep, he was scrambling up the unforgiving ridge of Humboldt Peak.

How did all those stones get there, after all? Had the mountain top slowly broken apart after eons of rain and wind? Had God piled them in the heavens for safe-keeping? Were they the Minotaur, stationed at the peak’s gate, to prevent unworthy ones from attaining the summit?

“450 feet.”

The thirty-five degree slope of the mountain seemed to rise into a wall of densely layered rocks. He wobbled, leaping between two distant footholds, and clung to the cold stones with sweaty fingers. His head throbbed.

He looked up again, the blinding sun masking the true distance to the goal. He closed his eyes, and suddenly saw two beautiful faces in the dark of his eyelids.

Wife.

She was smiling.

Daughter.

Giggling, she shouted, “Daddy!”

“I promise,” he had said to them. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

His wife had held his cheek, looking into his eyes.

“You’d better not. Because we love you.”

Dennis paused, several boulders above him. “400 feet left.”

Noah threw his weight against a boulder and swallowed, his mouth fretfully dry, aware that little water remained for him to satisfy the raging thirst. He rested his hands on his knees, and felt the slicing pain of the worsening headache.

“Okay,” he said with a gasp.

“You okay?” Tyler called.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m done.”

“You’re done?”

Noah nodded.

“But we’re so close!”

“I know,” he said. “I know. This is the top for me. This is my summit. And I’m proud of that.”

And so Dennis and Tyler gave him some water before resuming their climb, and told him to take his time on the way down.

He watched them go, disappearing up the pyramid, and he sat and looked out upon the world from the perilous height and was suddenly a little less nauseated, and his head ached a little bit less.

The climb was over. He was keeping his promise. Stopping here, and turning around, was very, very smart.

“Thirteen-thousand, six-hundred and forty-six feet,” he whispered to himself. “I’m happy with that.”

Alone and feeling better with every step, Noah worked his way down the ridge. He passed other climbers with dogs and children who didn’t seem nearly so out-of-breath. He traversed the switch-backs into the South Colony Lakes valley, remembering the agonizing journey from that morn-ing. He returned to their camp, his tent still wet with yesterday’s hail, left out to dry by the friends who’d headed down to the trailhead some 2,000 vertical feet and four miles below. He’d be sure to buy them a beer to say thanks.

Noah opened a camp chair, sipped some freshly filtered water, and took a deep breath. He’d done it. He’d made it to the summit – his summit – and in the glow of the Colorado sun, smiled as the warmth soothed him like never before.

“Well,” he said to the wilderness, “God provides.”

Copyright © 2022, David Safford and NoahDavid Lein