Closure

By

Ray Purcell

It was a quintessential Eastern Sierra summers day. The Owens Valley seared like tri-tip on the grill of a Santa Maria Bar-B-Q. No sane person walks barefoot there. Shoes are oven mitts. But at 12,000-feet, on the Eastern Scarp of the Sierra, winds were gusting to 30-knots. Powered by the great atmospheric machine, air is pulled and jerked over the crest of the Sierra from the Central Valley into the Great Basin.

In the dry less dense atmosphere of altitude temperatures are ordinarily cooler, 5 to 10 degrees per thousand feet- give or take. Wind chill makes it even colder. Deceptively delicate flowers hunker down in the lee of a rock or a depression in the sand no larger than a cereal bowl. Above timberline the environment is harsh and flowers seem like colonists to The Red Planet, keeping their life support tenuously about them, sheltered from the cold, desiccating winds, and projectiles of sand.

Seasonally the transients arrive, the backpackers, skiers, peak baggers, and climbers. The peaks and couloirs are indifferent to these carpetbaggers who, deceitful in their banality, surreptitiously steal a powder run, an ice runnel, a summit, and then leave with their “goal”- the all-encompassing, all consuming “goal”.

Among backcountry travelers there is a trail sociability, etiquette for passing encounters. “Where ya going (What‘s yer GOAL?)?” “What have you done (What‘s yer GOAL)?” Like the ulterior motive of singles-bar small talk, each passer by is pimping for a score, one mentally feeling the other up. Have you done what I want to do? Are you going to do something that’s on my list? What do you know that I don’t? Then the courtly closure. “Well, safe travel.” “Good luck with that.”

Some passers by are slicker than others are, but in the end you’ve either gleaned a treasured secret, key data, approach-modifying bit of “beta”, or you’ve lost nothing for trying. Other passers by, these are the worst ones, have a theology about adventure. They're loath to sin against the dogma of adventure, or deflower the purity of the faith buy sullying the Tabula Rasa of your experience (GOAL). They want to save you from yourself- help you keep your virginity so to speak. Like high country missionaries, wilderness proselytizers, these zealots advocate finding your own way to the 7th heaven, nirvana, or the summit of North Palisade. But their own vanity is usually given away by a haughty little smirk that belies that they have been there and you haven't.

But, I digress. No summit, or “goal”, is ever guaranteed. No matter how straight forward the approach, simple the route finding, or easy the purported grade. The simplest, most benign, and there by the most damnable circumstances can thwart your efforts and necessitate your walking away from the “goal”. It’s utterly maddening. Besides, there must be some physiological threshold below which, after having walked away from a summit under such circumstances, makes moving on to another “goal“ impossible. Some balance of neurotransmitters that won’t restore normal thinking until your physical presence is on that certain summit.

Of course it’s not enough to exist in a blissful state of arrested development. No, this is a psychopathology of torment. A Harpy that sublets your right shoulder and shrieks relentlessly into your ear “YOU DIDN'T SUMMIT, YOU DIDN’T SUMMIT,....and it was an easy one too!” Salvation and peace, sanity can only be regained by one thing, that summit.

For me Mt. Tyndall was just that summit. Due to good camp company, the lethargy of a warm Sunrise, and strong coffee, we got off to a late-ish, “Sierra” type start from Anvil Camp. It was late May and there had been several late spring snows that softened early in the day and slowed our approach. We were about 800-vertical feet from the summit on the Class 2 North Ridge Route when not entirely unexpected weather began to brew so we prudently and sensibly decided to retreat. Passers by would latter report that while they were on the summit of Tyndall they had seen the same storm overtake Mt. Whitney to the South and which struck its summit with a Medusa's Head of lightening.

On the trip back to Anvil Camp I hiked through post-hole hell in soft snow, and despite meticulous water proofing my boots were water logged, sodden, veritable buckets. By the time we got back I didn’t care if I never went over Shepherd’s Pass again. Until...until the next day when two of our party returned from an excellent summit adventure and, to make matters worse, passers by raved about the marvelous 3rd Class route on the North Rib of Mt. Tyndall. The way that they described it, by comparison the Class 2 route up the North Ridge was a far less direct log roll of loose boulders. I tried to be Zen about it but it was no use the Harpy had set up shop.

Before I even got back to the car I had concocted a plan for my comeuppance against that mountain, even the score. Mentally, I stood shaking my fist at the unfairness of it all. My wormy thinking convinced me that there was no point in even wasting unnecessary time on such a peak, let alone hike back encumbered by a backpack. Why if I started at 1 AM on a night with a full Moon I could dispatch this menial mountain and be home soaking in the spa, and sipping a gin and tonic that evening!

According to the National Naval Observatory the Moon would be nearly full July the 11th. The date was appointed, inked. I’d just drive up to the trailhead after work, get a few hours sleep and take off at 1 or 2 AM. Easy!

That Friday I was chomping at the bit for the day to end, tedious toil taunted me by dragging on interminably. With the last task complete I fled. A stop at Arby’s for a large mocha shake and a Big Montana Roast Beef Sandwich and I was off for the East Side. At the Symes Creek trailhead I watched the Sunset spread a shadow across the width of the Owens Valley until it draped the Inyo Mountains. I dropped off to sleep with a warm breeze caressing my skin. My alarm went off at 1 AM. I hurriedly dressed and shouldered a daypack filled only with food, water, and spare clothes. I felt light as I started up the trial in the unnatural white light of my headlamp. It was still warm but nothing compared to the 106-degree daytime heat.

Compared to the same trail laden under a full backpack I felt like I was floating. Hiking at night is disorienting because it’s difficult not to confine all of your awareness and attention to the small area illuminate by the headlamp. It occurred to me that it was inky dark and I wonder where the full Moon was. As I gained the ridge that divides Symes and Williamson Creeks I found the Moon and realized that I had neglected to check for the time of Moonrise and set. The moon appeared surreal as it rolled across the sky just above the summit of Mt. Williamson. So close to the horizon the moon looked down on me like a large jaundiced eye until it set over the horizon.

It only took three hours of comfortable hiking to get to Anvil Camp. At 5 AM there were only clues of the coming dawn. A tarry black sky yielded to indigo, and then the burnt umber the precedes the sun. In the East the Inyo Mountains looked like the black horizon that borders the hemisphere of a planetarium. I quietly passed the tents of hikers encamped and presumable still sleeping. No “alpine starts” today. As I stopped to top off my water bag from a cascade of snow melt, Shepherd Pass and the surrounding granite cirque had turned Persimmon from the rising Sun. Morning light is rare and ephemeral, a reward to the nocturnal.

The pass was still in shade and I was grateful to layer on my coat. It’s easy to get hot laboring up the steep pass even when the Sun is low and the morning cool. Only a little tongue of snow remained from the previous winter and it was no barrier to a speedy ascent. A cold wind began to spill over the face of the pass from the plateau above, a foreshadowing of blustery conditions.

As I walked over the lip of the pass, Mt. Tyndall lay before me dressed in the morning Sun. Before the Peak there is a small lake. On the lake’s West Side there is a thick snowfield with slabs of ice that were calving into the water like slices of warm Monterey Jack sliced away from the brick. On the near side of the lake was a scattering of tents. The occupants milled about briskly, bundled in pile against the cold morning. Some busily shouldered packs and heading out for the day’s adventure. As they gained the rise that separates the Tyndal Plateau from Williamson Bowl the line of hikers looked like supplicants trundling off toward a holy shrine.

I followed the procession, crossing Tyndal Creek over a mosaic of stones each remarkably flat in the way of a Japanese Garden, the waters abstractly reflecting the folded and warped images of the surrounding mountains and sky. Already above 12,000-feet and with just 2000 more to go I feel sluggish in the thin air, but no other malaise from the altitude, especially given that I‘ve come directly from 400-feet above-sea-level. I follow the trail of pilgrims up a moraine while trying to avoid stepping on some bright yellow Compositacae that were turning their blossoms toward the Sun.

As I walked along I regarded the North Rib of Mt. Tyndall. The rib is really just a band of granite slab that buttresses subtly against the flank of the peak. The line of ascent is clear, jumblely with blocky boulders toward the bottom third but cleaner toward the top. At the top of the rib the route clearly intersects a notch that allows passage onto the summit ridge.

Shambling over eons of rock fall that’s sloughed off of the peak and that lies like a shield at it’s base, the route soon transitions into a scrambling climb, and then a low angle highly featured slab with no real exposure. As I climb I intently listen for a warning shot, or worse, a full cannonade of rock fall from the slope above. The higher I ascended the less necessary I found it to be wary of placing a foot on a loose stone- lest I surf back to the bottom on a slab of granite. I’d pause occasionally at one of the many comfortable stances to take in the expanding panorama. The harsh treeless xeric landscape that is the High Sierra is otherworldly but improbably punctuated by lakes.

Diamond Mesa spreads out to the North, while Williamson Bowl opens South and below me. In the bowl lakes are terraced up the drainage where epochal glaciations have scooped out their basins on a scouring descent. Above the highest lake in the bowl, the one that is to the most Southwest, rises the steep scree slope that leads to the often-elusive Class 3 gully. The same gully that is key to attaining Mt. Williamson’s summit ridge by the Western Route. From my perspective on the flank of Mt. Tyndall the actual 3rd Class chimney moves at the top of this gully is visible, and from this vantage the chimney appears dark and improbable.

As I near the top of the rib a party of three poked their heads through the notch. As they descended they paused, and in the tradition of wilderness passers by we talked. They were from Ridgecrest and we knew common names of the members of the China Lake Mountain Rescue Group. They had climbed Williamson the day before and they were happy to have climbed the peak because of its place in alpine heritage. But to the man they volunteered that they would never repeat it because of the brutal slog up the scree slope at the base of the route. I was oddly happy when their report reversed a relative amnesia, clearly posttraumatic, that I’ve experienced since having done the same route in 1985.

Then, surprisingly, we transcended the usual shallow passers by chit-chat and began a debate on a subject now topical in the climbing literature; whether climbing is an obsession, a disease, or a vice. In the end there was an amiable consensus; that none applied, and that climbing is an honorable lifestyle from which obsession, disease, and vice merely distract. After adjourning our, pardon the pun, summit on the nature of climbing, I continued through the notch in Mt. Tyndall’s summit ridge and was immediately buffeted by 30-knot winds.

I was bumped and blown toward the summit, cautious not to climb to close to the precipice of the East Face lest I become a kite. Once at the summit I hunkered down in the relative shelter of a boulder took some pictures with the self-timer on the camera and signed the Sierra Club Summit Register. The register case contained the usual accumulation of broken pens, dull pencils, and hodge-podge of notepaper. The last “official” summit register hadn’t been replaced since 2001. After a moment I settled back and took in a vista that was expansive. I could imagine how Clarence King must have felt on his first ascent of this peak in 1864, when he and Richard Cotter arduously scaled what he hoped to be the tallest peak in the range only to see what he was to name Mt. Whitney still further to the South.

I loitered about basking in the shear volume of space the surrounded me. Having a tidy penchant for round numbers I arbitrarily set 10 AM as my return time. At the appointed hour I turned and retraced my steps, stopping only at a rock berm wind shelter near Shepherd Pass to have my traditional alpine lunch of sardines in mustard sauce on Rye Krisp.

On the final switchbacks only a few miles from the trailhead I gained on a young man. Even from behind he appeared to trudge more than could be explained by a heavy backpack and a hot day. Catching up he was in fact glum, dejected. “Where ya been (what was yer GOAL)?” I asked, perhaps too cheerily in retrospect. He shared that he had just come back from Mt. Tyndal and hadn’t summited. Like a good bartender I quietly listened as he told me how he had climbed the loose bouldery North Ridge Route. He had made it to a spot where the West and North Ridges meet but said that he couldn’t remember how the book had said to pass the gendarme. “Maybe I just got altitude dumb.” he said. “I just couldn’t remember.” he followed somewhat vacantly. In the ensuing silence I notice it, sitting with its claws buried in his right shoulder, it was my Harpy.

I returned to the car after 14-hours. None the worse for wear other than my feet feeling like they had been beaten with a 2X4 during a savage interrogation. I stopped in Independence long enough to chug 4, 20oz Dr Peppers and eat a bag of Bar-B-Qued Fritos. That evening, after arriving home in a state of profound temporal distortion, I sat in the spa sipping a gin and tonic, and thinking about the next “goal“.

July 2003