I was awakened according to my usual circadian rhythm, which in this instance constituted at least a quasi-alpine start. It was predawn and it was moonless. It was also cold. The kind of cold that comes like a con-man, and through guile will cheat you out of every mili-BTU of cozy warmth that you’ve hoarded in your sleeping bag throughout the night. You can try to deftly deflect the icy slap of morning by wrapping yourself in layers while still in the bag. But any movement sucks in the coldest of the night’s air, and prolongs the creeping chill. So you hurry, and burst out of the cocoon into the still, dark morning. On the whole this is spectacularly symbolic.

Stomping feet and clapping hands are our supplications to awaken the spirits of the mitochondria in the myocyte. One molecule of glucose yields 36 ATP; three molecules of CO2, and 263 kilocalories per mole of blessed by God heat. Last minute items get tossed into the day packs that were pre-organized last night in Bishop, while still wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, and with the warm Sun still shining. Slam one can of Starbuck’s Double Shot Espresso. Even Ray Jardine, at the pinnacle of his start-early-travel-light zealotry might not have quibbled with the relative efficiency of this caffeinated morning indulgence.

Geoff and I stumble off into the dark. The roof of the world is covered with moth-eaten black felt, and starlight of the purest white keens through, the way it can only through the clearest fall nights in the mountains. We shamble down the Mosquito Flat Trail, advancing the pace to warm our legs. The hoarfrost on the ground crunches like croutons. Our headlamps warn of the rocks and water bars on the trail before us, but they look like flat cardboard theater props, all washed out in a sickly postmortem blue-gray.

I begin to feel like I’m in a high altitude isolation chamber. My mind quickly becomes lulled by the luminescent blue-gray sphere projected before us, the ambient noise of footfalls, and my accelerated breathing. I turn to my thoughts for company; I’m thinking it wastes fewer precious calories than talking to Geoff, and moving my jaw in air this cold hurts. Are we really in the post-enlightenment, I wonder? Is genuine, from the bottom up exploration really dying? Is exploration for it’s own sake just not high concept enough any more to be widely marketable to societies DSL attention span?

I remember as a kid sitting on the floor at my Dad’s feet after dinner, and playing with Lincoln Logs, while he watched shows like Arm Chair to Adventure, Wanderlust, High Adventures with Lowell Thomas, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. What happened to the mass appeal for these shows? Are we at risk of losing our renaissance intrigue with the unknown and obsession with the possible? Or am I romancing that our adventurous zeal has only recently begun to smolder. Did TV adventure programming of the late 50's and early 60's just supplant the individualism that was collectively and patriotically abrogated in Post-War America? And, are today’s “reality” shows a reflection that we’ve not only not recovered but degenerated; confusing the ideals of adventure and exploration with voyeurism set against an exotic back drop.

Happily I emerged from my reverie as the eastern sky begins to lighten and the warm colors of dawn begin to bleed across the horizon like a persimmon watercolor spilt across midnight blue silk. The silhouette of trees, boulders, and ridges emerge out of the dark; the quartz in the granite works like a sorcerers stone transmuting mere rock into magically illuminated spires, gendarmes, and needles. In the distance Bear Creek Spire begins its transfiguration as it absorbs the dawn and glows resplendent in all shades and hues of rose.

Geoff and I rummage through our packs for our cameras to try to capture the alchemy of Sun and mountain. I fumble with cold fingers experimenting with camera settings that might, just might capture this spectral and never to be seen again moment. The dawn pastels fade, we gather our packs and continue along the trail to Gem Lake. The trail has an easy grade that’s uncharacteristic for the Sierra. Of course the trail begins at 10,000-feet in the Rock Creek Canyon, so little elevation needs to be gained on the approach to a 13,713-foot peak, or else there would be little left to climb.

Continuing on we find that this glacial valley has more lakes and wetlands than it does dry ground. The name Mosquito Flat is surely apropos and traveling here in the late summer or fall is likely a tactically wise decision. Though this trip had no such planning, and like the best journeys, was taken on impulse. My original ambition was that I had wanted to go to the Second Annual Eastern Sierra MountainFest in Bishop, and in particular meet Sir Christian Bonington, the featured speaker at the first night of the “Fest“. Simpler still was that I wanted him to sign my copy of his book Kongur, China’s Elusive Summit.

Bonington is legend in the mountaineering community, and has beaten the odds as a survivor among an ever-smaller cadre of high altitude mountaineers. Knighted in 1996, Sir Christian Bonington’s vita of peaks and first ascents is expansive and spans at least three continents. But where Bonington has certainly accomplished greater and perhaps more personally challenging summits than Kongur, the story of this summit is singular. It is a voyage that involves not only the high adventure of summiting an unclimbed 7,719-meter peak, but the drama that surrounds the exploration of the approach to the peak across arduous terrain and among peoples in the Chinese Himalayas; lands not long even allowed access to by westerners.

Geoff and I had spent the afternoon bouldering in the Buttermilks and I hurried back for the book signing that evening. I wasn’t interested in owning an heirloom or having a collectable as much as having some connectedness to the author, the explorer, the adventurer; a bridge between a mass published volume of paper and ink and the humanness of having lived the experience. A bridge spanned by a unique mark on paper, in fact a form of communication singular among all animals, and distinctly human, a signature.

As I stood patiently in line, I was incapable of not comparing the photos of the man who explored the approach to Kongur through the Xanjiang Province in the early 1980's to the man pleasantly engaging the owner of each proffered book. I was more interested in the comparisons than the contrasts. My mother always told me that the mirror to the soul was through the eyes. Having been raised Catholic this was an adage that more often as not was calculated to belie the guilt of a... shall we say mistruth. But the real sage of this motherly wisdom lies in the timeless immutability of the depth of expression that the eyes retain across time. What did Sir Chris’ eyes mirror- insatiable wanderlust.

The line crept forward and I was distracted for a moment by the man in front of me. He held a stack of print, books and a magazine. Another gentleman knowingly engaged the man holding the stack, and in passing commented “second time around, eh.” For the moment the significance of the substance of that exchange was lost on me so I returned to my thoughts. What could I say to this man, what question might I ask. I mean mountaineering is one of man’s frontiers, like the exploration of sea and space. The world seems to be shrinking with a paved if not a metaphorical road punched into every recess. So, is there more? Is there more of the same ilk that went into the summiting of Kongur? And if there is, what is it that the explorer brings back to the masses for having been there; or are exploration and adventure an exclusive folly of an exclusive few, the cognoscenti?

At last I stood before the deeply tanned face lined deeply by the wind, the Sun, the miles away and the vertical meters up. I froze. The questions stuck in my throat. Finally, as his felt marker glided across the polished paper, I choked out, almost imploringly, “Is there more like this in the world?”. Bonington closed the cover, leaned forward over his arms, and with a broadening smile and those telling eyes said “Oh yes, scads!”. It occurred to me too late, while I walked away with my signed edition. So, why isn’t it being done? I imagined myself asking the question of Sir Bonington, and I imagined his answer, “Terribly expensive.” Of course Christopher Columbus had to get sponsored too, I reminded myself. Then I remembered the guy with the stack of “product” waiting for signatures; it’s all about profit.

Geoff and I took our seats early, but not so early as groups like the Old Bones Climbing Club, who secured the better seats by virtue of optimal visual angle and proximity to the podium. Then, with what I presumed to be British punctuality, Sir Chris addressed the crowd from behind the podium. There was an immediate and honorific applause after which the program began. Through the course of the one-hour program the audience traveled the world and only a small but representative number of the peaks that Bonington has climbed over some four decades. Bonington spoke of the adventure, the fellowship, the philosophy, and the romance of climbing, of which most of us are familiar. He also spoke of the tragic losses. Men like Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker. He also spoke of risk in a matter of fact way, of at once controlling risk and embracing the remainder with grace.

Clearly, at the very core of our sport, it is the unknown that defines the endeavor; this is similar to the philosophy, which states that the shape of the clay pot is defined by the space it contains. At the evenings conclusion both Geoff and I were left wanting more, as it should be. I at least had the germ of an idea that would be the answer to my question, what do we get from the existence and experiences of men like these. But the full corpus of the answer was still in the ether, the answer to why I felt changed and inspired for having attended Bonington’s presentation.

The higher the Sun rose over Little Lakes Valley the greater the excitement and anticipation that Geoff and I felt, it hung about us like a cloud of ionization. We turned off the main trail on a clear use trail that eventually faded at Gem Lake, then skirted around its south shore to the West Side. There we picked a line up steep talus to the top of a ridge that separates Gem Lake from Treasure Island Lakes. After a few moments in conversation with some late season backpackers we got our bearings and headed south along the ridge over easy terrain until we were overlooking the north shore of Dade Lake.

From here the North Arete of Bear Creek Spire and the North East Ridge loomed above us. Still to the south was a cirque of large talus and some smooth slabs that ascended to a saddle on the North East Ridge. We wound our way around Dade Lake and through blocky boulders having no trouble picking an efficient line up the cirque. I was surprised by how stable the talus field was; experiencing little of the teeter tottering that so frequently sends me into a crazed Saint Vitas Dance to regain my balance.

After snacking and water just below the ridge we hiked up onto the ridgeline proper and the beginning of the route. The ridge follows a clear and lazy serpentine line while the grade and difficulty gradually and steadily progress from Class 2 to Class 3, and then, with the top of the North Arete Route clearly in view, consistent Class 4. As we climbed, the line of ascent continued to reveal it’s self, and I suspect there are a number of correct choices to gain the summit ridge.

We had opted to climb the route without a rope since both of us felt solid in both our climbing skills and headspace up to easy Class 5. Our conviction in this regard was tested after several Class 5 moves placed us on the summit ridge with airy exposure. It was here that Geoff posed the thought provoking style question of our climb. “If you’re soloing with someone else is it still soloing?”

Now Geoff and I have been friends for years and at one point had been fairly regular climbing partners. His question had only briefly caught me off guard, and I knew that it wasn’t entirely rhetorical. My first response was who gives a shit, but since I knew that Geoff had majored in Anthropology at Texas A&M, and as such one of the softer sciences, even though he claims to have also majored in biology, I decided to give the question it’s due. I responded something along the lines that since we were fortunate to not have the style police accompanying us we could pretty much call it as we saw fit.

That said, on the one hand we were unroped, and even though we were on solid rock with fabulous holds and position, there was the risk, albeit remote, that if either of us pulled just a fantastic BONNER or we got supremely screwed by the fates that were we to fall it could be spectacularly ugly. Since this meets at least some of the criteria for free soloing in that respect, we were in fact free soloing.

On the other hand, a rope not only acts as a physical restraint when used properly but also provides a measure of psychological peace of mind- emotional comfort if you will. Therefore, were you to factor in that as high functioning partners our cooperation, combined resourcefulness, and synergistic mountain sense might also lend a modicum of mental centering that, were either of us alone in the same setting may well cause us to be cowering and incontinent. So, where we had decided that we were soloing, but not to the same bold extreme as solo soloing, we had in fact established a scale for soloing. I agreed with Geoff’s modifier “soloing with company”, and in so doing we irrevocably changed the complexion of soloing.

Then and there we managed to diffuse a standard, where either you are or are not soloing, into a gradation. Something like the one-to-five Lickert Scale, where the integer 1 represents “never” along a continuum to the integer 5 which represents “always”. Kind of like what the V, for Verm, scale did for bouldering. Well let history be the judge, but that’s what happens in academic disciplines that struggle to artificially strengthen flimsy statistical power with obfuscative quantification. That done we were free to continue our solo in good company on to the summit.

The top of Bear Creek Spire is perhaps the finest summit that I’ve stood upon, owing to the breathtaking view and selection of familiar landmarks. From the summit blocks we were able to see as far as Mono Lake to the north over the Minarets, and to the south there is the Evolution Range the most conspicuous of which is Mt. Darwin. We luxuriated on our summit as long as possible until finally chased off by the descending Sun and the possibility of a dark descent over talus.

We descended back to Dade Lake down a loose descent trail off of the Northwest side of the spire. Our adventure had hedonistically consumed the better part of the day and evening, so we resigned ourselves to missing the second night of the MountainFest, which is, I suppose, just as well. Having returned home to job and family I’ve continued to reflect and perhaps ruminate on the state of exploration and adventure, and out of this has emerged some clarity. That where we can not all be Boningtons, Ridgeways, and Crofts, as long as we get off our arses and get out to a place that we have never been, no matter who and how many have preceded us, then we are not unlike them either. And, in so doing we give the finger to the corpulent prurience and emunctory decadence of slothful western society.

We may be represented by varying integers along a number line of adventure, but at least we are on the same plane.

October 2003