Deep Play: whereby what [one] stands to win from a gamble can never equal the enormity of what [one] will lose.
– JOE SIMPSON, Dark Shadows Falling
IN THE YEAR after my encounter with the stalking black bear in the Grand Tetons, I selected three climbing projects that would come to occupy my entire recreational focus: I would climb all of the Colorado fourteeners; I would climb all of them solo in winter (something that had never been done before); and I would ascend to the highest point in every state in the U.S. In late June 1997, I started my job at Intel, which seemed like a piece of cake compared to being hunted by a winter-thin bear.
Compensating for the banality of my new career in mechanical engineering, I created adventure in my life by exploring Arizona’s vast variety of public lands-canyons, mountains, volcanic cones, meteor craters, deserts, and forests. I met my friend and mentor Mark Van Eeckhout through a college classmate. We both worked at the same clean-room facility in southern Phoenix, and over lunch we would plan out hiking and camping trips.
My college girlfriend, Jamie Zeigler, gave me Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire, which fanned my passion for desert adventure. I became a founding member of the Intel Adventure Club in 1998 when four of my friends from work, including Jamie Stoutenberg and Judson Cole, drafted a plan to hike across the Grand Canyon twice on consecutive days. Starting from the South Rim, we would descend five thousand feet in seven miles via the South Kaibab Trail to cross the Colorado River near Phantom Ranch, then continue fourteen miles on the Bright Angel Trail to the North Rim, climbing six thousand feet up to our campsite. After resting, we would turn around and do it in reverse, North Rim to South Rim. We called it the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, or R3 for short.
Just before the trip I was reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild. The story of young Chris McCandless dropping out of mainstream society to travel around the country entranced me with dreams of living out of the back of a truck and “rubber tramping” across the U.S. I was so caught up in the adventures of Alex Super-tramp, Chris’s nom de voyage, that I carried the book with me across the Grand Canyon on the R3 trip. One passage in particular-from a letter that Chris sent to an older friend he’d met on the road-read like a manifesto:
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
I wanted to taste that joy, to experience that passion for adventure, to cast away the security of my job and let my spirit roam. This meant I needed to get educated on outdoor living; I needed to gain experience before tackling major expeditions; and I needed to be prepared and mitigate risks. Even more directly, I needed to get a truck and then leave my job. But I had a ways to go before I would be ready to do that.
Another of Krakauer’s books, Into Thin Air, captured my imagination in the winter of 1998. It documented the Mount Everest disaster, in which eleven people died, so compellingly that I felt transported to 26,000 feet on the South Col with Neal Beidleman’s group of lost climbers, just a few hundred yards from Camp IV, wondering what I would do in their place. Exhausted from summit day, pounded by the hellion winds of a blizzard, out of oxygen, and frost-bitten-would I lie there dying? Would I leave the others to save myself? Would I go back to find them if I made it to camp? How would I behave in a situation that caused me to summon the essence of my character? The tragedy inspired me to test myself. I wanted to reveal to myself who I was: the kind of person who died, or the kind of person who overcame circumstances to help himself and others. Not only did I want to go to the Himalayas to climb a major peak, I wanted to explore the depth of my spirit.
And so it was that on March 8, 1998, I set out for a solo winter climb of Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona. Mark lent me snowshoes, an ice axe, and the mountaineering reference Freedom of the Hills, telling me that I needed to master the ice axe techniques it described. Orienteering north from the Snowbowl ski area five miles northwest of Flagstaff, I snowshoed through the pine trees for two hours, following the 10,000-foot contour until I entered a meadow at the base of a long snowfield. From there, I took Mark’s ice axe in my hand and climbed over 2,500 feet up the moderate slope to the summit ridge, where I left the snowshoes smothered in storm. In places, the clouds were so thick that I couldn’t see the drop-off on the right-hand side of the ridge, so I stayed safely to the left, which was, conversely, more exposed to the wind. After a half hour of hiking along the rock-strewn rim of the ancient high volcanic crater, I was shivering hard from the ice-cold blast, but I eventually found the summit, where I squatted behind a hand-stacked wall of rocks at 12,633 feet. Three distant clashes of thunder and lightning collapsed in the clouds to the south.
I couldn’t stay on the summit and risk getting hit by a lightning bolt, but I didn’t want to leave the protection of the rock wall, either. For a fleeting moment, I empathized with that huddling group of lost climbers on the South Col. Here in my own winter whiteout, I was confused, stressed, and lethargic, and I understood a little more personally how the temptation to wait until things got better could, in extremis, turn into deadly apathy. Collecting myself, I stood up from behind the windbreak to face the storm. Staring into a featureless blanket of hazy gray and bracing myself against the wind, I checked my compass to pick a ridgeline to descend. My ascending footprints had been obliterated in seconds.
Forcing my way down, I kept my eyes searching for Mark’s snowshoes. I had left them on the ridge at the top of the snowfield, marking the turn where I would descend into the trees and get out of the storm. Above the gale, I noticed a hissing sound coming from my pack. I stopped to check it out and saw small blue sparks discharge between the metal tips of my ski poles. Idiotically, I had lashed them onto my pack so that the tips were three feet above my head, and they were attracting lightning. I dropped the pack and dove onto a patch of snow faster than I had ever moved on a mountainside. Panting, I dragged my pack beside me as I scooted off the ridge on my belly. When I felt safe to stand up, I ran for my life. After a minute, I slowed down when a momentary break in the clouds showed me Mark’s snowshoes just above. I ditched my pack to retrieve them and made it back to my truck two hours later without further incident.
There are patterns to my climbing style that first sprouted on this ascent of Humphreys Peak-traveling by myself, climbing through storms, making solid route-finding decisions in demanding situations, and getting lucky around lightning. This climb was also a confidence builder for me: My awareness was heightened, and in that awareness I felt more deeply alive.
After my adventure on Humphreys Peak, Mark and I spoke often about my plan to solo-climb all the fourteeners in Colorado in winter. Mark knew I was too inexperienced to tackle such a risky project, but he also knew that I was intent on getting the project going. He taught me the basics of rock climbing, rope work, avalanche awareness, and snow travel. We went on beginner-level climbing excursions around central Arizona, took trips to the indoor rock climbing gym in Tempe, and over Labor Day weekend of 1998, Mark led my friend Howard and me on my first multi-pitch alpine rock climb on Vestal Peak in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.
Vestal Peak was especially memorable, as Mark taught us to handle the fear we felt before and during the climb of the two-thousand-foot-high slab of granite that tops out at nearly 14,000 feet. Halfway up the center of the north face, the soles of both my climbing boots blew out within minutes of each other, the stitching of the heels just disintegrating under the stress of the ascent, leaving me with the equivalent of massive flip-flops for the upper part of the route.
Despite my failed equipment, we reached the summit, and I was even longing for more, wishing the climbing weren’t already over. At the top, Mark introduced me to his favorite summit ritual of kippered fish and crackers, a tradition that we continue on every shared mountaintop. We took photos together, my beaming smile through a mouthful of half-chewed fish was a genuine expression of how giddy I felt to be at the top with my best friends, having overcome fear that day.
When my sister started college in the fall of 1998, she moved to a part of northwest Texas that could give a prairie dog a case of the doldrums. Wanting to share the exhilaration I was discovering through the outdoors, I invited her to come with me to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen-the waterfalls of Havasupai Canyon, just southwest of Grand Canyon National Park. In the language of the native peoples who have lived in the canyon for a hundred generations, Havasupai means “people of the blue-green waters,” for the waterfalls of the lower canyon. There are four major falls, the tallest of which leap over two-hundred-foot cliffs into deep turquoise pools filling the canyon from wall to wall.
My sister and I arrived at the trailhead on Thanksgiving Day, 1998, and hiked ten miles down from the plateau into Havasupai Canyon to pass the village of about two hundred residents. Since there is no road to the village, everything is brought in on small helicopters and trains of pack burros. The Havasupai village has the distinction of housing the only post office in the United States that is still served by burros. Residents have a community landline phone, plumbing, and sufficient electricity to power the reggae music that pushes past Bob Marley tapestries hung in the windows of every third government-issued trailer home. Most of the younger residents forgo the subsistence farming that the overgrown plots in front of their homes suggest their parents and grandparents pursued.
Beyond the village and Navajo Falls, the least dramatic but widest of the four waterfalls, we came to the Havasupai Falls and camping zone in the early afternoon. Havasupai is the trademark waterfall that pours its luminous flow over a 150-foot drop of maroon travertine draperies into a deep pool warmed by the sun. It’s a magical place that sees a heavy load of traffic from hikers and campers, though the Havasupai manage the use to concentrate the impact upstream of the largest of the cascades, 220-foot-high Mooney Falls. We chose a campsite in the middle of the zone and left our packs and gear to explore farther downcanyon.
Within minutes of venturing beyond our camp, we came to the brink of Mooney Falls, its beauty and flamboyant color freezing us in our tracks. It was a full minute before either of us even muttered “Wow.” We looked down on islands of lush green grass, towers of brilliant yellow cottonwood leaves reflecting the dazzling sun, sandbars strewn with bleached white tree trunks, and the uniquely flowing rock formations of cherry-red travertine that decorate the canyon in hanging curtains under a wall-to-wall cerulean sky.
Below Mooney, which we descended by a system of tunnels, chain ropes, and downclimbing, a faint trail disappeared into tall thickets of grasses that sprang from the sandbars. We waded down the streambed for another three miles and came to Beaver Falls, a group of interlaced and terraced pools that receives only a small fraction of the visitors as the upper falls. Here the travertine builds up dams across the stream that form horseshoe-shaped pools, each spilling over into the next. The falls drop about fifty feet and are spread out along a two-hundred-foot-long corridor in the canyon. They reminded me of the thermal pools my family had visited in Yellowstone almost a decade earlier. Five miles past Beaver Falls, the creek drops into a narrow channel where the turquoise waters of Havasupai spill directly into the often muddy-brown torrent of the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. My sister and I didn’t have time to go all the way to the river, so she sat on a rock above Beaver Falls while I balanced my way across the dams to reach the west shore of the creek. In my wet sandals, my footing was unsure, but I made it over to a rock shelf alongside the dams that was guarded by a barrier of prickly-pear cactus. I needed to go upstream on the shelf, somehow bypassing the garden of four-foot-high cacti, to gain a wider series of dams where it would be easier to cross back to the east side. The best strategy looked to be climbing about ten feet up the rock wall above the shelf and traversing over the cacti. I went for it, despite doubts that my sandals would grip the steep, wet travertine.
Perched a body’s length above the largest of the prickly-pears after five moves from right to left, I pinched a hold with my left hand that stretched my body into an X. As I shifted my weight onto my extended left foot, the travertine broke off, and the resulting jolt of my body on the knob I was holding in my right hand caused it to disintegrate as well. Suddenly, I was slipping down the travertine slide on the toe tips of my sandals, facing the rock. I had enough time to spot the prickly-pear closing in on my ass. The branches and paddles were naturally arranged in a curve close to the wall, with two separate cacti at the shelf’s lip. In my brief downward glance, the prickly-pear bushes turned into a grotesque smile, like a ravenous oversized fly-trap about to enjoy an overdue meal. Just before my heels met the top of the cactus, I sprang off the wall, turning a half rotation in midair to clear the tallest part of the spiny plant.
My feet hit the sand straddling a three-foot-high branch of the pear-shaped paddles-the nose of the smiling face. The landing would have been safe, except that my momentum had pushed my body into a crouch to absorb the fall’s energy. Spine-covered pear paddles met the sensitive soft tissue of my inner thighs. Recoiling from dozens of impalements, I burst back into the air. I stood bowlegged on the shelf above the travertine dams and aqua pools like a dismounted cowboy. My sister’s shout, “Are you okay?,” allowed me to defer looking down for another five seconds while I replied, “Yeah…but I fell on a cactus.”
I twisted and maneuvered my way out of the cactus garden, then dropped my shorts. The fabric of my gray long underwear was polka-dotted with red spots of blood. At the center of each crimson bull’s eye was a half-inch-long barbed cactus needle. I plucked for twenty minutes and removed the most offensive thorns, then took off my long underwear to hunt for the smaller, more hairlike spines. Extracting them one by one, I lost count somewhere past a hundred. Nearly an hour later, Sonja shouted over the water noise for me to pull my shorts back on-there were other hikers approaching. I stuffed my gray tights into my pocket and crossed the dam to see who was coming. These were the only other people we had seen below the village. They were two gregarious guys about my age, also from Phoenix, heading down to camp at the Colorado River. I wanted to see the lower part of Havasupai, but as my sister had little desire to make the sixteen-mile round trip, I arranged to meet Jean-Marc and Chad at the river by ten the next morning to make the return trek together.
Sonja and I returned to climb the Mooney Falls tunnels in the fading light. For our dinner back at camp, we laid out some pre-cooked turkey on crackers to go with our main course of macaroni and cheese. Even for backcountry cuisine, it was basic fare, but we weren’t there to celebrate a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner-we were most thankful about being with each other in such an inspiring place. After a chocolate bar each for dessert, we hung our food to protect it from the ring-tailed cats and raccoons and crawled onto our open-air tarp, the two lone occupants of the half-mile-long campground. My sister rolled over and fell asleep as I sat with my headlamp and tweezers for about forty-five minutes, trying to extract the remaining prickly-pear barbs from my inner thighs. It eased my embarrassment to know that no one was watching my peculiar ritual of awkward stretching, rubbing, plucking, prodding, and grimacing-my tweezers and I had the canyon to ourselves. It would be a full week before I found and removed the last spine, a fine hair impaled in my left buttock, while watching football on television in my town home in Chandler.
By seven A.M. the next morning, I was descending the canyon by headlamp, downclimbing the ropes and chains at Mooney Falls, splashing through the streambed, and hiking swiftly through the grasses and reeds bordering the sandbars and creek banks past Beaver Falls. I was exactly on time for the rendezvous at the Colorado River, where Jean-Marc and Chad offered me some of their coffee, freshly brewed on their backcountry stove. We hung out on the slate ledges along the downriver side of the Havasupai outlet, overlooking the comparatively monstrous Colorado, and scoped out swimming possibilities along the south shore of the river. Chad waded out throughthe confluence zone of Havasupai Creek to get a picture of the mixing line where the translucent waters first met the rushing madness of the Colorado’s black-opal current.
What possessed me to follow Chad out into the water, pass him to climb onto the last rock at the upstream edge of a powerful eddy, and then cannonball into the Colorado River, fully clothed, without a life jacket…Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Chad did get a funny picture of me, balled up in midair and unthinkingly bound for disaster, but had he and Jean-Marc not acted as fast as they did in the ensuing moments, it would have been the last picture anyone ever took of me, silly or otherwise. As I plunged in and came to the surface, I gasped at the unexpected temperature of the river-a hypothermic 50 degrees-over twenty degrees colder than the tropically warm Havasupai Creek.
My thick long-sleeved shirt and pants became ten-pound weights, and my running shoes dragged my feet plumb as the current swept me along the edge of the fifteen-yard-long eddy. Kicking off my shoes, I swam hard and fought my way into the eddy within five feet of shore in deep water. I noticed I was no longer getting any closer to solid ground. The circular eddy current was too strong to overcome. As I made stroke after stroke, I watched the shore move past. Chad and Jean-Marc were watching me and called out, “Aron, do you need help?” My pride replied, “Nah, I’ll make it,” as I took in my first swallow of river water.
Chad must have heard panic in my voice, because he dashed up the ledge behind the short beach to their campsite, thirty feet away, as I recirculated upstream in the eddy. Pushed from shore by the eddy current, I was quickly caught by the main current and the cycle began to repeat itself. As I attempted to unbutton my long-sleeved shirt to alleviate the drag, I instantly submerged and couldn’t get more than a single button undone before I needed air. The icy grip of the Colorado constricted my chest, making my breathing a shallow and rapid gasping. After swallowing three gulps of water and immersing a second time, I abandoned the shirt removal. Downstream of the eddy, the canyon walls rise straight from the water in two-to-three-hundred-foot cliffs for a thousand yards until the river turns right and disappears at the corner. I knew if I were swept past the Havasupai Creek eddy, I would drown long before I had another chance to get out of the river, and indeed it would be another hundred river miles until the current would spit my remains onto a beach at the upper end of Lake Mead. A newspaper headline flashed in front of my eyes: IDIOT ENGINEER DROWNS IN GRAND CANYON, BODY RECOVERED IN LAKE MEAD.
I thrashed at the water, straining for the eddy. At the farthest downstream edge, I broke through the eddy line and cried out, “Help! Help!”
Chad was up on a ledge returning from the campsite. “Jean-Marc, here!” Chad tossed a coiled accessory cord to Jean-Marc, who was fifteen feet away from me.
“Aron, grab hold!” He threw out the line, but it fell in the eddy, upstream of my position, and quickly floated out of my reach.
“Unnnggh,” I grunted. I continued to swim as hard as I could manage toward the shore. The cold was crippling me, numbing my legs, my arms, and my core. Jean-Marc retrieved the cord and tossed it out again, but the eddy current had already swept me past the beach and out into the overwhelming force of the Colorado. Concentrating on the eddy line, I kicked my lethargic legs and pumped my arms freestyle. I didn’t see Jean-Marc hand the cord off to Chad, but when I broke into the eddy again five seconds later, Chad had already thrown the coil and was shouting, “Aron, grab it! Get it! It’s right there!”
I reached to my right and brought my hand down on the thin black line as it drifted limply in the eddy. Chad yanked on it to reel me in, and I lost my sodden grip on the cord. The crush of disappointment nearly drowned me. Certain I wouldn’t survive another recirculation, I pleaded, “Help! Throw it again!”
My strokes were desperate but weak. The toss had to be perfect. Any mistake here and I was dead. Three seconds later, the line came back and draped over my right shoulder. A miracle! I grabbed at it with both hands, wrapping my left wrist in the line twice as my body wilted. With one last breath, I let my head drop into the water and felt the tension increase on the cord, biting into my wrist, but I didn’t care. My only thought was a hope that the line wouldn’t break. First my hands, and then my arms and chest brushed up onto the sand, and Jean-Marc was grabbing me under my shoulders. I felt sick, cold, blown out, and apathetic. I was safe at last but exhausted beyond concern. A voice spoke: “Oh my God, are you breathing?”
I nodded. “Thank…you…” I huffed between choked breaths, my head buried between my outstretched arms, face in the sand.
“Jesus, you almost died!” Jean-Marc was upset and stressed out, but Chad was calm.
“It’ll be okay. You’re safe. How do you feel?”
“I’m cold.” I paused and shuddered. “I think…I swallowed…a lot of water.” Rolling over to sit up, I slowly drew my legs out of the eddy and held my bloated stomach, groaning over the ache, wanting to puke, but I was too faint to summon the energy.
It took a full five minutes of rest, staring at the eddy where I nearly took my last lungful of air, before I could stand up. Chad offered me a dry sweatshirt, and I paced around in lurching stumbles, trying to restore my equilibrium. Even dry, I was still chilled and needed to get moving. However, nauseated from the river water, I could barely hold my balance. Jean-Marc spotted me when I climbed up the slate ledge to our earlier perch, and I had to sit and take a break while they packed away their camping supplies. We were relaxing, and the aftermath of the adrenaline made us all a little slaphappy.
“I can’t believe how lucky that last toss was.” I was dumbstruck at how a matter of seconds and inches had saved my life.
“I can’t believe you were like ‘No, I don’t need any help-I’m drowning, but I’ll be OK,’ ” Chad teased me.
I looked up and smiled, and we giggled. “Are you ready to go? I need to get my metabolism fired up.”
“Yeah, we’re ready,” Jean-Marc said. “Get your shoes on.”
“Oh. They’re gone. I had to kick them off when I was in the river. I’m gonna hike back in my socks.” My shoes were halfway to Mexico by now, and my sandals were back at Havasupai Campground.
“It’s eight miles, man. Here, take my sandals off my pack.” Chad leaned over, and I undid the Velcro loops. The rubber sandals were too big, but they were better than nothing.
The more we walked, the better I felt. I warmed up, and my stomach absorbed the river water. We rehashed the rescue, I asked if Chad had gotten the picture of me, and he confirmed, “It was you in the middle of ‘Yeee-haw’ jumping off the rock.”
“Well, then, it was worth it. As long as you got the picture,” I said sarcastically and grinned. Secretly, I was pleased to know that I’d have a souvenir of one of my stupidest moments ever.
As we headed back to our camp, Jean-Marc mentioned he had a bottle of Stolichnaya up at their gear stash above Mooney Falls, and all of a sudden, it was the only thing the three of us could think about. We sped the remaining three miles upstream, hopping over logs, splashing and slipping in the creek, in an hour-long dash for the Havasupai happy hour. We eagerly guzzled most of Jean-Marc’s vodka, then found Sonja as it was getting dark, to join up for a swim in the large pool below Havasupai Falls. Telling and retelling the story of my near-drowning, we waded up under the falls to reemerge in the moonlight like creatures from the Blue Lagoon. After polishing off the vodka, our group of four stumbled out of the water well past dark. We crafted a faux distress note to stick in the bottle before sending it over Mooney Falls toward its destiny. We imagined it making a journey all the way to Lake Mead, where a Jet Skier would find our message: “Help! We’re at Havasupai Campground. Send more vodka immediately! Emergency! [signed] Jean-Marc, Chad, and Aron, November 29, 1998.”
An hour later, when we’d called it a night, Sonja and I got into our sleeping bags. Lying there next to my sister, I told her what it had been like at the Colorado. All comedy aside, I said, “I was scared, Sonja. I saw headlines reporting my death. I thought I was a goner.” We cried together, then drifted off to sleep. The next morning, we packed up our gear for the ten-mile hike back to my car, then posed together for a final picture next to Havasupai Falls, happy to have each other. It became one of my favorite photos of the two of us.
By December 1998, I hadn’t yet climbed any winter fourteeners. Indeed, I’d climbed only seven total, and all of those in summer conditions. I planned to start with the easier, nontechnical peaks at the beginning of the winter 1998-99 season. Even these least demanding mountains would require safe snow-travel knowledge and winter-weather experience. On the last training trip Mark and I did before I left for my winter vacation, we attempted Engineer Mountain in southwestern Colorado, near Durango. Conditions were rough, due to a ground blizzard whipping snow into fifty-foot visibility conditions. About a third of the way in, we bailed on the climb and spent the late morning and early afternoon digging snow-study pits to practice evaluating the snowpack. Mark showed me how to check the snow layers for hardness, cohesion, and avalanche potential, something that would become routine for me as part of my fourteener project.
Two days later, after one of my best days skiing ever-in three feet of powder at Wolf Creek-Mark and I drove down into Alamosa in my fully laden sports coupe to get a motel room and recuperate from our binge of snow recreation. We had skied together regularly in the big snow year of 1997, usually camping out in zero-degree weather in the back of his Tacoma in ski-area parking lots, sitting on his tailgate eating hot oatmeal straight from his camping-stove pot, and watching the other skiers arriving. This time was even more special because Mark was moving to work in Alamosa for the winter.
In the morning, we parted ways, and I drove north toward Fair-play, in central Colorado. My plan was to attempt a winter solo of Quandary Peak before I visited my parents for Christmas. Quandary’s easy winter access and short ridgeline route makes it the easiest winter fourteener, and one with a low exposure to avalanches, an ideal proving ground to test my winter skills and solo methods. December 22 dawned clear and cold, but with a jet-stream wind blowing hard across the high peaks. I had bought Mark’s old snowshoes from him, and as I strapped them to my waterproof leather hiking boots, I jittered with childlike excitement, feeling that it wasn’t just another hike. This ascent of the 14,265-foot Quandary represented the first stage of a substantial commitment, an engagement to my project. I stood at the threshold of the forest, arms wide, balancing on that moment when preparation changes into performance.
The wind in my face occupied my attention for most of the gentle ascent. I tried to keep my head bent and my goggles from frosting over on the inside as I trudged in the snow up to the elevation where the trees grow more horizontally than vertically. I quickly left behind even these stumpy juniper shrubs. Higher up, the wind scoured the snowpack down to the rock-strewn tundra. I left my snowshoes on the broad ridge at a knoll somewhere above 12,000 feet. I looked to the southwest, where the nearby Lincoln group of fourteeners was clearly visible. The wind cut through my goggles’ ventilation ports, making my eyes tear up; snow-frosted summits swam in my vision under the azure sky.
As I put more and more of the atmosphere and its contaminants below me, the sky sank along the color wheel from Mediterranean blue to solid cobalt to indigo dye. I imagined I could hike until the sky went black, and to me, for a few hours, the sky in my world was a different color than just about everyone else’s. I thought about the chance that I was the highest person in Colorado, and it seemed extremely likely-virtually no one climbs fourteeners in the winter. Given that it’s the off-season for the other high mountains of North America, I figured there were fairly good odds that I was the highest person on the continent, too.
Windchill temperatures were in the negative twenties, and I’d completely spaced on my plan to keep a few food items in my pants pocket. At the summit, I found that my storebought water bottles had frozen through completely, and my chocolate bars were frost-nipped inside their packages. They weren’t edible, though I sucked on one like a Popsicle until I had licked the chocolate coating off the peanut core.
Descending with the wind at my back, I nearly took flight from the mountaintop, as I ran in bounding leaps to my snowshoes. Relief from the physical stresses of the climb gave me a chance to celebrate my accomplishment. I put on the snowshoes and thought back over the day, especially about what I could do better to keep my food and water thawed during the climb-it wouldn’t always be such a short trip that I could get away without eating and drinking. In fact, hunger was gnawing in my stomach, and my tongue felt sticky in my mouth. I needed refreshment and was discouraged that I’d carried around the deadweight of my frozen food and water without gaining from it.
I returned to my car and drove two hours down to Denver and my parents’ house, bursting with the exhilaration of a successful start to my project. There would be many more successes and opportunities for improving my performance on the winter solo climbs, but that one held me all year, until I climbed my second winter fourteener in December 1999. In the interim, I moved to Washington State with my engineering job, which provided me mountaineering opportunities that pushed my skills to the next level. My speed increased to where I could climb over 3,000 vertical feet in an hour with a twenty-pound pack; I became proficient in using crampons on snow, ice, and rock; and I went out with climbing partners to practice crevasse rescue and roped-team glacier travel techniques as we prepared for multiple ascents of the Cascades’ glaciated peaks-Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount Shuksan. During the six months I spent in Washington, there wasn’t a single weekend of good weather (by the end of summer, the world record for annual snowfall had been set on Mount Baker), but neither was there a single weekend that I didn’t go mountaineering. I discovered that if I waited for the weather, I’d never do anything, so I coped with soggy clothes, a mildewed tent, cold nights out in the middle of summer, and less than rewarding summit views from the inside of clouds.
On Mount Rainier, I learned what it meant to sit in an exposed bivouac after my partner Paul Budd and I had made a traverse over the summit, ascending via the Kautz Ice Chute route and then-because of our shortage of ice screws and a nasty lightning and snow storm-descending via the standard Disappointment Cleaver route. With our camping gear, food, and water supplies at 11,000 feet on the opposite side of the mountain, we shivered at 10,000 feet for eight hours as a ten-degree chill drained our bodies’ warmth. During that epic, we climbed over 15,000 feet vertical in twenty-four hours (we had to reclimb the peak to retrieve our gear) and went sixty-six hours without sleeping due to the storms.
Paul and I had put forth a monstrous effort that showed new depths to my strength; these came to bear the next weekend, when I returned with my friend Judson Cole from Arizona and we climbed the regular Disappointment Cleaver route in a single push, going from the Paradise base area to the summit and back in fourteen hours. On an endurance-climbing kick, I joined a group of three companions from the ACME Mountain Club for an ascent of the North Face of Mount Shuksan, one of the most beautiful mountains in the world and still one of the greatest climbs I’ve ever done. But the approach to the climb was proof of the adage “If you want to get to heaven, you have to go through hell.” Our team bushwhacked through such heavy forest undergrowth that it ripped one of my ice tools completely off my backpack without my even noticing. I lost our only map as well, as I slipped with every second step on the sloping hillside coated in two-inch-thick slide alder branches. Thankfully, we knew the route well enough from having memorized the description that we were able to keep going, despite gaining only a mile’s progress in almost eight hours of hiking through the night.
By morning we were exhausted from the heinous approach. After reorienting ourselves in the daylight, we reached 5,000 feet on the north shoulder of the mountain and collapsed for an hour-long nap. At noon, we rousted ourselves and roped up for protection against falling into a crevasse while we climbed the mountain’s upper glaciers. A thousand feet up, in the middle of the ramp connecting the two glaciers of the North Face, as my rope-mate Bruce and I were spread across an avalanche debris field, we heard a distant rumbling far above us.
Our partners ahead started screaming at us to run. Without looking at what the other was doing, Bruce and I ran three steps away from each other, and the rope drew taught, comically jerking us to a halt. It was a moment that we recounted later in bellyaching guffaws, but it brought me to the brink of a roiling panic at the time. I turned back toward Bruce. “THIS WAY!” I yelled over the increasing but still invisible thunder, and gave a rough tug on the rope.
We both sprinted forward across the snowfield in a blinding terror. With heavy mountain boots, crampons, and forty-five-pound packs, moving quickly proved to be a nightmare. Time slowed; it felt like we were running in place. Suddenly, the noise got louder and then stopped, as though I’d stepped into a soundproof room. I shot a look back over my shoulder.
From an ice cliff hanging above and halfway across the traverse, a boulder the size and shape of a motor coach hurtled into the air, spinning and wobbling violently like a punted football. The sight brought me to a horrified stop as I screamed for Bruce. “RUN! KEEP RUNNING!” I couldn’t tell if he was clear of the boulder’s landing zone yet, and we had only about two more seconds before we both found out the hard way.
In those last elongated seconds, Bruce didn’t even look up-he just sprinted harder toward me. I grabbed the rope, whipped it downhill, and pulled it in as he ran, trying to keep it from tangling in his crampons. A brilliant fury of adrenaline contorted Bruce’s face as the gargantuan boulder ended its meteoric flight in a mammoth explosion of snow fifty yards uphill and-thank the heavens-forty yards behind Bruce. With its momentum only partially absorbed, the boulder slid across our tracks like a derailed train car, accelerating until it careered over the edge of the crevasse lip at near-highway speed.
The sound died away. None of us could believe how quickly the whole sequence had played out. Bruce didn’t see the boulder at all; he was still running when it dove off the glacier. We were safe from the near-miss and regrouped in a cyclone of backslapping.
“You sure nobody needs to change underwear?” one of the other guys jested. We had been shaken and wanted to rest, but we were each equally determined to keep going and make our high camp before we ran out of afternoon light.
After they had led for three hundred vertical feet, the other rope team turned over this more difficult work to Bruce and me. Still recovering from his emotional expenditure, Bruce wasn’t up for kicking steps, hammering in snow pickets, and carrying the psychological burden of being in front. I collected the pickets, borrowed an ice hammer to temporarily replace my lost second tool, and set off from the others, who would follow once I was a rope length above them. Stabbing the front points of my crampons into the stable late-summer snowpack, I held my ice tools like daggers, with my fists wrapped high around the handles.
I fell into a cycle of motion, first plunging my right axe into the crust above my shoulder, then kicking my right foot through the crust and compressing a step. As I stood on my right foot, the sequence continued on my other side. When I started, I had nearly two thousand feet of virgin white mountainside rising steeply above me. Without landmarks, the unbroken field slipped by indeterminately. Even the horizon of the glacier’s upper slopes rolling back out of sight above me seemed fixed at an unapproachable distance. My one indication of progress was the occasional shout from Bruce that let me know we’d climbed another rope length, and it was time to pound in another picket. At his signal, in a smooth series of motions, I would draw a two-foot-long T-section metal post from my pack’s quiver, hold it against the slope, and strike it with the hammer on the back of my right ice tool until it was nearly buried. Clipping the rope through the adjoining carabiner protected Bruce and me against a fall. Our second team used the same pickets, then removed them as the last man passed each snow stake.
To my left, the slope swept down to the same hanging ice cliff where we had watched the boulder perform its airborne display. I drew myself inward, focusing my mind on efficiently regulating my body’s motions. My climbing patterns took on an unbreakable rhythm, plunging an axe, kicking twice with my foot, switching sides, plunge, kick, kick, plunge, kick, kick. It was a waltz that I danced with the mountain for an enchanted hour.
As the sun dropped into a thin cloudbank forty miles out over Puget Sound, light refracted in the prism of ocean vapors, and Mount Shuksan put on her finest evening gown. I glanced over my right shoulder to watch the lights of Victoria illuminate the coastline of Vancouver Island. As the sunset spilled claret wine over the jagged Picket Range and the border peaks of the North Cascades, I found it harder and harder to lean in on my axes, until finally, I stood up and walked ten yards without kicking steps. I was at the top of the glacier, close to 9,000 feet above sea level. Staring ahead, I admired the black pyramid of Mount Shuksan’s symmetrical summit jutting up from the surrounding snowfields. As the rope allowed, I walked over to a convex roll in the white plateau that commanded views of Mount Baker, Puget Sound, the North Cascades, and southern British Columbia, and made an executive decision that this would be our campsite for the night. If the afternoon’s exquisite climbing had been a reward for the torture of the previous night’s bushwhacking, then the tranquil splendor of this campsite was due return for the boulder’s terror. My run-down teammates arrived one by one with compliments for my step-kicking and campsite selection, and we went to work making ready for dinner and rest.
Our adventure on Mount Shuksan wasn’t over. Since we hadn’t yet topped out on the mountain-and indeed were on the opposite side of the summit pyramid from the fastest route to the top-we had a long day ahead of us when Sunday dawned bright and clear. Circumventing the black pyramid’s ramparts on the east and then the south, we were forced to skip going up the final five hundred feet to the peak’s high point so we could scout the three major gullies that dropped off the west side of the mountain’s southern glacier. Without the map, we had little certainty of our descent, and though we found our way down the steepest climbing of the trip-through an ice tunnel at a glacial bergschrund (a crevasse created where the head of a glacier pulls away from the adjacent rock), down the vertical rock of the Fisher Chimney, and up a grueling finish to reach the Mount Baker ski area-it was dark again before we were off the mountain.
A week after the Mount Shuksan climb, I moved to New Mexico with my job and immediately joined the search-and-rescue (SAR) group to which Mark had belonged for five years. The Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council, the top team in the state for technical rock rescues, provided me unparalleled training and experience and introduced me to nearly every one of my climbing partners of the next three years. Living in Albuquerque also allowed me closer access to the peaks in Colorado where I spent an average of five days climbing each month, year-round.
With my summer of big-mountain adventures in Washington, and more time for training in the Colorado mountains, I had gained a significant amount of experience that prepared me for a full slate of winter fourteener ascents during the winter of 1999-2000. However, I was still at the mercy of the mountain gods. Greater-than-100-mph winds blasted me on the summit plateau of Mount Bross on December 22, repeatedly knocking me over. The entire time I was crawling and fighting for my balance, unbeknownst to me, the metal frame of my headlamp was conducting the heat off my forehead into the bitter windchill, leaving a Gorbachevian crimson frostbite mark centered between my temples. I joined my family that evening in Denver with a ridiculous purple brow that faded to a brown splotch, like the stain of a mild sunburn, after four days.
In the three days after Christmas that year, I surmounted five fourteener summits; two days later, I rang in the millennium in the Everglades of Florida with about twenty of my friends (and eighty thousand other fans) at my fiftieth Phish show. The band played continuously from midnight until dawn, nearly eight hours, in an incomparable marathon set. Later in the spring, four of my friends and I decided to go to Japan that summer to see the band play an entire tour of small venues; while we were there, we also hiked to the top of Mount Fuji, the first time I’d ever been to the highest point of a country.
Before the winter of 2000 was over, I soloed another six winter fourteeners back in Colorado, including the moderately technical Kit Carson Mountain and Blanca Peak, both in the southern Sangre de Cristo Range. On January 16, 2000, after nabbing the first documented ascent of the millennium on Blanca and its easier sister summit, Ellingwood Point, I descended briskly on a thin snowfield that barely covered some underlying boulders. At about 12,000 feet, I broke through the snow crust up to my right knee for about the hundredth time-I was bruising and scraping the front of my shins from bashing into the leading edge of the crust each time I stumbled-but this time I couldn’t pull my leg out of the hole. I yanked and yanked without reward; a rock had shifted under the snow, trapping my foot at the ankle. There wasn’t much pressure against my foot, but the boot was stuck fast, and I couldn’t budge the rock from my forward-leaning position. I would have to dig away the snow, then move the rocks to get my boot out, which would be easier if I weren’t lodged in place. Wriggling my hand down into the hole, I released my shoelace, yanked my foot out of the boot, and rolled over onto my right side, trying to keep my sock-covered foot out of the snow. Fifteen minutes later, I had my boot once more. The experience gave me cause to wonder what might have happened if not just my boot but my leg had been stuck, or if I’d twisted my ankle or even broken my leg. Could I have survived a night in the open? I had a 30-degree sleeping bag compressed in the bottom of my pack, and a stove and fuel, but nighttime temperatures were cold enough that I had my doubts. Shrugging off the accident as a brief delay, I nevertheless avoided two other shallowly buried boulder fields during the remainder of the descent.
Over the course of the winter, I learned about the concept of deep play, wherein a person’s recreational pursuits carry a gross imbalance of risk and reward. Without the potential for any real or perceived external gain-fortune, glory, fame-a person puts himself into scenarios of real risk and consequence purely for internal benefit: fun and enlightenment. Deep play exactly described my winter solo fourteener project, especially when I would begin a climb by heading into a storm, accepting malevolent weather as part of my experience on that trip. Suffering, cold, nausea, exhaustion, hunger-none of it meant anything, it was all part of the experience. The same went for the joy, euphoria, achievement, and fulfillment, too. I found that I could not set out with the intent of having a particular experience-safety precautions and risk management aside-my goal instead was to be open to what that day was giving me and accept it. Expectations generally led to disappointment, but being open to whatever was there for me to discover led to awareness and delight, even when conditions were rough. Mark Twight, an American alpinist with an extraordinary history of success and misadventure at the most extreme level of mountaineering, wrote in a climbing essay, “It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” Precisely.
In my next two winter fourteener seasons, I would tackle increasingly difficult ascents; however, I had saved the most technical and remote peaks for the second half of the project. With time, I became more efficient with my climbing and camping methods and equipment, and made gains with my fitness and acclimatization, which allowed me to attempt longer and more strenuous routes. I always established an itinerary and communicated my expected return time to my parents or roommates, and chose routes and adjusted my schedule to minimize avalanche exposure-the deadliest objective hazard of the project.
By the end of 2002, I had completed thirty-six of the fifty-nine fourteeners in four winters. My achievements were greater than the numbers-I was consistently creating for myself new experiences that no one else in the world was having. It was common when I signed in at trailhead registers to see that the last entry before mine was three, four, or sometimes five months old. On the occasions when I would return to a summit in the summer, my entry would be the only one in a seven- or eight-month period. With the solitude that came from being in places four months removed from others’ presence, I felt a sense of ownership of these cold high mountains, these buried alpine tarns, these sound-dampened forests; and a sense of kinship with the elk, deer, beaver, ermines, ptarmigans, and mountain goats. The more I visited their home, the more it felt like mine.
In the willow thickets of Mount Evans’s west bowl, I almost stepped on a snow-white ptarmigan that cooed and hopped out of my way at the last instant. Bending down to the bird, I fell into a trance in its ink-drop eyes. The universe expanded; neither of us moved. I felt a connection with that little puff of feathers on its matching snow pillow that seemed to surpass my bond with my own species. With our coexistence in the wintry landscape, we shared more than I did with the other humans who would never journey into this world. I took a picture to show my friends, but despite my explanation, they saw only the ptarmigan, not the connection.
These places, and the experiences I had in them, were mine and mine alone. The senses of solitude, ownership, and place that I felt on these trips were creating a private world that, by definition, was impossible to share. Nevertheless, I tried. I took photographs and posted online albums of my trips; however, the images failed. They were unsuccessful because they were removed in time and location from what I went through to be in that place at that time. To a person sitting in an office or a living room, a picture of a winter mountain sunset is just a picture. To me, it was the experience of taking the picture. For instance, after snowshoeing for eight hours with my fifty-pound pack up Cottonwood Creek Valley, through an untracked forest of bottomless powder, past frozen cascades, I attained the 13,000-foot pass between Electric and Broken Hand peaks. From a vantage worthy of an Albert Bierstadt painting, I watched the red sunset light of the millennium’s first winter solstice transform Crestone Needle’s snow-plastered rock ribs into a purple mountain so majestic I cried at its beauty. A picture couldn’t do the experience justice-no matter my photographic talents, I couldn’t make the viewer feel the transcendent combination of depletion, fatigue, hypoxia, elation, and accomplishment that I felt in reaching such a sublime vista at that twilit moment.
The further along I got with my solo winter fourteener project, the larger this private world grew, and the more it intertwined with my sense of self. Climbing fourteeners in the winter by myself wasn’t just something I did; it became who I was. I didn’t hold any delusions about the difficulty of the project relative to world-class climbing routes, or compare myself with elite alpinists, but each time I scaled another high peak, I explored and developed another part of me.
I left my first swooping backcountry ski tracks on Mount Harvard’s lower south face with my telemark skis, the only traces of human passage that peak would see for six months. I saw three wolves run a half mile in three feet of powder across a wide-open meadow at 11,000 feet on the west side of Mount Massive-even more impressive than their power and grace was the fact that prior to that day in March 2002, wolves had been extinct in Colorado for over six decades. I stared into storms and met their fury with intensity and jubilation, growing icicles on my face on Humboldt Peak and spreading my arms like wings in the wind on the summit of Torreys Peak. I basked in the sun spray of a perfectly calm and unnaturally warm noon atop Mount Yale and froze in my maximum-thickness down parka on Mount Sneffels.
As my passion and dedication to the outdoors deepened, my time in the mountains left me with a singular desire to move back to Colorado and pursue my development from a home in the high country. I was altogether burned out on working in a large corporation. Then, in the spring of 2002, the opportunity came up for me to climb Denali with a group of über-athletes. But without the required vacation time to go on the trip, I had to make a choice between following my bliss and keeping my job at Intel. In the end, it didn’t even feel like a sacrifice to quit my job, sell most of my household goods, and pack my outdoor toys into my three-year-old Toyota Tacoma pickup truck (complete with rubber-tramping topper for camping). On my last day of work, Thursday, May 23, 2002, I wrote an e-mail to all my friends, announcing my new start, quoting Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Most of my colleagues encouraged me in my transition, but there were a few who could scarcely believe what I was telling them-that I was quitting, didn’t have another job lined up, and wasn’t going back to school. It just wasn’t something that Intel engineers did. But at twenty-six, after a modest career of five years, I officially retired. “Holding a corporate job” joined “living east of the Rocky Mountains” on a two-item list of things I vowed never to do again in my life. Thus began a journey that would take me to the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, through thirty-eight states and Canada in six months, and end in a little place called Aspen, Colorado, elevation 7,890 feet.