I can recall vividly the first panic attack I experienced as an adult. It happened during a thunderstorm. I was 22 years old, sitting on a couch in the front room of the house where I lived at the time — a $1,000-a-month, four-bedroom rental in Salt Lake City’s Avenues that I shared with nine other people who had all graduated from college several years earlier. During the summer months, most of them went off for seasonal jobs or funemployment adventures. Meanwhile, I was working 50 hours a week at a newspaper, so after long stressful days, I spent many long nights in that big, cluttered house alone. The Summer of 2002 was particularly bad for my mental health, and it culminated in my first notable episodes of anxiety. That August evening, a thunderstorm moved almost directly overhead. Flashes of white flared through the window and instant deafening booms echoed through the living room. I was probably safe since I was indoors. I told myself this. But that didn’t stop me from hyperventilating, seeing dark spots in my vision, and curling up on the floor in a fit of gasping and sobs.
“I’m not even that afraid of thunderstorms,” I later thought about this episode. That’s when I finally admitted to myself that all was not right with me. (I addressed it with funemployment and adventures rather than mental health care because I was 22 years old.)
These days, one of my big anxiety triggers seems to be driving. I don’t even know why. I don’t think I’m all that frightened of driving. I used to enjoy it, even. But now, every so often, I get behind the wheel and tremble with nervousness for reasons I can’t discern. I follow the Instagram account #i70things to watch videos of truck fires and tunnel closures and stoke my irrational fear of that highway. I think I do this because I’m so timid about driving that I try to find excuses not to go anywhere, even when my FOMO is telling me I really need to go bikepacking in Leadville at least once before summer is over. Anyway, it’s all quite strange.
Crewing Beat at Hardrock included a lot of driving. After long, sleepless nights, the weekend culminated in driving back to Boulder just hours after Beat finished the race. By Sunday night, I could feel that inexplicable, unmoored dread — the chronic anxiety I managed to mostly banish with medication in February — settling back in.
The following week was great, but it was a lot. Our friends Roger and Hailey from Sydney, Australia — who were visiting Colorado for Hardrock — brought their two young children to stay for a few days. It’s the first time we’ve had children in our house. I fretted about all of the sharp and hard things everywhere, along with two sets of treacherous stairs, one of which I’ve fallen down three times (and even Roger fell down once on a prior visit.) But the kids were great and we had a fun week, even though Beat and I were both working and I was heading out every morning for different medical tests.
My stupid pinkie finger. For much of the first half of 2022, I had a pinkie toe that gave me grief after a little bone snapped because I fell down the stairs. I now have a little finger that hasn’t been right since I fell while hiking in Canyonlands on May 5. I waited a while to do anything about it because it’s just a pinkie. But having pain every time I gripped something for weeks and then months started to become problematic. So last week, I went to see several different specialists on different days for an EMG nerve conduction test, an ultrasound, and a consultation. The prognosis is a likely ligament tear and buildup of scar tissue, so I now I’m going back for an MRI to see whether it’s fixable or not. I’ve continued with hand physical therapy, which I’ve done before for carpal tunnel and which always seems so silly (squeeze this sponge 10 times, repeat.) I’ve made progress, and am finally able to lift barbels normally again … but not without pain. Is this injury even worth the many hundreds of dollars I’ve been dolling out toward my health insurance deductible seemingly daily? I don’t know. They say hands are the million-dollar organ. But it’s just a pinkie.
By the end of the week, the sea monster of anxiety had fully emerged from the depths. I needed something where I could find flow, something calming, something both familiar and captivating. I needed a long solo walk. A walk in the mountains.
I picked Sunday because the local mountain forecast called for a 15% chance of thunderstorms between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. This is pretty much the requisite forecast for Colorado in July — it’s about as tranquil a forecast as one can find during these monsoon months. We’ve had a lot of storms all spring and summer, and because of this, I’ve become complacent. I feel like I know the storms now. I can feel them coming. Hardrock weekend and the following week were surprisingly tranquil, and there was no reason to believe this calm pattern wouldn’t stretch out a little bit longer.
I didn’t want to feel even a modicum of stress, so I picked the easiest, most familiar mountain I know — Niwot Ridge. I wrote about Niwot Ridge in June. It’s a mean place in the winter, a wind funnel just below the Continental Divide that frequently features the worst weather I have experienced outside Alaska (and really just the worst weather, period.) This makes it good training for Alaska. Since avalanche risk is relatively low, Beat and I frequent Niwot Ridge in the winter. I’ve grown fond of this broad, flat ridge beside jagged Indian Peaks, and have started returning more often in the summer. It’s become my comfort mountain — a straightforward yet strenuous climb with no exposure or scrambling (unless you keep going beyond the broad, flat part.)
I didn’t think I needed an early start. My sleep has been spotty since Hardrock weekend and I wasn’t about to give up any sleep that I didn’t have to. But I should have set out earlier than 11 a.m., for sure. Still, I had slept well and felt good. I hiked steadily and soaked in the silence and tranquility until a small breeze kicked up just over a mile above treeline. It was a whisper of wind, really, and I didn’t think anything of it. When I reached the “end” of the ridge at mile seven, I scanned the western horizon (shown above.) Those puffy white clouds are not to be trusted — I know this. But I’d heard no evidence of storms anywhere nearby. The few puffs of clouds looked like no big deal.
I’ve been interested in exploring farther up the ridge to find out whether I could sight the route Navajo Peak. It’s rated as class three, with tricky route-finding that is necessary to avoid class four and class five terrain. It’s not like me to covet such endeavors — I have a fear of heights that can devolve into debilitating vertigo if I’m not cautious. But I know Beat would be interested in this climb, and I was curious to see how far I could scramble up the ridge. I resolved not to climb outside my comfort zone.
Perhaps predictably, I settled into a flow zone and scrambled up farther than I should have. I finally shimmied up one slab and thought, “That’s going to be hard to get down, and I have to go down. I should go down now.” The downclimb did prove unnerving. The handholds weren’t as obvious as they’d been on the way up, and there was a lot more air below me than I had realized. My right hand still doesn’t have a lot of strength. Dumb. Dumb. But I got down. There, I paused and considered whether to eat my lunch, but I felt rattled and wanted to crawl down to safety before taking a break. Instead, I pulled out my phone and took this selfie. Looking at the image mirrored in the screen was the first time I realized — “Huh, those clouds are pretty dark.”
I hadn’t yet heard thunder so I wasn’t too worried. But dark clouds at high altitudes mean one must move with haste regardless. I wasn’t in a position to move quickly, though, with more slabs to downclimb and boulders to teeter precariously across. Suddenly, I felt the strangest sensation in my hands. It felt just like the nerve-conduction test I had on Monday when the doctor attached electrodes to my palm and fired electrical pulses into my hand. Then I heard strange sounds — crackling and popping. Even the hose of my hydration bladder started making an eerie, whining noise. I gasped and tossed both of my trekking poles as far away as I could and squatted next to a rock.
“So this is happening,” was all I could think. “It’s really going to happen. I wonder if I’ll survive?”
This thought came to me in such a calm, matter-of-fact way, as though anticipating a lightning strike was no different than anticipating traffic on I-70 — the way most people anticipate traffic on I-70, not me, who has an irrational fear of that highway. But if the lightning is going to come, there’s not much one can do about it. There’s no incentive to panic.
But lightning didn’t come. I was so certain that the static electricity found me and built up its charge around me, that I have no clue how it didn’t happen. But it didn’t. After several seconds, I stood. Rocks can conduct electricity, so rocks are not the place to hide in an electrical storm. If I could make it down to the ridge, there’s a shack that is part of a research station. It might not be locked. Calmly but also inexplicably, I crawled over to my poles, folded them up, and carefully put them in my backpack. When I stood, I could still feel the static electricity. It sparked against sweat droplets on my neck and cheeks like tiny bee stings. My hydration hose again whined, so I took a big drink.
“Stop it!” I hissed. “Stop it!”
The hissing finally sparked an adrenaline response, and I began running down the rocks. My ankle rolled on a loose boulder and I nearly went down. Lightning or no lightning, a head injury would not do me any favors, so I slowed my pace to my usual methodical plodding. The sparks on my skin finally stopped. That’s when I heard the first clap of thunder. It was close, but it wasn’t deafening. I told myself this was a good sign. I kept crawling downward. It was all I could do.
The thunderclaps grew more frequent, but also more distant. If you can hear thunder at all, that means the lightning bolt is less than ten miles away. But I told myself this was a good sign. I reached the bottom of the scramble and commenced running toward the research shack. The storm still looked like it was very much right behind me and approaching. But the research shack did not look like an inviting place to hide. It was covered in metal solar panels and antennas. No, I did not want to stay here. I wanted to run. So I ran.
My brain slipped into energy-saving mode and I stopped making decisions. I just ran. Then I ran out of glycogen from my lack of calorie intake, and I also probably spent up my adrenaline. Either way, I lost a lot of steam. The storm seemed to be moving to the south rather than directly west toward me. I told myself it was moving to the south. I told myself this was a good thing.
By the time I stumbled blearily back to my car, the bright sun and blue sky had already returned. The 15% chance of storms had found me and me alone, then faded away.
“That was not the relaxing walk I wanted,” was all I could think. And then, “Damn, Summer Niwot is even meaner than Winter Niwot.”
When I sat at the steering wheel, my finger hurt but my arms were not trembling. I told myself this was a good thing. Maybe my anxiety will let this one be a freebie, and won’t torment me with flashbacks and nightmares for weeks to come. Then I even smiled, because here I am, having survived what is likely the closest encounter with an electrical storm in my life, and all I can think about is what kind of PTSD fodder this will be for the cannons of anxiety.
And with that, I conjured up the requisite gratitude and drove home.
Jill, I’ve never had anxiety or anything of the sort in all my life. Except for one day. One single day in all my 61 years on this earth. One horrible, scary awful day I’ll never forget. I was single and living alone in Farmington when out of the blue I had an inexplicable, unreasonable feeling. I was having a hard time breathing and feeling pure panic. I had no idea what was going on as I paced back and forth in my apartment. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do.
Finally after about 2 hours of pacing and crying a feelings came over me to call Jed. I knew somehow my brother would help me! I called him and he said he’d come right up. He said he’d get there as fast as he could. He showed up with your mom in less than an hour. I felt so stupid and helpless, as I prided myself on being so independent. He just kelp saying so kindly “what’s going on? How can I help you?” What can I do for you?”… long story short, they took me to my doctor who diagnosed it as a severe panic attack.
I’ve never had one since and still don’t know what triggered it that day, but your story made me think of that. It’s one of a thousand memories of Jed that I have and hold dearly.
Like a fairy tale......A happy ending.