I left this journal behind for a few months but have been working on archiving my old photos and want to get back into unpacking my favorite memories. I recently wrote about spreading my Dad’s ashes over Lone Peak in the Wasatch Mountains, so I thought I’d start with some of my early memories of hiking with him.
Dad applied for the permit in January. “It’s once in a lifetime,” he mused. “The highest peak in the country … well, the Continental U.S.”
The qualifier seemed a minor technicality. Mount Whitney is a 14,500-foot spire in the Sierra Nevada, rising to the top of California. Reaching the summit is a huge undertaking that requires a minimum of 22 miles of hiking with nearly 7,000 feet of climbing. I was hardly qualified to endure that, let alone mountaineering in Alaska. Still, my life was riddled with frustrating qualifiers. I was a university graduate … still struggling to launch my career. I was a creative spirit … laboring in the same retail job I held as a student. I was an independent woman … fumbling through three different dead-end relationships while pining for a man who had long left me behind to pursue his own wanderlust. I was applying for law school … it’s not that I wanted to be a lawyer, but I had good LSAT scores and law school seemed like something to do.
January was a seeming lifetime away from the August dates Dad requested. But that’s what Mount Whitney required. It’s the highest, and thus one of the most desirable mountains. The Park Service only issued 50 permits per day, so we had to apply as soon as the 2001 season opened. I agreed to the date Dad requested. It could have been June or December or August 2020 for as far away as it felt. Sleet pelted the window as we stood over his desktop computer, filling out the form on the screen.
In the eight months spanning those impossibly distant dates, all of my qualifiers crumbled. I took over at a local weekly newspaper, filling nearly every role in the company before the owner’s finances crumbled and I lost my job and more than two months of pay. I met a new man and dumped the others. The new boyfriend convinced me to decline my law school acceptance, quit the graphic design job I’d taken to try to recover my decimated savings account, and hit the road on a three-month trip across the country in my Geo Prism. While we were in Texas, my landlords — the parents of the ex I had been pining over for the past two years — kicked me and my roommate out of the apartment where I’d been living since my ex joined the Peace Corps. My parents, who themselves were struggling to reconcile the strange choices I’d made and how little information I was sharing with them, had to move out my things. The landlords insisted that most of the stuff in the apartment belonged to my ex, and my parents weren’t in a position to argue, so I lost most of my belongings. When I returned from the road trip — with almost no money, no job, no place to live, and no possessions beyond my Geo Prism — I decided to move in with the new boyfriend and his eight roommates in a rental house in Salt Lake City. I quickly found a job as an editor for another newspaper out in Tooele, some 35 miles west of the flophouse where I’d be taking up residence. One of my first requests — which I made during my job interview — was “I need to take some time off next week for a trip with my Dad to California.”
It was late August 2001 — just two weeks before September 11, when everything changed for everyone. It’s odd to look back on this time and realize just how untethered I’d become to everything in my life, and how that elasticity helped me weather a number of cataclysmic upheavals. And all that time, I was anticipating this set date on the calendar. “That’s the weekend my Dad and I will hike Mount Whitney. It’s once-in-a-lifetime.”
Dad had invited his hiking buddy, Tom, so the three of us drove from Salt Lake to Lone Pine in a day, crammed into the tiny cab of Dad’s 1994 Toyota pickup. We spent the night in a hotel and woke up well before dawn the following morning. We still found one of the last open spots in the parking lot — next to a station wagon whose window had been smashed by a black bear. The vandal’s tell-tale paw prints were smeared in the dust all over the car. To add insult to injury, a ranger had slapped a sticker on the windshield, notifying the driver they were being fined for leaving something that enticed a bear to break into their car. It didn’t matter what it was — and when we looked inside, we saw no food, only evidence of biting and clawing from the bear. Dad had a few knickknacks in his truck, and we did our best to hide everything under the seat.
I felt reasonably well-prepared for this hike. When I signed up for this in January, I was still living a slothful post-college life. But my new boyfriend was athletically inclined and influenced me in this direction. We spent the summer hiking, canoeing, and backpacking. Life on the road with no money had been its own physical challenge, often requiring long treks through the brush to find a stealth place to sleep, bathing in frigid creeks, and subsisting on pasta and pancake mix. I’d recently purchased a Camelbak M.U.L.E., a massive splurge that allowed me to take a sip of water anytime using a hose slung over my shoulder — a hydration revelation. For snacks, I purchased two of my favorites from the bulk section of the discount grocery store — a half-pound of Wasabi peas and a half-pound of banana chips.
Still, I had never embarked on anything so long, so grueling, so high. We slogged through the cool morning into the blaze of sunlight on white rock. The Wasabi peas left a sour pit in my stomach and the sensation of acid burn in my throat. I gave up on them around 12,000 feet, around the time we stopped for a snack in the midst of a large group of backpackers. I sat cross-legged with the thin plastic bag of banana chips sitting on my lap when a rogue marmot darted out from a rock 15 feet away. The cat-sized rodent startled me by continuing to run toward me at full speed. Just when I flinched, the marmot lunged onto my lap, grabbed the bag of banana chips, and scurried away. I staggered to my feet and gave chase. Dropping a few of the banana chips but keeping the rather large bag firmly clasped in its jaws, the marmot sprinted into the boulder field and out of sight. It got away. It got away with all of my food — at least, all of my food that I could stomach.
Dad, whose attention was directed elsewhere with Tom, found my account of the marmot thief amusing. I’m not sure he believed me, but he took pity on me — luckily, he had plenty of snacks to share. We started up the mountain’s famous 99 switchbacks. I was determined to tally them all but lost count somewhere in the 40s. My legs were heavy, my mind bleary with fatigue and limited oxygen. Dad had given me a couple of granola bars, but I still felt like I was rapidly losing steam. We crested 13,600 feet at Trail Crest, where I caught a glimpse of the final route to the summit. It was just a thousand feet higher but looked impossibly far away. I thought I might pass out.
I grasped for reasons to quit. Maybe I have altitude sickness? Maybe my legs will buckle and I’ll need a helicopter to get down? If I’d been with my boyfriend at the time, I likely would have quit. He was a gifted athlete but seemingly unmotivated by accomplishments and immune to summit fever. He was happy to go partway up a mountain and then sit and have a picnic. It’s ironic, looking back, that this is the way I knew him when within a decade he’d develop into a world-class ultrarunner who won most of the races he entered. But in 2001, he’d trained me in the practice of noncommitment. It’s about the journey, not the destination. It’s about the experience, not ego. I didn’t need to go to law school. I didn’t need a full-time job. I didn’t need a nice car or a nice place to live. I could squeeze myself into half of a tiny bedroom for $100 a month and be happy. Let’s hit the road and see where we end up.
And yet … I did need Mount Whitney. It was “once in a lifetime.” And it was so important to Dad. At least that’s the way I interpreted his motivations — after all, he’d applied for the permits an impossibly long time in the past, made all of the arrangements to be here, and brought enough snacks to share. And most of all, he’d forgiven me for my 21-year-old transgressions: Dropping out of law school. Quitting my job. Taking off across the country with a relative stranger and getting kicked out of my apartment in the meantime. Living in squalor in a flophouse. I understood well that these were none of the choices that Dad would have preferred I make. And yet, he supported me unconditionally. I wanted to have something — anything — that would make him proud.
It’s difficult to quantify my emotions upon reaching the broad summit of the highest peak in the United States (outside Alaska.) I was too exhausted to feel, but then we sat and ate and I caught a second wind. Suddenly I felt like I was soaring. I could see the sweeping skyline of the Sierras, and I could see the red basin of Death Valley, nearly three vertical miles below. Dad and I crept to the edge of the ridge until we could glance over a sheer wall. A sign on the summit shelter warned of lightning danger but the day was effortlessly blue. Dad gushed about how fortunate we were, to end up here on day like this.
Then we stood to head down. We’d taken all of three steps when another group approached on the trail. Dad stepped over to let them pass, caught his foot on a rock, and tumbled. He pulled himself off the ground quickly but confessed that he’d jammed his thumb. The pain was severe. When he held the appendage up to examine it, I could see it was pointing in the wrong direction. Clearly, Dad’s thumb was broken. We were still 11 miles and 7,000 feet descending from the nearest point of help.
Dad, characteristically, didn’t let this phase him at all. His legs were still fine, he declared, and he could still walk. Tom pulled a plastic grocery bag from his pack and collected chunks of old snow that still lingered in the shadows in late August. Dad took an Ace bandage and wrapped it around one of the snow chunks over his hand. Tom would carry the heavy plastic bag the rest of the way down the mountain so Dad could replace the ice as it melted. He didn’t complain once. I felt embarrassed for having nearly quit earlier because my leggies were tired.
The injury would prove to be severe as far as thumbs go. Dad was treated at the clinic in Lone Pine and later had to have surgery and months of physical therapy. He never did get his full range of motion back. In 2014, he and I returned to Mount Whitney. As we again climbed toward the highest summit in the Continental U.S., I asked about his thumb. Dad admitted it still caused issues, thirteen years later. I mused aloud whether it was worth it — these traumas we cause ourselves. Since 2001, I’d had my share.
“That’s just life,” Dad shrugged.
“It’s true. This isn’t once-in-a-lifetime,” I thought. “It’s just life.”
I have never regretted the decisions I made in 2001 because they became my life. I’ll never know who I would have been if I started law school or never met the boyfriend who coaxed me into many more years of irresponsible decisions. But I think I would have regretted not reaching Mount Whitney with Dad. That experience and its accomplishment set me on the most important path.
And, to this day, I still hope I made him proud.
Having met your family, including your dad, it’s no surprise that they’ve rolled with your decisions and adventures. Not only are you supported and loved, but those genes came from somewhere.
“It’s just life.” I suppose so.
I'm sure you did make him proud. Well, except for allowing yourself to be mugged by a marmot!