Name It and Claim It

This is the second installment in a five-part series on my experience hiking Mt. Whitney this summer.

The top of Mt. Whitney began for me as an off-handed comment in 1987 and a grainy picture of the stone hut built on top of it in 1909.

Here's a more recent image of the Smithsonian Hut, taken from the Wikipedia entry on Mt. Whitney. The original credit on the image goes to Justin Johnsen’s Flickr account.

I was twelve that year and my parents took me and my friend Jesse on a week-long backpacking trip out of Onion Valley, up over the 11,700 feet of Kearsarge Pass, and down into Kings Canyon. I'd been camping before, but this was my first time carrying my world on my back when I went.

That hike taught us a lot. We learned Mom has heart issues and carrying a forty-pound pack at altitude didn't help them any. That bears, when motivated, will jump up, snag the bottom of a food sack that's on top of an 8-foot pole, sort through for the best of your food, and leave behind the oatmeal. That the summer weather in the Sierras turns on a dime and hail is not out of the question, even in July.

One night, while we sat around the tents eating dinner, Dad mentioned that we'd passed the tallest mountain in the continental U.S. on our way to where we'd started hiking. Mt. Whitney. 14,494 feet tall (at the time, now it officially measures at 14,505). We'd just come over the 11,000-plus feet of the pass. An extra 3,000 feet seemed both imminently reachable and as far away as the surface of the moon.

I was captivated by the thought of it, particularly the book at the top of the mountain for people to sign in and mark their accomplishment. The idea felt permanent, like some proof of life I could carry with me even as I left my name up at the summit. I wanted my name in that book.

Whitney came up again after we came down from Kearsarge and stayed the night at a motel in Bishop. When we walked through the stores in town, I found a book about the Eastern Sierras and flipped to the section on the mountain that seemed to grow taller the more I thought about it. That's where I found the image I would carry until I finally reached the top.

The picture was fuzzy, even then without the distance of the past twenty six years casting their haze over it. In the center of the image, a man leaned against the small structure at the mountain's summit, his face stretched serious and tan, even in black and white. I remember thinking the stone building looked like it grew straight out of the rocky lunar surface it sat on. I stared at the picture a minute and then put the book back and found my dad.

“Dude, we have to hike Whitney.”

“Dude, don't call me dude,” he said.

“Ok, but we have to hike it.”

“You need to be older.”

“But we will, right?”

“We'll see...”

I took that as a promise. Now that I have kids, I know what he meant. He wasn't putting me off, nor was he lying. Dad wanted to summit Whitney as much as I did, but he knew better than me that as much as we may want something, life doesn't always let us have it. And in this case it was true, for him anyway.

Mt. Whitney came up over the years. We talked about it a lot the next summer when Dad, Jesse, and I spent five days hiking through the western reaches of Kings Canyon. On that trip, it seemed possible. We hiked at least as far as we'd need to, though not nearly as high. But I was 14 and 14,000 feet seemed just a few steps higher than I'd already been. I fully assumed we'd take it on the next summer.

But we didn't. Nor did we the summer after that or the ones after that, and then I was in college and my parents moved to Central California. My first “adult” summers were consumed with work and my years in school earning my degrees with the minimal load of debt at the end of the day. Then I was married and working 90-hour weeks at the newspaper and Whitney receded into my childhood. When it came up, it was generally followed with the words, “Oh yeah, we were going to hike that weren't we...?”

A few years later, I brought it up at Christmas and my dad changed the script.

“I couldn't do that now,” he said.

In that moment, I felt a bit like Colonel Aureliano Buendia, noticing for the first time in 40 years the way his mother Ursula had aged when her words helped him really see her again. My dad wasn't old, probably about 60 at the time, but he was beginning to feel the effects of heart issues that are still with him and less manageable now. His hair was grayer than I remembered. His eyes, always the brightest bright blue, seemed darker with the disappointment.

And then it was gone. Moment passed. Conversation hop scotch. Back to the NBA game on the TV. But I was left with the loss. And I think I might have been more disappointed than he was. You'd have to ask him.

Five years later, I got my chance to climb the mountain with good friends I hadn't seen in way too long. But I wasn't ready for a snow-clad Whitney and some combination of lack of conditioning and altitude and a migraine stopped me at 12,100. Jeremy and Gus, they of the previous posts, walked down with me to make sure I didn't fall to my death. As Jeremy put it: “Dude, that is not a phone call I'm willing to make.”

By 10,000 I felt fine. By 9,900 I felt awful. I'd failed, and not just myself. I drove down the mountain and stopped at my parents for the night before my flight the next morning and had to tell my dad we hadn't made it up...again.

After I wrote a series of blogs to try and make sense of it all (which are no longer available as the journal that ran them changed hands), I spent the next year not thinking about it. Then I buried myself in a new job, new students, and the more familiar failures in submitting my work. I probably could have let it go and not tried the climb again.

Save for my dad. When I was a kid, I wanted my name in the book at the top. Now, more than that, I wanted his there. I wanted to put it there. I wanted him to see it there. So I coerced Gus and Jeremy (I mean, really, I owed them a summit too) and challenged myself to complete the more difficult single day round trip hike. And, on July 16, 2013, we set foot on the summit at 11:30 am.

Conservatively, there were 25 other people at the top, but I was there alone. Or, more specifically, I was there with Dad. I signed in for the two of us, sat for a few minutes, and then headed back down so we could finish before sunset.

A little more than two months now after finally reaching the top and running my fingers against the rough walls of the building I'd seen in the photo so long ago, it's already fading. The work of the hike is now a story told with jokes and self-deprecation. The moment I touched the hut commemorated along with the summit shot of the three of us both are just that - pictures of that time when.

Sure, you made it to the top of the mountain. But you haven't really made it until you touch the seal.

But the picture of my dad's name in the book...that one won't fade. And I don't expect it to any time soon.

Before you judge the handwriting, try holding your breath while running up a very long, very steep hill as far as you can, then sign something.

Photo by Gus Svendsen