A winter view of Mount Clark in Yosemite
A pure flat-lander, a Florida boy from the Everglades, went to learn to ski on snow up in the mountains. That kid drove to Badger Pass in Yosemite, and—I guess this is the proper instant to reveal it—he was me.
But I’ll kid you not, I was no kid at the time. I’d already reached age thirty-three. Nevertheless, my sole (pun intended) experience with planting both feet on boards was a few years of waterskiing. During my initial try at skidding around on snow in Nordic (cross-country) gear, I probably made a calf strapped onto roller skates look about as graceful as Nureyev.
Still, I kept on picking myself up and dusting (or most often, shaking and scraping) myself off. And by my third day on cross skis I found myself in a 10km Nordic race. And did OK, finishing with a time just a tad better than the center of my age group.
Next day, I was striding-and-gliding out toward Glacier Point on a snowbound road, simply to further indulge a dawning delight in my newfound sport. As I slid along with a teeny dose of heightened skill through fir forests, at certain gaps, I could spot the magical pyramid of a high and distant peak. It seemed to wink at me past tips of the tallest trees. I’d already glimpsed that very same gleaming, glorious and beckoning landmark from various viewpoints on Badger’s summit ridge.
I felt positive I could hear that particular peak summoning me. And—allow me to play a geologic ventriloquist here for a brief second—that sylphic call sounded like, “Hey dude, you might now be thinkin’ highly of yourself … But! Shall you ever own ‘nuff moxie and fitness to climb and glide and slip and slide the whole distance out to Me?”
I claimed that I did. Or rather, I decided I’d indeed possess the right stuff for that exploit… someday… after a period of preparation. Next, I packed eight more years of mountain instruction and adventuring under my belt, and I did attempt a winter ascent of Mount Clark. That effort put me within about a mile of the awesome peak before deteriorating conditions forced a U-turn. However, following another eight years after that day of disappointment—and so, a full 16 years after my original sighting—I ultimately managed to trek to the top of that mountain, once dubbed The Obelisk by Yosemite’s initial Euro pioneers.
And I did get to stand upon the slim tip of that 11,527-foot peak to relish a splendid, 360-degree panorama of Yosemite’s high country, plus even more of a vast Sierran landscape that spread out far beyond the rim of my boots—a sheer, glacier-speckled terrain, seemingly-grander-than-even-life-size, like a 3D, 2:1 topo model of an alpine paradise.
Victory! At last.
A THICK LOG OF MANY SLOGS
Dreams can be elusive, ephemeral things. Despite this, or more probably because of it, I’ve found that bringing a dream to life usually requires a hard-nosed approach. It’s true of athletic achievements, of course. But physical exploits are simply the events where your need to apply a dedicated discipline crops up most clearly.
However, choosing, sticking with, and then surmounting a physical challenge is an excellent training ground for achieving the same thing in far more complex pursuits. Such as: attaining goals with our careers, our relationships, the arts, or even our inner levels of emotional, mental, and spiritual evolution.
For myself, an early practice was climbing trees in an oak forest. I set myself the goal of reaching the uppermost branches of every one of the tallest, oldest, and most mighty bearded “ents” (cfTolkien) dwelling in our Florida hammock. Took years to achieve, but I did so. En route, I found plenty of gymnastic puzzles to unlock, key nubbins and knobs to locate underneath thick mantles of resurrection fern, wild grape vines, poison ivy and thick moss. Not to mention that I had to summon focus and guts to span quite a number of increasingly hazardous drops.
And after that box was checked, I moved on to a fresh project: swinging my body from tree-to-tree at altitude—which required astute evaluation of the snapping points of thin branches. While still a boy in his single digits, I grew aware that these odd pursuits would eventually prove esoteric training to accomplish a bunch of other stuff.
That theme persisted in acts such as learning to whitewater kayak well enough to take on the Grand Canyon; to sea kayak well enough to paddle 400 miles of open ocean from the Oregon border to San Francisco Bay; to run well enough to do marathons; to rock-climb up to 5.10a level; to ski off the summits of Shasta and Lassen; to surf well enough to join a national team, to swim in cold sea water for more than an hour, and so on and so forth.
It also manifested in more complex and multi-faceted pursuits such as enduring a bare-bones, hand-to-mouth existence as a freelance writer and videographer for ten years. Whereupon I found I’d finally built up a launchpad sturdy enough for me to fully ignite a career and take off into a more remunerative lifestyle as a pro journalist who specialized in the outdoors beat.
It’s a pro trek that I more-or-less seek to repeat now as a novelist. Haven’t been at it for ten years, though, not quite yet. But I fully intend to keep aiming myself at that goal for at minimum total of twenty…
EVERY DAMN THING TAKES A VILLAGE
A myth of rugged individualism that we’ve long fostered in the West is exactly that: a myth, a legend, an inspirational yarn that sports—when you award it any sort of real close look—plenty of moth holes and dropped stitches, as well as a lot of other shortcomings.
Truth is, everything we do—including an act as simple and “private” as taking a deep breath—depends utterly on our partnerships with other beings.
Now, climbing trees in my youth didn’t demand apparent companionship. It seemed quite solitary. Yet, I’d been inspired by legendary ascents of other lads, and learned some moves from watching them. And the trees themselves had to invest years in rising from mere saplings before they could present me with a challenge. Not to mention, keeping themselves fit and thick enough to stay upright through multiple hurricanes.
My Grand Canyon voyage wouldn’t have been possible without lessons learned and runs made on countless rivers with many partners; these culminated with my outfitter friend Dan who organized the Canyon trip in its entirety, then invited me along. On the 400-mile sea kayak voyage, the support, guidance and advice of my adventurous pal John was one big key to its success.
(“And so on and so on and scoobee-doobee-doobee… we got to live together!” – Sly.)
The Buddhists say that all things are “dependent-arising,” which means that phenomena never have just one cause or a single instigator. Everything is forever linked to everything else, and we rise or fall, rise up again or go sideways, all together. It’s the big reason why classic Buddhists just can’t believe in a monotheistic type of God. They refuse to imagine a single vast and timeless being out there, totally free from all earthly cause-and-effect, an entity Who selectively tugs levers (or not) to make all below occur at His whim.
At times, a few Buddhists do happen to trip into a maudlin fallacy of praying to the Buddha as if he were indeed such a guy. Yet Gautama would (and did) inform everyone that he absolutely was not him. The very best that we can do, he preached, is achieve a mystical poise enabling us to stop making bad stuff happen whilst providing sweet boosts of compassionate aid to others.
SPOON OF MEDICINE DOES HELP YOUR HONEY
All that said, let me leap back to my original point. Among the best generators of human phenomena is a durable and potent intent. We should aim to embody a force that not only survives disappointment, but actually grows able to thrive on it—since failure can be so highly educational.
Both failures and successes are dropped on us utterly packed with information. Yet one is able to harvest this psychological terrain only by driving a combine of perseverance across every acre of their data. So, don’t abandon yourself to feeling depressed or daunted by a “failure,” because understanding it well is what later presents you with most fertile seeds of success.
Similarly, don’t feel overly impressed by any of your successes. If you just wallow and glory in them, yet don’t spend any time studying and grasping what worked, and how and why it did, then you only set yourself up for what might be rather startling failures in days to come.
In sum, the choice of humility or confidence doesn’t need to be binary. Because using an “and” is the proper conjunctive for this equation, not an “or.” The healthiest attitude we can ever devise ought to combine both moods, ambitious as well as cautious, since a nimble and productive mind will always deploy varying amounts of each, depending on what fits a given situation.
Even if you happen to fall far short of any goal, simply knowing that you’ve done your best is its own type of victory. The universe allows us to be fully in charge of our own motivation as well as the quality of our efforts, but that’s as far as it goes. We can rarely or barely claim to be in command of anything else, including our results.
Furthermore, a level of success more modest than the one that you fantasized can wind up as an amazingly perfect fit. In my own pursuit of peaks—other than those mountains I’ve already named—I also managed to summit on Julius Caesar, Buena Vista, and a few times on White Mountain, as well as a medley of lesser bumps.
Yet not anything more impressive. Certainly, not an 8K-plus meter monster of the Himalaya or anything of that ilk.
Consequently, I’ve ended up without any true bragging rights in the peak-bagging department. What I did gain was a sufficient ability to interview genuine megastars of climbing, and chat them up without embarrassing myself—folks like Reinhold Messner, Sir Edmund Hillary, Royal Robbins, Lynn Hill and Yvon Chouinard. That proved satisfying, and indeed, it was the only harvest I needed to acquire in order to nurture my foremost passion. Which was, and yet remains, my writing.
Even in my scribbling, as solitary as that craft might seem, I perforce must acknowledge a giant “village” of co-conspirators and elders who enabled me to pursue my craft. From nuns who taught me my ABC’s and my mom who sat us near a glowing fireplace on a winter’s eve and read to us from tattered copies of books by Mark Twain, to a college poetry teacher named Van Brock, to all those newspaper editors who grumpily sniped and snipped at my copy, as well as readers so eager to tell me about whatever they happened to love or hate in any given story.
OUR ROUTE TO A PEAK EXPERIENCE
On a crisp dawn in early autumn, I set out on the John Muir Trail from Tuolumne Meadows with two companions: Tim, an ex-guide with the Yosemite Mountaineering School; and Deacon, a sports photographer living at Tahoe.
Mount Clark loomed on the southern horizon, looking a remarkably long way off.
We hoped to accomplish our assault on Clark in the best “fast-packing” style. Bearing the lightest possible loads, we stomped off between the gleaming granite of Cathedral Peak and Clouds Rest to hike a literal marathon to a high-country camp at Merced Lake.
Next day, we rose once more with the sun and hung most of our gear up out of reach of rodents and bears. Toting a slim minimum of essentials, we set out to bushwhack our way to the summit of Clark via its northwest ridge.
The first people known to attain the top of Clark were Clarence King and a partner in the U.S. Geologic Survey, way back in 1866. They ascended by way of the southeast arete, or ridge. King later wrote that his motive was much more than a simple, “…desire to master a difficult peak. It was a station of great topographical value, the apex of many triangles, and… (it) would command a grander view of the Merced region than any other summit.’
Once they arrived, he found himself, “on a summit so slender… we seemed to be suspended in air.”
I can report that both of King’s sensations are wholly accurate. I’ve already described that stunning view. What I’ve not revealed yet is that—while I handily went up the weathered granite on a high Class III to low Class V approach—on the extremely narrow last bit, I asked to be roped up to cover my butt in event of a misstep. That was an aid neither of my companions wanted or needed. But I didn’t wish a slip on my part to cause a problem for any of us.
My third sensation was delight in achieving an eagle’s perch, following my not inconsiderable exertions to reach it—a set of broad raptor’s wings might’ve proven a great help. And my fourth was a pleasant feeling that I now could wangle a transfusion of hope and confidence from this tough physical act, and apply it to my far more complex and interior psychic chores.
A long-term, worldly goal had been attained. Almost too soon, it became high time for me to descend and traipse away with a refreshed determination, heading off to chase after some of my other hopes and dreams.
The author scales the last bit of the summit ridge on Mount Clark