Buffalo Bayou, which runs through Houston, was Vern’s getaway in his youth
It is strange what we recall best from our youth. For a guy whose entire adult life would be devoted to high places, it might be said Vern Tejas did not come to his affinity for tall mountains naturally. Perhaps if he had stuck around his birth place of Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of Mount Hood, it would make perfect sense for him to want to climb magnificent, well-known mountains.
However, most of Tejas’s youth was spent in Texas, a very large but generally very flat state. Born in Oregon on March 16, 1953, Tejas does say one of his first childhood memories actually is of Mount Hood, the snow-covered, 11,249-foot-mountain looming near Portland. The mountain is just thirty-seven miles from the city, though the vehicle route takes more than an hour.
The tree line on Hood is at 5,960 feet, and situated there is a building called Timberline Lodge, a National Historic Landmark constructed as a Works Progress Administration effort between 1936 and 1938. The magnificent structure is a tourist attraction drawing some two million people a year, and the outside of the building was used as a body double for The Outlook hotel in the 1980 Jack Nicholson horror movie “The Shining.”
Tejas guesses he was three years old when his family took the drive from Portland to admire the mountain and popular stone building.
We lived in the city, but we drove into the country to see Mount Hood from Timberline Lodge. I think that’s the imprint on my mind—the mountain. I don’t know why I fixated on it. Maybe it was foreshadowing.
The drive was not that long from home, but we did not remain in Portland. My father, Phil Hansel, transferred to a new job in Houston, Texas. It was very different; it was not evergreen or mountainous, just pancake flat. We lived in the city at first, then moved to a suburb. Elementary, junior high, and high school were all in the Houston suburbs. Around there, the only mountain I could see was in the pages of a magazine.
Texas is hot, humid, and flat. There were sugar-cane fields nearby. In fact, we were a stone’s throw from Sugarland, Texas. There were rice fields near us, not an Alpine setting as there was near Portland. It was an easy place to live, but I think even at an early age I wanted something more challenging in my life.
My mother Janice was from Canada, near Toronto, and she told stories about how rugged her life was there in the snow, and what the winter storms were like. She loved the outdoors, and that rubbed off on me. We went camping and fishing and I enjoyed those activities.
Even as a little kid, I had a lot of energy that my mother felt I needed to release in a proper activity, so she put me into swimming. I swam competitively for ten years and was strong in the water. My lung capacity and anaerobic threshold were high.
Swimming was a big deal in my family. My father was a prominent swim coach and officiated at the Olympic Games. Ultimately, he became head swim coach of the U.S. Olympic team. My mother was a swimming teacher. My older sister Ginger qualified for the U.S. Nationals. Overall, we were a very physical, very aerobically-oriented family.
We trained with and against some of the best swimmers in the state. Some of them were national-caliber swimmers, and there were even swimmers from around the world. We were held to a pretty high standard of accountability and measurement. I kind of resented it, and I know one younger brother certainly did. I believe that’s why he gave up swimming. One sister thrived in that environment, though. We were raised around big-time swimmers and sometimes, if they could not get a room elsewhere, they stayed in the guest house behind our home. Dawn Fraser of Australia, who won eight Olympic medals, including the 100 meter freestyle three times, stayed with us for a while.
I liked swimming when I was doing it, but it wasn’t my choice; it was my parents’. Most kids don’t necessarily resonate with choices their parents make for them, and I was no exception. I swam through high school until I was seventeen, but I had never asked myself, “Do I like this?” In retrospect, I liked it fine, but I may have liked it for my parents’ sake. However, it was probably the best training for high-altitude mountaineering that I could have dreamed up. Still, swimming is a lot of work. The average person has no idea how hard swimmers work. It’s also solitary work; you’re really in your own head there, in kind of a sensory deprivation environment where everything is warm and sloshy and you can’t hear or see well. You can barely breathe well, and yet you’re asked to perform at a level of high energy output for a long time. I mean hours. Top swimmers worked out twice a day: an hour-and-a-half before school, and again after school.
The parallel to high-altitude mountaineering is a bit ironic. Swimming long hours is probably the best thing to do to prepare for being a high-altitude mountain slogger. Basically, a mountain climber’s breathing is almost the same thing as a swimmer’s. Kicking is like walking while leaning on ski poles or an ice axe. Climbing, the whole body is in rhythmic breathing. There is monotonous sensory deprivation, especially high on a mountain when wearing an oxygen mask and hat.
Ed Viesturs, the only American to climb all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, was the captain of his college swim team. Several other high-altitude mountaineers I know were swimmers. I know Ed Viesturs’s lungs are larger than normal. I had my lungs measured, and they are twenty-five percent bigger than the average person’s lungs, meaning I get an extra liter of air when I breathe. The average male’s lung capacity is three liters, and I am at four liters. That’s significant if you are exposed to a low-oxygen environment.
While swimming was great for building stamina when I was young, getting involved with scouts provided more outdoor time, including hiking. I got involved in scouts early, first Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts. At thirteen, I went to the famous Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. The ranch was founded in 1938 and owned by the Boy Scouts. I was on the young side—I believe thirteen was the minimum age for acceptance—but my scout master recommended me and maybe even fudged my age. I think he recognized I was searching for something that I wasn’t finding, even in a family with five brothers and sisters. I was the second oldest, with one older sister, two younger sisters, and two younger brothers.
Since I was younger than most of the other scouts (only grew to be five feet nine inches anyway), I was the runt of the group. We did some fishing, went through survival school lessons, and then climbed a mountain. Baldy Mountain stands 12,441 feet high and is located on the northwest boundary of the ranch. More accurately, we hiked a mountain. We did not need ropes, ice axes, or crampons. What we did face was an abrupt elevation gain to a respectable altitude that would definitely slow you down if you were not in shape. As we hiked higher and higher on the trail, we had to cope with thinner air. I think the scout leaders believed I was going to be the last one up.
Gradually, as we hiked, I noticed we began losing some of the adults and the older and bigger scouts. As we closed in on the top, I was the only one left: the one in front. I didn’t realize it at that time, but that was no doubt due to my swim training.
I did really well and stood out that day. It did set the hook early on for my climbing interest. I found something I was suited for as a side effect of swimming, even though I had never climbed before. I was naturally adaptive to the circumstances, and had good aerobic capacity from my everyday pool cardio training. Climbing to the top before anyone else in my troop left me feeling really stoked. I remember actually running down from the summit and experiencing a certain kind of lightness. It was the joy of discovering I had done really well at something new. I think I was benefiting from my larger lung capacity. I did not think about it for years until I was climbing mountains full-time and had my pulmonary capacity checked.
Baldy may have come easy, but school was rough on me. I had dyslexia and did not socialize well. It wasn’t that I was dumb, but I had learning issues. For me, the big challenge was just getting through it at all. When I was about fourteen, my folks enrolled me in a reading course because of my troubles. Once that occurred, I did quite well. I was taught how to read faster. I became a speed reader and was clocked at over 40,000 words a minute. I was burning through pages. I could flash through a paperback book in thirty minutes. I read about things that interested me and learned a lot. It was just zoom, zoom, zoom. I got so good that they put me on TV. I’m not sure the TV part was good; I was not a guy who spoke well, especially in public with cameras on me. It was tough duty for the introverted. Speed reading takes considerable work. I hated working that hard, so it didn’t stick. But my comprehension rose from sixty percent to eighty percent.
Even though I was a whiz at reading, I did not like school. Socialization was very painful for me. I knew I wasn’t dumb and my teachers figured it out, too, but I floundered in junior high, and was put in advanced placement classes in high school. The speed reading led the school authorities to put me in a gifted class. That was probably not the best thing. Even in English I did poorly. Putting me in a gifted class because of my speed reading was probably a well-intentioned mistake, and I went from being at the top of my class to just being a contender. It mirrored my swimming situation: I went from being someone special to one of a bunch of people labeled special. Really, at that level I was just like everyone else in the class. Somewhere along the way I felt, “Why should I try?” I decided I did not want more competition in my life. So I backed off and my reading slowed down. It took a couple of years before teachers recognized I did not want to be in advanced classes. When they put me back in normal classes, I did OK. I was a lot more comfortable, and before it was all over, I tried to fail my senior year so I could repeat a year of school. I just liked being there.
My parents had chosen our neighborhood based on it being having a good school system. So they were not terribly excited by my attitude towards school. I think it was caused more by social anxiety than anything else. Shyness. It didn’t help that I had a bit of a speech impediment. I used to daydream. I was the guy who spent his time looking out the window. I was the guy who wanted to go outdoors, run amongst the trees, play with the frogs, and be left alone. I didn’t want to be on sports teams; swimming was enough for me. But I still had all of this energy. My old Alaskan friend Harry Johnson once described me as a Type Β personality in a Type A body.
My father bailing out on my mother and the family devastated me and made me quite rebellious. My response was to push authority’s limits as far as I could. Basically, I was a good kid. I grew up religious and had a pretty normal upbringing, but I had a feisty streak and wanted to find out where the limits were. I pushed against the teachers, and they didn’t like it. School kicked me out, and even had me arrested to get me off school property. I figured out at a pretty early age that I didn’t fit in well, but I decided I didn’t want to. I had brushes with the law, though nothing big. Mostly, my mother would be called to come get me.
In my junior year at high school, I got sent home for being disruptive. I was wearing a cowboy hat and jeans with holes in them and kissing a girl. Though all very stylish these days, schools back then had rules against such things. To me, it was an attempt to stifle my freedom of expression, so I refused to go. That’s when the sheriff arrested me for trespassing and dragged me away in handcuffs.
I wasn’t socializing well, and I was not into the same things as my classmates. Houston seemed like a horrible place for a young kid. I kept trying to escape in one way or another. Every time I got the chance, I jumped the back fence and ran off into the woods. We lived close to the Buffalo Bayou, a fifty-two-mile-long slow moving waterway that flows right through the middle of the city. Houston was founded on the Bayou; I just retreated there.
I was going on fifteen when I temporarily ran away from home to the Rocky Mountains, hitchhiking to Colorado. The mountains were an attraction because they seemed to offer solitude. This was in the later sixties, at the beginning of the hippie movement and the theme of back-to-the-land.
I discovered that hitchhiking could be an amazing way to get around. It was cheap, I was young enough people weren’t afraid of me, and I got rides all of the way to Colorado. Not by accident, I ended up in the San Juan Mountains near the New Mexico border. I was told by a guy that ran an outdoors shop in Houston that the San Juan Mountains are the roughest square fourteen miles in the contiguous United States. Houston wasn’t cutting it for me, even though I fished in the Bayou and hand-caught snakes, so I was excited to learn there were places even more adventurous than the solitude of the Bayou. I thought, “I’ve got to go to the most rugged places.” I went alone and took along books telling me how to live in the wilderness. One was Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons; the other was The Wilderness Cabin by Calvin Rutstrum. I wanted to learn how to build a log cabin and live in the woods. I took a bow and arrow, axe, sleeping bag, stove, tent, books, tarp, and a whole lot of gumption. I left no forwarding address. My intention was to run away, become a hermit, live off the fat of the land, and hang out in the most rugged fourteen-square-mile part of the United States. I figured I would be a hermit for the rest of my life.
I quickly found out there was not much fat on the land. I lost a lot of weight. Two weeks later, I came out of the woods pretty hungry. I had a few dollars in my pocket so I walked into a café at a truck stop and ate a full meal. It was so good that I began thinking, “I’m not sure if living off the land is what I’m really cut out for. I’m really into pancakes and eggs.” It was educational. I found out I loved the mountains, but didn’t love trying to live off the land. I could build a cabin, but then I would be stuck in one place. What I really learned was that I enjoyed travel. I enjoyed meeting new people. I actually came out of my shell somewhat when I was not sequestered in suburbia. I could learn from people, learn their stories.
I had a free spirit and fortunately did not get into any major trouble on the road, though I got into a couple of tight jams. I learned the worst animals out there are not the wild ones; they’re the human ones. That’s what you have to worry about. I survived lots of propositions as a young, long-haired traveler. I got picked up by gay guys and older women, but I was lucky and learned fast. I learned about people and life at a young age. I was only a ninth-grader, but I felt free out there. I could go in any direction I wanted to, at any time. This was all quite novel for someone brought up as a church-going Boy Scout who was a suburban-life dweller. I wanted this bigger, wilder life. After my big, hot meal, I spent a little more time in Colorado and headed back to Texas. I definitely did not want to spend the winter in Colorado’s mountains
My mother was beside herself with worry while I was gone, but she also was raising five other kids, and I was the troublemaker. She had many things to focus on like trying to earn a living and maybe find a new boyfriend with my father gone. She didn’t want me to run away, but it might have been a blessing for her. I did not even leave a note, but she figured out I ran away when I didn’t come to the dinner table for a week.
After that trip, I began awakening to girls, and that’s where my main interest was when I returned to school. It didn’t bode well for learning much in a classroom setting, but learning about the opposite sex helped me enjoy school a little bit more.
The next year, not running away, I hitchhiked to Colorado with a friend, Michael Mansfield, the nephew of the glamorous actress Jayne Mansfield, who died in a terrible automobile accident. I became more enticed by the 14,000-foot Rocky Mountains on that visit.
My last semester in high school, I planned to flunk out, but the teachers didn’t want me back. I picked up what I could from high school, but did not go to college. I can hold my own in a conversation and I can thank my parents for that. We had a great family. We weren’t poor, and we weren’t wealthy, and although many of the people around us had much more than we did, we had family.
When the school year ended, I was itching to get out of Houston. I felt life was happening out there in the world, not in the suburbs of Houston. The people around me seemed to have a closed mindset. They wanted to tell me how to look, how to think, how to act, how to pray. I mean, it was everything. I was in rambler mode again. I bailed out early and didn’t stick around for graduation. My teachers colluded to make sure I wasn’t coming back the next year. They didn’t want the trouble I represented.
I spent the next two years of my life hitchhiking to every state in the country except Maine and Hawaii. That included visiting Alaska for the first time.