THE TRAIL disappeared beneath the whiteness. Shielding my hood with an arm, I strained, squinting to pick a path up through broad valley walls. I knew the pass lay beyond in the whiteout, but vertigo swelled behind my eyes and I could see nothing. I looked down at my feet, nestled six inches deep in the previous night’s snow. Somewhere beyond us, I knew, Sawtooth Ridge’s granite flanks were gathering snowfall; beyond lay the nearest exit from the Sierra on Yosemite National Park’s northern boundary. We were nearing the first of the two 10,000-foot passes we would need to cross; I took comfort in the fact that we had already crossed a dozen much higher.
Behind me, Becca cradled her injured hand close to her heart. In the cold, we’d been forced to remove the splint and sling that we’d used to protect the healing wound. Five days earlier, as we strode across talus, a rock had shifted, sending Becca for a tumble. Her thumb had been pinched between a flat rock and sharp stone blade, severing an artery and chipping the bone. The emergency-room stitches were still fresh. We’d discussed calling it a trip, but neither of us wanted to leave. We’d keep walking even if we couldn’t climb.
California’s High Sierra should have been bathed in sunshine during the fall months, but two days earlier, a gentle rain had begun to fall and had built into a steady downpour, drenching us to the skin and sending the golden larch leaves fluttering to the ground. That night, the steady drum of rain on our open-floored tent gave way to the whisper of snow. We hastily gathered our camp, set out, and walked directly into a wall of white. We could have turned back; that would have been the conservative call. But there didn’t seem to be anything conservative about this storm. We could retreat back to the tree line, crawl into our soaking tent and damp sleeping bags, and hope for blue skies. But our lightweight gear was meant only for summer squalls, and staying put would probably earn us an embarrassing helicopter ride home.
We had history with the Sierra. That same October week six years earlier, we’d been ten miles to the north when an unforecasted storm rolled through, leaving three feet of snow, stranding dozens of hikers, and killing several climbers on Yosemite’s El Capitan. It had closed the high country for the remainder of the winter. I had the same feeling about this storm. Both had been preceded by a heat wave, then a day or two of unsettled weather. The day’s forecast had called for 60°F and sunny. It was 25 degrees and snowing an inch an hour. Becca and I both knew it was time to head for the exit.
In the flat dawn light, I looked at Becca and uttered a oneword question. “Go?”
“Go,” she echoed, without hesitation.
WHY? THAT WAS the question I fielded most often before we left. Our expedition was an ambitious, stubborn, and even borderline-inefficient approach to climbing. We’d have to walk almost the entire length of the High Sierra, 300 miles, from southern Sequoia National Park north through Yosemite. We would carry climbing gear the entire way and climb as much as our rations, our bodies, and the weather would permit. It sounded more like a never-ending approach than a climbing trip. “Why?” was a pretty valid query.
Before Becca and I left in August, I’d given out several answers. I’d been thinking about this trip for a decade after hearing about it over a campfire. I wasn’t getting any younger. Then there was the fact that men I admired had done this trip in a similar fashion. First, of course, there was John Muir. Then David Brower, the legendary activist, made a very similar trip in the 1930s. Over the course of two months, he and his cohorts ticked off over fifty summits and concluded their route with a moonlight climb of Matterhorn Peak.
Or maybe I’d say that I wanted to prove that you didn’t have to travel to Pakistan or Baffin Island to have a truly profound adventure—that it could be found in our backyard ranges. That it was possible to take a climbing road trip without a car or even a road. That modern adventure is more a reflection of creativity and individuality than it is of setting or environment.
The people closest to me knew better.
I was looking for an escape. I was drinking too much. Sleeping not enough. I’d pushed through writer’s block simply because I didn’t have time for it. The quiet spectre of depression was tapping at my shoulder. I relied on the theory that an animal in motion is less likely to be caught. Keep moving. Don’t rest. Don’t think. Just get to the trip. In the clutter, the noise, the constant motion of my life I was struggling to hear the quiet. If you never come out of the mountains you never have to answer a phone.
Secretly, I’d hoped that the trip would provide some quick, easy answers. They would snap from the sky as quick and complete as a lightning strike. I was waiting for someone or something to save me.
“I CAN’T SEE the trail,” I howled back at Becca, just three steps behind me. We had progressed no more than a mile and a half from our camp. I used my trekking pole to break the untouched snow. At least the change in texture helped ease the vertigo.
“I don’t think we should go back,” she yelled.
A trail isn’t necessary for upward progress. I repeated that thought silently three or four times and stepped forward. We would have to create our own path toward our first destination, Burro Pass. I took another step and the talus shifted. My feet skated on the six inches of snow and I fell directly into a stranded-turtle position. I struggled beneath the weight of the sixty-five-pound pack. The trip had whittled fifteen pounds off my six-foot-two-inch, 160-pound frame. With the pack on, I felt top-heavy.
Neither Becca nor I could bring ourselves to say it outright, but our margin for safety was as slim as it had ever been. A mistake, a misstep, a twisted ankle, a blown-out knee, would mean one having to leave the other behind to fetch help. The steep talus slopes offered no flat ground for our tent, but the situation was still fine, I reminded myself. Our bodies would stay warm as long as we kept moving. We would pause only to eat and drink. We’d navigated in whiteouts before. We’d done enough skiing in the densely forested Cascades that orienting with a compass wasn’t hard. We simply had to keep heading uphill, hit the ridge, and find the pass. Without the trail, travel over the jumble of rocks would be excruciatingly slow, but we’d just have to be patient.
Just beneath those rational thoughts, the other side of reality gnawed. It was October. It was the Sierra. It was snowing so hard it was difficult to open our eyes. Our gear was too light. We were seventeen miles from the nearest road, wet from head to foot. I wasn’t sure if we were making the right decision. Only hindsight would tell, but my instinct was to keep walking. Keep moving.
Right about then, the lightning started and the storm swallowed us. Our footprints led back into the swirling white. I reminded myself to appreciate the rawness of the moment. This was obviously a day we would never forget.
FOR THE FIRST week of the trip, phantom cellphones ringing in my pocket haunted me as I dreamed incessantly about work. I chased away thoughts that I was shirking responsibility for my business and my life. Instead, I fished. I even caught fish. I imagined my mind being like a dry fly about to be swallowed whole.
We put up new routes. Climbed old, forgotten ones. We followed in the footsteps of Muir into the “walls of the celestial city.” I read books. We remembered that approaches aren’t something to be reviled or rushed, but an integral part of the wonderful process of alpine rock climbing. There were strings of days when we saw no one else. We lounged naked on granite slabs next to deep, crystal-clear pools. Becca and I began to think as one, completing daily tasks in wordless unison. Answering questions the other was about to ask. Eventually, the phantom cellphone stopped ringing. The worries about shirked responsibilities faded.
“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” I repeated endlessly. “You just said that,” Becca would say, with an amused but loving smile.
When cramps and diarrhea racked Becca’s body, I pulled weight from her bag and nursed her as best I could. And when stress-induced shingles bled the enthusiasm and strength from me, Becca quietly took over, fluttering through camp to handle the evening’s chores and organize gear for the next day’s climb. These small acts of caring grew to fill the great empty spaces of the Sierra.
The questions of life in the flatlands remained. Should we leave the city and move back to the Sierra, even if it meant struggling with work again? Would that make my bad days better? Could we afford to start a family one day? Should I let go of my work completely, take a job writing press releases, and leave at five P.M. every night? Were my creative passions killing me, or was I plenty capable of doing that on my own? After forty-two days in the wilderness, no answers had come and I’d stopped asking. There would be no neat solutions.
What was obvious was that I was happy out here. That my mind and body loved the rhythm of the rising and falling sun. That sleeping ten hours didn’t make me a lazy slob. That humans weren’t necessarily designed to know what day of the week it was. That our community’s habit of labelling grueling climbs, chattering teeth, and lightning storms as “suffering” was nothing more than a flair for the dramatic. Suffering, my ass, I realized. Out here ideas drink from inspiration like tree roots soaking up spring melt. This is thriving.
But I couldn’t stay out here forever.
I WINCED with each lightning strike on the ridge just above us. I took another tentative step upward. Then another. I’d lost the trail completely.
“At this rate we are going to spend the night out here,” I said. My thoughts had turned to spoken words.
“Not here. Not tonight,” Becca answered steadily.
I took another step forward. The blanket of snow hid what was a mess of jagged talus. I slipped again. A few minutes later, Becca ripped the stitches in her hand. Our progress slowed. We needed a path. We needed a trail.
I waited for the smallest gap in the clouds, hoping to orient off the Matterhorn, the same mountain Jack Kerouac had summitted with poet Gary Snyder on a cold October day and made famous in The Dharma Bums. I hoped they had better visibility. No break came. I moved forward simply because there was no other clear direction. I stabbed with my ski pole.
Then, like a gift, the tracks appeared. Right in front of me were the unmistakable hoof prints of a deer. They ended four feet ahead, as if the animal had been plucked from the storm. From the tracks’ position it should have been standing right in front of me.
I stopped.
“Follow the tracks,” I muttered to myself. “Trust this animal’s instincts. It will lead you.”
I took another step forward, looked right and then left for the shadowy form of a buck. I think I even looked up toward the sky. Nothing.
I motioned Becca on to investigate. I stepped two feet to the left to make room for her and right onto the relatively uniform ground of the trail we’d lost earlier.
“I’ve got the trail,” I said, surprised. “What do you think?”
Wordlessly we both answered the question. Go.
Each step became more decisive. When the trail became obscured or switchbacked, the buck’s tracks appeared. We were moving quickly again, steady, with sure footing beneath us. Forty-five minutes later we paused briefly atop the pass to appreciate the force of the wind. Squeezed by mountain walls, it accelerated through the pinch and wiped away any signs of the deer’s trail. The cloud ceiling lifted to offer a momentary view of the path into and out of the next valley. We were leaving Yosemite. We reminded one another to pause, to take notice of the snowflakes’ unique patterns before they melted on our jackets. Cold, wet, and physically exhausted, we were speeding toward our lives in the flatlands. Even days like this can be gifts. Then the shivering started, so we walked.
The day moved forward in the sharp resolution that comes with heightened concentration. I will never forget the booming concussion of the string of lightning strikes as we crossed the second pass. Or nervous amusement of watching Becca covered in rime and snow and clinging to tree branches in the third-class cliff systems we’d accidentally wandered into. Over the course of that day, we drew upon every tool we’d gleaned from our decade of adventure together. But whenever it got really bad—when we’d again begin to doubt our blindly staked path and pull out the compass and topo map to begin whiteout navigation—the buck’s tracks would appear. His presence unseen, but felt.
It would be tempting to imbue these moments with deep meaning, but the more I replay that day, the more I realize that to interpret them as anything other than facts would be to deny their beauty. There was a blizzard. We were dangerously exposed to lightning and cold. We lost the trail and slowed when we desperately needed to move quickly. Deer tracks appeared. We followed them because that seemed like the best option.
Eventually, the flawless granite turret of the Incredible Hulk emerged through the snow and clouds. Three miles beyond we could see Little Slide Canyon, snowline, and the flat valley below. We lurched downward through 3,000 feet of talus. Knees wavered with exhaustion. Blood trickled from scraped ankle bones. We fell repeatedly. In the gathering dusk, we waded thigh-deep through flooded, stinking beaver ponds and then we collapsed onto a rain-soaked trail lined with sage and hugged each other.
Three miles of flat, wide trail remained. Becca took the lead and, for the final time, tapped into the unseen, shared reservoir of energy from which we’d been drinking liberally on this trip. Too tired to ask questions or even formulate a sentence, I followed in her slipstream. An hour later, we staggered into a massive campground and wandered, lost, among the darkened forms of hundreds of slumbering RVs. We had returned to a day-to-day wilderness that no map or compass could lead me through.