I got out of
the tent at the first hint of daybreak and started cooking. Already, dark clouds had gathered over Mount
Hitchcock, Mount Muir and Mount Whitney, and the air bit with cold. We planned to summit Mount Whitney that day,
which would entail taking a side trail from the top of the pass, adding
approximately four miles roundtrip.
After summiting we planned to drop down a couple thousand feet to pitch
our tent at a place called Trail Camp on the mountain’s eastern flank. The following day it would only be seven
miles to Whitney Portal where we’d eat greasy food, meet my parents and end our
adventure.
But as I
cooked breakfast that morning, wind whipped across the land and clouds swirled
in angrily from the southeast, mounting against the peaks like some empyrean
army come to smother the world. It
seemed questionable that we could reach the summit before a storm ripped the
sky, and I woke Pam earlier than normal.
“We’re going to have to really push to make it up there before lightning
hits.”
Our gear was
still damp as we packed, and we wore our stocking hats and jackets to blunt the
cold wind as we hiked. It was a steep
climb, more than 2,000 feet of rock faces and talus slopes from Timberline Lake
to the pass at Trail Crest—the whole world gone to jagged chunks of granite,
pockets of emerald water, and a kaleidoscopic sky roiling with gray, white and
blue.
We passed a
group of hikers coming down off Whitney.
They had hiked up in the predawn hours using headlamps and spent the
early morning on the summit. “It’s
seriously cold up there, and the weather is looking nasty” one of them said to
us. He looked at the boys with obvious
concern. “The wind gusts are crazy too
and the trail gets pretty exposed. Keep
a hand on those guys.”
And he was
right. As we approached the top of the
pass at Trail Crest, wind gusted over the crags like a blitz of freight
engines. I walked beside Kai and grabbed
him a couple times as the wind blasted us and caused him to stumble. Pam walked ahead of me with Noah and kept a
steady hand on him as well.
We finally
topped the pass, standing straddle-legged against the wind on a narrow shelf of
rock, and we found the side trail to the Mount Whitney Summit. We took off our packs and hunkered together
on the leeward side of rock.
“What do you
guys think?” We nearly had to shout to
hear each other over the wind. Above us
and to the southwest the sky was a dark ocean of clouds, but large patches of
blue ran out from the eastern slope and across the desert. “It could take an hour or more for us to get
to the summit and back, and the storm is definitely coming this way
quick.” The clouds weren’t moving fast,
but they were marching steadily in our direction and they looked threatening.
“I really
want to get to the top of Whitney,” Noah said.
He looked so earnest, and I could tell the goal had really been driving
him. “I mean we came all this way. I just really want to be up there.”
“I
know. Me too.” I was proud of him for wanting it, and a
reckless part of me wanted to roll the dice to make it happen for him. “But it could get ugly really fast. It’s probably smarter to back off. We can come back and climb it later. Even big-time mountaineers back down when it
feels too dangerous. That way they live
to climb another day.”
Pam pointed
to a sign nearby with big bold letters that read, Extreme danger from lightning.
To avoid being struck by lightning, immediately leave the area if any of
the following conditions exist. Dark
clouds nearby, thunder, hail or rain hissing in the air, static electricity in
the hair or fingertips. “We should
probably pay attention to that,” she said.
Just then a
huge gust of wind tore over the ridge and rattled us even behind the large rock. “Wind like that could blow these guys off the
mountain,” she added.
And it was
true. The wind was a monster that
morning.
But Noah
looked crushed. He even had tears in the
corners of his eyes, and that was the hardest thing for me, knowing that my
eleven-year-old son wanted to climb a mountain that badly, understanding how
proud of himself he’d be for accomplishing it.
My boys had hiked more than two hundred miles with me. They’d been hungry for days and pushed on
through miles of exhaustion, and they’d amazed me with how little they’d
complained. They’d been tougher than I
could have dreamed, and I couldn’t have been more proud of them. I didn’t want them to walk away from this
summer with even the slightest feeling of failure.
“Mom and I want
to stand on top of Whitney with you today, buddy. Believe me, we do. But it’s just not the day for it. It’s not safe. But we’ll come back. We’ll climb this mountain together some sunny
day. We really will.”
Noah nodded
a little, his face full of disappointment.
“You promise?”
“I do. We’ll stand up there together. I promise.”
He nodded,
and I hugged both boys, squeezed them tight and held them. “I can’t tell you guys how proud of you I
am. You’ve hiked so far with so much
grit, and you could easily get to the top of Whitney from here. It’s not even much higher than where we are
right now. It’s just the weather. It’s not safe, and it would be dumb for Mom
and me to take you up there.”
“You guys
have hiked the whole John Muir Trail!” Pam added, joining us in a big family
hug. “You did it, and you were so tough
about it. You guys are amazing!”
As we let go
of each other I smiled at them. “You know
what this means, don’t you?”
They looked
confused. “That we’re not going the top
of Mount Whitney,” Kai answered.
“Well,
yeah. But it also means we’re cutting
out four miles of hiking. It’s only
eight and a half miles from here to Whitney Portal. If you guys are up for it, we can skip Trail
Camp and be eating at a restaurant this evening. You can see Grammy and Papa and Franklin.”
“Really?” They both smiled. “It will be fun to hold Franklin,” Kai
said. “He’ll remember us won’t he?” Franklin was our pet Chihuahua, a tiny, blind
runt of a dog that we all loved to death.
“Of course
he will,” Pam said. “He’ll be so excited
to see you.”
The wind
stayed wild, and Pam and I walked close to the boys, grabbing them whenever a
big gust hit. Noah still seemed sad that
we hadn’t been able to summit Whitney, and at one point he looked up at me and
said, “It feels kind of weird that we’ve already spent our last night on the
trail.”
A twinge of
sadness stabbed at my gut. This grand
trip that I had dreamed about for the better part of a year and enjoyed living
for the past month was almost over—no more going to sleep side by side in the
tent every night and waking together in a pile of sleeping bags, no more
sitting close and watching alpenglow slide across the granite peaks, no more
swimming holes or long trail conversations.
“Yeah, it kind of makes me sad,” I answered. “But we’ll be back. Maybe next summer we can come back for a
shorter trip, just hike to a high lake and hang out there for a few days.”
“That would
be really fun,” Noah said.
As we wound
our way down the 5,000-foot descent to Whitney Portal that afternoon I couldn’t
watch my boys enough. I walked behind
them the whole way, trying to memorize what they looked like hiking beside each
other, trying to burn the image into my brain—their strong, skinny, perfect,
little-kid legs taking step after step after step. They were so small when I really looked at
them. Sometimes I almost forgot how
small they really were, and I told myself that I didn’t ever want to forget
again because it would all be over way too soon. They wouldn’t be boys much longer, and
although I never doubted that I’d love the teenagers and men they’d grow into,
I knew there would be a day when I would miss their childhoods to the point of
tears.
I watched
Pam too, with equally strong feelings.
Here she was, the girl I’d gotten to know almost twenty years earlier in
Africa, a time that slipped away like a dream when I tried to grasp it in my
memory, but she was with me, after all life’s crazy ups and downs she was still
here with me. We’d created these kids that
we’d both fallen in love with, and we were still moving through the world
together. Step by step.
I think we
all experienced some strong feelings that day.
There was something about walking those last few miles—knowing that day
by day we’d passed through more than two hundred miles of the high Sierra
wilderness in each other’s company—that heightened our feeling of togetherness.
At one point
Noah and Kai walked side by side in front of me. Noah turned to his little brother and asked,
“So Kai, what do you plan to do with the rest of your life?”
Kai looked
up at him, his face full of life. “Where
should I start?”
And they
walked on, dreaming about the adventures and accomplishments that lay in store
for them. Step by step, I know they’ll
get there.
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