Tag: climbing

Want to Clip In?

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“You have a gift that only you can give the world – that’s the whole reason you’re on the planet.” – Oprah Winfrey

I saw this caption on Instagram from author and climber Jon Krakauer the other day.

“Today I watched the sun come up from this perch at 12,000 feet. It’s impossible to overstate how powerful experiences like this are for me, and how grateful I am to have such opportunities on our public lands.” – @krakauernotwriting

It reminded me of a story that my friend Doug told me. Doug was 15 or 16 years old climbing Mt. Hood in Oregon with his grandfather. They reached about 9,000 feet and his grandfather couldn’t climb any further. So he asked a passing rope team if his grandson could climb with them for the remaining 2,200 feet.

They agreed and Doug had a wonderful summit with these guys in their mid-20’s. When they returned to Doug’s grandfather, he thanked them for being willing to take Doug along. The rope leader said he’d done a great job and he was welcome to climb with them any time. Then he wrote his name down on a napkin and handed it to Doug. This is how I imagine it looked:

Doug never called the team leader – who was in fact THE Jon Krakauer who went on to write Into the Wild and Into Thin Air and many other great books (and climb some great routes). But in his own way, Jon Krakauer has been taking us along on his climbing adventures for 40 years. His passion for the outdoors and for writing has combined to bring us on his rope team for many years. And even when he’s not writing, according to his Instagram moniker, he’s sharing adventure with us and inspiring stewardship of this land.

A rope team usually has 5-6 people on it. The leader is most often the strongest climber or navigator, there’s usually someone on the team that organizes and keeps people together but everyone on the team works equally as hard and contributes to the safety and inspiration of all.

This idea of how we all contribute to the rope teams reminds me of what Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology at Yale, says about his work studying the long view of human history. He’s deeply optimistic about our ability to cooperate, teach others and love because we are one of the only species that does that outside of the family structure.

As Oprah says in the quote for the post, we all have a gift we can give the world, a reason that we are on this planet. Oprah, Nicholas Christakis, Jon Krakauer – they are like the dream team of climbers reminding us all that when we share with our gifts with others, we make the world a better place. Want to clip in?

(featured photo is mine from Mt. Ixtacchuatl, Mexico)

The Body of Humor

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“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” – Mark Twain

The other day in the privacy of my back yard, my 6-year-old daughter and her friends were using water balloons to pretend to pee. I started to say something about that being crude humor but then thought of back when I was climbing mountains. I had a She Wee which was a urinary redirector so that girls can stand and pee.

On one climb of Mt. Rainier, I was roped to three of my guy friends and had to pee at 13,500 feet. I walked as far away as I could while roped up, turned my back and used the She Wee. When I turned back to the group, one of my friends was looking at me and said, “Sorry, I couldn’t look away, that was fascinating!” I laughed because it WAS funny and not at all creepy.

What kids know that grown-ups seem to have forgotten is that bodies are funny, amazing and full of wonder. Both of my kids started laughing at “a-choo” by the time they were 6 months old and now most any sneeze, burp or fart makes them break into laughter. Pop a knuckle or get a scratch and they are fascinated. And though they cry when they skin their knees, both are completely entranced by the sight of blood.

The body is great at getting out what it no longer needs. We grow up and try to keep it in – emotions, bad meals, sickness and somehow in the process take it all too seriously. At my age, any twinge of adrenaline and I break out in a full sweat. And when I do yoga in the mornings, I close the doors to the family room just so my groans won’t wake the kids. Instead of trying to pretend it isn’t happening, perhaps I should laugh about it.

Back to funny stories from the mountains. There was the guy I wrote about who came back from the outhouse at 12,500 feet in the Caucasus Mountains saying, “I just spent five minutes dancing with my toilet paper.” And there was another incident on the way to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. We had set up our tents outside Namche Bazar at about 13,000 feet and our guides had created a toilet tent for us – a hole in the ground with a toilet seat sitting atop small luggage rack covered by a tall, skinny tent shaped like a telephone booth. One afternoon the wind came up and knocked over the toilet tent with someone inside. Once we helped him out of all that fabric and determined he wasn’t hurt, it was hilarious.

Perhaps it is because we are vulnerable while we are relieving ourselves that makes us forget that it’s funny. And even this cycle of life, as inglorious as it is, teaches us something. So we might as well eat, drink, and pee merry!

Is your body doing anything funny these days?

(featured photo is Miss O at 6 months laughing at a-choo!)

When the Clouds Roll In

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

Twenty-three years ago when I was practicing to get ready for a five-day expedition on Mt. Rainier, my friend Jill and I went up to the mountain to do a day climb up to Camp Muir at 10,200 feet. It’s is a non-technical climb of almost 5,000 vertical feet starting on trails and then trudging up the Muir snowfield which is snowy but not glaciated. On that June morning it was a lovely 4-5 hour hike up with views of the mountain and surrounding peaks to the south. It was early enough in the season that there were a few people on the route but it was comparatively quiet to the really busy high summer season.

When we got to Camp Muir, we sat on a rock outcropping and were eating our sandwiches when we saw the clouds coming in. They started from below and then just rolled up the mountain, thick and gray. Jill had summitted Mt. Rainier the year before, I had attempted it but not summitted so even though we didn’t have a lot of experience, we had heard warnings of how conditions on the mountain could change quickly with dire consequences.

Jill and I started hiking down and very soon were enveloped in the clouds. It was so thick, we couldn’t see the route. If you hike straight down from Camp Muir, you end up off the snowfield and in dangerous glacier territory strewn with crevasses. So Jill and I searched for the wands left by the guiding service. We couldn’t see from one wand to the next one about 150 yards away so we developed a strategy. We’d hike down about 50 yards from one wand until we could just barely see it and I’d stay there while she went down about 50 yards until she could see the next one and then I’d join her and we’d walk together to the next wand. It took us several hours to get down but eventually we reached the paths and got safely to the parking lot.

This hike makes me think of what we do when the clouds roll in. When we can’t see the horizon or any way points and everything looks white, grey or something in between. Do we look for the Divine waypoints marking the route? Do we ask our friends, therapists or other professionals to help us navigate safely through? Or do we keep walking in hope that motion will carry us down?

I think there as many answers to these questions are there are Wisdom traditions and personality types. But life has taught me that there are markers out there, just like the wands in the snowfield, if we bother to look.

The older I get the more I find it easier to stop and ask for Divine guidance. And when I have trouble discerning that, to seek out help from my friends. Whether it’s my ability to be vulnerable, imperfect or just because I know more quickly that I’ve lost perspective, I’m quicker to seek safety. When I’m having trouble finding my way, I have found that talking or writing about it helps me immensely.

The reason I remember this particular hike so well was the day after we returned the news reported that a 27-year-old doctor that had just moved from Georgia for a resident program in Seattle was missing after snowboarding on Mt. Rainier the same day we were climbing. The park rangers were out searching for him but in the days and week to follow there was no luck finding any sign of him.

Then the epilogue to the snowboarder story came for me about 3 years after that climb. The “nice guy” (from The Deep Story post) I dated told me that he had been hiking on Mt. Rainier the summer before with a friend and had gotten lost in the clouds. Knowing they were in dangerous territory, he set up camp and they waited out the night. The next morning rangers found them right on the edge of the Nisqually Glacier. And right around the corner, under a waterfall, was the body of the missing snowboarder who hadn’t been discovered for 2 years.  

While I drew parallels between my hike and life experience in this post, I don’t mean to infer any parallels or judgment on that snowboarder, a promising young man tragically lost too early.

(featured photo is of me and my parents at Camp Muir that same summer)

Dancing with Our Stuff

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“Wherever I go, I meet myself.” – Tozan

When I was climbing Mt. Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia about twenty years ago, the first stage of the ascent was to climb to the hut we stayed at until our summit attempts. At about 13,000 feet, it was a pretty rough shelter with nails that hadn’t been all the way hammered in, porch railings that didn’t go all the way around (see featured photo) and no exterior finish but it afforded us a good place to rest and try to summit the 18,510 feet peak.

The outhouse was just down a little path and set right on the edge of the ridge. That is to say, the hole in the floor opened directly onto a rock field. The placement was interesting and created some aerodynamic challenges. Anything light put down the hole would come right back up again.

This was discovered by the first climber from our group to go in there — a really funny, nice guy from California. He came back to the hut with his cheeks flushed, a little out of breath with a surprised look on his face. He announced, “I just spent 5 minutes dancing with my toilet paper.” At that altitude, any kind of dancing would take your breath away.

This always reminds me that, as the quote at the top of this post says, wherever we go we meet ourselves. Even when we are in the most scenic places, poised to accomplish some personal milestone, we still might have to dance with our toilet paper. If we’ve done our work, that can be more amusing than horrifying.

(featured photo is mine)

Other climbing posts:

Fantasy Climbs

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

I felt my phone ping with a message while I was trying to get dinner on the table the other night. At that moment, one little person wanted raw carrots instead of the perfectly grilled carrots and needed more hummus. The other little person was tired and having a moment of personal crisis and didn’t want to eat at all. As I was shuttling between kitchen and table, I snuck a glance at the message. It was my friend inviting me on a mountain climb of Mt. Adams with him and his son this summer.

Oh, it was so easy to envision myself away from that disastrous dinner and instead picture eating instant noodles from a tin cup on the side of a mountain at our base camp at 9,750 feet. I felt like it would be a complete luxury to say “yes” to climbing and trade in the work of parenting for a couple of days of slogging up a mountain with only the sound of our breathing and our footsteps crunching in the snow.

Even though I could rationalize how safe a climb Mt. Adams is with no crevasses or avalanche danger and rest in the reassurance of climbing with a friend that I’ve summitted that mountain twice with, I knew I’d have to say “no.”

Because even a safe mountain climb means being on the side of a 12,281 foot mountain for a couple of days, exposed to weather and human frailty. And in the very slight case that anything happened and I got hurt or dead, I’d be so angry at myself for leaving behind two young kids. Even if I was dead – I’d be dead and angry!

It highlighted for me the wide chasm between who I am now and who I used to be before kids. First of all, I’m entirely flattered that my friend thinks I could make it up Mt. Adams.

Secondly, it was a moment of realization of how completely my priorities have changed thinking about how I use my time, not only for the climb but also the commitment it would take me to get in shape to climb again.

But most of all, it made me feel yet again the wonderful work of our friends as they hold space for us when we are otherwise occupied, off on our quests to find meaning or just not feeling ourselves. Those friends that we can journey through all the phases of life and still find something to talk about with are a sacred gift.

So I told my friend, with a huge heaping of gratitude, that I’d have to take a rain check until I get my kids in shape and we can all climb together. In lieu of me going, his son is going to borrow my backpack and ice axe so a little bit of me is going by proxy instead. Maybe I’ll get to send my tin cup also so it can have dinner on the mountain too!

(photo is mine – of sunset from base camp on Mt. Adams)

Crossing the Chasm

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“Beautiful days do not come to you, you must walk towards them.” – Rumi

Yesterday was the first day that my daughter could be in school without a mask on. I found it to be a trepidatious experience. As a single, working parent, one of my biggest concerns is for school to be able to continue in-person. If I had to send my child in a full haz-mat suit, I would happily comply.

But broader than that, now that our state mask mandate has ended, is the question of whether I would continue to wear a mask when going into a store or resume activities like an in-person meditation class now that we seem to be transitioning to endemic mode from pandemic mode.

I’m not an epidemiologist so I don’t have an authoritative answer on mask wearing so I’m happy to follow their advice. But some of this return to normalcy feels like taking a big step to cross over the chasm.

Crossing over the chasm makes me think of some of the scariest things I’ve had to jump over or traverse when I was climbing mountains – like crevasses on Mt. Rainier. In most cases, I was lucky enough to have traversed them the first time going up the mountain in the dark. That way I couldn’t see the pit we were walking over on horizontal ladders with some plywood on them while wearing crampons our on boots which made the balance on top of metal spikes feel even more precarious. (See featured photo of my friend preparing to do this).

When I saw the full scale of what we had to do to cross back over in the light of day, that ladder was between me and the parking lot. That I had something to get back to was big motivation to conquer the fear and discomfort of crossing over.

Looking for the lure to other side of going back to pre-COVID practices and it reminds me of a Ten Percent Happier podcast that I heard with Professor Barbara Frederickson about positivity resonance. Our bodies and minds benefit greatly every time we experience a positive emotion in concert with another human. It could be as simple as a smile exchanged at the grocery store or being interested in the same topic with another person.

The more of these positive resonance interactions we have, the more we are buoyed by them and the benefits extend to our creativity, openness, willingness to get out of bed in the morning and on and on. Her two caveats for these to be possible – we have to feel safe and we have to be face-to-face. (She did say we can get somewhat of a boost on screen or over the phone but it’s harder).

There is a boy in my daughter’s class that she is particularly fond of. In Kindergarten, he was one of the two and a half boyfriends she’d told everyone about. (The half boyfriend talked too much to be a full one). Miss O was so excited yesterday to go to school to see his face which she has only really seen fully at his birthday party without a mask on. That in and of itself helped me get over my fear of this new phase of our public school lives.

May we all reap the benefits of more positive resonance.

Friendship Brownies

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“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was talking to my friend, Doug, the other day. He is planning a climb of Mt. Adams with his son this summer. It’s a 12,280 foot mountain in Washington State – tall enough to be a challenge but not technical enough to need a lot of equipment and training. The last time we summitted this mountain was with his daughter about 10 years ago when she was 14 years old.

Doug wanted to know if I remembered what packs we carried between our camp at about 9,000 feet and the summit. He is a meticulous packer and doesn’t carry anything more on his back than necessary.

These questions reminded me of a time we were planning a climb on Mt. Rainier that would take place over Doug’s birthday. His wife asked me if I would carry some brownies up to celebrate Doug’s birthday. It was only after I happily agreed that she told me that Doug said he wouldn’t carry them because he didn’t want that unnecessary weight in his pack.

It is probably because of all this carrying of loads that makes one of my favorite meditations is one where I imagine I sit down, empty everything out of my pack, look carefully at each thing I’m carrying. When I’m done sorting through the worries, the presumptions, and fears as well as the love, the purpose, the nostalgia, the energy stored for digging deep, the vulnerability, I mentally load the pack again with only what I need. I always carry a lighter load after that meditation.

But in thinking about those brownies, I realize that friendship means we are willing to carry things for other people that they won’t carry for themselves.

We hold in our packs a version of our friends at their brightest and most creative that can be shown to them when they are in a slump. We carry memories of the times we laughed, did silly things, failed and succeeded. We store all the depth of the ways we have walked side by side on the path as well as the times we waited at an intersection while they took a detour and vice versa.

Then at just the right moment, we unpack the brownies we’ve carried so far and celebrate our friends. There are some things worth the extra weight and friendship is one of them.

(featured image from Pexels)

Photo of the week: Nov 20

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My mom captured this picture of Mt. Rainier this week when she was flying home from a trip. With 26 glaciers, Mt. Rainier is the most heavily glaciated mountain in the lower 48 states of the United States. But even so the hot weather this past summer melted the mountain so bare that it is such a relief to see her covered in white again.

This is the mountain that made me want to climb mountains. I’ve stood on top twice and spent countless hours hiking around and admiring her majesty and mystery. Even with this long history, every time I catch a glance of Mt. Rainer out the window or while standing on her flanks, I feel a rush of awe, inspiration and peace. She speaks to me of beauty, timelessness and the Divine and I listen.

Thanks for the picture, Mom!

Back on Top

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“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir

Sometimes I think I can more easily name mountain climbing trips where I didn’t summit than the ones I did. Like that time on Mt. Elbrus in Russia where I was throwing up at our camp at 13,500 ft and stayed in the hut with the really funny, nice guy from California who had a headache. Or the time on Mt. Orizaba in Mexico when we couldn’t cross that exposed couloir because the ice was too fractious to get a screw in. In both cases I was a long way from home not to succeed and maybe that’s why they stand out — though I can name the ones closer to home as well.

Looking back at those climbs now, I see they were a way for me to practice two elements of life “in play” before having to live them. I started climbing mountains in my late 20’s before I had racked up any big life losses.  So the first thing I was practicing is trying, that decision to tackle something that is really gutsy for me, not knowing whether or not I would succeed. And the second I was developing was being able to fail without seeing myself as a failure.

There’s a critical element of letting go for me when I don’t succeed. It is humility, recognizing limits. It’s all about accepting that I don’t have to be finished in order to be loved, even by or especially by myself. That self-acceptance has come with practicing failing. A choice between leaning in towards the love that has always held me or branding myself unworthy.

Here’s what climbing has taught me. Standing on top is great, especially if I’m mindful of the sacredness of what I see up there. It is a moment to take in all the commitment and teamwork it took to get there. But failing to get to the top just means I get to spend more time in the mountains and I practice that key part of life – trying. Lucky me!

I’ve also learned a secret — no one else in my life really cares whether I summit or not. As long as I walk back into the parking lot upright and smiling, it’s good enough for the people who know and love me. Of course they care if it’s important to me but often it’s what I try that sticks in their minds, not what I succeed at. No one else is tallying a score card of my life.

None of these things are only about climbing because now that I’ve failed plenty in my “real” life, I know they are just as true about life in general. It’s not easy to keep trying big things and its hard to fail – but practicing it makes it easier.

Years ago I had a friend who said to me in a moment of vulnerability when his dad died suddenly, “I just wish he’d been able to see me back on top.” He’d gone through some really hard life losses right before his dad passed and the pain of wanting to be successful in his dad’s eyes was palpable.

I can’t speak authoritatively for my friend’s father but I knew him as a gentle and wise man. I believe he already saw his son back on top. Because my friend was still trying and still smiling.

Rock On

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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

As my six-year-old daughter and I walked in the rock climbing gym yesterday she pointed to a corner of the bouldering room and asked, “What are they doing there?” I responded that they were redoing all the routes in that section of the gym and she exclaimed, “But I was working on that one! I really liked it!” And then we went upstairs and commiserated with the camp coaches who were feeling the same thing.

I totally understand that sense of loss. In order to make room for new things, old ones have got to go. But sometimes I’m not ready to move on and the Universe does it for me. I’m talking about rock climbing routes — and also relationships, phases of life and things I find comfort in. Like my pajama pants that are exactly perfect so I’ve worn them forever and I loved them until they are almost in tatters and will likely disintegrate if I wash again. I’ll probably put them in the wash only to find they have “been disappeared” by some Divine force.

When I was little I had this blanket that I carried with me everywhere, my binky. We lived in the Philippines but came to the United States on extended vacation every two years. It was on this trip when I was five years-old that my mom decided that I shouldn’t need the blanket anymore, hid it from me and told me it was lost. I have a vague memory of looking for it everywhere – even in my parent’s luggage. Sooner or later I moved on but not without a lot of grief for Binky.

I think about this as a parent because I try to have infinite patience for my kids to grow out of things instead of creating timelines and thresholds. I seem to be doing a lot of work so that they won’t experience grief and I wonder if I’m doing them any favors. After all loss and renewal is one of the most elemental cycles of life.

When I went to pick my daughter up from rock climbing camp yesterday, I brought my climbing shoes with me so we could work on finding a new bouldering route together. We grieved for the great routes we’d lost like that purple one where she was just one hold from the top practicing her lean back technique. Then we climbed, fell and laughed together trying out new ones. It was a great way to experience resilience in the aftermath of loss. I left feeling so strong and inspired, I may actually get rid of those pajama pants myself. But don’t hold me to it…