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Outside Magazine November 2003

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The Hard Way
Head Trip
Sometimes the toughest climb is out of your mind and into your own animal skin

By Mark Jenkins


	Illustration by Istvan Banyai

REAL ALPINISTS KNOW HOW TO SLEEP. The night before a big climb I'm sure they eat heartily—slabs of bratwurst and chunks of stinky cheese—put away a bottle of robust red wine, crawl under any old wool blanket on the bunk, and fall asleep as contented as a Saint Bernard.

Not me, dammit. Here I am, alone in the Empress Hut, a breathtaking aerie perched above gigantic glaciers at the base of 12,349-foot Mount Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand, and the moment my lids drop over my snow-burned eyeballs, my mind's eye clicks open like the lens of a camera. I see the notorious Sheila Face, certainly named by some carnal-dreaming mountaineer, looming like a succubus above the hut. I find the lightning bolt of ice that jags through the stygian stone. I follow the streak up the face, trying sleepily to discern the difficulties of every pitch. At the final 300-foot headwall of ice, I study its color and wonder if it will be hollow or mushy and suddenly see my ice tools plunging into depths of sugar and my feet slipping and my body cartwheeling into space.

See what I mean?

I used to have a climbing partner who could cheerfully fall asleep anywhere, anytime. No sleeping bag, no problem: "This spot right here looks pretty darn good to me," he'd say, and then proceed to lie down on a six-inch snow shelf above a fathomless drop and be snoring away in less than five minutes. If only.

It's 11:30; I must be up in five hours. I rewind the scene I witnessed earlier this evening while reconning my route: a chopper circling above the Sheila Face, lowering a cable, and plucking two climbers off the peak. According to the hut radio report, they had bivouacked for two nights on the wall, then called in a rescue after almost getting killed by falling ice and rock.

Will that be me tomorrow? Again I slip into snapshots of ugly scenarios. Rock that is verglased, coated in frozen death slime, or weather that sucker-punches me part way up and I can't see anything in the swirling snow.

Shut up.

Real alpinists know how to turn off their head. From years of experience, they realize that half the time the body knows better than the know-it-all mind. The mind is too fickle. Optimistic one minute, pessimistic the next, pitching back and forth like a little boat on big seas. Not the body. The body doesn't exaggerate or self-deprecate or play mind games. The body is a machine, a realist. If it's hard and painful, well then, it's hard and painful. If it's a cruise, why, it's a cruise. The body doesn't make mountains out of anything. The body is an animal. It moves and lives in the present.

Now it's midnight. I wearily decide that the route will decide. I promise myself not to climb up anything I can't climb back down. I check my watch alarm for the third time. Flick my headlamp on and off. Finally drift to sleep.

Alas, one side effect of an overactive imagination is that I do not sleep without dreaming. I am a master dreamer. Tonight there is an elfin, fur-faced man in the hut. I don't understand what he is doing here, and of course, even inside the dream, I realize this is all supposed to mean something. This grotesque codger is supposed to be Death, profound and portentous. So where's his scythe? Still within the dream, I disavow all this Freudian hooey. The subconscious is a reckless dust devil blowing about random pieces of a puzzle.

I wake at 4:25 a.m., just before the alarm goes off. Take a leak out the hut door, pick up the pot of milk I mixed from powder the night before, gulp down three bowls of granola. (I only feel like one, but I know better—big day ahead.) I check my ankles. They are mangled from the last five mountains. Days ago I bound them up with athletic tape and layers of foam cut from my sleeping pad.

Crampons on my boots, headlamp on my helmet. Ice ax in hand, ice hammer strapped to the pack—all by rote. I step out of the hut onto the glacier, gaze up at the stars floating like campfire sparks above the black monolith of the Sheila Face, and go.

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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