Ch. 8 - There Were Tears: An Aging Man Gets Wise on Top of Mt. Whitney
Below is chapter 8 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
It was my wife Stephanie who discovered the TSX Challenge. She sent me a link to the website.
I scanned the site and shot back, “Let’s do it!”
She responded, “Really?”
I should have paused. That “X” stood for “Xtreme.”
* * *
The TSX Challenge was an eight-day backpacking trek through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. It was offered by a young adventure company, Trans Sierra Xtreme Challenge. The route covered 75 miles across remote high mountains, beginning at Horse Corral Trailhead in King’s Canyon National Park, some 60 miles east of Fresno. It emerged to the south on the other side of the Sierra crest, the eastern side, at Horseshoe Meadow to the west of Lone Pine. The journey culminated with a climb atop Mt. Whitney, at 14,508 feet the highest point in the contiguous United States.
We invited friends to join us on a TSX expedition in summer 2012. All but one declined. Dale, who accepted, was an international triathlon competitor. “This will be a once-in-a-lifetime trip,” he said. “There…Will…Be…Tears.” I thought he was making a joke with that prediction of “tears.”
I had dreamed of hiking Mt. Whitney for years. I wanted to explore that magnificent Sierra backcountry, places we could not reach in day hikes. I wanted to see the Sierra chain of peaks spread out below me. Stephanie and I had considered doing the John Muir Trail, a long-distance backpacking route through the Sierras between Yosemite in the north and Mt. Whitney in the south, 211 miles. TSX offered an immediate path to this great wilderness adventure.
I had another motivation. Just retired from a big job as a court administrator, I wanted assurance I was not on a downward slope. My employment was done. My future was a blank. I still was a long-distance bicyclist, planning a ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles in June 2012, two months before the TSX expedition. And I was a hiker. Stephanie and I vacationed through the West, where we tackled ambitious day hikes. With the TSX Challenge I could confirm the fitness of my body at 67, even in retirement.
I spoke with a TSX founder, Chris Casados, who later led our expedition. Although I had called to learn about TSX, I found myself selling Dale, Stephanie, and me as fit for the trip, despite our ages. In the midst of my pitch, I realized that Chris was reassuring me of his company’s ability to bring us through this challenge, despite our ages. But I never paused to consider whether this journey was wise. We submitted our applications, again emphasizing our fitness. And, that simple, we were accepted for the TSX Challenge.
“We have to train,” Stephanie insisted.
Train? Really? There had been no problem last time I backpacked. Of course, that was the Sixties, over forty years ago, when friends and I were in our 20s. All I needed in those days was to throw together my gear, clothes, and some food, and off we went to the Sierra mountains to the east or the Trinity Alps to the north. No training in those days. Just check the map and get on the trail. It all turned out just fine.
We did prepare that winter and spring of 2012. Stephanie did months of demanding Sierra Club day hikes, over 10 mile distances with 2000-3000 feet climbs, back-to-back on the weekends. And me? I would conquer the TSX Challenge through cycling fitness and occasional walks with a sack of charcoal in my backpack. No sweat.
Reality intruded in the summer of 2012, on day one of the TSX Challenge, in the first ten minutes. We’d been dropped off at a remote trailhead in King’s Canyon National Park, at 7,800 feet. We faced a 1,500-foot climb before descending into Sugarloaf Valley: switchbacks, steep ones, surprisingly difficult. As our group began ascending the trail, I had to step aside. Others were breezing past me.
We were 13 hikers, including the two TSX guides. Our ages ranged from teenage boys to four men in their 60s; my friend Dale was the oldest at 68, and I was a year behind him. The assistant guide Brian, 29, took the lead, and the expedition leader Chris, 33, stayed back as the sweep. On that first climb, the faster hikers powered ahead, led by the two teenage boys on Brian’s heels, followed by two young women. Dale and Stephanie moved up toward the front. At the rear were three older men. I soon found myself at the very back, trailed only by Chris whose job was to stay with the slowest hikers at the back.
I panted for air. My shoulders ached with the 35-pound backpack. My legs slowed to a creep. I struggled to keep up with the group. After half an hour upward, first one and then the other older man disappeared ahead. Just an hour into the expedition, Chris and I were alone.
All my life I was accustomed to being first, as the oldest of three brothers, an award-winning student, a high achiever in several careers. Even in Little League I had been a star.
Ambition. I thought of it as my Fifties edge. I still was a ferocious Scrabble player, a gloating winner, my competitiveness never stamped out in the cooperative Sixties.
And I enjoyed a Sixties edge too: the confidence that my baby boom generation would lead the way in building the world. We were in front whether it was politics, civil rights, rock music, or sexual revolution. Never before had I been weakest in any group of any kind – educational, athletic, professional, political. Not even games. Never!
Chris had warned that some TSX hikers found the first day the most difficult. Although this was one of our easiest stints measured by distance and ascent and altitude, it was the beginning of climbing in the high mountains. But I quickly gave up blaming my difficulties on first-day acclimation. This route was grueling. I worried about reaching the far-off end. Seven and a half days to go and many mountain miles ahead. Enormous challenges loomed, particularly the Whitney summit at almost twice our starting elevation. Had I made a terrible mistake?
I asked Chris about slow hikers on previous TSX trips. He was reassuring: my plodding pace was steady, my stops were few, others had had greater difficulties. In short, he had seen worse than me. Not much consolation.
I asked if any hikers had not completed the journey. I knew that one TSX founder, a schoolteacher, brought 5th graders, ten-year-olds.
“No,” Chris said, “everyone does it.” Fifth graders included, although they sometimes cried. And then he added, addressing my unspoken question whether there was any way out of this, “You’re just two hours in!”
I was startled and embarrassed with this airing of my simmering self-doubt. “Don’t worry,” I responded. “I’m a finisher.”
I realized I just had violated two of my cardinal rules for law practice and life: “Never complain; never explain.” I’ve had plenty of experience with adversity: career misfortunes, litigation disasters, things gone south in the court administration organization I directed. I did not believe in complaints, explanations, and justifications. Skip the words. Just fix it, make it right, get it done.
Yet there was much more to complain about that first day. In a miscommunication, the larger group led by Brian did not wait for Chris and me at the designated lunch stop overlooking Sugarloaf Valley. After the briefest break for lunch, Chris and I set off to catch them. I was tired. My neck throbbed. I was irritated, but I kept quiet.
Late that afternoon, after I had caught the group and fallen behind again, Chris left me on the trail with assurance that the meeting place was a few minutes ahead, and hurried on to confer about the evening’s camp location. After 20 minutes I stopped, called, and waited. I was out of steam, maybe lost, and exasperated. Eventually Chris tracked back from the meeting spot to find me a minute behind. He questioned why I had stopped. I said, “You told me a few minutes!” I felt like a whining fifth-grader, and now I was blaming someone else, breaking another personal rule. Chris decided it was time to make camp, a mile short of the day one destination, because of me I feared.
Around the evening campfire Chris instituted a team-building practice of “Thorns and Roses.” Sitting in a circle, each person would speak about the day’s personal negative and positive events, the “thorns” and “roses.” The other team members spoke frankly about the day’s hardships. But for me, no thorns, no more complaining. Just a rose. This first evening I praised the pleasure of talking with Chris at the back of the pack that day.
I admired Chris. He was a millennial, my daughter’s generation, in his 20s. A natural leader, Chris had a sure sense of command, an ethic of responsibility, and deft dealings with others. He was wiry and strong, quiet and assured. After a day on the trail with Chris, I realized he had written those stirring descriptors on the TSX Website: “motivated individuals,” “positive attitude,” and “the most challenging and inspirational experience in the Sierra.”
I liked his can-do perspective. Chris was a guy who made things happen, a young entrepreneur with innovative tech enterprises in the works. TSX was a sideline, a labor of love for this Sierra trek and showing it to people with the will to experience it. Chris was from a conservative Central Valley agri-business family, and I suspected he was a free-market libertarian who opposed government regulation of the economy, regulation that I welcomed as a socialist.
Despite his youth and politics, I was ready to follow Chris. I did not want to be a problem.
But I did have one “thorn,” a gigantic one. That first day, atop the first 1500-foot climb, I had reached a troubling conclusion: the TSX Challenge was too difficult for me: too high, too steep, and too long. I did not see how I could make it through the coming week and up to the top of Mt. Whitney. My cycling conditioning wasn’t enough. One day on the trail, and I was beat. My body was not cooperating.
But, no further disclosure of difficulty or doubt from me. Not to the group around the campfire. Not to Chris. Not even to Stephanie, who was celebrating her strong hiking toward the front of the group. “One day at a time,” I told myself. “One down. Seven to go. Here comes a test of will power.”
This “vacation” would have baffled my Chicago family. My grandparents, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, did not take vacations; between the 1920s and 1940s. They ran little neighborhood stores on the immigrant West Side of Chicago, open 6 am to midnight every day of the year except the holy day Yom Kippur. My parents, college educated and beneficiaries of post-World War II prosperity, but still cautious children of the Depression, took modest family vacations at beach cottages and boarding houses on the shores of Lake Michigan, driving trips to motels in Miami Beach and Washington DC, and once, extravagantly, a family air flight to Los Angeles. I have a picture of my young parents rowing an oar boat on their Colorado honeymoon, fit and relaxed. But for my ancestors, there had been no endurance tests backpacking in the mountains for recreation, nothing Xtreme in those days.
Stephanie and I, enjoying professional incomes and baby boomer prosperity, took family vacations at our Sonoma County ranch, comfortable Lake Tahoe rental homes and resorts, Manhattan hotels, and Parisian apartments. Once our daughter Julia was in high school, around 2000, we launched into adventure vacations. We both had sedentary office jobs requiring intense brainwork with heavy responsibility. I had long work hours, 24/7 electronic communications with my office, and unrelenting high stress on the job. A “vacation” for us meant escaping to the uncomplicated magnificent outdoors, overcoming strenuous physical trials, and enjoying a restaurant meal and hotel bed at day’s end. We shared our generation’s preoccupations with health and fitness, crammed into intense work lives, with vacations that promoted these strenuous and virtuous objectives.
We were ready consumers in an adventure industry for people who toiled and excelled at their leisure pleasures. Our preference was hiking mountains and exploring deserts, sometimes with commercial expeditions and lavish accommodations. We had friends who did variations under water, on water, on snow, on roads, in the air, in remoter deserts and on taller mountains. At the higher-end you could arrange for a Tuscany biking tour with villa accommodations, a river rafting excursion through the Grand Canyon, a walking tour in Patagonia, or, literally highest, a Himalayan trekking expedition. We enjoyed these luxurious challenges too.
On this Sierra excursion, the “luxury” was the TSX guidance through the backcountry. But you still had to propel yourself over those mountains. Each day we rose with the sun, ate breakfast, packed our gear, and hit the trail by 7:30. We hiked about ten miles a day. There were daily climbs of 1,500 to 3,000 feet, and corresponding descents. We hiked at elevations of 8,000 to 14,000 feet. We’d reach our new campsite in the late afternoon, pitch tents, pump filtered water, eat dinner, and do “Thorns and Roses.” We’d be asleep by 10.
I might have relished this Spartan regimen: hike, fuel, rest, and prepare to hike again. I might have savored the simple mission – reach the day’s destination and enjoy the journey. Instead, it was a daily grind, a slog up and down, up and down, day after day, each day seeming longer, higher, and steeper than the last. Where was my reliable body?
I still was hanging in there at day four, described on the TSX Website as “intense uphill.” The trail took us up, up, and up to Colby Pass, 12,000 feet, higher than I had gone before. The climb was over 2,000 feet. The final leg of the trail was a series of brutal short switchbacks, straight up it seemed, over huge stone steps and steep slippery loose granite. We towered over austere Colby Lake, the previous night’s campsite, and lush Big Wet Meadow below the lake. We were above the timberline, glaciers, and surrounding Sierra peaks. I was deep in the solitary mountain backcountry, high in the granite, under a crystalline blue sky. It was just what I had signed up for. If only I could have enjoyed it.
I trudged up the dry, dusty trail, one tiny laborious step after another, wondering why, at my age, 67, I was subjecting myself to this ordeal. My backpack felt like a load of cement, and my neck was on fire. It was morning, but the Sierra sun already was blazing. I had to stop every five minutes to suck in oxygen, calm my racing heart, and gulp water. Everyone in our group had pulled ahead, including Chris who left me with assurance that I’d make it on my own.
I finally crept atop the pass, where our entire group was waiting, packs off and relaxed. They cheered my arrival. I smiled weakly and doffed my cap, like a modest young baseball player who hit a homer, and they laughed. I was triumphant.
But by the time I’d removed my backpack, grabbed a power bar, and begun surveying the new mountain ranges ahead, the others were slinging on their packs. And then they were gone, on to the 4,000-foot descent to the Kern Kaweah River. Suddenly alone on the windy pass, a laggard again, I had a terrible realization: the weaker and slower you hike, the less rest you receive at the stops. But no one cared. Just move along.
At a rest break after Colby Pass, Chris announced that I would take the lead crossing a large high meadow en route to our steep descent that afternoon. I was surprised by this assignment to lead. I wondered if it was some kind of TSX exercise in leadership and positive attitude.
I felt a flash of embarrassment. Half a year earlier, I had retired from a top management position with the government agency that administered the California court system. I had years of leadership challenges, when I had been tested daily by my relentless boss, ambitious management team, adventurous line employees, and demanding clients, the California courts. I had given endless attention to fostering employee motivation. Why was this 33-year-old hiking guide giving me a leadership opportunity on this mountain trail? To build more character in my late 60s?
Apparently so, and it worked. Indeed, I was flattered by this vote of confidence from Chris. I welcomed the challenge. I was determined to do a good job leading. Do right by our group. Impress Chris.
I bounded to the front and set a rapid pace across that meadow. By following the stone cairns that marked the route, I kept us on the trail, which periodically disappeared at granite slabs and stream crossings. As we approached the descent, Chris returned up front to guide the way. He complimented my lead across the meadow, and he invited me to remain at the front to help select the lunch location. I suspected he just wanted me to step up my snail’s pace from the climb up Colby Pass, but I rejected the suspicion. Instead, I beamed at his invitation to continued leadership.
Of course, pride goes before a fall, specifically three falls. The trail down was steep, with deep loose granite. Chris had warned us, but my balance failed as my mind wandered back to leading. Suddenly I was on my butt, twice.
The third fall was more serious than embarrassing. At the end of the day a mountain thunderstorm opened on us. We were crossing a stream on wet rocks as globs of cold water began pouring down. Everyone scurried for raingear. From years of law practice, my personal rule for being rushed is to slow down and search for lurking danger. As people yelled conflicting directions for hurrying across the stream, I got caught up in the panic. Midstream, both feet slipped off the wet rocks. I landed ankle deep in water. For the next two days, I hiked in wet boots.
I did not take the lead again in the TSX challenge. I did not even volunteer for camp chores like filtering water or dicing vegetables. I felt shame watching others contribute to our team effort to cross these mountains, but I was too tired to join them. For the remainder of the trip I focused on my hiking and rested whenever possible. I intended to succeed with the TSX Challenge, or at least survive it. Against all my inclinations, I decided to do the minimum, and do it as a follower.
At noon on day five we reached the John Muir Trail, our route south to Mt. Whitney. There we met a couple hiking north to Yosemite. They faced 200 miles of mountains, many high passes, over 40,000 feet of ascent. They looked to be in their late 50s. They were confident as they described their journey and inquired about ours. Their clothes were clean and packs trim. They checked their map with authority. They surely would complete the John Muir Trail. I wondered, “Could Stephanie and I do that?”
Stephanie, 13 years younger than me, turned out to be the stronger hiker, much stronger. In recent years, I had often praised Stephanie as the stronger hiker. But I was just being gracious. I had not actually believed it.
The TSX Challenge revealed all. Day after day Stephanie skipped to the front of the group with the lead guide, the racehorse teenage boys, the strong young ladies, and the triathlete Dale. When I would arrive as the last hiker to a meeting point, she’d give me a warm welcome, and then she’d gambol ahead with the departing group. She wanted to maintain her comfortable pace, which was way faster than me, and of course I agreed. But I was mortified to be so eclipsed on the trail by my younger wife.
When Stephanie and I married in 1985, I was 41 and she was 28. I was establishing myself as a writer, with a first book published and a second in the works, and then I flourished in a new career as an attorney. Stephanie was young, lovely, and exuberant, smart and ambitious, searching for her future. I felt as if I had raided forbidden territory, made off with a young princess, shucked off a decade, and inhabited an ageless body in which I relived my 20s with the wisdom of my 30s. That gulf of 13 years from my young wife inspired me. I thought, “I can do anything.”
Hiking in those early years of our marriage – day hiking – I still felt invincible, another gift from growing up in the optimistic Fifties and Sixties, when I recognized no limits. In summer 1988, eight months after our daughter Julia was born, we hiked in Yosemite along the Panoramic Trail from Glacier Point to the Valley floor, one of the great routes for views of waterfalls and Half Dome. I carried Julia the entire way in a backpack, seven miles and 3,200 feet, including the steep wet stone steps of the Mist Trail along Vernal Falls. I never felt the altitude, the weight, or the distance as I brought my daughter down safely and celebrated my hiking prowess.
The 13 year gap between our ages seemed to evaporate in the two decades after Julia was born. Stephanie launched herself as a clinical psychologist. We were on equal footing, partners, as we raised our child, built professional careers, bought and sold homes, and took tame family vacations. Stephanie, now accomplished too, was at the top of her career as a psychologist. While I was at a loss what to do in retirement, Stephanie was running at full tilt in her professional life. And then came the grueling TSX expedition, the Xtreme Challenge. For the first time, I wondered whether I could keep up with her. She could conquer the John Muir Trail. But could I?
I was distressed watching our group adjust to my limitations. We climbed over 21,000 feet in 8 days, and I struggled all the way. I worried about others grumbling that I slowed everyone, that reaching planned campsites depended on my daily stamina. I was relieved to see nothing but enthusiasm for my battle to keep up, to get there, but I never stopped wondering. It was humiliating. And worse, I had to handle it with grace.
Chris helped, redistributing weight out from my backpack. On day one he removed a bag of tomatoes in the afternoon. Okay. On day two I realized, with relief and apprehension, that he lightened my load by leaving my bear canister empty of our food stores. When I straggled on day five, my tent went to a teenage boy and sandals to Stephanie. To my consternation, Chris appeared on the next leg of the trail carrying my sleeping bag by hand, since there was no space for more freight on his overloaded backpack. With pounds removed, I sped ahead. But watching others carrying my gear was intolerable. At the next break, I retrieved my things and resumed plodding along with the heavier load.
By day five, I had not complained or explained or blamed again. I was just silently gutting my way through the distances and climbs at my own resolute pace.
That’s when Chris and I made an arrangement. He would leave me alone on the trail, with directions for meeting ahead. I would maintain a steady pace, with as few rest stops as possible. Chris could move ahead to his leadership responsibilities, and I could hike in tranquility, alone with my thoughts, able to soak in the mountain vistas without a sweep on my heels. That solitary hiking was the highlight of my trip.
That’s when I first thought of this essay. Walking alone, trying to keep up my pace as I had promised Chris, my mind wandered. I realized this expedition across the Sierra was an extraordinary experience. Over forty years after the Sixties, I was being tested on my convictions that I could do anything, do it all, and not allow the usual limits of impracticality to block me. It was an idea I had formed in 1966, age 22, when I decided to move cross country from Chicago to Berkeley, obtain a Ph.D. degree in history, and build a new life in California. These were among many other Sixties challenges I encountered, like stop the Vietnam War and achieve civil rights equality. Later, after the Sixties, the challenges were more personal than world changing: write those books on chicken ranchers, become a lawyer, and reach top management in my court administration agency. And, oh yes, win that young woman, my former student, Stephanie. I did not know how this Mt. Whitney challenge would end, but it certainly would be a worthy subject for writing.
Meanwhile, I silently celebrated my superior health throughout this TSX Challenge, with no other problem than exhaustion. The two young men guides and the two teenage boys were invulnerable hiking machines, my lost younger self. But the two young women, who turned out to be bikini competition body-builders – Amazon hard bodies who were formidable even for my fit wife – suffered aching knees, and they hobbled behind me with lightened packs for several days. And the other guys were afflicted with headaches and altitude sickness, diarrhea and constipation, joint problems and blisters. It all emerged as “thorns” in the evening reports, while I maintained my no-complaints ethic. By my cheery accounts at the day’s end campfires, I was gliding along, only with “roses.”
One evening toward the end of our journey, in place of “Thorns and Roses” Chris went around the campfire and gave each member a trail name. He called Stephanie “Mountain Hare,” for her hiking speed and her hiking hair that had become an unruly mop over a week on the trail. “Funny,” I thought.
He named me “Tortoise,” her companion, for my slow steady pace, no complaining, and wisdom about how to complete the challenge.
Tortoise and the Hare! A joke? On me? My sense of humor was long gone.
And my “wisdom?” The TSX expedition was the most humbling week of my life. My body betrayed me. I could not lead or even keep up. I just grit my teeth and got there. Fifties edge? None. Sixties edge? None. Insight with age? None. Nobility with age? None. At 67, wisdom was a sorry consolation prize for the lost strength and spring of youth. I did not like being the Tortoise.
* * *
Mt. Whitney! I did reach the summit, as did everyone in our group. By then I had learned that some hikers on previous TSX expeditions had skipped the Whitney ascent, and I told myself that I could too. But once the high mountain was in sight, with its fearsome jagged ridges, I knew I was going to the top. For better and for worse, as I told Chris on day one, I am a finisher.
That morning, I set out an hour early, at 6 am, for the five mile hike up from Guitar Lake at 12,000 feet. It was a 2,500-foot climb, all granite, steep and forbidding. Halfway up, near the Packs Rest junction, our group caught up and passed me. That’s when I began experiencing vertigo. Vistas tilted, and I had to stop looking at the shimmering peaks below. The final two miles from Packs Rest were punishing: the high altitude, the steep climb, the rocky trail, the dizzying views. I needed five hours to reach the summit, creeping along at a mile an hour. I arrived last.
Stephanie was waiting on the trail just before the summit. She was crying for me as I hobbled in.
When I reached the top, we hugged. Dale and I hugged. Chris shook my hand and congratulated me on my mental toughness. It was his highest compliment, I like to think. For Chris, I was a success.
I was grateful for this moment. We were at the peak of the contiguous United States. Majestic views of the Sierra chain stretched far out across the south, the north, and the west, with the great Owens Valley spread below to the east. Some 30 people were at the summit. They all appeared like a glowing hardy elite species of humanity. I was thrilled to be among them.
We had lunch, snapped pictures, and signed the guest book at the summit. As we prepared to depart, Stephanie asked, “Will you come up here again?”
Standing there on top of Mt. Whitney, atop California, I had met the Trans Sierra Xtreme Challenge. But I arrived at the summit with new understanding, with wisdom. There would be no next Whitney climb. I had met my limits, the limits of age. There would be no backpacking trip across the John Muir Trail, 211 miles from Mt. Whitney to Yosemite. Stephanie would have to do it without me.
“No,” I replied. “I won’t be back.” Tears began dropping down my cheeks.
I looked out a final time. Then I turned down the trail.