Without further ado, here is my account. Sarah vs the Volcano, if you will.
The Forest
Like the swim in the triathlon, the forest is best appreciated in hindsight. Clear, well-maintained trail, gorgeous little clearings filled with purpley-blue wildflowers, the relative luxury of an OUTHOUSE(!) and shade from the abundant sunshine that greeted us as we set out around 9:30 in the morning. Our rather late start was a bone of some contention - we had been warned by several volcano veterans that the rocks (more about THEM later) suck up and spit back out lots of heat in the afternoon. Many climbers set out before dawn to get off the rocks before mid-late afternoon. We, however, opted to take the time to eat omelets at the hotel before getting underway.
Anyway, the forest was a nice warm-up. Our best pre-hike insights came, to our collective chagrin, from the blog of a 10-year old kid. Said wunderkind promised us a series of never-ending switchbacks, which was the one part of the hike I thought was a little overestimated. Switchbacks, sure, but of quite manageable duration and slope. Although, maybe my perception of this portion of the hike was affected by my dread of the...
Rocks
The forest is to the triathlon swim as the rocks are to, clearly, the bike. It seems like you're out there forever, your leg muscles complain if you move and complain if you don't, but at least there's a lot to look at. It took six hours for our entire group to make it to the crater rim, and I'd guess that three and a half of them were on the rocks. They are endless. Pictures don't do justice, but...
You might be able to see a couple of sticks poking up through the rocks. Yeah, that's the trail. As it were. The lovely, clear trail of the forest quickly degenerated into a rambling search through and around, with the only constant being up, up, up. The challenge of staying more or less on course had one major positive effect: it gave me something to think about other than how much farther we had to go. Occasionally we would get fleeting glimpses of the crater rim high above us.We stopped several times to regroup, snack and rest our quickly tiring legs. The group was splintering a bit at this point - of the six of us, two were feeling far feistier and consistently led the way. The remaining four of us (yeah, which group did you THINK I was in?) muddled along as best we could. There were some lovely moments - the higher we got, the more the vistas across the forests and rivers surrounding the mountain opened up, misted over somewhat by the smoke from fires in Oregon and elsewhere in the Cascade range. Several times, as we paused along one rocky ridge or another, a breeze from higher on the mountain skimmed across our sweaty, heated selves, offering us a welcome moment of cooling relief.
About two-thirds of the way up the rocks, I started to seriously falter for the first time. I don't know where it was, exactly, but I do know that we were somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 feet, which is just about my threshold for the early effects of high altitude. My symptoms are pretty predictable - I lose my appetite, feel a little nauseous, and, most frustratingly, get nasty, awful mood swings. I cope pretty well with the first two by now - force myself to eat when I know my body needs it, which helps with the nausea a bit. But the third one, the mood swings? I haven't found a strategy for that yet. How do you tell your own self that you're just being irrational when your own self tells you that you are, in fact, quite rational at the moment, thank you very much? More about that later.
We lunched on the rocks, exchanging a few words with the other latecomers creeping up the mountainside along with us. I watched a mountain-y grasshopper hang out on the rock next to me, which was about the wildlife highlight of the hike. Lunch taught me that beef jerky is very, very agreeable to my high-altitude system. Yum.
After we ate, off we went again, edging closer to the scree that we could now see above us most of the time. We knew from our online guide that we would climb 1,000 feet through the scree. We didn't know that it would take us the better part of an hour and a half.
The Scree
Ah, the scree. There are no words. At this point, any concept of a marked trail dwindled to nothing more than the indistinct footsteps of earlier climbers and, farther ahead, the snaking trail of ant-sized people closer to the top. Very soon after we began this phase, I was reduced to counting steps. 30 steps, stop and rest. 40 steps, stop and rest. 50, 60, 70, 80 steps, stop and rest. Start again at 30, repeat pattern. It was mind-numbing, exhausting, and most of all discouraging to look up at each rest to see that the rim was no closer, the people standing at the top no larger. 40 steps. Stop. Look around. Envy the birds gliding through air currents off the mountainside below us.
I stopped, at one point. Stopped to exchange a few words with a guy I recognized from the way up, now headed down. He had thrown in the towel before reaching the crater, and was now on his speedy and glorious descent. He had energy. He could string three or four or ten words together without gasping for breath. He had a friend taking pictures up at the top. That didn't sound so bad. I started to think... maybe I was just slowing the group down. Maybe, if I kept slogging up, I would take so long that I would actually cause us to be out on the trail after sunset, hiking through the forest in the dark, with no headlamps. And probably there would be bears. Or at least maybe bats. Probably, no, most likely, it would be better for everyone if I just stopped, for good, by that nice rock up there. That rock where, just now, Pat was waiting for me, where there was probably even a sliver of shade for me to rest in.
This sounded like a good plan to me, so when I got to the aforementioned rock, I said as much to Pat. Who said, "I really think you can make it up there. We'll do it together. Want to just do 10 steps at a time? Look, here comes C... we can hike up with her." Which, post-hike and with my sea-level even temperament restored, just proves again that I have the best husband ever. But at the time, I'm not proud to say, made me burst into tears. Angry, frustrated tears. Which my kind, patient husband (does anyone else sense that I'm STILL digging myself out of a hole for this one?) lovingly dried and comforted away. And then we started walking, and apparently I was still tired and angry, because after about 5 steps, I was crying again. Now I was hiking and crying. Talk about pitiful. So, in the spirit of for-better-or-for-worse, my husband heard me sniffling, stopped, slip-slid his way back down to me, and executed the dry-and-comfort maneuver a second time. C caught up at this point and reassured me that she cries about stuff all the time and feels dumb about it, so I shouldn't worry. Which of course made me all weepy again.
But. But, but, but. The point here is that ultimately I did start moving forward, uphill, again. 10 steps at a time. 5 steps behind my husband, using the familiar heels of his hiking boots as my focus, placing my feet just where his had been a moment before. Eventually, I looked up to see almost life-sized people looming above me. Familiar people - people we began the day with. People who began encouraging us as soon as we were within hearing range, that we were almost there, that we wouldn't believe the views when we got up top. 10 steps. Rest. A final glance up at those so-close faces, a quick set of last steps, and we were there.
The Rim
Okay. So I may have expressed my relief and awe upon reaching the rim in a less than family-friendly manner. Apparently, for my altitude and exhaustion-addled brain, "Holy shit" is an appropriate (THE appropriate?) exclamation for the growing, straining, shifting scene within this volcano. Sarah vs. the Volcano, indeed. They were right, all those annoyingly cheerful descenders, promising that "it's worth it, when you get up there."
To be fair, though, the first thing I did was sit my tired glutes down on that crater and attach myself to my orange Gatorade. I sat there for quite some time, just drinking my drink and not standing on my legs. Luxury changes quickly with circumstances, I've found in the past. Earlier in the summer, after three days hiking through the North Cascades with no more advanced facilities than pit toilets (for the non-hikers, picture the inside of a Port-a-Potty without any of the outside walls or roof or other privacy-enhancing features. Also, more spiders and mosquitoes.), a straight-up outhouse with a DOOR and a ROOF almost made me glance around for the person with the towels and the tip jar. On that crater rim, luxury tasted like lukewarm orange and radiated through quads and calves and toes.
We didn't stay long up at the top. Long enough to listen to the constant cascading rumble of rocks rolling down the inside of the crater. Long enough to watch the clouds break the late afternoon sunshine into diffuse rays and golden glow. Long enough to snap some pictures of ourselves and our surroundings. Then, down we went.
Wrap-Up
Compared to up, down was a piece of cake. Don't get me wrong - it still took us 3 hours to make it back to the car, and with tired legs and gravity on our side for once, we were all more prone to slips and slides and falls. But we moved along at a good clip; skidding our way down through the scree, winding and climbing new paths down through miles of rocks, and finally reaching the blissful predictability of the forest path.
In the end, I'm glad I went. As I said before, I didn't "race" this summer. So this was sort of my event; my big test to push past what I thought I could do, beyond even what I wanted to do. The sweetness and the disappointment here, but also maybe the moral of the story, is that if I had been on my own, if this had been a triathlon with no help offered or accepted, I would have come down with no knowledge of how that crater looked or felt. I owe that success to my husband, who refused to let my mind or my moods stop me from doing what HE was sure my body could do.
And that's okay with me. What sweeter lesson to learn, than that all that talk about interdependence is really true. So, Pat, thank you. Thanks for being the feet in front of mine when I couldn't look up to the path ahead. I couldn't be luckier.
I stopped, at one point. Stopped to exchange a few words with a guy I recognized from the way up, now headed down. He had thrown in the towel before reaching the crater, and was now on his speedy and glorious descent. He had energy. He could string three or four or ten words together without gasping for breath. He had a friend taking pictures up at the top. That didn't sound so bad. I started to think... maybe I was just slowing the group down. Maybe, if I kept slogging up, I would take so long that I would actually cause us to be out on the trail after sunset, hiking through the forest in the dark, with no headlamps. And probably there would be bears. Or at least maybe bats. Probably, no, most likely, it would be better for everyone if I just stopped, for good, by that nice rock up there. That rock where, just now, Pat was waiting for me, where there was probably even a sliver of shade for me to rest in.This sounded like a good plan to me, so when I got to the aforementioned rock, I said as much to Pat. Who said, "I really think you can make it up there. We'll do it together. Want to just do 10 steps at a time? Look, here comes C... we can hike up with her." Which, post-hike and with my sea-level even temperament restored, just proves again that I have the best husband ever. But at the time, I'm not proud to say, made me burst into tears. Angry, frustrated tears. Which my kind, patient husband (does anyone else sense that I'm STILL digging myself out of a hole for this one?) lovingly dried and comforted away. And then we started walking, and apparently I was still tired and angry, because after about 5 steps, I was crying again. Now I was hiking and crying. Talk about pitiful. So, in the spirit of for-better-or-for-worse, my husband heard me sniffling, stopped, slip-slid his way back down to me, and executed the dry-and-comfort maneuver a second time. C caught up at this point and reassured me that she cries about stuff all the time and feels dumb about it, so I shouldn't worry. Which of course made me all weepy again.
But. But, but, but. The point here is that ultimately I did start moving forward, uphill, again. 10 steps at a time. 5 steps behind my husband, using the familiar heels of his hiking boots as my focus, placing my feet just where his had been a moment before. Eventually, I looked up to see almost life-sized people looming above me. Familiar people - people we began the day with. People who began encouraging us as soon as we were within hearing range, that we were almost there, that we wouldn't believe the views when we got up top. 10 steps. Rest. A final glance up at those so-close faces, a quick set of last steps, and we were there.
The Rim
Okay. So I may have expressed my relief and awe upon reaching the rim in a less than family-friendly manner. Apparently, for my altitude and exhaustion-addled brain, "Holy shit" is an appropriate (THE appropriate?) exclamation for the growing, straining, shifting scene within this volcano. Sarah vs. the Volcano, indeed. They were right, all those annoyingly cheerful descenders, promising that "it's worth it, when you get up there."
To be fair, though, the first thing I did was sit my tired glutes down on that crater and attach myself to my orange Gatorade. I sat there for quite some time, just drinking my drink and not standing on my legs. Luxury changes quickly with circumstances, I've found in the past. Earlier in the summer, after three days hiking through the North Cascades with no more advanced facilities than pit toilets (for the non-hikers, picture the inside of a Port-a-Potty without any of the outside walls or roof or other privacy-enhancing features. Also, more spiders and mosquitoes.), a straight-up outhouse with a DOOR and a ROOF almost made me glance around for the person with the towels and the tip jar. On that crater rim, luxury tasted like lukewarm orange and radiated through quads and calves and toes.
We didn't stay long up at the top. Long enough to listen to the constant cascading rumble of rocks rolling down the inside of the crater. Long enough to watch the clouds break the late afternoon sunshine into diffuse rays and golden glow. Long enough to snap some pictures of ourselves and our surroundings. Then, down we went.
Wrap-UpCompared to up, down was a piece of cake. Don't get me wrong - it still took us 3 hours to make it back to the car, and with tired legs and gravity on our side for once, we were all more prone to slips and slides and falls. But we moved along at a good clip; skidding our way down through the scree, winding and climbing new paths down through miles of rocks, and finally reaching the blissful predictability of the forest path.
In the end, I'm glad I went. As I said before, I didn't "race" this summer. So this was sort of my event; my big test to push past what I thought I could do, beyond even what I wanted to do. The sweetness and the disappointment here, but also maybe the moral of the story, is that if I had been on my own, if this had been a triathlon with no help offered or accepted, I would have come down with no knowledge of how that crater looked or felt. I owe that success to my husband, who refused to let my mind or my moods stop me from doing what HE was sure my body could do.
And that's okay with me. What sweeter lesson to learn, than that all that talk about interdependence is really true. So, Pat, thank you. Thanks for being the feet in front of mine when I couldn't look up to the path ahead. I couldn't be luckier.
2 comments:
You found a keeper, it sounds like. You're amazing. So glad you know what the volcano looks like.
Sarah, 1. Volcano, 0.
You've been selected to receive a blog award! Check my latest post at writesoftly.blogspot.com for details. And thank you for the experiences you share with such honesty and clarity.
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