Last Tuesday Julie and I climbed the Grand Mogul, the peak that rises from the far end of Redfish Lake. It’s a loose pile of decomposing granite boulders that tops out at 9,733 feet. We won’t climb it again.
At least that’s what my 69-year-old knees and recently matured sense of caution are insisting at the moment.
We didn’t take the shuttle across the lake because of coronavirus fears. Instead, we took mountain bikes up the Redfish Ridge Trail, and stashed them in the bushes when we reached the lake’s south moraine. We followed the moraine into the steep valley at the base of the peak. Once there, we had less than a mile to go, but there were two thousand vertical feet in that distance. It’s steeper than it sounds.
Also, our March 31 earthquake had rearranged the big rocks we used to climb over and around and through to get to the top. Remembered safe passages ended in blank vertical walls of freshly-broken granite. We had the unsettling experience of seeing empty air where memory told us we had once walked.
I’m old enough to know memory can be unreliable, and, of course, old enough to have an unreliable memory. Even though I’ve spent most of my life climbing around the Sawtooths, they seldom have stayed the same mountains from one trip to another. Prior destinations have turned into unfamiliar territory, even when I’m returning to them for the third or fourth or fiftieth time. Either I’ve missed something during earlier visits, or I’ve become a different person placing importance on different things, or the rocks have softened and flowed into odd animal shapes that might or might not move when you’re not looking.
Anyone who has spent time in mountains knows that they become three-dimensional Rorschach tests, and what you see there reflects who you are more than what’s physically in front of you. Not many people have ever climbed the same Grand Mogul twice, and that includes the person who climbed it last Tuesday and the person of the same name who climbed it years ago.
There isn’t a lot of continuity between who we were, who we are, and who we will become. If names reflected our real identities, we’d all need a new one every morning.
There also isn’t much continuity between one person’s consciousness and another’s. It takes years of effort and good will and many, many deep conversations just for two people to climb one mountain.
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The last time Julie and I climbed the Grand Mogul, we were with Sarah, her youngest sister, Sarah’s fiancé, and our dog Loki. It was nineteen years ago, long enough that Sarah, then an undergraduate, now is a PhD voice therapist in Portland, Oregon. She and her fiancé have been married and divorced. Loki ended up with too many dog years and is buried under a tree in our back yard.
The Grand Mogul had been five different mountains on that long-ago day, but four of them were easier than the one Julie and I climbed last Tuesday. (Loki had acrophobia and had crept on his belly all the way up and all the way down. The trip had been his last session of exposure therapy.)
Nineteen years ago, there hadn’t been a recent earthquake, and we hadn’t had to climb up long slopes of shaky rocks, all of them covered with marble-sized bits of crumbling granite. Stable-looking footholds hadn’t given way when we stepped on them, and our way up hadn’t been repeatedly blocked by near-vertical headwalls. We hadn’t spent much time feeling our mortality.
This time, mortality was a factor. We had to drop down and traverse several times, searching for a chute that looked familiar. Along the way, we crept below house-sized blocks of stone with claw marks on their undersides, carved there when the earthquake had moved their balance points six or eight feet toward open air. We followed the mountain around to a route we thought we remembered, but instead of finding it, we looked over a boulder’s edge straight down at Redfish Creek, nearly three thousand feet below.
Julie turned to me and said she was happy to stay where she was while I found a way to the top. If I really wanted to go, she said. If I thought I could make it, she said. If I thought I could make it back without dying, she said.
“We’re only two hundred feet from the summit,” I said.
“Two hundred?” she asked.
“Two hundred vertical,” I said.
“I’ll wait,” she said, and stepped under a rock overhang that would protect her from anything loose I kicked down from above.
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I had remembered the Grand Mogul as a walk-up. I was wearing running shoes because they’re lighter and easier on my feet than my old leather hiking boots. They also fit into the pedals on my mountain bike. They don’t grip as well, is the problem.
As I climbed, the terrain took on a new hint of lethality. Experienced climbers know that if one person in a group starts thinking about falling, little fear pheromones start moving back and forth between bodies, amplifying as they go. Julie and I had just given each other big doses of fear. I began to wonder how I’d made it to the summit before, and why I’d wanted to return. Several times on the way up, I stopped, dropped back down, and started up again, reaching for rocks that wouldn’t move when I grabbed them.
In fifteen minutes or so, I was on the top, which happily looked the same as I remembered it. A small flat area allows standing and looking around without feeling giddy. To one side, a short spire marks the real summit of the mountain. Its top is marked by a patch of red lichen.
I reached up and touched the lichen for luck. I had, as we say, summited. Then I turned and saw the lake, and the lodge at its other end, and cars in its parking lot. Boats were leaving wakes in the dark water. Everything looked a very long way off, as if I was watching the world through the wrong end of a telescope, and for the last time. It is possible to miss this world while you’re still in it.
The afternoon was warm and windless. If Julie had come with me, I would have stayed longer and taken some deep breaths and thought through all the steps I’d take on the way to safe ground. The day would have lost some of its intensity, and that would have been a good thing. But I was worried about taking too long.
I took too long. I got rimrocked twice. I had to sit down and breathe, mostly to rest but partly to calm down. Once, facing climbing back up and starting again, I crawled through the tight darkness under a boulder, not knowing if I could squeeze through to the light on the other side, or if there was any way down if I did.
I made it through, and finally found the handholds and footholds that allowed passage down a crucial thirty-foot drop. When I got down to a place where I hoped Julie could hear me, I yelled as loud as I could. She yelled back. Fear and relief were in her voice.
“You miss me?” I asked when I finally stepped onto her perch under the overhang. It was an attempt to lighten the mood, but it didn’t go over well.
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We arrived home eleven hours after we had started out. We were footsore and dehydrated, but happy. We were safe. We were alive. There was leftover curry in the refrigerator. I fell asleep on the couch while Julie showered. I assume she fell asleep while I showered. We heated the curry in the microwave, gobbled it down, slept for ten hours, and didn’t accomplish a whole lot the next day or the day after that.
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The Grand Mogul looks solid and eternal when it’s a dark silhouette against the sunset, especially if you’re sitting in a soft chair on the porch at the Redfish Lake Lodge, drinking a margarita and waiting to be ushered to a table in the restaurant. That was how our climbing day would have ended in a year that lacked a pandemic.
The Grand Mogul is not solid. It’s not eternal. In fact, within a short stretch of geological time it will be shaken a few hundred feet shorter by a major shift in the Sawtooth Fault, which cuts loose every six thousand years or so. Long term, the Mogul’s boulders will be pried into sand by frost and carried by wind and rain into Redfish Lake, which will become a large grassy meadow, full of strange animals that have filled the vacant ecological niches left by the Anthropocene. We will be in some other geological era by then.
Only in comparison to a human lifetime is the Grand Mogul solid and eternal. It’s not good news for a sixty-nine-year-old human that it’s rotting and falling apart the way it is.
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By yesterday, Julie and I had recovered enough from Tuesday that we hiked partway up the side of McGown Peak above Stanley Lake. There are some big slickrock mounds up there, and you can climb up on one of the bigger ones and have lunch while you look down at the lake. Stanley Lake isn’t as big as Redfish, but it’s a nice view. If you sit there thinking about geological time and mortality, they remain comfortably in the abstract. You can talk about mountains as if they don’t want to kill you. You can talk about being scared without getting scared.
Julie: “Are you thinking terrible things about me because I chickened out and didn’t make it all the way up the Grand Mogul?”
Me: “No. Of course not. I’m thinking that I shouldn’t climbed on up. Standing on top wasn’t exactly a moment of triumph. I couldn’t see myself as a brave mountain climber with the whole world beneath his running shoes. All I could see was a tired and frightened old man, worrying about you worrying that I’d slipped and fallen into Redfish Creek.”
Julie: “It feels pretty helpless when you’ve been sitting in one place for too long, waiting for someone who’s climbed on up. You yell, and they don’t answer. You yell again, and they don’t answer. I was just starting up to find you—what was left of you—when I finally heard you. The last thing I’ll ever do is sit and wait like that again.”
Me: “Good to know. Next time it won’t be so lonely at the top.”
Julie: “Unless it’s the top of the Grand Mogul.”
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We really do talk like that. We talked like that for quite some time up above Stanley Lake, until it became clear to us that we were still alive, and even though living wasn’t a safe thing to do in the mountains or anywhere else, we were still willing to give it a go, at least for the brief bit of geological time that we had goes to give.