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06/04/2023

When I was 13, I found myself sliding down Mount Shasta headfirst, on my back. I had never been in this position before and realized I had no idea how to get myself out of it. I looked to my right and saw a rocky ridge getting farther and farther away from me as I gained speed down the steep snow slope. I looked up, and the sky was cloudless, and the sun beat down hard on the snow; and although it felt good to get some snow down my back, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. Almost instinctively, I dug an ice ax into the snow, flipped myself around, and stood up with a huge smile. “Nice job,” said the guide who had been teaching me how to self-arrest.

Four years later at age 17, I was back on Mount Shasta. I looked up at the Hotlum Glacier, the largest in California, and took in the maze of crevasses and ice cliffs – things I had only ever seen in magazines and on the posters on my wall. Every day for a week, I went up onto the glacier with a guided group and built snow anchors, rigged rescue systems, and learned how to travel on the glacier. 

On the evening of the fourth night, our group’s lead guide, Dave, hiked up to a moraine, a rocky ridge that divided the Hotlum and Whitney glaciers. I remember looking up at him from camp and seeing the silhouette of his pot belly with the sunset in the background as he stared up at the mountain, examining things I didn’t even understand to decide whether we could summit the mountain as we planned. 

Dave and the other guide, also named Dave, circled us up around the stove that night to bring us a proposition. “The glacier is completely dry,” said lead guide Dave. “There’s no snow on it at all, just the bare ice that's been there since the ice age all the way up to the bergschrund where the glacier ends. It’s impassable.” 

My heart sank a little when he said this. Since my first trip to Shasta, I had become increasingly obsessed with climbing mountains. As soon as I got my driver’s license the day after my 16th birthday, I packed a day pack and a couple of bags of freeze-dried food and drove six hours from my home in Lake Tahoe to Mt. Langley in the Eastern Sierras, my first 14er. Over the next year and a half leading up to my second trip to Shasta, I climbed any high-altitude peak I decided I could reasonably solo. Some of the climbs were mellow, and some I didn’t dare tell my mom about for fear she wouldn’t let me go back out to the mountains when she heard what I was really getting up to. Shasta had stayed in the back of my mind the entire time. All the mountains I had been climbing were rock climbs, and Shasta was unique in that it was completely covered in snow and ice. In my mind, climbing a mountain like that was a completely different game.

“So here are our two options,” said Dave. “Either we go for the summit by scrambling up the ridge between the Hotlum and Whitney glaciers, or we get as high as we can on the glacier tomorrow, find an ice cliff, and do some ice climbing. Just know if we decide to summit, it won’t be a fun climb. We’ll be slogging up loose rock the whole time.” Two friends I had made on the trip immediately said they didn’t care much about the summit anyway. Another person in the group didn’t have an opinion, so it was up to me to decide what I wanted to do. 

“Let’s go ice climbing tomorrow,” I said. “I’m here to learn anyway, not just tag a summit.” I was dismayed to give up on the summit, but I knew ultimately I was making the right choice.

The next day, we walked up to the glacier, roped up, and set off through the maze of drainages up towards the ice cliffs on the upper glacier. We stopped for lunch when we reached 12,000 feet and heard a massive crash of rocks falling on the lower glacier. On the way down, I saw a boulder the size of a small cabin sliding slowly down the glacier a few hundred feet away. “That wasn’t there before!” exclaimed one of the Daves. It opened my eyes to how mountains are an incredibly dynamic environment and far less calm and stoic than they seem from afar.

Another two years later, I had gotten into college, dropped out after a year, and decided to join a hotshot wildland fire crew to challenge myself. I spent half a year training and went through two weeks of “criticals,” a hotshot crew’s version of boot camp, which turned out to be miles of steep hiking, running faster than I thought I could run, doing hundreds or maybe thousands of pushups, pullups, and situps, and getting yelled at for not being good enough. At the end of the last day, the crew huddled up outside our compound in the middle of the forest, and my squad leader handed out gear with crew logos on it to signify we had earned a spot on the crew. 

“This weekend is the last weekend I can guarantee you guys will get for the next six months,” said the crew boss. “We go on call nationally Monday night, so use your time well and make sure your bags are packed and ready to leave by 0800 Tuesday morning.” 

In the face of no free will or freedom for the next six months, I immediately knew what I wanted to use my last weekend for. The next morning, I packed a day pack, some bags of food, and my girlfriend into a car and drove to Mount Shasta. 

It sat there, as intimidating and massive as ever. From the trailhead parking lot, I examined my route until the light faded, and I tucked into bed for a couple of hours of sleep before my summit attempt. As I fell asleep, I visualized my route. Follow the skin track past the treeline, climb over the snow rolls up to the plateau, stay out of the gullies below the ridge where you can, put a helmet on and send it for the upper ridge to get out from under the cliffs, then follow the ridge to the summit. I calculated how fast I would go to allow myself enough time to be out of the way of the inevitable rockfall below Red Banks cliffs when the sun came up. It was a notorious bowling alley with rocks as bowling balls and humans for pins on the upper slope of the mountain.

My alarm went off at 4 am, and I rolled out of bed to see headlamps already moving high on the mountain. I force-fed myself some cold scramble and walked to the end of the parking lot with my skis and day pack. One other group stirred in their car, but I suspected most people had already started up the mountain. The moon was bright, and the parking lot was easy to navigate in the darkness, but the forest in front of me was nearly pitch black. Light evaded the umbrella of tree branches here and there enough to make pockets of moonlight in the forest, which reflected off the snow. I reached into my pack for a headlamp. I had packed my bag strategically with water and food on top and my extra layer underneath since I figured I wouldn’t need it until after I summited, but I found no headlamp. I looked up at the colossal mountain in front of me. It rose another seven thousand feet, and the summit was five miles from where I stood. “Hopefully my eyes can adjust,” I thought to myself, and I set off into the forest, skirting from patch to patch of moonlight and trying to stay on the skin track where others had found a route before me.

First light started to illuminate the mountain by the time I was just below the plateau. The snow had iced over from the melt-freeze cycle, and I slipped a few times before sitting down below the West-Face amphitheater and having a few chocolate nuts. Above me was the bowling alley, and I knew I had to move quickly. The sun was rising fast, and as soon as it hit the Red Banks, it would begin melting the ice that was holding the rocks in place and set off the rock fall that would threaten any climber below that point until it froze again at night. I put my crampons on and kept moving, with the thought of rockfall driving me to move one foot in front of the other a little faster than before. 

“Rock! Rock!!” someone yelled. I looked up, and a dozen dinner plate-size rocks were hurdling at me. I ran side to side, dodging the rocks as they whizzed past me just a few feet away. I watched them fall all the way down to just above the plateau before finally sliding to a stop. I looked up, and it was clear, so I kept moving. 

A moment later, I heard yells again, “Rock! Rock!!” I ran to the side of the slope and watched the rocks whiz past me again, this time from a relatively safe distance. I looked up again and scanned for more rockfall. I didn’t see any rocks, but I saw a small group huddling around someone lying down in the snow. I walked up the hill a couple hundred feet to the group and was met with a man who seemed to be standing guard over the scene. 

“You guys okay?” I asked. 

“Yup, all good,” said the man. He looked skinny, even with layers on, and he smiled at me with a closed mouth as if to dismiss me. 

I looked over at the person lying on the snow and saw two guides fitting a ski pole splint to his leg, which had an open fracture. I didn’t want to get in the way of their operation, so I moved on. I scurried up the rest of the bowling alley and topped out on the ridge, completely out of breath, next to a rock feature that awkwardly jutted out of the snow. A single snow spine clung to its edge, connecting to the ridge, and when I picked my head up from catching my breath, I realized the majesty of the environment. The west-facing bowl below was dark in the shadows, but the sun had just risen on the east side of the ridge, and the snow radiated the type of warmth that you only appreciate when you’ve been deprived of the sun. It felt good to bathe in the sunlight for a moment and take in the redness of the rocks, the sharpness of the ridge, the thin catwalk leading to the final rocky slope, the Trinity Chutes defined by a series of parallel rock walls, and the contrast of the sunrise that I had just climbed into with darkness just feet away where the sun hadn’t risen yet. I realized I was higher than I had ever been on Mount Shasta, and the summit was just one more small hill away.

I followed the catwalk to a loose rock slope, crossed a plateau, and stood beneath the summit pillar. It was different than I thought it would look, much rockier and less prominent than I had imagined. But when I scrambled up the last bit of rock, it felt as good as any summit. I felt the wave of accomplishment and satisfaction overcome me and relief in knowing that the only thing that lay ahead of me now was a 7,000-foot, five-mile ski descent. I scarfed down a few more chocolate nuts and walked down from the summit and across the plateau to the top of the Trinity Chutes. The chutes were much more complex to navigate when I looked down them from the top. From afar, they had seemed like a series of simple, parallel lines that led down to an apron of snow, but viewing them from the top gave a completely different view. Their once straightforward lines now appeared twisted and maize-like, and I couldn’t tell which of them would have snow that connected all the way through for me to ski down. I walked farther out and looked at a chute that appeared to have snow all the way through it. The walls of the chute were a sheer, volcanic rock that curved just enough to make me question whether I could really see all the way through it. The top was a short, icy spine between rocks, but the rest of the chute appeared smooth. I decided to ski it.

I took my pack off and sat down. The snow was still icy and wouldn’t be soft for a while longer while the sun worked on warming it for the day, so I waited fifteen minutes to see if the conditions were improving. They weren’t, and I figured I might be waiting a while if I waited for the snow to soften completely. I put my pack back on, clicked into my skis, and dropped into the chute. My skis chattered on top of the rough, icy spine, and I made a turn down from the technical top section into the smooth chute below. The chute opened up a couple hundred feet down when the rock wall diminished on the left side, allowing the sun to shine in. The snow was no better, though, and I made turn after turn on the hardpack until I reached the lower plateau, where I had taken my first break and collapsed after fifteen minutes of continuous, technical skiing. I had never skied a line so long and steep as that before, and my legs burned as much as I could ever remember. The snow at the lower elevation was marginally better, and the terrain below me was much mellower as it rolled away down to the tree line. 

I stood up again and pushed off. The snow became better and better as I carved over the rolls and in and out of gullies. Finally, I passed the top of the tree line and followed an open snow gully back to the skin track I had taken on my way up. I passed a couple of groups, and they hooted and hollered at me as I zoomed past them. Skiing down the lower skin track was like being on a roller coaster winding through the forest while I tried to keep my speed up. After half an hour of descending, it was a relief to see the parking lot, even though the skiing had been so much fun. I was ready to rest my legs and have a meal. I stopped at the pavement’s edge and clicked out of my skis. Another climber plodded down through the snow and stopped next to me to take off his crampons. 

“How did it go?” he asked.

 “It was great,” I said. “Everything I hoped for. How was your climb?”

 “Good!” he said. “I started from the plateau at 2:30 this morning and summited at sunrise. It was incredible.” I pictured what the sight I had seen on top of the summit would look like at sunrise, and it did sound incredible. I thought it was interesting that the man and I had climbed the same mountain on the same day and clearly had very different experiences.

I walked back down the road to where I had left my girlfriend and car and took all my gear off. It felt like peeling off a layer of old, wet skin. My girlfriend emerged from the back of the car, and I began telling her about my adventure. When I first visited Shasta when I was barely a teenager, a man hiking down the mountain with a big overnight pack had stopped to talk. 

“Life’s all about stories,” he said to me.

Okay, I had thought at the moment, if you say so. But I was beginning to understand what he had meant. Our stories explain our actions, our motivations, and build the legacy of our human experience – how we chose to live it and how wild it was. So it felt good to brag to my girlfriend about how I had just narrowly dodged rockfall at 11,000 feet, summited another 14,000-foot mountain, and skied all the way down to tell her about it.