I've missed these mountain benders

Even after I nearly crumpled while inching out of bed on Sunday morning, it was difficult to accept how wrecked I felt. Despite appearances otherwise, it's actually rare that I so completely thrash my body. As an athlete, I'm conservative to a fault. I'm always holding back on the throttle for fear I'll burn out my engine, saving gas for the next mile while never quite knowing how hard I can go. That's one of the things I love about a mountain bender, when the sheer difficulty of the terrain forces me to engage those uncomfortable high gears. Timpanogos ran my quads through a cheese grater, tenderized my calves and crushed my glutes between a vice. The result was that oh-so-sore, oh-so-smug satisfaction that I gave that mountain my best effort. 

My dad, with the exception of his minor knee injury, seemed to be in a lot better shape than me on Sunday. He read my last blog post and mentioned something about "whining" so I wanted to add a postscript in case there was any confusion — my dad does not whine. He'll be sixty in January and he's strong, possibly as strong as he's ever been. He's also smart and knows when to say when, but he's open-minded and willing to try new adventure possibilities. Beat also had a spring in his step Sunday morning. I think I was the only one who was roughed up by the effort alone, proving that I do in fact need to work smarter with my training. 

Still, Sunday was our last day in Salt Lake, and we didn't want to waste it. Beat and I set our sights on Red Pine Lake, a relatively "mellow" climb up a gulch above Little Cottonwood Canyon. Yes, only eight miles with 3,000 feet of climbing in snowshoes. Easy peasy. A weak cold front moved in, and it was a bit of a blah day — gray, colder, with flurries in the mountains and a hazy inversion starting to spread over the valley. As we started up the trail, I struggled to keep up with Beat. My quads were throbbing, and I could no longer reach my high gears. Still, any day in the mountains is not a bad day. I would probably go into the mountains every day if I could. At least until my body gave out, which, at this rate, would only take a couple of weeks.

Lower Red Pine Lake. The wind picked up as we ascended out of the forest, and I had to put on my coat. The ambient temperature was a few degrees below freezing; the windchill was likely in the teens, and Beat was still in his short sleeves and no hat. I'm a bit of a cold wimp (it's true) but that shows how much heat we were generating during the climb. Hard work.

Upper Red Pine Lake. We walked along the edge, taking great care not to step into the hollow crevices between car-sized boulders. At the far edge of the lake, we watched two skiers and a snowboarder make their way down the ridge. Their position looked precarious. There were exposed rocks everywhere, and they would make one or two tiny turns before stopping for a long while, scooting laterally, then making two more tiny turns.

I can't say I envied them. A friend of mine asked why, since we obviously enjoy playing in the snow, didn't we just go skiing while we were in Utah? My quick answer is that I don't know how to ski, but that's not entirely true. Once upon a time I was a decent snowboarder, and I'd be more than willing to carry a board up a mountain. But as I've grown older, I've reached a level of acceptance about who I am and what I truly love, and gravity sports haven't fallen into that scheme. Descending a mountain is the price of going up, which is the part I enjoy, whether I'm running, hiking, snowshoeing, or yes, even mountain biking to some extent. Another benefit of growing older is that I no longer care if this makes me strange.

Sure, I can still have a good time on a snowboard, but I'd prefer to keep it to open, powdery, purely "fun" terrain. I understand that skis are more efficient than snowshoes, but I'd honestly rather be bogged down by gravity than constantly fighting against it. Fill me up with adrenaline, and I'm an anxious mess. But give me a good, endorphine-soaked slog, and I'm happy. In that regard, our weekend Wasatch mountain-bender was wonderful. 

Humbling mountain

Above 9,000 feet the powder became bottomless, a kind of fluffed sugar that scattered under our feet. I might as well have been driving a ruler into a bin of plastic balls for all the good my ax was doing, and every step only deepened the waist-deep trench that Beat and my dad had already cut. We were moving forward at a rate of about four feet per minute, which, to put into perspective, is a 22-hour mile. And still, the upward lunging and swimming was as anaerobic as I ever go, where every minute of gasping motion required another thirty seconds of rest. Beat and Dad had already expressed their skepticism about this exercise in futility, but I persisted, pointing up to the crest of the small ridge we were climbing and saying, "But we're almost there, and then we can at least see what's up there!"

We thought Mount Timpanogos would be an ideal place to stage a longer day hike on Saturday. About three weeks ago, a huge storm hit the Wasatch Front, and nothing has happened since. This single layer of snow on top of dirt means avalanche danger is about as low as it gets during the winter months, and we were hopeful that the warm temperatures since had reduced the snowpack to a manageable level. Plus, the southern approach to Timp is the most traveled trail in the Wasatch, something of a hiker highway during the summer months, and we wagered that there might even be a packed trail all the way to the upper meadow. If the conditions didn't pan out, we reasoned, we could turn around. My dad isn't stoked on suffering and we weren't looking to get into anything "epic."

The hike started out fairly benign. We took pictures of waterfalls.

We marveled at sun halos.

We worked up a sweat.

As we climbed, the trail became less defined, until we were following a set of knee-deep tracks across the steep face of the mountain. Above us was a veritable layer cake of cliff bands glazed with ice. I couldn't discern any rational path through the vertical maze, not for hikers at least. The summer switchbacks had been smothered by feet of snow, and unless the tracks we were following went all the way to the rim, we'd have to pick out the safest route on our own.

We held to the tracks until we reached a frozen waterfall between two cliff bands. The middle ledge was only a few feet wide in spots, off-camber at about a 45-degree angle, and precariously perched above a twenty-foot sheer drop that plunged into a steep gully. One ice climber who was preparing to scale the waterfall informed us that there was about an inch of loose powder on top of glare ice where he stood. We weren't even wearing crampons, and skittering across that section in dull microspikes seemed like a death wish to me. The climber pointed to a tree-lined ridge where the summer trail went through, and suggested we might find an easier route to that ridge if we descended a few hundred feet.

The downclimb became our first little mountaineering challenge, because our upward zeal had taken us up a slope steep enough that we had to descend backward using axes as anchors. I've never had a climber's mindset, and instead of hyper-focus, I often become strangely distracted on exposed terrain. It's as though my endurance-trained brain uses similar escapist tricks to numb the discomfort when I encounter scary exposure, which, although soothing during a long run, is not what I want to have happen while staring through my legs down a seemingly vertical ladder of snow and ice. Still, winter climbing techniques are something I would definitely work on if I had more opportunities, as I do love the buzz of having conquered a difficult problem once I reach the bottom (which is where I was when I took this photo. As you can see, there's still some lesser downclimbing to be done.)

The true slog began as we sought a less-steep, less-exposed route to the rim, which we weren't even sure existed. It was clear my dad had pretty much stopped having fun the minute we pulled out the axes, but he continued to be a good sport about my sometimes overzealous desire to continue up the mountain. I didn't want to torture my dad, and I honestly didn't even care if we made it to the rim. But Mount Timpanogos had suddenly presented us with this intriguing problem, this beautiful puzzle, and I was aching to see whether we could solve it. It didn't help my dad's cause when our route became increasingly more physically demanding, until we were expending vast amounts of energy for a 1,320-minute-mile pace. There are few activities I love more than a good, ridiculous slog.

There's also a sense of realness to winter travel, a truth that I don't find to the same extent in my summer adventures. The ease and predictability of dirt, the soothing prettiness of flowers and leaves, the comfort of warm temperatures — these are all things I cherish. And yet, when winter strips these things away, leaving behind a much starker, less complacent reality, I feel like I'm seeing a new face of the mountain — perhaps the true face. Mount Timpanogos is a breezy (if long) walk-up in the summer. Now that I've seen it in the winter, I know this mountain for what it is — steep, harsh, and guarded by a fortress of cliffs.

A couple of gullies we hoped would provide access to the rim turned out to have short vertical sections that required mixed rock and ice climbing. We found one potentially climbable snow ramp that would simply take us to a ledge below another set of cliff bands, where we'd have to renew the search for walkable gullies. But by then we were well aware of how loose and bottomless the gully snow was. Even though avalanche danger was minimal, I couldn't help but imagine one of us losing purchase and tumbling down on top of the others, an avalanche of bodies. We called it good and turned back without regret. I was satisfied because at least we tried without taking unnecessary risks for our respective experience levels, and my dad was satisfied that maybe he wouldn't have to stage an intervention for his daughter who apparently goes manic over waist-deep snow slogs.

"I've never worked so hard to climb Timp," my dad observed as we made our way back to the valley, which I found to be true myself even though we weren't anywhere near the peak. In all, we were moving for seven hours, "walked" about eight or nine miles, and climbed perhaps 3,500 or 4,000 vertical feet in total over our wanderings. My quads were thrashed, my calves ached, my shoulders were sore, my hands were numb and head was swimming through a beautiful fatigue more appropriate to a very long run than an eight-mile hike.

Three hundred yards from the car, we had our first mishap — my dad took his microspikes off, slipped on ice, and wrenched his knee badly. He was okay, but it added a punctuation point to our day's lesson from the mountain — sometimes the best adventures are unintentionally epic, small in scale, and huge in humbling life experience. I appreciate being reminded how tiny I am, from time to time.

White Friday

Beat and I flew to Salt Lake City to spend Thanksgiving with a large portion of my very large extended family. Between aunts, uncles, first cousins, and their children, I think there were at least forty people crammed in my uncle's rec room. This was Beat's first big Mormon family Thanksgiving. We made jokes about eating green jello mixed with carrots and overcooked turkey, but the food was actually quite good and my family members kept the uncomfortable questions to a minimum. The funniest statement came from my 82-year-old grandmother, who, upon first meeting Beat, exclaimed, "Wow, you're much cuter than I thought you'd be!"

Before the pie was even fully distributed, my sister and some cousins and aunts started gearing up for their Black Friday shopping assault. Apparently this revered holiday tradition has now trickled into Thursday, and they were all planning to hit the stores in a few hours. In my opinion, Thanksgiving is the best holiday to spend with family (less baggage and stress than Christmas), and the fact that U.S. retailers basically just gave the middle finger to Thanksgiving made me feel a bit melancholy. Although I have my own personal issues with consumer culture, I don't have a problem with Black Friday in general. I do understand how the economic machine that I depend on to prop up my lifestyle hums along. Still, as an individual, I can think of few cultural phenomenons that I'd be less likely to enjoy. Maybe a Justin Bieber concert. But no, even at one of those I could zone out and daydream. Black Friday is just torture, simple and pure. In fact, if Hell did exist, it would absolutely be a custom-designed type of place. Some people would live out their purgatories riding bikes in 40 below weather through Antarctica-like nothingness. I, on the other hand, would spend eternity trapped in the crowds at Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

Luckily, if you don't want to spend your holiday weekend in a retail mosh pit wrestling others over cheap televisions and DVDs, it's not all that hard to get away from the crowds. My dad, Beat, and I headed east into the Wasatch Mountains to climb a 10,200-foot peak called Gobblers Knob. It was, after all, the day after Thanksgiving.

Utah has been unseasonably warm all week, and the bright sun combined with radiant heat off the snow seemed to turn Mill B Basin into an oven. The terrain varied from slush to breakable crust, requiring a number of stability maneuvers that I haven't exercised in a long time. The combination of heat, rough terrain and altitude made for a tough climb. At one point after a particularly slow slog up a slope, I finally caught up to my dad and Beat and said, "I'm struggling. I don't know if it's the elevation or heat or both." It sounded ridiculous coming from a Californian who was wearing virtually the same outfit I wore at a Bay-area 50K trail run two weeks ago, given the ambient temperature was still likely in the 40s, but there it was. I was toasted. And of course it became windy and frigid on the summit ridge. Even after applying most of our extra layers, we had only time to eat a rushed lunch of Nutella sandwiches and tortilla chips on the peak before our fingers and toes were frozen.

The mountains are always joy-inducing, regardless of conditions. And even with the "heat" and weird snowpack, today's conditions on Gobbler's Knob were just about ideal. Strangely, we only saw three other people the entire time, near the trailhead. That fact is even harder for me to understand than the lines of people wrapped around Best Buy. Because if Heaven did exist, it would absolutely be customized, and mine would be a lot like this.