Return to Mount Borah

I think everyone needs a nemesis mountain. A mountain that has gotten the better of you at some point ... a mountain that drug you down to the base of your weaknesses, scraped away the shallow facade of your identity and exposed those deeper cracks in your soul, the ones you hope you never have to peer into. But after this happens, and you survive it, you want to go back, again and again, just to see whether those cracks have filled in. For me, this mountain is Mount Borah.

It's the highest peak in Idaho. 12,662 feet. It used to be seven feet shorter, but in 1983 a powerful earthquake thrust this massive mound of rock even higher into the sky. I didn't mean for it to become my nemesis mountain. I discovered it by accident, in July 2001, as my friend and I were making our way home from a two-month road trip across America. While we were driving down Highway 93 in central Idaho, we came across a sign that said "Borah Peak Access Road." And in the way we made most of our decisions at the time, we both looked at each other and said, "Let's climb that!"

Now, in all honesty, Borah is not even close to the hardest or scariest single-day effort I've embarked on. It's not even the hardest or scariest peak I've climbed. But it caught me in a perfect storm of weakness. We arrived at the trailhead at 1:30 p.m. - a bad time to start a hike that logs about 6,200 feet of total vertical gain and descent in seven miles round-trip. I was already fatigued from the long road trip, anxious to get home, and not in the best shape of my life. The route was all-business to 11,000 feet, and I was full-on dizzy when we reached the saddle, but still we kept climbing.

We came to the knife ridge - which is called Chicken Out Ridge - and Geoff pressed far ahead as I grappled with the exposed scramble on my own. I was rattled and physically shaking by the time I crawled, on my hands and knees, across the narrow snow-covered saddle. As I began to pick my way up the face of the mountain, dark clouds steamrolled in from the west and began to drop large quantities of snow. I was wearing a cotton tank-top and shorts, because it was July. I had no jacket or gloves. I did not want to cross Chicken Out Ridge in a snowstorm. I was convinced I would either slip off the mountain, or freeze to death avoiding that fate. I completely lost it. I sat on a rock and indulged in a full-fledged panic attack. Eventually Geoff came back to look for me and gently talked me down. Neither of us made it to the summit that day.

That was my first battle with Mount Borah - a sweeping defeat. I didn't go back until August 2005. I was working as a copy editor at the Idaho Falls Post Register at the time, and some co-workers were planning a hike on the mountain. The mere thought of it dredged up bad associations, and at first I told them I wasn't going to join them. But as the date neared, much in my life was beginning to change. Geoff was moving to Alaska. I was trying to decide whether to follow him there. I decided to dedicate the month to seeking out situations that scared me, and facing them head-on. I went on a whitewater rafting trip down the Snake River. I took my then-nearly unused mountain bike on several intimidating rides. And I asked my co-workers if they still had room on the Mount Borah trip. I did not want to go. But I did believe up there, I'd find the perspective I was searching for.

We camped at the trailhead the night before. I hardly slept at all, tossing and fretting as though I were psyching myself up to climb Mount Everest. We left the next morning at 5:30 a.m. Even though I wasn't in particularly good endurance shape at the time, I charged up the steep slope with single-minded purpose. I quickly left most of my co-workers behind, and climbed into the rising daylight with an almost gleeful sense of doom. As I picked my way across Chicken Out Ridge, it was tough but not nearly as deadly as I remembered. The sun was hot as I made my way up the peak, and I stood on top for the first time beneath a perfectly clear sky, so blue and bright that it cast far-away mountain ranges in startling clarity. It was the clarity I had sought, but as I squinted into the distant desert, I felt a strong sense that I should stay in Idaho, and let Geoff slip out of my life for good. Strong enough that it felt like a decision. I bit my lip, let the one co-worker who caught up to me take a picture, and headed down.

Returning across Chicken Out Ridge in August 2005, I got vertigo again. The sensation wasn't as bad as I had felt in July 2001, but it was still enough that I had to hunker down until my head stopped spinning. The physical reaction echoed the deeper feelings of confusion and frustration I had been feeling all month. The act of doing things that scared me wasn't working. It only seemed to magnify the fact that I was weak and helpless. I didn't know what to do about Alaska. I knew I didn't have a lot to lose by leaving Idaho. I returned as indecisive as I had ever been. The mountain showed me nothing I came to see, but later, after moving to Alaska and reflecting on what turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made, I think that Mount Borah showed me what I needed to see.

I hadn't really planned on ever returning to Mount Borah. It's hidden in the Lost River Range, not particularly close to anything, and there are hundreds and thousands of amazing, accessible mountains that I will never find the time to climb. But my friend Bill in Missoula has recently developed an interest in elevation, and Borah is the closest "12'er" that's fairly accessible to non-climbers. He was the one who brought it up. I was headed south anyway this weekend, for a trade show in Vegas. "Let's do it," I agreed. On Friday Bill and I set out with our friend, Norman, for a weekend road trip and mountain climb in Idaho.

It was interesting to return here, nine years after the meltdown and five years after the big decision, to experience Mount Borah as the person I am now, with the people I know now. The route is still all-business and I still harbor irrational fears, but I now carry a modicum of strength that goes deeper than a facade. After the first 30 minutes I looked at my GPS and said, "Wow, we already climbed 1,000 feet!" Everyone shrugged. We blazed up the talus, gaining another 1,000 feet, and then another. We cut across Chicken Out Ridge and I didn't even get the shakes. Norman and I started to feel the elevation above 12,000 feet. We had to take more frequent breaks to bring down our screaming heart rates, but we made it to the peak less than four hours after we left. We held the Idaho and U.S. flags and enjoyed a full half hour as the highest people in Idaho. We crossed the fields of recent snowfall and dropped down Chicken Out. My bruised ankle's soreness reached a level that aroused involuntary grumpiness, so I took a handful of Advil pills, leaned hard into my trekking poles, and plowed downhill until the pain went away. We lost 6,000 feet in 3.5 miles. There was a time when something like that would have wrecked my quads, but not anymore. Mount Borah is just a walk these days, a stroll, and it's beautiful and physically stimulating, but it's just a small piece of the grand scheme of adventure, and of the world.

Have I filled in my cracks? Not even close. But I see them now for what they are, just cracks, and like the fault line on Mount Borah, they remain as beautiful scars of the upheavals that have made me who I am.

Good ol' Monkey

I have a confession to make. I don’t really enjoy being the owner of five bicycles. They’re large. They’re cumbersome. They take up a lot of space in a one-bedroom apartment. And, most irksome of all, they all require a lot of maintenance. It’s like having five dogs, when really one is all the pet you need. Five will pull a sled more effectively than one — and my five bikes all have a particular function that I *Can Not Live Without.* But, like dogs, at home they just crowd you in and require a lot of care.

I own a touring bike that hasn’t been without some kind of mechanical problem since 2006. Right now, it has a broken brake lever, a sticky headset and both derailleurs in need of replacement. The broken brake lever prevents me from riding it, but I have been reluctant to pour any more money into new parts, because I just had a bunch of stuff repaired earlier this spring, and still more stuff before that, and I had the wheels rebuilt before that, and this was only a ~$500 bike to begin with, seven years ago. I think about donating it to FreeCycles, but I reason that I can’t give it away because it is the only “road bike” I own. The truth is, I can’t give it away because I am seriously emotionally attached to it.

My snow bike, Pugsley, has a flat tire. I can’t fix the flat tire, because I need to buy new tubes, which I can only order online. In the mash of life, ordering tubes online has somehow managed to fall low priority list, even though it would only take about five minutes and cost about $30. Meanwhile, Pugsley sits in a closet, gathering dust.

My fixie commuter was built with the intention of being “Jill-proof,” but I still managed to crack the top cap and have been riding it without one, which can’t be good for the headset. (Yes, I know, it's only another five minutes online and $5. I am so lazy.) It seems whenever I have finally settled on the decision to get rid of Roadie and make the fixie my “road bike,” I take the long way home from work and hurt my knees during the piston-like beating of a long downhill. I think the fixie is perfect for commuting, but I do not think I am cut out to be a long-distance fixed-gear rider.

Then there’s the Rocky Mountain Element. I love this bike. I’ve been riding it for three months, and made it mine about a month ago. But I have to admit, this bike is a bit of a princess. It was almost new three months ago, and I feel like I’ve done a fair job of keeping up-to-date with the basic maintenance. But the rear tire has several slow leaks and the rubber is worn almost through. I can’t replace the tire myself because it’s a tubeless system, so I need to take it into a bike shop for mounting and sealant. Then there’s the rear brake, which is rubbing randomly and the brake lever is sticking. I can’t fix this, either, because I don’t understand hydraulic brakes. I don’t understand tubeless tires either. I don’t even understand the through-axle fork, except for that it prevents me from mounting it on my car rack, and that I am terrified of stripping the threads. I am not wise in the ways of bicycle technology, or bicycle mechanics, or even bicycle riding for that matter. Taking the Element to the bike shop hasn’t worked its way up the priority list. Meanwhile, it hangs from an indoor bike rack, gathering dust.

If there’s any bike I can get rid of, it should be my Karate Monkey. I mean, I just bought a new mountain bike. This is just the high-mileage version of something I already have. But right now, it’s the only “non-broken” bike I own, so it’s the one I’ve been riding all week. And I have been reminded how much I *love* my Karate Monkey. I have put this bike through all kinds of indignity (skinny tires and fenders for two 370-mile tours of the Golden Circle) and abuse (two full winters perpetually coated in grit and slush on the icy streets of Juneau.) Oh, and there was the time I rode it 2,800 miles down the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, through all manner of rain and dirt and wheel-sucking mud. The only maintenance I did myself during the race was put lube on the chain and pump up the increasingly swiss-cheese-like tires. I had the bike almost completely overhauled once, but only once, about 1,500 miles into the ride. (As opposed to Princess Element, which enjoyed three overhauls during the mere seven days of TransRockies.) The Karate Monkey still has its original wheels. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had something close to 13,000 mostly dirt miles on them — with only one broken spoke in that time and one replacement of the freehub. I’ve also had the Reba shock rebuilt, a few drivetrain, brake pad and cable replacements, bottom bracket replacement, saddle replacement, and front brake and rotor replacement. The rest of the parts also have ~13,000 miles on them. And while the rest of my bikes fall victim to my ignorance and neglect, the Karate Monkey keeps plugging away — rust-coated, heavy, and completely reliable.

No, I can’t get rid of the Karate Monkey. Which means I’ll just have to justify her place in the kennel by turning her into a singlespeed.

Evening ride

Sometimes I like to go for a solo ride. A purposeful solo ride. One where I’m all but certain to not see a single other human being, even by fluke or chance. Such was my mood Tuesday night. I had planned to join the Dirt Girls for their weekly singletrack jaunt, but my ankle was feeling extra tender and I was feeling extra de-motivated. I didn’t want to risk hike-a-bike or anything even steep enough to necessitate out-of-the-saddle pedaling. I opted for a quick trip to the store and maybe a logging road spin … something mellow but high in the mountains … above the flow of traffic and beyond the frenzy to capture every fleeting hour of the fading summer … somewhere alone.

I started at Snowbowl, ducked under the gate, and turned ginger rotations up the gravel road. The air at 5,000 feet was already steeped in the complex aroma of autumn — sweet with decaying leaves and berries, bitter with smoke and dust. I babied my ankle until I forgot about it, just as the grade steepened, and I rose breathless into the cold wind and mindless passing of time. There were no thoughts, no obervations, only fleeting snapshots — the flicker of sunlight and shadow, the rustle of yellow leaves, the ever-thinning pine forest, the deepening saturation of pink light.

At 7,600 feet, my cell phone rang. I jumped as though awoken, blinked toward the setting sun and answered it. It was my friend John, who is out trying to set a record on the Great Divide right now, and was searching for perspective during a low point. The ride had been hard. The easy days had been difficult, the difficult days almost unbearable. The clock had reached its breaking point, and so had his resolve. How do you keep grinding through something when it ceases to have meaning for you? Is it best to stop? Cling to an impossible goal? Rewrite the meaning?

I furrowed my brow and fumbled for an answer. I had nothing to offer. My mind was still far in the distance, left somewhere far below, in the hustle and traffic of the city. My body had traveled here independently, and I didn’t want to say so, but I probably shouldn’t have answered the phone.

“If only you could see this sunset. It’s incredible …” I started to say, but I had forgotten he wasn’t far away and probably already could. That doesn’t stop the questioning of purpose, the relentless search for meaning.

I listened some more, and mumbled empty words of encouragement. The cold wind sank into my core. I started to shiver. He could hear it in my voice.

“I should probably let you go,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.”

I put away the phone and looked toward the horizon. There was nothing to see anymore, no snapshots to take. It was dark. I flicked on my headlight, pulled on the meager layers I had carried up the mountain, and rode toward home.

The reality of running

My friend Danni turned me on to a blog called “Hyperbole and a Half,” where a cartoonist combines MS Paint-type drawings with witty commentary to describe real-world situations. There’s a particular post that cycles through my mind every time I embark on an adventure or workout, called “Expectations versus Reality.” “This discrepancy between the way I imagine things unfolding and how they actually happen is most dramatic when I overestimate my ability to perform a pointless feat of athleticism,” she writes.

So on Monday evening, I went for a run. I need to preface this story with a couple of qualifiers. First of all, I am purposely training to run right now. I have a couple of fall and winter goals that may include pacing an ultrarun if all goes well. So while there will still be much bike riding in my future, with the possible exception of riding Pugsley in the Susitna 100 and/or White Mountains 100, my winter events may center around running. Because of this, I feel strong motivation to improve as a beginner runner. Secondly, I woke up before 5 a.m. Monday in Sandy, Utah, drove 530 miles to Missoula, worked six straight hours, and then set out for my run. So I was quite tired.

I changed into shorts at 7 p.m. and started running from the back door of my office. I jogged aimlessly around the streets of downtown Missoula, which eventually landed me on the bike path, so I picked up speed and headed toward the university. In the distance, I could see a steady train of students working their way up the switchbacks to the famous “M” on the mountain. Through my already runner-addled train of thoughts, some kind of spark crackled in my mind. “I should run up Mount Sentinel!”

I cut through campus and started up the trail. I purposely took the direct (steep) route just to avoid the congestion on the switchbacks. I have to say that so far, I have really enjoyed my runs. They tend to progress at a significantly higher intensity than I am accustomed to, and my cycling-forged endurance and hiking-forged impact tolerance allows me to go a fair distance without negative effects. So I am engrossed in “runner’s high” for upwards of 90 minutes to two hours. Even though my lungs are burning and my head is spinning and my heart is racing and I am fighting off an urge to puke, I am really enjoying myself. I have yet to go for a run longer than two hours, so I haven’t yet had to deal with the dreaded prospect of eating whilst gasping for air, but for now, I am convinced that running is “super awesome.”

Mount Sentinel rises to 5,200 feet from Missoula’s 3,200 feet, so climbers have to gain 2,000 feet to reach the summit. The direct route can’t be more than a mile and a half. It’s steep. It’s not very conducive to running. Similar to my failed “mountain running” attempts earlier this spring in Anchorage, I always try to run until I physically cannot function, and then I fast-hike just below the level of blowing up.


I still consider this running, because the intensity level is so high, generally several notches higher than what I experience while actually running on solid ground. And I was feeling great on Monday evening. Heart was pounding, head was spinning and endorphins were coursing through my blood. Elevations disappeared quickly below me, deer bounded along the ridgeline in front of me, and a beautiful sunset blazed in the sky. A couple of times, my body sent out overwhelming pleas to stop and rest, which I acknowledged with the excuse that I needed to take photos of the beautiful sunset. But I kept those stops quite short, and only made two.


I crested the summit and started down just as twilight started to sink in. I didn’t have a headlight, but didn’t need one as the shimmering city lights of Missoula cast an orange glow on the mountain. Downhill running is still very difficult for me, but I have listened to the advice of friends who tell me to trust my feet and just keep moving, with generally positive results. I felt like a mountain goat, dancing down the rocks as college students perched on a boulder cheered me on.

Halfway down the mountain, with my speed about as high as I can maintain without losing control, I kicked a large, sharp rock with my left foot, hitting my right ankle squarely and painfully. I cried out and slowed my pace, hobbling as I tried to find my rhythm, but I didn’t stop. “Running is all about pain management,” I told myself. “This is nothing.” I continued gimping for a bit until the pain subsided. I veered over to the concrete M and took the mellow switchbacks the rest of the way down, just for good measure.


As I ran through town, the pain started to return. By then it was dark, close to 9 p.m., and I was starving. I kept up the pace back to my office, then went home. Once at home, I looked at my foot and noticed that my sock was smeared with blood. Removing my shoe induced a few tears, and then I peeled off the bloody sock to see a swollen, bruised ankle. I think I must have kicked the sharp edge of the rock into my ankle, resulting in the cut and bruise, and continuing to run on it probably didn’t help things. It’s certainly not a bad injury, but stiff, and it may prevent me from running for the rest of the week.

Pedaling my fixie gingerly into work this morning, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Hyperbole and a Half: “As I'm lying there, crumpled and broken from my most recent attempt at meaningless success, I feel complete bewilderment at the motivation behind what I just did. There was no point. I'm sure that the decision was based on some scrap of reasoning, but in retrospect it seems that chaos and unbridled impulsivity just collided randomly to produce a totally unexplainable action with no benefit and all consequences.”

At least I can still ride a bike.

Reconnecting

I made a quick trip to Utah this weekend to attend my grandfather's funeral. It was a memorable event — having every single person in my rather large, dispersed family, gathered in one room to share their memories of him, many of which closely mirrored my own. He was selfless, he was strong, and he could fix any problem and make it seem effortless. In my "Lone Peak" tribute a couple weeks ago, I described my grandfather as "Superman." My dad repeated the paragraph in his eulogy, and later told me that a couple days after my grandfather's death, he climbed to Lone Peak to reflect. "It was the first time that he was there with me," my dad said as tears filled his eyes. It sent my own waterworks flowing, because I had experienced a similar closeness to my grandfather on the mountain. He was still alive when I climbed Lone Peak, but I had a inexplicably strong feeling that he was beside me on the summit, which is why I went through the ritual of writing him a note — if only to physically acknowledge that feeling of closeness.

I also had an opportunity to spend time with both of my sisters this weekend — a rare occasion to have the three of us together. As we returned from our Saturday night outing, my youngest sister, Sara, made a rather unexpected request — she asked if I wanted to go hiking with her on Sunday. My jaw dropped just a little.

I love Sara, but usually when I describe her to my friends, I say, "Picture the opposite of me. That's my baby sister." Sara is 23 years old, which officially puts us in two different cultural generations (me, X; she, Y). Sara lives in Huntington Beach, Calif. — the "bedroom burg" of 200,000 people amid a sprawling mass of millions. I consider Missoula — the "big city" of 70,000 — to be about my limit of crowd tolerance. Sara works as a sales associate for Bloomingdales in Newport Beach. I've spent my career purposely seeking jobs that place me at an arm's length from the public (it's why I prefer editing to reporting) and would probably pass out or break a bone if I had to stand in high heels for longer than three minutes. Sara loves shopping and has enough clothing to fill many closets. I still wear T-shirts I owned in high school, and not a small number of clothing handed down to me from her. Sara thrives amid urban culture. I get social anxiety in small-town bars. My favorite food is sushi. Sara despises seafood; she once caught a beautiful halibut right out of Kachemak Bay in Alaska and refused to eat a single bite. My favorite things in life are my opportunities to explore remote and wild places. Sara once answered the phone when my dad and I called home triumphantly from the top of Twin Peaks and replied, "Let me guess ... you're calling from the top of some peak" with such derision that we still tease her about it.

And I was pretty sure Sara hated hiking. So when she suggested we go, I thought she was just humoring me — offering a sisterly activity that she thought I would like and she might be able to tolerate. We decided on Bell Canyon. I hadn't been there since high school, but I had a vague memory that it was "easy." And because I was going for an "easy" hike with my non-outdoors-acclimated sister, I decided to go for a run beforehand to work up a good sweat. I ended up running for two hours on the Corner Canyon trails. The singletrack was crowed with mountain bikers on a Sunday afternoon, and I not only felt jealous of them, but also self-conscious, because now I was the annoying runner clogging up their trails. They were all very nice to me, even coming around blind corners when they had to slam on their brakes as I jumped off the trail (I probably have much to learn about runner etiquette, but I did everything I could to stay out of their way.) But I do forget that a two-hour run in afternoon heat is quite a bit different than a two-hour mountain bike ride. I covered a similar distance that I would on a bike (10 to 12 miles), and by the end I was well-toasted.

So I came home and Sara and I headed to Bell Canyon. I still have vivid memories of getting lost on this trail when I was 11 years old, and my route-finding hasn't improved at all in two decades. I guided Sara through a bewildering maze of faint trails, and she took with good humor my continuous advice to "go toward the sound of water. We want to follow the creek."

As we walked, we talked about our grandfather and our individual memories of him, and also how he reminded us of our own father. We talked about our lives in Montana and California. Sara told me she was really enjoying her regular sessions in bikram yoga. I crinkled my nose and said, "What is about bikram that you like?" because to me, spending 90 minutes in a 110-degree, humid room while twisting my body in uncomfortable contortions sounds like one of the lower levels of hell.

"Well," she said, "It's a challenge just to get through it, and there's something so satisfying about that. It teaches me to remove my focus on the past and anxiety about the future, and only exist in the present, which is helpful in the rest of my life."

My jaw dropped a little again. She could have asked me what I love about snow biking or endurance mountain biking or hiking for that matter, and my answer would have been similar if not precisely that. Maybe Sara and I have more in common than I even know.

We found the main trail and it quickly turned skyward — gaining a foot of elevation for every three feet of distance along a narrow, rocky slope with boulders the size of couches. I grew self-conscious again because it was a lot more difficult than I remembered — not quite the beginner hike I'd promised Sara. But bikram yoga must have put her in good shape because she powered up it. Sweat was pooling underneath my Camelback and Sara didn't so much as complain, even though she lives at sea level and never hikes and we were crawling up a rock garden above 6,500 feet. I started to suggest turning back because the afternoon was growing late. "No, I just want to see the waterfall," she said. "We have to be close." I had no idea whether we were close or not, but I didn't want to deny Sara her well-earned reward. If I couldn't produce a waterfall, I'd probably never convince her to go hiking again.

But pretty soon it was 5 p.m., and we had been hiking for an hour and a half, and we were supposed to be home by 5:30. "There's a chance we passed the cutoff to the waterfall," I said. "But at this point, I have no idea, and we really need to head back." She accepted it and we started down. As crawled down the rock garden overlooking the valley, she said, "This is a good lesson for life, too, that it's about the journey, not the destination. I mean, this is so beautiful, and if I only cared about getting to a waterfall, I might've not noticed it."

At that moment, I was brimming with pride for my baby sister, because she's wiser than me in the places I excel.

"Forever Lost"

Dave made a super-awesome video blog post about our Glacier ridgeline adventure.

Forever Lost from Dave Chenault on Vimeo.

This big, big world

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever fall in love again. I'm not talking in terms of human relationships, although this thought occasionally crosses my mind as well. But, no, I am speaking of Alaska. The Great Land. The place I loved. The place I left, three months ago, without regret.

How could I leave Alaska without regret? This thought still occasionally drifts through my mind. I reason that I live in a world adrift, where a sense of impermanence prevents attachments from growing too deep. Now I am in Montana, finding new places to explore, seeing old places in the changing light that comes with the passage of time, and finding an affection for my new home that almost feels like love.

This is how I came to plan a weekend trip in Glacier National Park with my friend, Danni. The trip was my idea — Glacier seemed like a pretty place to spend a Labor Day weekend. In invited my friend Dave in Missoula to join me, and then Danni invited her friend Brad, who had an idea for "getting away from the crowds."

The way I came to know all of these people individually is an interesting commentary on modern life. Dave is a recent social work graduate in Missoula who has been my blog friend almost as long as I’ve had a blog, somewhere in the range of four years, but we’d never met face to face until I moved here in June. Danni is a lawyer and roller-derby chick in Kalispell who is a mutual friend of my 2010 TransRockies partner Keith, who I only met because Keith’s wife, Leslie, extended an generous invitation to me — then a stranger — to stay with them in Banff before the 2009 Tour Divide. Brad is a sign designer and Hammer Nutrition employee in Whitefish, who along with Danni helped organize the Swan Crest 100 trail race, where I volunteered, and that’s how I met Brad. There was a time in recent history when the chance of the four of us meeting would have been unlikely at best, but on Saturday we found our paths intersecting on a remote mountain ridge in the southeastern corner of Glacier National Park.

Brad's plan was an off-trail ridge walk between Two Medicine Lake and Marias Pass, which is outside the park. Dave looked at a map and said, "I'll be really interested to see how this all works." The two points were at least 18 miles apart in a straight line, and blocked by a veritable wall of big mountains, some of which Dave said appeared from the highway to be actual walls. "It's probably going to be a little hairball," he warned Danni and me, because both of us suffer from varying degrees of vertigo, and Danni hasn't had much big alpine experience. "This will be my first hike off-trail," she announced. I put my faith in Brad's assurance that the route was "mostly" non-technical, then scrutinized the map and brought my GPS, bivy sack, fire starter, lights and a ton of extra food should I need to plan a drainage escape into East Glacier.

The day dawned auspiciously, which means it was raining and filled with pre-sunrise darkness, but we were stoked anyway. The clouds had mostly cleared by the time we reached the Two Medicine trailhead, only to be replaced by a cold and vicious wind. Even at the small lake, 35-mph gusts drove roaring whitecaps across the water. “That wind’s going to be cranking above treeline,” Brad observed nonchalantly. “Bring a jacket.”

We hit the trail and started chatting away, blissfully lost in conversation the way four people who met through the vast web of social networking can be — sharing an array of esoteric interests and commonalities that linked us in the first place. The elevation gain passed without effort or notice, and soon we were walking the lichen-coated tundra and talus of the high country.

At 8,000 feet we crested the Continental Divide. We moved swiftly along the spine that divides the golden prairies of Eastern Montana from the crumbling granite walls of the northern Rockies. The wind raged from the west, often blowing so hard that it knocked me into a teeter and I had to brace myself against my poles before I could start walking again. Dave and I estimated it was gusting to at least 60 mph and drove a windchill low enough to sometimes necessitate a down coat and gloves — not the kind of environmental conditions that boost one’s confidence in their already below-average sense of balance.

We approached a needle-shaped, 8,800-foot peak called Mount Henry. "We don't really have to go up that, do we?" Danni whispered to me nervously. There was no way to sideslope around it without severe exposure. The way up looked like a class-four scramble at best, with a far-away but uneasy notion that we might be entering the realm of low class five without ropes. "Let's wait and see what Brad does," I replied, expecting that Danni's and my combined lack of experience and exposure fear would probably lead to the girls retreating to Two Medicine while the boys finished up the hike alone.

Brad did indeed find a fairly simple chimney — probably class four because the potential to kill oneself was there, but full of comfortable handholds and small ledges. Danni was at her limit of acceptable fear but powered through as Brad helped guide her up the chimney.

When Danni reached a good half-way perch, she stopped, so I started up. Suddenly she screamed, "Watch out." I heard the sickening sounds of knocking and scraping as a very large boulder tumbled toward me. I instinctively ducked my head, pressed myself against the wall and threw my arms over my neck in a blocking position. A watermelon-sized chunk of old granite brushed inexplicably gently over my shoulders and plummeted beneath me. I looked up, confused, only to see Brad braced directly behind me. He held up his right hand, which was covered in blood. Brad had stuck his arm out and halted the momentum of the rock, and for all practical purposes had saved me from a skull fracture or worse. I didn't quite understand what had happened at first, and in the rush of adrenaline, I forgot to thank him. I'm not sure I've ever been in a position where someone may have actually physically saved my life. I still haven't processed it fully, but I did later tell Brad that I owe him a beer.

With that adventure behind us, Danni and I took a mutual celebratory self-portrait to mark our survival of what we hoped would be the most difficult obstacle of the traverse. Mount Henry is behind us, blocked by my thankfully non-fractured head.

We stopped for lunch in front of the foreboding silhouette of Mount Henry.

As we dropped down the tundra toward our next talus climb, I looked at my GPS and my jaw dropped. "There's no way we've already climbed 7,000 feet today," I said to Dave. "No way." He just shrugged. "I believe it," he said. We looked at the next massive mountain in front of us. "How much higher do you think it is?" he asked. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe 1,500 feet." "I was going to say 1,400," Dave said. "It adds up."

Mount Ellsworth turned out to only be 800 feet higher, but the talus was so loose and steep that we probably climbed 1,500 feet getting there. Danni was unnerved by the loose footing on a 60-degree slope. "It's not like snow," I said. "If you slide backward, you'll stop ... eventually." We made our way up into small cliff band where loose talus over hard rock made the climbing extremely sketchy. But there was nowhere to fall, so I felt fine. Danni and I were starting to see where our irrational fears divide — I feel uneasy with big exposure, but she has a harder time with difficult terrain.

The exposure started to open up as we walked along the spine of Bearhead Mountain, where a veritable wall dropped 2,000 feet into the drainage to our left. Initial route-finding kept us near the top of the ridge and uncomfortably close to that dizzying exposure. I started to lose my nerve. At first, it sank in slow and cold, numbing my fingers and darkening my vision. Then came the nausea, and an urge to either vomit or cry — I couldn't decide which. By the time we started dropping down the cliff bands to the right, where the exposure wasn't nearly as bad, I was quivering, just trying to hold it together for holding it together's sake. Dave looked back and said, "Are you OK?" "I'm scared, but I'm OK," I mumbled. After that, I hummed "Going Going Gone" by the Stars to get my mind off the mountain ... "There's nowhere to move on ... there's nowhere to move on."

We finally crawled off the cliff bands and shuffled down the steep scree. My dizziness began to fade, and I started taking larger steps, loping down the loose gravel with an exhilarating feeling of suspended gravity, as though I were walking on the moon. We connected with a goat trail as a clouds streamed by over our heads. I began to digest the massive quantities of adrenaline I had generated, and practically skipped along the narrow passage.

"You look much better now," Dave commented. "Back there, you had this look on your face like you were about to swallow a tarantula on Fear Factor." "You know," I said, "that's exactly what vertigo is like. Something really isn't all that likely to hurt you, and in your mind you know that so you can make yourself do it, but that doesn't stop the gut reaction that causes all kinds of trepidation."

The afternoon grew late. We still had to scoot around Red Crow Mountain and descend Firebrand Pass. As we approached our final contact with a ridge, I faced the freight train of wind to take one last longing gaze of the huge views we had spent the day with. "This is a big place," I said to Dave. "This is a really big place."

Walking down Firebrand, I thought more about what that largeness meant to me. We ended the day with 11,800 feet of climbing and 12,060 feet of descent. We traveled somewhere in the range of 25 miles, to elevations as high as 9,000 feet. We straddled the watershed divide that separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific, many times. We saw the rolling prairie stretch beyond the horizon, and we saw the jagged mountains ripple endlessly to the West. Alaska is amazing and beautiful, but it certainly isn't the only big place in the world. Not even close.

I often fall in love with places, and think about them wistfully in much the way I would an old friend. I'm going to add this ridge in the southeastern corner of Glacier National Park to this list, not only because it is big and awe-inspiring, but because of my new friends.

Hiking is harder with a bike

"Are you sure you don't want to join us?" I said to Danni after she dropped us off at the trailhead. "I bet you could beat us." Danni looked up as she gave the notion serious thought. Brad, Dave and I planned to ride our mountain bikes from Six-Mile to Broken Leg along the Alpine 7 trail in the Swan Mountains, a one-way route that traveled about 24 miles of hikers' singletrack. Danni hasn't ridden a mountain bike since high school, and doesn't own one, so she planned to go for a run. She finally shook her head. "No, I'll just do an out and back from the other side. I'll try to finish just before you."

The initial climb was right at the limit of granny-gear bikeability, gaining 3,000 feet in four miles on a narrow, side-sloped trail. I red-lined early and lost my steam. With 13 difficult hours already behind me on the weekend, I didn't have a lot of steam to start with. When I can only muster 3 miles an hour in the saddle, I feel no shame in walking at 3 mph with half the energy expenditure. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that sometimes I think wheels are downright silly.

We crested Six-Mile Pass and began the descent into the next canyon. The trail conditions in this section ranged from faint to almost entirely overgrown. The boys attempted intermittent riding and walking, mostly blind as late-summer brush whipped their faces. I kept tripping over unseen obstacles and decided that the silly wheels were just getting in the way, so I picked up my bicycle, balanced it on my shoulder, and walked almost the entire downhill, with a silly bicycle on my shoulder. One pass down. Three thousand feet climbed and dropped. Total riding on the day: Negligible.

Crossing a stream can only mean one thing - time to climb again.

As my engine sputtered and choked, the boys waited for me to work my way up the steep slope, mostly with the silly bicycle still dangling from my shoulder. Brad was kind enough to pick huckleberries and offer me handfuls. The invigorating rush of tarty sweetness should have alerted me to the fact I was bonking, and hard. But it is hard to refuel when carrying a 25-pound bicycle on one shoulder. My downward spiral continued as we worked our way up.

As we neared another 7,000-foot pass, it started to snow. It snowed hard. Wet white powder accumulated on the ground at a rate of 2 inches in an hour. The air was probably cold, too, but I didn't really notice because I felt increasingly more dizzy and nauseated. I really, really wanted to curl up in a patch of that oh-so-soft-looking white stuff and fall asleep. But I knew I couldn't stop because the boys would probably freeze to death while they waited for me to wake up, and I couldn't be responsible for anyone freezing to death. The absurdity of the situation finally woke me up to my obvious bonk, and I stopped long enough to grab a Power Bar out of my pack, which I ate as I trudged to the top with a silly bike still dangling from my shoulder.

The perk-up was slow but it started to happen. I first knew I was coming back to life because the chill sank in hard. I put on my gloves and balaclava and pulled up my hood. The snow was really slippery and I have a 2" bald tire on my rear wheel, so I continued walking downhill.

Finally we made it to Broken Leg Ridge. I ate a little more food and felt increasingly like a real person. I even attempted riding the bicycle that I had carried all the way up there, but the rocky trail bounced me around like a pinball, and I was still feeling more sleepy than alert. Gradually, I descended to stretches of trail that actually contained more dirt than rocks, where I could pick a real line and stick with it for more than 50 feet. Soon I was flying, weaving tight curves through the woods, giggling involuntarily. Holy cow, I was riding my bike! I had almost forgotten what this feels like! The feeling was frequently interrupted by rock slide paths, downed trees, and bear scat. Then Brad got a flat in his tubeless tire, and my rotor started rubbing, which caused my bike to moan like a demon bumble bee.

Finally at the bottom, Danni came running toward us. "What happened to you guys?" she said with a tinge of panic in her voice.

"Um, we went for a bike ride."

"How far did you ride?"

We consulted the GPS. "24 miles, with 6,500 feet of climbing."

She looked confused. "I just ran 21 miles, and I started an hour after you, and I finished more than two hours before you."

I just shrugged. What could I say?

Later, while we were driving home, she blurted out, "For the record, that ride took you guys more than nine hours. Nine hours!"

I shrugged again. What could I say? Hour for hour, it was the toughest workout I'd had in a while. Maybe all summer. And sure, we had just proved to Danni what she suspected anyway - that running is far superior to mountain biking. But she can't disprove the fact we had a ton of fun.