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Cottonwood Lakes, site of a campsite at about 10,000 feet.
Photo by Sean McKelvey |
Article thanks to Tara McKelvey and travelnytimes.com. Link provided below:
9/5/2013 Standing on Old Army Pass, a trail in the Sierra Nevada in California, my brother Sean looked back at me and said we would have to scramble over boulders. “With exposure?” I asked, referring to the steepness of the rock face — and how far down it was to the bottom.
“Well, about a 500-foot drop,” he answered.
I tried not to think about it.
Like the Sierra Nevada itself, the five-and-a-half-mile-long Army Pass trail offers astonishing views, as well as the possibility you might plunge into an abyss. This was an unlikely vacation spot for someone who is afraid of heights. Yet when my oldest brother invited me and our other brother, Kerry, last year, I — who had never climbed anything more challenging than a steep staircase in New York — said yes.
Sean, 53, a telecommunications engineer and Navy veteran, has worked as a white-water river guide in the Pacific Northwest, gone on 100-mile bike rides and faced a mother bear and her cub at a campsite in California. Our goal for a four-day trip last July was to climb Mount Langley, a 14,026-foot peak that, according to Backpacker magazine, has one of the best alpine views in the country.
With stark walls and craggy cliffs, Langley and the Sierra Nevada embody the myth of the West, providing backdrops for Hopalong Cassidy B-Westerns and dozens of others, as well as adventure. From the summit, you can see the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, 14,505-foot-tall Whitney, as well as the Great Western Divide and Owens Valley, where the water wars immortalized in “Chinatown” unfolded.
Our first day, we parked at Horseshoe Meadow, an Inyo National Forest campsite where a sign reminds visitors: “This Place Is Wild.” Three people have died near Langley since 2009, including two who fell from Army Pass. Nationwide, 30 people died in mountaineering accidents last year, according to the Colorado-based American Alpine Club. Shortly before our trip, Michael Ybarra, a Wall Street Journal extreme-sports reporter who had written for The New York Times, was killed in the central Sierra when he fell from a cliff. I knew about the risks you face on a mountain, but I also knew we would play it safe.
Sean stabbed his pole in the dirt and started up the trail, followed by Kerry, a corporate executive, and me. Sean has a muscular build and knuckles so weather-beaten they look scarred. He also has a weakened shoulder, a stiff knee and gnarled wrist, from surgeries that were necessary after years of running and doing extreme sports.
The air had a rosemary-pine scent, and the trail was a well-marked path of dirt and sand. At various points, you cross over brooks, on logs or small bridges. The trail is not steep, but it is long — about five miles, and Sean had said it would take us three hours. It did not help when three-quarters of the way I began to slow down. Kerry, wearing ear buds, passed me. I discovered my ideal pace was the shuffle he had adopted minutes earlier while trying to fix his iPod, which was stuck on R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.”
Finally we reached Cottonwood Lakes, a campsite at about 10,000 feet, surrounded by forest and lakes, and set up tents. Later we saw a mule deer and met our neighbors, Max, a military contractor, and Tom, a surgeon. As Max and I filled water bottles at Long Lake, he told me he was planning to photograph the stars at night. The icy lake was deep and clear, and in the early evening I watched a marmot slip across the rocks near the campsite.
I woke in my tent at 2 a.m. and struggled to catch my breath. My throat was thick, and I swallowed hard. I was suffering from altitude sickness. After a few minutes, though, I made peace with the thin air and got some sleep.
Next morning, Sean fixed coffee on a portable stove, and our neighbor Tom stopped by: I gave him Band-Aids for his blisters in exchange for creamer, and then my brothers and I started up another section of the trail, a well-maintained path known as New Army Pass, part of which runs through Sequoia National Park.
It got colder as we climbed, and the terrain was desolate. We reached the top of the pass three hours later. While we were standing in a clearing, a guy in a faded T-shirt and torn pants emerged from behind a rock. He said a few jumbled words, and wandered off.
My brothers and I headed up a path marked by Stonehenge-like monuments and ran into scree and talus, which sound like the title of a Nickelodeon cartoon, but are diabolical. Talus are rocks that trip you, and scree is fine gravel that feels like quicksand. For every step you take in scree, you slide back a few inches. Sean’s boots scrunched to a halt about 500 feet from the summit. “Tara, there are rocks ahead,” he said. “We have to scramble up them.”
He wanted to forge ahead on a route that led to the top of the mountain, shinnying over boulders near a series of ledges. I was not interested in seeing more drop-offs — and potential falls. Yet I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was determined to get to the summit.
“You can go,” I said. “But what happens to me?”
“We just leave you here,” he said, with a laugh. He pointed to a clearing and said, “You should wait there instead of here.” I looked down and realized I was sitting on a rock at an elevation of about 13,500 feet; I scooted to the clearing.
My brothers continued up the trail, and I settled back and took in the surroundings. There are no trees at this altitude. The terrain is rocky and arid. The Sierra began to form 10 million years ago and are made of speckled granite that shines like crystal. It seems impossible that anything can survive in this lunar landscape, yet I noticed a patch of stubby plants under a boulder. I lay down, with my head in the shade.
Ten minutes later, Kerry returned. He said he had been worried about me — and had also seen the drop-offs. He had decided to let Sean head for the summit on his own. “I was so happy when I heard your footsteps,” I said.
“What if it had been that crazy guy?” Kerry said, teasing me.
As Kerry and I rested near a boulder, a hawk soared above us, coasting on thermal air as if its engine had run out of gas. We were enveloped in hot stillness. The hawk and granite had a timeless quality, as if we had slipped back 13,000 years. I half expected Paleoindians to emerge over the hill, hunting for antelope.
“Did you hear something?” Kerry asked.
I heard a faint voice. “Go down,” Sean called. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to tell us something practical like, ‘I’m going down a different way now — meet you at the campsite.’ Or something terrifying like, ‘I am trapped on a ledge. Go and find a search-and-rescue team.’ I froze. Then, a moment later he was walking across the rocks below us. He had been gone for an hour or so, but it had seemed like several ice ages.
“I was afraid we lost you,” I said. A moment earlier, I had been so glad to see him that tears welled up in my eyes.
He said that happens to his wife, too, when she sees him. He was joking, of course, and I laughed — but not hard. He must have known I was angry, because after a moment he looked into the distance and said, “I’m sorry.” I smacked him on the back of his head, and we started down toward the campsite. We had been out nine hours that day.
After four days of hiking, Sean and I set up lawn chairs near a tangle of rose bushes a few yards from a pool at a Best Western off Highway 395. Before our trip, the Sierra Nevada had meant little to me — “brown rock, blue sky,” as Kerry described the landscape. Yet now as I sat in my lawn chair, I had a different perspective. Looking at the range in the distance was like reading a Russian novel. The view was full of drama and foreboding.
“Most people exist so swaddled against danger, measuring out their lives with coffee spoons, that those who reckon by a different calculation of risk and reward appear insane,” wrote Michael Ybarra in The Wall Street Journal in 2009, three years before his death. “Yet to survive a perilous situation is to love life more than the average person can imagine.”
I do not believe you have to look over a cliff in order to appreciate life intensely. Yet that is what Mr. Ybarra believed and what my brother still believes, and now I have a better sense of why.
HOW EXTREME?
Rankings are from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very).
Remoteness 3
The place is popular, with semi-heavy foot traffic on the trail. Yet there is no cellphone reception for miles. If anything goes wrong, it will take hours to get to a place where you can call a search-and-rescue team.
Creature Discomforts 2
The campsite is pretty — and about 10,000 feet high. At this altitude, some people will suffer from shortness of breath and headaches (Advil helps).
Physical Difficulty 2
If you are in shape, you can make it up Mount Langley. You have to scramble over boulders for a couple of hundred feet, though, and as my brother Kerry says, “I don’t like the areas where if I trip, I’m dead.” It’s your call.
