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Spared (for now): a Lesson on Fremont Peak

By Michael Wolcott

"I felt an immediate need to get up there."

I stand by the plywood door and sip morning coffee, staring north to the San Francisco Peaks. The cold tangerine light of dawn strikes the naked summits. Snow glistens like sugar frosting.
It is mid-winter 1991. Last week I moved to Flagstaff from the East. My new place is a "converted attic" with exposed wiring, no insulation, and mice. But it has one essential amenity: this small Plexiglas window facing the Mountain.
(People in Flagstaff, I have learned, say "the Mountain" when referring to the four distinct summits that comprise the Peaks. According to geologists, Arizona's highest sky island is the collapsed remnant of a single, dead strato-volcano that once stood 16,000 feet tall.)
The Mountain has tugged at me since I first set eyes on it in 1987, during a Grand Canyon vacation. I was approaching Flagstaff from the southeast when the Peaks leaped up from the horizon like Shangri-la. I felt an immediate need to get up there. But other plans prevailed. Today, though, I am ready: a bulging backpack sits by the door.
I confess to an unhealthy compulsion for reaching summits, unmatched by great skill or good judgment. My only mountaineering assets are pigheadedness and a seemingly endless store of blind good luck.
Today's plan is to walk from my door to the Mountain's southeastern summit, Fremont Peak. At 11,969 feet, Fremont is the third-highest of the Peaks, but every bit as graceful and alluring as the others.
The pack contains five days of food. I add snowshoes, then step outside to begin the 10-mile walk to the trailhead. I wonder about the weather forecast, but do not check. It doesn't matter: I'm going.
The lenticular cloud appears over the Peaks at around 10 a.m. It looks like a warship from Mars. If this story had a soundtrack, you would now hear somber cello chords, and a few quick notes on the double-bass.
A mile up the Forest Service access road, the first snowflake tickles my nose. By lunchtime, angry needles of snow are coming at me sideways. I lean against a big ponderosa and chow down. My sweaty clothes chill me, but the cheese sandwiches are good. I nod off. An hour later there's snow piling up on my legs - might as well make this a short day.
I pop open the Megamid tent, crawl inside and open a book. The shush of falling snow is a lullaby, of sorts.
By morning there's a foot on the ground. It has stopped snowing, but the sky is grey as death. I consider turning around. But this is not the plan. I strap on snowshoes. The map shows a trailhead two miles up the road, but it's unlikely that anyone has broken trail, so I take a compass bearing on the summit and strike out into the woods.
It's a fluffy wonderland. The trees still hold most of the new snow, so breaking trail is easy. The grade soon steepens, however. I plod uphill, breathing hard under a full pack. The sun breaks out briefly and my spirits soar.
I stop for lunch. Clouds move in again. I take off the sunglasses to study the map: the summit is just two miles away, but still 3,000 feet above. This will take awhile.
The menacing sky dumps more snow. All afternoon I make clumsy zigzag tracks in 2 feet of powder. An hour before dark I stamp out a tent platform and fire up the stove. The tedious chore of melting water keeps me busy for hours. The skin of my hands is cracking in the cold. Snow keeps falling.
Morning breaks clear, though. The temperature is zero. I eat a half-bucket of oatmeal with butter and brown sugar. Breaking camp is an excruciating chore. My feet are blocks of ice. Blood seeps from my ravaged hands. But the water bottles are full and there's a bluebird sky.
Climbing a 30 percent slope warms you up in a hurry. Soon I am peeling off layers, feeling strong. At 10,000 feet, the sun is brilliant. I reach into the map pocket for sunglasses. They are not there. They are back at yesterday's lunch spot - a significant problem. Even a few hours of this sunshine will cook my eyes.
Retrieving them is not an option. I'm still in the trees, though, which cast patches of shade nearly to the summit. Maybe I can just stick to the shadows . . . no, this trip is over . . . but . . .
This argument continues: go up . . . come down; give up . . . keep going; succeed . . . fail. Then I remember Cache Lake Country, an old-time timber-man's compendium of woods-lore - everything from trapping fish to baking sourdough to . . . making snow goggles.
Five minutes later I'm back in business, wearing a ludicrous duct-taped improvisation with tiny ocular slits. It immediately slides down my nose, eclipsing the view. For the rest of the morning I blunder upward, constantly readjusting my ersatz goggles. The sun and wind are fierce in the low-growing subalpine forest. My Scots-Irish skin, I realize, is burning to a crisp. There is no sunscreen.
I am stopping every six or eight steps, gasping frequently: seven days is not much time to acclimate from sea-level. By mid-afternoon I am headachey and nearly spent. I keep trudging.
In late afternoon I plummet 4 feet into an air pocket made by a bristlecone pine, breaking a snowshoe binding. At least it's not my leg. Now seems like a good time to camp.
I dig in deep to keep the tent from blowing away, then melt snow and repair the snowshoe with P-cord. The roar of the wind makes sleep impossible. My peeling skin feels like it has been bathed with battery acid. I lie awake and wonder why I do this stuff. Occasionally a gust reaches inside the floorless tent and throws snow on my face. Finally I drift off.
The wind eventually liberates the tent, interrupting an elaborate dream in which I am drowning. I spend an hour in the frigid wind first rescuing then re-erecting my tent. Morning finally arrives though - blessedly calm and clear. Less than a thousand vertical feet separate me from the summit.
I pack up and press on, reaching treeline several hours later. The wind is up, but the sky still shows some blue. The summit cone is brutally steep. I break for lunch a few hundred feet from the top, in the lee of some boulders. Success is at hand.
I fight a rising wind to pitch my last camp, pack the essentials, and begin the summit dash. It's actually a crawl. The past three days of snowplowing have caught up to me. I can barely breathe and my light pack is oppressive. After 30 minutes, the summit is not yet in view. Maybe this mountain is higher than I thought. Far below, my tent beckons.
At my next rest - a good-sized boulder - I decide to gamble. It can't be far now. I drop the pack, throw on a wind shell over my wool shirt, and go for it.
Remember those cellos? The music is now pizzicato. Atonal. Downright scary. The fog of my exhaustion has eclipsed all reason. I can only think to go uphill. There is no shelter ahead, just a barren slope shooting to the apex of my foolish hope. Ten steps, rest; 10 steps, rest.
More than once I glance back, uneasily, keeping a fix on my pack with its down parka and space blanket. The umbilical cord stretches. Much further down the mountain, out of sight now, is my blue-and-silver tent - the Mother Ship.
Ten minutes later, perhaps a hundred feet from the summit, I am stopped dead in my tracks: a huge black cloud has arrived on the west wind. It might as well be a pride of hungry lions. Finally, my reptilian brain takes over. Nothing is more important, I suddenly realize, than getting back to that tent.
The squall is sudden. I tromp downhill toward my pack, which is no longer visible. Neither are my tracks. The wind howls. A whiteout descends.
I am in deep shit, shivering with fear and verging on panic. So I do what we are always told to do when lost: I sit down. Slumped in the lee of a boulder, I fight back tears. Not a soul in the world knows I am up here. I am an idiot and deserve to die. The soundtrack shifts to elegy: Barber's Adagio with Strings.
But the universe is kind. When the sun bursts forth a few minutes later, I allow myself to weep. I am forgiven. There, 20 feet away, sits the snow-capped green lump of my pack, in the lee of a small boulder. Beethoven's Ode to Joy sweeps across the mountain.
When I pick up the pack and head for the tent, I can't resist one last look up Fremont Peak. There's still a bit of blue in the sky. I almost turn around.

Michael Wolcott writes from Flagstaff where he lies awake at night wondering what's next.