Climbing in a fog...

Sunday, August 15, 2010

I was up by 6 a.m. The forecast was for possible thunderstorms, which can be pretty dicey if you’re above the tree line where there is no cover against lightning strikes. I could see that the peak of the mountain we were planning to climb was completely shrouded in fog…a condition I had grown to learn was unlikely to change for the entire day…so I began making plans for an alternate climb.

With everyone sleeping, the land was eerily silent. Then the silence was broken by a humming sound, which turned out appropriately to be a humming bird. I shot some pictures of it and then decided it was time to get breakfast going and my fellow campers up for a long day on the trail.

We ate oatmeal…except for Goldilocks Marie…who had porridge. She let me taste it…I don’t know…kind of seedy and crunchy and…well…I can see why the three bears ate it, but I’m unclear why Goldilocks made such a pig of herself with it…I avoid pissing off bears whenever possible.

We packed lunch and rain gear in my day pack…about 15 pounds total, which I would carry. Don took my camera, Heidi had the camel back and Marie took two nalgene water bottles, which she wore on her hips with a special belt designed to carry them.

We made our way north along a rocky, root-covered trail to Colden Lake and the trailhead for our climb to Skylight Mt. When trying to figure out how long it takes to reach peaks, I tend to think in the time from the trailhead to the peak and exclude the time it takes to get to the trail. That’s recreational walking to my way of thinking…but it creates problems for those who are asking me how long we’ll be walking.

We made two stops on the way to the lake, checking out other lean-to’s and speaking to their residents. This added about 30 minutes to the time it took to reach the trailhead and became a confusing time issue as we climbed. I’d said it would take around an hour to reach a privy about half way up the trail, but my time started when we hit the trailhead. Heidi’s bowel movement and bladder, on the other hand, was calculating from the time we’d left camp…and she was ready to go much earlier.

“I said it would be an hour from the trailhead…not from camp,” as way of an explanation for why we weren’t near the privy after an hour of hiking.

“If I poop my pants…well…it’s all your fault,” she shot back, convinced that I’d once again mislead her on the time it would take to ease the mental burden of how long we’d be walking. I don’t do that either, but I tend to give the time it actually takes to walk somewhere, which often differs from the time to get there by the time spent taking pictures, stopping for water and snack breaks, visiting with fellow hikers and just taking it all in. This can easily add a couple of hours to the daily hike, but there’s no good way to figure what it will be. I really didn’t care too much though, because they needed me. No one knew how to get back and I was the camp cook. I had the power. Never mess with the bull…you might get the horns.

We had taken one 32-ounce bottle of water from camp, which had been purified and was all Don would drink. I was now dipping and refilling the camel back and water bottles directly from the mountain streams since there was no standing water above them. I’d been doing this for years and never had a problem personally, nor had anyone that traveled with me. Don wouldn’t hear of it though, he was still imagining tape worms four feet long exiting his body through his eye sockets.

The trail gains over 3,000 feet for the climb with half coming over the first four miles and the rest on the last two…which makes much of the second half quite steep…and tiring. I was sweating like the pig I am and walking slowly to try and control it…impossible. We reached Lake Tear of the Clouds, the headwater of the Hudson River, to find it completely fogged in. Normally, we’d see Mt. Marcy, New York’s tallest peak at 5.344 feet, from this vantage point, but it was lost in the fog, as well. I knew we would have zero views from Skylight, but the landscape shrouded in fog was interesting. We reached the tree line at about 4,900 feet and then needed the cairns (small piles of rock placed strategically on the bare mountain peeks about every 100 feet to help keep hikers from losing the trail in just such conditions) to find our way to the summit. The wind was blowing strongly and combined with the mist of the fog and the altitude, we all found it necessary to put on our jackets against the chill of the air. With no views to appreciate, we ate our lunch of gorp, energy bars, cheese and hard salami and made our way back down.

The return trip went more quickly, though Don was slowed by a sore left shin…the result of whacking it 11 times (he always keeps stats) on the hike. He was also fogging up his glasses pretty badly, which tends to make seeing a struggle and walking a little slower. We arrived back in camp accompanied by a light rain, but not nearly hard enough to clean the sweat and filth of the trail from my clothes and body…I headed for a cleansing swim with Don. When we reached the bathing spot, he walked in with shoes on, dunked his entire body in quickly and then sprinted for the shore. I was sitting in two feet of water watching this futile attempt to get clean.

“You’re still covered in mud. Get your butt back in here and clean up. You stink and you’re a sissy-mary,” I said.

“What…I’m clean! I’m not getting back in there…its cold and there’s…umm…stuff with parasites in there,” he said. If I could have pulled one of those tape worms from my eye socket at that moment, he’d have had a stroke and that would have been the end of the ‘Don Alexander Saga’, but I didn’t.

“There’s no fish…no beavers…no ducks or birds and unless you’ve pooped in here recently…this water is clean,” I said, knowing that no amount of common sense was going to penetrate that fear-plagued, distorted and peanut-sized grey matter he stored in his head and called a brain.

We made our way back to camp and I put together a dinner of cous cous with salami and black bean soup. We had vanilla pudding for dessert, which I’d made using powdered milk and instant pudding mix. It was a little lumpy, but tasted great. I also made hot chocolate, but had no takers for another sardine sandwich. Babies.

We had been on the trail for around 9 hours with probably 7 hours of hiking. That burns a ton of calories and everyone ate as though they were working their last meal…which works for me because I carry the food and didn’t want any left for the hike out tomorrow.

Hike duration: 7 hours.
Training Heart Rate: 90.
Calories burned during workout: Around 4,000.