Читать книгу Lime Creek Odyssey - Steven J. Meyers - Страница 9

OF MEATBALLS, SWISS CHEESE, AND SPONGES

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Much of the time I spent with Lime Creek, especially when I first explored the drainage, was in the high ground above the valley floor. My early memories of the area are dominated by mountains. Two peaks, in particular, stand out, one because I have been on its summit so often, and the other, though I have climbed it only once, because that experience was quite special. The two mountains sit facing each other across the Lime Creek canyon, their flanks defining a gorge that has come to be one of my favorites in the Lime Creek drainage. The peak climbed often is Engineer Mountain. The peak climbed only once is North Twilight Peak. Together these two peaks frame Lime Creek through the middle of her course; they frame the course of my experience of the creek as well.

Engineer Mountain sits alone, unlike most others in the San Juans. Not part of a larger group of mountains, its ridges don’t lead directly to other peaks. Its sphinxlike posture comes from this isolation and from its distinctive shape, which is unmistakable and easily identified. The mountain is long and narrow with a high, massive cone-shaped summit that is connected by a long spinelike ridge to a second, lower summit. From either of these summits or the ridge connecting them, the mountain falls away to the valley floor. Engineer sits between the summits of the West Needles (the mountain massif that includes North Twilight Peak) and the high mountain group that lies between the towns of Silverton and Rico. From the top of this relatively isolated peak, you can look out on a stunning panorama, including a broad green-floored and red sandstone-walled glacial valley that extends southward toward Durango. Most locals contemplate a trip to the summit, and many make the climb. Many times I have climbed this mountain with neighbors, with friends and with first-time visitors to the San Juan Mountains who want a look at the lay of the land.

A climb up Engineer is not particularly difficult in relation to the scale of difficulty used by experienced climbers, but it is quite difficult when viewed in terms of the scale of difficulty used by hikers. When approached by the usual, most beautiful route on the northeast ridge, it is a very difficult, exposed hike. A trip to the summit often involves a mixture of sloping meadows, deep woods, loose rock, rock chimneys, and steep snow; yet, if attempted in the company of someone who knows the route, it is a climb that a hiker without any climbing experience but with a little courage and pluck can make. As a result, strange collections of people often group together to work their way up the ridge to the summit. Experienced climbers, who often seek more difficult ascents, will accompany hikers who have never been on a mountain before. All go for the same reason: the beauty of the mountain and the anticipated beauty of the climb.

I have had the good fortune to find time to go up Engineer nearly every year since the San Juans became my home just over a decade ago. Some years I have made the trip several times. Most often I have spent the day on the mountain in the company of nonclimbers, and my most memorable experiences there are filled with the wide eyes and wider smiles of these companions. The mountain always fills me with wonder and profound pleasure; my companions often do too.

Several years ago I made the trip with two friends and a new acquaintance. We were an odd assortment. Two of us lived in the mountains; the other two were then living in the flatlands. We were a writer and a photographer, a therapist and a musician. Two of us had been up the mountain many times, often together; the other two not at all.

The two flatlanders, however, were not newcomers to wilderness. Both had, in their own way, dedicated a large part of their lives, talents, and energies to the exploration and celebration of the natural world. Their trip to visit us in the San Juans was an extension of a journey they had just made to the desert and canyon country of southeastern Utah—a journey that included an attempt to write and perform music as a response to the moods of the canyons. Before they returned home, Nancy and David decided to visit the San Juans and to climb Engineer Mountain. Our journey up the mountain was a metaphorical complement to the canyons. The climb, like the river trip to the canyons, involved music in response to place. In our packs we carried our usual supplies: extra clothing, water, food, and a rope just in case someone felt a need for a belay through one of the few tricky spots. In addition we carried some unusual gear: double ocarinas, a few simple percussion instruments, and an oboe.

We began our climb in the marshy meadows at the top of Coal Bank Hill, working slowly up through the steep wet grasses and false hellebore. In midsummer, the false hellebore was nearly up to our chests. Local belief has it that the height of these plants indicates the depth of the coming winter’s snows. If this was true, it was going to be a heavy snow year. At the crest of the grassy slope we entered a series of limestone benches, each several hundred yards wide, each heavily forested with spruce and balsam fir, the forest floor an alternating world of snow-melt bog and flower-covered meadow.

Is there anything that simultaneously reconciles the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of flamboyance and subtlety as well as the alpine forest floor? Color more showy and brilliant than any I have seen anywhere else exists along with flowers so small and delicate, so carefully hidden in the interstices, that they, but for direct attention and active seeking, remain hidden from view. This apparent contradiction exists in all of the natural world, but its manifestation in the alpine forest is no less startling for this realization.

As we continued our hike, forested benches and limestone cliffs filled with the fossilized remains of millions of tiny creatures gradually gave way to a rolling grassy slope, above which was treeline and then the massive rocky cone that is the peak.

Our climb took us through shattered rock along a ridge formed initially by glaciation and later by the continuous melt-freeze fracturing that is typical in the volcanic and sedimentary formations of the San Juans. Climbers used to the solid granite, hard cracks and vertical faces of places like Yosemite find the San Juans nerve-racking. Even modest slopes can be dangerous because of the loose rock. Without a basic sense of trust in the relative stability of broken rock in repose and the ability to quickly abandon a platform that proves to be unreliable, even a relatively easy climb, such as the one up Engineer, can become a fearful experience. With little relief the climb crosses scree, talus, and precariously balanced boulders, but the ridge emerges from all of this, an obvious and safe path as it winds its way to the summit.

Along the way, each change in the rock signals a new rhythm to the climb. The steep tundra of the base gives way to a band of relatively stable red sedimentary rock. The red rock becomes a fractured band of white rock that slides with little provocation. The white rock becomes another band of red, then a band of tan rock that is more stable but much steeper. Climbing out of the last chimney in the tan band, the large, balanced blocks of gray conglomerate on the summit ridge come into view.

At the bottom we had climbed steep slopes with long confident strides, then changed to short tentative steps in the loose scree. From here the rock had gradually steepened until nearly vertical, and we resorted to stair-stepping, climbing motions with our hands and feet. At last we had emerged on the summit ridge, where we moved once again with long, confident strides toward the summit.

The view, as expected, was wonderful and so much more pleasant and rewarding for having been earned. I have flown through the San Juans quite a bit, sometimes in light aircraft, sometimes in large commercial jets, a few times in helicopters. The views during those flights, I must admit, were spectacular. I would whisk over and through drainages that I had spent days hiking and those that I wished I would someday hike. As jagged pinnacles of rock, high crags, and steeply dropping ridges passed close below, with my feet planted on nothing but air, I saw more rugged land at one time than I once thought existed. But all that pales beside the experience of looking down from a mountain you have climbed. To be breathing hard with sweat glistening on your body, grinning as the view emerges at the summit, is an experience that can never be equaled in photographs or plane rides. The view that day with my three companions, though I had seen it many times before, was no exception.

The deep valley of the Animas River lay to the south beneath us, its waters and those of the valley’s small lakes shining in the midday sun. To the north the high snow-covered peaks of the San Juans near Silverton reflected a light that appeared amplified, more than just a reflection of the sun’s brilliance. To the west were the mountains and forested flats of the Hermosa Plateau. To the east rose the steep, massive face of North Twilight Peak and the pinnacles of the Needles Mountains behind it. Beneath our feet, Engineer’s walls abruptly fell away to the valley floor, green and lush before us to the south, white and wintry behind us to the north. Can anyone be in such a place and not be deeply moved?

When I was a student I heard many discussions in literature and writing classes about romanticism, about the limits of language and about the need for writers to restrain emotion, to rein it in so that description and expression of personal passion avoid hyperbole, or worse, maudlin sentimentality. I was distressed to hear this once again in graduate school in reference to the visual media. Even more distressing was the stunning silence, in the upper levels of academia, in graduate seminars and colloquia, of the issue not being discussed at all. For the academically trained, the issue had been settled. Personal passion, love, beauty, agony, ecstasy, none of these were allowed to exist. We would be well advised, it seems, not to make ourselves appear stupid by bringing these themes out of the grave where they had been laid to rest. This is true for love stories, autobiographies, news reporting, novels, short stories, essays, and poetry (God, yes, poetry), and, especially, it would seem, nature writing. Pure description when penned with skill is sufficient to evoke emotion. There is no need to overdo it.

Yet, what is someone to do with a memory like this? When we got to the summit, we smiled, laughed, sighed, sobbed, and ate. We organized thoughts and packs. After we had each found a comfortable seat the instruments were distributed. We began to play, to make music. Those of us with little talent did what we could in support of those in whose hands and lips instruments became extensions of thought, of being. Music began to flow from our happiness into the air, and from the air into the world around us. And from the world around us, into us and back out again. Butterflies that had been fluttering nearby came closer and fluttered near our faces. A hawk that had been circling overhead came in low and slowly passed—passed so close, in fact, that the wind moving through its wings made a sound we all heard above and in complement to our music. One by one we put down our double ocarinas, our wood blocks and sticks, and waited for Nancy to pick up her oboe. She did. A few tentative notes came out, notes that seemed to be searching for an anchor in the soil of the valley and a lift from the blue sky overhead. More notes came. Finally, a song. A song that flowed from the oboe as if the earth itself had written it. The light changed. A brightness of an intensity never seen down in the valley grew to envelop the mountaintop. Distinctions between rock and sound, light and rhythm ceased to exist. I cannot recall ever having heard a song so beautiful or so appropriate. That it was improvised, that it will never be heard again, that it belonged to that place and time made the memory more precious.

Is my description of this experience hyperbole? This telling isn’t the half of it. Romantic? I guess so. Maudlin? I don’t know. Sometimes life is more important than art (whatever art is) and truth more valuable than restraint. I’m a firm believer in passion and stupidity and life. I think these experiences are not ours to hoard; rather, they are ours to share. To pretend that the experience was less or other than what it was is not sophistication. It is pretentiousness in the extreme. Compared with a mountain some hundredmillion years old, we’re all a bit stupid and naive and unsophisticated. Coming down from the mountain, as we reluctantly did, doesn’t mean abandoning the joy and wonder we shared there, no matter how strange it might have seemed when we got back to town. Part of holding the experience of a climb is being able to realize that it all really happened.

MANY PEOPLE EYE NORTH TWILIGHT PEAK, THINKING SOMEDAY THEY might like to climb one of the ridges or snow-filled gullies that lead to its apex. Many, I suspect, wonder what it would be like to sit on top and see what the surrounding mountains look like from that vantage point. The desire is partially rooted in the knowledge that North Twilight Peak, unlike Engineer Mountain, sits in close proximity to the incredibly jagged and steep summits of the Needles Mountains and the Grenadier Range of the Weminuche Wilderness to the east. Few, however, make the climb.

The reasons are numerous. Any easy route up Twilight, any route that might be taken by an inexperienced hiker or climber, involves a fairly long slog through difficult country. Any direct ascent involves some rock climbing skill if the path follows one of the steep ridges or snow and ice climbing skill if it’s a gully route. Still, vastly more difficult peaks are climbed in the San Juans, some frequently. North Twilight Peak is protected from the hordes of hikers because it’s more than a hike, from the bulk of climbers because it’s not one of the better-known climbs, and from both, I suspect, because it has escaped the rather dubious distinction of becoming a well-known destination, even though it has achieved some distinction as a scenic wonder when viewed from afar. North Twilight Peak is not a particularly high peak. Many who climb mountains seek vertical; a 13,000-foot summit is not as attractive as a 14,000-foot summit. While the logic of this attitude escapes me, I don’t mind. It leaves some very nice country relatively untrammeled.

Strange wishes are known to develop and linger in the hearts of residents in this mountain-filled world, and I suspect the content of those wishes in some way sketches the outline of our response to the surroundings. A desire that began very soon after my arrival here, and grew until it became something of an obsession, was the wish to climb every peak that I could see from my home. The desire then grew to include all the peaks I see often. Nothing, as you might imagine, would be worse than having a wish whose limits are so obscure that they make fulfillment impossible. This was precisely the nature of this particular desire. I believe the technical term for this condition is neurosis; the common term, no-win situation. Climbing the peaks visible from home was relatively easy and very rewarding until I moved a few blocks and could see a few more peaks. The desire to climb all those, however, was never very realistic. My weekly fifty-mile trip south to Durango for groceries, to see a movie, to buy a book reveals scores—no, hundreds—of peaks. A twenty-six-mile trip north to the Ouray Hot Springs reveals hundreds more. And what of the summits that emerge when one of these peaks is finally climbed, summits that are seen repeatedly, with different aspects and personalities, as a person climbs more and more?

It didn’t take me long to realize that a desire like the one to climb every peak often seen would soon lead me to madness, if indeed I had not already arrived. Being a practical person, I found my wish slowly transformed into one even more diffuse, even less definable, but one less likely to cause insanity. This wish was to climb peaks I see from home or peaks seen often that for some reason I find particularly attractive, either by virtue of their beauty, their mystery, or their ability to make me think of them at the oddest moments and say, “Someday I’ve got to climb that thing.” This desire was infinitely more manageable and infinitely more pleasant. In a very natural way it guided my choices about where I would go and what I would do for quite a while.

North Twilight Peak, or simply Twilight, as it is known by locals, was one of the peaks on that wish list. I saw it from the highway every time I went to town for groceries. I saw it across Lime Creek from the summit of Engineer Mountain every time I made a trip there. Often I would see its snow-covered flanks bathed in the pink glow of twilight when I returned from winter ski trips. Its steep snow-filled gullies and ridges rose up before me when I was hiking or fishing in the creek bottom. It is a strikingly beautiful mountain.

There was only one problem. A pleasing ascent by a good route would require a degree of skill I did not possess when the idea of climbing Twilight first came to me. When learning to climb I found myself woefully inadequate on steep ice and snow. I discovered this when I attempted in ignorance an extremely difficult route up the north face of Mount Sneffels, about thirty miles north of Twilight, a route I thought might make a good warm-up climb for one of the snow-filled gullies I particularly liked on Twilight’s north face. I escaped from Sneffels with my life and some very precious lessons in humility, but my confidence had been damaged severely in the process. After that escape, Twilight, for all my desire to climb its north face, looked to me more like K2 in the Karakoram than it had any right to do. Still, wishes being what they are, with something about falling off a horse dimly echoing in the deep recesses of consciousness, I set out to climb North Twilight Peak by the direct route up a steep snow gully on its north face. With me was a friend in whom I had great confidence as a snow climber and another friend with whom I had escaped physical damage if not ego-deflation on Sneffels.

While nearly everyone we knew who climbed at all could talk very authoritatively about the mountain (mountaineers, I was to learn much later, are very much like fishermen), they all responded when pressed, “Well, no, I’ve never actually climbed it.” This great reservoir of experience and profound knowledge of the mountain among the climbing fraternity did little to soothe my fears. On the hike in—five miles of rolling limestone benches with alternating meadows and woods on a trail above Lime Creek—I stared at Twilight’s face with the intensity of a convicted man gazing into the eyes of a towering judge who would soon pronounce sentence. My share of our bright and cheerful conversation was, I sadly admit, a sham. I was whistling in the dark.