Anecdotes : Mountain Climbing and Verticality
I took the above photo on a recent hike up Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I was at the Lake of the Clouds, which is a small pond near the summit. The name is fitting, since I broke the cloud line a few hundred feet below it. This gave my surroundings a placeless quality since visibility was so limited. It was also above the tree line, so the ground was barren and bereft of life. Combine this with the sub-zero wind chill and the layers of ice and snow, and I found myself in an alien landscape, devoid of color and dreadfully inhospitable to humans. Despite all of this, I somehow found it irresistible and I didn’t want to leave. I felt a strange magnetism to it, even though it went against my better judgement. It was as if I’d left the earthly world behind and I’d discovered a higher plane of existence. It was a plane of isolation, solace, and treacherous beauty. The world up there brought a clarity to my mind, and after descending the mountain I was determined to revisit this mindscape as soon as possible.
My ascent of Mount Washington brought me face-to-face with some of the most breath-taking and unforgiving landscapes I’ve ever experienced. It was an intensely personal experience, and I still find myself struggling for the words to describe my feelings throughout the climb. It also helped me to understand a few aspects of the human need for verticality, and I’ll explore them in the following paragraphs.
Mountains carry a strange allure for me. I grew up in the flatness of the American Midwest, so topographic variety represents an exoticism I was unaware of as I matured. This affected my experiences as I grew up, and as an avid hiker in my adult years, I seek out paths that climb to peaks and high places. I also like to stretch out the bookends as much as possible. In other words, the lower the start and the higher the end, the better. It’s as if I’m trying to make up for lost time based on my background in flatness. Elevation gain has become my measuring stick for success while hiking, and I continually look for the next highest peak out there to climb. Recently, this led me to Mount Washington, which is the tallest peak in the Northeast.
After the trip was booked, I began to obsess over the mountain. I had climbed up smaller mountains before, but this one was different. The peak was above the tree line, and the mountain was known for its erratic weather patterns. My mind became pre-occupied with thoughts about it, as if it was taunting me, waiting to see if I could make it to the top. When the day of the climb finally arrived, I stirred awake in my hotel room at 3am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. My mind was racing with anticipation, craving the adventure that laid in wait for me.
While I laid awake in bed waiting for the day to begin, I read about the mountain and past hikers who had met their demise trying to reach the peak. This only served to heighten my anticipation. What was it about the mountain that caused all those people to lose their lives in pursuit of its summit? There was something going on here, and I was eager to get out there and understand what it was.
My alarm rang, even though I’d been wide awake for hours. After getting ready, I drove to the trailhead, parked the car, and assembled my gear. It was my armor against the mountain, and my protective shield against the cold, the ice and the wind. The temperature was hovering just above freezing at the trailhead, but the forecast at the summit was much colder and windier. I had read about altitudinal zonation before, but this was the first time I would experience it face-to-face.
As I embarked on the trail, I found myself looking up the mountain to try to see the summit. There was a low-hanging cloud-line that morning, which hid the peak. The slopes just climbed up and lost themselves in the clouds. This was the first aspect of verticality I was confronted with. In a flat landscape, clouds are not something one can interact with. They exist up there, in an abstracted world, far from the surface. The mountain allowed me to take part in this world; I was about to climb up into a cloud; I was about to leave the surface world.
My ascent followed a valley, so the entirety of the climb was revealed to me in pieces as they became visible. The second aspect of verticality I noticed was the snow line. The beginning of the trail had bits and pieces of snow scattered about, but was largely unfrozen. As I looked up into the valley, I began to see alpine forest that was covered in snow. The pine trees glistened with a crystalline shine that contrasted beautifully against the dark green needles. I was about to enter a vast sea of winter soldiers, standing at attention against the frozen air.
The temperature gradually fell as I gained altitude. The levels of snow and ice increased, and what was wet and muddy down below became icy and frozen up above. I put on my snow spikes, and continued to climb. They made a wonderful jingling sound as I walked, giving me better traction on the rocks as they clawed their way into the ice and refused to budge.
After I reached the snow line, the next vertical layer I reached was the cloud line. It’s a surreal feeling to interact with a cloud. As I got closer, it felt like I was about to reach an infinite ceiling that obscured the summit, shrouding the mountain in mystery. Of course, with any of these vertical thresholds, there is no actual line, per se, but rather a gradual change in landscape. As I entered the cloud, visibility diminished around me, and my sphere of awareness got more focused on my immediate surroundings. I could no longer see into the distance; it was a feeling of isolation and heightened focus, as if my attention was shifting inward, and my mind forgot everything that existed outside this sphere.
The sense of isolation and heightened focus correlated wonderfully with a change in weather. Shortly after passing the cloud line I approached the tree line. It felt like the forest was slowly shrinking around me, as trees turned to shrubs, which turned to ground vegetation, and finally I found myself in an alien landscape of rocks and ice, as mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
Along with the shrinking forest, I was also losing my protection from the wind. The ice-covered pines had been insulating me from the open air, and when I broke the tree line my environment became much less hospitable. I now had to fight against constant wind gusts, which pushed the temperatures down below zero. It felt like the mountain was trying to push me away from the summit. The cloud was quite dense at this point, and my focus had already shrank down to my little sphere of influence. All of my senses had diminished in some way. My vision was limited, my hearing was obscured by the constant wind, my sense of touch was muted by my gear, and my olfactory was dulled by the thinness of the air. I was completely cut off from my life off the mountain, and looking back, three things became clear as I reached the Lake of the Clouds.
The first, as mentioned above, was how everything in my life other than my current task had vanished from my mind. I was completely in the moment, choosing my next step and making sure I was warm enough to make it back down the mountain safely. I felt a mental clarity I’ve only experienced a few times in my life, and it was intoxicating. It’s a difficult feeling to describe, but while I was in it, everything just made sense. I gained precious perspective on the fragility of life, the sublime beauty of the natural world, and my mental ability to handle adversity.
The second was my relationship to my surroundings. This is also a tough thing to describe. I almost felt like my physical body was in a place, but I was somehow detached from it. My environment was completely devoid of life, and the only thing allowing me to experience this alien landscape was my gear. It separated my warm-blooded body from its frozen surroundings; it created a mini-climate that defied the relentless cold and wind surrounding me. My fragile human body didn’t belong there. My existence up on that mountain was only made possible because of the stuff I had covered myself with.
The third was the realization that I chose to do all of this. As I gazed upon the Lake of the Clouds and fought the coldness of the wind, I thought about the world down below; the one I left behind to experience this altitude. Down at the base of the mountain, none of this was possible. I had found something on Mount Washington, even though I can’t point to exactly what it was. There was something in me that wanted, even needed to climb that mountain. It was the same thing that drove all the other climbers to risk themselves for the summit.
I didn’t reach the summit that day. The conditions were too dangerous, and any hopes for a view at the top were dashed by the clouds. After reaching the Lake of the Clouds, I turned back and headed down the mountain. I experienced the same layers I had just fought through in reverse order. The alpine forest grew back up around me, I descended out of the clouds, the levels of snow and ice shrank, and the temperature gradually raised back up. After returning to the trailhead, I knew I’d found a new aspect of hiking. I’d never gained so much altitude in a single climb before. I’d never been face-to-face with the atmospheric aspects of verticality like I was on that mountain. I was instantly hooked.
Despite all the amazing scenery and experiences I had throughout the climb, not reaching the summit is a sticking point in my mind. Thus, I have plans to return in the summer and make it to the top. This is telling, since it gives me insight into my motivations for mountain climbing. I had set out to reach the highest point on the mountain. My motivation was based on verticality, and only the summit would’ve satisfied this. Throughout the experience, I tapped into my innate need to escape the surface of the earth, and on that mountain I got a fleeting glimpse of what it feels like to satisfy that need.
Read about my second attempt to summit Mount Washington here.