Mountain climbing stands apart from other sports in several respects. It is a challenging activity which tests your physical and emotional strength to whatever limits you allow. It is not a competition between individuals. Rather, nature provides hurdles, as well as avenues of retreat and of safe passage, to which one meets the challenge without going beyond one's personal limitations.
In climbing, if hazardous, the essence of life and its fragility is accentuated by the demands of the moment. All else, including work and the whole mundane world we have created in the cityscape, is of no consequence. As such a new perspective is gained, one wherein our everyday toils and trials suddenly appear petty by comparison. When this attitude is applied to our daily tasks we grow inside, having gained the confidence that accrues from having passed the more severe tests nature hands out. This then is one main reason I venture into the mountains. Another is the sheer beauty of mountain scenery. Indeed, the higher one climbs the more stark and seemingly surrealistic the mood invoked. Camping on a glacier miles and miles from any human generated garbage, there is a keen sense of the awesome grandeur of G-d's creation and, simultaneously, of the puny role we play out in our brief lives. Another reason to climb is the innate desire to reach the highest point within one's visual horizon. Standing atop Kilimanjaro in July 1996, I was keenly aware that there was no point of land higher for some 3500 miles. The Karakoram range of Northern India and Pakistan, including K2 (28,250 feet), lay across the Indian Ocean to the northeast. As for the old adage "because its's there", some truth does exist. However I have not met anyone who does not have some quite personal reasons for pursuing this demanding yet rewarding activity.My interest in climbing harks back, in its earlist stages, to when I lived in Denver, Colorado from the ages of seven to nine. My family owned a Volkswagon camper which was taken on numerous camping trips throughout the western United States.
We visited essentially every National Park, and most of the National Monuments, west of the Great Plains. I have an enormous number of photographs from these trips as well as progressively more distant memories of both good and not-so-good times. Between my second and third year of medical school in Michigan, I got the seemingly irrational urge to take a survival course in Colorado with the Outward Bound school. For 23 days we slogged through knee-deep snow in the Collegiate Range of central Colorado, legs and shoulders groaning from the weight of our backpacks. Remarkably (at least to me at the time), I appeared the only person with an intense desire to actually get to the top of the surrounding peaks. Other people simply wanted a wildnerness experience. I actually cried when at some 12,000 feet our group leader, for safety reasons, prevented us from continuing to the summit of Mount Massive (14,421 feet), the second tallest in the state. The mountain will always be waiting for another day, a realization which, when considered, should prevent many climbing accidents when pushing forward in dangerous conditions of terrain and/or weather. One summer I visited my parents in California and, with the family stationwagon, took a motel in Lone Pine near the base of Mount Whitney. The latter at 14,495 feet is the tallest mountain in the 48 contiguous states, and is typically hiked via an eleven mile long trail from the campsite and trailhead at 8,300 feet. I hiked the 22 miles from sunup to dusk, having enjoyed four peanut butter and blueberry jam sandwiches at the summit plus a gallon of water along the trail. After accepting a postdoctoral position at Caltech in Pasadena, I participated in a twelve day course of instruction in alpine mountaineering in Washington state. I learned essential skills in snow and ice travel which were then applied in a climb of Mount Baker. We also did rock climbing; and, later, failed to climb another Cascadian volcano (Glacier Peak) largely owing to a freezing rain. Denali, known also as Mount McKinley (20,320 feet), is the highest peak in North America. For some unexplainable reason I decided that someday I would climb this mountain, and would, bit by bit, gain the skills and experience needed to make this a safe and successful task. This would include, as will be seen below, experience in cold weather camping; high altitude; and overall knowledge available only by practice. I have participated in five other guided climbs. One was a winter course of instruction in the High Sierra the last week of February. We learned avalanche safety, cross country skiing, spent a day climbing waterfall ice (very demanding), and an ascent of Bear Creek Spire (13,720 feet) to conclude. I traveled to Central Mexico with the intention of climbing Popocatepetl (17,887 feet) and Ixtaccihuatl (17,343 feet) in December, 1990 on a guided excursion. The chief goal here was to gain experience at high altitude. At 2 AM on the morning of our Popo ascent I awoke with a severe headache. Nobody believed it was real as I heard claims that I had "wimped out". And so, aware that I would not work at home with such a pain, let alone climb higher than ever before, I elected to start out with everyone, and turn back at the first rest one hour later. This I did and, returning to the base, threw up and slept until three that afternoon. Upon noting the oderiferous mass on the floor everyone finally believed me that my condition had not been contrived. I succeeded in climbing Ixta, the more difficult of the two climbs owing to the varied terrain encountered on a traverse of its slopes. I climbed Mount Rainier (14,410 feet) in Washington state by the Ingraham glacier route on a guided ascent. Rainier is a mountain well known as a challenging test of basic mountaineering skills, and serves as a training ground for many American Himalayan expeditions. To gain further experience for Denali I attemped a winter ascent of Mount Shasta (14,162 feet) in northern California. This guided climb failed owing to severely cold conditions at some 12,300 feet on the Cassaval Ridge, a route which would be a class 5 rock climb in the summer but preferred in the winter in order to avoid avalanche danger in the gulleys below. In June 1995 I participated in an expedition to the Saint Elias Range of Alaska. We flew in by skiplane to a glaciated valley untrammeled by humans (or most animals for that matter), and succeeded, for the first time, in climbing four of the surrounding peaks (I climbed three of these).Many people are attached to climbing the highest points of the United States, one state at a time. Books are available describing the various routes, many of which are trivial, e.g. a roadbed makes for the highpoint of Delaware while a pig stable serves for Iowa.
For the western states this silliness is not the case. As such one summer Edward Earl and I drove through Utah, Colorado and New Mexico and climbed their respective state highpoints. We also met my brother Dale in Aspen, Colorado, so that he could climb Mount Elbert, the highest of Colorado (and hence of all the Rockies) as our guest. He failed, having feigned altitude sickness, apparently preferring to watch Labor Day football games in the motel bar back in Leadville. Note: Although Leadville is commonly thought of as the highest town in the United States at some 10,200 feet, on a climbing trip through Colorado in July 2000 I drove through the unincorporated community of Alma in Park County just northwest of Fairplay. Upon entering Alma the green elevation sign announced that Alma rests at 10,576 feet. That said, Leadville has much historic significance, and was, for a time in the late 1800s, the second largest town in Colorado. On another summer vacation Edward Earl and I climbed the Oregon highpoint - Mount Hood (11,239 feet), Mount Shasta (14,162 feet) in northern California; and the Nevada highpoint, Boundary Peak (13,140 feet). On that vacation, I first climbed the Arizona highpoint as Humphreys Peak (12,633 feet), and then flew from Phoenix to Portland to meet Edward who had driven there (he had allready climbed Humphreys). Humphrey's Peak was a hike by moonlight, and is a story all in itself.On many many weekends Edward Earl and I drove into the backcountry and hiked one of the local mountains. Prior to my current climbing binge that commenced in May 2000 (see below), Edward had more enthusiasm than I for these small hikes, seeing as I largely viewed these ascents as having little bearing on real climbing.
Nevertheless I was amused by his efforts in these matters since they are more noteworthy a pursuit than just sitting at home eating ice cream and preparing wonderful food (my ultimate homebound activity back then AND at present). As such prior to my current climbing binge he had accumulated some 150 peaks to his credit, many of them in the High Uinta and Wasatch ranges of Utah when as a graduate student at the University of Utah. By contrast, prior to May 2000 I had amassed a mere 66 ascents of all types.I experienced a flurry of mountain climbing beginning in summer 2000. It began with a trip that Roy Wallen (see below under county highpointing), Edward Earl and I took to southwest Utah and south Nevada with the goal of four county highpoints (Lincoln Co, NV and Kane, Iron, Washington Cos, UT). The Lincoln and Kane County highpoints are "liners", i.e. theoretical points on a county boundary along the slope of a mountain whose summit lies in an adjacent county.
In July 2000 I flew to Denver and climbed several 14ers in Colorado - Longs Peak (14,255 feet), Mount Massive (14,421 feet), Pikes Peak (14,110 feet), Blanca Peak (14,345 ft), and Mount Evans (14,264 feet). Longs Peak is a classic - here is a trip report on my county highpointers website. Mount Massive was climbed with the celebrated John Mitchler on my fourtieth birthday two days later. Although John had completed all Colorado (i.e. climbing to all of the county highpoints therein), Mount Massive, although second highest in the state, is NOT a county highpoint since it is a mere twelve feet shorter than Mount Elbert of the same (Lake) County. It is, for my sake, the more impressive mountain owing to its obvious bulk - especially as seen from Leadville immediately east. Pikes Peak was "Earlized" to a 1,100 vertical foot elevation gain starting at the 13,000 foot level on the summit road. Blanca Peak is uniquely a "three-fer", i.e. the highpoint of three counties. A trip report documents my experience there. Mount Evans was originally driven up to the summit parking lot with my parents when we lived in Denver. The true summit lies some 100-200 ft higher still after a 1/4 mile trail. Having never actually gotten to the true summit back then, I went up the north slope from Frozen Lake (12,800 feet), and, after attaining the parking lot, scrambled up rocks to the very top. I hitched a ride for the five miles back to my rental car at the lake. The climbing binge continues to this day (May 2009), with all manner of mountains being targets of my attention. I categorize climbing trips into four classes depending upon the distance and duration required.Edward Earl and myself successfully climbed Mount Ritter, the Madera County highpoint, in September 2000. It was class 3 and merited a summary of my experience there. Such a "county highpoint trip report" was to blossom into a very successful affair wherein I became the webmaster to the informal county highpointers group - a set of hikers and climbers intent upon reaching the highest points of USA counties. Many of their ranks come from state highpointers with more time on their hands than they know what to do with.
The web presence was initially limited to a subdirectory at my Geocities web pages - a state of affairs that lasted from roughly October 1999 to early April 2000. After formatting and posting some six hundred trip reports I felt the need to avoid the stupid pop-up advertisements that adorn every HTML page on Geocities. Thus was born cohp.org - with "cohp" for "COunty HighPoints". It is nearly a job given the amount of human effort required to design, implement, maintain, and incrementally upgrade the site from my home in Del Mar. In addition to making many friends through the county highpointers group, I too became infected with the county highpoints bug. I began in earnest my quest to collect counties in summer 2000 after returning from Colorado (I "inadvertantly" had been collecting county highpoints for years with Edward Earl on numerous class 2 trips to western Arizona and in California itself). Living in San Diego poses some geographical challenges as regards county collecting. As San Diego is at the edge of the continent, and noting the large areas of western counties, it is impossible to effectively rack up large numbers of counties as one can, for instance, living back east. In compensation one may readily collect all counties within a specific radius from home - especially since one only has about one-third of the full circle in which to travel. In calendar year 2001 I decided to pursue 4 climbing goals, one of which is based upon the above home glob radius records category -
I am enamored of travel that features climbing as the chief draw. Included are:
Click here for a list of distinct summits attained,
of which there are 1067 as of January 21, 2012.
There have been 975 distinct summit climbs
involving significant elevation gain on-foot.
Click here for a list of summits revisited,
of which there are 42 such events
(30 doubly-climbed, 3 triply-climbed, 2 climbed four times)
as of January 21, 2012.
Click here for a list of peaks unsuccessfully climbed,
of which there are 49 such events
(45 singly-failed and 2 doubly-failed) as of January 21, 2012.
