Program Leaders John Ryan and Gene Gaffney getting it done! “The World’s Worst Weather” “Hey Jon, it’s four.” “Ugh.” I roll over and look at my watch: 4:03AM. -20 F. “This is the hardest part you know, Gene.” “What’s that?” “Getting out of your sleeping bag.” I’ve had my eyes on this trip since last winter when it was shut down due to -60 F temperatures and 120+ mph winds. I hardly knew anything about mountaineering then; I’d never even worn crampons at that point, and even more, I’d never camped extensively in sub-zero temperatures. Such conditions seemed impossible to endure. But the more it floated around my head, and the more BACKPACKER Magazine dared me, calling it “the most coveted - and riskiest - mountaineering feat in the Northeast,” the more interested I became. Something about being in a place I absolutely shouldn’t be allures me. Even its name was grand: “The Presidential Range Traverse.” This 23-mile ridge line includes 11 miles above tree line, 10,000ft of elevation gain, and ten peaks (the highest of them, Mt. Washington, is the highest on the east coast at 6,288ft). But none of that really interested me. In fact, those figures quickly become trivial when compared to mountaineering feats in the Himalayas, all of which exceed 26,000ft. Instead, it was the Presidential Range Traverse’s infamous claim to fame that sparked my interest: it boasted “the world’s worst weather.” The range is at the intersection of several storm tracks causing rapidly changing, extremely cold weather, and they are amplified by the surrounding, converging valleys that create a natural wind tunnel which generates hurricane-force winds an average of 110 days of the year. The mountain has a long held record of the highest wind speed ever recorded at 231 MPH. Winter temperatures average well below zero with average wind chill temperatures around -40 F. No one should be in these conditions. I wanted this. In these types of conditions, knowledge and experience are everything, both of which I sorely lacked a year ago. However, I had the perfect training ground: SUNY Potsdam! Here we live 45 minutes to an hour away from some of the roughest terrain and coldest weather I am sure most of us have ever been in. Additionally, we have a library full of books, we have professors more than willing to help, an entire building dedicated to fitness, and most importantly for me, we have a phenomenal, wholly understated Wilderness Education Department. I loaded my semester with wilderness classes, starting out the week before Spring 2014 with Winter Expedition Skill. This class taught me basic and intermediate level winter backpacking skills, as well as non-technical snow and ice travel. I spent a week backpacking in the high peaks of the Adirondacks in the harshest conditions I had yet experienced, and I was taught through experiential education that it is not only possible to survive at -30F, but to be comfortable in it. I still look back on that class as one of my best times in Potsdam. I also took rock and ice climbing classes, which taught me the essentials of technical climbing, allowing me to start climbing on my own. I then spent the rest of the semester collectively planning a 21-day expedition to the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico for a class called Leadership II. I could write an entire article dedicated to Leadership II alone. For the sake of this one, I will say that Leadership II taught me to organize and successfully utilize the cumulative skills I learned throughout the entire Wilderness Education Program. It cemented all my accumulating experience and knowledge until the skills started to become second nature. Foregrounding such skills allowed for more essential decisions, particularly those relating to safety risk management. For example, on the morning I described in the beginning of this article, my climbing partner Gene Gaffney and I immediately and instinctively started breaking down camp, each person taking on a task without a word to be spoken about it. Without having to decide or even think about who needs to start melting snow for water, or who was going to start digging out the tent stakes buried in the snow, or other routine tasks that have become innate, we are free to think about more important decisions, like how the increasingly bad weather is going to effect our course of travel, or how we are going to deal with our low fuel supply for our stove. So it went, in a brief outlined way, everything that brought me to this morning lying in my sleeping bag at 4am, listening to the onslaught of 45MPH winds against sill nylon walls, contemplating how many seconds I had to put my parka on after I unzipped my sac before I lost all my precious heat. A year’s worth of work and my biggest struggle is getting out of my sleeping bag; it’s almost laughable how controlling our addictions to comfort can be. But after a relatively short-lived battle with myself, I rip open the bag like a Band-Aid. Immediately I am layering, packing my gear and starting the stove. Movement is your heater out here. Besides, today is “The Big Day”, the day we summit Mt. Washington, the day we get to really experience “the world’s worst weather.” There is no time to sit around. We started moving just as the sun started to hit the peak of Mt. Washington, bathing our target in golden pink light that turned the wind-carved landscape into a surrealist master piece. Rime ice coated everything, creating amorphous shapes out of anything that rose more than an inch off the ground. This was not the earth that I knew. There were no more trees, rocks, soil or water anywhere. There was nothing that reminded me of life. There were only strange, white shapes. I had landed on another planet. The will to continue looking around quickly became overpowered by the desire to keep my face from the blasting wind; the higher we climb, the harder it blew. Leaving any skin exposed was absolutely out of question, so a full face mask was a necessity. I knew that pulling the cover from my face to exchange even just a few words with Gene would burn my cheeks, even through layers of dermatome (a chap-stick like wind protection for your face). About 500ft up from the saddle, I stopped to take a picture. Within second of taking off my expedition mittens, my hands were painfully cold. I paid the price for the next half hour as blood slowly started reheating my hands giving them a rather uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling that felt endless. The only thing to do was keep moving, to keep the heater going. Step by step, breath-by-breath, we ground through the elevation. It became rhythmic, almost methodical: breathe in, kick step (kicking through the ice crust to make a step in the snow), breathe out, kick step, breathe in, kick step… We didn’t stop to break. We didn’t speak. We just moved. Breathe, kick, breathe. Slow and steady. Regulating our pace was the main thing on our minds. We needed to move fast enough to stay warm and make good time, but we didn’t want to push to the point where we would sweat, which would mean getting our cloths damp, a detrimental set back to staying warm once we stopped. As simple as it sounds, keeping track of the pace is one of the most important aspects to the success of a climb. A good pace ensures obtaining your objectives while maintaining endurance, so paying attention to that rhythm of “breathe, kick, breathe” became my mantra. Movement became meditative. These moments, when I am fully submerged in the reality of what I am doing, are part of the reason I climb. The only thing that would break this rhythm was the occasional pause to brace myself against the wind. In this way, the elevation disappeared without much notice of time, because before I knew it, we were within a hundred feet of the summit. But the wind became too strong to hold any particular pace. I was constantly leaning into it, trying my best to counteract its pull on my pack, which became increasingly awkward to carry. My eyes were watering to the point of tears, immediately freezing to my eyelashes. Even worse, my goggles became useless after the moisture from my breath froze over the inside of the lenses. I was starting to regret that mistake as I battled to keep my eyes from literally freezing shut. I had to start hiking sideways to keep my face from freezing over. I looked back at Gene as we were nearing the summit and wondered what private battles he was fighting behind his own facemask. We had not spoken much to each other all day, and I knew we wouldn’t be able to say anything to each other until we found some sort of cover, so I kept pushing to the summit, stumbling more than hiking at this point. It was as if this mountain did not want us here; as if the closer we got to its summit the harder it would fight us off. The harder it would blow, the colder it would get. When I finally rounded the top, I was leaning full body into the gale. The cold was brutal. It stung my face, froze my eyes, cut through my layers. A roaring, ear-filling howl screamed across the peak. No one should be here. I needed to get down. I leaned my way over to the cairn that marked the true peak. This pile of rocks marked the highest point on the east coast. I knew that somewhere, out past the icicles that hung down from my eyelashes, was a beautiful view. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t care to at the moment. I was looking for the best way down. I needed to get down. Eight more miles to go. But this mountain gave me something much more than a view I wasn’t seeing. It gave me perspective. Everything I do in my day-to-day life is easy. I am always relatively comfortable and safe. I will only ever be challenged as much as I push myself to be. So I dare myself to push, and gain more perspective, and when I meet those challenges, whatever they may be, all I need to do is keep moving. I am not stronger, faster, or smarter than the next person. Anyone can do what I do. There is nothing unique or special about me. I just got out of my sleeping bag. I took advantage of this extremely precious opportunity that we all have here at SUNY Potsdam. We live in a world where almost anything we want to know can be found at the touch of a fingertip. We are at a state university dedicated to educating us and enhancing our lives. We are surrounded by opportunity. This is unique! It is a privilege I wish that I had realized the potential of sooner. I hope I can, as well as all of you, keep this in mind as I move forward. If any of us want something, if any of us have a dream or a goal, the here and now is the time to take it. If any of us don’t know what we want, the here and now is the time to find it. And I can guarantee you it’s not in a sleeping bag.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 14:19:52 +0000
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