The Boston Marathon By Numbers

Self Portrait after the Denver Marathon

A lot of months of work are riding on 26.2 miles.

As soon as I got my 2013 calendar from Union College, I started scribbling my daily distances and times in the boxes, adding up my weekly running mileage, the days I felt strong, the days I felt like crap, days when the sun was shining or the snow was blowing.

There are only a few more boxes to fill now before the April 15, the day I will run in my first Boston Marathon.

I can flip from January, through February, March and April and take in the full scope of my training. It is not the portrait of how to run a perfect marathon. There are days I skipped that I shouldn’t have skipped, workouts that I could have run harder. I usually ran between 60 miles and 70 miles a week, awarding myself equivalent credits in miles for days when I chose to work out in the pool or on the elliptical trainer. I’ve covered (almost) 900 miles since January 1.

The top week in 2013 was a 76-miler (counting a 45-minute pool session as six miles) and the slimmest week was a paltry 39 miles in February when I hit a wall of physical and psychological exhaustion and took three days off.

I remember how I had been gearing up to run a 20-mile out and back run from my apartment in Gillette, Wyo. and watched as a pleasant morning gave way to hellish blizzard conditions.

It’s a test, I thought. If I can do this run, I can tackle worst that the marathon can throw at me. I bundled into my rain jacket and balaclava to render myself impermeable to the flakes that whipped down the wind like throwing stars. The roads were covered in ankle-deep slush puddles that cars splashed up at me as I tried to navigate the semi-white out. Even with my face covered up in the balaclava the flakes were still hitting the narrow slit I’d left for my eyes and they stung like hell. I realized that my form sucked and I was moving really slowly, that I felt drained and that I was making myself suffer for no good reason.

After two miles of struggle against the teeth of the wind, I turned around. The next day, the weather was much nicer, but I had work. I thought about running 17 miles in the dark, thought better of it, cooked dinner and had a beer. The next day, I decided to wait one more day, and decided I didn’t want to pay catch up.

These kinds of days are dangerous. If I copped out once, it would be easier to cop out the next time. On the other hand, I was getting to the point where I was feeling totally burned out. Somehow running in the cold and dark after work had lost some of its zest. I made a deal with myself. I’d give myself three days to totally slack and then commit myself fully to training right after that. For the most part, the deal has held up.

I’ve logged many miles in the dark after work, bundled up like a space man against the wind. There has always been a nice period of procrastination before I’ve headed out  the door, giving myself plenty of time to contemplate the icy road margins I would soon be running on.

In that way, I’ve been grateful for the calendar and for the running guidebook that I’ve been using. Having a training program written down ahead of time has taken away some of that inner wrangling:  Should I go out running or should I stay in? Well guess what fool?  The schedule says you’re running twelve miles today with five 1000-meter repeats. Looks like you better lace up those shoes!

The guidebook I’ve used is “Advanced Marathoning” by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas.

The book is the reason I went on a gut-busting 20 mile run with 10 miles at a 6:14 “marathon pace” (the wind was at my back) or a 18 mile run with a 14 mile pick-up at 6:29 pace (I was being too easy on myself.) I also ran a bunch of 10K time trials, a pack of runs with short distance repeats, and several runs with 100-meter bursts of speed. The 100-meter reps and the marathon pace time trials were both new staples in my training regimen and I hope that they will pay dividends on race day.

In other words, if I don’t P.R. it will be entirely the book’s fault and I will invite Pfitzinger to pay me back the money I wasted on the race entry.

Some other factors that may play a role in my finishing time include the fact that this will be my first time running Boston. The course is a net downhill with a couple of gnarly hills around the twenty-mile mark. The fact that the race is in April and in New England means that the weather could be just about anything. Last year, runners got screwed by 80 degree temperatures, and in other years, temperatures have been well below freezing. April storms are another possibility. This year, it looks like it the mercury will be in the 50s under clear skies. Here’s hoping.

While I would like to believe that my training will give me the strength I need to beat my personal record of 2:45:44 from the Denver Marathon, I’m not going to assign myself a pace. Instead, I’ll do what I’ve done for previous races, which is go by feel. I’ll use my stopwatch to tell if I’m running way slower or faster than I should, but mostly I’ll go by the feel of my stride and my breathing. I’ve tried to be more scientific about running these past couple of months, but I’m still miles away from making it a science.

Meanwhile, the elite guys will toe the line Monday with 100+ mile weeks under their belts, unfathomably fast speed workouts, perfect diets and a stony discipline that make my dedication look laughable by comparison. I bow to their perfection. It honors me to follow (quite literally) in their footsteps.

The training will determine just how far behind those footsteps I will be when I cross the line.

Oh yeah. For all of you guys out there interested in following me on race day, my race number is 685. You can actually follow my progress online and get text alerts about when I’m crossing the lines.

I mean, I’d be flattered enough if you just wanted to know my finish time. But if you want more than that, the Boston Athletic Association has a ton of info on ways you can follow the event, from watching the coverage on TV or going online.

Since I am in Wave One, the race starts for me at 10 a.m.. The Boston Marathon is always on Patriot’s Day —April 15 this year.

A free app for tracking runners is available here.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baa-marathon/id632231181?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2

When you want the full story afterwards, I’ll sit my tired ass down and write the blog.

The Greyhound Grind

One of the amazing sights I had the opportunity to see because I went by bus

When I announced my plan to get a bus ticket from Connecticut to Denver, the decision elicited grave concerns, fears for my safety and sanity, the broader question of why I would voluntarily take a slower, shittier mode of transportation than air travel.

Had I instead declared my intention to slash a bunch of wounds across my flesh and jump into a nearby cesspool, those people would probably have more horrified and confused, but only slightly.

Bus travel offers the chance hang around with people that you may not particularly like for extended periods, and a looming sense of claustrophobia for approximately the same price as a plane ticket.

However, it is also one of the greenest ways to get around. As a neurotic, self-doubting environmentalist, I can’t allow myself to take a plane without feeling a sharp pang of hypocrisy. How do I tell others to make sacrifices to improve our planet, when I’m putting thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so I can ride an aluminum bird?

Riding the bus across country is a few degrees suckier than taking a plane, but it also produces a lot fewer carbon dioxide emissions, even fewer than trains do. I could lay out the nuances of the argument here, but I think I would rather leave that to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Check it out!

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/greentravel_report.pdf

While cross-country bus riding is not without its suckitude, it remains my firm belief that my generation will have to start making sacrifices in order to offset the greater suckitude of climate change and the accompanying drought, fire, flood and famine. I know that I’m no angel, that many of the things that I am doing remain wasteful and produce more waste and pollution than they should.

Sinner that I am, I consider the bus ride to be less of an act of virtue and more of an act of penance.

However, my time in purgatory did offer a few perks, including the option of sleeping en-route (when I could sleep) and the opportunity to catch up on reading (when I could concentrate.) Moreover, the bus brought me a small sense of moral righteousness over air travel (which no one will care about because they’ll think I’m crazy or a pompous ass.)

Now that I have emerged successfully on the other side of the journey, I can speak with an expert’s authority about what it is to take a bus across most of the country: why it just might be the best way to travel, the worst way to travel or a fun way to feel less of your butt and more empathy for people who shake screaming babies.

The thing about screaming babies…

YEAHHHGHHHH!!!!!!!!

The thing about screaming babies…

YEAHGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

…is that…

AGHHH! AGGGHHH! (choking sounds of the tiny body trying to get hack up mucous so it can scream some more)

…is that…

yeaAGHHHHAhhaaaaeeeyheAAAAA!!!!!!!…

…they make it really, really hard to read to concentrate on reading or writing.

EeeeeyAHHHHH!!!!! EeeeyaAAAHHH!!!!! EEEEYAAAGGHHH!!!!!!!!

This is not the best time to be trapped in a small, enclosed place.

You look at the emergency exit bar on the window and wonder how well you would fare doing “tuck and roll” down the highway median at 60 miles per hour.

 It is simple biology. All of us with intact and functioning frontal lobes should hear the baby’s cry and feel the need to make it stop, make it stop, protecting the fragile offspring. Of course the system that makes us think this way isn’t sophisticated enough to differentiate whether the baby is ours or not, nor to make us care whether we shut it up with a bottle or a chloroform blankie.

Nearby, other people are making do with earbuds cranked up to full volume. These earbuds stay at full bore when there are no crying babies. I get to enjoy all the music lyrics, even from several seats away. The situation makes me contemplate just how much ear damage people are willing to inflict to listen to their beats at top volume — and how such damage would only encourage them to crank the music louder over time.

Cleveland

At least, iPods have user-friendly volume controls. Babies do not; nor were the parents considerate enough to bring a duct tape roll. For the next 45 minutes the other passengers and I get treated to an a capella screaming fit that would make for excellent background music within the pits of hell.

As darkness closes in, the screams subside, and I pray for sleep, if only as a means of escape from the bleak realm I inhabit and into the blissful arms of Somnia. As soon as I shut my eyes however, I feel 10 times more awake. I just don’t sleep well in seats. Nonetheless, I try to cheat my nature by putting my head against the window and lean my feet into the aisle — the number one position recommended for people who like to die in bus accidents. The fact that a sudden deceleration could go poorly for me is not as important as my need to be unconscious.

At first it seems like I might be able to pass out successfully, but soon I find that I’m putting a lot of torsion on one ass cheek.  I’m also at risk of falling between the seats and am ready to try something else.

I flip around so my head points toward the aisle and wedged my feet against the side of the bus. My jawbone picks up the hum of the bus motors, a lullaby. Finally, my mind shuts down and I get about two hours of sleep.

Then we’re in Cleveland and we all have to get off the bus for a cleaning (by which I mean they’re cleaning the bus, not the passengers, though I probably could have gone with a shower at this point.)

We gather inside an eye-stabbingly bright fluorescent terminal where an enormous television on a pedestal above our heads blares out an advertisement for bowel medication at bowel-loosening volume. I must be in a badly-written dystopian sci-fi movie.

The television goes from the bowel ad to an inspirational made for TV basketball flick. The unbearable noise must be the bus station’s way of making sure that no one falls asleep inside.  The acoustics send the noise bouncing all over the walls in a series of funky echoes. There is no escape.

 I limp listless towards the bathroom to unload my bladder.

I see myself in the black felt cap staring back from the mirror at the sink, stubble on my cheeks, crazed expression.

I brush my teeth while another dude shaves his head with an electric razor.

“Yeah I ride the bus,” I my expression seems to say, “You got a goddamn problem with that?”

The shot clock is winding down on the inspirational basketball game as I get into line to re-board the bus. A woman tries to board the bus but is in the wrong line and the Greyhound employee is being kind of a dick about it. I say nothing, glazed eyes pointed dead ahead, handed the employee my ticket and get on board. There are miles yet to travel.

Pennsylvania

Darkness on the road again, and I’m making feeble attempts to fall back to sleep. The hard seats say, “No!” Also, I am sitting next to the window that admits a steady stream of the cold night air through a gap in the insulation. It wraps around me like an icy snake, keeping me awake.

At 6 a.m. we hit a rest area in Milesburg, Pennsylvania. When everyone shuffles in, I find the driver and ask if he can open up the hatches below the bus so I can grab the parka out of my pack. If I’d had any brains I’d have had it out in the first place, or I would have been smart like the woman next to me who brought a blanket.

Fortunately, the driver is willing to help, and even shines his flashlight into the busses undercarriage until I find my pack. I quickly dig out my jacket and thank him.

When we all get back aboard, the driver asks if anyone else had found it cold over the last few hours of driving. Several answer in the affirmative. Well, this is as high as the heaters go, he tells them. And if they want to get warm, they should step outside and then get back on the bus, so it will feel warmer to them by comparison.

I feel like a wuss in my super-insulated orange parka, meant more for isolated mountain peaks than for slightly heated busses. At least I’m not cold.

I finally get some sleep, which lasts until the Delaware Water Gap on the New Jersey border. The riders file out for cigs and fast food and I walk around the parking lot in order to un-kink my legs.

Soon enough the New York skyline is in view.

NYC stopover and the final push

I choose to stay with some friends in Brooklyn and the day of walking around, taking subways and running from Prospect Park to Coney Island is a nice break from all the bus crap.

That night we dine on Indian food and grab some drinks from Sharlene’s Bar in Brooklyn.

The next day, I take the subway over to the Port Authority and get on the next bus for New London, Conn. where my parents will pick me up. The last state that I travel through turns out to be the worst. Not only are we on I-95 hell, but there is also possibly the most annoying couple in the world sitting on the bus. The antics of the middle-aged dynamic duo would be hilarious in a movie, I decide, but something about sitting next to them for four straight hours of traffic jams makes them somewhat less than wonderful bus companions.

It starts with an argument about caffeinated soda and evolves into the man telling his wife to fuck off, and cranking up his headphones so he can sing along to the music. Before the bus starts moving, he announces that he is switching seats, because it feels like a metal bar is going up his butt.

I stare ahead and try to stop imagining myself turning around to punch the guy in the face. The couple gets into about five more arguments in the next fifteen minutes and the guy cranks his headphones up again. No wonder why the dude, is so damn loud, I think, I bet he can’t hear himself.

I try to get back to Emerson essays on my Kindle, though it’s hard to hold any concentration. I’m reading about the importance of self-expression and I realize I have an important opportunity to put theory into practice.

With my rage and frustration at the breaking point, I do the unthinkable. I go back, lean over the guy’s seat and politely ask him if he can turn the music down.

The dude is surprised.

“Are you sure, it’s my headphones?” he asks.

“Yes, they’re your headphones,” a guy from the seats nearby tells him. I thank him silently. The annoying dude turns them down and apologizes. I get back to my seat and grimace the remaining miles home.

Eventually, I’m heading back west, and must admit that it is tempting to say ‘screw this” and just grab a plane to Denver. At the moment however, I am sticking with a plan to go by bus. I can’t say that there is any particular hallelujah moment that convinced me that I should ride back rather than fly. The best explanation I can give is the obstinacy, which got me on the bus in the first place.

It should be a fun trip back.

Escape from Gillette

Shortly after I got on Highway 59 and started the long drive from Northeast Wyoming to Denver, I pulled the Mazda over at the outskirts of the city.

“Welcome to Gillette, Energy Capital of The Nation,” the sign reads. They don’t have a “Come Back Soon” sign for outbound traffic. I am not coming back soon.

I did set up my camera on the small bendy tripod to take a parting shot to remember the place where I’d spent a year and a half of my life. I'll remember the good times, good friends and a lot of lessons. Many people who have lived in Gillette and done similar work also know that it can be a pretty tough gig. My gig ended with a layoff.

Tough gigs are part of life though and I’m not complaining. OK, maybe I complain over drinks with friends, or mutter to myself occasionally to myself on runs. This doesn’t mean I feel like I’ve been through anything special. Nor does it mean that I don't think payoffs in job experience, meeting new people and trying out a new life in a different part of the country weren't worth the time and effort.

So long as I have friends, running, beer and friends who will tolerate/participate in bitching sessions over beers and on runs, I should make it through all right. Bitching has its place, but if I put too much of it in writing I might become Drama Dude and shrink the small cache of people who read this blog.

I’d rather write about what’s next. I mean, I haven't figured out a lot of what's next, and again, that fact does not make me special.  Leaving Gillette has been the blessing that has given me time to breathe, reevaluate and start to do some things I’ve wanted to do but haven’t had the time for. 

Lucky, happy bastard that I am, I got back in the car and started driving south to start doing some of those things.

My progress so far has included a brief visit to Denver and a Greyhound east ride east into New York City. I just touched down in my wooded homeland in Connecticut. 

It’s exciting to reconnect with old friends and family, and it’s also exciting to wrap up months of training and run the Boston Marathon April 15.

I’m not settling in on the East Coast though. Soon enough I will get back to Denver, meet up with a friend and visit some of the great national parks of the west. I plan to fill the next month with a random series of adventures in canyons and over mountains.

It’ll be something to write about.

Gut Check

Bighorn Peak seen from a ridge to the Southeast

One time or another, some of us are bound to ask questions like, “Why the hell am I doing this?”

Such moments of self-reflection are not uncommon to those who squat wretchedly in the snow by a camp stove at five in the morning.

The smell of charred oatmeal flakes was already a good indication that my pioneering new technique of cooking breakfast was maybe not so pioneering.

In theory, a ziplock bag’s worth of dried oatmeal and sugar stirred into a pot full of snow would marry seamlessly into a warm, wholesome meal that I could eat before I started my climb on Big Horn Peak. In practice, the flakes started burning before the snow could melt around them, creating an ashy, lukewarm goulash. The flavor was not improved by the remnants of the Indian meal I had cooked in the pot the night before.

But a meal was a meal. Food was energy I would soon need and, just as important, those calories were heat. I slopped down each nauseous spoonful in misery.

It was well before the dawn, and to be completely honest, I wasn’t exactly sure where I had pitched my tent the night before, besides that it was some anonymous grove at the base of the mountain.  I had spent half an hour or more scooping away the deep powder with one of my snowshoes. By the end, I had made an enormous hollow, which allowed me to lay the bottom tarp on solid ground.

After dinner, I was in my sleeping bag at 6 p.m., eager to depart the realm of consciousness.

Long hours of uneasy slumber dropped away with the ring from my cell-phone alarm. Now the day’s challenge was somewhere up above me and to the west. The thousands of feet of rock, snow and ice that I intended to scale were hidden behind the branches, of the pines, cloaked in darkness. It was virtually guaranteed that I would be the only one up there.

Again: Why the hell am I doing this?

I’d scanned a mental list of easy answers as I left the day before, when I rolled out of town on my usual trajectory west toward the Big Horns.

It had been a pretty crappy week, one that had spawned a series of angry, unwelcome clinging thoughts. I lowered my foot on the gas, but the little buggers still held their grip. If I couldn’t drop them on the highway, maybe they would freeze to death in the mountains.

That was it, then.  I was going up on high to repair the damage that civilization inflicted on me.

 Obviously.

 My untamed, poetic, rambling soul demanded this — that I not only venture out in search of oneness with nature, but also that I take the ultimate challenge of a 12,000-foot mountain, testing both physical strength, but also my will.

Sing it brother! So true!

And then I would return to that polluted civilization with tales of daring exploits and triumphs on high that would rouse the hearts of those sedentary mortals who’d wiled away the weekend in bathrobes with a DVD collection of “The Office.” Yes, they would be damn impressed when they came across my blog post later and scrolled through the story of fighting the elements tooth and claw, along with the awesome pictures and…my thoughts trailed off.

It was easy to see the flaw in my thinking. If civilization was the condition I sought to escape, why was I fawning after its validation. This was something the mountains alone could not give me; only other people could do that.

Getting an early start

Yes, I can climb and ramble over every hill and isolated mountain only to find my footsteps leading me back to those bright lights and convenience stores, the apartment, the desk, the friends that I would hang out with, swapping stories in the bar.

Every blessing of civilized society was in the car with me, from snowshoes to a backpack, the tent, processed food, high-tech jacket and sleeping bag. I humped it all toward the mountains in my gas-powered machine courtesy of the federal highway system and state roads.

This time, however, I wasn’t sure if a weekend of mountainous lonerdom is what I really needed. Sometimes being the loner was the problem.

My life thousands of miles from where I’d grown up, on the high plains had meant time away from friends and family – though I’d valued those short visits. More recently, most of the people that I’d met and befriended in Wyoming had left the state for other work.

Reflecting on this as I approached the mountains beneath the insipid gray sky did little to boost my spirits.

What was the point of this anyway? If it were pointless, what would I be doing with my time that was more meaningful?

I thought about activities that were more creative than hiking (like practicing music or writing a short story at home), things I could do to better society (like volunteering), activities that were engagement instead of disengagement (like socializing amongst friends instead of going out into the mountains alone).

All of these required a different kind of work ethic than the kind of mindless obstinacy that I had cultivated within myself for these treks. Perhaps it was even less risky than doing something else that I was less familiar with. To be sure,  when I’ve left on such trips,  I’ve hardly guaranteed myself success – I have also reaped my share of misery and failure in the high places. But in any scenario I’ve faced, the most important ingredient has been my will to move forward. Whether it’s a sunny day or one with wind whipping sleet, success has hinged upon my desire to succeed and thrive. Success in so many other things in life be they jobs, relationships or creative success hinge upon the approval of others.

Not so with mountains. Peaks can be fickle in their own way but there is a fairness to them. Those who struggle throughout their lives to be something may never be rewarded for their toils. Eventually, the persistent hiker, one who was smart enough not to tumble into a ravine, will reach the summit. Similarly, one may wander in life uncertain, searching vainly for a goal. The mountain should do away with such existential wobblings.

There is the summit. Go forth and climb to it.

As the penitent monk tries to escape the worldly things to get closer to heaven, so does the mountain climber seek to ascend beyond the muck and slime of ordinary existence. He ascends bodily into a land that is pure, dead and snowy white. Life exists here, but tenuously. It is easy to pretend that all is barren, those proud, beautiful sloping forms of the mountain peaks.

The brutal beauty of the alpine summits is not just what is there but also what isn’t.

Unruly, stinking life is gone and its absence reveals the proud bones of the earth. Towering rocks show themselves, as do unrelenting snowfields, as do vast spaces that either make the visitor fell like an insignificant speck, or one particle in a grand, perfect creation.

 Wind and cold kill away what is weak and imperfect — including the traveler if he stays. And yet he comes anyway, hoping to transcend the ordinariness, which he is undeniably a part of, and to which he must tragically return.

Barren ridge leading to summit of Bighorn Peak

If there is an unquantifiable value to these hard and beautiful places, it doesn't necessarily follow that the traveler must go alone.

Some of my best experiences in the outdoors were the ones I’d shared, whether it was Colca Canyon with friends in Peru or the countless New England mountains my father and I have climbed together.

An amazing sunset is still beautiful whether one person sees it, or a group of people sees it. A mountain is just as physically challenging to climb alone (often harder) than it is to climb it in a group.

But when people go together, that individual satisfaction of conquering a commanding peak is also a team accomplishment.  It is rewarding to see others work hard toward the common goal, to put in the cooperation and communication needed to make things work. Whether the group succeeds together or fails together, the most important thing is whether it stays together.

Seeing things together can add a fresh level of appreciation.

Going out with others past the strange beauty of mountain cliffs, or to a wild waterfall means that those things become a common memory. The inevitable hijinks and pitfalls of any climb become fodder for a story that can be swapped over drinks years later. When someone else is around, you can talk about the beauty of the landscape and feel that much less like a doddering crazy person walking alone through the hills.

Bighorn peak as seen from near the Circle Park trailhead. The route I chose is to the left side of the frame.

Often, the distinction between what is meaningful or meaningless is how we remember it, how we tell the story. Whether I like it or not, I usually walk out of the woods with some kind of lesson learned. I try to write them down so that I don’t unlearn, or even so that others may gain wisdom from my follies.

After I finished the disgusting oatmeal, I put my snowshoes back on and looked down at my compass needle to find where I should aim myself in the darkness.

The climb was gradual at first, but then I came to a steep section that required me to pop the ascender bar on my snowshoes.

The red light spread in the east.

By the time I crested the first ridge, the sun came over the horizon to cast its light upon the thousands of feet of rock and snow that I still had to climb. My path was a catwalk of shattered stone, sandwiched between two abysses. Eventually this path wound to the summit. While this was an intimidating sight, my excitement at seeing the sunlight and the miles of untrammeled terrain was the closest thing that I had to real exultation on the trip.

Within another 15 minutes, I took the snowshoes off and began scrambling along rocks. I knew I had a long way to get to the top, and then a long way back to my tent and a long way back to the car. I thought about turning around then so that I would know my tracks back to the tent would still be fresh on my return. An early turnaround would also hedge against the increasingly likelihood that I would hike the final miles out in the dark.

But turning around felt wrong. If I had a good chance to make the summit, I would take it now, rather than have to go back over the same route on some later trip.

Looking northeast from the Bighorn summit

In a couple of hours of rock scrambling, I made it to the cold stack of stones at the summit. The whole climb up, I had thought about how I had wanted to be somewhere else. Now the frigid wind coming over the mountain slopes compelled me to hasten my descent. 

From noon until dark, I underwent one of the most exhausting ordeals of my life, first picking along the rocks on the way down, reaching the snow and losing my tracks. I spent about half an hour looking for my tent and then had to stuff everything into my heavy pack to haul the long, snowy miles out.

Because of my gross cooking pot, I had decided not to melt any more snow for water. Now I was thoroughly dehydrated and scooping up the odd handful of snow for what moisture it would afford. My legs and back ached continuously.

I could feel the reactors slowing down in my head, the needles on the machines moving back to E and the whirr of gears and belts dying as the lights of the control consoles went dead one by one.

The thought of just lying down in a snow bank to shut my eyes, was at once appealing and deadly. I focused on the dull desire to keep pressing forward. I had no energy to concentrate on anything else.

If there was one small blessing to be had, it was that the trees held the warmth; if the air had been 20 degrees colder, it would have multiplied the ordeal.

Darkness came as it always will come, and I squinted along the trail through the pines. I made certain not to lose the trail because I knew I didn’t have the energy to be lost in the woods in the dark. If that happened I would have to camp it out for the night and find my way out in the morning. Fortunately I didn’t have much difficulty staying on this well traveled section of trail and reached the road. It was still another mile to the car — the magical ticket back to lights, people and everything else I had left behind for the weekend.

I took a gaze up at the cold stars overhead and started hoofing my way down the last stretch.

I knew I would make it.

Morning light seen through lodgepole pines in the mountains

I climbed Anthill and it only took me a year

View looking east from Anthill Summit

Ah, Anthill, my arch nemesis, we met again last weekend.

The 10,980-foot mountain is hardly a goliath in the Rocky Mountain West; it had, however, loomed large over my last year in Wyoming.

It had been the first mountain in the Big Horns that I had made a serious attempt to climb, and that attempt had met failure.

Last December, I’d camped at 8,000 feet around the Hunter Trailhead, intending to climb the amusingly-named mountain the next morning.

It had been close, but ultimately, I the deep snow proved to be my undoing. Even in cross country skis, I was sinking into the stuff past my knees, and it got under my gaiters to make my feet freeze up. I had to turn around late in the day with perhaps another half an hour of hiking between myself in the summit. I wanted to get back to the car before darkness fell.

I had made another attempt in April, another failure, which I wrote about in “Take What You Need.”

It involved being too cold, getting too much snow in my boots, and falling through treacherous crust to the point where I was too cold and beaten to try a serious attempt on the summit.

Just as Charlie Brown keeps coming back to kick that football however, so was I determined to get to the top of the obscure mountain that shares its name with a minuscule sand mound.

So I came back the weekend before Christmas.

This time I was arsenaled out with a formidable array of outdoor crap that I have spent money on over the last year. There were the heavy Gore-Tex outdoor research gaiters on my legs and the new snowshoes that I had barely used on my last trip to the mountains with Andrew. I supplemented these with the cheap tent in my pack and the monstrous -40 degree sleeping bag on the outside, which is as handy as having a tauntaun carcass to sleep in on a cold night.

And damn it if I didn’t get what I came for!

I wonder now, if another utter failure might have made for a more entertaining tale.

Most of the story begins along the familiar routine that I have worked out for these expeditions, which starts with me driving out to Buffalo.

10 miles out from Gillette, the mountains rear up before my windshield and trigger a rush of excitement through my veins.

60 miles later, I’ll stop at the Maverik gas station to take a leak, or visit the Sports Lure to grab some last minute gear that I think will be necessary for my next attempt.

The IGA or the DJ’s supermarket is a final stop for peanut butter and any other last minute necessities, before I begin that last climb up the pass.

What happens next is supposed to be the adventure.

The weekend before Christmas, I drove up the plowed dirt road to the Hunter Trailhead and started out with a leisurely walk in on the trails.

The snow wasn’t as deep as it had been on my previous escapades, with perhaps 18 inches on the ground once I got past Soldier Park. All the same, I was glad to have the snowshoes, which made things that much easier.

Triangle Park was the next clearing, which I reached just as the sun was going down. Anthill was just over the trees. I walked into the woods a ways and then pitched tent.

I have learned that to camp in the woods is to come across all kinds of fun surprises, surprises like the discovery that the wand-style lighter that I brought as a surefire way to light my stove, had decided to snap in half in my backpack.

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me…”

Sun coming through the trees near Soldier Park

I ended up eating some caramel popcorn that I brought for dinner.

Though I was fortunate enough to have brought extra food in case of a stove malfunction, I wondered if there would be enough water, now that I couldn’t melt large amounts of snow.

Again, a small amount of foresight was my saving grace; I had decided to bring three liters of water instead of my usual two

Now I drank one bottle and a half, which left that much for the next day — less than ideal, but probably doable.

I supplemented by putting snow in the empty bottle to melt inside my sleeping bag, and into the half empty bottles.

It was dark at 6 p.m. and I spent most of the night tossing and turning trying to sleep.

I woke up at 7 a.m. and found an extra pack of matches I had slipped into my rain jacket from a previous expedition.

“Strike anywhere,” the box read. OK, how about lighting on the freaking box.

I went through trying to strike 20 matches in my cold hands, until giving up and woefully downing fistfuls of dry oatmeal as my breakfast.

On the plus side, almost all the snow had melted in my bottles and I figured I was in good shape for the climb. The only thing that made me a little concerned was the flurry of snow filtering through the pine trees. Because I was going to leave my tent in the woods away from Triangle Park, it meant that it would be that much harder to locate again.

I had my footprints to follow, but then the falling snow might make those disappear just as surely as Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

Well, it was just a flurry, and it looked like there was blue elsewhere in the sky.

I left my tent and heavy sleeping bag and started uphill to the Northwest through the woods.

The woods gave way to a cleared out slope — deep white snow with boulders protruding out. A cold wind blew down from the peaks above.

Their were handy heel bars on the back of the snowshoes, which I snapped into the upright position in order to tackle the steep angle of ascent.

Though this arrangement worked for a while, as I got higher the wind had blown most of the powder away and I took the snowshoes off again to do some good old-fashioned rock scrambling. It was still slow going, but it was also fun.

From time to time, I’d look back down over the ridgeline of broken stone, watching Triangle Park get smaller and smaller.

A false summit above tree line on Anthill

When I finally got to the top of the last immense stone pile, I caught an enormous gust of icy air coming from the west. Bomber Mountain and some of the other peaks were veiled in snow-squalls.

Below, the miles and miles of lodgepole pine, further down, the dry brown rangeland, with the improbable deep blue Lake De Smet.

 I took a slug of ice water from a canteen, got brain freeze, and followed my tracks down.

Unlike some of my earlier death march-style expeditions, I was able to get back well before dark.

The sun sank was low in the sky when I got to Soldier Park. Above and to the south a snow squall brought out a display of angelic light. Darton, Bighorn and neighboring peaks were strange and beautiful amongst the ethereal suspension of flakes. The beams that broke through shone gold upon their cold buttresses of stone and ice, so inhospitable and appealing.

Another day my friends.

 With the Anthill chapter closed at last, I will be sure to return to browse among the extensive catalogue of mountains that the Bighorns have to offer.

A view of the mountains from Soldier Park. I tried to capture the ethereal grandeur of the snowfall with the camera, but it didn't work. You'll just have to take my word for it. OK?

Damn Fools and Bad Roads

What the hell is a shirtless dude doing standing in the middle of a snow-covered road up at 9,000 feet in the Bighorn Mountains?

It was an excellent question, not one that Andrew had much time to think about from behind the wheel of his Suburu Outback, which he was revving through the snow directly at him.

The guy didn’t seem particularly worried about the thousands of pounds of metal hurtling in his direction. Instead of jumping the hell out of the road, like most people would, he stood his ground and waved his arms at us to stop.

Andrew hit the brakes and the guy moved to the driver’s side to talk.

 “I need you guys to help,” he said. (Or something to that effect, since I don’t remember our dialogue verbatim).

 “My pickup got stuck in the snow a couple miles up the road and I left my coworker there.”

He thought we might be able to help dig and push him out of the rut.

The man’s face was broad and ruddy. He was carrying some extra pounds on his frame — made all the more apparent by his shirtless state of affairs. The run down the road got him panting and his cheeks and torso were flushed red. I’d have pegged him at maybe 40.

The dude’s appearance was an unexpected development in our plans, which were already starting to look doubtful. Andrew and I had decided to West Tensleep Trailhead and snowshoe into the base of Cloud Peak. If things went well, we could maybe, just maybe, get to the summit.

This was the first time I’d seen Andrew for over a year, in which time he had been a ski instructor in Maine and then thu-hiked the Appalachian Trail. Now he was driving west to a new ski job in Salt Lake City, a journey that brought him through my neck of the woods. I was determined to give him taste of the Wyoming mountains I’d been playing in since I’ve seen him last.

What I hadn’t counted on was the dirt road to the trailhead being totally screwed the way it was.

We were perhaps three miles out from Highway 16 and it was already looking unlikely that we would be able to drive the full nine miles to the West Tensleep Lake where we planned to start our hike from. The deep snow on the road meant that the only way to travel was to stay within the ruts made by previous vehicles. It was no easy task going uphill, and when the ruts weaved crazily to the left and right.

I had to admit that it would have been too much for my Mazda Protégé, but even Andrew’s Suburu was struggling to keep on track. It was getting bad enough that I was ready to suggest that Andrew turn it around so we could try our luck somewhere else.

 Now we had been recruited to some kind of rescue mission for the pickup and some unidentified coworker (is this some demented form of corporate team building?) The coworker was a woman, but I didn’t inquire about any relationship status. 

Oh and there was also something about a snowmobile with a torn belt that he had left even further up the road from the truck. He’d run the truck off the road in a failed attempt to rescue it. It had been a busy day.

My first suspicion of a shirtless dude who neglects to move out of the path of a speeding vehicle is that alcohol may be a factor. He didn’t seem drunk though, maybe a little strange. When I asked him why he was going with no shirt, he said that he had removed it because the run had overheated him. First he had thrown his parka to the side of the road, which struck me as less than brilliant.

I figured that Andrew and I would have to drive the guy back to Highway 16 and then somebody with a tougher, more redneck vehicle would roll through to bail out his truck and his friend.

But Andrew thought he could punch through with the Subaru.

We couldn't put our new passenger in the back because it was jammed with the stuff Andrew was moving to Utah — our gear on top. We ended up jamming the guy into the front with us (at least he still had a shirt to put on) and hit the gas.

The engine revved and the tires spun helplessly in the snow.

Of course the guy had to stop us right in the middle of an uphill pitch where we really could have used the forward momentum.

Now we were stuck too.

“Man, I hate Wyoming,” the guy said.           

The two of us got out and pushed for all we were worth, enough for Andrew to rev his way to the top of the hill where we got back in.

I made sure to take the passenger seat where I could buckle up. Yeah, we were doing the guy a favor; but all things considered, I’d rather not be the one who went face-first through the windshield if things stopped suddenly.

The wheels started spinning again and the engine revved to about where it would be if we had been drag racing at 120, with the tachometer well to the right side of the dial.  It was barely enough to get us moving forward.

But forward was forward, and we were good for the time being.

The guy between Andrew and I talked non-stop, describing the chain of misfortunes that led up us finding him.

 “Oh yeah,” he kept saying. The way he said it made it sound like he was lecturing us.

 “Oh yeah.”

All the while, the engine roared. A smell like hot plastic or burning oil filled the car. We were going at about 30 now, which is hella fast for taking on18 inches of snow over a twisting roadway. Andrew had to go fast enough to get through ruts and go up slopes, but not so fast that we would skid out on one of the many tight turns on the road ahead.

To make matters worse, the ruts went all over the road, often in multiple sets, and Andrew had to jerk the wheel this way and that to stay on course.

Every other minute Andrew would let out a curse as he struggled to steer the car through the snow.

Then we careened around a corner and skidded sideways.

Andrew let off a stream of profanity then managed to rein the Subaru in and get us back to the ruts. 

It was a good save, and soon we were off and running like a demented sleigh ride.

Then there was a steep uphill, with even more confused ruts.

The engine roared. The wheels kicked up plumes of snow behind us. It was no good.

Andrew turned off the engine and we all got out. I had brought a snow shovel, which he used to start digging. I spent my energy kicking down the ruts, sending sprays of snow into the trees by the roadside. After about five minutes, we had enough of a starting ramp to try going forward again, with plenty of pushing.

We made about 20 feet of progress before Andrew got stuck again, then backed it up once more.

Finally, he got enough traction to get going and we let him roll up the road so we could catch him up somewhere more convenient.

As we walked, the guy continued to talk about all his bad luck, elaborating to include trouble with family, the law and severe depression. Some people just love to share. I was a little wary of the guy, but decided we were still obliged to try to help him. I didn't see a concealed carry strap, and figured Andrew and I could take him if he started going all Deliverance out in the woods. He seemed OK overall but just a bit eccentric and I'm sure many a wanderer who encountered my wild-bearded visage in the woods would think the same.

After we got back in the car, it was excruciatingly slow going next couple of miles, with plenty of other opportunities to push. Again and again.

Finally we rounded the corner to a nice straightaway. A little further up, and we came to the guy’s pickup.

He had tried to gun it up a hill and got stuck it the deep snow on the side of the road. A short, rotund woman got out of the cab.

“Thank God!” she explained upon seeing us.

We tried the out best to be the rescue team she thought we were and started kicking snow away from the truck with our boots (the snow shovel had broken at this point. ) Finally, the guy got into the cab and with Andrew and I pushing, he managed to get out.

He wasn’t finished though. The crippled snowmobile was still up the road. The woman got back into the truck with him and he rolled it back down the hill. When he reached the flat he gunned the engine again, and took tore back up the hill.

Andrew and I heard the sound of the truck skidding and revving through the pines. It sounded like he got stuck more than once, but managed to escape each time.

Getting the car started (second day)

Now that we had bailed the guy’s ass out of trouble, it was time to figure out what we wanted to do.

We were probably about a mile from the Tensleep trailhead, and already spent a couple of hours extra driving in this far.

I suggested that we just park here and hike the extra distance. Either way, it wouldn’t be too many hours until dark. With any luck, we’d be able to moonlight it to Misty Moon Lake and make an attempt on Cloud Peak by the morn.

But Andrew wanted to try the rest of the road. I shrugged and got back in the car.

Things went well for the first 10 seconds or so. Immediately after however, we found ourselves skidding to the side of the road. The car veered helplessly into a snowdrift.

We had made it, perhaps 20 feet further than the pickup truck had.

I got out and tried pushing, but the road was sloped here, and the car seemed only to want to go further off the road.  We might as well have just stepped into a puddle of quicksand.

There was more kicking and then we were crouching down to dig the soft powder out from underneath the car with our hands.

With each attempt, we avoided getting into further trouble, but we also didn’t seem to be getting out of the trouble that we were already in. Slowly, we worked the car into the exact same spot where we had bailed out the last guy.

As fate would have it, that was just when we heard the roar of the pickup coming down the road. There was his snowmobile tied to the back weaving along the road behind him.

Yes, he had a towrope with him. Time to return the favor.

First thing we did was help him push the crippled snowmobile up the ramp to his pickup bed, then we got the Suburu hitched to the truck, and after another 15 minutes of struggling in the snow, both vehicles were free at last.

We shook hands with the guy and wished him luck on the rest of the way out.

This is the part where I should be telling you that Andrew and I decided to call it a day. We would have seen that it was going to be dark soon and decided that going back into Buffalo to swap stories over pints of beer in The Occidental Hotel pub was a more pleasant option than tramping through the snow at night and shivering in my tent.

However, an important part of the brain, which prioritizes enjoyment over suffering, seems to be missing in both of us.

Instead of going all the way back, we drove down the hill a couple hundred yards to the flat area and parked the car off to the side. Then we loaded up our gear in packs. The plan was to make it as far in as we could with headlamps, hopefully as far as Mistymoon Lake. We had snowshoes too, which would hopefully be what we needed for a successful ascent on Cloud Peak.  That prospect looked more and more doubtful with each passing hour.

The sun had already sunk below the mountains by the time we trudged up to the trailhead.

Here, the snow got to be about calf-deep, though neither Andrew or I felt like putting on snowshoes. Ours were the first tracks in the powder and it made the trail very difficult to follow.

Going through the trees was challenging enough. It was easy to mistake a deer path for the trail and bumble up it for ten minutes in the dark before realizing it was a sham.

Fields were worse because we wouldn’t be able to see a trail rut beneath the powder and it would be impossible to tell where the trail began on the other side.

After countless false starts and perpetual disorientation, Andrew and I realized that there was no way in hell we were going to make it to Mistymoon that night.

Discouraged, I found a clearing and pitched the tent. Neither of us felt like fiddling with the stove, so we gulped down handfuls of trail mix and crawled into our sleeping bags.

Andrew was feeling nauseous, because he had driven in from sea level and now suddenly I had brought him up to 9,000 feet. I wondered nervously if he shouldn’t be the one sleeping closer to the tent door, and if I was in any danger of being puked on.

The next morning, Andrew seemed to have acclimatized better. I worked out where we were on the map, which showed it plain to see that we were nowhere near Cloud Peak.

We packed up our stuff and humped it back out the way we came. I had planned to save my snowshoes for waist deep snow, but found that they worked quite well on the shallower stuff.

We drove back the way we came, but made a stop at Powder River Pass — 9,666 feet in elevation.

Here, a shark’s fin of broken rock goes up to a cluster of exposed crags.

Andrew and I weaved out way up the rocks until we got to the top of one of the crags.

 Far below us on either side, we could see the warm, dried out rangeland where no snow had fallen. There lay the Powder River Basin to the east of us, where you will find Gillette, cattle and coal mining. The Big Horn Basin was to the west where there are cattle and enormous sugar beet plantations. Far beyond that, well out of sight, the roads led to Cody, the eastern gateway to Yellowstone.

Well to the north, Cloud Peak lurked invisible behind the nearer mountains. True to its name, there were clouds gathered about the area. All things considered, maybe it was for the best that we weren’t playing around up there in the thinner air, getting snow thrown up in our faces.

It hadn’t been the most epic trip of our lives, but the view was all right from here.

Andrew atop a crag, not far from where we parked at the Powder River Pass