Savoring the Unsavory

Making Meaning on Mount Adams

I wrote and submitted this story for [an outdoors podcast]. The editor got back to me a few weeks ago and said they didn’t have room for it this year, so I thought I’d share it with you all instead.

Thanks to the many folks that provided feedback on an earlier version of this story. Thanks to Tom, even though you’re terrible at keeping in touch <3

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I boarded the plane to Oregon with a head full of expectations and a pack full of protein bars. Tom, a friend from childhood, unexpectedly broke up with a long-term, long-distance girlfriend shortly after he moved across the country to Portland. In an attempt to provide a healing experience, I proposed a last-minute adventure: a climb of a glaciated volcano, Mount Adams, just a couple hours’ drive from his new home. 

When I saw Tom was hurting, I wanted to reveal to him even a glimpse of what my first trip to the Northwest revealed to me, especially considering that he wasn’t exactly an outdoorsman and had just moved to the area. 

This trip wouldn’t be my first visit to this mountain. Ten years ago, at the age of sixteen, I went to the Pacific Northwest for an outdoors camp. After three weeks of backpacking, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, and hacky sacking, I tackled the figurative and literal apex of the trip: I clumsily donned crampons, hefted an ice ax, and summited Mount Adams.  

Sure, before I flew to Oregon in 2013, I had spent a lot of time in the outdoors. I was well on my way to becoming an Eagle Scout and my family had instilled an outdoor ethic in me from a young age. But frankly, I spent more time editing YouTube videos and playing video games than I did outside in early high school. I only begged my parents for the chance to go on this trip because of the influence of my first real girlfriend, who had gone to northern California the previous year with the same outfitter.  

Thus began the passion that would grow to take over my life: a love of the mountains and of adventure, kindled by this trip, and by this mountain. Without this trip, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with climbing, I wouldn't have moved across the country to Colorado to pursue alpine adventures at my doorstep, and, to be cliche, I wouldn’t have met many of the wonderful friends I hold dear today. My tenth anniversary climb of Mount Adams, I thought, would be like a holy pilgrimage for me and, hopefully, a proselytizing experience for Tom.  

Each night on the Northwest trip, we would review the day’s highs and lows. We called it “plus-delta”—pluses being the things you liked, deltas being the things you would change. The only rule of this exercise was that you weren’t allowed to “delta” another person or the weather. I’d like to make an addendum: you aren’t allowed to delta the wildlife.  

Our ascent began according to plan: Tom and I caught up on life, music, and the details of his breakup for the three hour journey from Portland along the inspiring Columbia River Gorge and into southern Washington. Driving across the narrow Hood River Bridge, I found myself holding my breath as oncoming logging trucks eked past our car, just like I had a decade before, our instructors hushing us while they nervously navigated the crowded confines of the steel span. 

Lunch & chess in Trout Lake. Comment below on who you think won the game.

I introduced Tom, and his Mazda, to rutted-out forest service roads. The Mazdarati, as we called it, handled the conditions like a champ and delivered us to the trailhead. After a final check of the map and a ceremonial gifting of a wag bag to Tom, who declared “in that case, I’ll just be holding it, thank you,” we set off. 

We hiked through a burned-out forest, passing blackened husks of trees standing guard over the new growths reclaiming the land beneath them from the fires that burned thousands of acres since I last visited. We emerged from the treeline to a world of dark igneous rock and brilliant glacial snow and ice. Heavy clouds, the remnants of a storm, swirled around the upper half of the mountain like a dark halo. 

We passed a climber on her descent. I asked her how her trip had been. She smiled and described how the weather had been too much for her. “I started for the summit, turned around, went back up again, and came back down because of the storm.”  

“You can’t change the weather!” My friend and I responded in near unison, having just finished talking about the “plus-delta” rules.  

She agreed. “Hey, at least it’s really nice now! And it’s the experience that matters anyway.” With that, we warmly parted ways. She was like a human Hallmark card. We loved her for it. 

By the late afternoon, we reached our desired campsite above the first glacier near 9,500 ft of elevation. I put Tom to work, showing him how to operate the stove while I quickly assembled our tent and found a stream of runoff to replenish our water supplies. In no time, our dehydrated meals were cooking, our gear was laid out for our alpine start, and the sun was setting. 

The world around our tent, compared to the forest below, was like a different planet: all rock and ice, black and white. As I had hoped, the experience enraptured Tom. More than once he said aloud, more to himself than me, I think, “I’ve just never done anything like this before.” I retired to our tent early, anticipating our 3:30am wakeup time, but he stayed outside, declaring, “I absolutely have to see this sunset.” He got it.

Heavy rains started an hour before midnight. It didn’t let up much after that. 

My alarm went off at half past three and we emerged from the tent. The mountain greeted us with a foreboding mist and a tenuous pause in the downpour. The conditions looked wicked: although supposedly a full moon out, the heavy ceiling of storm clouds left us no light other than the soft glow of our headlamps. A grim attitude settled over our campsite like the storm socked in over the mountain. 

With a squish as he donned his boots, Tom learned the importance of ensuring your shoes make it fully under the vestibule of the tent. I stuffed an extra pair of socks into the moist shoes in an attempt to dry them out while we layered up against the cold. As I boiled water for breakfast, I picked up my oatmeal packets from our rock kitchenette we had built the night before, finding them nearly empty. Oats scattered into the wind through a hole torn through the pouch. Turning back to the stone windbreak, my headlamp lit up the eyes of a content-looking mouse taking shelter from the weather under the rocks, surrounded by oatmeal remnants. The mouse met my gaze and eagerly resumed his breakfast. At least someone was having a good time. 

The rain started again in earnest. A light drizzle accelerated to steady, heavy drops accompanied by a droning wind. Looking up the mountain, I saw a few other brave pinpricks of light starting their ascents. Tom and I consulted about the conditions. I had just enough cell service to load a few tiles of future radar; it looked like things would be at least this bad, or worse, for many hours yet. 

We started uphill. I led the way, plotting a slow course through the igneous cairns leading us to the beginning of the Crescent Glacier. The stainless steel head of my ice ax was rapidly turning my hands to icicles through my saturated gloves. Used to the summer conditions of Colorado, I hadn’t expected it to be this cold or, especially, this wet.

After half a mile, I turned around and looked at Tom. My headlamp illuminated him like a statue. His brow was furrowed in determination… or perhaps he was just squinting against the brightness of my light. I thought about the forecast. The next few hours were going to be pretty rough. Tom’s cotton pants were already soaking up the steady rain. We’d both be completely saturated if we stayed out in this much longer. I made eye contact with Tom. I could see the grit in him, but also the pressure he probably felt to push onwards. I sighed.

Feeling old, and kinda lame, I said, “This isn’t going to be very fun. Should we call it?” He quickly agreed and, after a final glance up at the roiling gray clouds obscuring the upper mountain, we turned back. 

Conditions worsened. The rain pounded us as we stared at the ceiling of our tent feeling a mix of disappointment for having to turn around but gratitude that we weren’t soaked. We rose with the sun and packed up camp. We had wanted to be back in Portland around midday, so we began our descent even as dim rays of sunshine from the east began trying to peel back the storm clouds.  

We arrived back at the car tired but happy with our decision to bail. The summit was still covered in menacing clouds. When we threw our packs in the car, though, we noticed something: the seatbelts of the car were all chewed up. In the front seat, bits of foam and trash were scattered across the floorboards. Something had broken into the car while we were gone. We heard a skittering noise in the backseat—that something was still in the car! 

After some cautious encouragement, we coaxed a chipmunk out from under the seats and back into the woods. We were amused—although the torn up seatbelts were a little annoying, this would be a great story!  

A quarter of a mile outside of the trailhead lot, over talks of lunch and afternoon activities, Tom noticed the car’s controls go dark. The dashboard lights stopped working. We pulled over to check and see if there were any other surprises waiting for us, and then the car went dead. Uh oh! This was going to be an even better story than we thought…

The Mazdarati sat ten miles away from the nearest “town” of Trout Lake (a gas station, cafe, and small grocery store). About eight of those miles were unpaved Forest Service roads. I knew from past misadventures that tow trucks wouldn’t touch us. We began to push.  

The road was mostly downhill. Mostly. I ran behind the car pushing and Tom steered, adding his horsepower to mine when necessary. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, even cracking some jokes, until we reached a consistent, intimidating rise in the road: “Sisyphus Hill,” I anointed it with a weak smile when the car began a slow roll backwards after our third exasperated attempt at besting the grade. We had made it about three miles: pretty good, but not good enough. 

To make an already long story short, we hitched a ride to Trout Lake. I called the Mt. Adams Rangers Station and, without hesitation, the ranger said “You’re in Trout Lake? See the red building with the porch out front? Go in there and ask for Bev. She’ll get you to Gerry.”

We went inside, where we indeed found Bev. Gerry, she told us, would be back around in a bit–we had just missed him. We moped around for an hour until a pickup truck equipped with good tires and a winch rolled up to the store. A man in overalls emerged. It had to be him.

Gerry, who we discovered was a part of the local Pacific Crest Trail angels group, agreed to grab a tow rope and pull us back to Trout Lake Café. From there, we called in a tow truck to Hood River an hour south. All two of the taxi services operating in Hood River were booked for the night, so as a hail Mary we asked the tow truck driver, who had just finished his shift, if we could pay him to take us to Portland. He obliged.  

Thanks for the tow, Gerry!

A pathetic shamble got us into Tom’s apartment sometime after seven o’clock. A few hours later and a few hundred dollars poorer than expected, but back, nonetheless. 

I was worried I had ruined the outdoors for Tom forever. After all, the last time I had gone camping with him in high school had been disastrous too (another story for another time, but let’s just say three 6’+ tall dudes don’t fit well in a one-person tent in a downpour). His reaction, though, defied my expectations as much as the trip had already.  

“I’m glad this happened,” Tom said. Yes, now that it was over, the legend was already forming in our heads. But more than that, he emphasized the richness of the experience. "Savoring the unsavory,” he called it. Being on the slopes of a volcano, crossing a glacier, weathering a storm at an elevation twice as high as he’d ever been. Hell, pushing a car for miles was something neither of us had done before. 

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” wrote Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. He might have had us in mind, smiling and laughing, pushing Tom’s car uphill.  

We sat on Tom’s couch, greedily eating Thai food and half-watching The Truman Show, exhausted. I felt like we had been in the movie ourselves. I could almost hear Christof, the sociopathic director of the show, speaking into his headset, “Alright, they’ve reached the treeline and the rainclouds are in place over the summit. Queue the chipmunk attack.” There was no reason or meaning behind that chipmunk saboteur, but here was Tom, rebelling against the absurd, making meaning. I felt proud of my friend. 

I had expected and wanted a certain outcome to the trip: a summit to honor the ten-year anniversary of something important to me, and a similar experience of awakening and healing for my friend. Instead, we both got a lesson. Tom said he would title it “Mt. Adams or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Dismiss the Plan.” 

I don’t know if Tom is going to buy his own crampons anytime soon, but that’s okay. As our human Hallmark card had told us with a smile: “It’s really nice now! And it’s the experience that matters anyway.”