I had a funny thought while climbing Glacier Peak last weekend.
It happened on the way down from the summit, as my rope-team was stepping down the boot-pack scrawled into the glacier by thousands of sharp little crampon points. I was placing my own boots into the tracks with exceeding caution, my knees arched and leaning slightly backwards, the way you do after a long uphill push when, on the way down, you suddenly remember that gravity does occasionally cooperate.
Concentrated as I was, I still noticed two climbers woosh past me on their way to the summit: athletic guys in their late twenties or early thirties, both in shorts and long-sleeved T-shirts, without helmets, their bulging, tanned calves pumping away happily. If they’d been instructed to climb this mountain in a manner completely opposite to my own (short of chartering a helicopter) this would have been the end result.
I was roped up to my teammates, they were climbing freely and side by side, chatting carelessly. I was focused and deliberate, they moved in gargantuan leaps over the snow. I’d summited early in the morning when conditions were safest, they were moving up in the daytime heat when rockfall increases and crevasse lips melt right off the glacier. I was laden with several pounds of rescue gear that made me clang like an assortment of windchimes, they didn’t even have harnesses on. I was bent under a 50-liter rucksack filled with water, food, and extra layers, while they each wore one of those backpacks that is little more than a hydration bladder and a single pocket you could probably fit a headlamp into if you used brute force to shut the zipper. And finally, I had on top-of-the line mountaineering boots, weighing in at 1.1 pounds each, plus crampons, while they had on simple trail runners with lightweight microspikes.
What a couple of wackadoos, I thought. Someone’s gonna have to scrape them off the bottom of a crevasse. But I didn’t think about it much more. I’ve been climbing big glaciated peaks in the Pacific Northwest for over a year now, and I’ve been climbing in general for over three years. That’s not a very long time, but every climber worth their salt will tell you that’s more than enough time to see just about every shenanigan you can possibly imagine: people glissading with their crampons on and without an ice axe, sport-climbers who don’t know what a Z-clip is, mountaineers who thought a jaunt to the top of Mount Rainier without a pair of gloves would be a good idea, etc. You name it, I’ve seen it. So again, I didn’t think much of these two happy gentlemen bounding away up the Cool Glacier.
But later on, as I was scrambling down one of the many little ridges separating us from our camp, I was struck by a singular notion: what if those two weren’t a couple of Sunday climbers headed for an early grave, but extremely accomplished alpinist at the cutting edge of their field?
Now I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out. Imagine you were climbing the Mont-Blanc or another comparable peak in the alps and ran into Kilian Jornet or another cutting-edge alpinist in the Ueli Steck tradition. Odds are, they’d be wearing a visor, t-shirt, shorts, low-top shoes, and not much else. Perhaps a short ice-axe and some aluminium crampons, and a minuscule backpack you’d hardly notice...in fact, they’d look exactly like the two gentlemen I’d passed going up the mountain!
This got me thinking some more. If you saw this theoretical Kilian-like hero blazing up the trail and devouring ground quicker than a homeless man would a free burrito, you’d think: oh wow, they’re hardcore! If you passed them while they were tying a shoelace and only saw their total lack of gear or safety precautions, you’d think: gumbies on parade. They’re gonna die today. But the fact is, the amount of gear one carries does not equate to overall gumby-ness (please pardon the term).
Climbers tend to be judgmental, and I’m no exception. Okay, I might even be amongst the most judgemental (which is ironic, considering what a ridiculous gumby I used to be not so long ago), and this got me thinking: how often have I mistaken a top-notch climber taking the sport to new heights for a novice questing for a premature, snowy tomb?
I started thinking back to some truly spectacular gumbies I’d encountered in the hills. Could they be the misunderstood boundary-pushers of the mountain world? There were the two guys holding their ice axes backwards on Mount Adams. Who’s to say they hadn’t developed a new way of self-arresting more efficiently than even Pete Schoening’s legendary miracle ice-axe belay? What about the two guys climbing Mount St. Helens in winter without crampons or headlamps, with a lantern tied to their waists? I can still hear them now: “Dude, you wearing your microspikes yet? Or are you just raw-dogging it?” “Raw, man, I’ll probably wear them on the way down.” They offered us tequila shots halfway up the mountain before downing two apiece. I can’t say with absolute certainty that their alcohol-based summit-day diet wasn’t a groundbreaking nutritional advancement reserved for elite athletes...or that their seemingly crude method of communication wasn’t a super-efficient code meant to multiply the speed of exchange of their respective analyses of complex weather patterns, snow conditions, and general mountain conditions. And I can’t say that their lanterns weren’t...uh...well, I guess I don’t have an explanation for the lanterns. But who’s to say that’s not just way too advanced of a mountaineering technique for me to even comprehend? And what about that guy who tried to go above Camp Muir without crampons that one time? Maybe he was just...hum. Well, okay.
I scrambled down another ridge and found another one quite like it waiting for me. I stopped and took out my water bottle, draining its too-quickly diminishing contents. My little theory was breaking down pretty quickly. I guess ninety-nine percent of the time, a gumby is just a gumby, I thought. It’s really pretty damn obvious. At least, it had been a fun theory to think about. Not even a theory, really. Just a funny thought, that’s all.
Still, I hope I never do run into Kilian Jornet in the mountains. I’m not exactly sure what he looks like, and I’d hate to mistake one of the world’s best climbers for a chucklehead.
