joked that if he slipped, he would knock us both off the Homestretch, like bowling for climbers. At a protected spot behind a large flake that had separated from the wall, we passed the man in the flat lee of the protrusion and continued. In another three minutes, we reached the open rocky plateau of Longs Peak and celebrated with an extended hug. Jon made a sign on the back of our map that read “I love you,” for his girlfriend, Nikki, and I took a photograph of him holding the paper in the breeze, beaming a hypoxic smile.
Despite our late start, we were off the summit and climbing down the Homestretch before two o’clock in the afternoon. A few clouds were gathering to the northwest, but we’d lucked out with the weather. Once we were down below the Keyhole again, we stopped for another snack and spied an open snow slope to our right, on the east side of the north ridge. I think the idea came to Jon and me at the same moment, because we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go slide on the snow!” I don’t think either of us knew what glissading was, but we clambered over to the top of the longest stretch of snow, some two hundred yards long, and donned our ski pants. It was a slope steep enough to avalanche, but with midsummer conditions, we were more concerned that we would slide all the way off the bottom edge and go hurtling into the Boulderfield. Jon went first on a thirty-second ride, spraying the softened snow in all directions with his boot heels, hooting with glee. I yelled for him to take a photo of me when I got close enough, and I plopped onto the snowfield and accelerated toward Jon at breakneck speed.
Using the snow groove Jon had created, and with my low-friction nylon ski pants, I quickly surpassed the speed where I could control my descent. Bouncing over buried obstacles, tearing down in a streak, I was going to end up staining some rocks with blood if I didn’t slow down. In fear, I thrust my hands down into the snow at my sides, dug in my heels, and was instantly rewarded with a faceful of heavy wet slush. As the slope angle diminished at the end of the snowfield, I raked my fingers more tenaciously and kicked with my boots until, half blind, I stopped right beside Jon, just a few feet before the rock field. We immediately broke into a bout of exuberant laughter and shouted at each other, “Let’s do it again!” Hiking up back to where we’d left our backpacks, I tried to revive my numbed hands, wiping off the ice crystals, and devised a scheme to hold small pointed rocks as brakes this time.
Once we were done terrifying ourselves, we hiked down to Granite Pass and traversed across Mount Lady Washington’s eastern flank. Clouds had started to move in by the time Jon and I reached treeline, and we shifted into a run to beat the coming rain. Pounding down the trail in our boots, we christened this first trail-running escapade Rapid Mountain Descent, or RMD for short. By the time we returned to the Land Cruiser, I had been thoroughly infected by the overall experience of climbing my first fourteener and knew that I would be up for more.
I took a weeklong rafting trip with my father in 1993, and enjoyed it so much that two years later, I followed up on my dad’s contacts with the rafting companies near Buena Vista, Colorado. Within a week of returning from college after my sophomore year, I got a summer job as a raft guide. In late May 1995, I moved into the motel- cum-boathouse that my employer, Bill Block, used as the base of operations for his company, Independent Whitewater. We were one of the smallest companies on the river, running two or three boats a day compared with some of the larger outfitters, who might have ten times that number. But with three guides, that meant that Pete, my new friend, colleague, and bunkhouse mate, and I worked almost every day. I could have taken off more than the seven days I allowed myself that summer, but this so-called job was so much fun that I rarely felt like doing anything else. Due to a snowpack that reached 400 percent of average levels in the surrounding ranges, the summer of 1995 was the biggest water season in the history of guided boating on the river. Rapids that were normally Class III to IV+ morphed into Class V, the highest runnable grade-and even unnavigable giants-while smaller sets of wave and technical obstacles like the Graveyard and Raft-Ripper disappeared completely. Three people died that season on the stretch of river that we guided-two private boaters and one with another rafting company-and we saw a peak of over 7,200 cubic feet per second in the canyon, nearly four times the average peak and twice the last big-water-year peak. With water like that, I felt like I was missing out when I didn’t work a trip.
Even after most of us had taken two half-day trips down through Brown’s Canyon, with available equipment and skilled partners abounding in the evenings, guides from other companies and I would load up a van with our hard- shell and inflatable kayaks and drive up the valley to run another excellent section of rapids made even better by the big water. On days when our companies’ owners deemed the river too gnarly to run with clients, we would get together an all-guides boat to tackle the most aggressive lines in the canyon, or even do midnight runs under the bright glare of a full moon. The rafting community in the upper Arkansas valley was a culture that rewarded cocksure risk-taking, even when it bordered on the absurd. One afternoon in July, I went with our third guide, Steve, to the hardware store in Buena Vista and bought two inflatable kid-sized pool toys. These kiddie rafts were like three-foot-long rowboats, with twelve-inch-high flotation tubes around the perimeter of the thin, flexible plastic floor. They cost ten dollars each, and river-worthy they were not. We’d been joking about running Brown’s Canyon with them ever since Pete had alerted us to their existence, but instead, we drove over to the put-in south of town and dropped them in the ever mighty Arkansas above an eight-mile section of Class I-II rapids, the smallest on the river but sufficiently large compared to our meager craft. Each armed with a personal flotation jacket, a cutoff-milk- jug bailing bucket, and kayak paddle, Steve and I proceeded downstream on our “do not try this at home” mission and successfully ran one of the biggest rivers in the state with our hilariously inadequate dinghies.
In late August, I took three of my best friends, all neophytes on the river, down through Brown’s Canyon on a single-raft midnight run. This was much more intense than when I’d gone with other guides on a multiple-boat excursion. The biggest twist was that I’d planned it for the night of the new moon, instead of the full moon. In such darkness, with river, shore, canyon walls and sky all blended into the same inky blackout, navigation was all- important; an unexpected bump could send one of my friends into the river, where he or she would disappear completely in the dark.
In still-water sections, the stars reflected at us from the mirrored surface of the river. Where the stars didn’t reflect, that meant there was a ripple, rock, or rapid. At times there was just enough light from above to make out the white-tipped wave crests, but once we entered the canyon, the high walls diminished the ambient light even more, and it became a total memory game for the remaining nine miles to the takeout. Just before the first rapid, Ruby’s Riffle, a short Class II, I scraped the front left corner of the raft on a large rock. But after that, through the next thirteen rapids, including some large Class III and technical Class IV sections, we had a completely clean run and an awe-inspiringly surreal experience. When the river was calm, it felt uncomfortable to break the silence. Rather than speak, we looked up. More stars than my friends and I had ever seen floated so vibrantly in front of our eyes that I perceived for the first time that space wasn’t a flat blanket but a three-dimensional womb. I thought I could tell that some stars were behind others just by looking at them.
After graduating at the head of my class and receiving my B.S. in mechanical engineering-with a double major in French and a minor in piano performance-in May 1997, I took a job as a mechanical engineer for Intel Corporation, in Ocotillo, Arizona, a far-flung suburb at the southeastern edge of the mega-sprawl of Phoenix. I would eventually transfer first to Tacoma, Washington, in March 1999, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in September of that same year. But it was in 1997, right after graduation, when my long-dormant passions for the wilderness environments of the western U.S. began to blossom. Before I moved to Arizona, I wanted to reward myself for my successes in school and for having found what I anticipated would be a good job, so I planned not just a vacation but a super-vacation. It was to be the Road Trip to End All Road Trips. I would start driving my 1984 Honda CRX north, first to the Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks, then on into Canada, to tour the Banff National Park and Icefields Parkway, over to Vancouver and down into the Cascades, Olympic, and Rainier national parks, finishing the circuit with Crater Lake, Yosemite, and Zion national parks. Thirty days, six thousand miles, ten national parks.
As it turned out, I didn’t get very far. Since it was only late May, the snow levels were still high, which confined me to lower-elevation backpacking trips at first. My early-season venture into Phelps Lake in the Tetons rewarded me with a top-rate campsite beside the lake, where at dusk the first night, a cow moose trotted her silhouette in front of the sunset. I saw a pair of bald eagles soaring above a waterfall the next morning, then spied a grizzly bear in the forest near the road the day after that. I drove around and took photographs of the Tetons reflected in the broken windows of abandoned farmhouses in Antelope Flats. That same afternoon, I planned my next excursion, a two-night trip to Bradley Lake, where I intended to place a base camp for an attempt at climbing the Middle Teton, the easiest technically of the major peaks in the park. When I asked the backcountry ranger at the permits station how I could climb one of the Tetons, his disconcerted look foreshadowed the adventure I would have. It was a look that said, “If you have to ask, it’s against my better judgment to tell you.” He showed me how to get to Bradley
