through life was a big issue. Then she took a class at a local gym with a woman named Denise Hatch, who put things in perspective: “Be grateful for what your body can do, rather than focusing on what it can’t do. You can’t have children. That’s hard on you, I know. But your arms and legs work. You’re healthy. You have two daughters who need to see you modeling healthy behavior. So all of this negative body image talk and thoughts have to stop right now.”
Lorrie learned that it was vital to find a way of exercising that she liked. “If you’re not a runner, then be a walker, a hiker, a dancer,” she tells women now. “Just be brave. Find your thing and do it. As with everything in life, if you like doing something, you will do it more often.”
In Lorrie’s case, hiking liberated her. Walking outdoors and seeing a red-tailed hawk gliding overhead or looking out over the carpetlike hills of California or feeling the softness in the summer wind—she realized she was having spiritual experiences she’d never find on a treadmill. And her enthusiasm was contagious. She wanted to hike every day, and to take me and the girls with her.
“I think I’m in love,” she told me one day, “…with exercise.”
Lorrie would go on to be a fitness expert on the San Francisco ABC-TV affiliate, hosting regular segments about how women can incorporate the outdoors in their quest for better health. And she takes groups of women on regular hikes, listening to the stories of their lives as they walk, and sharing her own.
“The body that betrayed me for so long responded to the outdoors,” she explains to them. “Exercise gave me the confidence that had eluded me. It made me a better mother, wife, and friend. And I hiked off those thirty- five extra pounds.”
Lorrie is frank. “As women, we have to become comfortable with our bodies. That’s crucial. A woman who isn’t comfortable will turn off the lights at night and say to her husband, ‘Please don’t touch me.’ When a woman is happy in her own skin, she’s more willing to let her partner be close.”
For years now, Lorrie has included me as a character in her repertoire of inspirational stories. I’m not sure I want to know everything discussed high in those mountains about our private lives. But I’m happy with Lorrie’s basic message: “Hiking,” she says, “has reinvigorated my marriage.”
IT WAS Lorrie’s idea. She wanted us to hike together to the top of California’s Mount Whitney, which is in the Sierra Nevada range, southeast of where we are in Northern California. At 14,505 feet, it’s the highest peak in the contiguous United States.
This was fairly early in Lorrie’s discovery of hiking, and she arranged for eight couples to go together. She got the necessary U.S. Forest Service hiking permit, but one by one, for scheduling reasons or because they hadn’t trained well enough, each of the other couples dropped out. The sixteen-person hike became a two-person hike —me and Lorrie—but we decided, what the heck, we’d still do it.
We trained for the adventure faithfully. Whenever I was home from a trip, we’d put on our running shoes and run over to a shopping center a mile from our house, where there is a series of stairs leading up a hill to a parking lot. We’d run up and down the stairs fifteen or twenty times, and then we’d jog home.
We kept going to the gym to lift weights, and we went on practice hikes locally, carrying weights in our backpacks. We also did a lot of biking up Mount Diablo, just northeast of Danville.
Lorrie believes that to meet your goals in life, it’s important to write them down. But that’s not enough. You also need to take what she and others call “authentic action” every day to achieve them. That means you have to knock on a door, or make a phone call, or do something concrete to get you closer to your goal. When training to hike the tallest mountain in the continental United States, you have to get out every day and prepare. She made sure we did that. In the middle of our training, I hit a patch of gravel while riding a mountain bike on Mount Diablo, breaking my pelvis. I was out of work for six weeks, and it made getting back to preparations for Mount Whitney that much more challenging.
Lorrie felt that, not unlike our adoption journey, training for the hike would be good for us as a couple. We needed each other for emotional support. When one of us was tired, the other would offer encouragement. And these moments of rallying for each other would be good practice for the support we’d have to give each other on the actual hike.
Our ascent of Mount Whitney was set for September 2, 1999. We got a babysitter for the girls, and rather than driving the seven hours southeast from our house to the mountain, we decided to rent a Cessna Turbo 182RG (a four-seat, single-engine plane) and fly there. It was pretty romantic, just the two of us, heading off to test ourselves in the wilderness.
We planned to complete the hike in one day, but that meant we’d have to start very early. We stayed in a motel near the mountain, woke up at 3 A.M., and were on the trail at four-fifteen, wearing our headlamps and backpacks, ready to go. The trailhead starts at 8,300 feet, and if we could make it to the top and back, it would be twenty-one miles round-trip.
In our backpacks we had rain gear, hats, gloves, spare batteries, matches, power bars, water, peanut- butter sandwiches, and other essentials. I also had brought along a gallon-size plastic bag with my mother’s ashes. She had died the January before, and I thought the mountain might be an appropriate place to spread her ashes.
My dad had passed away four years earlier, and after living a pretty traditional life with him, my mom had really come into her own in her final years. My father had been more of a homebody, and my mom had loyally stayed on the home front with him. But once he was gone, she did a great deal of traveling with friends. It was as if she was making up for lost time. She embraced every part of living she could, and it was wonderful to see that. Lorrie and I thought it would be fitting to bring her ashes to this tallest peak so we could set her free in the wind, to continue her travels.
We started our hike well before sunrise, but the moon was half full, and straight up in the sky. There was so much light from the moon that our bobbing headlamps were almost unnecessary.
The predawn darkness was magnificent. Astronomers would say “the seeing was good.” The air was stable, and so the stars were bright and clear, without much twinkling. It was almost as if we could reach out and touch them.
At first, we were walking in the shadows of tall trees, wearing just light jackets. Once the sun started rising and warmed the mountain, we were able to put the jackets into our backpacks.
The sunrise was spectacular. We were hiking on the eastern side of the mountain, facing west, and one peak behind us was perfectly aligned with the sun, forming a triangularly shaped shadow on the expanse of Whitney ahead of us. As the sun got higher, the black triangle moved down the face of the mountain. It was an amazing sight.
We were also fascinated by how the mountain changed as we climbed. With each change in elevation, we traversed different zones with varying terrain and plants. We encountered marshy areas and some lakes and streams, but as we got higher, the vegetation became more sparse. Portions of the trail were rugged and rocky, and at one point we had to scramble over large boulders. Then the altitude began taking its toll on us. We knew this would happen—we had read the books—but that made it only a little easier to handle. Lorrie had a raging headache, and both of us got sluggish and very tired.
We kept reassuring each other with an old line that marathon runners use: “It’s not twenty-six miles. It’s one mile, twenty-six times.”
We had another mantra: “Anyone can hike Mount Whitney. You just point your feet in an uphill direction, and put one foot in front of the other.” We kept repeating that.
We lost our appetite, which is also common. We knew we had to force ourselves to eat, because we’d need our energy. The guidebooks had told us to bring our favorite foods, even junk food, because we’d be more apt to eat something we liked. It was remarkable to see what happened every time we pulled something to eat from our backpacks. Blue jays would try to land on our shoulders or backpacks to take the food away. Large ground squirrels called marmots would come out of the rocks, almost out of nowhere, and would also try to grab their share. They were all obviously very used to humans and knew that where there were people, there was food.
At thirteen thousand feet, the narrow trail crossed over the top of the mountain and there was a sheer drop-off. We were well above the tree line at this point, and it looked as barren as the surface of the moon. Lorrie got teary, in part from exhaustion and also, she admitted, out of fear. It was pretty intimidating looking down. She wondered if we really needed to reach the exact summit to release my mother’s ashes.
