Climb Every Mountain

A 23-year old woman from nearby River Forest was found alive yesterday after spending nearly seven days lost in a wilderness area not far from Glacier National Park in Montana.  The parent in me wants to go ballistic and scream, “What were you thinking?” while the kid in me has to admit, “Been there, done that,” sort of.  I just didn’t become part of the local news.

Back in the summer between college and law school, I went out West on vacation.  None of my friends were willing to go with, so I went alone.  My parents lent me the Galaxie 500, probably telling themselves, “Well, at least he won’t be on that motorcycle he wanted.”  And off I went.

I remember reaching Kansas City and getting caught in the afternoon rush; I had the radio turned on to a station that was hyping an Eric Clapton concert that evening; to this day, hearing “I Shot the Sheriff” makes me long for the sound of fingernails on chalk board.  To borrow a line from Canned Heat, I was going up the country, Rocky Mountain National Park, to be precise.

We’d gone on a family vacation there five years earlier, and I wanted to relive the triumph of hiking circles around my parents.  I had a fancy new backpack which I filled with goodies and soda; what a snack the bears could have had if things had gone differently.  Without any thought to safety or time, I sat off on a trail—without telling anyone, of course—one morning.  Oh, how I communed with Nature.

I still have the pictures of mountains rising against sky and clouds.  If there was anyone else on the trail that day, I don’t recall.  It was just me going fifteen miles to get up above the tree line, the only sound from out-of-sight jets passing overhead.  I found a spot Thoreau would have approved of, ate and rested up.  The dumb stuff started on the way down.

For openers, there was an icy snow patch maybe 100-150 feet long that beckoned.  I left the trail to slide down it, which was the easy part.  I only thought of having to stop with about 20 feet of snow left; the rocks would have done a real number on me if not for a frantic, Fred-Flintstone imitation.  Saved from a stony embrace, I stuck to the trail.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t reckoned on the sun setting.  That eventuality came to me only as the shadows deepened across the valley I was descending.  Dusk turned to night before I could reach the trail head.  You could say that luck was with me, in so far as the trail was well marked and it would’ve have been impossible to wander off unless I were a mountain goat.  While my head may have been clueless, my feet knew what they were doing, and I reached the trail head an hour or have after dark.  Some combination of God, Nature and the bears all took pity on me as they did on that girl in Montana.

When I came home, my father helped me unload the back seat of the car.  Back then, Midwesterners crossing the Mississippi were expected to fill up with cases of Olympia Beer, which wasn’t distributed in these parts.  In a commercial, I would’ve shared a beer with the old man while regaling him with the story of my misadventures, only I knew what he would’ve done had I told him—yell at me while thinking of the time he nearly drowned in Lake Erie at nearly the same age during a squall.

That was a story he saved for much later.