(Editorial note from Larry: Climbing trips, examined across a temporal divide---ten years now!---have a dream-like quality. Shocking, important events stand out crystal clear while other eerie circumstances blend and move around among these adrenaline-charged signposts, mental post-it notes in a well-thumbed diary. Extreme exhaustion is the final blender. Find below a melange of thought balloons, Dan's recollections of one of our climbing trips including his solo drive from Minnesota to/from Wyoming. We met up in Wyoming, staying at the Jackson Climber's Ranch for our Teton climbs. I flew from Seattle to Salt Lake and drove the rest. Jack flew in the next day to Jackson airport. We had met him a couple of years earlier on Rainier. Jim, now an FBI agent, was hanging out at the Climber's Ranch eager to hook up with a party aiming for the Grand. He seemed able and compatible so we decided to give him a try and have climbed with him subsequently. Enjoy!)
Notes on Climbing
Trip to Wyoming, June 1998
Daniel V. Sola(rev. 12/21/99)
Terrified and cold, dazed and moaning, and hanging upside down in a white-out blizzard. I pulled myself upright while my right arm stayed stuck out to the side. A numbness spread across my back as brain signals to move the complex muscle groups got confused in the twisted mass of tendons and bone. I shouted down to Larry and Jim "My shoulder's dislocated...oh, shit, shit...my shoulder's dislocated." The numbness was fast turning to burning pain as the swelling started deep in the joint. That night I would dream about the glistening end of my humerus sticking out of my back and I couldn't reach around to push it back in. Now, I just wanted to talk to my wife.
And the thing about Mount Rushmore is that to truly see it, you can't look directly at it. Not like an eclipse, where you desperately want to look at it, but more like those blind-spot illusions in magic books -- the more you look directly at it, the more it disappears. When you finally arrive at Rushmore you have been so saturated with its image, its like that part of your retina has been worn away. It just tries too hard to be something. At any given moment a dozen cameras are angled up from the visitors area or along the road in to the Monument. Can a thing be looked-at-out-of-existence? If so, Mount Rushmore will disappear long before the effects of rain and weather ever dull the hard features. Those tribes that believe photographs steal the soul are on to something.
From its beginning, Rushmore was meant to be an attraction; a tourist trap before there were tourist traps. Along the "Presidential Trail" that skirts the base of the man-made talus pile are chiseled pieces of the granite mountain that have sat there for 60 years. Master-carver Gutzon Borglum put pieces of this rubble inside clay miniatures of the future Monument, which he then used to promote the project and raise money to finance his 14 years of carving. In these fragments you can see grooves cut by one of the 400 or so workmen who hammered and blasted under Borglum's gaze, as he hung from his boson's chair. But the pieces are now just out of reach beyond the railing. The whole talus pile would probably be hauled away, bit by bit, under the seats of Winnebagos, or glued to varnished boards at Wall Drug, were it not for that railing.
The 911 operator put us into an answering machine at Teton park headquarters. Over the wind Larry heard: "HI, this is [ranger] Tom. You've reached my answering machine. Please leave a message. IF THIS IS AN EMERGENCY PLEASE DIAL 911." The cell phone was flashing 'lowbat' and Larry dialed again. It was around noon; they were probably at lunch.
We were setting up to rappel back down the ridge, my arm useless, I clutched it to my side trying to keep it from moving. The pain was growing and I said to Jim "I don't want to go into shock." Jim's eyes flashed for an instant with what Hunter S. Thompson calls The Fear as he contemplated hauling my semi-conscious form down a thousand feet of difficult rappels. He switched to a confident, soothing tone, We're going to be just fine.
In the new Mount Rushmore visitor's center they have set up video tapes of old films documenting the construction of the Monument. One exhibit is a series of videotapes showing the explosions from Borglum's initial blasting, as he prepared his canvas for more detailed work. To make it hands-on (which everything must be nowadays) they have set up an old fashioned dynamite plunger electronically linked to the videotapes. As you raise the plunger the tape resets itself; then as you push down – boom – a great section of the mountain collapses in a boil of dust. The sound has been dubbed onto the old silent newsreel footage the way background "atmospherics" are added to the photographs in a Ken Burns documentary. It seems important to preserve the act of creation through gimmicky exhibits. I blew up the mountain about three times.
Standing in a tangle of ice coated rope, Larry grasped the ball of my shoulder from behind and pressed hard on my scapula as I tried to twist my arm straight out to the side. The move was based more on desperate instinct (we later learned that this was the wrong way to do it) than any medical knowledge. A tearing pain shot down my arm. I started to say " No, stop...." and suddenly, the ball eased back into place and my arm gently settled to my side. I almost cried "It's back in, It's back in." Getting home seemed distinctly more probable.
I had stepped up off of the two knobs of rock and placed the front points of my crampons into two shallow depressions filled with a rime of ice. It was below freezing with about a 40 mph wind and snow blowing up the ridge. I had taken off my glasses because they would ice over every few minutes, and so could only really focus a few feet in front of me. We were probably just a few hundred feet from the summit; the altimeter read 13,070 feet but the barometric pressure had been erratic as the blizzard closed in, making the altimeter suspect. I was happy to be leading because the exertion helped me keep warm. I seemed to have been over the crux of the move and was stretching for a left-facing edge just out of reach. My left glove was in my mouth so that I could feel the edge of the bucket when I grabbed it. Over the wind Jim and Larry gave a little cheer. Then, I heard my right crampon skitter and looked down to see it jump out of the pocket in a spray of ice crystals. I felt myself slip, knowing the hand holds were good only for balance and that I couldn't stop the fall. I heard carabiners click to attention as the rope pulled down hard on my harness and my head snapped back into the rock face. I was upside-down about ten feet below a shallowly placed, #3 mechanical cam. I had carefully cleaned the ice out of the crack and made sure each of the four cams were touching rock, but had been sure the piece wouldn't hold a hard fall. It did. Larry and Jim were yelling "your glove...behind your head!" My glove had somehow been caught between the back lip of my helmet and the top of my pack. I felt my bare hand getting cold and my shoulder felt oddly twisted.
As Rushmore disappears with the repetition of its image, the Corn Palace you see with crystal clarity. From around the corner you see the gaudy Russian-styled domes poking above the low store fronts. From across the street you can begin to make out the individual cobs carefully nailed into place. Each cob is a pixel and you can see both it and the great mural it comprises with the merest flick of focus. This year the theme is "Youth in Action" with murals of hockey, soccer and basketball players. The lampposts on the street have a corncob cast into each of four iron faces mounted on their concrete bases. It's a nice touch.
Stand next to the Palace and you see the individual kernels that are the sub-pixels making up each cob. Bits and bytes, if you will. Each cob is cut to length and placed as carefully as a skilled mason places stones. At Rushmore they remind you at every opportunity, in videos and pamphlets, that Mount Rushmore is "above all a work of art." There are no such exhortations at the Corn Palace; it's just the Corn Palace, the world's only Corn Palace. I like how they've given it a sort of a priori existence -- "The world's only Corn Palace" – like the world has always held an existential space open for one.
In late June the workers, standing on great scaffolds erected along each side of the building, begin stripping, ear by ear, the previous year's murals. There is something odd about seeing macho construction workers with tools and scaffolds and safety harnesses pulling corn off of a building. The same men jack hammering a granite mountain would seem rather normal. I want to come back and see them nailing up the new corn.
Larry and I got to the car at about 3:00 AM. Jim spent the night at base camp. About every 15 minutes along the trail we would stop to rest -- just lie down on the path and stare up at the sky. We used the watch to make sure each rest was only 5 minutes or we would stiffen and start to fall asleep. The altimeter seemed to be stuck at 9000 feet, 9000 feet, 9000 feet... The valley was surrounded by distant lightning storms that would flicker silently and reveal the silhouettes of the mountains and large hulking shapes just beyond our view. Larry kept seeing animals darting across the path and I could hear a large group of people talking, like at a cocktail party, just beyond the trees. Larry told me about the animals and I told him about the people. Then I started seeing the animals; as if I'd missed them earlier. I realized that it was just droplets of dew clinging to the leaves that looked like little eyes in the glare from our headlamps. The fact that it was just dew didn't seem to change anything; there were still eyes shining in the tall grass a little farther out. Silent, we continued thumping down the trail 15 minutes on, 5 off. A cycle or two later Larry blurted out " Yes! I hear the people now."
By this time of year the Corn Palace is getting a little tired looking as nearly 11 months of work by the grackles and ravens takes its toll. The folks who run the Palace have tried everything to keep the birds away, but I like the effect; it emphasizes the temporary and fragile part of the thing. I heard an interview on the radio this spring with the farmer who raises the corn. He thinks that this year he will have the first truly black corn, which he found in some blue corn he grew last year. The soft sound of the workers stripping off the old cobs is not unlike the sound of husking fresh corn at home. Instead of blasted granite fragments the sidewalk is littered with individual kernels of corn: yellow, brown, blue -- that will soon be swept up or eaten by the birds. There are no railings or Park Rangers about and no one is concerned if you want to take a little of the corn home.
By about 3:30 Larry and I were at an Exxon Mini-mart with an easily entertained and talkative clerk behind the till and a lonely insomniac wandering around the aisles looking at magazines. What he must have thought of us. I'd eaten maybe two candy bars, a hunk of salami and a cup of soup over the last 23 hours and Larry probably had about the same. We'd probably burned three or four times as many calories. We ate right in the aisle and brought the wrappers of the things up to the clerk and he would ring them up. Microwaveable Chuckwagon sandwiches, V8, Gatorade, Lay's deli-Style Cheddar Potato Chips, and Ocean Spray Cranapple juice. Then we would go back into the aisles for more. We left with several quarts of Gatorade and the chips, and went to get a few hours sleep.
Driving in to Jackson for X-rays about 9:00 AM, warm, dry and clean, there was a crash, and a spray of glass shards fell into my lap and scattered across the front seat. An RV had kicked up a chunk of granite as I drove through the construction north of town and blown out my driver's-side window. It was only mildly interesting to me at the time and, somehow, not remotely surprising. At the hospital, the check-in nurse referred me to Teton Motors, a VW dealer, down the road. They gave me a crisp new arm sling, and an ankle brace (I'd also cracked a bone in my foot) fresh from the ER supply room, and I headed to Teton Motors, which I was to learn, USED to be a VW dealer. Seeing I was a bit worn looking, the body shop manager, Ken Davis, got on the phone and found a window over in Casper, Wyoming. Of course, they were 250 miles east and only open until 1:00 PM tomorrow.
There was a message at the Climber's Ranch campground that the park ranger wanted to talk. I hobbled through the throng of campers and sight-seers and in to the little log office, feeling adolescent, and expecting 'the lecture'. I told him who I was and was surprised to get a smile and congratulation for getting down without help. Apparently, because of the El Nino storms, no one had been that high on the Grand Teton for sometime. One of the nice things about the Tetons is that the Rangers climb. He asked about the climbing conditions. He advised lots of finger-tip pull-ups for my shoulder.
I knew that if I went to sleep I'd never make Casper by 1:00 PM tomorrow. I filled up the tank and headed east, left-handed shifting up over the continental divide. I'd seen the Corn Palace on the way out and wanted to see Mount Rushmore on the way home. If they could get the window fixed by noon tomorrow I could make Rushmore by 3:00. About every 50 miles or so my mind would wander and I would try to roll up the broken window.
Rushmore is like any summit, meaningless and anticlimactic by itself. And the irony of the summit is that, no matter how obsessed you are with reaching it, once you are there you just turn around and go back. What makes Rushmore interesting is the trip in. Just as a helicopter ride to the summit of the Grand Teton could never substitute for the climb, Rushmore would be a disappointment without the layers of tourist traps and attractions along the way. Like that summit, as you approach through Rapid City you strain your eyes around every corner trying to spy it. What you see are the reptile gardens, moccasin shops, Wild Bill Cody museums, and Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlours in ever increasing density. Rushmore is the Centaur at the center of the labyrinth, the alpha-male tourist trap. Cleverly, not until you leave Keystone and head up the final winding road to the tollbooths at the park entrance, do you catch your first glimpse of The Monument. With Washington's familiar silhouette pasted against the sky, I had the sense that I was driving into the pictures on money.
It is tempting, as you barrel across the South Dakota prairie, to pass by Mitchell and the Corn Palace. You can't see it from the interstate and, anyway, it seems so silly. Mitchell is about a third of the way across the state, well into the Wall Drug zone, but well short of Rapid City. Assuming you got an early start in St. Paul, it is too early for lunch and too late for breakfast. On my way west it was only the gradual and ominous sound of my muffler dislocating from the tail pipe that caused me to stop in Mitchell at all. The muffler guy had to run some errands (I think he had an early lunch date) . So, with an hour to kill, I headed over to the Palace. Guiding the way to the Palace are signs that wind you through town. I'm pretty sure there is a more direct route straight off the freeway but the posted route brings you through the entire downtown Mitchell business district. Mitchell is cagey.
The World's Only Corn Palace just seems like the first of an endless succession of tourist traps yet to come; just one more town capitalizing on the westward press of tourists. As an adult you know too well the endless bill boards for Real Black Hills Gold and the Gutzon Borglum Story ("He carved the mountain!" the signs endlessly proclaim) are just beginning and the temptation is to not turn your head but remain zeroed in on the goal.
But, while Mount Rushmore was conceived as a tourist trap, the Corn Palace was meant to attract settlers. It was first built in 1892, 49 years before Rushmore was completed, as a giant display proving to immigrants that the South Dakota soil was fertile. It was, at once, an exhibit of the new world bounty, and a familiar, old world, shape. The present Corn Palace was built in 1921 and has had new murals created by local artists nearly every year. I imagine that the early immigrants would send post cards of the Palace back to Europe where they would be passed among family and neighbors. Nineteenth century direct marketing. I wonder how many dreams were ignited by the promise of such surplus in America, how many well-read post cards returned in carpet bags to Ellis Island? And what did they think when they finally arrived at this unlikely edifice under the sublime prairie sky?
Perhaps I was too obsessed with reaching the summit to have climbed more carefully. I knew I was at the limit of my ability but at the same time I was cold and desperate to keep moving. Larry had tried the pitch and taken a short fall that jammed the rope hopelessly into a crack. He had to cut about 20 feet off the end. Cutting the rope is about the most desperate thing a climber can do -- the rope is to be protected at all costs. You don't step on it, you pad its way over sharp edges, you store it more carefully than your mortgage papers. That was a bad moment.
Jim and Larry had been alternating the lead all morning. I was in the middle position, making it hard to take the lead since I was tied to the ends of both ropes. Jim had managed some difficult leads and was getting tired. Larry, relentlessly strong, seemed to be doing better but he was shaken after having to cut his rope.
On a sunny day the Exum Ridge route is a moderate rock climb up the beautifully exposed ridge that forms the left skyline of the Grand Teton as you look up from the Park. We found an ugly mixed rock and ice route, really just ice-coated rock climbing needing an ice axe and crampons. Every move was awkward without the depth of ice to make the tools stick but too slick to hold on without them. Larry and I used to seek out these kind of conditions in Minnesota just for the training but we were never more than a rope length or two from the car.
I was cold from sitting and belaying both the leader and the third man. The snow was blowing up the ridge and making feathery blast patterns on the underside of boulders and finding its way into every fold and opening in our clothes. When the time came to cut the rope, it was a chance to move me up to lead for awhile. While I may have been fresh to the lead I was cold and half blind from the blowing snow. My goggles didn't work over my glasses so I had the choice of climbing in fogged goggles or in a 20/100 blur. I chose the blur.
Jim telephoned me a couple weeks after we got home. Jim had been a communications expert in Somalia. Now he was fresh out of the service and in college on the GI bill. He was operating a radio link during the tragic firefight in downtown Mogadishu where about 18 US soldiers were killed. It is no wonder he was able to keep me calm at 13,000 feet. He had told his father about our trip. He recounted the details of the climb, full of the primal excitement of sharing a triumph with your dad. He finished the story to a long, cold stare. I could imagine Jim, all of twenty -five, beaming but bemused. His father said, "so are you going to give up this stupid sport?"
After reading my first draft my wife said to me "What I want to know is why you climbed when you thought that piece would pull?" That question hadn't occurred to me in the eight months I'd worked, on and off, on this essay. I like to climb because it forces me to stay in the moment. My point in climbing mountains is simply to be an improbable figure in a sublime place. Not to over state anything, we're just weekend recreational climbers going out to have some challenging fun. On the way down with Larry, I thought about my sense of judgement and was convinced that I have some fatal character flaw. I thought about how I work on the house sometimes until I am so hungry and frustrated that I can't help but hit my finger with the hammer or cut myself on some jagged edge. At these times I lose or forget the moment and can become defensive if someone reaches out to me. Did I push too hard and risk the lives of my friends or did I just do the route and fall? I don't know why I climbed when I knew the piece was bad. I've moved on less a hundred times. This time I fell and this time it held. But I did get to see Mount Rushmore and the Corn Palace.