The Big Gift: Post Denali Ponderings

(for the initial story of the climb and more pictures scroll down to the next post…)

Above the clouds: Calm before the storm at High Camp

I have spent a good portion of my life, moving through, learning to cope with, thriving on, and feeling pretty “comfortable”, under physical duress. I’ve trained my mind to work with and through times when I struggle under bodily discomfort and still mentally manage to peel those layers away and continue movement forward.

I’ve also learned over the years to allow myself a bit of soft emotion in times when the pressure cooker of physical stress is busting at the seams and needs some codling to ease the tension. And if I were even remotely paying attention through these countless hours of movement, I couldn’t help but gain a very intimate relationship with my body on and off any training or race course.

Climbers on the ridgeline leading up to high camp

Getting up there in years as a pretty intense athlete I thought I’d emotionally experienced it all, but then I travel to this immense mountain range in a very unique part of the world and its highest peak hands me a gift I didn’t know existed. A gift that pushed my knowledge of self up a few notches. A gift that I despise and wanted badly to reject.

My mom would say I came out of the womb a competitive, intense, person, and others have reflected that perception as well over the years. From my view, my persona is gravely embedded so I do not feel these traits perse as much as I notice the actions derived when my brain gets its mind set on something it wants. It sometimes looks like this: “…searching for objective…object found…aspiration targeted… ambition hit… ahhhhh”. Perhaps in another life I was a metaphorically, aimless, non-violent missile of sorts.

As a highly competitive being you either learn some big lessons, or, you continually implode in a long (or short) life of frustration. I learned very early on that highly driven people need to discover how to manage their competitive drives. For me this came in my realization that I am always a student of life and sport. I don’t rule my drives, I learn from them. In that, I am constantly growing from my experiences and that growth refines my ability to hone my competitive desires and more importantly study, and enjoy learning from - my screw ups.
Looking down the Kahiltna Glacier

Denali, in all its bad weather, thin air ways drove this home to me in a way I had never conceived. Nature has a way of doing that - of handing us the really obvious lessons on a profound yet indifferent, silver platter.

The Autobahn above High Camp

In addition to figuring out that optimally competitive people battle only with themselves to gain evolved results, I have realized over time that we never, ever, can compete with nature. Just as we can’t control other human competitors in a race, we can’t control nature, so we’re better off leaning toward optimizing the actions and mindset of something we can guide – ourselves.

After almost 46 years as an athlete honing the mental and physical skills that have helped me define forward movement, this place, this mountain, was coaxing me to STOP movement upward when my lungs started acting up. What??! This word, “stop” was like Latin to my trained mind.

I tried at the time to pretend that I didn’t understand its meaning. I tried to use my skill and experience to mute its implication so that I could obtain my targeted objective – the summit. This effort created an internal storm of dispute like wind chop on the sea on a sunny summer morning. Odd.

Even with my refined ability to always visualize my objective in all challenges, I could not “see” myself standing on the top of this mountain. The positive internal dialog needed to ready myself for the assault was silent. I was ready for the task at hand with the tools I had honed over the years but my mind and body said, “do not go up.” Damn.

I was angry, I was confused….. I was fascinated. And today as I write this, I am fascinated still.

But the moment I made that that final, gut decision not to go, the internal seas calmed. All was still and there was a sense of transcendence. Sounds hoaky, I know, but that’s the best word I can come up with. At that moment I had surpassed logic and reason and moved to deep intuition like some outside force that was nudging my well-established world. It was comforting. I was bummed.
View from ABC
I DO realize how fortunate I have been to be able to run the gauntlet of sports and come out the other end, intact with this odd, tough, body. But my body has never indefinitely said, “No, you can’t do that” – it’s hedged in that direction at times but I’ve always strategized ways to move through the obstacles and forge on. I don’t sit well with being told what to do yet the voice from within was so strong it was impossible not to give it the stage.

There’s a great climber, Gary Ball, from New Zealand who had a predisposition, like me, to High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE). He made a career of climbing the big, wonderful mountains of the Himalayas, and he died high on their slopes, drowning in his own lung fluid.

I’ve often wondered if he heard his intuition during times of lung distress, or if his drive to climb surpassed any inner voices. If the latter, I’ve wondered if I should admire him for disregarding any weakness inhibiting his ability to go after his dreams, or, if I should have sympathy for him for ignoring the issues with his lungs and instead let his driving nature press on.

For a passionate athlete this differentiation rides a fine edge, as both hard drive and survival are coveted acts in extreme sport success. A honed risk taker knows that the instant of death does not define the quality of how we lived if we lived doing what we love, its just simply a moment in time when either mother earth dealt us a subpar hand, or perhaps, when she offered us a lesson for which we didn’t stop to listen.

Denali is like a Bermuda Triangle of mountains with its crazy weather, thinner air, and hungry glaciers. Yet in all its peculiarity it offered me a peek into a depth of self I hadn’t yet encountered. This gift I heeded reluctantly, anchored my belief in my intuition, in gut instinct. Some believe that the command and beauty of a mountain and our quest for its summit can lead us astray. But perhaps its not the mountain we fear. Perhaps what we truly fear are the human decisions we may choose when faced with the allure of those pristine slopes.

climbers on the glacier