Tsisnaasjini’

By Bruce Affsprung

“A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.”  –Joseph Conrad

 

Albuquerque in July, the sun is dazzling outside. Having watched the mesa country of New Mexico slide by below the plane and seeing the crest of the Sandia Mountains rising above the city like the surfacing back of a whale I feel exhilarated, but I am stuck in baggage claim for the next hour and forty-five minutes. I just flew in from Portland. I have a daypack, a frame pack and a duffle bag; wandering around the airport is out of the question. I find the carousel my brother’s bags are to arrive on and spread out on an empty bench. It is at the far end of the claims area and it is quiet. I eat the last hard-boiled egg my wife Daisy packed for me this morning. I try to read a little; I try to meditate, grow sleepy, and wedge myself between my pack and my duffle to cat nap.

I dreamt of this trip some months ago, but my brother Eric is the reason why I came. I sent him an email last winter and told him I was thinking of going to Colorado in the summer. I wanted to climb Blanca Peak. Ten years before, in 1997, I had set out to climb Blanca. I parked on the San Luis Valley floor, followed the jeep trail in fine clear weather to Lake Como, and then continued up the valley on the foot path. I camped near a small lake above timberline. That night the weather turned; the wind buffeted my tent violently, and in the morning the foot of my sleeping bag was soaked. The valley was completely socked in and there was no indication that the weather would lift. I decided to head down. I passed a pair of climbers on their way up; they said they were going to climb Blanca. I watched them recede into the mist. That evening, I viewed the Massif from the valley; the mountains were still shrouded in storm clouds. I decided someday to return.

I had hoped Eric might show an interest in my plans, so I could invite him along. But he did not, so I dropped the idea. After considering the time away from home, the expense and the long lonely trudge into the mountains, I felt it was not worth the effort. I began to doubt I would ever return to Blanca. However, when Eric turned fifty in May, he said he wanted to make a special trip in the summer, but did not know where. I decided to play a hunch and asked him if he wanted to climb Blanca. He responded with, “That sounds good,” but then he added a condition. I must agree that he would do all the driving. He said it had nothing to do with me; it was just that he had become nervous and superstitious in middle age. I accepted his condition.

 

The carousel jams into gear and begins delivering baggage. I stand up and watch as the passengers drift in. I spot Eric standing back, watching, dressed as if he is going fly-fishing, minus the waders and vest. I approach and we shake hands and hug. It is joyful, and a little awkward; a few years have passed since we’ve seen one another. We shared our childhoods and youth growing up in Oklahoma with our mother, before and after our father died. However, there was always the disparity of four years in age. I was the “little brother.” Now many years have passed and our lives have diverged. He has spent most of his professional life in Pennsylvania, and I have been on the West Coast. He is married with two teenage sons and I am married with no children.

No matter how old we are or how much time has elapsed, whenever we are together, subtly and in spite of myself, I find that I am trying to be Eric’s equal, even at forty-six. So when I climb into the rental car with him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat, I can’t help but feel as though I am a minor once again heading out on one of our Western trips. As we are leaving the airport, Eric isn’t sure whether to go straight or exit to the right, so we head for the concrete divider. I pull my feet up to the dashboard. “I got it, I got it … its OK!” he says, laughing as he steers to the right missing the divider. “Well,” I say lowering my legs, “we made it out of the parking lot. That should be auspicious.”

Heading northeast on Interstate 25 to Santa Fe, the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rise in front of us. Eric identifies the Truchas Peaks. Eric and I climbed North, Middle and South Truchas thirty years ago on one of our backpacking trips in the Pecos Wilderness. On our way back to camp, we watched a small herd of bighorn traveling across a snowfield. The adolescent males butted heads, trying out their gear on one another, preparing for a time in the future when their display would become serious combat.

We arrive in Santa Fe and decide to stay  in the same motel, with a different name, that we had frequented in the ’70s. We walk downtown in search of blue corn enchiladas and curios for Eric’s kids. When we have returned to the motel, I feel comfortably tired and ready for sleep. Eric hands a packet of papers to me, “This is for you,” he says.

There are a couple of pages of route information for Blanca printed off the internet, complete with photographs. Behind that is an American Alpine Institute Accidents in Mountaineering report. It is a detailed account of the actions taken, and the missteps made on August 5, 1967, that lead to the death of our father Harold Affsprung on the northwest face of Little Bear Peak. I sit down on the bed and read it over, not sure if I have seen it before. Much of it is familiar. Harold, his friend Bruce Stewart, and Bruce’s two college age sons Jay and Deon, had originally hoped to traverse the highly exposed ridge between Little Bear and Blanca peaks. Predictably, the walk in took up much of the morning. They surveyed the face and decided a route to the right of the summit and just above a “gash” in the ridge would be the easiest and fastest route and would get them to the ridge and summits before the afternoon thunderstorms that are common to the high mountains. After about an hour of climbing, Harold said he did not think they had time for the traverse, and suggested they move the route to their left. It seems that he wanted more of a challenge. Bruce said he reluctantly agreed to shift the route slightly to the left. As the steepness and difficulty increased Harold was in the lead and began heading directly for the summit. This was not agreed upon. Bruce called for the rope, but Harold did not rope up himself, and he started ahead, presumably to scout the route.

They were now in clouds. Bruce, Jay and Deon rested on a ledge and discussed what to do next. They heard, “Rock!” from above, and Deon ducked under an overhang to avoid being hit. A few seconds later a hail of debris and a body hurled past in a chute to their left. They were stunned. Bruce, Deon and Jay collected themselves and began a slow belayed descent. When they found our father, he was dead. As they retreated from the mountain, the clouds that had covered the summit dissipated.

I lower the pages and say, “I don’t know if I have seen this before; I read the news clippings a long time ago.”

When we were boys, our Dad was almost mythic to us largely because our mother idealized him. He had grown up poor during the Great Depression, had been in the army in WWII, and had been wounded by shrapnel. After the war, he went to college on the GI bill, where he met our mother, Helen. He obtained his PhD in chemistry and was hired as a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He began climbing in Colorado in 1951 with Bruce (whom I am named for). At the time of his death he had climbed most of the 14,000-foot peaks in the state and some notable 13,000-foot peaks. Shortly before his death he had successfully lobbied the Geological Survey to give Mount Oklahoma, a 13,845-foot peak in Colorado’s Sawatch Range, its name, because he felt that far more visitors come to Colorado from Oklahoma than hail from all the schools of the Collegiate Peaks combined.

After a pause, Eric says, “I think he was thinking the northwest face of Little Bear had never been climbed, and he wanted to be able to say he was the first in their party to reach the top.”

I think about this. It may be true, and probably is, at least in part, but I think it is more complicated still. We continue to talk about the mountain, the routes, and the posts people have made about their climbs on the internet. “Would you ever want to climb Little Bear?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, “but I won’t. If anything happened … I wouldn’t do that to my family.”

We finally settled down to sleep, but neither of us rested very well. In the morning, we have coffee at La Fonda and breakfast at the Plaza Café, and then head north. We take 285 into Colorado. We travel through rolling semi-arid country along a feature geologists call the Rio Grande Rift. Across the state line it opens up into the broad expanse of the San Louis Valley and the Sierra Blanca comes into view. It is hot and clear with white cumulus clouds over the mountains, but no storms. It would be a great day for climbing I think.

In Alamosa, we find a fuel canister for the stove and fill up the car. Near the gas station is a Taco Bell. We go in for lunch. Sitting at the table, Eric is hunched over his burrito his eyes gazing upward. “I can’t believe, I’m sitting here — looking at that,” he says with much irony. I turn my head and look over my right shoulder. Blanca’s pyramidal summit and Little Bear’s dark, jagged ridge are framed in the window rising over the highway and the strip malls. The massif dominates the view all around. 

 

Blanca is one of the sacred peaks of the Navajo people — the Dinè. It is one of the four mountains of the four cardinal directions. It is the sacred mountain of the east and its name is Tsisnaasjini’. The sacred mountains were created by the  Holy People with the soil called Dzil leesh that First Man and First Woman brought with them from the first world up to the fourth world. The Holy People adorned Tsisnaasjini’ with white shell for positive thoughts and thinking, and fastened it to the earth with a lightning bolt. Dawn Boy and Dawn Girl, White Bead Boy and White Bead Girl, White Corn and Male Rain, Rock Crystal Boy and Rock Crystal Girl, Birds and Spotted White Corn live within the eastern mountain. White Wind and Spotted Wind give life to Tsisnaasjini’. Talking God and Second Talking God stand atop the sacred mountains. The Dinè say prayers at dawn to the sacred mountains in order to maintain harmony in their lives.

Just past the tiny town of Mosca on Highway 17, we turn east heading for Great Sand Dunes National Park. There is an eeriness driving this road with the dunes off to our left, pale and flesh like in the shimmering heat, and Little Bear rising ominously in the distance across the plain to the right of the highway.

Eric and I turn into the middle loop of the campground. “I think it is this one,” he says. The campground is full with RVs, tents and campers. We drive to the end of the oval, “I think our tent was there.” He points to a campsite with an empty, open expanse beyond a couple of gnarled juniper trees and a picnic table. “And the Stewarts were camped there,” on the other side of the road, in the center of the oval with more and larger trees.

Strikingly, it is very much as we remember even forty years later. Still we are uncertain, so we drive the other loop and it looks much the same. “I don’t know, I think it was that one,” Eric says, “but it might be this one.” We go back and drive the middle loop again, “No, it’s this one, I am pretty sure. See that stump?” There is an old grey, rotted tree stump near the campsite that was the Stewart’s. “That’s the tree stump we played pinochle on.”

I do not remember pinochle; I have a different memory of the tree stump. I had refused to believe my father had died, and Bruce had called me over to talk to me. He had my father’s rucksack, my father’s camera and my father’s wallet. He placed each item on the stump one at a time and explained to me that those were my father’s things. They were there and my father was not, because he was gone. He was not coming back. He would never come back. 

 

We pull into a campsite up the road from where we were in ’67. We share our memories of that day. He was ten and I was six. Eric had seen Bruce near the rest-rooms, looking toward the campsites. He heard Bruce’s wife May Lou say, “You mean Harold went off by himself?” When Bruce saw Eric,  Eric asked, “What’s going on?”

The park ranger was with our mother, breaking the news to her. It was late in the day. Eric and I were summoned to our mother at our campsite. She was sitting at the picnic table, “He’s gone!” she said, hanging her head in anguish.

Eric and I go through our gear, pull everything out that we will need, and repack it for tomorrow. We set up the tent and fill our water bottles. Then we go see the sand dunes where we played that morning in ’67. Eric wants to call his family. There are no pay phones that work and he cannot get a signal on his cellphone, so we drive back to Mosca. Eric finds his oldest son Joe at home and lets him know he won’t be in touch for a couple of days. I call Daisy and leave a message on our answering machine. After dinner we go to the Park Ranger’s slide show, another memory from ’67, and learn about the winds and sands that form the dunes. In the dark I have a nightmare and call out, startling Eric from his sleep.

 

2.

“Perhaps life is just that … a dream and a fear.” 

–Joseph Conrad

 

The valley floor at the foot of the Sierra Blanca is a flat, open expanse of blue grama grass, with marshes in low lying areas. Closer to the mountains the land is dry and well drained, vegetated with rabbit bush, prickly pear cactus and small yucca plants. The dirt road heads directly for the mountains at a right angle to Highway 150. Cars and low-clearance vehicles park at a makeshift pullout at 8,000 feet before the road’s incline begins to rise. Erosion causes deep ruts, and the ground is strewn with round, polished cobble so one’s feet are never on a flat surface for the first mile or more. Juniper and piñon forest begin. It reaches the discernible base of the escarpment and ascends in a few small zigzags up a small shoulder of a vast and spreading alluvial fan. Then it hooks to the left and begins to seriously climb.

Soon there is a view across the valley of the San Juan Mountains. One walks in unrelenting sun and heat up long steep switchbacks, each one seems a mile long, and they are joined one into the next by hairpin turns. Eventually it is not so much a road as a jeep trail, climbing over steep, rocky outcrops. The air becomes cool and the montane forest begins. Douglas fir, some ponderosa pine and the first aspen appear. At the end of the long switchbacks, there is a valley that leads into the upper reaches of the mountains. It is a deep canyon with a stream far below, but as the trail follows the canyon, it meets and crosses the stream. The canyon narrows and the trail threads along the steep open north side. Little Bear comes into view, its ridges spreading like great arms from its dark and brooding face. The valley broadens once more when the trail reaches Lake Como.

Eric and I follow the path beyond the lake and find a place to camp in the sub-alpine forest near a stream. We had been caught in a torrent of rain as we entered the valley, and we are relieved to get the tent up. As I am digging through my pack, Eric tells me he is going up the trail to look at Little Bear. He is clear that he wants to go alone.

“Do you have your binoculars?” he asks.

I always used to carry binoculars. 

“No,” I say. “They’re broken.”

Eric leaves, so I linger at the campsite and mess with my gear until I become restless and start slowly up the valley. To the right of the trail is the deep gully where climbers gain the ridge for the standard route up Little Bear. The actual summit is vague, the highest mound of rocks among mounds of rocks at 14,037 feet. All summer there is a daily stream of climbers up and down the route. There is much risk from rockfall, and a fair amount of exposure. In my mind, I have dismissed Little Bear as an indistinguishable part of Blanca, the higher summit. It is only arbitrarily a separate mountain. I want to summit Blanca and see Little Bear and the other peaks and the valley and the plains from the highest point within a hundred miles.

A little further and the forest ends. Under Little Bear’s headwall, the valley is green, open meadow, undulating, glaciated rock with beaten-down trees. It is at 12,000 feet. Eric is standing in the open on a rise, his arms hanging at his sides with his head tilted back gazing up at the summit. He looks small before the mountain. Between Eric and the mountain there is a small creek that forms a mote-like gully, then a skirt of scree at the headwall’s base. The wall rises abruptly, then the angle decreases, and then it steepens again, and so on like this until it is sheer, vertical rock beneath the summit. I continue on slowly. The face is mostly dry. Ten years ago, there were clinging fields of snow streaked and blackened with dust and debris from above. I glance at Eric from time to time as he continues to search. I know he is tracing the likely route, and the place our father fell. Eric drops his head and rubs his eyes. When he raises them again, he sees me. He is still many yards away, but I think he looks heartbroken.

I try to be aimless, and amble around looking up at the mountain. Eric comes my way and says, “I think I see where they were.” We agree the route seems pretty clear, and although it is high on the mountain, it is surprisingly close, less than 2,000 feet above. It happened here.

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Eric says over his shoulder as we head back to camp. I have to agree; there is nothing attractive about the northwest face of Little Bear. It is rotten and treacherous looking. However, in 1967, my father, Bruce and his sons counted as an experienced party. They were carrying a manila rope, pitons, hammer and carabineers. On a sabbatical in Europe, our Dad had made climbs with friends in Austria and had attended John Harlin’s International School of Modern Mountaineering (ISMM) in Switzerland. Harlin died in 1966 climbing the Eiger Nordwald. He was ascending a fixed rope when it sheared, and he fell to his death. My father knew of the risks, and yet in some ways he acted as if they did not apply to him.

His body had not reached the base of the mountain, but had come to rest somewhere above. A rescue team was called in from Fort Carson. Jay Stewart led them to the body. The recovery took fifteen hours.

 

Around 10 p.m., we hear ATVs rumbling around Lake Como. They seem to rev, maneuver and idle for a very long time before the quiet returns. I wake up every hour or so. I am determined to get up at 4:30 a.m. and be on the trail by 5. Finally the hour comes, and I go out into the cold. The sky is clear and full of stars. I start boiling water for instant coffee. Eric rises, but when he tries to walk he is dizzy. He says he needs to lie down, and I agree. I am beside myself. I badly want to stand on the summit of Blanca. I tell Eric that I am going to go ahead, and that he can come along later if he feels better. If he does not feel better, he should leave the tent and head down. Eric reluctantly agrees.

I shoulder my daypack, walk into the darkness and with some difficulty find the trail. I immediately have second thoughts about leaving Eric alone. He is having classic symptoms of altitude sickness, which can range anywhere from a mild headache to life-threatening edema, but I do not think I can find my way back to the tent until it is light, and the path draws me toward the mountain. My headlamp doesn’t help; I prefer to leave it off, and navigate the blacks and grays in the dim predawn light.

It is easy traveling, and I come to the end of the valley quickly, but then the trail becomes vague. I know that it ascends to the right of a ribbon of a waterfall on the other side of the creek, but I cannot see where. My eyesight has diminished with middle age. I look back down the valley and see a headlamp. The person is making good time, so I sit down and wait. He catches up with me and quickly finds the trail. We cross to the other side of the stream and start ascending. It is soon light. I learn that the fellow climber’s name is Mike, and I see that he is good at spotting the little cairns that distinguish the trail from the otherwise discordant jumble of rocks. We get above the waterfall and skirt a little lake, climb another steep section and skirt another lake. We stop to catch our breath, and I learn that Mike is a carpenter from Florida. He is taking the summer off to bag peaks.

We proceed on, and all the while I am feeling bad about leaving Eric behind. The weather is holding, but the high, wispy clouds have a red tinge, and we can only see the portion of the sky that is not obscured by ridges. I am thinking about how much time it will take to reach the summit, and then return to camp. Most of the day, I figure. There will not be time, nor energy to hike back out. Eric will be waiting for me below, assuming he is well, and we will have to spend another night in the valley. I am also feeling uncertain about my dependence on Mike for route finding. I know I can find my way down in good weather, but if the weather turns, I don’t want to be responsible for holding him up.

The trail winds between some small cliffs that require careful footing. When we are above the cliffs, the talus slope sweeps upward dramatically to the ridge. We are at 13,000 feet, but the next 1,345 feet are going to be unrelentingly steep and arduous. I can feel that my pace is slowing, and Mike is ready to pull away. I don’t want him to accommodate me by slowing down. I decide I had better let him go, and head back.

“Well, Mike I’m going to head down from here,” I say.

He is surprised, “After making it this far?” He glances up at the ridge as if the summit were right there.

“Yeah, well I left my brother back at camp and I’m feeling bad about it, he’s going to have to spend the whole day hanging out alone.”

Mike is unconvinced, “Just continue to the ridge,” he says. “You’ve made it this far.”

I feel I owe him more of an explanation, “My Dad died climbing the northwest face of Little Bear back in 1967,” I say, pointing toward the mountain. “I’m carrying a lot of baggage here.”

He seems shocked. “You know, I don’t know how far I want to take this climbing thing,” he says, glancing up at the ridge. But he accepts that I am turning back, and I give him some encouragement before he goes. When he is gone, I head down.

I come to one of the lakes. A stream riffles into it at one end and pours out over an escarpment on the other side without the least disturbance of its surface. It is perfectly calm and clear, reflecting snow, cliffs and sky. I sit down and admire it. 

 

In 1998, before Bruce Stewart passed away, I had the opportunity to talk with him. I happened to be in Ashland Oregon, where Bruce and May Lou had settled after his retirement, and I arranged a visit. They were very accommodating, and took me in their car to see Crater Lake. Before we left the house, Bruce had shown me a picture of my father through a small hand held-slide viewer. I gazed into the lens, and there was my Dad at their campsite. It was early morning and he seemed cold. He was glancing up at the camera, and his expression was tentative and uncertain. I was surprised; in all the photos I had seen of my father as an adult he always seemed confident and self assured, usually looking at the camera as if evaluating the photographer’s skills. In this photo, there was none of that; he looked apprehensive.

On our drive, Bruce started talking about my father. For some reason, I hadn’t really expected this. I felt that I had long ago made a peace with my father’s death and was no longer trying to understand it. “Your father had been afraid of heights,” he said, “When we climbed Elbert our first year, Harold was very uneasy on the summit.” I was shocked; Elbert is a walk up with a broad summit.

“Years later, when we were on the Maroon Bells, your Dad asked me to hold his hand,” he said. A rush of emotion came over me, and for an instant I wanted to yell, “You’re lying!” But the impulse passed as quickly as it had arisen. Bruce continued, “Later Harold said, ‘I don’t think that was very manly of me.’”

“When Harold returned from Europe, he told me, ‘I’ve conquered my fear of heights, it doesn’t bother me any more.’ John Harlin had complimented him on his abilities, and he was proud of that.” Bruce looked over at me, “Sometimes you need your fears,” he said, “Sometimes your fears are there to keep you alive.”

Of course that is true, and I think for most men of my generation he was simply stating the obvious. But a generation ago, perhaps it was different. Bruce recounted what happened on Little Bear again. He said he felt uneasy, but when Harold suggested the route changes, and his sons were enthusiastic, he did not want to be seen as “chicken,” so he had gone along. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Bruce said.

“Harold was such a sweet man, Bruce,” May Lou said from the back seat in her soft sing song voice. “He was such a nice man, and he had so much enthusiasm about everything. Everything he did whether it was climbing mountains, or bird watching, or collecting rocks, he was full of energy. As long as he had his cup of coffee in the morning — then he was ready for anything.”

I could not speak. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. My Dad was a combat veteran of campaigns in North Africa, Sicily and Anzio, one of the deadliest, most-protracted battles of WWII. He had been given the Purple Heart. Most men only fantasize about being “tested under fire” as he had been. And yet he had felt inadequate somehow because he had found fear in himself where he thought there should be none. Once he became afraid of his fears, there had been nowhere for him to go but toward the abyss.

 

I descend along the waterfall and see Eric across the valley sitting on a rise of rock wearing his bright red chamois shirt and ball cap. I wave to him, and I think he sees me, but he does not respond. As I approach I see a small brown animal directly in front of him. He is feeding two or three marmots out of his hand. “I never knew they have such a strong, musky odor,” he says.

“You know you’re not supposed to feed the wildlife,” I say. He gives me a sidelong look. “What are you giving them?”

“Crackers.”

“I have some nuts here. That ought to be healthy,” I say digging into my pack, “You think they eat fruit?”

“I think they eat anything.”

As we are taking down the tent, I think a nap would be nice, but we are on our way. At the head of the valley, we stop to look back at Little Bear’s dreadful indifferent beauty. On the way down, we take a break for lunch. A couple of hikers pass by; they have just bagged Little Bear this morning and are jubilant. A while later, we pass the same pair with their 4x4 parked at one of the turns between the switch backs. Their stereo is cranked up and they are drinking beer and eating chips. They are celebrating a fleeting victory over flabby middle age.

We continue on and I think to myself about our relationships to geography. I wonder about frenetically rushing up and down mountains and using landscape to provide mediums and backdrops for activities and entertainment. When the early surveyors climbed Blanca, they thought they would be the first men to stand on the summit, only to find a rock shelter already there. Undoubtedly Native Americans had been there before — on vision quest. In Navajo mythology the Hero Twins are the sons of Changing Woman and their father the sun. Their names are Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. The Hero Twins rid the land between the four sacred peaks of dangerous monsters, and made it safe for the people. I wonder if we will come to a place when our relationships transcend conquest. When we will live among the sacred peaks, within a sacred landscape, accept our blessings, and say a prayer to the dawn.

Eric arrives at the car just ahead of me. On the way to the mountain we retraced our father’s final steps. Now we have returned from where our father had not. I look back on Blanca and Little Bear. The sky is still clear. I feel sure Mike has made the summit and is on his way down. I am happy for him. MG