A Definitive Route to the Summit

By M. John Fayhee

It waswhile sitting many years ago on the summit of Missouri Mountain, at 14,067 feet above sea level, the 36th-highest peak in Colorado, that the subject of correct verb use in the land of vertical terrain finally coalesced and solidified within the bowels of my cranial mainframe.

Most times, when you are atop a mountain in Colorado, even in the dead of summer, you stay there for only a few minutes, because there’s usually a wall of thunderheads fast approaching and/or the wind/chill factor is captivating enough that a few quick photos and a huddled-down-behind-a-rock-wall snack provide a perfectly satisfactory summit experience. This go-round, though, the 20 or so people who were there gathered were all taking borderline-languid advantage of the crystal-clear sky, the moderate temperature and the complete lack of a breeze. Folks were sitting around sans the outer layers that the summits of Fourteeners usually demand, snacking leisurely, dozing off, chatting, sipping celebratory summit beers and taking less-than-surreptitious, but not overtly blatant, tokes off of one-hitters. You could hear all that exposed white skin happily sizzling under the unimpeded UV onslaught.

The demographic mix covered the usual wide Fourteener spectrum: There were young dirtbag hedonists (those would be the bearers of the one-hitters and the beers), retirees, families from Iowa with their teenaged kids and the obligatory state-of-the-art-attired Outward Bound instructors. The vibe was cool. Even those who may have thought that it was inappropriate behavior to toke in front of young families from Iowa kicked back into the increasingly rare genial and accepting atmosphere that long defined almost every aspect of life in the Colorado High Country.

But nothing lasts forever, not even good vibes atop a favorably weathered mountain summit.

There was a stir among the summit people as this heavily tattooed twenty-something man approached, as though a bow wake of negativity preceded him. The positive energy of an entire mountaintop was abruptly assailed by the mere corporeal existence of one psychically mislaid human being. When he reached the summit, he looked downward, toward the very essence of the mountain itself, and theatrically bellowed, “Bagged your ass, bitch!” Then he proceeded to stomp several times as though he were eradicating the life force of a very bothersome cockroach that made the mistake of traversing the summit of a Fourteener that otherwise fine day. Then, just to make certain that his point was dramatically made, he spat on the summit upon which we sat and commenced dancing around and throwing his arms over his head a la “Rocky.” (Sadly, the summit of Missouri that day contained nary a diehard Second Amendment devotee.)

Now, there is a possibility that this man was merely attempting to rid the summit of its occupants so he could then enjoy some meditative solitude. Maybe this was some sort of irony-based performance art. Either way, you want to talk about serious and instantaneous buzz kill. Point-two nanoseconds after this clown’s saliva made physical contact with terra firma, a young couple, which had been smooching and giggling an eye-blink prior got into a snit because the woman did not put the sunscreen back in the daypack where it was supposed to go. And, out of the blue, a dad from Iowa cast a scowly glance over toward one of the dirtbags as he took yet another toke. You get the picture. The people on the summit of Missouri Mountain started dissipating, making their way sans best wishes down their chosen routes toward the various trailheads that would lead them out of the woods and back onto the highway of life. And, just as my buddy Rick and I were getting to our feet, I looked at that awful man, whose nostrils were literally flaring, almost with rage, and, behind him, I could see in the distance an ominous-looking bank of clouds materializing out of nothingness on the far-western horizon. As we left the summit, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped 15 degrees almost instantly.

Though I have never been there, I understand it is common in Nepal for travellers to make prayerful offerings to the mountain gods before journeying upward. I also understand that such entreaties are not always honored by the mountain gods for reasons too cosmic for my comprehension. Prayerful offerings or not, many climbers in Nepal end up eating one kind of shit or another. Maybe the pre-trip offerings were not sufficient. Maybe the prayers were uttered with impure, ulterior motives. Maybe the belief was feigned. Maybe the gods simply like being unpredictable. Whatever the reasons, it’s my guess that the flip side of a reverentially made prayer to the mountain gods — the act of spitting on a bitch mountaintop after bagging said mountain’s ass — likely does not bode well for anyone within the immediate reach of mountain-god-level karmic retaliation. We quickened our pace as the cloud bank moved closer. 

“Hey, it wasn’t me and Rick who disrespected you,” I limp-lipped to the mountain as raindrops started to fall out of the erstwhile azure firmament. I think the mountain was right then in the mood to neither split  hairs nor cut slack. 

 

It was not long after I moved to Colorado in 1982 that I started thinking about how I would properly phrase my experiences when those experiences included trying to make my way to the top of a mountain.

The first Colorado mountain whose summit came to bear my boot prints was Mt. Craig, the 12,000-something-foot peak that adorns almost every postcard sold in Grand Lake, where I then lived. I backpacked up the East Inlet Trail into Rocky Mountain National Park, camped, got up at dawn, hit the slopes of Mt. Craig with focused diligence and a properly puckered sphincter, made the summit a few hours later, descended and hiked back into town, feeling my oats in a mighty big way. Almost everyone I hung out with in those days would rather have amputated a body part than tackled a big mountain. It was just not a subject they were interested in. Despite their absolute-zero-level of disinterest and borderline incredulity that anyone would tell a story that did not include the word “football,” I still felt compelled to spew forth a few well-placed phrases about my journey, even though, by alpine standards, it was a journey completely devoid of relatable incidents, at least of the nonfiction variety. Never one to concern himself with disinterest on the part of those within earshot, I opted to relate my story anyhow. Yet, I found myself uncharacteristically tongue-tied a couple of times, like my story got waylaid by a series of narrative roadblocks that I ordinarily would just plow right through without breaking stride. The problem was that I did not know what verb to properly use to describe my experience. Most of us will say, when regaling our drinking buddies with tales of our many death-defying summit successes, will tend toward “climb” when describing an upwardly mobile on-foot journey through the mountains, even though, most of us, when backed into an argumentative corner, would likely take the position that “climbing”  technically requires the use of arms.

Since no one listening to my bullshit cared one way or the other, the story I told was of my “climb” to the top of Mt. Craig, even though said “climb” did not once entail anything more severe than steep hiking uphill.

But it didn’t sound right on about 20 levels, 19 of which centered around the fact that Colorado is a state populated by a great many REAL climbers, people who do not have to scratch their heads looking for the right words as they make their way to the tops of mountains.

 

Sadly, though, there are surprisingly few synonyms for “climb.” But, what the synonym list lacks in breadth, it more than makes up for in height. And therein lies the proper-use dilemma, because each of those synonyms contains within their few syllables the seeds of inflection that I believe are important in ways we’ll meander our way to here in a moment. Without venturing into the silliness of “clamber” or “shinny,” here’s pretty much the contextual list: climb, scale, scramble, ascend, summit, gain the summit and conquer. There are of course more technical terms, such as “boulder” or “cragging,” but, for general use, those few words pretty much cover the climbing alternative gamut. Each means basically the same thing, but each carries with it some serious connotation. Few other relevant-category words boast so much inflection within their synonym families.

For instance, there are supposedly more than 20 workable variations of “walk.” Yet, with the exception of “hike” and “backpack,” almost all of them are as much as anything else reaches for less-pedestrian means by which to express the process of fundamental perambulation. (See what I mean?) Sure, there’s a place for a “stroll” or a “saunter” in any good walking story, but it’s not as though you’re going to risk incurring the wrath of the footpath gods if you tell your chums that you “sashayed” your way up the trail. They might pull your Thesaurus from your hands and set it on fire right there in front of you, but that’s about it. No one will likely accuse you of misrepresenting the experience, just over-embellishing it.

Weirdly enough, the synonym phylum that appears to me to have the most direct relevance to this subject is: sex. Think of the many words that can be used to describe the procreative act. Yet, few of us would argue that “screw” and “make love” are in actuality synonyms, and, unlike “walk,” improper use of a sex synonym can land you in all manner of hot water, that much I can tell you. (I’m sure even the mountain gods are nodding their heads in enthusiastic affirmation on that one.)

For years, I experimented with plugging the various climbing synonyms into my backcountry stories. Sometimes I “summited” a mountain, which always sounded a bit grandiose. Sometimes I “gained the summit,” but that always sounded as though I was aspiring to be a Mallory clone. I tried to “ascend” a few times, but that sounded far too holy for these mortal remains. I never did apply “conquer” to any of my modest vertical exploits, partially because of the potential bad juju ramifications, but mainly because that’s a word even the most egotistical, goal-oriented mountain travelers generally eschew.

Almost by default, after years of trying mightily to apply the right word for my self-propelled travels through the land of vertical terrain, I found myself adopting by default the most humdrum way to describe the process of making my way on foot from, say, the Missouri Gulch Trailhead to the summit of Missouri Mountain. And some years later, a wonderful movie came out that almost lent institutional credence to my chosen phrasing.

But about the time I smugly settled on that chosen phrasing, the mountain vernacular was changed forever, with palpable negative implications that prompted me to finally sit down and pen this story.   

 

The awful compound word/concept “peak-bagging” entered the mainstream mountain vocabulary in the early-to-mid-’80s. It was a direct offspring of the suddenly popular and very Type-A Colorado concept of dashing to the summits of the Fourteeners for the express purpose of checking those visitations off a list — often to the point of clinical mania. (I know a man, for instance, who has stood atop the summit of each of Colorado’s 54 Fourteeners more than a dozen times each! I mean — shit! — get a life!) 

Summits of mountains, of course, have always attracted those who pay at least as much attention to achieving quantifiable goals as they do to gaining less-quantifiable experience. It’s just that, there was one unassailable difference between the summits of the Fourteeners and most of the summits that had long held the attention of those inclined to seek out summits: Almost all of the Fourteeners sport straightforward walk-up routes. Sure, a few — Castle, Pyramid, Crestone Needle, El Diente, the Wilsons et al — boast Class-4 sections, and almost every one of the peaks sport non-traditional route options that can increase the mortality quotient dramatically. But, mostly, the only ways you’re going to translate standard-route Fourteener forays into decent bragging material in the studly Centennial State are 1) to make your way up lots of them and 2) to adopt flippant, even condescending terminology to describe your experience. Even the most-ignorant flatland city person trying mightily to socially fit into mountain culture ought to understand that to “bag” a peak diminishes not only the experience of standing atop that peak, but it diminishes the peak itself.  And such diminution can’t help but translate into less than ideal backcountry perspective or comportment. I’m certain that most of us can make an applicable conceptual leap here back to the aforementioned synonyms for “sex.” And the leap does not bode well for the long-term health and well-being of backcountry places that do not need to get screwed. The attitude that birthed and continues to fuel peak-bagging is indicative of a larger evil, one that views the great out-of-doors as more of a giant workout facility with a nice view than an ecosystem increasingly under pressure from our myriad recreational pursuits. The same attitude that “bags” peaks also considers it perfectly justifiable to mow down forests to build additional ski runs or to oppose additional wilderness designations because such designations will preclude mountain biking in areas desperately in need of  legal protection. 

Certainly, these admittedly disparaging words do not apply to everyone who journeys to the tops of the Fourteeners. Many are the people for whom the process of making their way from the trailhead to the summit of a Fourteener is physically and mentally very demanding and one of the highlights of the entire year. And there are plenty of folks (the majority, actually) for whom the experience of moving through the mountains is first and foremost a holy or near-holy act undertaken in a most reverential and respectful manner no matter the destination. And this is not to indicate that there are not many circumstances where the quest for the summit of a Fourteener — even a relatively benign Fourteener, such as Sherman or Quandary — is not fraught with danger. There is the altitude. The weather can turn life threatening in an instant. The marmots might finally organize and attack.

Par for the mountain-recreation course these days, the peak-bagging mentality has spread from the summits of the Fourteeners to more virginal territory. We now have many people actively seeking the summits of the High Thirteeners (you can buy a pre-printed journal), the 100 Highest (ditto), and, most silly of all, the State Highpoints (ditto). And that quantification/bagging mentality has even left mountain summits altogether to find sympathetic homes at ski areas, where many people now measure their days on the slopes via vertical feet skied. (You can buy a chronometer that keeps track of that for you!) People are now check-listing backcountry hut visitations.

Sigh.

I will never forget sitting in the old Soulhouse Café in Montezuma — in the very building that soon thereafter became the Mountain Gazette office — and overhearing a corpulent gent whose accent betrayed a Southern-fried upbringing bragging to then-Soulhouse proprietress Sadie, a serious hard-body even by High Country standards, that he had just “bagged” Red Cone (a nearby peak close to Webster Pass) for the second time in two days. “By what route?” Sadie asked. Perplexed, the man responded, “Well, by the road.” Ended up that he had driven his Jeep to the summit of Red Cone. Twice in two days. Sadie graciously feigned awe. “How were the wildflowers?” Sadie asked. “Huh?” the man responded, nonplussed. That one short exchange had said it all.

Still, I wonder, after this major quantity of verbiage, if I’m not making a nomenclatural mountain out of a lexicographical molehill here. After all, a synonymic rose by any other name is still a rose. So what if you opt to “bag” a peak? I decided to bounce this conundrum/line-of-thought off Dick Dorworth, a world-class climber/skier/philosopher whose words have graced the pages of Mountain Gazette since the early-’70s. Here’s his erudite emailed response to my two-part question, “Dick: This will sound like a weird one, but what verb do you most often use to describe the process of moving your way up a mountain/cliff/boulder? Do you think it matters one way or another in the big picture when someone who hikes up a mountain to its summit says he or she ‘bagged’ the peak or ‘climbed’ it?”

Dorworth: “Perhaps weird, but certainly good and without question well worth exploring. The language one uses, of course, says it all. Do you remember the obituary I sent you on Chuck Pratt? In it I quoted Pratt’s definition of the world’s best climber as one who soloed a new route out of the bottom of the Grand Canyon at night, AND NEVER TOLD ANYONE ABOUT IT. Let’s start there. Climbing for climbing’s sake needs no language to describe it. (Or hiking, ascending, going up the mountain, bagging a peak, etc.) That said, the words one uses to describe moving up a mountain, peak, rock face, boulder, icefall, etc. often but not always say more about the mind set of the person describing it than about the experience. For me, the term ‘peak-bagging’ is of a kind with the puffery phrase ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’; that is, a shallow scorecard.

“Hiking is anything uphill (sometimes downhill) that is done on two feet. Walking is anything done on two feet that is essentially flat. Climbing, to my way of thinking, is getting up anything when it is necessary to use more than two feet, whether it be two hands, one hand holding an ice ax (or my friend John Donlou, the one-armed climber), though of course we use the term ‘climbing’ to describe going up a set of stairs when, except in extraordinary circumstances and usually late at night, we don’t use our hands. Climbing has many faces (sic): rock climbing, cragging, alpine climbing, sport climbing, ice climbing, gym climbing and so on. (‘Bouldering’ is, to my mind, an entirely separate endeavor.) ‘Ascending’ is fine, though it may be a bit less precise and a bit more literary than it is descriptive. To my way of thinking, anyone who says he or she has ‘conquered’ a piece of inert rock/dirt/snow/ice/mountain/face/peak/etc. is deluding him or herself. He or she may have ‘conquered’ something within him or herself, but the fact that he or she uses the word ‘conquer’ calls this inner accomplishment into question. One may (or may not) ‘climb’ Everest. I just heard that there have been 800 climbing permits issued for just the South Col route this spring. One or 800 may litter Everest with garbage, oxygen bottles, fixed ropes, dead bodies, human excrement and so on; but the last time I saw Everest (1981), it did not look conquered to me, and nothing in more recent photos I’ve seen of Everest indicates that it has been conquered. People who think they have conquered a mountain probably would learn to better appreciate and enjoy their own climbing and be better served by getting to work on conquering their own hubris.”

Very well said.

 

I once sat next to a fellow Colorado High Country-dweller on a flight to Mexico. The conversation ended up being one interminable dick-swinging contest. Whose Spanish was better? Who had been to more countries? Who had read more of the 100 greatest books of all time? Inevitably, when we wound our way around to backcountry experiences, I soon learned that the man had “bagged” all 54 of Colorado’s Fourteeners. “How many have you bagged?” he asked with a smirk.

And here I finally tell you how I word my uphill experiences. In 1999, the single best mountain-related movie that has ever been made came out. It starred Hugh Grant (playing his usual stuttering idiot character) and was titled, “The Englishman Who WENT UP A Hill But Came Down A Mountain” [emphasis added]. I take the wording of that title to heart. I am a hiker, a man whose considerable backcountry experience spanning more than four decades and covering thousands of trail miles often takes him to the summits of mountains. I have climbed, but I rarely climb. I have strived for the concept of ascension, but am not optimistic I will ever achieve it at this late point in a life lived as much in gutters as on mountaintops. Yes, I have scrambled, and I have clambered, and I have even shinnied up a few times. I have never bagged anything, and I never will, even by accident or association.

“I’ve gone up maybe 30 Fourteeners,” I told the man in the seat next to me.

“You don’t know exactly?” he responded, incredulously.

“No, I don’t,” I told him, honestly. He had entirely missed my choice of words, even though I intentionally stressed them.

I asked which of the Fourteeners was his favorite.

“I really can’t say,” he responded. “I usually go up and down so fast, I hardly pay attention. I’m just focused on the summit.”

The saddest thing was that his reply did not contain even the seeds of self-reflection or even irony. He was not lamenting; he was bragging.

And from that seat, it became crystal clear how a man could bag a mountain, spit on it and call it a bitch.

We flew in silence the rest of the way to Puerto Vallarta, as the peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental passed beneath us at 600 miles per hour.  

 

 

MG