shasta

so mount shasta has always been my favoritest mountain in the whole wide world. i've never totally understood it - i've been blessed to spend a lot of time in the mountains and there are many others that have a special place in my heart. but if there is one mountain that i would be happy to spend the rest of my days on, nothing even comes close to shasta. and in light of things that have happened in my life recently, i'm starting to understand the connection i have to shasta a lot better.

ry guy, dad, and i climbed shasta for the first time in 1998. it was the first mountain ryan and i had ever climbed, and from that day forward were were climbing partners. sure, i wanted to throw him off the mountain most of the time (especially in the early days), but no one matched my pace, determination, and humor in the face of hardship like ryan did. and in the later years, he really understood my connection to the mountains and the reverence and respect i hold for them. i started solo climbing shasta last year mainly because ry guy had gotten so busy with work and his family that he didn't have much time to climb anymore, and i didn't really want to climb with anyone else. we climbed on rainier together several times, but both of us had a connection to shasta that overshadowed any plans to stand atop other peaks. it wasn't coincidence that he settled in northern california, only 4 hours from shasta, and although he didn't get to do a ton of climbing in the last few years, he did find another way to enjoy shasta's brilliant slopes: snowboarding. shasta has a little tiny ski resort (three whole chairlifts) that has managed to keep the essence of resorts from yesteryear. you won't see anyone wearing fur but you'll see a lot of people that obviously fell in love with skiing waaaaaay back in the day and never left the slopes. it's the least pretentious resort i've ever been to and i absolutely love it. and you don't have to be independently wealthy to buy a season pass! last new years ry guy invited me to come snowboarding for a week with him and tess and a few of their friends. every new years ryan rented the only suite in this cool, old school motel for a week and spent every day shredding the nar. i fell down a couple of weeks before new years and sprained my ankle badly - it ended up taking months to heal. although i could barely walk, i decided to go snowboarding anyway. and the funniest thing is that as soon as i strapped into my bindings, my ankle was almost healed. i couldn't walk but i could board just fine. and i got to spend the week partying like a rock star and snowboarding with my bro. he is an incredible snowboarder - the passion, strength, and fearless nature that characterized his life was evident in the way he boarded. it was beautiful to watch. he's a huge guy and he took the mountain by force. i have a connection to snowboarding that runs as deep as my passion for climbing and one day i hope to be half as good as ryan. it was amazing just to board behind him and watch him make every slope, bump, rail, and mound of snow his own personal playground. and the fact that we were on shasta, seeing the snow glitter magically on the slopes and the sunsets calling out to us from the lifts, made everything so much more powerful. and now, less than a year later, that trip means so much more than i ever would have imagined. what if i had been a bit less obstinate and decided that a busted up ankle really shouldn't be taken snowboarding?? or that life was awfully busy during the holidays and i just didn't have a week to travel hundreds of miles just to go snowboarding? more importantly what if dad, years and years ago, decided to abandon his dream of standing on top of shata one more time, and ryan and i hadn't gone on that first climb??? so much of our lives have revolved around that one epic trip and if dad wouldn't have kept pushing and pushing, it never would have happened. oh i remember it like it was just yesterday....

mid 90's. dad had climbed shasta in his 20's and had been trying to find (in his words) someone stupid enough to climb it with him since then. none of his friends were taking the bait, so after years of searching for a suitable fool, he moved on to his kids. he started with me in high school. i was, as some of you may remember, not the greatest kid in high school and i was having none of it. ry guy is 4 years younger than me, so as soon as he got into high school dad started working on him. we thought he was nuts. but eventually his persuasion worked on us, and we decided to give it a try. the summer of 1998, ryan and dad and i rented plastic boots, ice axes, and crampons, and headed north to shasta. i was 20 and ry guy was 16. we had absolutely no clue what we were doing, but we were stoked to be heading to the mountains! we parked at the trailhead, grabbed our packs, and headed out. all was well for the first 15 minutes or so, and then ryan started driving me nuts. hey, he was my little brother and he was 16 - what do you expect?? we eventually got to base camp just fine and settled in. every part of the experience was new - first time i'd worn plastic boots, camped in the snow at altitude, used a pit dug in the snow for a bathroom, prepared to get up in the middle of the night for an alpine start. don't think any of us slept that night but we were up and ready to go before dawn the next morning. what an amazing combination of excitement, fear, exhaustion, nervousness, and achievement!! there's just nothing in the world quite like putting on plastic boots and crampons in the light of your headlamp....everything is crisp, sound travels for miles, and the stars gleam like beacons lighting our way to the heavens. we set out. it's not very steep leaving helen lake but as you head up avalanche gulch, it gets steeper and steeper. the sun came up, revealing everything that we had to climb up. it was intimidating!!! at this point, i was literally about to throw ryan off the mountain. he was being SO 16 years old - bragging about how easy the climb was and that he was going to bring his snowboard next time so he could snowboard down from the summit and blah, blah, blah. wouldn't listen to anyone else and thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread. the climb had gotten pretty damn steep by this point and my nerves were a bit raw. and he kept driving us nuts....until the rock fall, that is. ryan was to my right by about 10 feet. we heard weird swishing noises and heard someone yelling "rock" from above. we looked up, only to see several rocks bearing down on us, all of them airborne because of the steepness of the slope. there was no time to do anything and of course none of us were wearing helmets. most of the rocks cleared us by a mile, but the biggest one - the size of a basketball - fell right between me and ry guy. and all of the sudden, we realized that we were mere mortals on a very powerful mountain, and we were scared shitless. ryan got super spooked - that was the last we heard of snowboarding down from the very summit. i turned my fear inwards, swallowed it down, calmed ryan down, and kept climbing. the rest of the trip up was steep, icy, and intimidating. i would look a couple of thousand feet down the gulch (where i would end up if i fell and couldn't stop myself) and realize that it was too steep for me to be able to climb down. i'd heard that people sat down and slid down the gulch on the descent, but there was no way i was going to be able to handle that. but i figured we'd deal with it when the time came and kept climbing. breaks were hard because it was so steep we had to cut away places to sit down and it made my head swim..... we eventually got to the red banks and climbed through. not far off was misery hill. we'd seen it on the map but didn't realize until we got there that it's very well named - it sucks. it's a big pile of crumbly shale and every step up you take, takes you two steps back. after what seemed like hours, we got to the top of misery hill and kept working our way up. one thing i didn't realize was the number of false summits you see before you get to the top of the mountain. i kept seeing the summit and we'd climb higher and another summit would appear and we climb to that one, and another one would appear. it was torture. finally, we got to the summit plateau. there's a big flat spot at the top of shasta about the size of a football field. you have to cross it to get to the final mound of pink rocks that make up the actual summit. we knew once we got to the summit plateau, we would make it to the summit, but that didn't make it any easier. we rested as soon as we got to the plateau and when we decided to get up and keep moving, ry guy announced that he was done. he just didn't have enough energy to keep going and since he could see the summit, he figured he'd gotten close enough and would wait for dad and i to summit and return. we were totally bummed out, but didn't have enough energy ourselves to try to convince him to continue. we'd take 7 steps and would have to rest on our ice axes to catch our breath - and it was almost flat there!! dad and i got about halfway across the plateau and i turned around to check on ryan - just in time to see him running to us! not just walking, but running!! at 14,000 feet!! i knew he just needed a good rest and would keep climbing!! he got to dad and i and the three of us climbed to the summit together. it's a beautiful place. the rock glows pink and you can see everywhere, in all directions. the colors up there are unreal - the sky is the deepest blue you've ever seen and all of the other colors of the rainbow are bigger than life. i was more tired than i've ever been in my whole life, and was the happiest person in the whole world. ryan and i almost strangled each other numerous times on the trip up, but we formed a bond on that summit that changed our relationship forever. we weren't just brother and sister, from that day on, we were climbing partners. the three of us took a few pictures, signed the register, and headed down. it was a pretty uneventful descent until we dropped between the glacier and the rock face to head down around the red banks. the glacier had pulled away, leaving a five foot gap between it and the rock. we were able to climb down and walk along the rock face, checking out the glacier. there were all these holes about the size of my head and when you looked in them, you could see them open up into huge ice caves inside the glacier. they glowed blue from within. we dropped from there onto the face of avalanche gulch and started traversing over to where the main glissade trail started. we were traversing the steepest part of the gulch and had removed our crampons because the snow had gotten so soft. one second i was walking and the next, i was sliding. i don't remember falling at all, but suddenly found myself sliding feet first on my back - and i had dropped my ice axe. fortunately, i had tied it to my wrist with this lovely piece of purple webbing. as i slid, i grabbed around my right hand again and again, trying to catch the webbing. i could see that there was nothing to stop my fall other than a big pile of rocks a couple of thousand feet down the mountain and i was falling faster by the second. finally, i caught hold of the webbing (will remember how it felt in my hand for the rest of my life) and yanked my ice axe to me. it was facing the wrong way. so i switched it in my hands, flipped myself over on my side, and self arrested beautifully. 10+ years later, and that is still my finest self arrest, hands down. good thing we'd asked someone to show us how to do it earlier in the trip!! i got up, brushed myself off, and climbed up to meet dad and ry guy. dad looked a lot calmer than he felt, but says he could see that i wasn't ever panicked and was pretty much in control the entire time. we managed to get over to the main glissade trail without any more falls, and began the next leg of our trip. i was really nervous. the gulch is really steep and you really notice it when you're trying to walk down it. sitting down and sliding really fast down the face is a bit daunting at first! but we stuck our ice axes in the snow like we'd seen other people do, and shoved off. and began the greatest descent in the history of climbing. this was late in the season so there had been a lot of people using the same path. it was deep enough that you could lay back and not really see where you were going, and it twisted and turned so was more like a water slide than anything else! it took ryan and i about ten seconds to figure out that this was the greatest thing in the whole world!! it took us like 8 hours to get to the top and maybe a couple of hours to get down - we flew!!! we were laughing so hard the entire time we could barely breathe. one of us would stop and the others would go plowing into the back of them - it was a miracle that we got back unscathed! after glissading all the way down the 3000 foot face, we ran the final hundred yards to camp - we'd made it! we packed up camp and headed back to the car, finishing up what would be one of the most influential adventures of our lives.

ryan and i never really recovered from that first climb. there would be many more in the next decade. dad was keen to climb rainier and a few other northwest peaks, and we spent several summers climbing in oregon and washington. but ryan and i just never connected with any mountain like we did with shasta. every climb i've ever done on shasta has ended up perfect. everything just always works out there. ryan had many epics on the mountain - he moved closer to shasta after high school so he was able to spend several summers exploring other routes on the mountain. we were always going to climb casaval ridge together, but never seemed to find the time. funny how things work out that way. but no matter what plans we had and what we did and didn't get to do on the mountain, one thing remains. ryan and i have that mountain running through our veins. something happened on that first trip and it just clicked for both of us. shasta made us so much more than just brother and sister, even more than climbing partners. it made us understand each other and understand that we were so much more alike than we ever could have realized.

years later, that connection remains. ry guy has gone to a higher peak in the sky and we're not going to be able to climb casaval ridge after all. and yet we are. i know that all i have to do is step foot on shasta, and ryan will be there with me. he won't be on the other end of my rope anymore, but at the same time he will be. he'll be the ravens flying overhead checking up on us. he'll be the butterflies that cover the summit for no good reason several times a year. he'll be the alpenglow that warms my face in the morning, the glittering snow setting my world sparkling all day, and the moonlight that lights my way at night. when i snowboard on the mountain, he'll be there pushing me to go faster and harder. and next winter when i teach his daughter how to snowboard on shasta in his place, he'll be there to see us. and many years from now, when maddie is ready to climb shasta, he'll be our guide. i can't call ry guy on the phone or drink a beer with him on the tailgate of his 4-runner anymore, but shasta has given me a link to him that runs as deep as my soul. to think that all of this started with my dad wanting someone to climb a mountain with him is truly beautiful. it shows me that one simple decision, one seemingly insignificant trip, can be enough to change a lifetime.

thank you dad. we should all be so lucky.