A faint sound cuts through the silence and I stop moving. Snow floats down in massive flakes, tickling what little skin I have exposed on my face and getting tangled up in my eyelashes. I’m a beacon of heat in a frozen land. Tendrils of steam arc from over my head. I imagine myself starting to sink into the mountain, as if even without motion my position becomes unstable. The horizon is all but blank. The sky and the ground are the same dull white, only the faint tracing of a distant rocky ridge delineates the two. Silence. Not even a whisper of wind.
Then a faint but unmistakable yell from below. I jolt into action. I’m standing on top of a steep, 200 foot long finger of snow, and to get to this position I had made my way along the edge with delicate and calculated advancements. Heading down I’m like a clumsy drunk, only upright by chance or divine intervention. The snow follows my lead and starts shooting down in small clumps which turn into big waves. Somewhere down there, I think, off to the left. Then another yell, but this time the word is clear: “STOP!” So I do.
———
Toward the end of winter in 2012 I’m sitting at my desk in total disbelief. Mike Sylvestro had attempted to climb Jagged Mountain in the San Juans, stopping 94 vertical feet short of what was to be the first winter summit of the mountain. I didn’t know Mike, and I hadn’t even heard of Jagged Mountain, but his account sunk hooks right into me. As it turns out, Jagged is one of the 100 tallest mountains in Colorado, referred to as a ‘Centennial’ by those that partake in the body and blood of elevation measurement. Such mountains are second tier only to the famed ‘14ers’ in Colorado reverence, and in fact a little over half of them are 14ers.
I was astounded to learn that such a summit had never seen frozen boot prints. So were a lot of people, I think. I came to learn that it had a poor combination of difficulties. If it were any easier, somebody would have hiked it by then. If it were more difficult, a serious climber would have made the effort. A serious climber could not be bothered for a disjointed and spiraling 5.2 face not even steep enough to shed the poorly consolidated North face snow, and most importantly: located 20 miles from a road. I was not a serious climber.
I started training for an attempt, the prospect of being first in winter driving my body out of bed each morning well before I was accustomed. I had about one year to get ready for the following winter. I hauled packs full of water. I climbed in the dark and cold. I ran, biked and even spent hours lifting various heavy plates and bars only to set them back down again. But when winter came I didn’t even try for it. Nor did I try the next winter, or the one after that. As far as I know, nobody else did either. During this time I had been training with such regularity that it had just become my lifestyle, and I stopped calling it training.
Although I never forgot about Jagged, I became adept at finding ways of distracting myself from an attempt. By 2016 I had relegated the notion of a first winter ascent into the realm of ‘it would be cool, but…’ along with other grand ideas which I secretly knew would never come to fruition. Like everything bold or difficult that I’ve ever tried, it happened because one of my friends wanted it to. 2016 had seen warm temps toward the end of winter and when my friend Ryan Marsters called me, he was alight with the possibility that the long approach would’ve been tamed by consolidation in the snow pack. “We won’t have to break any trail!”
———
I’m frozen with fear. Ryan isn’t off to my left, he’s below me. The mighty tsunami of snow that I launched as I charged down the couloir must have been aimed at him. My gasping breath and hammering heart are the only sounds that cut the silence, but soon even those fade. The snow continues to fall. I strain to hear Ryan over the deafening roar of the quiet that surrounds this place. The terrible weight of soundlessness presses down on me. I wonder if I’m now the only living thing for miles. I wonder if I just killed my friend.
———
We step out of my car at the gentlemanly hour just after sunrise, having slept in the parking lot following an all day drive. It was a night full of the kind of sleep you tend to get in these situations; the bad kind. We shoulder our bags, making the usual foolish remarks about how ‘they aren’t that heavy’ that begin every multi-day adventure. Crunching on snow, we depart Vallecito and trace the river water toward the confluence with Sunlight Creek. Now and again I see skin tracks. The sun beats down. After a few miles Ryan punches deep into the softening snow, so we stop and don snowshoes. The skin track fades into a memory, and onward we march with no further sign of humans. We begin to see signs of moose. I marvel at the power required to make trenches through the snow like the massive ones before me. Nearby trees are mangled and scraped clean. We see cat prints. Big ones. We walk over avalanche debris and bear witness to the destructive potency of snow. All that time over the years spent in service of making myself harder to kill was for naught. I’m at the mercy of this wild place.
At the confluence, a final crossing of Vallecito creek is required, and this time we have to make a small leap. When landing, Ryan snaps the thru-rod connecting his binding to his snowshoe. Hobbled, we decide to make camp. Ryan makes repairs to his binding while I drop my pack and start breaking a trench up the creek toward Jagged for our use the next morning. I engage myself with this laborious task until the sun drifts below the horizon, taking occasional breaks to unsuccessfully load a map on my phone. Higher out of the valley and alone, I relish the tranquility of sunset before aiming back downhill. Back at camp we slurp pouch food and pass out, exhausted.
The next morning my eyes adjust to the greenish glow of my single wall tent bathed in the harsh light of headlamp. Frost rains down from the walls above and I think, like I always do, about how I am spitting on myself. Warm feet turn cold in my frozen boots and I tighten the laces, careful not to get them too tight at the cost of precious circulation. Just after 3am we’re heading uphill. Ryan, a careful navigator and possessor of a phone which can load the map, discovers within the first half hour that I had made a wrong turn the day prior. All my work was for nothing. Awesome. The snow is deep and the ground is steep. As penance for my mistake I’m thrashing up the hill with all my strength and fury. So slow is my progress, Ryan can’t even tell. By first light we’ve gotten above treeline and received our first views of the mountain in all it’s disjointed glory, bathed in red and gold alpenglow.
As we wrap around to the North the consistency of the snow changes, and no longer offers resistance to our weight. By the time we get to the base of the mountain we’ve been wading through waist deep snow, unsure whether snowshoes are even helping anything. Ryan sheds his first, while I soldier on with characteristic stubbornness. This decision splits us up and I managed to claw my way up a bulbous slab to a rap anchor before he can catch up to me. Ryan doesn’t like the slab when he gets to it and decides he can work around to the right to meet my line higher up. I don’t know why we did this. It would’ve been no trouble to get a belay going at that rap anchor.
Ryan had studied the face, and was certain he could climb straight up and combine with me in the couloir above us. Straight up he went. The North face of Jagged is deceptive though. It is laced with ledges and blocks of brown stone of indiscernible scale. From a distance it has the appearance of a field of rubble or talus. On the face itself you understand that the blocks are massive. The multitude of routes narrows down, and the easiest path wanders deviously back and forth in a maze of stone and snow. Ryan worked himself into trouble, alone and without a rope. He found himself stemmed out in a shallow dihedral. He ran out of holds near the top, and made a desperate attempt to stick his axe above and out of sight. Not much sun on this face, so not much melting, and not much ice. His axe pierced into frozen tundra instead and he had to decide if he was willing to make The Big Gamble on such a precarious placement. Just then, some trickles of snow made their way down to him, signaling my position above. He yelled my name. The trickles of snow turned into a stream, and then a roaring river.
———
He can’t breath. Snow fills his mouth and the weight piles onto his shoulders. The load path traces down his body, through his legs, and onto a couple thin strips of crampon steel placed on undulations in stone. He manages to turn his head, spit snow and scream. The snow relents. Eventually he is able to excavate some space around his chest with his free arm. “ROPE!” he yells.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit” I stamp a small platform, and shove my axe to the hilt. I pull the rope out and tie a quick figure eight on one end. In a frenzy, I clip a biner to the loop and lower the end toward the bottom of the couloir where the snow stops and the mountain takes a hard turn down. Somewhere below, hopefully not too far, Ryan must be balanced on that cliff. The bright yellow rope drops over the precipice and about 10 feet later Ryan yells up “I got it”. The platform I stamped out is made from snow more akin to sugar so I throw my crampon clad boot over the top of the axe and yell down to Ryan that I’ve got him. I pull in rope around the head of the axe as Ryan climbs, just like I had learned to do from reading ‘Climbing Ice’ by Yvon Chouinard only days before. Ryan pulls over the lip, axe in one hand and rope in the other. My relief is a potent drug. My whole body leans into it, and a fool’s smile makes its way onto my face while I put an arm around my friend. We never mention turning back. Onward.
It takes us hours to swim out of the couloir and scramble onto ice clad rock. Our work more closely resembles excavating than climbing. When we move onto the rock, the climbing is the advertised 5.easy and we are comfortable leaving the rope in my pack. We progress higher as we corkscrew around to the south face of the mountain. Up ledges and around blocks, we find a final small chimney aimed toward the top. I make the moves, pull myself to a standing position, and see that the summit is a few steps away. I wait for Ryan so that we can get there at the same time. Euphoria. Ryan snaps a couple pictures but there isn’t much of a view to appreciate. It’s snowing hard. Down we go, back the way we came. We make two rappels, and otherwise manage to follow the massive snow ditch we had plowed on the way up.
Not long after we depart from the face, the sun comes out in full force and the sky shifts blue. Beautiful and lonely land stretches all around, imperfectly blanketed in white. Spires and stony passes mix with massive swaths of snow. The snow curls toward a thick cluster of timber split by the frozen stream we had followed up that morning. We shed layers and grab our sunglasses. The hostility and danger of that horrid face is forgotten, and the weight of it falls from our faces. When we wander into our camp there is still daylight, so we decide to pack up and walk as far as we can toward civilization. At some point, long into that night, we jointly decided that we could not be bothered to set up another camp. I remember little of it now, save the occasional collapse of my weary legs and the time when Ryan, ever the entertainer, had one of his patented zero warning emergency bathroom breaks.
There was one other peculiarity on the walk out. Perhaps 5 miles from camp we came upon a few tents. To see people this far out felt improbable. I was eager to meet them, and after I made some false conversation with Ryan at an artificially loud volume, the occupant’s made their way outside. I asked them what they were up to out here, and so they described their plans for Jagged, hope at its zenith. Their faces went stone cold when they found out where we had been that day, betraying their interest in becoming first to the top in winter. I found out later they still made an effort, via a different line, but ultimately did not summit. I would be lying if I said their defeat gave me no pleasure at the time. Had the positions been reversed, I think I would’ve walked back home without even trying. So total was my motivation wrapped up in the idea of being first.
Years later I was sent a link to a 2018 article in Outside titled “Chasing a Couple of Geezers on a San Juan Traverse”. In the article, the author (Devon O'Neil) describes a ski traverse of the San Juans with a couple old timers named Matt Wells (then 70) and Denny Hogan (then 68). Devon writes that Hogan “made the first winter ascent of Jagged Mountain in 1971 with a friend, Arturismo Agasuma”. That’s fourteen years before I was born. I have, of course, had some debates about the legitimacy of this claim. What we define as ‘winter’ is vague within our culture at large, but very specific in this particular context. It is common, for example, that someone claims to have climbed something in winter merely because there was snow. In this particular case, I found that uncharacteristically I don’t really care one way or another.
I found out too late you see. I’ve already listened to the lonely silence of winter, seen the sun rise on an imposing mountain and climbed it. I witnessed the relief on Ryan’s face when he made it to safety in the couloir. I shared the joy of the summit with a friend. I saw the storm pass, and the sun shine on a land of pristine winter beauty. I’ve already shaped myself into a person capable of seeing and doing those things.
There is a common concern among climbers that their motivations may not be pure. Those with impure motivations are looked upon with disgust. If you climbed the route because it represented a number grade, or because you wanted to be the first to do so, or because you wanted to do it the fastest or cleanest among your peers then you couldn’t possibly have achieved the True Goal. Some kind of ill defined interface with your surroundings and environment. Something personal, which cannot be shared or understood or measured. I climbed Jagged in winter, only because I wanted to be the first to do so. My motivation was ego driven. My ego drove me out of bed each morning for years prior to the summit, redefining my body and abilities. My ego had me shielding my face to the wind and putting one foot before the other. My ego does this to me all the time, I suspect. It whispers to me that I may be able to do something just a bit harder.
My motivations often lack purity. My experiences never do.
I’ve been the first, or the fastest guy to do a couple of other obscure things since that Jagged summit, or at least I think so. It’s hard to be sure. My resume, as it relates to climbing, is not particularly interesting though and is only a small footnote on my resume at large. Perhaps that’s why, when I heard about the other climbers in ‘71 I wasn’t upset. Ego drives me, but I’ve never been so far gone as to forget that none of this matters. I’m not curing cancer over here.
I have two pictures from this climb in my possession. To find them, I had to flip through a collection of pictures from about 6 years ago. Pictures of my kids looking much younger than I can imagine now without effort. Pictures of my dog, my wife, my parents, my brother, my niece, my old car, our old furniture. Things that matter to me most, and things that just paint a picture of a moment in my life. A lot happens in 6 years. How can you measure a life, over a fixed amount of time? The time is of course, constant. A poor way to measure a life, really. No matter what I do in the next 6 years — it will have been six years. The trick I think, is to find the thing that will get you out of bed and drive you to do something that’s hard for you. Whatever it is, it might not be important to you down the line and that’s ok. It was the getting out of bed part that was important.
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