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Highs, lows and in-betweens

ST. HUBERTS – Our friend Maggie had just slid a good 25 feet down Giant Mountain, gravity pulling her through snowy branches and stone-cold tree limbs before she came to a smack of a stop well off the trail.

Her fall probably took fewer than two seconds, a spill from the icy switchback where I stood to where her bruised body came to a halt. Boy, did it feel longer.

The frightening moment became part of what felt like an eternal mid-winter nightmare for us, a group of five friends more than 2 miles and 2,000 icy feet elevated from the safety of State Route 73. Between us, we had three headlamps to combat the darkness.

This was the wrath of the Giant of the Valley.

This, we realized as darkness crept in and we helped Maggie back to the trail, was a potential disaster. That feeling in the pit of our stomachs? It was less butterflies and more frozen-to-death moths. It was the realization that we were living something similar to what we’d seen in those mountaineering documentaries we’d watched the week prior, between this jaunt up Giant and our initial hiking trip together up Cascade and Porter.

Or, for that matter, we were living something out of the newspaper, this newspaper – the kind of grim headline about the misfortune of young hikers who were too pompous to know when to turn back. The kind of headline some of you reading this scoff at, chalking it up to just another example of how out-of-towners and transplants succumb to the mountains due to their own stupidity.

Looking down at Maggie, barely seeing her through the chilly darkness, one thought crossed my mind.

“I don’t want to have to write about myself come Monday morning.”

One hour and less than a half-mile down Giant later, I was at peace with the thought of my name appearing in this paper as a result of our peril – as long as I didn’t spend Monday morning at Adirondack Medical Center. Moving my microspikes and trekking poles one limb at a time, headlamp illuminating my four friends in front of me, my co-worker’s advice from a few days prior ran through my head.

“Getting to the summit is optional. Getting off the mountain is not.”

That moment on the evening of March 5, when my friend Logan carefully helped Maggie retrieve her broken twig of a trekking pole and helped her sink her microspikes back into the river of ice that was the Giant trail, was the moment when I realized the power of the Adirondacks.

But the four-hour experience that followed was also when I realized the power of a focused, selfless and dialed-in group of humans.

Our group of five was comprised of buddies with kindred, carefree personalities who had met thanks to the mutual connection of the college newspaper we’d all worked for. Maggie, Logan, Michelle and Annie had all driven through the Park the night before from Syracuse, knocking on my apartment door around 1 a.m. eager to summit a High Peak the next day.

I was new to the North Country, a 25-year-old transplant from downstate who had left a secure journalism job in the greater New York City area for North Country peace of mind and Adirondack adventure. I was fresh meat for the mountains, and on this Saturday, my buddies had come to get chewed up and spit out, one switchback at a time.

We were in good enough physical shape to get up and down the mountain, including Logan, an avid hiker who’d summitted peaks across the country and abroad. And our crew had come prepared with spikes, poles and backpacks stuffed with clothing and caloric reinforcements.

What we cheated was Mother Nature, namely the fact that the sun was to set before 6 p.m. We began our hike at about 11:30, from the mountain’s primary trailhead on Route 73.

According to my iPhone photo gallery, we summitted around 3:20 p.m., left the summit shortly before 4 p.m. and took some photos while descending down Giant at 5:03 p.m.

The next photo was taken at 9:35 p.m., our headlamps and shaken smiles illuminating a pitch-black scene in front of the trailhead sign. There wasn’t much time for photos through those four dark and frigid hours in between.

Until we returned to Giant’s Washbowl many hours after we’d planned to, the only thing we had time for was survival. What it took was utmost cooperation, communication and focus. Maggie wasn’t the only one to slip that long day. I took a slight tumble descending down at an even higher location on the mountain. And Logan carefully climbed his way out of a precarious situation when we were ascending one of Giant’s open rock faces.

But both of those situations came when we had actual daylight. As 6 p.m. became 7, and 7 became 8, and temperatures dipped closer to zero degrees, we couldn’t see beyond the few of feet of vision our headlamps provided. And when one of us turned to help someone else descend a few feet on the icy river, the darkest night any of us had ever seen stared back at us. At times we weren’t able to see if there were trees there to catch another slip, so each new step became the most important of our lives. It was the ultimate here-and-now experience, the ultimate feeling of vulnerability.

But the trick, as individuals and as a team, was to not freak ourselves out enough to let that feeling of vulnerability become a feeling of powerlessness. The trick was remembering that with the proper cooperation and focus, we still had at least a shred of control.

Hours later, when the dirt turned to pavement, the feeling of vulnerability evolved into a feeling of Adirondack deliverance, for sure. But there also was the empowering realization of what can be accomplished with steely selflessness. Many times since that cold March night, I’ve thought about how if I’d been up on pitch-black Giant with a different group of people, things may have turned out differently. After all, the day before we attempted Giant, a fatality had occurred in the High Peaks. A 61-year-old woman from Delaware, Hua Davis, died of hypothermia near the summit of MacNaughton Mountain.

But we didn’t argue, yell, point fingers, or, perhaps most importantly, freak out. We understood the gravity of the moment and the importance of each time we lifted our spikes and sunk them back into the river of ice. That much was conscious.

What maybe was a bit more subconscious was our understanding of the power of our collective resolve. Our instinctual desire to overcome together. It was that simple.

For us and for me, a newbie who came to the Adirondacks hoping to find my own alcove of serene simplicity in an ever more complex world, I’m glad we had this experience to learn this lesson. Along with the proper over-preparation of gear and nutrition, I learned firsthand two priceless things that come most in handy when most in danger. The first is guts. The second is a soul in harmony with the moment.

Before Giant, I’d hiked a handful of mountains downstate and here in the Adirondacks. Since Giant, I’ve summitted numerous other peaks, including tallying three of the Saranac Lake 6.

But it’s just that element of scaling mountains solely to check off the next one on a list that I feel, in some ways, cheats our soul’s own pilgrimage.

I don’t write that to slight the Saranac Lake 6 or the Adirondack 46 High Peaks. Just last week I had perhaps my best experience yet, safely scaling Algonquin Peak for the first time with just a few scratches on my arm and calf, in much better health than the majority of hikers who failed to bring spikes, some of whom descended Algonquin’s boulders as bloody messes.

But when I hiked Algonquin, the thing is I didn’t even intend to do it. Rather, at the start of the day, I set out for smaller, neighboring Wright. Listening to my body and Mother Nature, my itinerary changed as I wandered deeper into the trail. Much the same happened on one of my other favorite hikes, when a friend and I trekked through the Jay Mountain Wilderness, not caring whether or not we reached 4,000 feet or higher.

Before I came to the Adirondacks I had this term: “Journey-based perspective.” I used it to, well, understand life, I guess.

To me, it equates to the kind of conscious and subconscious contextual outlook on life we each have, thanks to the literal and figurative landscapes we’ve traversed.

To me, it’s an emboldening element of existence we can accept on a personal level. It’s the kind of big-picture empowering understanding that no one else can bring the same kind of specific comprehension of life that we each can bring to every new moment, thanks to the highs, lows and in-betweens of our personal pasts.

Truly, it’s an appreciation. And after taking the chance to move here five months ago, I couldn’t be more at peace to now be able to bring something else to my journey-based perspective: an enlightened Adirondack awareness.

Wherever the hike that is my life takes me.

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