THE MORE I TRAINED, and especially the more I began to race, the more I understood that my mind needed toughening at least as much as my body—that endurance was about going until it hurt, when the natural impulse was to slow down, and then deciding whether to listen to that impulse or not. Not long after my golf date with Dad, I went off to Australia, which has the planet’s best August snow, eager to test out my hepped-up lungs. I’ll never forget the morning of the Paddy Pallin Classic, a 25-kilometer race through the twisted snow gums and eucalyptus trees on the shoulder of 7,310-foot Mount Kosciusko, the continent’s highest peak. I remember exactly how good it felt when the gun went off, how I bounded up the hills on my new legs, how I fantasized about catching the wave of skiers who had started five minutes before me—and how immediately I lost all that sweet focus at the first real sign of adversity. A racer came blowing by me, my chest tightened, and suddenly I was just plodding along, concentration gone. I still had some work to do.

But there’d been enough glimpses of transformation—races where for a few minutes I’d drop into the inescapable now of competition—to keep me going. When I came back from Australia, I began the longest, hardest month of my training schedule, an endless September that peaked one Saturday morning with a 238-minute run. My parents were visiting our Adirondack home, and they offered to watch my six-year-old daughter, Sophie, while I worked out. I ran and ran and ran some more, finally stumble-charging up the last rise, congratulating myself that from now on the whole year was downhill. I was peeling off my T-shirt and savoring the smug aura of finishing something hard when I noticed Dad. He was about a hundred yards away from Mom, walking back and forth, and he was lurching a bit. “He’s testing himself,” she said, with a frantic edge in her voice.

Slowly the story started to come out. In August he’d been hiking hard in the Cascades, feeling fine. But when he got home he’d begun stumbling a bit—and once fell right over. Some days, Mom added, he slurred his words. Dad had chalked it up to the late-summer humidity, or perhaps a sinus infection, and had rallied (and reassured) himself by walking faster, working up a sweat. But when I took him aside that afternoon he confessed that his right side felt weak. Could I have had a small stroke? he asked me. As soon as he said it, I felt myself starting to panic—it had never even entered my mind that at 68 he’d start to decline. But I knew it must be true; it would explain the balance, the speech, even a few recent mild displays of uncharacteristic temper.

I bade my parents good-bye with a sour taste in the back of my throat. The next day Dad phoned from home in Boston to say that his doctor was convinced that indeed he’d had a very mild stroke. He’d scheduled an MRI for later in the week just to make sure, but he told Mom and Dad to go ahead planning a trip to Mexico; I could tell from his voice that Dad was immensely relieved.

And I was too. I spent a little time thinking about the Meaning of It All—how your body would eventually betray you no matter how fit you got—and then I went back to work, because racing season was coming into distant view. The weather began to change; a front came through one of those early autumn nights, dropping temperatures down into the low thirties, threatening the tomatoes. The weatherman talked about “the possibility of sleet or snow on the high ridges.” The S word hadn’t been heard in these parts since early May, and it made me quiver inside.

I started stacking firewood in earnest that week, and while I was working Friday afternoon I looked up to see our dog, Barley, trotting toward me with something in her mouth. At first I thought it was a shoe, but when she dropped it for me I saw it was a hawk—dead, but utterly unmarked, a broad-wing, all strength and sinew. Sophie and I spread its strong, gray feathers, examined its powerful beak and talons, and then wrapped it in plastic and put it in the freezer so that she could take it to school. I went back to the woodpile.

When I looked up a few minutes later, Sue was standing there in the fading light with tears running down her cheeks. My mom had just called. Dad had a brain tumor, “an aggressive nonbenign tumor.” They were operating on Tuesday. Just like that.

I hugged her for a long time, and then headed straight out into the woods, cursing and crying and carrying on. Mom said the doctor had told them that even with the operation “the long-term average survival” was 12 months, which put a new spin on the whole idea of long-term. For me, 12 months was a “training cycle.” I was still sobbing when Dad came on the phone. “This is ridiculous, isn’t it?” he said with a rueful chuckle. He’d been shaving when I called, and for some reason that made me even sadder. How do you manage to look in the mirror when someone has just told you that in a year you won’t be there?

A couple of weeks before, I’d visited some actuarial Web site that let you calculate your likely life span. Didn’t smoke, long-lived relatives, plenty of exercise, low cholesterol—when I tapped the final button it told me I was going to die at 93. I’m certain that Dad would have gotten the same result. He was strong and active; he’d just written his first book. But there was no little button on the actuarial table for something called glioblastoma, the most virulent form of brain cancer.

When we got to Boston the next day, the change was obvious. Six days earlier his speech had been a little slurred. Three days earlier he’d driven to church and chaired a meeting. Today, Saturday, his triumph had been walking the 20 yards to the Adirondack chairs in the backyard. His world was shrinking with incomprehensible speed. He told us about finding out the bad news: The surgeon had pronounced his death sentence, and then said he should choose. “I could get a big bottle of Scotch and have a wonderful last night before going into a coma, or I could have this surgery and that would keep me going a little longer.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE Dad went to the hospital, as I was taking off his slippers to put him to bed, I could see the hard, veiny calves that only a month ago were powering him up high mountains in his native Northwest. They were useless now. Was he useless? What did it mean to lose your body in a week? And what would it mean, 24 hours hence, to lose some large chunk of your mind?

That next morning, at the hospital, Dad passed into another, yet-smaller world, where his abilities meant nothing. When the surgeon finally came for his pre-op visit, Dad asked only one question: “Will my personality change?”

“I hope not,” the doctor said.

We watched as they wheeled him out of his room to the operating theater. It was after lunch before the doctor appeared to give us the news. Dad had come through surgery OK, but the pathology was exactly what he suspected: glioblastoma, grade four. The worst grade. He couldn’t get it all, it had already spread to both lobes. Sorry. The next few months, the doctor said, would be “the good time,” a phrase that would come to haunt us.

When they finally let us up to see him, Dad looked…beautiful. A turban of bandages wrapped his head, but beneath it his face was eerily young, as if he were in his twenties. The sparkle was back in his eyes. When we turned on the TV the Red Sox were leading the Indians in game one of their playoff series behind seven RBIs from Mo Vaughn. Dad was making jokes—he whose head had been sawed open and then the two halves pulled apart by traction. This much was clear: His personality had not changed, not one whit. Doubtless it would darken when the tumor recurred, when the swelling built up again. The hope, though, was that we’d bought ourselves a few months, a window of time to make peace with his passing. Nothing more.

And so we settled into the pattern of small victories and somewhat larger defeats that must mark most terminal illness. They shifted Dad to a “rehabilitation hospital” in the suburbs, where after daily morning trips by ambulance to the radiation ward he would return for afternoons of physical therapy. The therapy rooms reminded me of the world where I’d spent much of the last year—they were filled with weight machines, parallel bars, treadmills. But here, in place of the ersatz philosophy of the gym, real struggle prevailed. Dad’s workouts, as tightly scheduled and as exhausting as mine, involved batting a balloon back and forth with the therapist, folding washcloths, unscrewing a jar top, kicking a ball. He could swing his right foot perhaps an inch, enough to nudge the ball along the floor, but no more. When he tried to steer his wheelchair, it inevitably drifted to the right till he hit a wall, reflecting the now-distorted architecture of his brain. His major triumph: learning to apply and disengage the wheelchair brake.

Through it all I kept running. I suppose I should have stopped, if only because it seemed in such poor taste, calibrating my body’s improvement as Dad’s withered away. But Dad had been the most interested in my project from the beginning. And there was nothing else to structure my life. No one expected me at an office. I was commuting between the Adirondacks and Boston, between my adult and boyhood homes (I was sleeping on the bed I’d slept on as a boy, the same bed Dad had slept on in his youth). There was no way I could write—when I tried to still my mind enough to string two thoughts together, I invariably began to weep. Only motion seemed to relax me.

I’d begun this compulsive exercising on the premise that I was at the tail end of my youth. Now it was all too easy to calculate that if I lived as long as my father was going to, I was already halfway used up. But I could feel the second half of my life starting in more complicated ways too. Identities long fixed shifted back and forth. Sometimes I was still his son. But then the next morning would dawn, and we’d need yet again to make some impossible decision: more radiation, say. Dad would doze off while the doctor was explaining the options, and we’d be left trying to figure out what he might want, what we might want. The goal of all the physical therapy diminished. Instead of teaching him to regain real function in his muscles, the single aim became training him to help in the process of transferring himself from bed to wheelchair, and vice versa. If he learned that, he could go home and Mom could take care of him by herself. The technique, as detailed and precise as a good cross-country skiing kick, involved lifting his butt an inch up off the bed and then sliding himself in two stages about a foot and a half into the wheelchair. He would push himself up on his knuckles, slide ten inches, rest 30 seconds till the panting subsided, then make the next assault. Each time he’d forget the sequence and need to be reminded; each time it left him red-faced and tired.

All this training, and for what? It wasn’t like my training. I knew I was getting steadily stronger and fitter. Not Dad. He worked all afternoon stretching his rubber bands, lifting his tiny dumbbells, and yet his body decayed faster than he could build it up.

I went in to the rehab center one morning and found him in an uncharacteristic rage. Some doctor had wandered through that morning (one of the glories of managed care was that unknown doctors constantly drifted in and out of our lives) and remarked to him, on the basis of a handshake, that he was getting weaker. Dad was outraged, agitated. He didn’t want to go to therapy that afternoon, but I talked him into it.

You followed your schedule no matter what; sometimes that seemed about all my year had taught me.

IF I NEEDED A metaphor for my autumn, it came in early November. Back in the Adirondacks for a week, I noticed some fresh new pavement on a back road on the far side of the Hudson River. Fresh pavement, to a roller-skier, exerts a nearly gravitational pull—smooth and fast, it’s the next best thing to snow. What I hadn’t noticed was just how steep the hills were. I was, as always, wearing a bike helmet, but I’d forgotten my knee pads, and the light was fading. Predictably, I went for it. For an hour I skied the hills, tucking for fast descents, powering up with short, choppy kicks, feeling pretty damn strong. And then, predictably, a dog ran out at the bottom of a hill just as a car passed on my left—and I was down in a second.

Predictably, I jumped up, in the way that guys do when they’ve fallen, as if to say, Oh, I meant to do that. I waved off the stricken driver—and as soon as he was out of sight I sat right back down to consider. True, my knees were bleeding dramatically, soaking my shredded tights, but on the other hand I had 90 minutes left in my workout. I’d snapped a pole, so I clearly wasn’t going to keep skiing, but I had my sneakers in the car. And so—predictably?—I ran, knees bleeding and stiff. It was clearly stupid. Perhaps I just wanted to hurt, and to keep going through the hurt.

My road-scraped knees healed just in time for me to return to Lake Placid and the giant treadmill at the Olympic Training Center for the final readout on my year’s training. I’d passed through this particular crucible in the spring, establishing my baseline numbers and learning just how much the test could hurt—you ran until you couldn’t run anymore, or at least until you thought you couldn’t. This time, rubber bit clenched in my mouth to catch my exhalations, I lasted two minutes longer than I had in April, but it didn’t cheer me up. Because I knew I’d had another minute in me, if only I’d fought the pain a little harder. But when the treadmill tilted toward the gut-check stage, I couldn’t keep going. It hurt, that’s why.

My coach, Rob, professed delight. “You’ve had a 45 percent improvement in body fat, your lactate threshold is 25 percent better—your engine is burning hotter at a lower lactate production. It means you can ski at a faster pace longer.” Part of me did feel exhilarated. It had worked the way it was supposed to, all those hours and miles. Mine was not the physique of a champion, but what I had done was maximize my genetic potential, grown about as powerful as my ancestry would allow.

But the day left me feeling unsettled. When things had gotten really tough, I had looked for a way out. My heart might have become more efficient, but my heart seemed no stronger.

Maybe it was because I was beginning to question whether endurance was such a grand goal anyhow.

From the moment I’d learned of Dad’s first conversation with the surgeon—Scotch or scalpel—part of me had been wondering whether we should be keeping him alive. We’d press the specialists with questions about whether his condition would improve, and all we’d get was the Ph.D. equivalent of shrugs. In the meantime, he was home, enduring, and Mom was, too. The HMO professed to believe that a couple of hours of nursing assistance a day was all Mom needed; never mind that Dad outweighed her by 80 or 90 pounds. She hired extra aides to come in the evening and help her get him out of bed; the next-door neighbor’s son slept upstairs now just in case he rolled out of bed and she couldn’t get him back in. New pills piled up almost daily; dosages changed with every visit to the doctor; Mom was awake by six to give him his first medicines, and still up at midnight to feed him the final batch. When I thought about the burden she was under, I doubted I could handle anything like it. And yet she kept going forward, forward, forward, like—well, like an elite athlete. In her case, though, it wasn’t uphill intervals and mental imagery that had laid the base. It was year upon year of loving, so consistently that the giving had become instinctive.

As for me, if watching someone die could perform the same kind of magic, I wasn’t sure I was ready for it. When the treadmill got steep enough, I started looking around for someone to turn it off.

Whenever we were with the doctors, no matter how much of a fog he seemed to be in, Dad would ask that they treat his cancer “aggressively.” But one night, when I was talking to him very late, he said, “If it’s going to be like this all the time, then there has to be a cutoff somewhere.” Amen, I thought. Where’s the guy with the switch?

WE MADE IT TO THANKSGIVING, and I spent the week in West Yellowstone—my longest absence from his bedside so far, a guilty vacation—at the annual cross-country training camp that fills the town with gaunt, wax-obsessed nordic racers trying to cope with the 6,600-foot altitude. I flew home on Friday, though, for a delayed turkey dinner, where we managed to convince ourselves that we had much to be thankful for and that, with Dad propped up at table’s end, all was joy. After the pie settled, I went for a run and instantly understood why athletes are so eager to train at altitude. My body had compensated for the thin Montana air by adding extra red blood cells. I ran through suburban Boston on a high—no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t make myself hurt. My heart-rate monitor showed I was working reasonably hard, but I could have been out for the lightest of jogs. I felt out ahead of my body, as if I was outrunning my feet.

Sadly, the corpuscles quickly disappeared, and with them the sense that I had become a minor deity. Worse than that, the East was still warm and bare as December began. The temperature hit the seventies on the first of the month. The pond by our house was filled with summery ripples. No need for the woodstove; we slept with the windows open.

It bothered me on many levels. For ten years I’d been a nearly full-time student of global warming—worrying, tracking the rising sea temperatures that were bleaching coral reefs, writing about the increase in the strength and frequency of hurricanes. But I felt it most personally come winter. Always my favorite of seasons, it had become deeply unreliable. As the man from Fischer Skis had told me in West Yellowstone, global warming had already damaged their business, interrupting every winter with long stretches of mud and thaw. Business would doubtless carry on; in fact, I’d just come across a series of economic forecasts proving, in the smug fashion of economists, that increases in the greens fees from golfers would outweigh the losses from declining ski sales. But I didn’t want to play golf—I wanted to speed sublimely through the woods, riding on an outstretched ski, pushing with every muscle in my body. I wanted the annual remission from friction.

Rob had been pushing me to pick a final race to aim for, something grand enough to be worthy of this whole experiment—and he’d been urging me to think about the Norwegian Birkebeiner, the mother of all cross-country races, held each March on a course that runs over the mountains from Rena to Lillehammer. Open to all comers, it attracts thousands of Norwegians, and most of the world’s best marathon skiers. As they race, they commemorate the pivotal event in Norway’s 13th-century civil war. The Birkebeiners—Birchleggers—were the underdogs, “often in such dire need that they had nothing but the bark of birch trees as footwear.” But they were determined that the rival faction, the Baglers, not capture Haakon Haakonsson, the toddler son of their dying king. So on Christmas Day 1205, two Birkebeiner skiers spirited him away on an epic journey across the mountains. The boy grew up to be King Haakon and to finally rout the Baglers, raising Norway to its medieval glory. And hence, each year in late March, racers pound those same grueling 58 kilometers, about 40 miles, mostly uphill, each carrying an eight-pound pack to match the weight of the young king.

I doubted I could go. With Dad dying, the prospect of a trans-atlantic trip seemed unlikely. And I wondered if I could even finish the race. But I still logged onto the race Web site and clicked the button for an application. Maybe Dad would get better for a while—maybe the “good time” would arrive. I knew I wanted to go; it sounded crazy, hard enough to justify this crazy year.

This crazy year in which winter seemed never to come. By mid-December we’d set up the Christmas tree at church and gone caroling in shirtsleeves. Finally, December 17 brought a little snow to the Adirondacks, and a few phone calls established that the Olympic trails at Lake Placid were partially open. They were barely covered, but it was skiing, and I kicked around and around the same short loops with the junior biathletes, guns strapped to their backs, and the local masters skiers, all of us desperate for snow. The next day warm, foggy air melted big tawny patches in the snow, and it was back to the damn NordicTrack. December was shot.

We got through Christmas Day in Boston just fine—a lot of the ornaments hung at wheelchair height, testament to Dad’s pleasure in the work—but then, tired from the strain of this last big celebration, Dad was all but comatose for a couple of days. “Were it my dad,” said the surgeon, “I wouldn’t do much more.”

At which point Dad emerged from his fog for the first time all day to ask yet again that he be treated “aggressively.” Which annoyed the hell out of me—some part of me wanted him to go away and stop bothering us. Stop making me feel guilty for not being more help to my mother; stop pulling me away from my family; stop stop stop being so damn needy, so unlike my father. Which, of course, left me feeling twice as guilty as before.

A snowstorm might have righted me. It usually does. A couple of hours alone in the woods, gliding along, pushing up hills and carving down them, breaking out into the open on Adirondack lakes and tucking back into stands of hemlock, reminding me of the proper order and scale of things.

BY LATE JANUARY THE GROUND was still bare, and Dad was setting off on a major journey. Each day he seemed to grow a bit more abstracted from his shrinking world. He was never short with any of us. If his grandchildren were on hand, he would watch them playing around his bed with deep delight, and he never ceased following Mom with his eyes.

Sometimes the world he was visiting seemed inscrutable. Once I asked him what he was thinking so deeply about, and he replied, in a loud voice, “Insects!” But he did tell Mom several times that he constantly saw a white line in front of his eyes. One morning, when he was more alert than usual and when we had the house to ourselves, I asked him if he could describe the line to me. He asked for a pencil and, gripping it tightly in his shaking hand, drew a wavering line about two-thirds of the way across the page and labeled it R. On the edge of the paper, he drew a wavering circle and with great effort wrote “W. Ocean” across it. (In a lifetime of writing, they were the last words he ever wrote.) The picture represented, he said, a “typical Western river” leading to a “Western ocean.”

“And what does that ocean mean?” I asked.

“Infinity,” he said. “Completeness.”

He nodded off for a few moments and then woke back up. Why didn’t the river connect to the ocean? I asked.

There were, he said, necessary tasks still to be done, but he couldn’t find the words to say what they were.

“Is death more scary to think about or more peaceful?” I asked.

“More peaceful,” he said emphatically, and then drifted back to sleep.

That night at dinner he seemed happy—we’d been discussing “ultimate truths,” he told Mom, with just a little smile to let us know he knew how unlike him it was to discuss ultimate truths. But a new man was clearly taking shape before our eyes.

MY OWN JOURNEY seemed all but irrelevant, dull even to me, but by now the training was so ingrained that I kept with it almost automatically. And Rob, the one person besides my wife whom I’d trusted with my resolve to mount a supreme effort in some race, kept trying to help me find the right venue.

The trip to Lillehammer seemed less likely than ever, but I came across a brochure for the annual Keskinada races in Ottawa, in late February. The theme for 1999 was Norway; they were trying to duplicate parts of the Birkebeiner in Canada, including sending off one wave of racers carrying eight-pound backpacks. Ottawa was only a quick trip from Boston; this one I figured I could make. And so the images that filled my mind on training runs were suddenly Canadian: the pine forests of the Gatineau Park, the 50-kilometer trail. There was finally a little snow on the ground, and Rob told me to prepare with a four-hour time trial two weeks before the race. Four hours is a long time, especially with none of the adrenaline of a race to distract you; I headed to the ski tracks and did the same five-kilometer loop 11 times, till I knew every soft spot in the snow. Every lap brought me by a pigpen filled with noisy hogs; I’d stop there and choke down some energy gel. When the clock finally stopped, I’d gone 55 kilometers, and proved to myself that at the very least I could manage the distances in the race ahead. And I’d done it with my pack on my back, like a true Birchlegger.

Almost in spite of myself, I could feel my body starting to peak. As the really long workouts of the fall dwindled in number and distance, and the brutal intervals built up my speed, power began to accumulate. I imagined that I knew what a racehorse felt like in the gate, pent-up energy ready to express itself. Long, hard uphill skiing left me feeling spent but not wasted; my body craved fuel and burned it evenly; I was eager for a test, impatient for the Ottawa race to arrive. I was, in fact, in the best physical shape of my life.

In the middle of all this, my friend John Race came to visit. We’d met when he guided me up Mount Rainier five years before. Intellectually curious the way I was physically curious, he’d nonetheless spent almost all his energy on things of the body and the spirit. He’d spent months on Mount McKinley, gotten within 500 feet of the top of Everest, climbed 26,000-foot peaks like Cho Oyu. Now he was hungry for intellectual growth, and he wanted to write about his experiences. He was playing on the path I’d been following since I could first remember, and I was playing on his. It made me think of the first notion Rob had taught me when we’d started working together a year before—each of us born to be balanced physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

It hadn’t taken me long to figure out how linked all three could be. If exercise was about being physical, then racing—being willing to hurt, to go harder than you wanted to—had an obvious spiritual quality. But the neat progression of my idea ran into trouble when Dad got sick. He was clearly operating at some higher level now, but it wasn’t because he was trying. Instead, it seemed to be because he was letting go. Not giving up, not dropping out, but slowly, methodically, patiently letting go of his life. Every so often, I kept trying to ask serious questions, to find out what was going on inside. Partly it was just my curiosity, but I sensed, too, that he enjoyed talking about it, liked the fact that someone acknowledged he was dying and that it was an interesting process. One day he muttered that he was trying to figure out if there was something beyond this “make-believe” world, if there was something beyond “next week.” His metaphors, like the drawing of the river, tended always toward the outdoor, the concrete, toward the joys of the Western boyhood that had filled his imagination ever since. “I feel like I’m climbing,” he told me slowly one day. “Like I’m climbing up a cliff.”

“Are you near the top?” I asked.

“Getting there,” he said, with a grin.

I thought of all the climbs we’d taken when I was young, in the mountains of Maine and New Hampshire; of the pleasure he’d taken in the Adirondacks when I moved there; of the long trip we’d taken with his brother and my brother around Mount Rainier. Every time I’d looked at him in those weeks on the Wonderland Trail, he’d been grinning. Climbing wasn’t a struggle for him, didn’t represent a battle or even a test. It was a great joy, because it carried you higher, to where the view was clearer. And more than that—though the grand view may have started you slogging in the first place, no one kept hiking for years unless they came to like the slog. Sometimes it’s bittersweet to reach the top, because there’s nothing to do but linger for a while and go back down. This time, however, he wouldn’t need to descend.

I’d started this exercise of exercising in an effort to try on a new identity, the way a high school boy might try on meanness, or a college boy might grow a goatee. But now, watching Dad, I realized what a solid thing an identity is. He was unchanged even by this catastrophe—he remained as decent and egoless a man as I’d ever met. As for me, I’d examined my core from a different side, or placed it under light of a different wavelength, and found it to be much as I’d always known it: curious, eager, tempted by deep commitment but afraid of the effort and pain.

I could live with that—it had served me well so far—but now I wondered if I could die with that. Wondered if I could go as gracefully as my father was going, as bravely and yet as peacefully. What would it be like to reach the end of my life without regrets?

Dad took one last trip into the hospital, for one last MRI. The tumor had fired up again, the doctors said, started once more to grow. Don’t even bother calling the ambulance if something happens, they advised—you don’t want them sticking a tube down his throat. Mom listened, asked Dad if he had anything to say.

He looked up, and in a clear, conver-sational tone announced, “I have this fascinating vision of a white line along the edge of a riverbank.”

SO THERE WAS DAD, cheerful in the face of a brain tumor. And here I was, gloomy because I’d caught a cold two days before the big race in Ottawa, and was reduced to obsessively guzzling tea, sucking on zinc tablets, and fretting about compromised respiratory efficiency. But on race morning I was up at 5:45, and I was the first to arrive at Gatineau Park. I splurged $30 at the ski-waxing booth and watched the ski techs patiently iron on purple and red and then a coat of klister because the tracks were icy. I took my skis outside, tried them for a few strides, and instantly felt my mood soaring—I had rock-solid kick and lustrous glide. They felt like perfect extensions of my legs, each twitch converted into forward momentum.

The starting pen for my wave filled with other backpack-carrying skiers, about 40 of us among the hundreds of more conventional racers. An official weighed the rucksacks, making sure they topped the infant-king-Haakon line on the scale. We shuffled back and forth in the tracks for a few minutes, trying to stay limber, until the Norwegian ambassador to Canada sounded the ceremonial horn and we took off.

Because of the packs, it was easy enough to keep my competition in sight. We hit the first long uphill, and my legs felt so strong I had to consciously rein myself in a little, remind myself I’d be out on the course for a good three hours. One by one I picked off the guys in my wave—a fellow carrying a blaze-orange knapsack, a fellow in camouflage Lycra, a fast-looking skier who somehow managed to fall on the first small downhill. Twenty minutes into the race, a fellow in a brown rucksack was in front of me, and I was pretty sure he was either second or third in my wave—in other words, if I passed him I’d be in the money. I stayed on his tail for a few minutes, pulling abreast occasionally, even chatting for a while to let him know the pace wasn’t hurting me. And I passed him.

After that I was skiing by myself. The hills just kept on coming, and my form began gradually to erode; by the halfway point I was laboring. I stopped for a drink of water and a ClifShot, and the people manning the table seemed concerned. “You’re shivering,” said one. “Are you hypothermic?” Before they could ask again, I skied off.

At some point along the course, a photographer crouched, taking pictures of everyone coming by so that he could try to sell them at the banquet that night. Through his lens, I was just one more tired-looking guy stuck somewhere in the middle of an unimportant race. And yet for me it was an epic. I crouched down in my tuck and let my muscles recover for a few minutes as the trail tilted downhill. Then came a long flat. Finally, at about 40 kilometers, the trail turned back on itself, and for about 500 yards you could see the skiers right behind you. Oh, God—one had a brown backpack, the same fellow I’d passed nearly two hours before, now right on my tail, maybe 40 seconds behind. Worse, my limbs were slowing down—I couldn’t muster more than a sluggish kick. I could feel myself about to give up, about to be passed, about to turn normal.

And then I didn’t. I made it up one hill and coasted down the other side; after that, though I was shaky and absolutely drained, I managed to go hard. Not fast. But fast enough, because I was still passing people. Fast enough, because every time I looked over my shoulder, the tracks were clear. Eventually there was a sign by the trail and it said: “Finish 1,000 Meters.” Did a thousand meters mean a kilometer? Ten kilometers? My hypoxic brain fuzzed the question around until suddenly the trail spit out onto an open field, and the finish was only a few hundred good old English yards away. I sprinted, I fell across the line, someone picked me up and wrapped a wool blanket around me. They said I’d come in second in my wave.

MY FATHER’S RACE finished on March 3. Though his sickness had lasted barely six months, half the impossibly short “long-term average survival” the doctors had given us at the start, he had endured. He’d kept going.

I had spent a year thinking about endurance. Trying to understand it as a function of physiology, of lactic acid and capillary networks. Trying to understand it as the ability to fight through the drama of pain. But now I understood it, too, as a kind of elegance, a lightness that could come only from such deep comfort with yourself that you began to forget about yourself. Something no heart monitor would ever measure.

Dad died in time to let me go to Norway for the Birkebeiner. Once I’d thought that this would be the epic end of my saga, but now I knew that whatever epiphanies I’d been allotted had come at the edge of his sickbed. Now there was just the pleasure of enduring in a great crowd of others doing the same—old men, some of them 80 and 85, a little stiff in their Lycra, but still elegant. They’d been skiing these hills 50 years ago, tracking down Allied airdrops in the woods, and they did so still, for the sheer joy of it.

The course was brutal as advertised, and I was in no danger of letting loose another epic performance. But never mind. I went deep inside, kept track of my weakening calves and my tightening chest, measured my resources against the distance left to go. And it all came out just fine—a little over four hours of hard skiing, ending with a series of sharp downhills into the Olympic stadium filled with brass bands and cheering crowds. I finished just above the middle of my age group, which I declared a great victory, considering they were all Norwegians. But I took my conquest as quietly as everyone else—there was no whooping or hollering on the bus to the showers, just satisfied and tired smiles. The year was over, and it was time for a smoked salmon pizza and a bottle of Ringnes and some Tiger Balm to rub on my aching thighs.

The next morning dawned clear and cold, and Sue and Sophie and I went for another ski. And for the first time in along time, it meant nothing at all.

Longtime contributor Bill McKibben is the author of Hope, Human and Wild, among other books. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, which will be published next month by Simon & Schuster.

Do you like it rough? Easy? Hard? Soft? However you choose to hit the trail, you’ll find a soul mate among the woodsy habitués who dispense their wisdom in the following pages—from the long-distance trekker and the devotee of amphibious excursions to the headstrong guy who enjoys getting lost and the gung-ho guru of fast-packing. Not to mention the backcountry hedonist with the luxury jones. So pick your style, bushwhacker—and let’s get it on.

Go Long, Go Deep
The Floating World
Get Real Gone
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Are We Not Men?
It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Salmon on Toast Points

But soon enough your brain starts to run out of gas—opinions, ideas, plans start to float away. Maybe once upon a time life was so simple that this process only took a few hours: wander in fields, write sonnet, come home, take bath. But now a day trip does more for your muscles than your mind. It’s hard to leave it all behind when it all is used to tagging along with you wherever you go.

When you do really get away, though, strangeness can happen. I remember hiking for a week by myself, easy trail- walking in the Adirondacks where I live. One rainy morning, I woke up, my mind still, didn’t bother to get dressed, and just began to wander down the trail. It was as if I gave off no vibrations at all. An owl stayed perched on a branch as I walked two feet beneath him; a deer stayed on the trail, shifting her weight to let me pass; a mother merganser paraded her young inches from where I lay naked on a rock. Late in the day I saw people coming my way_—a party of four, perfectly pleasant-looking backpackers chattering their way down the trail. I’d already yanked my clothes on, but I crouched behind a fallen hemlock and hid till they were gone; I didn’t want the spell to break.

Take as much food as you can carry, but no cell phone. And no book that isn’t illustrated with pictures of the local birds or wildflowers. You can chew information all the rest of your days—the idea here is to get a little bored. Does that prospect unnerve you? It shouldn’t; it’s not like going on an airplane without a book. There’s plenty of stuff out there to read, written in what John Muir called “the great alphabet of nature.” But you have to slow down enough to see it.

One trick is to bushwhack whenever possible (and ethical). You can keep your eyes fixed as firmly on a muddy trail as you can on a four-lane highway, and if you do, your mind will drift just as quickly. When you’re off the trail, finding your way, you’re always looking. The contours of the land, the game trails, the drainages—they catch your attention, fill your head.

Sometimes, if everything’s going well, even movement starts to seem unnecessary. I remember a week I spent on the top of a mountain near my home, when I hiked no more than two or three miles from camp on any given day. I’d just head out along some ridge until I found a patch of sunshine and then sit down, or until I found a patch of berries and then fill my baseball cap. Here are the things I noticed: Night takes a long time to fall—hours, from the sun low in the sky through the pink glow to the darkening blue to the first star. Also, a mountaintop has a sufficient number of rocks and trees, needing neither more nor less to be complete. One day I lay on my stomach on a little promontory and watched a black bear pick berries on the same slope I’d browsed the day before. He moved at about the same leisurely and unconcerned pace. Like me, he had the luxury of a predatorless existence, at least until hunting season. His only work was to fill himself with calories before winter; mine was to fill myself with silence before I returned home.

If you’re lucky, nothing dramatic will happen. The days will fade into one another. That way, you’ll know it wasn’t fording the raging river, or facing down the grizzly, or surviving the thunderstorm that left you a little changed. It was just the quiet, the chance to use senses other than the info-eye or the info-ear. Which leads, of course, to the main danger of going long and deep. You might not be able to find your way back to quite the spot where you began.

PHILOSOPHY OF CAMPING 101: “People too often hike to a beautiful natural area, pitch their tent, crawl inside, zip the door, and shut out the world. This is camping? I prefer what I like to call ‘stealth camping’—wander a mile or two beyond the crowded campground, establish a low-profile campsite, and sleep under a tarp. If a deer wanders past, you see it. You stay connected to nature.”
—RAY JARDINE, AUTHOR OF BEYOND BACKPACKING

Bill McKibben’s book on cross-country ski racing, Long Distance: Notes on a Year of Living Strenuously, is due out this fall from Simon & Schuster.

An hour later, my peaceful reverie was shattered when Carl stretched his 6-foot-3 frame out of the tent and broke into booming fits of laughter, waking the entire camp. “Why, Stephanie,” he bellowed, “is that a nightgown you’re wearing?” As a matter of fact, it was—my favorite full-length, flowered flannel nightie. The other kids could tease me till I cried, but as far as I was concerned, frilly sleeping apparel was fair game on a canoe trip.

Actually, even the kitchen sink is fair game if it fits in the boat and can be schlepped across a portage. I’ve seen folks lug sirloin-packed coolers and Samsonite-size tackle boxes through the wilderness. But no longer needing my security nightgown, I now stuff my Duluth Pack with only the bare necessities: an extra pair of shoes, two pair of wool socks, a stocking cap, a Hacky Sack, polypropylene long underwear, two T-shirts, a paperback novel, a pair of nylon shorts, a swimsuit, Carhartt work pants, rain gear, a sleeping bag, a headlamp, a first-aid kit, a bee-sting allergy kit, a Bible, and at least one roll of toilet paper.

But to reduce the joys of canoe-camping to the material goods you can stash between the gunwales is to discount the mesmerizing rhythm of a paddle dipping into glassy waters, the shivery call of a loon as it surfaces across the lake, and the glorious self-sufficiency of catching and eating your own walleye. Even the most terrifying episodes bring about a certain thank-God-I-didn’t-kick-the-bucket kind of happiness, like the time in the middle of Lake Agnes when every curly hair on my head stood on end, rising in staticky salute to an incoming thunderstorm.

What really elevates canoe-camping and other forms of amphibious exploration (kayak touring is no less wondrous) to the higher echelons of wilderness experience is this: It takes a partner to help muscle the craft and carry the load. I’ve guided canoe trips in Minnesota and Ontario, and my paddling partners have included Beastie, a frazzle-haired Outward Bound junkie who combed his beard with a dinner fork; Kelayna, a sassy 12-year-old who couldn’t swim a stroke but could bake a Dutch-oven chocolate cake to rival Betty Crocker’s; and Maren, a 95-pound wisp who I once saw portage a canoefor eight miles. No matter what our differences were in the real world, we still managed to create our own peaceable kingdom, a self-propelling yin to each other’s yang.

On some days, however, when the weather turns hypothermic or super-size mosquitoes zoom in for the kill, the dark side of even the most symbiotic paddling partnership can reveal itself. Such was the case when Kelayna the cake-baker decided she was homesick, tired, and dying of malaria. Her proposal: to tough it out alone at the campsite while I paddled the four days, 16 lakes, and 15 portages to call for a rescue party at the nearest phone. With bodily force and strategic cajoling—namely, the false promise of a 7-Eleven Big Gulp just a few portages away—I managed to coax her back into the boat.

Chances are you won’t be held captive with strangers on your next paddling venture, but even relationships with siblings, spouses, parents, and friends take on a new light after a few days on the water. You discover, for example, that your brother, once a head-banger, now has an affinity for Yo-Yo Ma. Or that your mother once was a Girl Scout archery champion. Or that your husband can spend hours on end picking blueberries. Such insights are often as fleeting as wispy clouds, disappearing the moment you strap the boat on the roof rack and head back to civilization. The memories that linger, though, are of the soul-searching debates—and jokes—over the Big Questions, like, does God really exist? Or, more important, who lit the firecracker under Dad’s sleeping pad back in ’76?

It wasn’t me. I was out fishing in my flannel nightie.

“Outdoor Research makes women’s clothing with a pee system and the zipper opens wide enough so that you can do more than that. Title Nine Sports makes a zip-open bra, for easy access. A Lush oil-filled massage bar for him. And get a tent that gives you a better morning glow than green. You don’t want your partner to wake up and think they just slept with the Loch Ness monster.”
—LUANN COLOMBO, AUTHOR OF HOW TO HAVE SEX IN THE WOODS

Stephanie Gregory writes The Wild File for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.

My first reaction is to envy the exciting perils of these men in T-shirts. Then I read something in the furrowed brows of the TV anchors: the chilling truth that newsworthy outdoorsfolk rarely make it back to check their Nielsens.

OK, you can die out there. Usually, though, misplacing yourself is neither so public nor so tragic. I, for one, get lost on a regular basis. Yet I always manage to find my way out before friends and family can agree which of my organs to donate and which to keep for themselves. Being prepared for getting lost is a skill like any other. The trick is to keep a cool head. The rational mind knows that fat reserves can keep you alive in the wild for weeks. Even better, the rational mind can think your butt back to safety.

The most obvious strategy is to turn back the way you came. My brother tells a story of being lost with his wife in Southern California’s Los Padres National Forest. Relying on an outdated guidebook, they set off on a Saturday morning to spend the weekend hiking a long loop—not knowing that the Forest Service stopped maintaining the trail in the late eighties. They struggled for a day and a half through a maddening overgrowth of chaparral, manzanita, and poison oak before totally losing the trail in a place jovially known as the Devil’s Potrero, or “pasture.” They turned back late Sunday, but not in time to avoid an unplanned night in the woods. On Monday, when my sister-in-law didn’t show up for work, concerned coworkers asked the Highway Patrol to check accident records for any sign of the missing couple. Their humiliating retreat didn’t end until late that night, when they hitched a ride with a random band of beekeepers dressed, as my brother said, “all in white, like angels.”

How painful is it to retrace your path when you planned a loop? Well, five years after this misadventure, my brother still rants at length about Forest Service budget cuts and their effect on trail maintenance. He forgets to mention that, while they were lost in the Los Padres, he and his wife conceived their first child.

For most of us, getting lost is little more than an inconvenience. The 21st century, however, has declared a holy war on inconvenience. With cell phones and GPS receivers, we can keep ourselves present and accounted for at all times. What a bunch of weenies we are. If you do get lost, take the opportunity to tap into the better human qualities, i.e. our powers of deduction and animalistic instinct for self-preservation. Bring water, food, and an extra layer of clothes. Don’t just look for landmarks and terrain features, take their measure, too. If a pretty, snowy mountain slope is tilted steeply and bereft of trees, it’s an avalanche zone. Hiking amongst big, dead trees on a windy day is wilderness Jenga. So think, dammit, think.

A few years ago I took a solo tour of the Tatoosh Range in Rainier National Park. I ambled aimlessly, and tangled myself in thick underbrush on the wrong side of a ridge. The skies wept and my fingers grew numb. It seemed I had two choices: to brainstorm my way out or to fashion a nice deathbed pillow from D.B. Cooper’s wormy skull. I figured that parallel valleys all drained to the same place, so I tramped downstream along a creek until it emptied into a river adjacent to an unfamiliar trail. My sense of direction urged me to go right, and eventually I made a grotesque circle back to my original trailhead.

If you have the good sense to get lost in the daytime, use the sun. Even overcast skies glow a little brighter in one direction. Consider it east or west, depending on the time of day. Factor in the time of year, also—that brighter shade of pale in the sky will trend southward around the winter solstice and northward in June and July. The sun is the only star I trust. Some say you can navigate by the south-pointing triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair, but it’s hard enough to find one star, let alone three.

The way I see it, getting lost provides unexpected relief from the sometimes tedious “eat-recreate-eat-sleep” routine of a camping trip. Veer off-trail and you might stumble upon a bulbous porcini, a 500-year-old Incan mummy, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You camp in order to reconnect with the wild, right? So go ahead and ramble. Remember, the beaten path, by its very nature, is beat.

“Your circadian rhythm becomes skewed, personal hygiene is a challenge, and after a week anybody will start to miss the sun and wide open spaces.”
—PAT KAMBESIS, CAVE PHOTOGRAPHER, CODISCOVERER OF THE CHANDELIER BALLROOM IN NEW MEXICO’S LECHUGUILLA CAVE

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø correspondent Rob Story profiled the ski-filmmeisters of Teton Gravity Research in the November 1999 issue.

One snowy morning last spring, Graham let me tag along on a hike to one of the explorer’s campsites, a spot near Carson Pass he’d recently discovered. As walks in the woods go, it was both geographically and intellectually rigorous, with Graham delivering a lecture on the technological advances that have eased the burdens of land navigation. To emphasize his point, he explained that Frémont’s duties as leader of a U.S. government–sponsored survey expedition included having to call a halt at midday and get up at odd hours of the night, weather permitting, to futz with a bunch of sextants, chronometers, thermometers, telescopes, astronomical tables, and complex mathematical formulae, and thus determine the latitude, longitude, and altitude of his exploring party.

Fast-forward a century and a half. As we snowshoed up a spur ridge covered in aspens and lodgepole pines, Graham suddenly stopped, reached into his parka pocket, and extracted his cell phone–size Magellan 315 Global Positioning System receiver.

“What if Frémont had had this?” he barked. Well, maybe his men wouldn’t have had to eat their boots. Alas, this was not the answer Graham was looking for.

“He wouldn’t have had to get up in the middle of the night, waiting to fix one of the Jovan moons,” he said. “At any moment of the day or night he would’ve known where he was.”

Then he punched a button. In seconds, our position materialized on the tiny screen: Latitude 38Å¡ 41′ 56″ N; Longitude 119Å¡ 57′ 35″ W; Altitude 7,776 feet. So much for Jovan moons.

IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE

The GPS relies on a constellation of 24 orbiting satellites that the United States Department of Defense began launching in 1978 to meet its own navigational needs, and to keep tabs on military movements during the Cold War. Using atomic clocks accurate to within one second every 70,000 years, each satellite continuously broadcasts the time and its position. A GPS receiver, pulling in signals from three or more satellites simultaneously, then measures how long it takes them to arrive, calculates the distance to each orbiting body, and, using simple geometry, produces a fix on your position.

First made available to the public in the 1980s, GPS technology nowadays is exploited by everybody from bush pilots to mountaineers to your Uncle Milt the bass fisherman. Instead of having to lug around a load of obscure, weighty, and hard-to-figure-out navigational equipment (would you know where to buy a sextant these days?), now you can push a button or two on your GPS receiver and, just like that, you’re on the map. Most models can store at least 200 “waypoints,” readings on locations you either want to go to or have been to already. If you haven’t been there, keystroke the coordinates and your GPS will help you find the spot; if you’re already there, just press a button to bookmark the position. By entering a series of waypoints, you can create a route and store the whole thing for later use.

In his hunt for Frémont’s trail, Graham typically studies a topographical map to suss out the coordinates of a particular Sierra locale he wants to visit, and then keys them in to his GPS. Using the same map, he finds a road that takes him within striking distance, parks, and switches on his GPS to take a reading on his location. At this point the instrument can tell him exactly how far his target is and in what direction. Now it’s just a matter of using a compass to hike to the site. That’s right—a compass. As the amateur cartographer is quick to point out, while GPS would have greatly reduced Frémont’s logistical burdens, it would not have solved the mess he got himself into. “Since Frémont didn’t have a decent map of the Sierra to use GPS by, the system would have told him where he was, but not where he had to go—or anything about terrain,” Graham says. “The Sierra still would have been terra incognita for him.”

JUST DON’T FORGET THE MAP

When it comes to terra incognita, Graham knows what he’s talking about. Because merely pinpointing your position won’t get you anywhere, you need to own traditional orienteering skills along with that fancy GPS. To fully exploit the data it provides, you should know how to use a topographical map, a compass, and a plotting scale—a rulerlike tool calibrated to the same scale and coordinate system as your map.

And then there’s the small matter of UTM. All GPS receivers provide traditional latitude-longitude readings but, increasingly, many also utilize the newer Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system. Universal Transverse whaaaa, you ask? Good question. Lines of longitude and latitude superimposed on the earth’s spherical surface result in inconstant distance factors, meaning a degree of longitude at the equator is about 69 miles long, whereas it’s about 49 miles long at Minneapolis, on the 45th parallel. By “flattening” the earth’s nonpolar regions into a rectangle and dividing them into 60 zones, UTM reduces those inconsistencies.

Both systems work, it’s just a matter of personal preference. In Graham’s case, he sticks with traditional latitude-longitude readings. “Most of the time, I’m working with 19th-century maps and Frémont’s journals, which don’t use UTM,” he says. For the rest of you modern-day frontiersmen out there, now may be the time to get acquainted with both systems, lest you find yourself using your shiny new GPS device as a projectile to fend off vultures.

If most of this sounds like a techno-geek soliloquy left out of the latest Star Trek flick, here are a couple of pre-Computer Age caveats. First, although GPS receivers feature tiny video screens that display preprogrammed map grids with various zoom options, those images don’t compare in detail and scope with traditional paper topo maps—so definitely use both. Second, while GPS offers bankable latitude and longitude coordinates, its altitude readings are often unreliable (see “Going Up?”, a review of altimeters, page 130).

Ultimately, Graham is pretty sure he would have found the Frémont campsite using the old maps-and-legends method, but GPS made success a speedy certainty. “Without GPS,” he says, “even after getting close to the site, it would have been hours of wandering here and there.” Which is fine if you’re basking in nature’s splendors, but not so good if your men are starting to gaze longingly at your footwear.

Tom Chaffin teaches U.S. history at Emory University and is currently working on a biography of John C. Frémont.

We’d been in such a hurry to get off work, get out of town and get into the mountains that it was only when we finally decided to whip up some breakfast that we discovered things were missing. I’d apparently left my stuff sack of extra clothes in the car—gone were my long pants, fleece vest, extra socks, and my baseball cap. Mike dumped his pack and did inventory. Somehow he had forgotten his cup, the extra bottles of stove fuel, his windpants, and worst of all, one of the food bags.

“Guess we’ll just go without,” said Mike, grinning goofily.

And we did, hiking the Medicine Bow Range from Elk Mountain in Wyoming to the Rawahs in Colorado. I wore what little I had, put on my windbreaker when it got cold, and wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders in the evening. We saved fuel and rationed the food; Mike used the pot as his cup. None of this caused hardship. On the contrary, our packs were lighter and thus so were our hearts.

On the next trip, loading up in the parking lot, Mike grabbed my sack of spare clothes and threw it back into the car. “Cut it!”

“Then you gotta cut everything you forgot last time.”

“Already did,” he said.

Not to be outdone, I pulled the stove bag out of his pack and tossed it back into the car.

“Excellent, man, excellent,” crooned Mike.

We did that trip eating breakfast and lunch cold and building the tiniest of campfires to cook dinner. It was a spartan trek. Unburdened by dead weight, we moved quickly and smoothly through the mountains, covering more country more easily than we had ever done before.

Mike and I decided to call our game “the big cut.” Pushing further, we added variations. On any adventure, before leaving the parking lot (or the airport), each of us was empowered to remove one item from the other guy’s pack. Our trips became ultralean and efficient. For every pound of gear we cut from our packs we were rewarded with an extra mile on the trail. More for less. More of the wilderness in exchange for less equipment. Instead of sweating underneath monstrous loads, moving as slowly and ponderously as beasts of burden, we cruised the trail like coyotes, heads up, alert, eyes on the horizon.

Here’s the real trick to traveling light: Scrutinize every piece of gear. Why take a three-pound, multi-zippered, multi-pocketed, expedition jacket when an eight-ounce windbreaker is sufficient? Why take a heavy full-length air mattress when, with the right campsite selection, an eight-ounce foam pad is enough? Why carry a ten-pound tent “tested on Everest” when, if the point is to be outside, a four-pound tent is terrific? Why take a bulky sweater when a featherweight down vest is adequate? Why carry extra food when you’ll never eat it? Why carry extra water when you can move from stream to stream and purify what you need? And now that you’re carrying half the weight, why use a seven-pound backpack when a three-pound pack is fine?

Why? Because it goes against everything we’ve learned to crave. Ours is a maximalist culture—the bigger the better. Minimalism is discouraged, even denigrated—but take a minute and think about the last time you were on the trail. A fat, plush Cadillac may be fine for the highway, a big-screen TV just the thing for home theater thrills, but carrying a heavy backpack is backbreaking work. It crushes the body, flattens the spirit, and makes about as much sense as carrying a picnic table when you would be just as happy sitting on the grass.

In the end, the decision to go light and fast is an existential one. To enter the wilderness is to dispossess ourselves of the burden of possessions, to slip smooth and clean as Houdini from the thousand invisible chains of stuff. Once inside, we become, however briefly, part of the wild—lithe, lighthearted and free, loping across the landscape.

So next time you’re getting ready to head out, identify every single thing you doubt you’ll really need. Then forget it.

“The more our camping style depends on the paraphernalia of the world we are leaving behind, the more we dwell in contradictions.”
—IAN BAKER, BUDDHIST SCHOLAR AND EXPEDITION LEADER

“It’s really seductive to take along complicated-looking gear, but when it comes down to it, I think you’re better off without that battery-operated egg beater.

Mark Jenkins is The Hard Way columnist for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.

Latimer works with peevish focus, but then suddenly she’s ready, shouldering an enormous external frame pack. A smile slices her cheeky apricot-colored face and she dances onto the trail. “I love it!” she yells. “God, I love it!” What she loves, among other things, is weight on her back. “I’m the reincarnation of a mule,” she says.

She also adores leading pilgrims into the Sierras with a load of grande luxe comestibles. Latimer occupies a singular position in the outdoors: For 22 years she has pushed back the limits of backcountry deliciousness through her Berkeley-based guiding company , which specializes in all-women trips. But she doesn’t mind taking me and another Y-chromosomer on this outing, a recapitulation of her standard Whitney hike. We’re taking a roundabout, scenery-maximized backside approach to the top of the mountain. We’ll cover about 42 miles, with one goof-around day at a particularly gorgeous campsite. Whitney’s role, as Latimer explains it, is to provide incentive as well as aesthetics. “I think it’s good to have a goal,” she says. But the goal’s goal is sybaritic delight. And I’m getting hungry.

OK, I am un-wowed by the thai tom yum soup on our first night in the backcountry. The problem is not the soup but psychic displacement. I don’t know where I am yet and compare Latimer’s tom yum to restaurant fare. But then, after a few day’s hiking, Latimer flips me and everybody else to the 33rd level of gustatory bliss with her salmon on toast points.

It doesn’t hurt that the campsite is as good as the hors d’oeuvres. We’re in a 9,600-foot valley in a copse of pines between a trout stream and a glistening meadow. The group stands around the maestra, who kneels in pine duff, browning slices of bread in a banged-up frying pan over an itty-bitty camp stove. She cuts the toast into dainty triangles, smears on the salmon and offers them around. The first bite is oral Fantasia. The smoked fish swims to heaven while Holsteins sing the cream-cheese chorus and herbs and minced green onion go off like fireworks. The toast—pain grille, really—makes the whole business too too. The contradiction between here-and-now and what we’re eating opens a toothsome rent in reality. Latimer seems to be having even more fun than we are. “I like the element of surprise, of turning people on,” she says. “Cooks are egoists. They love the praise they get.”

Latimer’s ego can dine hugely on us, who praise her nonstop. Most of our meals are straight out of her 1991 book, Wilderness Cuisine, which is a woods-foodie standard. She doesn’t mind sharing unpublished recipes, which seem too simple to be such knockouts. The salmon spread, for instance, is just cream cheese stirred up with a piece of vacuum-packed fish and a bit of dill and onion. Anybody could do it, except, of course, most of us wouldn’t bother, much less follow it with a romaine salad perfectly dressed with rice-wine vinegar (Latimer tosses ours in a plastic grocery sack patched with duct tape), and then pesto over angel hair and fresh-baked brownies.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, who mapped out every camera shot on storyboards ahead of time, Latimer mentally rehearses each of her evening meals. “I have only a limited number of pots and stuff,” she says. “I start planning my dinner out in my head. Exactly, step by step, what I’m going to do.” Latimer has devised a battery of shortcuts and weight-saving gadgetry. She travels sans water filter, killing microbes with tincture of iodine (ten drops per liter of water) then killing off the medicine flavor with powdered ascorbic acid. The Latimer-signature backpackers’ cupboard/dish drainer consists of a 3 by 4-foot piece of nylon window screen folded in half and pinned to a line strung horizontally between two trees. Dishes dry quickly in it, and they’re easy to keep track of. She also carries a smaller piece of screen which multitasks as a colander, salad spinner, and scouring pad.

During our layover day, Latimer cranks the backwoods-comfort meter up to ten. She leads her group to a nearby waterfall, where she proffers chevre and sun-dried tomatoes. The high point, from her end, is finding wild watercress to garnish the plate just so. “I’m having fun now!” she enthuses. But she also finds time to loll with her back against a tree. Just sitting in the sun, Latimer fosters an illusion that follows her through the trip: Somewhere, just out of sight, she has her own secret resort hotel, because she looks too good to be camping. She sports the same synthetic fuzz and techno-cloth as the rest of us, but she wears it with more flair and a few extras—scarf, silver earrings, lipstick. Grooming, she says, is part of the disciplined attention to one’s own needs that can mean survival. “Where are you going to draw the line, if you let yourself go?” she demands. “Are you going to let yourself get cold? Is it going to be no lipstick? I mean, where’s the line?”

I can’t imagine what the guy-equivalent of lipstick might be, but I’m with her—it’s treacherous to cross the slob line. And I can’t help but notice how the survival/fashion gear flatters her. Latimer is good to sit next to; brown-eyed, with an arsenal of smiles and a low, precise voice with an accentless twang. If a puma had her own radio show, she’d sound like Latimer. Rrrrrow. At 55, she doesn’t play tricks with artificial youth. She’s just an all-American babe with crow’s-feet and decades of windburn. She’s also a fifth-generation daughter of the Sierra foothills, raised in Placerville, California, a couple of hundred miles northwest of where we sit. Childhood backpacking trips with her father taught Latimer that camping is eating. “We had biscuits and eggs and salad with Thousand Island dressing. And bacon. And trout, golden trout,” she rhapsodizes. Her food is a contemporized throwback. It’s also a protest against what she calls “Sierra Club nerds” who make camping into something anal-compulsive and meager. Ultralight fetishism particularly gets on her nerves. Says Latimer, sounding as if she’d like to biff it out with a nerd right now, “There are plenty of hard-core people who carry heavy packs.”

Latimer confides something about mount whitney: it might be the tallest peak in the Lower 48, but it’s not the apogee of our trip. “The goal is the garbage-bag bath,” she says. There’s no way to know if she’s right during the bath itself, because it happens three days before we summit. But the post-trip view bears her out. Whitney is this great big, you know, mountain. There’s nothing all that surprising up there—at least not on the scale of a packable solar-heated spa.

Latimer’s recipe:

Spread a ground cloth 300 feet from a water source where the sun can shine unobstructed for at least four hours. Set out two extra-large black garbage bags and fill with six gallons of water apiece. (Tie the bags loosely shut while filling to prevent spills.) Close the bags and leave the sun to do its work. When the bags are warm, it’s bath time. Use one bag to wash, the other to rinse.

The water in my bag is more tepid than hot, but things start to get miraculous when I sit in it, pull the plastic up to chest level, and remember backcountry baths past. Where are the goose bumps, the screaming from ice-water shock? How come I don’t want to run to the sleeping bag and go into fetal position? The bath is so not-horrible that there’s time to sink into it, to splash and look around at the meadow, the trees on the far side, the mountains over the trees. In five minutes the garbage bag is kicking the ass of every outdoor spa in the West. Here, in a sack of Sierra bathwater, is the entire Camping-with-Carole-Latimer experience: It could be miserable, except she’s figured out a way to make it more like a week at Canyon Ranch.

Speaking of which, isn’t this sushi night?   

“People don’t realize how much dead space there is in a pack. You learn to stuff the pots with food and squirrel away the cheese.”
—MARK HARVEY, AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL WILDERNESS GUIDE

“I did start to consume a bit of Mountain Dew towards the end. Other than that, I guess I’m naturally full of energy. Fourteen hours a day was not that hard.”

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø correspondent Mike Steere profiled GoLite, an ultralight camping-gear startup, in the December 1999 issue.