Mike Moe’s eldest son came by the house yesterday. He was just out of the psych ward, after serving time in prison. He looked the same—lean, strong, with a long red beard and a mess of dreads. Behind the hair he was quick to smile, like his dad had been. I had a box of outdoor books I’d saved for him, but he said he’d done so much reading in jail that he was taking a hiatus to get his farsightedness back, a metaphor he did not recognize.

His name is Justin, and the last time I’d seen him was in 2015, when he and I and his younger brother, Kevin, went backcountry skiing in the Snowy Range of southern Wyoming. This was before their sister, Carlie, died. At that time, all three of the Moe children—whose ages ranged from 21 to 24—were homeless. Carlie was living in a van in California, Justin had been aimlessly hitchhiking across the West, and Kevin’s house was a snow cave.

Kevin had dug his cave where his dad and I used to dig ours, at 10,000 feet on the eastern end of Wyoming’s Swastika Lake. All winter long at this spot, snow blasts across blue ice into a big stand of lodgepole pines. The trees slow the velocity of the snow, which settles on the leeward side of the trunks, forming drifts 20 feet deep. Kevin had decorated his cave with battery-powered Christmas lights. On the ice platform that served as a bed, he was using the same heavy down sleeping bag his dad had used when we went to Denali together in 1980.

During my backcountry trip with Kevin and Justin, they skied with total abandon and little technique. They would drop down through the trees, legs spread wide, whooping at the top of their lungs. Then, lacking the ability to turn on their skinny cross-country gear, they would inevitably face-plant. Laughing loudly, with snow in their beards, they got back on the boards and kept plowing downhill.

When the terrain eased into rolling hills, we skied in single file through widely spaced pines, and I asked them about their plans. Kevin had already circumnavigated all the islands of Hawaii by sea kayak, solo. Now he wanted to go to Alaska. He played bagpipes and thought he could busk his way up there and back. Justin didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do.

Over the next few years, Kevin actually got to Alaska with his bagpipes, and then he wrote a nonfiction book about the adventure. He became an itinerant carpenter and helped build a shop in my backyard in Laramie. He loved looking at my old slides of his dad.

Justin wandered back to California, became ever more mixed up, took a lot of acid. He was tripping nonstop. One night he heard voices in his head telling him his girlfriend was serving the devil and he tried to stab her, which earned him a sentence of two and a half years for assault with a deadly weapon. He spent some of it in jail, some of it in prison, and some of it in the psych ward.

When he came over yesterday, we hung out in the backyard. I suggested he could help me build a fence, and he seemed interested. I tried to ask him about prison, but he had trouble expressing himself.

“Being in a cell, man. No sunlight, no sky,” he said, throwing his head back and staring directly into the sun. With his eyes closed and the dreads out of his face, he looked ­exactly like Mike.

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Ho and Hsi were the court astrologers for Chinese emperor Chung K’ang in 2136 B.C. Throughout history, Chinese rulers—who were sometimes paranoid megalomaniacs—used astronomical divination to justify their often eccentric decisions, and a total solar eclipse was believed to be a bad omen.

According to legend, Ho and Hsi failed to predict the eclipse that occurred on October 22—4,156 years ago­­­­—and both were beheaded. It still seems like a bum rap: no one would be able to predict the precise timing of a solar eclipse, within a few minutes, until 1715.

Luckily, my friend Large and I, despite getting almost everything wrong about the eclipse in South America last summer, only lost our heads metaphorically.

Our goal was to be the first confirmed humans to witness a total solar eclipse from a peak above 20,000 feet. This half-baked scheme came to me while watching the 2017 eclipse from inside the zone of totality—specifically, from a prairie bluff in central Wyoming. The strangeness of seeing the world go black in the middle of the day was so provocative, so entrancing, that it made me wonder: What would it be like to experience an eclipse from the summit of a high peak?

Research indicated that the 2019 total solar eclipse would be fully visible from a 20,548-foot Argentinean peak called Majadita, on July 2 at 5:40 P.M. A relatively unknown knob along the spine of the Andes, Majadita rises at Argentina’s border with Chile, 155 miles north of Aconcagua, which at 22,831 feet is the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. First climbed in 1965, Majadita has seen only a handful of ascents since.

I cross-checked NASA’s eclipse logs with the American and British alpine journals and found no mention of anyone being at high altitude during an eclipse. Obviously, countless humans living in elevated places—the Himalayas, the Karakorum, the Andes—were witness to total solar eclipses over the past few thousand years, but above 20,000 feet? It’s damn cold and barren up there; without down parkas and double boots, you freeze to death. The likelihood seemed small.

Putting my plan in motion, I called Matt “Large” Hebard, a native of eastern Wisconsin who now lives in suburban Denver and is always dying to get after it, whatever it happens to be. Large is physically large—nearly six feet, 200 pounds of solid muscle—but he earned his nickname mainly because he’s large of spirit. When he graduated from high school in 1995, pudgy, neglected, and poor, he went directly to work in a toilet-seat factory. He stayed there two years before deciding college wasn’t the worst idea. He got a degree, moved to the Rockies, got another degree, then another, and now runs a forest preschool. (There are no classrooms; kids are outside the whole time.) Along the way, he rode bikes hard or climbed mountains fast nearly every weekend for two decades.

“Large!” I shouted into the phone. “Want to do an expedition to the Andes?”

“I’m in,” he said, without a split second of hesitation. “I’ll bring the cheese.”

He didn’t even know which mountain we were going to. What’s more, his wife, Cherie, was pregnant. But the trip as I described it seemed simple and hard to resist: fly to Chile, catch a ride to the base of Majadita, make camp, climb the thing, put on protective eyewear, and wait for the big event.

“When we going?” he asked.

I gave him the dates.

“I’ll get tickets.”

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Déjà vu. A herd of humans waiting in line for their 15 minutes of fame on top of the world—their flesh beginning to freeze, strength waning, oxygen running out. As in years prior, the grimly unlucky and the overly egotistical will perish; their bodies, frozen solid as monuments, left on the mountain as gruesome harbingers of next year’s mistakes.

Eleven people died on Everest this spring. Not from avalanches or earthquakes or even unexpected snowstorms, but rather, in some part, from the consequences of overcrowding. Nine of the eleven climbers died on the way down, after summiting. Why? Although each death was a unique and tragic case, many of the victims died from altitude sickness, a condition that easily could have been related to spending an unacceptable amount of time in the Death Zone—between Camp IVĚýat 26,000 feet and the summit, above 29,000Ěýfeet. This slowdown was caused by a human traffic jam near the summit.

How many years will this senselessness continue? Everest today is the ugliest antithesis of good mountaineering. Driven by arrogance, ignorance, or avarice, bad judgment abounds and blame must fall on all Everest participants—the climbers, the guiding companies, and the NepaleseĚýgovernment.

I first went to Everest 33 years ago as a member of the 1986 U.S. North Face Everest Expedition. Back in the eighties, everyone who went was an experienced mountaineer. To get a spot on the team, I had to submit a lengthy climbing résumé. All of us had already summited another 8,000-meter peak; all of us had climbed hard rock or hard ice in Yosemite or South America or the Alps. With no porters and no Sherpas, we did everything ourselves. We humped loads, camp to camp, for weeks. We cooked for ourselves; we led every pitch ourselves. We spent 75 days on the North Face, never used oxygen, and didn’t summit. But we all came home, with all our fingers and toes.

In the decades that followed, I climbed all over the world, making first ascents from Afghanistan to the Arctic, Kham to the Congo. I returned to Everest in 2012 as a member of National Geographic’s 50th Anniversary Expedition. We took the standard Southeast Ridge route, as the first Americans had in 1963, and summited, but I didn’t feel good about it. In fact, I was both appalled and vaguely ashamed. With all the Sherpa support and bottles of oxygen and fixed lines, it wasn’t a fair fight.

It’s only gotten worse in the past seven years. Everest is clearly broken. Here are the ways to fix it.

Limit the Number of Permits

Judging by this year’s ghastly pictures of the conga line snaking up to the summit,Ěýit’s obvious that there are too many climbers going for the top at the same time. Why are they all going at once? There are a number of reasons, but the most salient is that they’re all using the same remarkably accurateĚýweather forecasts. Twenty years ago, forecasts on Everest were little more than Nostradamus-like prognostications, and teams decided to go for the summit when they were physically and mentally ready. This tended to spread out their attempts over several weeks. Now, through vast technological improvements, the windows of good weather—lower wind, higher temperatures, no precipitation, when the chances of reaching the summit are most probable—are forecast down to the hour.

Even so, there are still far too many people on Everest’s standard route, and a lot of the responsibility lies with Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation. For the 2019 pre-monsoon season—April, May, and June—the ministry issued a record 381 individual Everest climbing permits at $11,000 a pop. This brought in more than $4 million, which doesn’t appear to go to Everest or Sagarmartha National Park (where Everest is located). With all the support staff and Sherpa help, this put at least 750 people on the south side of Everest this year. This is beyond the carrying capacity of the mountain if we hope to maintain safety, not to mention an aesthetic mountaineering experience.

So the first and most fundamental way to reduce traffic jams, frostbite, and death on Everest is to radically reduce the number of permits. Put bluntly: the ministry should issue just 200 climbing permits a year, 100 for the pre-monsoon seasonĚýand 100 for the post-monsoon season, which happens in October and November.

“The post-monsoon season has been all but forgotten,” says veteran New Zealand mountain guide Lydia Bradey, who became the first women to climb Everest without oxygen in 1988. “On that trip I summited in October.” She’s right. Over the years, the process and infrastructure for climbing Everest with Sherpas has shifted to the spring season, but the post-monsoon season offers some of the finest weather. Days are shorterĚýand sometimes colder, but storms are less frequent.

There’s already a good precedent for limiting numbers at highly attractive adventure locations. The Colorado River, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, every year for nonguided boaters. Often people will wait years to get a permit. The Southeast Ridge Everest lottery would need to include guided and unguided teams, and the results for each climbing season should be announced at least 18 months in advance to give everyone time to prepare.

This obvious solution will be deeply unpopular with the guiding companies on Everest (less money), the NepaleseĚýgovernment (less money), and the Sherpas (less money). I can already hear them howling. But is Everest merely about money? If we want to restore the meaning of mountaineering on the planet’s highest peak, overall numbers have to be reduced.

Given that only 400 people attempt to climb Everest from the Nepal side every yearĚýbut almost 30,000 trekkers hike to Everest Base Camp every year, neither the Sherpas nor the tea houses nor the government would lose out that much if the number of Everest climbers was cut in half. Nepal’s government is sensitive aboutĚýits reputation, so international pressure could push it to limit permits.

Part two of reducing numbers would be for the ministry to reduce team size to a maximum of eight climbers. Since client climbers today are paired with one orĚýsometimes two Sherpas, this would ensure that every climber has adequate support.

Establish a Concessions System for Guiding

There are clearly guide services on Everest right now that should not be allowed to operate. They lack technical skills, sufficient support staff, and proper mountaineering and environmental ethics. The Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation must create an international board that vets all commercial guide services, giving licenses only to those that meet the highest standards of safety, professionalism, and client support.

Grand Teton National Park and Denali National Park, both coveted climbing destinations, use this kind of process to keep their mountains from becoming madhouses.

Require Complete Leave No Trace Practices

Parts of the Southeast Ridge route have become downright disgusting. At Camp II, at 21,000 feet,Ěýthere are hundreds of three-foot-high pyramids of frozen human feces. Climbers should be required to use wag bags and carry their own excrement off the mountain.

There are tents at every camp loaded with detritus that teams simply refuse to remove. There’s already a penalty for not carrying your trash off the mountain, but it isn’t enforced. Sherpas need to be paid well to remove all the legacy garbage from every camp. This would cause the price tag of an Everest expedition to go up, but so what? If you’re willing to pay 50 to 100 grand to have Sherpas hump all your heavy loads up the mountain, you should be willing to pay them to hump it all down.

Fix Lines Earlier in the Season

The Sagarmartha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), deploys a select group of SherpasĚýcalled the Ice DoctorsĚýtoĚýput the lines and ladders up through the Khumbu Icefall every spring. Twenty years ago, ropes to the summit were fixed by the end of April, but these days the ropes sometimes aren’t in place until the middle of May. This shortens the opportunities to summit by at least two weeks and contributes to overcrowding. If the ropes were ready by May 1, some climbers could take advantage of an early weather window.

Most important, the SPCC should place two fixed lines from Base Camp to the summit. Right now, on many parts of the Southeast Ridge route, there’s just one line, which is like having a one-lane bridge on an Interstate highway—someone always has to stop and wait to let the other go by. There should be an up line and a down line. Putting in these lines in both early spring and early fall will require twice the amount of rope and twice the amount of time for the Sherpas, so the expedition price tag would again go up. (See: So what?)

Licensed Guides Need to Do More

All guiding companies should require prospective Everest climbers to have solid mountaineering skills, which can only be obtained by climbing mountains. Prospective Everesters should be required to have climbed at least a dozen other big mountainsĚýand at least one 7,000-meter peak. When I mentioned this to Bradey, she upped that to at least one 8000-meter peak on your rĂ©sumĂ©. “This would completely change the makeup of Everest climbers,” she said.Ěý“They would be technically prepared and capable of moving faster. The Everest clients I’ve had who previously climbed an 8,000-meter peak were dialed. They knew what they were doing. There are clients on Everest today whoĚýdon’t even know how to put on their crampons, let alone walk in them.”

This experience requirement would be a boon to guiding companies and the NepaleseĚýgovernment alike—both of whom would rake in money for permitting and guiding ascents of peaks all over the country.

Everest Climbers Must Take Responsibility

Everest is the highest mountain on earth. Majestic, magnificent, malevolent. Every prospective Everest climber must ask themselfĚýif theyĚýdeserveĚýto climb Everest. Climbing Everest is a privilege, an honor, not a trophy. Do you have the depth of mountaineering experience necessary to attempt Everest? If not, you’re disrespectfully endangering the lives of others. Do you have the physical stamina to ascend Everest (how many stadium stairs have you been running and for how many months?) If not, you’re selfishly endangering the lives of others. Do you have the grit, what we used to call “intestinal fortitude,” to stick it out when the going gets nasty? If not, you’re unfairly endangering the lives of others.

“We live in a culture of blame,” Bradey says. “If something goes wrong, especially on Everest, everyone is always looking for someone else or something else to blame. But it’s mountaineering for God’s sake. Things go wrong. It’s part of the game. What ever happened to taking personal responsibility?! If you choose to climb Everest, you should take responsibility for yourself and your team.”

It’s the ethical and moral obligation of every mountaineer to stop and help a fellow mountaineer in trouble—no matter if it decreases one’s own chances for the summit. This is the immutable mandate of mountain climbing, the unbreakable bond of the rope. Human life is more important than any silly summit.

Bradey and I were attempting a new route on an unclimbed mountain in Tibet a few years back. We’d climbed up the east face, tunneled through a cornice on the north ridge, and suddenly found ourselves with overhanging ice walls ahead of us and a black storm approaching. We could see the summit. It was just right there. It would only take us a few more hours.

I looked at Bradey. She didn’t say a thing. She shook her helmeted and goggled head and stabbed her mitten downward. The storm struck an hour later, but we lived to climb another day.

“There is only one way to survive mountaineering,” Bradey says. “That is to know when to turn back.”

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“This is my last expedition.”

My wife, Sue Ibarra, was driving me to the small airport outside Laramie, Wyoming, as she had dozens of times before. It was dark, and the lights of the little prairie airstrip were shining like stars.

“You know how many times you’ve said that?” Sue’s long, dark hair was tied in a loose ponytail to one side. She laughed and wiped away a tear.

“Really,” I insisted. “I’m getting too old for this.”

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It was April 2005, and I was bound for , an obscure, 20,000-foot mountain in central China. Neither particularly hard nor notably high, it’s plenty dangerous—mainly because of the likelihood of avalanches. The peak had initially attracted me because it was unclimbed and because of its ele­gant humpback shape, resembling a white whale breaching the sky.

“I’m not sure how long I can keep this up,” I said.

“What?” Sue said. “Being who you are?”

There was nothing I could add that I hadn’t said too many times before. What do you say to your wife when you’re heading off on yet another expedition that might end in death, leaving her at home with two young daughters? Addi, 12 at the time, and Teal, nine, were used to dad “going on a trip.” Thankfully, Teal was not yet very time conscious, but Addi had started to realize that this was a euphemism. Sue, a stoic veteran of separation and long silences, was teaching her how not to worry. “We’ll write letters to Daddy,” she said.

The kids didn’t come to the airport. We tried that a few times and it was heartbreaking. I’d said my goodbyes the night before, so they could sleep on it. In the morning, Mom was there making French toast and Dad was gone. This is how it had been for most of our marriage.

“I’ll be back in just a month,” I told Sue. “Up and down and home.”

“I hope so. We’ll see.” She and I had done many expeditions together—in South America, Africa, Asia. She knew how fucked-up things could get.

It was twilight at the airport, the sky the color of a bruised peach. We hauled out two heavy duffels and embraced, holding each other for a long time. Sue was crying silently. “You know,” she said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t come back.”

The only place we can bivouac on the mountain’s face is in the middle of the central couloir at 16,000 feet. We chop out a ledge beneath an overhanging boulder and press ourselves up against it, hoping that any rockfall or an avalanche will somehow shoot over the top of us. J.J. Cieslewicz, my climbing partner, sinks two pickets into the snow and we tie in—the rope snaking into our sleeping bags—so we can’t roll off into the abyss.

“You’ve got kids,” says J.J., his white teeth showing through a dense blond beard. “You sleep on the inside. I’ll wear a helmet and sleep on the outside.”

We had hoped to spend two nights on the face to acclimatize, but the shelf is too perilous. We were at 13,000 feet this morning; tomorrow we’ll have to move to 18,000 feet on the ridge. We just need to survive a few dark hours.

It’s April 2017, and this is J.J.’s first big expedition as an alpinist and his first time to Asia. I did my first expedition to Asia in 1984, 33 years ago.

A 31-year-old climbing guide from southern Utah, J.J. is almost half my age, but he’s already climbed more rock. He was sending 5.13 in high school—putting up routes so bold that he can’t repeat them now. One of his climbing partners, Jerel “Supe” Lilly­white, told me that J.J. was something of a legend around Zion National Park. “He has the ability to make good decisions very quickly,” Lillywhite said. “He’s also got gnarly toes that can grab anything. I’ve seen him climb 5.12 barefoot.”

We remove our double boots, careful not to drop them, and scooch into our sleeping bags. I finally get the petulant stove started—after a thorough cleaning that blackens my hands—while J.J. patiently fills our water bottles from a trickle coming off the boulder. Sitting up in the bags, we swallow hot liquidy mush. The sun has set. The sky is pink, but the peaks around us have already turned black.

Perched here on the east face of Nyambo Konka, swaddled in goose down, we’re high enough to identify the surrounding mountains of the Daxue Shan, a heavily glaciated range on the eastern edge of Tibet, a two-day bus ride west of Chengdu, China. After three failed expeditions to Nyambo Konka—in 2005, 2009, and 2011—I know the surrounding peaks and their stories.

“That’s Minya Konka, almost 25,000 feet,” I tell J.J., pointing to an enormous snow-crested pyramid with an ominous purple plume streaming from its summit.

Minya Konka was first climbed in 1932 by a four-person American team; two of them, Dick Burdsall and Terris Moore, reached the summit. In a 1935 book, , a third member of the group, Arthur Emmons, noted unemotionally that, after the expedition, the Chinese village of ­Yachow “was destined to be my home for seven months while my feet underwent renovation and my toes were removed.”

I swing my arm northward. “Beside it is Long Shan, 22,000 feet, unclimbed. And over there”—I point to the east—“Tai Shan, 21,000 feet.”

Long Shan was attempted in 2015 by my friend Bruce Normand, a connoisseur of ­Sichuanese mountaineering, and Kyle Dempster. They were turned back 1,000 feet from the summit by high winds and dangerously soft cornices. The pair survived that climb, but Dempster’s number came up before long. With partner Scott Adamson, he vanished on the north face of Ogre II in northern Pakistan last year.

Tai Shan was climbed in 1981 by a ten-man Swiss team led by Roman Boutellier. They had only four good-weather days out of 50, and the avalanche danger was unbelievable. Still, they managed to make the first ascent of seven 6,000-meter peaks, returning unscathed.

By the time I finish talking, J.J. is asleep, sitting upright with his helmet lamp still shining. Black clouds have rumbled in, and the silhouetted peaks and silky stars have vanished. As I stare out into nothingness, it starts to snow. This is exactly what I’ve feared. We’re in the direct line of fire for an avalanche, and I have no faith that the boulder will shield us. A slide of any size would sweep us off the mountain. Snow starts to collect on our bags, and I worry about how much is loading on the couloir above. I’ve been in this position twice before on this mountain.

To my enormous relief, at some point in the night the snow stops, and I slowly calm down. I think of Sue, halfway around the world, in bed.

I’ve spent so much time in a sleeping bag—thousands of nights—that I’m most comfortable with nylon against my skin. At home I will go to bed between the sheets, but often I slip down to the basement, open all the windows, and crawl into a bag.

We live in a large, 100-year-old Craftsman house. Bought it cheap before the kids were born and spent three years fixing it up. Sue knows how to replace a toilet, rewire a chandelier, hang drywall—because things needed to get done and I wasn’t necessarily around to do them. In every marriage, there’s a division of labor. I write and go on assignments. Sue travels with me when she can, and when she can’t she holds down the fort.

I did my first big trip, to North Africa, in the spring of 1977; my first big expedition, to Denali, in the spring of 1980. I’ve now done roughly 50 expeditions and gone on far more foreign assignments.

Sue is the only woman I met who didn’t expect me to change, in part because she’s an adventurer herself. We met in college, and after a handful of dates we did a ten-day camping trip in the Grand Canyon. (She was a marathoner, so she more than kept up.) We’ve bicycled across eastern Europe and climbed in Bolivia. She’s a tough, self-reliant Wyoming woman who’s up for everything.

The first time I went to Nyambo Konka, in 2005, I was with a partner named Ross Lynn—Louisiana farmer, Montana ice climber, guitar picker. We were in the tent talking about a Yosemite climb called Lurking Fear when a deep, terrible grumbling clammed us up. In seconds our tent was being pounded by snow. Ross and I shouted at each other, but the roar buried our screams. We ripped at the zippers, dived out of the tent, and ran for our lives in our socks and underwear.

When the avalanche stopped, we slowly picked our way back up to camp. The slide had crushed the tent. A chunk of ice had cut straight through the vestibule. We dug out a new platform farther to the right, but then an avalanche swept by in that direction. We spent the rest of the night wide awake, straining to catch the sound of the next explosion that might kill us.

In the morning, despite the close call, Lynn and I started climbing on the face above us. We were unroped as we proceeded up loose rock. Things eventually became so tenuous that we reluctantly moved into the avalanche gullies.

Soft snow layered over ice made for slow going. The weather deteriorated. By the time we stopped climbing, dervishes of swirling snow were whipping our raw faces.

We didn’t even have to talk about it. We turned around.

There’s no sound in the mountains more beautiful than the purr of a stove. I have ours going at 5:30 A.M., J.J. still asleep. While the stove melts snow, I pack up, anxious to get out of the avalanche chute. We each slug down a large cup of watery oatmeal, and I start moving, ahead of J.J. The snow in the couloir is punchy enough that we can kick steps into it. We continue to climb unroped.

When the sun strides out, I go to the right-hand edge of the couloir to wait for J.J. I’ve just gotten my pack off when I hear a whirring, like the sound of a bomb coming in, and duck beneath an outcrop. A stone the size of a brick grazes my face.

“Rock!” I scream. “Rock! Rock!”

J.J. is in the worst possible place, right where the couloir funnels into a narrow neck. It’s a horror show in slow motion. I see him look up. I see the stone whizzing right at him. I see him throw an arm above his face. The stone hits the snow a hundred feet above him, bounces, hits the snow again, then strikes him. I hear him scream, but he isn’t knocked off the face. He’s standing there, groaning, both axes buried in the ice.

“You OK?”

“Yeah,” he yells back. “Hit my forearm.”

I wait until he climbs up to me, and we reassess. His forearm is bruised, not broken.

“The snow’s not safe,” J.J. says, “but it’s safer than the chossy rock!”

We angle up and to the left, moving as fast as we can with heavy packs. Eventually, the angle steepens and the snow becomes perfidiously hollow, so we rope up. Placing a few ice screws, we reach the ridge in two long pitches.

We’re cramponing along the ridge, J.J. announcing how relieved he is to be off the face, when my legs plunge into a crevasse. He pulls the rope tight, and I crawl out. We identify more hidden cracks in the glacier before finding a safe place to cut a platform. J.J. sets up the tent, and I get ready to start cooking. The stove won’t start, and I’m forced to fieldstrip it. The wind is so ferocious, tearing right off the Tibetan Plateau, that J.J. is compelled to haul large stones from a nearby pinnacle to guy out our tent and keep it from sailing into the sky. He goes about his task with a guide’s meticulousness.

J.J. earned a degree in restoration ecology from Utah State University, living efficiently and happily in his truck the whole time. His forefathers were from Poland. He has lived there, speaks Polish, and has the laudable ability of most Slavic climbers to suffer with a smile.

The wind screeches all night. Exhaustion and half an Ambien finally conspire to knock me out.

I’ve been on deadline most of my adult life, so in the rare times when I’m not, I am aimless, listless, irritable. When this happens, Sue realizes that I’ll be on a new story in a matter of days and just rides it out.

Every spring I start to get hungry and restless, like a grizzly emerging from hibernation. Sue knows this. Perhaps by now she even counts on it. At some point she’ll say, “You need to get out of here.”

And I do. I go off to Tibet or Mozambique or Afghanistan.

For many years, our separate lives were out of sync. Packing for an expedition, I’d be all pumped up, but she’d be quiet, antic­ipating her impending loneliness. After coming back, I’d be desperate for affection, but by then she was in her groove and doing fine without me, immersed in another community project and the girls’ lives. I longed to sit in the kitchen and have dinner with everybody. Sue had been with them 24/7 for weeks or months and was ready to get out.

Sometimes we would circle each other warily for a few days before finally settling back into the relationship. Over the years, our emotional wrinkles got smoother. Sue started leaving on her own travel adventures, and I had to learn how to be the one who stayed home.

Back from a trip, I’d spend days, weeks, playing with the kids, trying to make up for lost time. But that’s impossible. I’ve missed so much beautiful, ordinary life. Holidays, funerals, barbecues. I’ve been gone on either Sue’s birthday or our wedding anniversary almost every year of our lives together. I left when Addi was 18 months old, still in diapers and sleeping in a crib. When I returned two months later, she was fully potty-trained, gleefully sleeping in her own room upstairs, and speaking in full sentences.

I’ll never get that time back. But there have been gifts from the roaming life, too. Once, Sue and the girls met me in Nepal and we rode elephants. I took Teal on assignment to Tanzania, and at one point we were surrounded by two dozen lions. I took Addi to Bangkok when she was 15 and let her run around the city by herself all day for a week. It changed her life.

On the dark side, I’ve buried most of my best friends, all killed in the pursuit of an adventurous life. Sue and the girls know where to spread the ashes when my number comes up.

In 2009, I convinced New Zealanders Lydia Bradey and Penny Goddard, along with a pony­tailed Jackson Hole climbing guide named Kenny Gasch, to come to Nyambo Konka for a second shot.

This time, Lydia and I reached the mountain’s north ridge, tunneling up through a cornice of sugary, unstable snow. But a storm descended on us, and we were forced to rappel back down onto the southeast face. We hacked out a hasty platform and crawled into our tent. After a few hours of listening to snow slam the nylon walls, I said, “It’s gotta stop.”

“No, mate, it doesn’t,” Lydia said. She was the first woman to solo Mount Everest, in 1988, and she’s self-effacing, tough, and blunt. “A mountain doesn’t have to do a damn thing, Mark. You know that.”

At midnight it was still snowing hard. Six inches had accumulated.

“Well, looks like we’re in a bit of a pickle,” Lydia said calmly, in a classic bit of Kiwi understatement. If we stayed put and it kept snowing, we would most likely be swept off the face before morning. If we headed down now, there was a high probability that we’d trigger an avalanche ourselves.

Waiting for death was not an option that either of us could stand. We pulled on every stitch of clothing we had and crept out into the bellowing darkness. Shards of snow strafed across the meager beams of our headlamps. The tent had already hardened into an ice cave.

“We’ll have to leave it!” I shouted.

We roped up and started postholing steeply downhill, hoping that the line between us would snag on a rock ridge in the event that we were swept off. We descended blindly through the maelstrom all night, dropping 2,000 feet. We reached our advance base camp an hour after daybreak. Two feet of snow had fallen. Two more would fall that night, ending our expedition. Later that same year, on May 20, alpinists Jonny Copp, Micah Dash, and Wade Johnson—who were climbing just over a ridge from where we’d been—were killed by a slide.

It helps that J.J. and I have built momen­tum on Nyambo Konka, because it’s hard to get out of your tent at 18,000 feet when the wind is just shy of a tornado. Cold is one thing, but wind so fierce that it feels like some malevolent force is trying to shove you off the mountain? It can be demoralizing if you give it any quarter. So we act like we don’t even notice.

J.J. and I march off into an invisible gale, coils of rope over our shoulders, the line whipping in the wind between us. It’s a bluebird day. We’ve been humping loads and climbing nonstop for a week—and desperately need rest—but you have to go when the sun shines.

Our biggest fear, other than simply being blown away, is coming to an icefall that’s insurmountable. Before we left, a close-up look on Google Earth revealed an indistinct welter of open-mouthed crevasses halfway up the east ridge. We have pickets and ice screws and extra line, but we’re strung out and have only one day, this day, to get it done.

Looking both ways along any suspect lines of sastrugi, we curl around ice bulges and keep clear of fathomless holes. The crevasses we feared are largely filled in. We do a spicy traverse on a spine of ice that requires moving à cheval—­straddling the crest like you’re on horseback—but it’s more fun than frightening. We reach the top in five hours.

On the summit I feel no elation. No triumph. That will come later. We hug, take a few pictures, and turn around. We spend maybe three minutes on top.

There’s a thin line between not giving up and becoming obsessed. Kayakers, alpinists, sailors, and BASE jumpers sometimes cross it and die. Perhaps the greatest self-awareness in life is knowing when to let go. I’m still working on that. I tried to climb Denali in 1980, failed, returned in 2000, and summited. I tried to climb Everest in 1986, failed, returned in 2012, and got to the top.

Sue understands this. She knows that mountains and rivers aren’t always the greatest dangers. The serious threats are unmaintained Russian choppers, reckless Pakistani bus drivers, forgotten land mines, and stoned Congolese 15-year-olds with AK-47’s.

Back before there were cell phones and the Internet, Sue and I wrote each other, blue aerograms expressing our love and what was happening in our lives in tiny, tight script. Whenever I was incommunicado, our understanding was simple: no news is good news. She told me once that she would have gone mad without this mantra. She taught herself not to worry and instead to dive into her own life.

I went back to Nyambo Konka for a third try in 2011. It wasn’t really a serious attempt. My partner, Joel Charles, and I were more interested in ascending the smaller peaks in the area. We gave the mountain a half-hearted shot but were thwarted on the south side by Jenga-like 100-foot pinnacles of rotten rock.

That was it. Enough is enough. I let it go and was proud of myself for doing so.

Then one day, years later, Dougald MacDonald, editor of the , sent me a report stating that a large Korean team using fixed lines—and leaving behind lots of garbage—had climbed Nyambo Konka. They did it on my old route up to the north ridge.

Good for them, I thought. I tried to blow it off. I tried to convince myself I was chill. No luck.

I had just met J.J., and we were climbing long routes in Red Rock Canyon, the magnificent sandstone walls west of Las Vegas. This doesn’t happen often, but somehow we were in harmony from the first pitch. We moved at the same pace, assessed risks similarly, came to mutual decisions easily. On our third day of climbing, I asked if he’d ever been interested in doing an expedition.

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“Well, I know this mountain…”

Just like that, he was in. I called Sue.

Since 2005, the year I thought I could give all this up, I’d attempted Nanga Parbat in winter, made the first descent of the largest cave in the world in Vietnam, bicycled the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Sue, spent months in Africa and Asia writing about land mines and mine victims, and put up dozens of new routes around the world.

“Really, Mark? Does it mean that much to you?”

“No,” I said sheepishly.

There was a long silence. Then she asked if J.J. was competent.

We bought tickets that day, had passports andĚýChina visas FedExed the next. Less than ten days later, starting on April 1, we were on Nyambo Konka, sucking wind, attempting an unclimbed route on the unpredictable east face.

And damned if we didn’t get up the thing.

That should be the end of the story, right? The summit. But that’s not how it works in mountaineering. You finally get to the top, your lungs gulping for oxygen and your face crusted in ice and your body wasted and your blurry mind just ready to be done with it all, and you still have to get down. You have to recognize, even in your benumbed state, that hypervigilance is compulsory—otherwise the mountain will kill you.

J.J. strides off the summit, descending sure and fast through the howling wind. I struggle to keep up. At one point he pulls me in with the rope.

“You OK?” he shouts.

No. I’m starting to stumble from fatigue. “Beat,” I mumble. My age is showing, despite all my efforts to deny it.

We split an energy bar, and J.J. takes weight from my pack. It’s what I did for my mountaineering partners when I was his age, when I was strong and invincible. Even in a fugue of exhaustion and hypoxia, I’m still capable of realizing that I’ve crossed into unfamiliar territory.

We make it back to our tent eventually, without mishap. Wind has torn the fly in half. We’re severely dehydrated, and our stove won’t start. J.J., unconcerned, swallows packets of cider mix and dry oatmeal.

The next day, we do a dozen rappels down the east face, with lots of delicate downclimbing in between. The couloir that I was afraid would slide when we were bivying on the face has slid. Carefully, we crunch down through avalanche debris. The next day we make it out, and by nightfall we’re fumbling with chopsticks in a deliciously steamy street shop in Kangding.

Slurping rice noodles with sunburned lips, pounding down bad Chinese beer, so tired I can barely sit up—this is when I finally feel triumph. It comes over me in a wave of joy, relief, and recognition.

Maybe this will be my last expedition. Probably not. Either way, I know Sue will be waiting at the airport.

Read more:ĚýA professional adventurer has to break a few eggs along the way—and, apparently, several bones and a skull. Mark Jenkins tallies up the most memorable injuries and mishaps from a life lived on the edge.

Mark Jenkins () was °żłÜłŮ˛őľ±»ĺ±đ’s Hard Way columnist from 1999 To 2006.Ěý

The post A Father’s Last Shot at Cheating Death appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Wildest Wreck

I was training for a mountain-bike race, going too fast downhill, when I hit a gopher hole, went over the handlebars, and crashed into a boulder at 40 miles per hour. My left shoulder was crushed; the collarbone was shoved straight through my back.

Most Painful Stomach Ache

I’ve blown out my belly three times carrying heavy packs. After several hernia operations, I now have a stomach lined with large swatches of bulletproof nylon mesh.

Big Break

I shattered my leg while telemarking the steep and deep in Utah—but who hasn’t?

Even Bigger Break

I was climbing near Taos, New Mexico, and fell more than 20 feet into some boulders because of a belaying accident. My left hand hit first and was nearly snapped off at the wrist. It took several surgeries to reattach it, followed by two years of rehab.

Nastiest Itch

While tracking lowland gorillas in the Congo, I got 30 ticks on my butt. I had to remove them with a mirror and a pocketknife.

Meanest Microbe

We were in Siberia, two weeks from a hospital, when a staph infection raged through my entire body. After ten days I had severe sepsis, my legs so bloated that skin folded over my ankles. When I finally reached a hospital, a Russian doctor told me I had about 12 hours to live. I was wheeled in front of giant electromagnetic cones and saved by repeated high doses of radiation.

Second-Wildest Wreck

I fractured my skull hit­-ting the pavement while cycling across South Africa, no helmet.

Grossest Grooming

I got my worst shave ever in Cambodia, from an old blind man with foot-long whiskers who used a rusty straight razor, dipping it into a tin of bloody water.

Worst Massage

In northern Yunnan, China, a masseuse believed that slapping my back as hard as she possibly could for an hour was what I wanted.

Most Devastating Loss

I was ice climbing out-side Cody, Wyoming, with my friend Keith Spencer. I was huddled inside an ice cave high on the route’s face, belaying Keith up the pillar, when the entire mountainside avalanched. He was killed instantly—it was like he was hit by a locomotive. There’s no reason I lived and he died. I later learned that the avalanche may have been caused by a small earthquake centered in western Yellowstone.

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WE LIT OUT in a spring snowstorm, flakes fat as butterflies spattering the windshield, the highway hissing with slush. By sundown we were galloping into Utah, our tracks back in Wyoming vanished under white. We hooked off I-70 at the ghost town of Cisco and curled down to the Colorado River, silver under the starlight. Hooting with glee, we dropped the windows and let the warm evening air wash over us.

Caleb Own in Zion National Park, Utah.

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Two nights earlier, I’d been sharing a pitcher of beer in a Laramie pub with Caleb Owen, an itinerant climber and a college student at the University of Wyoming, both of us dreaming about an old-fashioned rock-climbing road trip.

“Like, just up and leave,” said Caleb, his hair a greasy mess, his tall, rangy body too long for the barstool. At 24, Caleb was half my age and twice my height, or almost. We’d met in a wilderness first-responder course, the only two serious climbers.

“Not finishing every last thing,” I said. “Not explaining. Not preparing. Just going.”

“Adios to all this country!” roared Caleb, flapping his arms like a raptor lifting into the sky.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just dropped everything and hit the road. Back when I was Caleb’s age, spontaneous adventure was the norm. I once hitchhiked from Laramie to Tempe, Arizona, just to see a girl who didn’t want to see me. When I finally got the hint, I caught a lift to Las Vegas and then thumbed it to Yosemite, where I worked out my frustrations on white walls of granite. I bicycled across the U.S. with a one-pound down bag and $100, no helmet. I bought a ticket to Nairobi, planning to climb Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, and didn’t come back for a year.

Over time, I’d turned my play into my work. Yes, I was still doing adventures, more than ever, but now they were well-planned, well-executed, well-documented missions.

Over breakfast the next morning, I was lamely complaining about this to my wife, Sue, when she interrupted: “Then go. Who’s stopping you?”

I started mumbling about conference calls and impending deadlines and…

“Yeah, yeah. Call Caleb and tell him you’ll pick him up at daybreak tomorrow.” She’d never even met the kid. Her only demand was that I do it right: no calls, no e-mail, no work.

When your wife gives you carte blanche, don’t speak, don’t feel guilty, just go. I dumped my climbing gear into four plastic milk crates and loaded them into the battle van (a dented Toyota, odo reading 256,789). Caleb moved everything from his fridge into a cooler. Sue made us a chocolate cake, a pan of corn bread, and a huge pot of chickpea-and-sausage soup. At dawn we filled up the gas tank and fled.

SIX HOURS LATER, Caleb and I were on the white sandstone hills outside Grand Junction, Colorado, shirts off, our rubber-clad feet re-remembering how wonderfully sticky sandstone can be compared with snow-slick granite. We had not planned to stop here. We’d never even heard of the place. We’d seen the smooth walls from the highway and just pulled over.

Several hours after that, we were cruising along the wide ribbon of the Colorado, palisades of stone blacking out the night sky. In southeastern Utah, we randomly turned up into Castle Valley and pulled off at a sign that read PRIMITIVE CLIMBERS CAMPSITE.

“That’s certainly us,” Caleb said.

I set up my crusty green Coleman on a boulder and warmed the soup. We ate corn bread while staring up at crumbs of stars. Sometime after midnight, we threw out our bags and crashed in the dirt.

With no wife, kids, or career, Caleb is in the heart of his dirtbag years. A sharp-eyed, thin-bearded river guide from Maine, he was only one semester away from a degree in journalism, but he was taking yet another semester off because he couldn’t bear the claustrophobia of a classroom after spending the previous summer at Devils Tower, working as a sawyer. For three months he’d lived outside, running a chainsaw one day and climbing the next. His face was darkly tanned, his hands strong as claws.

Caleb was a classic climbing bum. His down coat was patched with duct tape, and his threadbare pants—$2 from a thrift store—didn’t survive our first ascent. He drove his grandmother’s station wagon, lived in a dilapidated brick building, and knew where to find the best dumpsters in town. He’d recently scored a 50-pound box of bacon.

That first morning of freedom, after driving for ten hours, we decided to continue our adventure with an ascent of Castleton Tower, an iconic obelisk of red sandstone poking into the blue Utah sky. To climbers, Castleton is like the Statue of Liberty, a calcite-cloaked beauty standing over an ocean of desert, welcoming the wayward. It was first climbed by Layton Kor and Huntley Ingalls in 1961, two renowned forebears of the dirtbag lifestyle.

We practically sprinted up the cone of red dirt to the base. I would have been happy to do the classic route, the Kor-Ingalls, but Caleb was hot for the North Face. Since he has the wingspan of a condor, he led the first pitch, the crux. I, being short and broad, led the scary and more physical pitches above. On top, we sat in the sun and ate sandwiches. Rapping off, we hid our gear under an overhang along the ridge and stumbled back to camp. Hot homemade food, sloshy cooler-cold beer, and a warm bag under the shooting stars completed a perfect day.

OVER TIME, IT’S EASY to put yourself inside an invisible prison. The bars are made of money, expectations, obligations, and habit. If you’re not careful, years on you’ll have unwittingly convinced yourself that you absolutely must get up and go to work. That’s a sucker’s life. And while you can’t run away from obligations forever, you can certainly take a break, whatever your age. They’ll all still be there tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

The dirtbag road trip is just the thing: an existential jailbreak, an escape from domestic appurtenances. Unlike other kinds of road trips—staying in hotels, campers, etc.—the dirtbag version is all about going cheap, even if that means bending the law a little. The goal is to live off the land, to make a partial return to the hunter-gatherer life we all had thousands of years ago.

Paradoxically, the dirtbag road trip has goals. Extreme goals. Physical and psychological goals. To kayak a wet-your-pants creek or surf a giant, no-mistakes-or-you-die wave. Ours was to climb in the sun every day until we couldn’t lift our arms. To scale the hard, steep walls of our fears, to eat lunch atop steeples of stone, to let the grit of the rock get into our sandwiches and our guts.

Coming into camp on the second afternoon, after sending another southern Utah favorite called the Rectory, Caleb was alarmed to discover that we were practically out of beer. We had no choice but to drive into Moab. While there, we realized we needed our own picnic table: a platform upon which to set the Coleman and build our enormous sandwiches. Luckily, it was almost dark. We found just what we were looking for at a construction site—a nice new sheet of plywood—and swiped it.

We drove straight into the night, west by southwest. We listened to Robert Earl Keen and John Prine and Lyle Lovett. We played “Fat Babies” over and over. This is how you get your groove on a road trip. You listen until you know every line by heart and then sing it together. What you don’t do is listen to fascist talk radio. Or NPR. Not another word about what’s happening in D.C. or the Congo. Your music, your voice, nothing else.

We bivied in the sagebrush. The next morning, we ate pancakes and sausage in the town of Panguitch. A 1970s diner, Formica countertops and chrome stools, eerily empty except for us. When the waitress walked away, Caleb whispered, “She’s a zombie, I swear.”

There was something strange about her, and she was the first of a series of humanoid-seeming waitresses who told us lies. She said the tourist season was over and we wouldn’t see another person in Zion National Park, our next stop.

We got there that afternoon and found wall-to-wall tourists, the campground crowded with every kind of camper known to man, but not one tent.

In Zion, instead of climbing something long and legendary like we should have, we put up our own new route. Three unprotected pitches, a crack wide enough to shove a goat in. We couldn’t believe nobody had spied this classic. We named it Get Dirty with Me and don’t imagine it will ever be climbed again.

We came off so grimy that we actually needed a shower. Fortunately, in Springdale, we had our choice of schmancy hotels. We found one with an enormous outdoor pool, wriggled our trunks on in the van, caught the gate as a paying customer was exiting, and walked in. There was even a stack of folded towels. Nice of them. We each slung a big towel around our necks, careful to face away from the security cameras.

“I say we put in a few laps to clean off,” Caleb suggested. Which we did. Then we slipped into a hot-tub pool to soak our sore muscles. We stayed there until we were as pink as lobsters. Stepping woozily to our feet, we combed our hair back like James Dean, strolled out the gate, and drove four hours to Las Vegas.

Where it was pouring. We had hoped to put up a new multipitch route in Red Rocks, the 2,000-foot set of walls just outside the city, but faced with soaked, crumbly sandstone we decided that was a no-go.

Instead we found ourselves cruising the tacky, luminescent Strip. Fat people were walking beneath zippering lights, and the neon silicone showgirls were reflected in asphalt puddles. “There’s nothing for me here,” Caleb said disgustedly. We left as quickly as we arrived, steering north toward the holy grail of granite: Yosemite.

THIS YEAR MARKS the 110th anniversary of the first American road trip. In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker, along with a goggle-eyed bulldog named Bud, drove from San Francisco to New York City in 63.5 days. They roughly followed the Oregon Trail backward and used 800 gallons of gas.

It wasn’t until 1938, 35 years later, that Route 66 became the first paved, coast-to-coast highway, though by then road trips were already a mythic rite of passage. Cars were uncomfortable and untrustworthy, flats frequent, and highways knee-deep in mud, but Americans couldn’t get enough of the open road. By 1950, 32 million people were driving to national parks, Yosemite to Yellowstone, the Great Smokies to the Grand Canyon. Kerouac’s , the Beat bible of libertine freedom and flight, came out in 1957. Steinbeck’s vernacular followed five years later, devil-be-damned in 1969, in 1974, and in 1982.

The road trip is the cure for monotony, the answer to all the questions you should be asking yourself. Why am I doing this? Why am I living here? Why am I still with this jerk? Why haven’t I hit the highway, blaring the horn and giving the finger to the rearview mirror? It’s not merely your right but your duty as a citizen of this manifold, confused, labyrinthine, hypertrophic nation to slip your head from the noose of mediocrity and escape like a fugitive into the hinter-land.

During our drive to California, it rained all night, all across the Southwest. At dawn we had pancakes in Indian Springs, Nevada, then drove north on Highway 95, whizzing through clear blue puddles. Past the old Nevada Test Site and the even larger Nevada Test and Training Range.

“Contamination everywhere,” said Caleb. “Explains all the zombies.”

Across Sarcobatus Flat, left on 266, driving directly toward the snow-coated White Mountains. Because of the storm, all the rocks in a 500-mile radius were dripping wet, so I extemporized.

“What do you say we climb the highest peak in Nevada?”

“Doesn’t get more obscure than that,” said Caleb, genuinely uninterested.

“Boundary Peak, 13,147 feet.”

“Ułó-łółÜłó.”

“It’s on our way. When will we ever be this close again?”

“Who cares?”

But it was my shift in the driver’s seat. We crawled up an old mining road, following it almost to the end, and set up base camp at around 8,500 feet. We erected our plywood kitchen table, built a fire in the snow, and roasted hot dogs.

“OK, this is living,” Caleb finally admitted, sipping a beer.

At daybreak we set out to hike Boundary Peak, stalking through the willows, crossing into the Boundary Peak Wilderness, scattering hunky mule deer. Soon enough we were postholing, and I understood Caleb’s initial reluctance: His boots were peeling apart. But he wouldn’t turn around. On the summit, we read the register in the ammo box, then glissaded a thousand feet down to camp.

We were so close we were starting to smell Yosemite. That night we drove to McMurry’s in Bishop. It had a barroom shuffleboard table, and we played against a couple of girls who were clearly watching the door for someone else. Either that or we were just a little too pungent.

I remedied the situation in Lee Vining with a stealth shower. To score one, you should be at the hotel you’ve targeted by 9 A.M.; this is when people are checking out and maids are cleaning rooms. Take your gym bag and skip purposefully up the concrete stairs. Walk past the rooms briskly, as if yours is down a ways, while discreetly eyeing each door. Without fail, the maid or someone just exiting will have left one ajar. Go inside, flip over the break-in latch. There’s almost always an unused towel and an unopened package of soap.

Eric Beck, a bold Yosemite climber from the 1960s, once said, “At either end of the social spectrum there’s a leisure class.” Right on, brother. I shaved slowly and took a long, steamy hot shower. You don’t know how good it feels to get clean until you get really dirty. I changed clothes, slipped the complimentary toiletries into my gym bag, strolled out, and drove away. Clean as a whistle.

THE STORM, WHICH had soaked Las Vegas and closed Tuolumne Meadows with a foot of wet snow, couldn’t have been more perfect: the landscape was utterly empty. Caleb and I met up with 19-year-old “Cracker Jack” Torness, a South Dakota kid escaping his girlfriend. The three of us camped outside Yosemite near Tioga Pass, drove in every day, and had the gorgeous granite of Tuolumne all to ourselves.

If there’s anything better for the soul than a burning cobalt sky, warm granite, and long, nervy runouts, I don’t know what it is. We didn’t see a cloud or another climber for almost a week. At first we climbed routes we knew we could do, gaining confidence. Later we sailed out onto oceans of empty rock. We happily ascended Fairview Dome, the Stately Pleasure Dome, Daff Dome, Lembert Dome, even Mountaineers Dome, where we sent a route called American Wet Dream, which deliciously summed up our time in Tuolumne.

By this point, Caleb and Cracker Jack were hankering to hang in the Valley, but I couldn’t stop moving. We split up, Caleb and Jack heading down to Camp 4 and I continuing west. I had to. I was like an alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon.

Driving alone, I began remembering journeys that I’d long forgotten. Dining and dashing as a rambunctious teenager, just to keep climbing in Yosemite. An insane driver putting a gun to my head when I was hitchhiking across North Dakota. Jackknifing with a U-Haul trailer on black ice. To set out on any journey is to relive past journeys.

I wasn’t ready to go home, so I visited my youngest brother and his wife in Santa Barbara, then my parents, who live just down the street, walking with them along the beach and realizing, viscerally, how little time we all have left. I swam out to a buoy in the Pacific, miles from the beach—it took an hour longer than I anticipated—and wondered for the hundredth time why I didn’t come to the ocean more often.

When I finally did start heading back to Wyoming, I decided to knock off a few more state high points. On Arizona’s Humphreys Peak, 12,633 feet, it was blowing so hard I had to get down on all fours to reach the empty summit. On New Mexico’s Wheeler Peak, 13,161 feet, a thick, full-curl bighorn sheep was guarding the top. It pawed the tundra and raised its snout at me. When it charged, I ducked behind a boulder, but it was just a bluff. I reached the peak at dusk, only a crease of crimson separating the black earth from the black sky.

I didn’t call and say where I was or what I was doing. Didn’t answer e-mail, text messages, or voice mail. I turned it all off and just drove and sang and climbed wherever I happened to be at midday. I did this for ten more days, until I was ready to be home.

ĚýMark Jenkins, şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř's longtime hard way columnis, is a staff writer at .

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ACCIDENTS HAPPEN. It’s the nature of nature, since chaos is built into the system. The trick is knowing the right thing to do when the wrong thing occurs. Which, for too many years, I didn’t.Ěý

Ice-climbing accident

The author, right, after a falling-ice-block incident in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Woofer students

Woofer students assess injuries in mock scenarios

Helicopter evacuation

Sometimes the only option: a helicopter evacuation at altitude

More than a decade ago, my brother Dan and I attempted to bike the length of Africa. We started at the top, in Morocco. Aside from puking up rotten dates and getting scrubbed too hard in a Marrakesh bathhouse, everything was going swell. South of Casablanca, we spent a night on one of the highest passes in the High Atlas Mountains, taking refuge in a tiny hut. The caretaker, a four-foot Berber, offered us shots of sweet mint tea. The only food was a jar of giant olives.

At one point, Dan had to take a leak and disappeared through the hut door into the darkness. When he didn’t come back, I started to wonder. Half an hour later, the Berber and I went for a look. Apparently, Dan had tried to walk around the back, but the hut was perched on a cliff. The Berber was swinging an oil lantern, and we were both staring over the edge when I heard Dan say, “Some brother’s keeper you are.” I climbed down the cliff; when I reached Dan, he was lying in the rocks with one mangled foot in the air.

“Broke my leg taking a piss,” he half-laughed, half-winced. We hauled him back to the hut and laid him out. I said, “This is going to hurt.”

“No shit, bro.”

I gave his foot a jerk, and he screamed and passed out. I straightened it but failed to splint it, so it was still floppy. Dan was in excruciating pain for a week before we got his lower leg put in a cast. Then we modified his bike pedals and continued riding through Africa.

Had I taken a wilderness medicine class, I would have known this: When you reset broken bones, you don’t yank. Instead, you pull, slowly and firmly, gradually allowing the bones to settle back into place. Then you splint the fracture, using whatever is at hand. A foam pad works well; sticks wrapped with a jacket will do.

Truth is, I should have taken a proper first-aid course 30 years ago. I guess I figured on picking up whatever I needed along the way, one expedition at a time. But after another trip to Africa during which chaos reigned—more on that in a moment—I decided it was irresponsible of me not to know exactly what to do in an emergency. So I coughed up $600 for one of the best training experiences in the country, the (nicknamed Woofer, a loose take on its acronym), and braced myself for ten straight days, nearly ten hours a day, of medical instruction.Ěý

WHEN THE CLASS CONVENES there are 30 of us, ranging in age from 18 to 57, and we’re all apprehensive as we gather for an orientation session in a lecture room on the University of Wyoming’s Laramie campus. The rigor and seriousness of this course are notorious, and a collective groan rises up from the students when two thick medical textbooks are handed out. Our instructors, Colorado ski guide Ryland Gardner, 48, and Wyoming wilderness expert Dusty Downey, 33, are experienced outdoor hands. They grin sadistically.Ěý

“By the end of this class,” Downey says, “you will know how to deal with everything from a tension pneumothorax to torsion of the testes.” (That’s a punctured lung and twisted nuts to you laymen.) Stout and direct, with sandy blond hair, Downey encourages us to view this course as preparation for emergencies in places where there are no lifesaving machines, the med kit is smaller than your sandwich, and “you are the doctor on call.”

Between lectures there will be five hands-on outdoor-emergency scenarios each day, plus two extended night scenarios. It’s winter in Wyoming, so all this acting will happen in the snow and wind. During each enactment, half the students will play the part of injured patients—complete with fake blood, fake broken bones, and fake vomit—and the other half will be first responders. We are urged to stay in character (plenty of screaming!) until the instructors call a halt. At the end of the ten days, there will be a written test and a half-hour practicum.

Between now and then, we’re expected to learn everything essential about backcountry first aid. And it’s a lot: how to bandage wounds, set fractures, stanch bleeding, perform CPR, treat hypoxia and hypothermia and hypoglycemia, recognize the difference between compensatory and decompensatory shock, recognize a broken back or a transient ischemic attack, and even remove a fishhook or a tick.

Which brings me back to Africa.

It was April 2007. I was deep in the Congo, and I had two dozen African ticks attached to my ass. This wouldn’t have happened if M’viri Bwily, my guide, hadn’t cleaved open his thumb with a machete one day. He came running to my tent, blood spurting everywhere. I had him sit down and raise his arm while I squeezed his thumb for 20 minutes. When the bleeding finally stopped, it was obvious he needed stitches, but M’viri would have none of it. Instead I fashioned butterfly bandages out of athletic tape and wrapped him up. (Had I already taken the Woofer course, I would have had Steri-Strips on hand, one of the best first-aid products for small-wound closure.)Ěý

M’viri could no longer accompany me into the jungle to track gorillas. If he had been with me, he would have told me not to sit where the gorillas had sat, because the beasts are infested with ticks. But I had told him to stay in camp, keeping his arm above his head. Jungles breed infection, and since we were days away from a bush clinic, I was afraid he might lose his thumb or his hand or his life if the wound became septic. So I gave him my only course of doxycycline, an antibiotic.Ěý

Then I started getting headaches and a stiff neck—which, unbeknownst to me, were classic symptoms of African tick bite fever. Lacking a good set of tweezers (another mistake), I squatted by the fire, digging them out with a pocketknife, a headlamp, and a mirror. But what I really needed—as I learned during a SAT-phone call to an African wildlife biologist in Brazzaville—was a round of (you guessed it) doxycycline.

In the end, M’viri and I both healed up, but it wasn’t pretty.

THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS begins at 8 a.m. sharp. Gardner, wry and fit, throws out a Mark Twain quote to set the tone: “One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothing can beat teamwork.”

Then it starts, a whirlwind of medical knowledge imparted by Gardner and Downey, who tag-team a big range of topics: chest injuries, spine immobilization, neurological emergencies. After just an hour of lecture time, we’re thrown into the cold for our first scenario, a simulation of a high-altitude plane wreck. The injured are lying in the snow bellowing when we first responders arrive. We spread out and try to help.Ěý

Overwhelmed by all the fake blood, I kneel by my patient and try to stop the flow, failing to notice that she isn’t breathing. She dies because I didn’t clear her airway first.

Another first responder tries to move his patient before performing a thorough examination. Oops. The victim’s spinal column is severed and she dies.Ěý

Back in the classroom, we can laugh about what we did wrong, but we all feel enormous pressure to do the right things in the right order. Throughout the day, we continue to make critical mistakes.Ěý

In one field scenario, I’m so concerned about a broken leg that I fail to immobilize the victim’s head, which is fundamental. In another, I misread the patient’s behavior and leap to perform an abdominal thrust, only to learn that my subject was having an asthma attack and simply needed a puff on her inhaler. In yet another, I forget to ask a patient with a head injury if she lost consciousness, a sign of a possible concussion. In another, I fail to recognize the symptoms of shock.

By the end of the first day, one student speaks for all of us when she says, “I feel so stressed out by the initial scene, I’m afraid I’ll fuck it up.”

Gardner acknowledges that it’s easy to allow the urgency of the moment to make you move too fast and get it wrong. “You must force yourself to be calm, force yourself to slow down, force yourself to think clearly and logically,” he says.

In other words, don’t panic. But the only way not to panic is to practice not panicking. Which is precisely what we do during the remaining nine days, hour after hour, day after day. Gradually, we all become more relaxed, more competent, and more confident. Like emergency professionals, we stop hurrying. We take time to perform a thorough assessment of the person, the injury, and the environment.

MIDWAY THROUGH the course we have a day off. Some students go skiing, but a group of us get together to review, practice scenarios, and quiz each other. I’ve been studying every night after class, but I’m still anxious. We fire questions back and forth for hours:

Q: What are the earliest signs of high-altitude pulmonary edema?

A: Excessive fatigue, dry cough, shortness of breath.

Q: In CPR, what is the ratio of compressions to breaths?

A: Thirty compressions (at a rate of 
100 per minute), then two breaths.

Q: What do the acronyms SOAP and LOR stand for?

A: SOAP—subjective, objective, assessment, plan. LOR—level of responsiveness.

Q: What is the treatment for an ice-ax puncture to the chest?

A: Plug the hole, cover with occlusive dressing, evacuate immediately.

The last one haunts me. I once took a 100-foot fall off a glacier on Shishapangma, an 8,000-meter peak in Tibet, and almost impaled myself with my ice ax. Another time, self-arresting while sliding at high speed down a couloir in Wyoming’s Medicine Bows, the ax pick popped off and the adze buried itself partially in my chest.

I always assumed that if I did really nail myself, even if I was days away from a hospital, I’d still live. But the Woofer has taught me otherwise. For some accidents, it doesn’t matter who you are or how tough you are: you’re still going to die. There’s no good treatment for a widespread disease that rangers in the Tetons call YMIS: young man’s immortality syndrome. But taking a Woofer, and learning just how easy it is to kill yourself, ain’t a bad start.

THE MOST COMMON backcountry injury is not something dramatic like impalement or grizzly mauling or snakebite. Instead, it’s an ordinary sprained ankle. Makes sense: Who hasn’t tripped and twisted one? The treatment: taping. The NOLS course teaches a bombproof tape job that I really could’ve used the 17 times I sprained one of mine.

The Woofer also prepares you to deal with a catalog of less common but far more interesting outdoor emergencies, some of which overlap with my own experiences.

Like the time my three brothers and I were cleverly mountain-biking in Moab during the dog days of summer—approximately 163 degrees out—and my brother Steve disappeared. We found him naked, hiding under a thornbush, mumbling bizarrely, pouring the last of his water on his genitals.

Did he have heatstroke, which can be fatal, or heat exhaustion? Probably exertional heatstroke, judging by his altered level of responsiveness. Of course, we had no idea at the time, so we sprayed him with water and forced him to drink. Luckily, he recovered.

Or the year I was coming off Denali and met a French couple trudging to the summit. She was being short-roped up, practically dragged, and her cheeks and nose were white. Without asking, I put my bare hands on her face and explained that she was getting frostbite. She was confused. Although it might not have been my place, I told the couple they were moving too slowly and should turn around.

Her partner cursed at me, and they continued on. Ten hours later, a full-scale rescue was initiated. The woman was eventually dragged down the mountain in a sleeping bag, with frostbite not only on her face but along one whole side of her body.

Or the year I climbed Mount Kenya and met four plumbers from London at Mackinder’s Hut, one of whom had acute mountain sickness. He was a giant of a man, had a skull-bursting headache, a rapid pulse, and rapid respiration, and was puking and slightly ataxic. I told the Brits they needed to get their buddy to a lower elevation immediately. They were offended. This was their expedition—they’d been planning it for years. In 48 hours, they’d gone from sea level to 14,000 feet, and no smart-ass Yank was going to stop them. Fair enough. I went on up to the Austrian Hut.

Three a.m., there’s banging on my door. It’s the plumbers. Their buddy is now unconscious. He has shit and pissed himself and is covered with puke, and his breathing is deeply labored. Borrowing porters from a half-dozen other teams, we organize a rescue. Carrying the giant in a litter, we get him to the bus stop at 10,000 feet, where, without a word of thanks, the three plumbers abandon him and head back up the mountain—which, karmically, they fail to summit.

THE WOOFER, or an equivalent course, is what most mountain guides, river guides, ski patrollers, and recreation-program managers are required to take. But it’s also perfect for those of us who spend a lot of time in the backcountry. We learn how to take vital signs—pulse, blood pressure, respiration rate, temperature—and what these numbers mean. We’re taught how to splint dislocated fingers and broken toes, how to build a traction splint for a femur break, how to immobilize a patient in a litter, even how to give a saline injection. Personally, the most valuable skill I learn in Woofer is how to perform a focused spine assessment.

I don’t think I’ve had a serious climbing or skiing or kayaking partner who hasn’t taken a bad fall at some point—hitting his head, smacking her back, whacking a tree, thumping a rock, and inevitably breaking something. Arms and legs are one thing, but injury to the back or neck is delicate: misdiagnose the situation in the field and the spinal cord may subsequently be severed, causing paralysis or death. In a focused spine assessment, which is performed only after a patient assessment, there are five clear steps to follow that can accurately tell you whether the patient will need to be backboarded and carried out or whether he can walk out on his own.Ěý

Two years ago, I was caught in an avalanche while ice climbing. My partner was swept off the ice, and when I got down to him, he was hanging by the rope, upside down. I cut him free and laid him in the snow and did everything I could think of. Had I known how to perform a focused spine assessment, I would have known that my partner had broken his neck severely and there was nothing I could do to save him. As it was, I was almost out of my mind with anxiety.Ěý

Near the end of the Woofer course, we’re sent out on a four-hour night scenario up in the mountains. At 8,000 feet, the wind is whipping so hard it seems to be throwing the stars around. We are divided into teams of five and sent out into the snowy forest, tromping through knee-deep drifts. The moon is a sliver playing hide-and-seek. Our headlamps bob on our heads like luminescent butterflies.Ěý

For some reason, I’m thinking about Downey’s lesson on how to use an EpiPen, an injection of epinephrine to counteract life-threatening anaphylactic shock. “Don’t be afraid,” he insisted, “just stab it right into their thigh. In some situations it’s the only thing that will save them. And nothing—nothing—is more important than saving a person’s life.”

His voiced cracked when he said this, and 
I could tell that he had a story he wasn’t going to share. Now, postholing through the crusty blue snow beneath the stars, it occurs to me that this, in a nutshell, is the entire point of the Woofer class: to acquire the skills to save a human.Ěý

After an hour of hiking in the snow in the dark, my team hears shouting and we begin plunging down through the trees.Ěý

We find our victim at the base of a small cliff. He has fallen. He’s screaming in pain. There’s blood in the blowing snow. Did he break his back? Break a leg? Puncture a lung? Hit his head?

Doesn’t matter. We know what to do.

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Lost in a building whiteout on a frigid day in 1896, encrusted in ice, the two Norwegian brothers finally stopped skiing. Disoriented and directionless, Roald and Leon Amundsen decided to bivouac. They dropped their immense backpacks, stepped out of their ­seven-foot-long skis, and began burrowing into a snowdrift.

After digging two cramped holes side by side, like shallow graves, they crawled into reindeer-hide sleeping bags. They were shivering terribly. It was January in the mountains of southwestern Norway, when snow and wind, darkness and biting cold—the wolves of winter—conspire to kill the unprepared. Having skied for three weeks to traverse the 100-mile-wide Hardangervidda Plateau, wandering in blizzards and bivouacking repeatedly, they were thin and weak. Their stove was inoperable, and they hadn’t had food for two days.

During the night, blankets of snow piled up on them, at first muffling the sound of the roaring wind, eventually extinguishing it. The moisture from the brothers’ slow breathing iced the interiors of their snow holes. The snow’s weight nearly cemented their bodies in place. They were almost buried alive.

The next day, when 23-year-old Roald woke up, he found himself encased in ice, unable to move. But Leon, 25, having kicked off the snow through the night with berserk exertion, was able to escape. Only the tips of his brother’s boots were still visible. Leon dug frantically for more than an hour, pulling Roald out just before he asphyxiated.

Later that day, the brothers skied south off the Hardangervidda. Frozen and hungry, they found their way to Mogen, a cluster of log cabins on the northern edge of a body of water called Vinjefjorden.

“They were saved by a farmer just over there,” says Kjersti Wøllo, sliding homemade reindeer sausages onto my plate and pointing through a steamed window at the spot. Wøllo and her partner, Petter Martinsen, operate the cross-country ski hut at Mogen, which they’ve opened early, in March, just for us. My brother Steve and I have come to Norway to retrace the Amundsen brothers’ journey across the Hardangervidda, partly as a tribute to our heritage (our mother’s side of the family is Norwegian) and partly to better understand the courage and drive that made Amundsen unquestionably the greatest polar explorer of all time. Mogen is halfway along our ski route. For four days straight, we’ve been grinding into 60-mile-per-hour headwinds.

“Amundsen gave the farmer a compass for saving their lives,” says Wøllo, a classic Norwegian beauty in her thirties, whose hair is pulled back in a thick ponytail. “His great-grandson still has it.”

The attempt was Amundsen’s second at crossing the largest mountain plateau in Northern Europe; the first, in 1893, ended after a 40-below open bivouac in which he nearly froze to death. The Hardangervidda had turned out to be almost unconquerably cold and storm-whipped: the perfect polar prep school. Amundsen would later wryly recall that his ski traverse “was as strenuous and dangerous as any of my ­following trips.… [T]he training proved ­severer than the experience for which it was preparation, and it well-nigh ended the ­career before it began.”

It is often the close calls of a man’s youth that set the course for his life. Ill equipped and ignorant, flush with youthful hubris, Amundsen would never again make such mistakes.

“şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř is just bad planning,” he would famously say. And yet it was by getting slam­med in his own backyard that Amundsen found the direction of his life.

One hundred years ago, in the fall of 1911, a team of five Norwegians led by the 39-year-old Amundsen began skiing south across Antarctica, the harshest continent on earth. They looked like Inuits, clothed entirely in furs, mushing 52 Greenland dogs pulling four sleds. Some 500 miles west, a team of 15, led by 43-year-old Robert Falcon Scott, a British naval captain, began setting out for precisely the same absurd location: the South Pole.

Scott’s team consisted of four men driving two motorized sledges, ten plodding behind sled-pulling ponies, and two on skis. As British author Roland Huntford recounted in his extraordinary 1979 double biography, Scott and Amundsen, this was the start of one of history’s last great adventure epics: a contest not simply between two men or two nations but between two philosophies.

Huntford was scathing in his critique of Scott, describing him variously as contradictory, confused, deluded, ­dramatic, irritable, and morose. Amundsen, on the other hand, drew his highest praise. “In the way an artist may be obsessed with his art,” Huntford concluded, “Amundsen was obsessed with exploration to the exclusion of all else.”

We all know how the contest ended. Amundsen got to the pole first and made it back safely with all his men. Scott also got to the pole—34 days after Amundsen—but didn’t make it back alive, dying of starvation with two other men in a forlorn tent 130 miles from base camp.

Having studied and experienced polar exploration throughout my adult life, I’m convinced that Huntford’s tough, controversial take on Scott got it right, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for the Brit. Scott and Amundsen were both courageous men, equally committed to their cause. Both had larger-than-life egos that could lead other men to sublime achievements or bring them unimaginable suffering.
But their styles couldn’t have been more different. Amundsen was a brilliant tactician and an exhaustive strategist, Scott a rigid officer and obdurate romantic who failed to understand that the strategies of travel and survival developed by the Inuit were the keys to success.

Both men served long apprenticeships en route to their destinies. Amundsen was born into a wealthy family of ship captains, the youngest of four brothers. He spent half his wild childhood skiing in the rugged fjords and deep forests around Christiania (now Oslo), the other half in shipyards and on the ocean. His father, a ship captain, died at sea when Amundsen was only 14. Amundsen ­attended university to appease his mother, but he had an intensely pragmatic, rational mind that was well suited to a life outdoors and incompatible with the classroom.

Scott was born into a wealthy family of ­naval officers, with four sisters and a ­brother. He was a sickly child, gently teased by his ­sisters, and at 13 he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet. An exceptional student, especially in mathematics, Scott went to sea for four years, returned to naval college, then went to sea again, sailing around Cape Horn.

Amundsen’s heroes included a fellow Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen, a fabled explorer and the first man to ski across Greenland. Nansen was an ethnologist before the word existed and learned how to survive on the ice from the Inuit, almost reaching the North Pole in 1895.

Scott cast himself in the mold of the tragic British hero Sir John Franklin, a dogmatic, siege-style explorer who perished in the ­Arctic in 1848 with all 128 of his men, starving ­after his two ships became hopelessly trapped in ice. When Scott was made an ­officer, the Royal Navy had ruled the world’s seas for more than a century, but it had been gradually weakened by bureaucracy and nepotism. Scott wanted to be the man who restored that glory: he was known for his sly ambition, academic ability, and deep desire for promotion.

Amundsen decided as a teenager that he would become a polar explorer and never wavered, preparing himself in every way and signing on to a polar seal-hunting mission in 1894. He subsequently spent two years ­exploring the edges of Antarctica, then another three years, 1903–06, in the Arctic on a quest to become the first to sail from the ­Atlantic to the Pacific through the ice-choked Northwest Passage. He not only com­pleted this harrowing mission but became the second explorer to reach the magnetic North Pole.

It was during this expedition that Amundsen learned about dogsledding and igloo building from the Netsilik Inuits. What he saw impressed upon him the hard facts of polar travel: fresh meat could prevent ­scurvy (a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C), dogs and sleds were perfect for the poles, skis were fast and efficient over great distances.

In 1907, Amundsen published The North-West Passage, two unheralded volumes of straight, unadorned prose in which he under­plays risk, takes struggle in stride, and heralds the primitive winter survival skills of the ­Inuit as supreme. Like Nansen before him, Amundsen was far ahead of his time, having the ­genius and openness to master the indigenous ­culture’s ancient survival skills—an ability not simply ignored but often disdained by other explorers of the day.

Scott also spent three years, from 1901 to 1904, probing the edges of the Antarctic. Afterward, he wrote an adventure classic, The Voyage of the Discovery, a man-against-nature tale that became a critical and financial success. And yet, regarding polar travel, Scott’s national prejudices led him to conclude just the opposite of Amundsen: he insisted on the nobility of man-hauling sledges versus the efficiency of dogsledding, was convinced postholing on foot worked better than gliding on skis, and refused to believe that fresh meat prevented scurvy.

At the time, the South Pole was the last great prize for explorers. English captain James Cook had been the first to sail across the Antarctic Circle, in 1773; his countryman Edward Bransfield the first to set foot on the continent in 1820; and another English captain, James Ross, the first to chart some of its coast. Ernest Shackleton, who had been with Scott in the Antarctic on board the Discovery in 1901–04, led his own ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, getting within 97 miles in January 1909 before turning back and almost dying of starvation during his retreat.

Later, in the summer of 1909, the American Frederick Cook, thought to be dead, ­suddenly emerged from the Arctic, claiming to have reached the North Pole in April 1908. Two weeks after that, American Robert Peary claimed to have done the same in April 1909. Newspapers were abuzz for months.

Today it’s generally accepted that both Peary and Cook were lying, but at the time their claims changed the game completely. Scott and Amundsen, archrivals, immediately set their sights on the South Pole. The race was on.

At 845,595 acres, Hardangervidda National Park is the second-largest wilderness area in Europe. When the Amundsens tried to traverse it, they winter camped, spending only one night in a hut called Sandhaug. Today, thanks to the Norwegian Trekking Association, there are two dozen huts on the treeless, wind-scoured plateau.

Using Amundsen’s description of his ski trek and a topo of the Hardangervidda, Steve and I plotted a roughly 100-mile route from southeast to northwest, passing by eight huts. Two were staffed and served meals; the other six were self-service dwellings stocked with food, fuel, and blankets. Which meant that we could conceivably do a very light ski tour—no tent, no sleeping bags, no stove, no cookware, no food.

“But what if we get lost in a whiteout?” Steve asked. “Or get hurt, or move slow, or for whatever reason don’t make it to the next hut? We’ll freeze to death.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Three weeks before we left, four Germans skiing hut to hut on another trail in Norway were found dead. Swallowed by a snowstorm, they froze within a mile of shelter. Four years earlier, two Scottish skiers attempting to cross the Hardangervidda hut to hut had been caught in a storm and died of exposure right on the marked ski track.

In the end, we each brought a foam pad and a paper-thin bivy sack, plus one ­shovel—just enough to dig in and survive a night out if necessary. Throughout the winter leading up to our trip, Steve, a headhunter in ­Denver and a former high school cross-country ski racer, hit the NordicTrack each morning at four; I skate-skied every day in Wyoming. Knowing that we had to be swift and smooth—or else—we toured together some weekends, through the worst conditions we could find, continuously testing and refining our gear choices.

Steve was expecting calamity and prepared for it. The Hardangervidda traverse didn’t strike me as any more difficult or danger­ous than some of my other trips—skiing across the heart of Greenland with a Norwegian and Swedish expedition, circumnavigating Yellow­stone for a month on skis—so I arrogantly expected an easy eight-day tour.

The first five minutes on the Hardangervidda disabused me of this. The wind was so fierce, it had stripped much of the snow off the tundra. What snow remained was ice, and we were obliged to immediately stretch on our skins to avoid being blown straight backward.

“What’d I tell you!” Steve screamed, grinning ear to ear.

The first hut, Helberghytta, was empty and cold when we arrived. The cabin is named after Norway’s most famous World War II ­resistance fighter, Claus Helberg, and its walls are lined with photographs from the secret mission he’d been part of to destroy a Nazi plant near Telemark that produced heavy water, an essential ingredient in the production of nuclear weapons. We fired up the woodstove, boiled canned reindeer meatballs we’d found in the pantry, burrowed under five layers of woolen blankets like kids in a fort, and felt deeply grateful not to be camping.

The next day, the headwind was preposterous. We were repeatedly knocked off our feet, as if we were being slugged by an invisible boxer. At lunch we had to sit on our packs, backs hunched against the wind, lest they be blown away.

“Can’t imagine having more fun,” Steve shouted through his hood.

It took us more than eight hours to cover 14 miles to the Kalhovd hut. There we found 16 Norwegians huddled around the woodstove, drinking tea and waiting out the storm. When our faces thawed enough for us to speak, they were shocked.

“Americans! Why woot you come here to Norvay?”

I mentioned my obsession with Amundsen, and Steve explained that our mother’s maiden name was Smebakken—“smith on a hill.” They nodded but still looked confused, clearly wondering why two people from the land of obesity would choose to ski through a storm in long, lean Norway.

The next day, the wind remained ridiculous. The Norwegians altered their plans and ended their trip, going downhill with the wind. Steve and I did the opposite, skiing due west across Kalhovdfjorden, directly into the gale, not speaking and stopping only once to wolf sandwiches and energy bars while hiding behind a boulder.

It took us seven hours to go 14 miles. Without skins, despite the fact that the terrain was flat, it would have been hard to reach the next hut, Stordalsbu.

“Amundsen would be proud,” Steve ­shouted as we arrived at the snug, clean, well-built Norwegian cottage. I made a fire while he cooked. My brother was lighthearted and talk­ative, unfazed by the unbelievable­ ­weather; I was both exhilarated and exhausted.

The next morning, we crossed a pass in the first couple hours and began sliding downhill into a roaring opaqueness. When the terrain leveled out, we guessed we were somewhere near Lake VrĂĄsjĂĄen but needed bearings. As I was holding the orienteering compass over the topo and trying to triangulate, the wind ripped both map and compass from my hands. They disappeared in the maelstrom. Only partially unnerved, Steve pulled out an extra compass and spare maps and we huddled together.

“We’re off course!” I yelled.

He looked worried. He knew that if we were really lost, we probably wouldn’t survive a night out.

Following a hunch, we made a 90-degree turn to the south. We’d skied half a mile when the clouds cleared just long enough for us to get our bearings, locate the trail again, and identify our next pass. I laughed with relief, and Steve spanked his ski poles over his head.

We ascended the pass slowly, cowering behind rock outcrops where we could. Dropping down the other side was lovely at first. We telemarked over icy meadows and along a wiggling creek. But soon the topography tipped and we found ourselves in a steep defile. For hours we carefully downclimbed frozen waterfalls, zigzagged through birch trees, plowed into snow up to our waists, and cursed the Norse gods.

We reached the Mogen hut deeply grateful not to have broken a leg but well aware that the remaining trip would be both dangerous and challenging. Though there was a trail on the map, there wasn’t one on the landscape: almost every day we were out, we had to navi­gate with map and compass through a howling white wilderness.

Amundsen and Scott arrived in the Antarctic in January of 1911, and each team knew that a historic contest was under way. Hundreds of miles apart, both teams built elaborate base camps on the Ross Ice Shelf and prepared to winter over. A single push to the South Pole—1,400-plus miles round-trip, with a dangerous haul over high passes through the Transantarctic Mountain—was impossible, so each team spent the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn ferrying supplies to depots along their respective routes. When winter set in—June through ­August—darkness descended, and temperatures dropped to 50 below.

Amundsen’s men, working in ­well-crafted snow caves, were urgently industrious through the dark season. They tested and altered their ski boots three times, each man cobbling his own boots to conform precisely to his feet to prevent frostbite and blisters. Their fur clothing was repeatedly evaluated on trial runs and then retailored by each member to fit perfectly, eliminating chafing. The men used a lightweight wind cloth to make tents that were nearly half the weight of canvas ones, then dyed them black with shoe polish and ink powder, for three reasons: to make it easier to find the tents in a whiteout; to provide rest for ­weary, snow-seared eyes; and to soak up warmth from ­solar radi­ation. In the snow-walled wood­shop, the team’s craftsman, Olav Bjaaland, redesigned their dog sleds, cutting the weight from 150 pounds each to 50. Bjaaland, a champion skier, fashioned custom skis for each team member.

Scott was satisfied with his wool-and-­cotton clothing and confident in his ponies’ ability to plow through snow pulling heavy sleds. The English expedition did not refine its systems. Scott believed courage trumped adversity and that character, not craft, would carry the day. In their base camp at McMurdo Sound, he and his men squandered the ­winter on esoteric academic lectures, amateur theater, soccer, and letter writing.

For Amundsen, nothing had been left to chance. Pemmican was weighed down to the gram, biscuits (more than 40,000) were counted individually, seal meat was laid in depot larders, sled compasses calibrated, dogs fattened. He had learned from the Inuit that deliberately courting danger was immature, if not immoral.

Scott was a big-picture man with visions of grandeur, and he left the details to others. Besides, for the first 400 miles he would literally be following in Shackleton’s footsteps. To set his farthest-south record, Shackleton and three companions had plodded on foot, man-hauling massive sleds. Scott intended to do the same after using ponies and dogs for part of the route.

From the start, Amundsen moved quickly and smoothly. He could barely control the exuberance of his dogs, and the men could sometimes ride on the sleds rather than ski. His teams typically covered 12 miles in five or six hours, then set up camp, devoting the rest of the day to rest and recuperation. If the weather was nasty they built igloos. In the fall, they had marked their depots with wide lines of flags in case they veered off course, so that even in storms they easily found their resupplies of food and fuel. For the Norwegians, all of whom were excellent cross-country skiers, it was a grand jaunt. A big ski tour.

Scott’s two prototype snowmobiles (a third fell through the ice while unloading) had not been properly tested during the winter, and few spare parts had been cached, so they broke down and were abandoned ­after five days. The ponies, sweating all over their bodies, suffered grotesquely, Huntford wrote, their backs and flanks often plated in ice. Naturally, their sharp hooves punched holes in the snow. They were often wading up to their trembling knees, sometimes up to their freezing, huffing chests. Halfway to the pole, their fodder gone, the ponies were shot. From that point on, man-hauling began.

It was a given on both expeditions that some of the draft animals would be killed en route. Amundsen put down any of the sled dogs that came into heat, wouldn’t pull, or became too belligerent, feeding them to the remaining dogs, his team, and himself. At one point, after slogging over the Transant­arctic Mountains—a massive east-west chain with peaks of up to 15,000 feet—Amundsen slaughtered half his remaining dogs to ­supply both men and animals with enough meat to survive the final push to the pole and the ­return trip. The journey back, when men and beasts were mentally, physically, and spiritually fatigued, was even more crucial than the push out.

Having determined on previous polar journeys the precise daily nutritional needs of both man and dog, Amundsen had ten times the reserves of food at each depot as Scott. By skiing only half a day, Amundsen’s team retained strength, vigor, and morale. Scott drove his team like he drove the ponies, his men pulling in harnesses 12 hours a day. They inevitably became weak, emaciated, and demoralized.

At Mogen, WølloĚýand Martinsen fed us so well—and regaled us with so many remarkable stories about the pleasures of Norwegian life—that we might have given up our traverse right there. Thanks to a wealth of oil and natural gas, the government has accumulated the second-largest rainy-day fund on earth, more than $500 billion. Every citizen has guaranteed government health care for life and a full pension. Unemployment is low, and there’s essentially no poverty.

“I think I could live here,” Steve said dreamily as we were falling asleep in our bunks. Alas, the next day we had to ski away.

The wind had at last abated, replaced by below-zero temperatures. We pushed back up onto the central plateau, stopping only for lunch and swigs of hot cloudberry tea. The snow was brittle and the landscape bewilder­ingly featureless—in all directions, there were snow-clad hills of identical height and shape. We set a map bearing and followed it precisely, deviating only to avoid steep ­ascents or descents.

When we reached the Lågaros hut, in mid­afternoon, it was so buried we had to dig it out to get in the door. We assumed we would have it to ourselves, but soon we heard shouting. Peeking out the frosted windows, we couldn’t believe what we saw: three kite-skiers literally sailing in from nowhere. They dropped their packs beside the hut and then continued to kite-ski just for the fun of it, jumping and carving, sweeping in vast loops across the landscape.

When they finally came inside, they were jubilant. They were Norwegian, of course: two brothers and a woman. They’d skied 28 miles that day and still had energy enough to play. We’d come just 11 miles and were whipped. One was a soldier who had just ­returned from a year in Afghanistan; the other two were medical students. This was their third attempt to cross the Hardangervidda.

“The other times, the wind didn’t cooperate and we had to trudge along on skis,” one said with a knowing grin.

They’d spent three years testing different skis and kites and knew exactly what they were doing. They were also ­going with the prevailing winds rather than against them, as we were.

“Total traverse of the Hardangervidda will take us about three days,” the woman ­offered, almost ashamed to admit the efficiency of their trip to a couple of cross-country masochists who would ski for eight days to cover the same distance.

They slept in the next morning, knowing they could fly ­another 20 to 25 miles in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, Steve and I slogged on.

The snow was rough and the landscape burning white. It was like skiing across a desert of sand dunes. With the wind down and navigation unnecessary, we knocked off the 16 miles to Sandhaug, the next hut, in a few hours.

One hundred and fifteen years ago, the Amundsen brothers had spent a night in this very hut. Arriving early in the afternoon, we had time to catch up on our journals, sketch out our route on the maps, hoover an extra meal or two, and toast our toes over the stove.

“I’m not sure life gets much better than this,” Steve said before dozing off.

That night another storm blew in, and it ­began building drifts around the cabin. Just as we were turning in, five middle-aged, not particularly fit Norwegians burst through the door.

“Vat are you doing here?” one of them asked snootily. But they were more than happy to suck down all the snow we had melted and dry their soaked socks over the well-stoked stove.

The next day we were gone before they got up. It was snowing and blowing ­miserably. Within the first hour of skiing, visibility dropped until the sky and the earth fused into a single miasmic substance. At one point, looking down, I spotted two black dots far below me. Staring through depthlessness, I couldn’t tell how far away they were. Five yards? Five hundred? I backed away from the gaping abyss only to realize that the distant dots were the tips of my skis.

Without depth perception, it became difficult to balance and impossible to move in a straight line. We were blindfolded by the whiteout ten miles from our next hut. We had to stop.


“Have gone completely blind all day,” Amundsen recorded in his journal on ­Decem­ber 5, 1911. “[T]hick snowfall more 
like home.” He and his team still skied 12.5 miles. The next day was no different, but Amundsen’s team made their standard distance no matter what.

Scott, materially and mentally unprepared for such conditions, either didn’t move on bad days or trudged moderate distances that required unconscionable suffering, his men straining to man-haul their monstrous sledges.

As Amundsen closed in on the pole, Scott was hundreds of miles behind. Neither knew of the other’s position, which caused Scott enormous anxiety. He pushed himself and his men sadistically. There were days when both Scott and Amundsen made the same mileage but Amundsen did it in half the time, economizing on effort and riding the sleds when possible. Scott all but killed himself and his men.

On December 14, 1911, Amundsen and his four teammates made it to the South Pole. “And so at last we reached our destination and planted our flag on the geographical South Pole … Thank God!” he wrote in his journal. His focus on his men, he stated that his teammates displayed the qualities he most admired: “courage and dauntlessness, without boasting or big words.” He and his skiers had been in the Antarctic almost a year and had been skiing toward the pole for more than 50 days, covering some 700 miles. Aware of the need for proof, the Norwegians spent three days mapping 24 sextant readings to make ­absolutely certain they were precisely at the bottom of the earth. They left a sled, a tent, and a cheeky note of welcome to Scott, then headed home.

Scott and four men (all the others having been sent back along the way, fortuitously) arrived at the South Pole more than a month later, cadaverous, malnourished, tired, and weak. They found Amundsen’s tent and his note. Wrote Scott: “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Steve yelled.

“No! But I know where we’re going,” I screamed back.

The evening before Steve and I got caught in this latest whiteout, at Sandhaug, I’d been listening to the snow beating against the windowpanes like the wings of a frightened bird. Concerned about the next day’s travel, I’d calculated four consecutive bearings in the warmth of the hut. There were three empty cabins between us and our next destination; the bearings shot like arrows from one to the next.

Abandoning any pretense of seeing where we were going, Steve and I set off in the ­dir­ection of the first bearing. After skiing blind for five minutes, we stopped, held the compass directly over our skis, and found that we were ten degrees off course. The wind was too strong to ski with­out both poles, so we resorted to rechecking our bearing every 50 paces. It was tediously slow going, but we hit the first intermediary cabin dead-on. A drink, an energy bar, and onward.

We made the next hut by lunch. It was half buried, so we dug out a hole under the eaves, laid down our foam pads, ate deliberately, and ignored the swirling snow. On the map we were halfway to our goal, although we had been trapped in clouds all morning and had seen nothing but white on white.

We never found our third landmark ­cabin—it must have been entirely buried. At one point, the clouds cleared and Steve pointed out a ridgeline.

“Maybe a click away?” he shouted. But the landscape was still playing tricks on us; it was three times that far.

At the end of the day, we were traveling along a steep hillside, beginning to ­question ourselves, when our destination—the Hadlaskard hut—appeared out of nowhere to our left.

It was our last hut on the Hardangervidda. We feasted on reindeer stew, crackers heaped with Nutella and cheese, and thick squares of Norwegian chocolate. Since we were the only people in the hut, we dragged blankets from the cold bunk rooms, lay down on the couches next to the woodstove, and slept so well we snored.

As if the Norse gods were finally convinced that we were worthy of our little dream, the wind stopped blowing the next day—our last—the sun came out, and Steve and I slid ­effortlessly along. We glided atop the snow-covered Veig River, dropping into pockets of birch trees with summer cabins sprinkled among them. As we marched up over our last pass, it ­started snowing lightly. Warm, big flakes and no wind. We slid north off the Hardanger­vidda hardly ­poling, completing the traverse in Garen.

But now it didn’t feel right to stop. After more than a week of abysmal weather, the conditions were suddenly straight out of a fairy tale, twinkling snow falling like goose down. We decided to do a big victory loop. Striding in rhythm, brothers in silent unison, we skied through the forest into the twilight.


As Roland Huntford clearly laid out in Scott and Amundsen, Scott was transformed into a hero by the English press when he should have been pilloried. On his expedition’s ignoble struggle from the South Pole back to camp, petty officer Edgar Evans was the first to die, pulling to the last, collapsing in his harness. Cavalry captain Lawrence Oates was next, his feet so frostbitten they were gangrenous. On the morning of his 32nd birthday, Oates crawled from the tent and limped into oblivion. Scott was still keeping his journal, writing for posterity, penning vainglorious letters of farewell. Marine lieutenant Henry Bowers, chief expedition scientist Edward Wilson, and captain Robert Falcon Scott, all skeletal and badly frostbitten, died in their tent in Antarctica sometime after March 21, 1911.

After reaching the South Pole, Amundsen and his team easily cruised back to base camp, covering 700 miles in just six weeks. In all, they had skied 1,400 miles in 99 days. No one had died; hardly anyone had been sick. There was some frostbite, but no one lost fingers or toes. Amundsen had done everything possible to remove drama and danger from his expeditions, and for that he was, in a strange but tangible way, punished. Despite the fact that his South Pole expedition was the apotheosis of elegance and efficiency, arguably the finest expedition ever accomplished by man, he would be all but forgotten outside of Norway in the decades after his death, which came in 1928, when he perished in a plane crash, probably over the Barents Sea.

Huntford, who did as much as anyone to restore Amundsen to the adventure pantheon, thought his death was both a waste and a fitting end. Amundsen had been on his way to help rescue an Italian polar explorer, Umberto Nobile, who had disappeared during an airship flight to the North Pole. Nobile was rescued by someone else, so Amundsen could have stayed home. But for Huntford, it was a strangely appropriate exit.

“His end was worthy of the old Norse sea kings who sought immolation when they knew their time had come,” he wrote. “It was the exit he would have chosen for himself.”

The post Amundsen Schlepped Here appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Jonathan Goldsmith saved a man’s life once during a whiteout on Mount Whitney. He rescued a little girl who was drowning in Malibu. He starred in and has appeared in some 100 TV shows. He cries easily, practices Pilates, and has . Impressive, sure. But is the 72-year-old actor, who plays the Most Interesting Man in the World , as intriguing as the gallant gentleman he portrays? Mark Jenkins rang him up at his home in Vermont to find out.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř: I love that you’re Sno-Sealing boots as we talk.
Goldsmith: I really like the smell of . I even put it on my dress shoes.

Most people hate commercials, but everyone likes yours. Why is that?
The appeal, I think, is to . For example, I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant, and this fella came up to me and said, “I asked my seven-year-old kid what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said the Most Interesting Man in the World.” Two weeks later I’m on a bus in Manhattan, and this old gentleman getting off the bus taps me on the shoulder and says, “Sonny, when I come back, I want to be you.”

He’s kind of the alpha male—part Indiana Jones, part James Bond. But I find it interesting that you’re poking fun at the whole persona, too.
I try not to make fun of the character at all, although I understand how it could come off that way in someone’s interpretation. I take his legacy seriously. He has a sense of pride and all-knowing that only come from a life well spent and thoroughly lived on the edge.

Let’s talk about that, because most guys don’t live on the edge.
. The funny thing is that my life has had more of those kinds of moments, really, than the character’s has.

So is he based on you then?
Not really. I based him more on my friend [South American actor] . He used to be my sailing buddy and regaled me with his stories for years. And he’s the kind of guy, of course, that I, too, would like to be. We’re different in some ways—I prefer the outdoors, nature, and solitude—but I like to think there’s a little bit of a DNA match somewhere.

This resurgence in your career must be wonderful.
You have no idea. I had a very auspicious start in my first year as an actor, 52 years ago. I co-starred in some vehicles with Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge.

I read that you always wanted to do comedy but ended up being a bad guy instead.
Absolutely. I in a comedy with Jack Elam, but then I went back to killing and being killed.

You’ve got kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids now. What advice do you have for a young man today?
Life is like a parade, and it’s . And then there are some that get in that parade. Those are the people who come away with something special. And don’t be afraid of your sensitive side. I used to be ashamed that I was so sensitive. I can see two dogs copulating and get teary-eyed. I find the least attractive men are the ones who have so-called macho­ness on their sleeve. They bore the living shit out of me.

That’s part of the appeal of your character—you get the feeling he doesn’t have to prove much.
Exactly. You either have it or you don’t. And it can’t really be quantified; there’s no prescription for it. Class is class. Courage is courage. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř is adventure. Most people who live a nine-to-five life, they get security in structure. I don’t. I love unstructured. I find sleep mostly a waste of time. I’ve been living on sailboats on and off for almost 40 years. Sometimes you have to let the dock lines go.

The Most Interesting Beers in America

• Do you live in one of the best beer regions in the U.S.? The “eat local” movement just hit a brewery near you.
• What about craft beer towns, you ask? We answer.
• And for our foraged-beer lovers (the farm-to-tablers strike again), this has to be interesting.

The post The World’s Most Interesting Alpha Male appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I unintentionally pitchfork a clod of manure into my mouth. Sputtering—it tastes like brussels sprouts and farts—I spit it out, finish loading the wheelbarrow with dung, drag it out of the barn, and start running and rolling across the field. This is my 14th round-trip, and I'm being timed; each circuit has to be quicker than the last or they start adding laps. I race past the timekeeper, dump the manure at a compost pile, and head back to the barn.

Death Race

Death Race competitor JENKINS, MARK. Subject's expression of enjoyment may prove short-lived.

Death Race

JENKINS pilots wheelbarrow, contemplates nothingness, during Death Race “manure laps.”

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It's June 26, I'm 17 hours into the Death Race, and, all in all, I'm still feeling pretty strong. A barbwire gash on my head has coated one side of my face with blood, but as I told the medic in my best Monty Python falsetto, “It's a mere flesh wound.” My back no longer feels as if the vertebrae are being crushed, but the pain in my knees is definitely worse. It's not raining (at the moment), and my one-person pit crew—stalwart wife, Sue—is running alongside me, pushing peach slices into my slack-jawed mouth. I know I can finish this race. What I don't know is that this is the last time I'll feel good for a month.

I fill the wheelbarrow again and sprint across the hayfield, shit flying. En route, I pass Stefanie Bishop, 27, the fastest woman in the event. She's practically skipping behind her wheelbarrow, turd-flecked blond hair bouncing. At age 51, I'm grimacing, huffing like a horse, while Bishop, halfway into her laps, effortlessly gives me a broad smile and shouts, “Yeah! Go get 'em!” It's twisted. The girl's some kind of superhero.

The next task turns out to be a pond swim. (In the Death Race, you never know what each new challenge will be.) I've been ordered to count out 1,250 pennies and put $5 worth in a plastic bag. After running straight through the night lugging ungodly heavy objects, sitting in the grass counting coins sounds almost pleasant. Except I'm so exhausted that my mind's malfunctioning. I keep miscounting. By the time I get 500 pennies into the bag, the Vermont weather has changed its mind. It's drizzling and I'm shivering.

I stand on the edge of the dimpled pond and watch as the bag of pennies, plus two bags of rocks thrown in as decoys, sink into the chilly water. My job is to go in and retrieve the pennies. Bishop got ahead of me during the counting, and I watch her perform this task with ease—diving in, bobbing back up with the correct bag, and then tearing off for the next mission.

I slide into the water, nuts shriveling, heart momentarily halted by the shocking cold, swim out to where I think the bag sank, and go down. I try feeling my way around in the foot-deep mud but find nothing. I surface for air and then, like a duck, flip ass end up and dive again. I do this five times, holding my breath as long as I can, blindly groping in the billowing muck, and still I don't find the damn pennies. Ten times—no pennies. Fifteen times—no pennies. By now my lips are blue, chest constricted, joints rigid, jaw so stiff I can no longer speak. I'm reaching the point of hypothermia but refuse to give up.

That's always been my problem, of course. I've viewed DNF-ing a race as a fate worse than injury, so I've straggled in with broken bones on more than one occasion. Not reaching the summit of a mountain kills me, so I've almost died trying a dozen times, returning with frostbite or torn tendons or a triple hernia.

Obviously, I don't know when it's time to say uncle. But I have a sick feeling that this race may teach me when it's time to scream it.

EVERYBODY WHO SIGNS UP for the Death Race—a demented sufferfest held in Pittsfield, Vermont, every summer for the past six years, with a winter edition in March that's been run only once—clearly shares my problem. Founded by Joe De Sena and Andy Weinberg, triathletes who were tired of ordinary races and gifted with a creative sense of the sadistic, the Death Race is an idiosyncratic form of punishment that can't be compared to any other race in the world. The New York Times dubbed it “Survivor meets Jackass,” and for ordinary athletes the competition is indeed appalling. Without exception, my climbing and cycling buddies, wife, daughters, and everyone else I asked said it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard of.

“Our goal is to break you,” De Sena bluntly told me on the phone a few months before the race. A stocky, crew-cut, no-holds-barred entrepreneur from Queens, New York, the 41-year-old De Sena is convinced that America has become despicably lazy and needs a kick in the ass. “We don't give you any water, we don't give you any food, we don't tell you what you'll have to do in the race,” he said. “You don't know when the race really starts or when it ends. We don't encourage you. We want you to quit.”

It was this pervasive foreboding that I found so appealing. In most races, you know exactly what to expect—tasks, distances, feed stations—and can therefore prepare yourself mentally, easing anxiety. Not in the Death Race. All you know is that it takes place on or near De Sena's property, the Amee Farm, a rolling spread in central Vermont's Green Mountains, and that you'll be forced to think for yourself, adapt, suffer ceaselessly, and suck it up in bizarre situations. Every year the race is different and full of cruel surprises: In 2009, for example, competitors carried a bicycle for ten hours only to ride it for five minutes.

The race's Web site is YouMayDie.com, the name alone drawing in a certain type of person—i.e., me—like cattle to the slaughterhouse. Here you'll see videos of exhausted competitors crawling under barbwire in the dark, splitting wood in the rain, running muddy mountains or slippery-bottomed rivers while bent under absurdly heavy loads. “We push participants way out of their comfort zone,” explains Weinberg, 39, a high school gym teacher. “The people who enter this race are amazing, inspiring individuals. The kind of people you want in your foxhole.”

Each participant in Death Race 2010 was required to upload a video of his or her training methods to YouMayDie.com. I toyed with the fates by sending in a parody of a training film—extolling the use of bundt cake as a performance enhancer—but most of the videos were serious fare, leaving no doubt that those who entered were insanely fit and knew how to hurt. Most entrants appeared to be military, ex-military, physical trainers, triathletes, ultramarathoners, or some other iteration of psycho endurance freak.

Although fewer than 20 percent of competitors are able to finish the Death Race, I didn't think I'd have much trouble, since mountain climbing is practically the definition of masochism. But I wasn't taking any chances. I decided that my standard daily workout—100 push-ups, 100 pull-ups, 100 sit-ups, 30 minutes of stadium stairs—was insufficient, so I began adding time to the stairs. After I could run stairs for an hour without fatiguing, I moved to running hills at altitude. After that I started running hills with a backpack. Eventually I was running ski slopes with a heavy backpack, which landed me in the surgeon's office one week before the race.

“Well,” said the doc, comparing my latest set of back X-rays with the previous set, “it looks like this time you've managed to severely inflame an old injury on your L5.”

“All right!” I was actually relieved. The injury was so painful that I thought I must have squashed a disk.

I practically have a wing named after me at Gem City Bone and Joint, an orthopedic center in my hometown, Laramie, Wyoming. A few highlights: Snapped my left leg telemarking, requiring a shiny plate and six screws; smashed my right shoulder mountain-biking, shoving my collarbone right through my back, requiring lots of fancy work with a bone saw; tore my biceps tendon—”a bull rider's tear,” another doc called it—ice-climbing; fell to the ground rock-climbing, almost ripping my left hand off.

“I know you're not going to not race,” the doc said, “so …” He gave me a six-day course of steroids for my back and threw in a bottle of Vicodin. “At your age, after this race, you're going to need it.”

YOU'RE ADVISED not to attempt the Death Race without a support person, someone to squirt fluids in your face or haul you off to the hospital. Sue, my wife, thought the race was idiotic, but once I decided to do it she had my back. She always does. A marathoner herself, she's seen me covered with blood and stitches; stayed calm when I was arrested in Tajikistan or Tibet or Burma; kicked my ass climbing at high altitude; and installed a new sink and rewired the kitchen when I was away too long on an expedition.

Our tickets from Wyoming to Vermont were canceled without explanation (lovely airlines!), so, naturally, we were rebooked and endlessly delayed, with pre-Vermont stops in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. After traveling for 48 hours, we arrived in Pittsfield just in time for the Friday-evening registration, having had no more than a few winks of bad sleep in two days.

But the race wasn't scheduled to start until 4 the next morning, so I wasn't sweating it. After signing liability waivers (for death or dismemberment), competitors were told to meet at 8 P.M. at Pittsfield's Original General Store for a pre-race overview of the course. We were also advised to show up with all our equipment. Three weeks earlier, competitors had been e-mailed a list of mandatory gear: $50 in pennies; a posthole digger; a ten-pound bag of onions; a knife (three-inch blade, minimum); and Greek: An Intensive Course, a five-pound, 850-page modern-Greek textbook.

The list made me anxious. I could imagine digging postholes, on the clock, while trying to recite Aristotle, mouth bursting with onions like something out of Cool Hand Luke. A week before the race, we were sent a cryptic e-mail in Greek. I got it translated. “Less is more,” it read. “Light is better than dark. Make sure you're on time. Prepare thyself. Nothing banned; you can bring a projector, gloves, broadcasting equipment, computer. The mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

A total of 132 people had signed up, but only 89 showed that evening, the rest quitting in advance and forfeiting their $200 registration fee. We all had our 50 pounds of gear, plus water and food. Some people carried not just a knife but an ax; some an ax and a saw; some a humongous Bowie knife.

At the general store, there wasn't any orientation to speak of. Instead, De Sena, Weinberg, and a race staff numbering around 40 gave us maps and loaded us into vans that took us halfway up a 2,621-foot peak called Sable Mountain. From there, we were ordered to hike to the end of the road—about half a mile—where we were told to form into teams of eight. I managed to get myself in with five guys and two women who were ripped. Both women and half the guys were personal or military trainers; one rock of a guy was a Blackhawk fighter pilot; all would drop out within the next 12 hours. We were told to carry our pennies, our five-pound textbooks, and a footbridge—a 17-foot wooden footbridge, to be precise. Thing must have weighed 300 or 400 pounds, and there was one for each team.

At dusk, with each of us carrying about 35 pounds in one hand and part of the bridge in the other, ten teams started marching uphill on a steep, muddy, switchbacking trail. Within minutes, people were stumbling, dropping the bridge, headlamp beams arcing wildly through the forest. De Sena started barking like a drill sergeant: “Five feet! No more than five fucking feet between teams!” He threatened to pull any team that couldn't keep up, so everyone was groaning and slipping and cursing.

My team found its rhythm right away. Lift the bridge on three, move with quick, choppy steps (like you would carrying a refrigerator), drop it on command when we butted up against the next team in the dark. The weight was absurd. It would be easy to crush a vertebra or slip a disk. No one talked about it, though. We were, one and all, stiff-upper-lip Type A's. Suffer-in-silence souls. People who take a dare even when it's dangerous—especially when it's dangerous.

Each team eventually carried its bridge to the top of Sable Mountain. By then it was midnight on Saturday. We'd started at 8 P.M. We were all hoping we might still get a few hours of shut-eye, but we were ordered to carry the bridge back down the mountain. At that moment we all knew, without a doubt, that this wasn't just a pre-race initiation; this was the race. The hideous bridge-humping exercise was a prologue designed to do two things: (1) make certain that we all started in a profoundly sleep-deprived state; (2) make certain we were viscerally afraid of what might come next.

At 3 A.M., we were allowed to drop the bridges and run back to where we'd started seven hours before. There, we each had to load up a five-gallon bucket with gravel and, still carrying the other 35-pound bucket containing the Greek textbook and the pennies, take off running down another trail in the dark.

Following orders, we poured the gravel into various dips in the trail, then De Sena commanded us to jog down to the bottom of the mountain, to the Amee Farm, to the “start” of the race. When we got there, at about 4:30 A.M. on Saturday, we were required to translate two words in Greek, thanatos and genos (“death” and “race”), and told to turn around and go right back up Sable Mountain. Sue poured Gatorade down my throat and plugged a PB&J into my pocket, and away I went.

WHOEVER SAID “What you don't know won't hurt you” was an imbecile. Not knowing is exactly what the Death Race is all about, and it most certainly will hurt you. I knew the race took place in a bucolic Vermont valley and would include classic farm tasks—chopping wood, moving manure—but I didn't know that such efforts would represent only a small fraction of the race, and that 90 percent of our time would be spent running up and down the surrounding, forested mountains, circling back to the meadows of Amee Farm only once every four or five hours.

One of the more hideous tests was a 200-yard barbwire trench, laid out near the top of Sable Mountain. When I got to it, I dove onto my belly without hesitation and started slithering through the mud beneath the strands. Because the barbwire hung only about a foot above the trench, my clothing and skin—everybody's clothing and skin—kept getting caught. It was impossible to reach the other side without getting bloody. And when you did get there, you were told to turn your ass around and go through the trench again, cutting your hands and back and head, before heading back down. I ran the whole way. All the way up, all the way down. Going up was no problem, but coming down, my knees started to whine. I dutifully ignored them, running as fast as I could.

By this point, competitors were spread out through the woods. We were all in misery, so a camaraderie sprang up. If someone passed me, they'd say “Keep it up” between breaths. If I passed someone, I'd shout “Power on!” The race was so hard that we weren't competitors so much as members of one ragged, just-hanging-in-there team. Nicknames emerged: A woman from the Lone Star State was called “Texas”; a guy from Australia became “Oz”; I was “Wyoming.”

Before the race, one companion had opined that the Death Race was “utterly contrived.” I'd agreed. But, hell, so is every other sport besides walking and running. No one was playing basketball or football a thousand years ago. Those games were created by us humans to challenge ourselves, now that we no longer had to wrestle saber-toothed tigers. In fact, a good case could be made that running up and down hills carrying extra weight (like a baby or a haunch of impala), never knowing what's around the next bend, is closer to what man was up to for a million years than almost any socially accepted sport.

When I got down to Amee Farm for the second time, I was told to turn around, go back up, and retrieve my posthole digger, the bag of onions, and the knife. “You're in fourth place!” Sue whispered before sending me off with a handful of gel packets.

Running back uphill, I passed a guy even older than me who was astonished by my pace. “What're you—fucking mad? Running uphill …Pace yourself, man, pace yourself!”

I didn't. I should've walked, but it was a race, right? Besides, I wasn't ready to walk, because I wasn't in enough pain yet. But by the time I got back down to the farm for the third lap up, my knees were screaming. More than half the athletes had already quit, and the race wasn't even half over.

FOR THE NEXT TASK, I had the choice of splitting wood or wheelbarrowing manure. I'd failed to bring an ax, but I could purchase a wheelbarrow for $25 in pennies. (You could use your pennies to buy your way into or out of a given task.) The leader, Joe Decker, 40, a solid block of steel, was on his second-to-last lap in the wheelbarrow event when I started it. He gave me a huge grin and warned me not to go too fast on the first laps, because you had to keep improving your times.

Judging by Decker's video submission, it was clear he was the epitome of what De Sena and Weinberg were looking for in contestants. There were clips of him competing in some of the toughest races on earth: the 2000 Raid Gauloises (a 520-mile trans-Himalayan race) and California's 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon. He's run 65 marathons, completed the 152-mile Marathon des Sables across the Sahara, and also placed first or second in half a dozen strongman contests. He's a one-in-a-million mutant who's built with a gymnast's upper body atop runner's legs. Founder of San Diego's Gut Check Fitness, “a boot camp for civilians,” he was named World's Fittest Man after posting the best time in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records 24-Hour Physical Fitness Test.

Stefanie Bishop, a financial broker from New York, had skipped the video and instead posted a provocative picture of herself in a bikini, wielding a large red ax. I later found out that she was a serious triathlete who'd competed in March's winter edition of the Death Race, an 18-hour snow ordeal, and had whupped all comers, men and women. She's slender but with muscled legs that could squeeze the life out of a sumo wrestler.

Throughout the many hours of hell slog, both Decker and Bishop were always smiling, a phenomenon she'd explain to me after the race. “Even when you're miserable, smiling lifts your mood,” she said perkily. “Allowing yourself to get flustered and angry is when you lose focus, then everything falls apart.”

That sort of thinking is important, because the Death Race attacks you mentally as much as it does physically. Online, you can find De Sena bragging about how the race separates the tough from the timid, the pussies from the powerful. No one forces you to sign up, but after you do, you'll receive regular e-mails from Joe and Andy advising you to give up in advance. “It's not too late,” they say. “Just quit.” They also throw in helpful training advice: “Check yourself into a state prison and get into as many fights as possible” and “Have some teeth pulled without drugs.”

“We are animals, meant to sweat,” De Sena said. “For thousands of years, every day was a death race for humans. This race is for the hunter-gatherers left in society, those few who can still deal with risk and uncertainty.”

I NEVER DO FIND my pennies in the goddamned pond, which means I won't have that five bucks to buy my way out of some unknown future task. When I finally give up and crawl out of the water, I'm shivering uncontrollably. Sue covers me with fleece jackets and pours hot soup down my throat.

The next task is to run—with textbook, posthole digger, onions, knife, remaining pennies, and six heavy chunks of firewood—up and over another mountain to someplace called the Onion House. By this point it's almost 4 P.M. on Saturday, and the few of us still going have been at it for 19 hours.

I can no longer run. No act of willpower could put the pain in my knees out of my mind. I hike as fast as I can, following fluttering bits of pink survey tape straight up a trailless mountain thick with poison ivy.

At the top of the 1,000-foot climb, there's no Onion House. Instead, the survey tape turns and drops straight back down. Going up was manageable for my knees, but going down is excruciating. I should've paced myself, recognizing that, since this is a long race, an extra half-hour walking the downhills wouldn't have made much difference.

Should'ves are always irretrievable; now I have to deal with the consequences. I'm sidestepping, limping, tripping over deadfall and flipping onto my face. At the bottom of the mountain, the survey tape doglegs and goes back up. I begin the ascent with knees screeching and diminishing hope, which surprises me. What the hell is my problem?

When I finally reach the Onion House, the assigned task is to wheelbarrow firewood back and forth for ten laps, then chop up nine pounds of onions and eat a pound. If you still have enough money, you can buy yourself out of this torture, but then you might not have enough to avoid whatever comes next.

For the first time, I sit down to rest.

The old saw “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins” is running through my mind like a loop tape. Am I a quitter?! I can't get my head around it. I never quit. Yes, I've turned back while climbing mountains, but I've always had an excuse other than my body or ability: bad weather or avalanches or rockfall or the injury or death of a partner. I never quit just because I'm in pain.

“Push through the pain!” also echoes, as if my old high-school wrestling coach is screaming inside my head. Which is exactly what I've always done in the past, regardless of the consequences.

I stand up and look down at my knees. They're swollen to the size of cantaloupes. I try to start walking, but hobbling is the best I can muster. I stop and just stand there.

Quitter!

It is at this point, as my bloated ego screams in my ears, that I have an epiphany. Somehow—it will surprise me for months to come—my rational self steps out of the thorny vines of machismo and forces me to think about what's going on. Yes, you can continue, it says, and by the end of the race, tendons and ligaments will be popping out of your knees like worms, another surgery inevitable.

I suddenly remember how, throughout the race, Andy Weinberg (the good cop to Joe De Sena's bad cop) has, remarkably, praised those who quit as much as or more than those who continue—and it all becomes clear. This race isn't only about you against the preposterous physical challenges. That's the ruse, the perfect stratagem. This race is you against your own ego. The constant goading to quit is an exquisite, mind-bending double message: You should already know to rise above your horse's ass of an ego—and thus know when to quit—but we know you don't and won't simply because we're telling you to quit.

It's genius. The lesson of the Death Race is that you still haven't learned your lesson. My mind is on fire with the elegant atonement of it all. And while my spirit isn't broken, my body is. I quit at 21 hours.

DECKER WINS the race in 28 hours and five minutes. Bishop is the first female finisher, in 33:35, tying for sixth overall. While I had my knees packed in ice—I would be in a wheelchair for two days, popping Vicodin, with trashed iliotibial bands that would require six weeks of physical therapy—Decker and Bishop and 17 other implacable competitors continued to run up and down the mountain with all their equipment, paddle down a river in a tube, and finally, at the finish line, do 100 push-ups. The posthole digger was never used, just carried. Of the 89 who started, 19 finish, the last straggling home in 39 hours. In all, the race was 45 miles long, with more than 22,000 feet of elevation gain and loss.

“Every year, the participants are better,” Weinberg says afterwards. “And every year, it's getting harder,” says De Sena. They don't make any money off the Death Race; indeed, the first year they lost more than $10,000. They have no plans to make it bigger or turn it into some kind of reality show. “We won't change the philosophy of the race,” says Weinberg. “The mystery is fundamental.”

De Sena sees the Death Race as his contribution to an America in decline. “Most people are like zombies, sleepwalking through life,” he says. “If we can wake up a hundred people, a thousand, ten thousand, we will have done something.”

I call both Decker and Bishop a few weeks after the race to congratulate them.

“I'm still on a mental high,” gushes Bishop from her office in Manhattan. “I loved that race. It was like three Ironmans back to back. I had sooo much fun.”

Only five weeks before the Death Race, Bishop raced the Ragner Relay, running 60 miles. “So I couldn't train as hard as I would have liked for the Death Race,” she says. To prepare, she ran hill repeats with a pack, doing push-ups and squats and burpees at the bottom of each lap. A week after the Death Race, a co-worker said that her legs “looked like they'd been shoved into a pillowcase full of tacks.”

She's already signed up for the 2011 Death Race. “I'm gonna bring it next year,” she laughs. “I want to beat all the guys this time.”

Decker is signed up, too. He found the race perfectly suited to his abilities: ultrarunning and weightlifting. “I'm not going to lie to you, though,” he says. “Twelve hours in, I wasn't sure I could finish. My back was killing me from carrying that bridge. I finally had to stop and stretch. I calmed myself down, and from then on I had one mantra in my head: Run your own race.”

Decker says it was definitely one of the toughest races he's ever competed in, but he still doesn't think he's reached his limit.

But at long last, I have.

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