Slim Randles

Climbing mountains just doesn’t make any sense at all. Not to a smart person, anyway. In the first place, mountain climbers don’t just do it for the view you get once you reach the summit. If that were the case, they’d just charter a plane and fly around up there, looking down on the rest of us just so they could feel superior.

No, if you are to be a real mountain climber, you have to try for a First. What’s a First? A First is the first time a particular mountain is climbed a particular way. Otherwise, you’re just out for a hike and plan to get tired.

A friend of mine once climbed a famous mountain by being the first person to drive a dog team to the summit. This was, naturally, a First. Another pal of mine once climbed the same mountain in winter. Another First. One woman climbed the mountain when she was 60 years old. This was a First, because every other woman her age knew better than to do a dumb thing like that.

Some famous peaks have comparatively easy trails leading to the summit. I once rode a horse to the summit of Mt. Whitney in California, which used to be the highest mountain in the U.S. before we let Alaska join the club. That’s an easy trail. So how can you do a First on an oft-climbed mountain? Let us now count the ways:

Climb it after dark.

Climb it blindfolded.

Climb it straight up a cliff.

Climb it backwards.

Climb it only after your 90th birthday.

Climb it while carrying a week’s worth of washing on your head.

Climb it with a snake in each pocket.

Climb it to the tune of “The Hokey Pokey.”

By using any one of these methods, you are guaranteed a First, providing no one else has climbed the peak before while using that method. If you suffer from a perpetually snakebit existence, you’ll be unlucky enough to discover, after your record-smashing trek while packing a live monkey in a fanny pack, that someone else already did that, and with a larger monkey. But did he climb the mountain as fast as you did? Aha! Did he have as much rain on the trail as you did? Accc-Haaaa!

Another first.

For half a century now, people have made it to the top of Mt. Everest. It might be worth all the effort and training to get to the top of that mountain just to write in your journal, “…from there we turned downhill.”

But now the trick is going to be, 1. climbing it without oxygen (already done), 2. climbing it alone (oops, did it that way, too), 3. climbing it more than once (yeah … they’ve done that already, too).

What’s left? I wonder if the monkey in the fanny pack has to have oxygen…

Has anyone ever climbed it with nothing to eat but peanut butter sandwiches?

Has anyone ever called a talk show from the summit?

All of this First stuff is simply to avoid having to say, “Yeah, I climbed that one, too.”

No one likes rehash. There’s no sense in it. If I ever climb a difficult mountain successfully, it will definitely be a First. I’ll be able to say, “I made the first ascent of that peak under alcohol-enhanced conditions.”

(Kids … don’t try that at home.)

Usually the Firsts occur because a new route up the mountain is tried. This means if there is a good packed trail going to the summit, we go over about a quarter mile to an overhanging cliff and start up that sucker with nothing but fingernails until we reach so high up it would cause enuresis in a mountain goat.

Back in younger and more flexible days, I joined a certain search and rescue team to go get idiots’ bodies out of impossible places. The actual rescues weren’t too bad, because you just went in on adrenalin and got it done. But the practices were murder. You had to lean back to rappel down a vertical face, trusting your future to a nylon rope.

A person shouldn’t do that.

After one retrieval of dead bodies, an old cowboy saw the sick expression on my face and felt overcome by sudden wisdom.

“Slim,” he said, “you know why they tie them climbers together with ropes?”

I just shook my head.

“To keep the smart ones from going home.”

Brought to you by Dogsled, A True Tale of the North, by Slim Randles. Talk about challenging Nature for a cold death…. Kids, don’t do it.