Rookie Takes Bishop

(Archive - written Wednesday 15^th September 2010)

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…  A lanky looking Cal Poly student with one arm in a sling and the words ‘sad bad n rad’ etched in green neon on his black tanktop is lifted upside down and handed a freshly filled plastic cupful of beer to down in one while his classmates cheer him on.  It’s a scene that is played out in bars or at ‘keggers’ at student houses all over San Luis Obispo and doubtless all over America.  But this one is a little different.  It is happening at the precarious summit of Bishop’s Peak, fifteen hundred feet above San Luis Obispo.

My mountaineering career is limited.  Crampons, ice axes, even ropes are not to be found hanging in my garden shed (even if I had one).  The only carabiners I ever use are the big rubber coated ones hanging off the handle of my god daughter Annabel’s extra funky children’s buggy for holding your shopping.  Give me a crevasse you can hop over.  Give me a chimney you can light a fire under.  Give me a mountain you can walk up. 

On paper, I have one impressive-sounding mountain under my belt.  I walked up Kilimanjaro a few years ago, having been talked into it by my friend Bruce to whom I’d made the mistake of confiding my distress at a post-quitting-smoking weight gain.  ‘Mate, you need a goal,’ he told me, accompanied by one or two fairly graphic and uncharitable observations on what I would become if I didn’t have a goal.  I thought perhaps a weekly visit to the gym might be a good goal but Bruce had other ideas and six months of British Military Fitness, spin classes, weight training, treadmills and Alexander Technique later, I was to be found in Tanzania trudging my way up its highest mountain in a six day expedition.

It had its moments.  The evening when Bruce went into shock having been caught under-dressed and under-protected as bad weather hit us on an acclimatisation climb and the guide suggested that someone warm joining him in the sleeping bag in which he was shivering, came close to becoming my own personal Uncle-Bryn-on-the-fishing-trip moment.  On the summit day, altitude hit us with the same impact as a serious dose of alcohol.  Bruce was sick repeatedly (but somehow still managed to charm several of the girls) and I was to be seen staggering all over the place, begging to be allowed to sit down and sleep, tearfully telling one of the guides that I loved him, he was my best mate in the whole world, seriously mate… before turning on him on the way down and ranting and raving at him, convinced that he was trying to rob me and leave me for dead up there, all the while grasping the hand of the exhibition leader, my new best mate in the whole wide world.  I let my eyes droop shut for every summit photo and teetered my way back down around the precarious crater rim to the horror of Kim (a fellow climber), who was certain that I was just one step away from plummeting into the crater itself to join the body of the tragic subject of the previous day’s unsuccessful rescue attempt.  I was completely overheated, still in the ten thermal layers and three pairs of trousers I had worn for the night part of the climb, when it’s so cold that you have to blow the water back down your platypus tube after drinking to prevent it from freezing.  As the African sun rose overhead after nine hours of climbing, I was unable to ditch any clothes, having gratefully handed over my rucksack to a cheerful guide called Godson in a Wolverhampton football shirt given to him by a grateful climber some weeks earlier.  He’d walked and slept in the shirt ever since and the smell was overpowering.  Bizarrely a friend met Godson on Kili three years later and said that he was still wearing the same shirt.  When I made it back to my tent at the base camp, the last of our team to return, I collapsed into my sleeping bag and slept soundly with my still-booted feet poking out of the tent.  I was lucky.  This exact thing happened to my friend Pete a couple of years later, except he managed to get his boots off before sleeping.  He woke up with them buried in snow and didn’t get full feeling back in a few of his toes for nearly four months.

The best moments of all were the return to civilisation: that first cold Coke on the way down when all you’ve been drinking are the six litres of vaguely filtered tarn water required daily to combat altitude sickness; the bottle of Kilimanjaro beer that you’ve been too superstitious to drink before you’ve conquered the mountain; the first shower after a week of wet wipes.  And of course there’s the energy.  Obviously there’s a natural buzz that comes with it but one of the ways in which the body reacts to being six thousand metres above sea level, where the air is half as thick, is to produce more haemoglobin to carry what little oxygen there is around your bloodstream more efficiently.  As you come down the mountain, you feel more and more energetic and it doesn’t wear off for at least a week.  I felt it acutely and was awake and chattering over-excitedly from nine o’clock the next morning, all the way to Nairobi, through a five hour wait at the airport, an eight hour flight home and most of the way through the following day.  Come to think of it, that may be why Bruce avoided me for most of the following week.

Kilimanjaro was a lot of fun.  It’s a walk, a hard walk, but not a technical climb and I’m happy with that.  Mexican Chris doesn’t consider it to be climbing mountains unless he’s making his way up the smooth face of Yosemite’s Half Dome with a couple of crampons, a bucket of chalk and an iPod full of Johnny Cash, but I’ll stick to walking.

Today’s walk is Bishop’s Peak, the tallest of the Nine Sisters, a row of volcanic plugs that stretch from San Luis Obispo to Morro Bay.  It’s named because of the jagged crags at the top that form a sort of crown or mitre.  Kilimanjaro has been some time ago and I’m less sure of myself so I opt to do it alone, at my own pace.  Not perhaps the wisest move.

To get into the mood, I take Gary’s pick-up truck.  Nine feet tall, nineteen feet long with five different four wheel drive settings and a diesel engine that rumbles like the not-so-distant sound of thunder.  Gosh, it makes me feel manly. 

Which is just as well because fifteen minutes out of the parking space and up the peak, I am feeling like a little girl.  Not one of those stoic little girls either; more a little girl who complains a lot and cries easily.  On the dense and winding trail, the only time I am not easily overtaken every couple of minutes by a strapping local is when I lose the trail and have to hack my way straight up through the scratchy shrubbery, convinced that any moment a couple of snakes, hopelessly hypnotised by my pearly calves, will appear.  The sun beats down and I scramble slowly over the rocks, keeping a careful distance from the edge as San Luis Obispo recedes below me.  Tick follows tock as rock follows rock and I keep my head down and press onwards and upwards.  The summit above me looks no nearer than it did fifteen minutes before but the blonde dreadlocked guy who jogged past me five minutes before in a pair of Baywatch shorts, not even out of breath as he uttered a quick ‘hey bro’ at me through the side of his mouth, is just reaching the top.

Shortly after, I am there too.  It has taken me over an hour to climb and Mexican Chris will later tell me that his best time is 29 minutes.  I am out of breath and ready to chill for a few minutes and enjoy the view in silence but, over the next rock, there is a party going on and I crash it instead and meet Rusty and Trevor.

It is WOW week at Cal Poly and Cuesta College.  WOW stands for Week Of Welcome and is similar to our Freshers week.  Rusty and Trevor are part of a gang of twenty students who have taken it in turns to carry a keg of beer all the way up to the top of Bishop’s Peak, in a bin slung between two long bits of wood.  Whoops and howls echo around the peak and a pretty girl in jogging shorts offers me a cup of beer while the guys tell me that this is the second year in what they hope will be a long tradition of WOW keggers on the peak.

I sip my beer and enjoy the view before starting down again.  Tonight in the pub I will casually slip Bishop’s Peak into the conversation, mention I climbed it today and feel the acknowledgement of my peers.  On the way down, I pass more students hurrying to the top, worrying about missing the end of the keg.  I take another wrong turning and walk miles out of my way but it doesn’t matter because I am happy.  I have conquered Bishop’s Peak and when I get back to the pick-up and gun the mighty engine, a song called Ladies Love a Country Boy comes on the radio and I find myself humming along as I head through the dusty sunset back to the homestead and again I feel like a man.

Then I get home and Marianne sends me out shopping for soft furnishings.