Mount Washington Winter Ascent
"It is not the mountains we conquer,
but ourselves."
—Sir Edmund Hillary
As I sat on the flight home, I thought about how I had just summited Mount Washington. It is the first of 7 summits I set out to ascend back in 2015...a goal set from the lowest of places to reach the highest. Friends and family asked why, but when I think about it in those terms, I have trouble coming up with anything to say other than, "why not?" But as I climbed the mountain that is known by its reputation as having "the worst weather in the world", I wasn't thinking "why" or even "why not".
I was on a different planet, so far away from what I can only call the worst year of my life, and the freedom of the wilderness called out the emotions I had buried so deep.
My past of sleeping in my car in parking garages, daily panic attacks, and struggling to be with my children because I could not afford groceries was all behind me as I took my first step toward the trail head. I journeyed in the present tense, enjoying snow-blanketing landscape, venturing across ice-covered waterfalls, and breathing in the crisp silence of the hermetic hills.
I was on a different planet, so far away from what I can only call the worst year of my life, and the freedom of the wilderness called out the emotions I had buried so deep. As I began to cry in that otherworldly place, it was not because I was suffering but because I was done suffering. I was done feeling like I was broken. I was done feeling like I was alone in my defeat.
I wasn't alone. Not then and not on the mountain.
I wasn't alone. Not then and not on the mountain. I was joined by a group of three twenty-somethings--endurance hikers that were as willing to share their stories as I was mine. As we talked, I realized that like me, they were there to shed the weight of their own pasts. Like me, they had never summited Washington. And like me, they were looking to beat the 4500ft ascent and nearly 50 degree temperature shift from the parking lot that began the long hike to the top.
But it didn't begin there for me; it started much sooner. And when the emotions I had withheld were at last allowed free, I wondered if the tears I had held back for two years would instantly freeze on my face in the gale-force blasts of bitter cold. I wondered if they would become wind-compacted rime that in this torturous place covered anything that dared to stand against it.
Like the past two years, I had fought for every step in a whiteout that kept me from hoping for anything beyond the pile of rocks marking my way a bit further. Except this time, the fight to rise up was a battle with snow and wind and gravity herself.
The tears came and went, making way for action; I continued to the summit.
The tears came and went, making way for action; I continued to the summit. There were no more tears of relief, the final cairn was one of celebration. I celebrated being on top once more. I celebrated the beginnings of something wonderful and new. I celebrated shedding the weight of the past. I celebrated unburdening myself of it.
But at -23 degrees, the moment could only be fleeting. The descent was confident but rapid as I left the present and rejoined the immediate future--I had a plane to catch after all. Driving back to the airport, I was "back to business", and the summit seemed nothing more than an exciting first check in a list of checkboxes.
But it wasn't. Not on the summit. It was so much more up there than it will ever be down here. Down here it is a simple 'why not?' Up there, it was the answer to 'why?'.
