Last month, while I was back in the States, I had the chance to participate in Queer Adventure Storytelling. It’s a monthly event were queer people can come together to tell and hear stories about a variety of adventures. It’s hosted by Jenny Bruso, who started the Unlikely Hikers Instagram account and Travis Clough of the Venture Out Project. I told the story of how I came to consider myself a hiker, and I thought I’d share that here.
Falling in Love with the Mountains
I have a lot of privilege in my life. I’m white and I come from an affluent family. Combine that with the fact that I’m a Millennial, I’ve heard throughout my life that I can do anything. However, as a fat, queer woman, I’ve constantly heard the whispers of, “She can’t.”
I moved to Portland in 2010 from the flat Midwest and I commuted to work in the Columbia River Gorge. On my drives east, on clear days, the perfect, triangular peak of Mt Hood stared at me in the face. I would stare out at the blue layers of ridge lines as they disappeared into the distance. And I fell in love with the landscape. Eventually I got myself to wondering what it looks like from its 11,249 foot peak.
Hiking in the Tetons
I was not totally inexperienced when it came to hiking. When I was 15, I went on a backpacking trip in the Tetons with a church camp. For all of the reasons that I wanted to go and do that, I was totally fulfilled. However, for all of the camp’s stated mission of youth on that trip, I was really not a great fit. I had began questioning my faith years earlier and by this point in my life had pretty much made up my mind that Christianity was not for me. I tried my best to fit into their expectations as well as I could, but it wasn’t enough and resulted in a lot of shame and negative associations for my reasonings for wanting to be out in nature. That’s not even counting the huge blisters I got.
Making the Plan to Climb Mt Hood
However, the call of Mt Hood whispered to me for more than year. And I did some research and found out that it is the second most climbed glaciated mountain in the world, behind Mt Fuji. With that information, climbing it seemed to fall within my grasp. In my research into climbing Mt Hood, I came across Big City Mountaineers and their Summit for Someone program. The way it works is that you raise money to allow them to introduce urban youth to the outdoors by doing some kind of big outdoor thing – usually summiting a mountain – and they had Mt Hood as an option.
You see, people are much less inclined to question your ability to do something when you’re doing it for charity.
So I signed up, committed to raising $2,000, and downloaded the training schedule, which consisted of weekly hikes and some cross training.
Beginning to Hike
My first hike was for three miles with essentially no elevation gain on the Garden Trail in Portland’s Washington Park. Each week I increased the distance and elevation gain and I could feel myself getting stronger. Not only that, but getting out of bed on a Sunday morning to hit the trail was not a struggle for me, a surprise for this decided night owl.
If I couldn’t even do this one small mountain, how was I going to summit Mt Hood? But, I had already raised more than half of my fundraising goal and I already told everyone I was climbing this mountain. And I still had about a month and a half before I was set to climb.
Becoming a Hiker
So I buckled down on cross training, and at this point my training schedule included shorter hikes on Thursdays, so I kept at it. Four weeks later, I set off for Mt Defiance – a 12.1 mile loop with 4,800 feet of elevation gain. I had read that this trail pretty closely simulates summiting Mt Hood and I knew this was going to be my kind of final determination.
A friend suggested to me that do the route counterclockwise, meaning I would ascend the step rocky back section and descend down the nicely graded switchbacks. I knew I needed to challenge myself, and I felt strong.
It took me six hours to get reach the top. I got there around 4 pm. But, I got there and I felt like I was on top of the world. From the summit, I had the perfect view of Mt Hood, though I couldn’t linger too long because it was pretty late in the day. I nearly ran down the mountain, but mostly because I had to poop.
The Summit Attempt
On July 5, 2012, I went to Timberline Lodge to meet with the guide who would be leading the summit attempt and to participate in a crash course of mountain safety. I learned how to use an ice ax and walked using crampons for the first time. We practiced short-roping, the technique we would use for the one technical stretch of the climb. Everything was set, and the time was set to come back at 1 am on July 7 – summit day.
In the dark of the night, we hitched a ride on the snowcat to the top of the ski lift. We got down and followed a rather well worn track in the snow toward the summit; it was rather late in the climbing season. As the snow got steeper, steps were kicked into the snow. We would take three steps, breathing with each step, and stop and take three breaths. We passed by the Devil’s Kitchen, which reeked of sulfur; the mountain is an active volcano.
Around 4 am, we reached Hogsback Ridge. This is just before it gets technical, and where we would put on our crampons and rope up, but we needed to assess the conditions first. I stood there, looking out at the twinkling lights of Portland. In the dark, I searched the expanding land, straining to see and find the peaks I had become familiar with in the preceding weeks.
My reverie was shortly interrupted by the guide. “We can’t go.”
Being so late in the season, the overnight temperatures did not reach freezing. There were watermelon sized chunks of ice that were falling right on the route we were supposed to take, and there isn’t another option. So we stood there, at 10,800 feet above sea level for a while, just taking it all in and taking pictures.
And even though that time, I was told, We can’t, I knew at that moment, I can.