Fresh Snow and Frozen Fingers

When we awoke this morning, there was a dusting of snow on the high hills in the Bay Area. No, I suppose for the poor residents in the East and Midwest who are digging out from “Snowpocalypse” and other record winter storms, that is no big deal. But for us folks in Cali, it’s still a novelty to have snow this close to the Left Coast. While I am still hoping and waiting to wake up in Novato one morning and find several inches of snow on the ground, I’ll take what I can get.

The most recent time it really snowed here was in 2003. That day, I woke up, got in the van and started the relatively short drive to my job at Riverdeep Software in Ignacio. I didn’t get very far – onto Rowland Boulevard – when I caught sight of Mount Burdell, just north of town and covered in a mantle of snow from about five hundred feet up. Serendipitously, I happened to have my camera with me and made a detour to capture the view for posterity.

Unfortunately, everywhere I drove, there were trees or power lines or houses in the way. I just couldn’t get the clear shot I was looking for, so I decided to get closer. I parked at the trailhead on San Andreas Drive and thought I would walk quickly up the gravel road to where the meadow opens up, which I knew would give me a spectacular view of the mountain (really more of a very tall hill, at only 1,500 feet). The going was awkward in my dress shoes and chilly in my jeans, but at least I had a thick coat.

Reaching the meadow, I got off some excellent shots. If I left now, I would only be slightly late to work and in time for my 10 o’clock departmental meeting. Instead, I chose to climb higher up along the Middle Burdell Fire Road.

Pretty soon, I was walking on a dusting of snow, which quickly deepened to three or four inches. I tried to walk in others’ footsteps, to keep snow from filtering into my shoes. Soon, that was impossible, as I was making fresh tracks.


Tire tracks in the snow.

 A mountain biker passed me, leaving tread marks in the pristine whiteness. It was now only the two of us on the upper reaches. Without being conscious of it, the decision had been made to blow off the meeting altogether and push for the summit. I passed Hidden Lake, named because it disappears in the summer, but now beginning to freeze solid. Soon it would be hidden beneath a blanket of white.

As I ascended the steepest section of the Cobblestone Fire Road, my shoes slipped on the snow, threatening to throw me into gaping drainage ditches. My feet went from cold to numb. I took off my shoes only to discover that my toes had become blackened with frost-bite. They swelled so quickly that I couldn’t get my loafers back on, so I kept going in my stocking feet, trying to keep Jim and Jennifer Stolpa out of my thoughts.

A couple of hundred feet higher and my food and water ran out. I could also no longer remember where I had left my backpack, tent, and sleeping bag. Too late, it hit me how foolish it had been to attempt this route without oxygen, as hypoxia began to muddle my senses. Still I climbed. I tried to call the office, but my cell phone had lost reception. I tossed it away into the snow drift mindlessly, a hasty action that I would regret later when my monthly bill came and I discovered that all my Anytime Minutes had been used up to call drug traffickers in El Salvador.

My pace slowed as I struggled to place one foot ahead of the other, cursing my decision to leave my crampons in my underwear drawer that morning. Step-pause-breathe. Step-pause-breathe. My thought processes narrowed to just one seemingly unattainable goal – reaching the top.

The mountain biker passed me again, going back down the mountain. His hair was frosted with rime, his corneas iced-over and his mouth a frozen rictus of cold and pain. If he even saw me, it didn’t register as he whizzed past on bare wheels, his knobby tires apparently having become so brittle from the cold that they had literally shattered off the rims. Then I realized that he was probably already dead, his spinning wheels the only things keeping him from falling over in his ghostly descent down the mountain.

Toward the end, I was flat on my belly, making upward progress only by digging my chin into the snow and pulling myself along inch by inch. In the back of my mind, I think I knew that this would now be a one-way journey. As my fingers became numb, breaking off like icicles, I ate them, eager for whatever energy they brought to my depleted body. If this continued, I would consume myself entirely before I achieved my goal.
 

View toward China and Pakistan.

It took me several minutes to suddenly realize that I had made it. I stood slowly and looked out over sleepy Novato, far to the south, and the snow-covered flanks of Mount Burdell, spread out below me like a plus-size wedding gown. As I gazed north, I could see into China and Pakistan, actually looking down onto the 20,000 foot peaks of the Karakoram mountain range.

Realizing that I was now in the Death Zone, where the body starts to deteriorate rapidly due to the effects of high altitude, I ate the last of my digits and began my stumbling descent into the abyss. Hypothermia now began to make me shiver uncontrollably and I lost my footing often. Several times the ground disappeared from underfoot and I found myself falling over jagged glacial bergschrunds.

My arms were frozen into this grotesque position.



Miraculously, I came across some native Novatoans in their indigenous garb just above Hidden Lake. I tried to communicate with them, but my words were addled and my frozen lips could not form consonants. They took pity on me and snapped this photo. Here it is:

The rest is a blur to me. Apparently, I was rescued, spent ten days in a mud hut at the corner of Simmons and Novato Boulevard and then weeks in a medically-induced coma as new fingers were cloned from frost-bitten tissue carved from my toes.



Do I rue my decision to climb all the way to the top of that frigid peak? Definitely not. I still have vivid memories of the day I summitted Mount Burdell in the snow. Would I still have remembered whatever was discussed in that departmental meeting that I missed? What do you think?