Wow. Something really new and meaningful to write about - my wake up call. 3/30/12 @ 0430. Something really wasn't right. No pain, no shortness of breath, no diaphoresis, no pressure: just waxing and waning waves of "fullness", like a balloon was inflating and deflating in my upper chest, BOTH shoulders and BOTH sides of my neck. Normal heart rate (84), normal respirations (14) and a BP of 124/82. After an hour of increasing "fullness" sensations, "we" decided it was getting worse instead of going away so Shel drove me to the ER. After six hours of equivocal tests, two normal'ish (non-diagnostic) ECGs, 10mg of Morphine that had me feeling good enough to want to go home, nothing more scientific than a nagging doubt in the consciousness of the ER doc that put me on the Telemetry Unit for observation, and finally a second Troponin (a cardiac specific enzyme) level that definitively spiked, the diagnosis was made. It was definitely a heart attack. I was oddly relieved because I sure didn't want to cause all this fuss over a panic attack - which was on the list of working diagnoses. The calls went out and Jess and Scott immediately started north from Boulder and Alex was located and started east from Bozeman. An hour later I was in the cath lab in the competent hands of one Ed Dean, M.D. An angiogram showed two blocked coronary arteries. For you medical types the First Diagonal off the LAD was 80% occluded and the Circumflex was 99% occluded (often considered a "widow maker"). Since I was resting comfortably under the influence of some great narcotics, my family on hand (Shel, Mom, Bill) was called in for a briefing by the cardiologist and "we" rightly decided I wanted a couple of stents. Lots of TLC, patience, and education by a great nursing staff, acclimation to three new drugs (for at least the next year), much familial fretting ultimately replaced by relief, and two days later I was sent home (with what would ultimately amount to about $75,000 in medical bills) feeling so good that two days after that I was (wrongly) working on a tile job we had started in the entryway, hall, front bathroom and laundry room. Something about having all that extra blood flowing into the arteries that feed your heart muscle makes a guy feel pretty good. All of that turns out to be the easy part of this journey. The hard part and the topic of many future posts, is learning to accept the reality that A) despite doing everything right I had a heart attack, and B) that I'm not 35 anymore and NOT able to do any damn thing I want - physically.

Walking On Rock 3

The last two posts took a very analytical approach to walking on rocks. Most recently I described six of at least eight attributes of rock that captured my attention over the past summer of hiking in the Beartooth Mountains of South Central Montana. This post describes the last two identified attributes of rock in a consistent fashion and then takes an uncharacteristic and abrupt right (brain) turn, quickly making most of the analytical considerations in this and the last two posts superfluous, and speaks to rocks from the perspective of how they speak to me.

Stability
This attribute relates to how well rocks hold still. At first blush this sounds like nonsense! Of course rocks, generally considered members of the family of inanimate objects – some might say beings – hold still. It’s not like they’re going to get up and walk away... But it’s not quite that simple. When you step on them do they remain in place or do they shift with the application of your weight? Like ice bergs in oceans, rocks buried in the earth often reveal only a small percentage of their mass. Well “grounded” rocks are indeed “rock solid” and they afford you a certain measure of confidence when stepping onto them. In contrast, on a sharply inclined scree field - a veritable house of cards made of small to medium rocks – the weight of any footstep can cause a half dozen rocks to give way under you and begin a slide down the slope, the endpoint of which is uncertain.

Even on the level however a talus field can be strewn with boulders that have tipping points. They may have been at rest for ten thousand years but the proper, however inadvertent, application of a hundred pounds of weight in the right spot can cause them to shift under your foot like a San Francisco cobblestone in a 6.5 quake. The challenge is to see the boulder, assess its size, shape, and position relative to the rocks around it, and under it, and try to determine if it is “rock solid” or a potential teeter totter. When you commit your full weight to a rock and it suddenly changes its attitude, rocking back toward you, listing to the right, and spinning a quarter turn, you can go to ground very quickly.

I was trailing three buddies across a talus field on the edge of Hairpin Lake three years ago when a rock the size of a small desk that I had just weighted with my dainty frame tilted to the left about fifty degrees. The coefficient of friction was low enough that my foot slipped out from under me and my pack and I instantaneously went down, striking the side of my right knee on the way. Moving ahead and away from me my buddies heard a deep rumble as the rock shifted, a “clack!” as it came to rest against another rock, a “whump!” as I went to ground, followed by a streak of expletives they didn’t know I knew. I extricated my leg, which had become pinched between two boulders and a quick inspection revealed a small tear in my pants and a substantially larger abrasion along the outside of my knee. Fortunately, all the important parts still seemed to be connected and I could still stand on it with only a little residual discomfort. After I got fully to my feet we continued on, I going slower and more cautiously than before. My buddies later told me that when they turned around to see me on my side between the two boulders grabbing my knee and cussing a blue streak, they were sure I had broken my leg. Their first thoughts were about how they were going to carry me across the rest of the talus and the four miles across Hellroaring Plateau to our car. When I heard that they had been thinking about how to carry me, rather than where to bury me, I knew I had chosen the right hiking partners!

Route Finding
This term has multiple connotations in mountaineering but I doubt it has ever been used to describe an attribute of rocks. Generally, when you intend to go somewhere you have to find your way. Everyone is familiar with the idea of studying a road map to find the route from one town to another or a subway map to find the trains to take from one station, across town to another station. On a much smaller scale, when walking on rock, one has to be sure that the next step will lead to another, that takes you in the desired general direction of travel. So while you are picking your next step, one of the considerations is to determine if any given rock will offer you a good next step. If you aren’t paying attention to route finding, it is possible to be crossing water, leaping from one rock to the next, only to find out that the last rock you stepped on is out of reach of any other rock!
When navigating a talus slope like that pictured below you have to carefully choose every step. Sometimes you have to deviate right or left of your intended direction of travel just to find the next safe footstep. After you’ve taken six or seven “easy steps” that aren’t taking you in the direction you need to go, you have to reassess and potentially take more difficult steps that will get you back on track. In this kind of terrain one has to stop often to assess the easiest path toward and then over the next ridge and then the next, and the next. In the Beartooths, it seems like the next ridge should always be the last ridge, but it rarely is. Based upon their lie along your intended route you have to choose rocks every two or three feet that ultimately get you to the right notch in a ridge two or three hundred feet or yards ahead. The easy step is not always the most efficient step if it takes you too far out of your way. Two many bad choices in a row and you wind up backtracking

So when walking on rock, in considering where to place your foot for every next step, you have to consider each of these attributes for all the rocks within reach: elevation, size, shape, attitude, texture, spacing, stability, and route finding. That’s eight decisions for every step. On the previously mentioned twelve mile hike, during which you might take 30,000 steps, that means you could make at least 240,000 decisions.

Of course thus far we’ve just considered the many attributes of the rocks. You have your own personal set of attributes to consider as well in this moment by moment decision making process:

Muscle strength – lower legs, quadriceps, hamstrings, hips, back, abdomen
Joint strength – ligaments of the ankles, knees, and hips
Flexibility – of the legs and hips affects stride length
Balance – how good is your balance, can you place a trekking pole to help?
Pack weight – heavy packs can magnify weaknesses and impact balance

Possessing only the most rudimentary mathematics skills necessary to calculate whether Costco or the State Liquor Store has the best price per ounce on my favorite single malt scotch, it is not possible for me to calculate the sum of all of the possible permutations of all of the variables described here. I’m not even sure a mathematician could do it without having a discreet number of values for each variable, but I have confidence in saying that it is a really big number – in the millions at least. That means that while walking on rock, with every step, our brain surveys the landscape, assesses all the possibilities for all of the rocks within one steps reach, considers the millions of possibilities, makes a nearly instantaneous decision and then guides our bodies to step on the next best calculated risk of a rock. You’d think doing all of that processing would leave a person totally exhausted in no time. The curious thing is that it doesn’t.

When walking on non-rocky terrain we don’t need to make all of those instantaneous decisions and we don’t spool up that part of our brain at all. Other times, when traversing the high plateaus of the Beartooth Mountains for example, you can be forced to transition between twenty foot wide veins of rock and striations of sub-alpine tundra every fifty feet or less. My own experience is that the first time I approach scree or talus I have to pause, look at the rocks and then carefully start to pick my way across. Each step takes a little analysis and contemplation. I have to concentrate on placing my feet in balance. There is an initial hesitation that slowly wanes. Each subsequent step becomes a little more confident. Within 20-30 steps my balance feels good, my comfort level is up and I start taking steps with confidence. Pretty soon I can stride from rock to rock, knife edge to point to flat to knife edge, all in balance without breaking stride and the transitions from tundra to rock and back become seamless. It’s as if with the first encounter in any given hike I have to learn how to walk on rock anew, but the learning comes quickly.

Then pretty soon it becomes a challenge to see how far and how fast I can go from rock to rock without breaking stride, without miss-stepping or getting off balance and having to slow down or completely pause to collect myself. Walking fast on rock is like driving fast when you’re tired. The risk associated with going fast stimulates you. It keeps you awake. It demands your attention.

Then when you walk on rock mile after mile, after a while, after all of these attributes of rock are loaded not into your cerebral cortex but deeply into your subconscious, after your body warms up and your leg muscles start taking steps without apparent nervous intention, when all the physical, psychological, and earthly vectors of force that are always pulling you into opposing corners of your psyche seem to align in directional harmony, it’s possible to develop a rhythm, a resonance with something greater than just earth upon which you are walking that changes walking on rock from a burden or a challenge into a spiritual experience. It’s as if with each step your spirit and your body and that rock ever so briefly become one. You find that you are not just walking on rock but instead that you are walking among friends. You share the experience of each footstep together out of mutual consent and trust, and as you leave one rock for the next you bid it farewell and you silently offer it your gratitude for its support. As you greet the next rock you feel compelled to honor it, to tread lightly upon it, and to leave it as you found it for somehow, while being in the moment with a rock for that brief step, you get a small osmotic appreciation for all the time that rock has been just resting there, observing the events of our creation and our evolution, and it makes you humble. For what an insignificant event must your passing be compared to the historical events witnessed by a rock whose genesis was Precambrian and who has occupied the Church of Higher Elevations for millions of millennia?

Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time.

Regards,

JR

Walking On Rock 2

(Note: For those new to blogs and that haven’t figured it out… you can click on the embedded photos to see them full size. Then hit the back button to return to the blog. )

The last post talked about walking on rocks in general terms. My own assessment is that there are a lot of specifics that have to be considered with every step one takes. They all figure into when you take the next step, where, and how. If you really want to break it down there are at least eight separate attributes of the rocks in front of you that you are constantly assessing before each next step. Whether you do this consciously or unconsciously depends on where you are in your journey.

Each rock has:
Elevation - higher, lower, or even with last step?
Size – smaller, equal to, or larger than your foot?
Shape – flat, round, jagged, pointed, knife edge?
Attitude – flat, sloped forward, back, left, right? Degree of slope?
Texture / Friction – smooth, rough, wet, dry, covered in snow, ice, hail, lichen?Spacing – small, medium, or large next step, a jump away, a leap away?
Stability – solid or resting balanced and subject to shifting when weighted?
Route finding – does it lead to a next step?

Elaborating on each of these attributes is instructional.

Elevation
When the next step is at the same elevation as the last one, and you are neither climbing nor descending, it’s a simple step. When the next step is higher, you have step up and place your weight further forward, maintaining upward momentum to avoid falling backwards. When the next step is lower, you have to control the rate of your descent to assure your leg can bear the additional weight caused by downward acceleration, and you have to keep your weight centered or back slightly to avoid falling forward. When wearing a 25-50 pound pack, evaluation the elevation of the next step is even more important. When you’re over 50, wearing a 50 pound pack, and have badly worn knees like old duffers I can think of, you should be evaluating why you are there at all!

Size
Is the rock – or more precisely the surface of the rock onto which you will step – big enough for your entire foot? If it is, then the simple step is to allow your entire foot to contact and weight the rock. If it is not, then you want to place your foot precisely on that part of the rock that gives your foot the most support, closest to the center of the sole of your boot, which is directly under the center of your leg. Misplacing your boot off center will create torsion stress on your ankle and lower leg muscles and could cause loss of balance. Of course in the Beartooths it is not uncommon to encounter very larger boulders – say the size of cars and trucks – as well. Finding a place for your foot isn’t the challenge!

Shape
Large, flat, level, rocks linked one to the next without gaps are often referred to as a sidewalk. There is a resting point on the col along the East Ridge route up Granite Peak that we called the sidewalk, but that was a bit of a stretch. It was level however and big enough for a half dozen people to sit and rest so it was definitely a sidewalk by comparison! But rocks are rarely flat and level. Depending on where you are in the Beartooths the rocks can be predominately rounded shapes or they can be fractured rocks that present jagged or knife edges, or points. Stepping to a rounded rock that is bigger than your foot is the simple step. Stepping to a pointed rock smaller than your foot or a knife edged rock, even if it is three times longer than your foot takes concentration. It also depends whether the knife edge is running along or across the long axis of your foot, or somewhere in between. The desired step is to put the point or knife edge in the center of your boot to minimize ankle and lower leg stress and to maintain balance. While walking at 10,947 feet on the top of Beartooth Pass, Alex has all sorts of choices… knife edge, point, knife edge, or point? “Now let’s see, my next step is….?”

Attitude
Like the “attitude” of an aircraft, the surface of the rock onto which you step can be straight and level or it can be pitched up so the surface of the rock faces you, pitched down so it slopes away from you, or rolled (sloping) to the left or right. If the rock surface is long and narrow it can also be aligned with your direction of travel or yawed some number of degrees (like a compass needle) to the left or right of north. Also like an aircraft, the surface of the rock you are about to step on can deviate from center in all three of these planes at once! When about to step on a rock that is tilted away, sloping steeply to one side and rotated more than 15 degrees, it’s not uncommon for some of us to take a quick inventory related to the integrity of our ankle and knee ligaments and the support provided by our boots.
And while you’re processing all of that you have to avoid being distracted by the beauty of the rock under your foot!

Texture and Coefficient of Friction
Texture and coefficient of friction, are pretty closely related because one contributes to the other. Sometimes it is easiest to grasp a concept by first considering the extremes. Consider trying to stand on an ultra smooth freshly Zamboni’d ice rink in hard leather soled dress shoes. Now consider standing in high-top thick soled boots, surfaced with really soft rubber, on a board through which very sharp nails have been driven one half inch apart for several square feet. In the first example it would be nearly impossible to stay standing unless one was an accomplished circus performer. In the second, nearly anyone could stay standing even if the bed of nails was sharply tilted. These examples speak to a concept in physics known as coefficient of friction. I’m not suggesting that anyone hiking in the mountains spends their time doing mental calculations for the coefficient of friction for each rock they are about to engage, but it is safe to say that they are assessing the likelihood that their foot will stay on the rock when they place it and weight it there. For the most part granite rocks in the Beartooths have a high coefficient of friction. That is, if you’re wearing good boots with soft rubber soles, your foot will stick to a rock even if the surface you step on is angled 45 degrees or more. But if you’re stepping on a rock that is wet from rain, or in a stream and covered with moss, or even if it is dry but heavily covered in loose flakey lichen, then the coefficient of friction will be small and the likelihood of slipping off the rock is high. Descending a thirty degree slope consisting of Volkswagen sized boulders covered in two inches of hail (think ball bearings) was a very low coefficient of friction experience Pete Shelley and I shared while hustling off the 12,047 foot summit of Sky Pilot Mountain in a lightening and hail storm last July. The camera didn’t come out for that particular experience, but here’s another photo that leaves one thinking about coefficient of friction.

Spacing
Everyone has their own comfortable step spacing when walking. Of course we all started out with baby steps that grew larger as we did. They reach some maximum length as we mature and then reverse the trend and shorten again as we age. At any given age, depending on leg length and hip, knee and ankle flexibility, we each have our own most comfortable and efficient stride. When walking on rock you often have to take steps that are shorter or longer than your natural stride to land on what you’ve determined to be the next most reliable rock. In the decision making sequence when evaluating where to put your next footstep, stride length is a lower priority than a number of the other attributes described here. For example it doesn’t matter how perfect the rock fits your gait if it’s tilted at an impossible, ankle breaking angle, or if it is moss covered in the middle of a stream. Shorter than natural steps are usually easier than longer than natural steps, though often less efficient. On a twelve mile hike where you might be taking more than thirty thousand steps while gaining six thousand feet, maximizing your efficiency seems highly desirable. Of course if you’re young, and efficiency isn’t part of your calculations, it is easiest to just FLY over the rocks!


Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time. Don’t if neither exists.
Regards,
JR

Walking On Rock 1

“If you want to be a mountaineer in the Beartooths, you’d better like walking on rock.” – Pete Shelley, mountaineer, Nepal mountain guide, and 31 year resident of Red Lodge, Montana.



Upon returning from Afghanistan, when asked what the territory is like, a soldier was overheard to say, “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Imagine taking all of the rocks on the earth and putting them in one place. That’s what it’s like.” With all due respect, that soldier has never hiked in the Beartooths.


“The Eastern Beartooth Mountains of southern Montana and northwestern Wyoming are among the most spectacular, diverse, and unique mountain regions anywhere in the world. Their Precambrian core of gneiss metamorphosed 3.4 to 3.8 billion years ago, which makes Beartooth rock the oldest in Greater Yellowstone, and among the oldest in the world.” *1


The Beartooth Mountains constitute one of the largest contiguous ranges of peaks and plateaus over 10,000 feet in North America and they are almost exclusively composed of granite. For a more sophisticated description in historical and geological terms, you’ll have to access any number of books, professional journals, websites dedicated to the Beartooths – for that is not the true focus of this post.

This past summer offered a lot of time for hiking and climbing in the Beartooths. The motivation for almost all of the previous posts originated from trips in these mountains and I’m nowhere near done – hiking or writing. The allure is irresistible and has previously been described. What has not yet been explored in any detail is the amazing amount of rock one has to travel on to get anywhere in the Beartooths. It’s often overwhelming, in a spectacular sort of way. The photo above shows rocks… sure, but you could walk around them, right? The thing is, sometimes you can’t walk around them. Sometimes you face an endless sea of rocks.


You can literally walk for miles on rocks.


When every step includes a critical decision about where to next place your foot, the simple act of walking takes on many new dimensions. When the ground under your feet is constantly changing in shape, texture, color, size, height, orientation and potentially position as you weight it, the simple act of walking is anything but simple. It has been estimated that a soccer referee can make as many as 60 decisions per minute in a highly competitive match. Having experience in both refereeing competitive soccer and walking on rocks, I can say with confidence that a person walking on rocks easily makes four to six times as many decisions per minute, and the stakes are a lot higher and the outcomes more personal.

Here is a nice photo of my son Alex walking on rock.

Now look closely at the decisions he has already made and those that he has to make next…

Where should the next foot fall? On the pointed rock that is smaller than his foot? On the large flat rock that is sloping away from him? On the smaller irregular rock that is sloping toward him?

When walking in the high mountains, alone, for three days, on nothing but rock, one has a lot of time to think. After soaking in all the beauty, addressing my immediate personal security concerns (discussed in previous posts), finding a rhythm, and generally becoming quite content, I spent some time thinking about the process of walking on rock. What I considered, and what I discovered, will be the topic of the next few posts…

Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time. Don’t if neither exists.

Regards,
JR


Footnote:
*1 Select Peaks of Greater Yellowstone – A Mountaineering History and Guide, Thomas Turiano, Indomitus Books, 2003, 490 pp

The Church of Higher Elevations

There is an underlying subject in the last two posts, but you probably haven’t noticed it. Until recently it wasn’t really clear to me either. I danced around it in “This I Know to be True” until I got distracted, forgot I was dancing, and walked away before the music had even stopped. In “Walking in Sixes” I danced, I sang, and I had such a generally great time that, as is too common for many of us in our fifties – even without Alzheimer’s, I totally forgot why I had hosted the party. It’s all become clear to me now though so let me clarify that both of those posts and this one, are about me getting religion.

After forty plus years of deliberate and conscious but admittedly not regular contemplation on the subject of religion, until just recently my assessment was that formal religions, western religions and fundamental interpretations of any religion in particular, are nothing more than devices for managing the masses; tools in the hands of those who want to stay in power to suppress ambition, free thinking and free will; and ways to give those with very little capacity for autonomous thought a system of principles and rules which if followed regularly would likely keep them out of major trouble. The only real benefit I’d concluded that practicing one of the mainstream western religions might legitimately bestow upon the regular churchgoer is a sense of community and the opportunity to regularly interact with friends. But for me the price of admission to that social club was way too high. I never understood why anyone would want to practice what always seemed to me such archaic dogmas and doctrines to get closer to God. Admittedly, while I’ve never doubted that there was a God out there, I’ve also never felt the pressing need get in close touch with Him.

To quickly resolve the potential for concern that has erupted in the minds of those who know me and are confounded by my use of terms here, please understand that I use “God” and “Him” in the broadest of interpretations. For me, these are terms that in essence acknowledge that there is something greater than the individual that has to be considered; infer that no woman or man is an island; and suggest that there is a spiritual component to living. It was that spiritual component that recently reawakened in me and forced me to consider some aspects of what are most commonly considered to be religious practices in a different light.

The Japhy Ryder quote referenced in “This I Know to be True” was an avenue of introduction to the notion that going to the mountains makes me feel closer to God. Climbing mountains, gaining elevation, getting higher into the clouds and sky is a workable metaphor for getting closer to heaven and God. Although, I have to admit, I didn’t find that metaphor on my own. Yet, I’ve known it to be true since I was about six. As a young boy who often went to the Elkhorn mountains south of Helena, Montana with his mother to a friends mountain ranch, I was once heard to say while climbing over a corral gate that led to a lovely mountain meadow that I was “going to go talk to God.” I had never been to church but I knew with confidence where to find God.

From that perspective you can imagine my surprise when from a very interesting book about avalanches entitled The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone by McKay Jenkins, I recently learned that to early Christians the “wilderness represented the moral chaos of an unregenerate world, with primeval forests the domain of demons and spirits all too eager to steal a good man’s soul.” Really! Further, in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory Marjorie Hope Nicholson reported the common belief among Christians of the 1600s that “mountains, like other distortions of the earth, were an immediate result of the sin of Adam and Eve...” Distortions of the earth? It’s no wonder Christianity has never appealed to me. To their credit and as far as I can tell, in the last four hundred years Christian religions have evolved a more benevolent, or at least less demonic, perspective on mountains. That’s an encouraging bit of progress so I’ve made a note to give them a thorough re-examination in another four hundred years or so.

In “This I Know to be True” I revealed that for me going to the mountains on a three day solo up Mt. Wood was much more than just a backpacking trip, it was intended to be a journey. The objective was to climb Mt. Wood but the journey’s destination was unknown. In “Walking in Sixes” I talked about chanting, but I didn’t reveal my motivation. The truth is as I began my hike up the West Rosebud valley I started to experience an emotion that was unfamiliar to me - fear. Three days and two nights high in the mountains alone, with no expectation of encountering any other humans to acknowledge my existence, let alone come to my aid, was outside my comfort zone. I was processing a long and intimidating list of unknowns that, in the dark of the night alone in a tent high in the mountains completely out of contact with anyone, might even include bogymen. At the least, I was walking alone up a valley known to be inhabited by grizzly bears. McKay Jenkins describes that awareness well.

“Your senses become more alert. You become aware of tiny sounds – every creak of a tree limb, every snap of a twig. In bear country, you become aware, perhaps for the first time in your life, that you are not at the top of the food chain. For once, nothing is so important as the direction of the wind; there is something out there that, with a mix of your own ignorance and bad luck, could finish you off.”

For the first time in my adult life I was feeling vulnerable, not adequately prepared, not in control. I felt the need for comfort and support but saw no immediate source. I was perhaps for the first time actually consciously feeling a weakness of spirit, the void that I had been benignly ignoring for more than thirty years. The conclusions of prior contemplations disallowed the option of surrendering myself to a superior non-being, a god whose holy attributes demanded emulation but were known to be unattainable by mere humans; a Pantene god who demands we confess our sins to him and then pray for our sins to be washed away, until the next time we soil our soul – shampoo, rinse and repeat.

In “Emptiness, Ghosts and Empties, Graceland, and Connectedness” I suggested that all living things share a connection; that there exists a collective consciousness, perhaps even a spiritual unity. I know with certainty that there is shared energy among all living things and that it is possible to access and utilize that energy. I very consciously did that once when I was younger, in danger, and really needed help. The outcome was astounding. Significant physical harm to me and a friend was avoided, tensions were eased, and the potential assailants just walked away. It was Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s market-square encounter with Imperial guards on Tatooine. Afterwards I effectively blocked the whole event and behaved for thirty years like it never happened.

In the last few years as I’ve aged and begrudgingly relinquished some of the confidence of youth upon which, with that one exception I’d always relied, I’ve started to re-explore and embrace these concepts of connectedness and shared energy again. That’s what I was doing when I started chanting to myself while hiking toward Mt. Wood. With Om Mani Padme Hum and other mantras, I was connecting to the energy that all living things share. I was asking for strength, guidance, safe passage, courage and comfort. I suddenly got religion, that is to say I thought I understood it. I was acutely aware of a void within me that I’m assuming the acts of going to church, and praying fills for many people. My chanting sought to fill that void perhaps differently than many, but one could say I was praying, in my church, the Church of Higher Elevations.

Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time. Don’t if neither exists.

Regards,
JR

Walking In Sixes

Walking. How many different kinds of walking are there? We’re going to explore that a bit more later but for now let’s consider two – well… really just one. One can either walk with others or alone. Imagine yourself walking with others - in town, in the city, in the country, or even in the mountains. What are you likely doing? Talking! Now, imagine yourself walking alone in any of those places. Same question – hopefully a different answer. In the first three settings you’re probably going to find people looking at you slightly askance if you are talking to yourself. Someone so long ago in my past that I can’t even remember who it was used to say “I was givin’ them the old hairy eye ball”. I think you know what I mean. Technically, you could probably get away with talking while walking alone in the mountains. Yet, I suspect (hope!) most of us would have the wherewithal to raise a reflective brow within a mile or two. So what does one do while walking alone in the mountains? Trick question! Anything they want to do – or nothing at all.

The sequence of events that created my preferred option for mental (i.e. non-verbal) activity while walking alone in the mountains is frankly, not the point of this post. So with your assumed consent I’ll skip that part and get only slightly more directly to the point. It turns out non-verbal chanting, i.e. to yourself, exclusively within the confines of your own cranium, silently – but make no mistake the target audience is the entire universe – is a great way to go. Recognize that there is a plethora of potential chants – everything from “Hi ya, hi ya, hi ya…” to “Hup, two, three, four…” to “The ants go marching one by one…”. You get the picture. Now, allow me to take a leap. Please leap along with me.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Familiar to you or not, we’re going there. For those familiar, please allow the pathetic abbreviated personal interpretation that follows to suffice (or, as always, you are free to write a comment directed at this post). For those not familiar with Om Mani Padme Hum, it is a mantra which Tibetan Buddhists believe when repeated to oneself silently or aloud invokes the powerful benevolent attention and blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. It is also said that all the teachings of Buddha are contained in this mantra. (These same words and more can be found at: http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/meaning-of-om-mani-padme-hung.htm if you want more information.)

For those of you that didn’t put enough personal effort into the leap we just took, what I’m suggesting here is that one could, when walking alone in the mountains, on say, a three day solo climb of Mount Wood (see previous post), choose to repeat this mantra to themselves more or less endlessly. It is said that repeating this mantra helps one to get centered. It turns out that being centered spiritually, mentally, and physically can be of great benefit when climbing in the high mountains. I had some sense of this as I headed out toward Mount Wood so I took to repeating this mantra in my head as I walked. The results were…, well…, wow!

It is helpful to imagine that there are lots of ways one can walk and chant this mantra. It could go like: ommanipadmehum – step with the right foot, ommanipadmehum – step with the left foot step, ommanipadmehum – step with the right foot, ommanipadmehum – step with the left foot. Repeat. I have to admit I never got there. It seemed a little too angsty when done quickly enough to make any kind of time while walking in the mountains. You know, sort of contrary to the intent of the entire exercise. It could go like: Om – step with the right foot, Mani – step with the left foot, Padme – step with the right foot, Hum – step with the left foot. Repeat. Or it could go like: Om – step left and right, Mani – step left and right, Padme – step left and right, Hum – step left and right. Repeat.

In my limited experience with chanting this mantra on this trip (really only almost every waking hour for three days), I found that how you chant, i.e. the cadence of chanting depends upon whether you are walking on the level, climbing, or descending. It also depends upon whether you’re walking fast or slow, and whether you are walking on dirt, grass, rock (scree, talus, boulders), or water (only sort of kidding…). Synchronizing the cadence of the mantra with your breathing is not only an option, but likely, and very beneficial. On a prolonged climb up a 45 degree talus covered slope at 11,000 feet it became:

Inhale lift and place left foot, exhale Om – step up.

Inhale lift and place right foot, exhale Mani – step up.

Inhale lift and place left foot, exhale Padme – step up.

Inhale lift and place right foot, exhale Hum – step up. Repeat.

During the first day, mostly on the trail and on modest grade, I’d get distracted by one thing or another and forget to chant. Then I’d find myself walking around a blind corner in tall pines with thick underbrush and the wind to my face, and suddenly I’d remember why I wanted to chant and I’d start up again.

This is the part where providing the reader a frame of reference would be helpful. I mentioned this in a previous post but I’ll briefly set the stage again. Taking a three day solo trip in the Beartooth Mountains was not in my comfort zone at the time. The Beartooths are aptly named. When hiking in the Beartooths it is common to see clowns carrying 44 Magnum revolvers with eight inch barrels. One also encounters many fairly normal looking hikers carrying bear spray – the US Forrest Service’s recommended bear deterrent. Occasionally one experiences a Zen master walking bare (pun totally intended). I know at least one Zen master and when walking in the Beartooths with him I don’t carry my bear spray either. But as I was going solo I thought I ought to start developing my Zen side. So I took up chanting. I also made occasional tobacco and cedar offerings in the spirit of Native American practices – to which I have had some exposure (perhaps the topic of another post at another time). I really am working my way toward the title of this post…

You’ll note that Om Ma-ni Pad-me Hum has six syllables. Recall that within these six syllables are all the teachings of Buddha. That makes pronouncing each syllable seem kind of important!

As an aside, I will admit that I found occasion to stretch this mantra to eight syllables: O-om Ma-ni Pad-me Hu-um. It just fit the situation. Remember all of this is going on quietly in my head. So no-one on the outside world was any the wiser. I don’t think it was demons or the dark side that brought this on and I don’t think I’ll face eternal damnation for this personal deviation from a practice that is thousands of years old. It’s just not the Buddhist way (Thank God! [smirk]).

As I said, on the first day I’d get interrupted, or I’d mispronounce the syllables, or I’d get distracted and get them out of order. By the second day, I was eight to twelve miles in to the back country, navigating my own way to the intended destination without the benefit of trails or cairns, not likely to see anyone at all, and needing all the support I could get to climb my way up 3,000 more feet of vertical and over thousands of acres of boulders, talus, scree, and delicate sub-alpine tundra to negotiate Mount Wood. It’s fair to say I was “in the moment”. By that time chanting the mantra was at least easy, if not totally automatic.

Breathing, chanting, stepping.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Climbing.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Navigating.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Being present.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Being grateful.

Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Not only becoming the little engine that could, but being elated to find a whole new way to engage with Mother Nature.

Om Ma-ni Pad-me Hum. Om Ma-ni Pad-me Hum. Walking in sixes.

Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time. Don’t if neither exists.

Regards,
JR

This I Know to be True

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.” – Japhy Ryder

For those of you who don’t know him, Japhy Ryder is a real character. No really, he’s a character in a book called The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, first published in 1957, and the character is based upon a real person (a poet) by the name of Gary Snyder (more info at http://www.litkicks.com/GarySnyder/).

The truth in this statement became abundantly clear to me last weekend when I spent three days on a solo trip climbing up Mount Wood, the second highest peak in Montana. Admittedly it had been a long time since I’d done a solo overnight trip and I was going somewhere I’d never been before and which was miles beyond the end of the established trails I’d use to access the backcountry, so I had reservations. Yet, somewhere deep down inside my consciousness the lesson this trip had to offer was calling me like temptation calls an addict. “You know you want it, boy”. I knew I wanted it.

It was no big deal really. Start at 6,500 feet. Climb a trail for 6 miles to 7,600 feet, past an often visited lake, leave the trail, cross the outlet of the next lake up the drainage on a 200 foot long serpentine log jam, climb 2,000 more vertical feet and find a level place to camp at the edge of the forest where the trees reluctantly yield their hold on the ground to rock.. The next day climb a quarter mile long 45 degree slope of loose scree and retreating ground cover to the top of an unnamed plateau, and then just keep climbing slope to shelf to slope to bench for another 2,600 vertical feet and almost three miles until atop the second highest mountain in Montana. Even in theory and on the maps, it certainly didn’t look like a walk in the park, but as I said before I wanted it. So that was that.

This was for me, what Joseph Campbell might have called The Hero’s Journey. This of course is a long standing historical, even biblical, metaphor for the journey a young, troubled, or seeking soul takes to find themselves - seeking answers, experiencing trials, and then returning to the home and family a different, more evolved and mature soul.

Ok, Maybe The Hero’s Journey is a bit of an exaggeration. I wasn’t going on a ten year crusade, in fact I wasn’t even going into a subterranean cave on Dagobah to face my Vader voiced father, although some in my family have inferred something to that effect. All the same, the challenges of this trip were enough to set me on edge. Little did I know that I’d come home from the trip with no sharp edges at all.

Continue to follow if you are inquisitive - and have the time. Don’t if neither exists.

Regards,
JR