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