Walking On Rock 2

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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

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