The Measure of a Mountain
Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier
Bruce Barcott
Mount Rainier is called “The Mountain” by those who live in its shadow. It dominates everything around it. Its presence rises up above all else in its skyline. It dominated the view as I looked out of my Uncle Vine’s living room window. It dominates Seattle and every other town and city in the area. It dominated Bruce Barcott. He had no desire to climb it, but he wanted to know and understand The Mountain.
He decided as a first step to circumnavigate The Mountain via the Wonderland Trail, a twelve day, ninety–two mile trek. He was a rank amateur at such things, so his first step was to buy the necessary equipment starting with a Gore–Tex jacket and rain pants for five hundred dollars. He was finally fully equipped with everything except money and he started off on a rainy day. It kept on raining. After four days with everything, including his sleeping bag, soaking wet and no relief in sight he quit. So much for walking around The Mountain. (In the event you were wondering, he later completed the hike under more favorable conditions.)
Barcott’s next step was to learn about the mountain from other people. He presents the history of the mountain, its discovery, and the man it was named after. He talked and traveled with entomologists about the insect life to be found in and around the snow. There is a chapter on glaciers, the nature and dangers of crevasses, and the eternal grinding of the mountain’s rock by the glaciers. And then there is a reminder that The Mountain is a volcano. “Mount Rainier is the most dangerous volcano in the United States. More people in the State of Washington live around a dangerous mountain than do people anywhere else in the country. The more scientists learn about Mount Rainier the more nervous they become, because in the last few years they’ve discovered that the danger doesn’t lie as they had thought earlier, in a volcanic eruption. What has the geologists spooked is the fact that The Mountain could collapse at any minute.” Barcott has a good number of pertinent stories that make this a lively book. My favorite concerns Ake and Bronka Sundstrom. Barcott tells it well, so here are his words. “If you spend time at Camp Muir [Camp Muir is at 10,000 feet and nearly everyone climbing The Mountain stops to rest and sleep at Camp Muir before the final push to the top] you’re likely to meet Ake and Bronka Sundstrom, a retired couple who hike about ten miles every day except when they go grocery shopping, and sometimes even on those days, too. If you meet them you will not overtake them, because they are faster than you. They will pass you. Pleasantly, but they will pass you.
Ake is eighty years old and his wife is seventy–two, which she’ll tell you proudly because when you live productively, she’ll say, why be ashamed of your age? If you want to know how good or bad the weather was in a given year, Ake and Bronka can tell you according to how many times they made it to Camp Muir. Last year they managed thirty–nine trips which wasn’t bad. Two years ago they went fifty times. ”
“Ake wears eyeglasses so thick that it’s tough to see which eye works and which doesn’t (He lost the left one to cancer a few years ago). The legs of old men are not often pretty, but a quarter–century on the trail have turned Ake’s into marble limbs that would have enhanced the reputation of Michelangelo. I have stared in awe at another man’s legs only twice in my life: once in high school when Rick Fenney, who was later employed as a running back for the Minnesota Vikings, wore a pair of cutoffs in the lunchroom and again when I saw Ake’s eighty–year–old shanks. They were magnificent.”
“Bronka’s tiny frame belies her superhuman endurance. She can blaze up to Camp Muir without stopping for food or pausing in conversation….”
“Bronka’s unflappable cheer seemed all the more curious when I learned her history, which she told me once on the way to Camp Muir. She was born in the twenties in a village south of Krakow, Poland. The Nazis captured her and her parents near the end of the Second World War and sent them to a concentration camp. Her mother and father were killed; Bronka survived….”
I will leave the rest of the story for you to read yourself.
Eventually in his reading Barcott comes across words from an alchemist, Petrus Severinus, who wrote that those who would know the world through books deny themselves the sensual experience of their subject. He says: “Burn your books, put on your shoes, climb mountains, explore deserts to gain for yourselves some idea of the things of nature.” He tacked this quote above his desk, next to a poster of Mount Rainier. The quote and the poster kept working on him until he finally concluded that he must climb The Mountain. The story of that climb makes a fitting conclusion to the book.