Just below Misery Hill, we stopped on a ridge to see the sun popping out over the bed of clouds we’d been slogging up through since 1:30 a.m. We were only about 1,300 feet from the top of Mount Shasta, a metaphor all of us had been looking at for the past six months.
The six of us climbing — my girlfriend Steph, myself, Robb, Jayson, Zach, and Jessica — raised more than $25,000 for wilderness programs for inner-city teens through the Summit For Someone fundraiser. Of course, to get everyone’s attention to donate money to a cause, we had to do something big. Climbing Mount Shasta was a pretty good attention-getter.
I work for Big City Mountaineers, the nonprofit benefiting from our climb, so I knew what I was getting into — I had taken a group of tough kids from East Palo Alto on their first backpacking trip the previous summer, in the Ansel Adams Wilderness southeast of Yosemite. I sat around campfires and listened to them talk about tough family situations, getting jumped on the way to school and getting pressured to join gangs. But I walked behind them as they climbed their first mountain, 10,522-foot Sing Peak, saw their smiles at the summit, and caught them all watching the moon rise from the top of a boulder one night after dinner. So I knew what I was getting into by committing myself to raising $3,600.
Steph signed on with me, and went after the fundraising with a fervor. She posted signs around her neighborhood and collected items for a garage sale to raise money. She talked her yoga studio into donating all the proceeds from a weekly class to Big City Mountaineers. A fundraising group at her old high school donated $500. I never left my desk, harassing everyone I knew through e-mails, Facebook messages, and Google Chat. Together, we raised more than $9,000, or enough to fund two weeklong backpacking trips, each pairing five urban teens with five adult mentors for a week in the wilderness. By my approximation from experience, that’s about 10,000 smiles and 60 nights sleeping under the stars.
After the fundraising was done, all we had to do was climb Mount Shasta. Every Tuesday night, Steph and I drove out to Mount Morrison, just behind Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and trudge up the social trail that led to the summit in .7 miles and 1,400 feet of elevation gain, mostly in the dark. After 17 summits of Mount Morrison, it was time for our climb of Mount Shasta.
We met our guides in the town of Mount Shasta and hauled our gear up the trail to Horse Camp for our first night on the side of the mountain. Since there was bad weather and bad visibility, we would be turning our climb into a 3-day ascent, with the third day including a 4,200-vertical-foot climb to the summit, then a 7,200-vertical-foot descent to the trailhead. We rose a little after midnight, ate “breakfast,” put on crampons, roped up and started stepping, crunching forward and up through the darkness by the glow of our headlamps. We were in a whiteout most of the morning, and everyone remained silent and got into their own personal rhythm: step with left foot, step with right foot, plant ice axe. Repeat for one hour. Stop, rest, eat, drink water. Begin again.
At 7:30 a.m., we carefully stepped onto the summit outcrop, one at a time, at the 14,192-foot top of our adventure together. We signed Big City Mountaineers summit flags, just like the ones our teens take on their backpacking trips, and posed for photos. It was the first time I’d gotten together with a bunch of people I didn’t know for anything that ambitious. There’s something different about climbing a mountain when you know it’s about more than just getting yourself and your team to the top.
Interested in supporting or participating in Summit For Someone in 2010? Visit their website at www.summitforsomeone.org.
