OLD SCHOOL: A Mountain Guide's Life Before the Net

This is a story of a mountain guide's life before we were all deported to the tiny planet Cyberon, where Connectivity is King and getting away and back to the Earth a forgotten joy

It was the Golden Age of backcountry mountaineering and Vincent Lee was lucky enough to be there. Forty years he wandered the high country, thirty as an instructor and guide, mostly with young beginners.

The ranges were wild and empty. The digital genie was still in its bottle. No net, GPS, sat or cel phones. Packs were big. Food was awful. Tired, scared, hungry, bug-bitten, filthy, wet and miserable Lee and his clients were, but they felt like giants, latter-day "mountain men," roaming the wilderness, avoiding trails, fording rivers, camping wherever they wanted, climbing whatever they liked, dealing with the Earth on its own terms.

The whole idea was to disconnect, get out, up and away and for a few brief, shining moments be free! How rare today the freedom they so easily found then.

Paul (Petzoldt, @ Colorado Outward Bound in 1964) thought every student should climb a ‘big' mountain before leaving camp. He arranged their schedules so that sometime in the last half of July, they would climb nearby 14,137-foot Capitol Peak by its justly famous Northeast Knife-edge.

High Camp We'd been humping huge loads all day and finally found a flat spot big enough for five or six tents. It was somewhere around 13,000 feet, so it was all rocks, with a nearby snow bank for water. Also a short scramble from where we'd be roping up, it would save climbing time once the students began to show up. That was Paul's plan: the four of us would stay up there and meet the patrols as they came by. We'd divide them into threes and each of us would take a team up to the summit, then bring them down and turn them loose to continue on their way. The "challenge" was just beyond camp, an easy, but razor sharp section of the ridge-crest with horrendous drops on both sides. For us, the big problem was protection, horizontal traverses being notoriously difficult to safeguard. The rest of the climb to the summit was easy scrambling, so we'd earn our pay each day crossing and re-crossing the knife-edge. At least, that's what we thought.

The appropriately-named Knife-edge.

Dead tired, we cooked a quick dinner and turned in, even though there was still a bit of daylight left. No sooner had we dozed off, but a bunch of noise outside the tents woke us up and got me out to see what the hell was going on. It turned out to be our first patrol group, also tired but excited by the huge summit pyramid looming just beyond camp. I told their patrol leader to quietly find tent-sites and settle in for the night. Since we were all so tired, I said we could sleep in a bit in the morning and get up around eight. "Wow! Is the climb that short?," he asked. "The weather's good and we've got all day, don't we?," I replied. "No way," he said. They had to be off to their next "challenge" by noon. Oh man, just what we needed! A crack-o-dawn start the first day! "OK," I said. "Up at four and back by noon," and stumbled back to bed.

Four o'clock came minutes later, or so it seemed. We all climbed out of bed, ate a quick cold breakfast of gorp, granola and such, figuring we'd cook up a real meal when we got back. We divided into teams and roped up in camp so I could see if they all knew what they were doing. That turned out to be a good idea, since the patrols varied a lot in their skill levels. These guys were pretty good, so off we went. We had three teams of four and one of three, which turned out to be fairly typical. At the knife-edge a goodly amount of the previous night's enthusiasm evaporated. Suddenly, they were looking straight down hundreds of feet to the boulders and meadows below. This void fell away on both sides of a crest at places sharp enough to cut yourself on. Yikes! How were they going to get across? Each of us leaders in turn went out bit less than half a rope length, maybe 50 feet, leaving protection along the way for those behind. Then the second man would come out, change positions with us, and bring out the third man while we went on without belays to speed things up. I forget how many leads were required, but it was several to get everyone over. Not until our last man started out, could the next leader begin. If you're beginning to get the idea that this took awhile, you're right, and we had to do it all over again to get everyone home.

Capitol Peak viewed across the Northeast Knife-edge.

152 pages

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