Conquering Mount Doubt

I carefully place each shaky step, trying to calm my breath as I take in the 360 degree ridge-top views. Low-lying clouds make for hanging summits that appear to be wrapped in silky white scarfs. I feel like I am in a movie. I feel like I am in a virtual reality game. I feel like I am on a roller coaster. I am on top of a mountain, and alive as a person can be, yet this feels unreal. On either side of me are valleys that plunge into expanses of more mountains on a scale that I can’t comprehend. My foot dislodges a loose bit of rock whose progress I watch as it rolls off to one side, bumping against a few bluffs as it tumbles into the abyss. It is a good thing that I chose this week to kick my coffee addiction: I do not need a supplement to my jitters today. Nerves circulate through my veins in liquid form as I contemplate the upcoming descent. My legs literally shake. On the way up, there was a 10 meter section of track that seemed like a near vertical rock climb above a 1,000 meter drop-off. I was surprised to see this since the track description said something like, "If you find yourself on a vertical scramble, you are probably off-track". Yet this is the only part of the track with an actual orange triangle trail marker, so I knew I had to be on the route. As each worried thought comes into my mind, I diligently shove it away in favor of focusing on the task at hand: putting one foot in front on the other. It is just me out here so I have to do it. 

My anxiety is fueled further because I'd slept through my alarm. I didn't get started as early as I'd wanted to, given the weather was forecasted to come in to slicken things up. I nearly skipped breakfast, but thought better of it realizing that it might be two hours before I reached a reasonably horizontal spot in the trail to stop and snack. Besides, when else was I going to have a chance to drink hot Milo (cocoa) besides a thunderingly melting glacier reflecting the pink sunrise backdrop? Maybe I slept through my alarm because I was awakened every 15 minutes by that glacial thunder all through the night. I cannot believe how quickly the ice is literally falling from the earth. The possum didn’t help my sleep either. At first I'd thought that maybe there was a lone mountaineer trying to break into the hut in the middle of the night. Then I'd thought maybe it was a cheeky Kea bird (a smart bugger of a bird that likes to eat your boots and steal your socks). But all the sudden, perched on the windowsill, back-lit by the moon against the scraggly mountain silhouette there was a cat on the hut's window-sill! “Should I let it in?”, “ What is it doing up here?”, “Oh wait, no, it's a possum!”, I thought in quick succession. That stupid thing scratched at the roof for a good twenty minutes around 4 am. I had decided to leave my boots outside to avoid stinking up the tiny mountain A-frame bivouac (bivvy). To keep them from getting rained on, I'd stuffed them underneath the hut, but not before tying my laces to the foundation. There are only a few feet between the edge of the bivvy and a very large drop-off. I just didn't want to take a chance that my boots would take sail in the wind off the cliff. This was a fortunate decision because the damn possum took a go at my boots, dragging them perilously to the edge of the cliff, restrained only by the tied laces. Safe boots aside, I didn’t sleep well last night.

The clouds begin to darken, so I quicken my step wanting to hit the hard section before the rain beats me there. My foot catches a smooth, flat rock sending me to my bum in one of the few sections of track with a wide margin of error. Rattled, I take it as a sign to slow down, and utilize every calm-down tool in my mental arsenal. 

I think about all the people who have come before me; Sefton, unlike other New Zealand huts I've bagged in was built as a mountaineer's basecamp and it is the oldest structure in Mount Cook National Park, built in the early 1900’s. It's the sort of place that incredibly badass people sleep for a few hours before waking up at 2 am to go ice climb the glacier in rope teams summiting one of several surrounding mountains. I consider the impossibility of this, especially 100 years ago when people were mountain climbing without modern gear. Furthermore, this hut would have been built without the aid of helicopters to transport in the supplies. How did they build this thing? The bivvy sits on a rocky ledge sticking out of a much bigger mountain. I felt like part of a select club sleeping there. I am not (yet?) a real mountaineer. But at least I can say I've slept on a mountaineer's sleeping mat in a tiny A-frame where I could stand up only in the middle next to my wet clothes that hung on prayer flags dangled from the ceiling. Other huts I've bagged originated as campsites for hunters, gold miners, cattle herders, or Maori greenstone (jade) seekers. This one has Canterberry Mountain Club magazines with stories of people conquering icy crevasses. Low and behold, there was a story about people camping at Sefton and climbing Footstool, a nearby peak. I checked the hut book where people log their trip intentions (which among other things include things like "eating gummy worms") to aid Search and Rescue should such a need arise. I couldn't believe it! There, in the hut book were the signatures of the people mentioned in the article! There I was, snuggling in my sleeping bag in their basecamp reading their story, looking at their actual signatures! I belong here, I reassured myself. I can do this.

I take one last comforting glance across the substantial valley to Mount Oliver where I'd watched the sunrise just the morning before. I could see the red speck of Mueller Hut tucked away. Somewhere in that hut is Bridget the volunteer Hut Warden; someone rooting for me to succeed. She encouraged me to tackle this tramp the night before. Through the binoculars, she showed me the tiny orange pin point which marked Sefton bivvy across the way. The ridge below it looked formidable, but she told me that I could do it. Given that Bridget is a member of the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council, is a wilderness survival teacher, avid tramper, and outdoor educator, I decided to trust her assessment of me. Further, I bet that as a Mueller Hut warden, she would be good at picking out idiots from competent hikers. Mueller is on top of a legitimate mountain with steep, loose climbs and the sort of weather changes that happen at 1800 meters (6,000 feet). Yet it's only a 3-5 hour climb from Mount Cook Village in Mount Cook National Park. So it attracts an incredible array of people in jeans and cotton t-shirts with big cameras and insufficient jackets; each appearing to be less prepared than the last. While I warmed up in my sleeping bag in Mueller Hut, I read an article in Wilderness Magazine describing Mueller as New Zealand's highest altitude Backpackers (Youth Hostel), and I couldn’t help but nod my head in amused agreement. Before I set out, Bridget instructed me to flash my light from Sefton back at her on Mueller Hut. I felt a little less alone out there, recalling her five long, steady flashes in response to my signal.

Rapidly approaching the most treacherous section of the tramp, I review my contingency plan. If I can’t safely make the descent, I will go back to the hut and get on the radio to the base station. I have an extra day of food in my pack, so I can stay and wait for help, if needed. The previous night, I'd botched the radio communication on the 7 pm "all hut" call where the base station sets up a sort of radio conference call to all the area huts to check that everyone made it to their intended destinations and report out the next day weather forecast. I was a little over-eager to use the words "over" and "copy", so I ended up speaking out of turn. My nerves turned to giggles as I recalled my embarrassing radio flop. Still, as good as it is to have a back-up plan I do my best work when I am convinced that there is nobody to rescue me. I'm constantly amazed by what people (including me) are capable of when they have to be capable. Orson Scott Card was onto something when he wrote about this in Ender’s Game; Ender becomes a capable battle commander because during training, nobody came to his rescue when he was being dangerously bullied and he learned to survive, waiting for no one.

Finally, as I approached the dreaded steep bit, I decide to do a few practice runs turning toward the mountain to lower myself down backwards. Though I could do these sections facing forward, it would be good to try out my footing backward, feeling out how the weight of my pack affects my balance…And then all the sudden, I reach that orange triangle that marks the end of the steep part, and I wonder what happened to that scary vertical section? Conclusion: while the route is quite vertical in my imagination, it is a much more reasonable angle in reality. It seems I have "practiced" my way down the hardest bit and didn’t even realize it! Stunned, that it’s over already, I remember why it doesn't pay to worry: Worry distorts reality and we probably worry about all the wrong things anyways. I recently went to dinner with a rafting guide who told me a story about how a sheep fell off a massive cliff into the river and exploded on impact, such that its guts and entrails dispersed into the rapids. When the sheep's head started following the boat, his non-English speaking clients panicked, stopped listening to his commands, and ended up underneath the boat with the sheep head. First off, I just want to point out that this story is so Kiwi. This is the sort of thing that can happen in a country with 40 million sheep per 4 million citizens. Second, I mean, you just can't make up stuff like that to worry about. It would seem reasonable to worry about someone falling out or about the raft popping. But you might as well not bother to worry about any of it, because you will inevitably forget to worry about the exploding sheep.

I continue along the sharp, but navigable switchbacked ridge down toward the river, formed from the glacial melt I'd witnessed earlier while taking a dump on the World's Most Scenic Toilet, which has a full 180 degree view of the Southern Alps, right up close and personal. (P.S. You haven’t lived until you’ve used a toilet with a view like this). Stressing and straining my quads on the way down, I looked around for the next sign of a footprint or rock cairn as this is technically not a "trail", but an off-track route-finding challenge. For the most part it is easy to see where others have been before me except for a few sections when the track takes an unexpected sidestep with a hard-to-find cairn marker. As my nerves calm from the earlier excitement, I wonder why it is that I'd imagined the track to be so much harder and more dangerous than it is. Perhaps it is because of the doubting Negative Nelly DoC (Department of Conservation) officer I'd spoken with when I registered my trip intentions at the base station. Without knowing anything about me and my abilities, she spoke to me as if I was 100% destined to fail. Instead of helpfully delivering critical safety information, she said things like "well you can just find somewhere out there to sleep until we send help for you in the morning". Her negativity was so strong that I almost cancelled my trip since a supposed "official" was doubting me. But then I asked to speak with another ranger who had actually done Sefton. He explained important navigational pitfalls to watch for. Then, I wondered why I should trust the opinion of someone whose default is to doubt everyone without knowing anything about them. She had also spoken to me that way when I registered my intentions for Mueller. I decided to trust my own judgment and the judgment of the hut warden who'd actually spent hours getting to know me. Still, I think that little seed of doubt was enough to inflate my perception of the situation when things got a little bit intense. It is disturbing that it took me a few hours of chatting with a qualified person to believe her assessment of my competence whereas it took only a split second for my confidence to be shaken by someone whose default is to assume that I am an incompetent idiot. 

How many unqualified doubters have thwarted me from succeeding before I even try? How many times have I indiscriminately judged and doubted someone else, discouraging them from attempting something? I bet it happens so often to most of us that we don't even notice when it does. In the First World, we worry about additives in foods poisoning our bodies, but we fail to recognize the extent to which we allow ourselves to be poisoned by unqualified negative thoughts. In the wilderness, doubts can lead to panic which leads to bad decisions, which lead to emergency situations. In everyday life, negative thoughts are just as dangerous, but they affect us in a slower, long-term fashion which is difficult to notice. In this case, I’d say I bagged Sefton Bivvy and in the process, I bagged Mount Doubt.