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Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Hard Way
Split Decisions (Cont.)

TECHNICAL CLIMBING may be practically impossible in the rain, but hiking is not. I decided to go for a walk.

New Zealand has the finest hut-to-hut hiking system in the world. The huts themselves are immaculate wonders, featuring shimmering, stainless-steel kitchens with gas burners, heat-radiating coal stoves surrounded by benches, bunks as tidy as at the finest summer camp, and head-shaking views you'd pay millions for in Jackson Hole or Zermatt. Paper, plastic, tin, glass, and organic waste are choppered out and recycled or safely disposed of.

Still, given the extraordinarily disagreeable weather, I assumed that even the most famous hut-to-hut tracks would be practically empty. How stupid am I? New Zealanders apparently can't imagine anything on earth more pleasant than hiking through freezing rain. They're worse than the Scots. They wear rough wool sweaters and heavy sailor's slickers and mushy boots and yet remain unyieldingly good-humored and eager. Many of the huts are booked up months, even years in advance. When I called the Department of Conservation, I learned that virtually every single bunk in every hut along the Milford Track had been reserved until I become a grandfather.

The Routeburn Track, however, did have a few spaces left in one or two huts. One of the classic fjordland treks in the southern end of the South Island, it's meant to be a three- to four-day excursion. But when I added up the total distance, even with side trips, it was no more than 25 miles.

I hiked up the Routeburn Track the first day, spent the night in the Howden hut, and hiked out the Caples Track the next. It rained remorselessly. The New Zealanders I met on the trail were grinning and enjoying the hell out of their hike, and almost every foreigner was hypothermic and whining. I met a Kiwi wapiti farmer in the shelter on Harris Saddle. "'Tis indeed possible to drown just standing up in this gorgeous green land," he said with pride.

The hike was a respite from dwelling on an expedition that had long ago passed under the bridge. But back in the car, I found myself once again chewing on my Everest experience. I stopped at one of the dozens of landslides that road crews were trying to clean up. A loader and a grader, working in methodical harmony, were trying to carve a path through an avalanche of mud and debris spilling across the highway.

That's when I had my epiphany.

For the first few years after the expedition, I had harbored the sullen conviction that if Sandy and Dana hadn't turned back, we could have been the first Americans to summit Everest via the North Face. I was so strong, so naively self-confident. Then, after more years of mountain experience, after the deaths of friends and fellow mountaineers, I came to accept that we probably wouldn't have made it, no matter what. But somehow I'd never taken it any further.

In New Zealand, staring through the foggy windshield at a deep river of mud that had cut the road in half and killed all traffic, my thinking took the final step. Say Dana and Sandy had come up and we'd all carried on. Above 26,000 feet we would each be soloing, attached to the face only by the teeth of our ice axes and crampons. Were a spindrift avalanche to have hit any one of us, we would have been torn off the mountain, plucked into space a mile above the glacier. It would have been exactly like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. By turning back, our two teammates had made the right call.

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