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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Climb Every Mole Hill (cont.)


	(Joseph Rafferty)

I DON'T KNOW OF MANY high school posses that have stayed as close as ours. This happened, in part, because my buddies and I liked high school so much that we've mythologized it. (Hey, it happens. Call it the Diner syndrome.) Steve served as student-council president; Dave was veep. Dorrell edited the yearbook. I worked for the student newspaper and was lineman of the year on the football team. Spade was a star golfer. Casper was the class clown. Drew, who gets along with everybody he meets, was one of the most popular guys in school. Our friendships have never faded; we would march to the grave for one another. And though we'd all made it to our 20th high school reunion the summer before, we relished a chance to meet up again.

Which is how we found ourselves roaring past Mount Rushmore with barely a glance—who needs it?!—heading merrily toward South Dakota's apex. On the Martin difficulty scale, Harney Peak is a 4, thanks to its height, its 1,500 feet of vert from trailhead to tippy-top, and its round-trip hike of 5.8 miles. A sign on the summit reminds visitors, incorrectly, that Harney is the highest point between the Rockies and the towering Pyrenees of Spain and France. It's capped with an elegant stone lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939.

Of course, there's a built-in problem with a soaring, 7,000-plus peak: It's a real mountain, so it attracts real mountaineers. At the summit, while taking celebratory sips of whiskey from my Kansas City Chiefs flask, we were approached by an athletic couple from Colorado. Mistaking us for like-minded "serious" climbers, they gushed, "You gotta go sit in the Chair!"

The what?

"An armchair-size divot in the cliff just downhill from here," one of them explained. "You can sit in it and dangle your legs over 300 feet of nothingness."

This intrigued Steve, who just can't resist a challenge—despite his utter lack of coordination and kinetic awareness. One time in high school, Steve tried to hurl a pack of lit firecrackers out a half-open car window and hit the glass instead. The fizzing explosives tumbled to the floor of Drew's mom's Thunderbird, blowing a hole in the carpet.

While Steve managed to sit in the Chair without tragedy, the sight of him wiggling on the precipice made the rest of us hit the flask repeatedly. We drank more that night at dinner, which meant the only sober driver available was . . . Steve. He gave up drinking a while ago, but he remains, quite simply and without peer, the worst driver of all time, constantly alternating between sudden acceleration and braking. His hands shake constantly; throw in his current addictions to coffee and cigars and you get transport that is, at best, fumbling and herky-jerky, at worst, upside down in a ditch, surrounded by flashing lights.

As Steve pointed us toward Nebraska, Spade, Dorrell, Dave, and I nodded off. Drew and Casper claimed they "couldn't sleep in cars" and watched Steve drive—with the color drained from their faces and their fingernails dug deep into Econoline vinyl. Whatever they did as backseat drivers must have worked, because Steve successfully, if shakily, kept us on the road.

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