Sanford Schulwolf

Network specialist Mark Seker consults his Palm III near the Bunny Flat trailhead.

Which is, of course, exactly why it is swarming with techreationalists. To them, it seems, Shasta is not so much a Zen experience as another hurdle to clear, much like the unrealistic deadlines and hyperinflammatory shareholder expectations they deal with every other waking moment. "What [our company is] trying to do is get up to ten million users by 2002," says Memorial Day Shasta climber John Adams, a marketing rep for high-speed Internet access provider Excite@Home. The firm still needs to wire up more than eight million people to make the goal. "It is kind of like a 'Go big or don't go at all' attitude, and you look for a similar rush in all the recreational stuff you do," Adams explains. And with so much riding on such outlandish goals, that recreational counterbalance must also be recalibrated to knock-the-bastard-off speed in the span of a long weekend.

This traffic surge has left its mark, but the techreationalists have proven to be a largely conscientious bunch. According to the Forest Service, Shasta climbers last year packed out more than two tons of their own excrement, which would otherwise have fouled the mountain. (Not everyone does the right Ziploc thing, though; rangers carried down 250 pounds of feces in the same season.) Unfortunately, climbers aren't as careful when it comes to watching where they step. "We have had a phenomenal increase in the injury rate—27 medevacs last summer, when it really spiked," says Grizz Adams (yep, it's his real name), an emergency-services technician with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's office. Previous years saw only about six to a dozen helicopter rescues per season, he notes. (The stats don't mirror the national trend; despite an upturn in the number of visitors to the backcountry, the American Alpine Club reported in January that, nationwide, the annual mountaineering accident rate is flat and generally declining.)

Of course, it's not all dotcommies up on Shasta. On Memorial Day, for example, a group of 15 vacationing Russians built its own snow-walled minirepublic at Helen Lake, enclosing three of the party's tents. But it's hard to avoid the database engineers, one-to-one marketing veeps, and network security consultants, all of whom seem to be supercompensating for the countless hours and brain cells they spend assembling PowerPoint slides and studying clickthrough rates. Not far from the Russian outpost, you could see the techreationalist determination in the campsite of Brad Moore, a former junior analyst for a San Francisco venture capital firm. Most climbers build snow walls around their tents in an effort to stem the winds that howl across the plateau come nightfall. But along with his party of four others, Moore, who had just quit a 60-hour-a-week job at Fremont Ventures, spent hours engineering six-foot ramparts that would not only hold back a gale, but also corral an elk, if one would have wandered into camp. "I like to learn about new technologies, but I don't center my life around them," says Chris Johnson, a 27-year-old quality assurance engineer with Internet advertising firm Flycast and a member of Moore's climbing party. "I like to leave it at the office."

The same could not be said of everyone at base camp. One climber stood by his tent, punching buttons on his cell phone. It was about 4 P.M. and a wall of clouds had moved in, reducing visibility to only a few yards. If conditions stayed like this, there would be no chance of a summit attempt in the morning. "I'm trying to get the climbing report," the guy said, sounding mildly annoyed. I suggested he try directory assistance for the shop at the bottom of the hill. He called the store, asked for the number of its climbing hot line, then dialed it and told me that conditions were poor at base camp due to clouds. Later that afternoon, I heard another climber raising his partners farther down the mountain on his Motorola TalkAbout two-way radio. "Yeah, I'm up at base now," he announced into his squawk box as he surveyed the field of well-fortified tents. "But it looks like all the good real estate is taken."