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DAV I D S T E V E N S O N

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AGAINST

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M E D I TAT I O N S O N

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A LIFE IN CLIMBING

University of Washington Press

Seattle and London

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Design by Thomas Eykemans

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2016 by David Stevenson

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Cassia, typeface designed by Dieter Hofrichter

Display type set in Montserrat, designed by Julieta Ulanovsky

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201918171654321

Photographs are the property of David Stevenson

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unless credited otherwise.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

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or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press

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www.washington.edu/uwpress

Cataloging information is on file with the Library of Congress

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ISBN 978-0-295-99553-3

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the mini-

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mum requirements of American National Standard for Information

SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

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ANSI Z39.481984.

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Macklin Stevenson

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19932015

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For my sons,

Slow your roll and hold your own

A million miles, a million roads.

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Macklin Stevenson

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Dougal Stevenson

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Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three

spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimen-

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sional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on

our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality

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of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. All communication between readers of an image and the makers of an image

must now take place on a two-dimensional surface. Escaping this

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flatland is the essential task of envisioning informationfor all the

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interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that

we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in
nature. Not flatlands.

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Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information

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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

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Warnings against Myself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Speaking in Code: Conversations and Reflections

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on Climbing, Language, and the Religion of the French . . . . . . 27

The Purposes of Ascent: Episodes and Conversations

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on Adventure, Climbing, and What It All Might Mean;

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An Account of Twenty Years in the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Climber as Writer: From the Armchair to the Tetons . . . . . . . . . 67

Last Dance of the Wu Li Master: A Distanced

Appreciation of Terrance Mugs Stump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

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Virga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Untethered in Yosemite: A Report from Paradise

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in the Last Summer of the Millennium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

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Short Walks with McInerney: Three Classic Pilgrimages . . . . . 117

Superstitious: Mont Blanc, French Alps 117

Struck: Longs Peak, Rocky Mountains 133

In the Bugs: In the Canadian Rockies 143

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Axe of Contrition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Byron Glacier, June 24, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

Eros on the Heights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

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The Tower and the Riddle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

Lives of the Volcano Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

A Short Cultural History of the Ice Axe

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in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

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Here Comes Ol Flattop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Three Dreams of Mountains, Late Fall 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Whillans, Haston, and Me: A Distanced Appreciation

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with a Couple Trip Reports, Contextualized . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

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In the Very Big Ice House: Travels on the Harding Icefield . . . . 231

List of Illustrations 239

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Acknowledgments241

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INTRODUCTION
Since it is certainly not customary for an author to dis-

cuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least

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an explanation should occupy first place.

Thomas Mann, The Making of

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The Magic Mountain, 1953

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Warnings against Myself accrued essay by essay over more than

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twenty-five years, beginning in about 1989. I began climbing in 1971.

By 1989, some of the events I was writing about had already been unruly residents in the treasure house of memory for eighteen years.

If taken as a whole, they might be read as a kind of mountaineering memoir. If so, it is one that leaves out enormous amounts

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of my life, such as my family life and my working life, all of which

unfolded in the foreground while my mountaineering life occurred

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mostly in the margins or waited in the wings.

But I never set out to write a memoir, nor have I done so.

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The writing is not chronological, nor necessarily linear. Most of

the essaysthe ones I like best anywaymight best be described as

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recursive. Ive added as postscripts the year the essays were written

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and a note from the present reflecting on how they strike me now.
The more recent essays require less commentary.
I set out to write literary essays, by which I mean something more
sophisticated than a traditional mountaineering trip report. The reports collected in the annual American Alpine Journal are models of
this traditionally minimalistic and journalistic style. Those reports
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are usually limited to a single paragraph and concern themselves

with most of the traditional questions of journalism: Who? What
When? Where? How? Almost never does the Why? figure into these
accounts, or even into much longer accounts, since this question is

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largely personal and understood as almost impossible to articulate

anyway by most of the presumed audience. Joseph Conrad wrote

of his novel Chance: No doubt that by selecting a certain method

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and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out

on a cigarette paper. He was responding to critics who complained

about the length of his works. American Alpine Journal trip reports

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could be written on a cigarette paper.

The piece titled Short Walks with McInerney: Three Classic Pilgrimages contains the least literarily ambitious of the pieces col-

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lected here: they are straightforward telling for the most part.

As it turns out, the Mount Kennedy trip has commanded an in-

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ordinate amount of space in my own memory and thus reappears in

a number of essays, like a Magic 8 Ball that, when consulted, reveals
the same fortune over and over: not It is certain, or Reply hazy,
try again, but Mount Kennedy, Mount Kennedy, Mount Kennedy.

I understand completely David Robertss repeated recounting of

his climb and tragedy of Mount Huntington in the Alaska Range

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in 1965. The book Mountain of My Fear, which launched his career,

was written eight months after the climb, when he was twenty-two

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years old, in a white heat, a chapter a day, too impatient for second
thoughts or serious revision. He also published four different ac-

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counts of the climb. And when he wrote his memoir On the Ridge
between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Re-examined (2005), the

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Huntington trip appeared again. How could it not? As Roberts said

of the climb, I have never lived through a five-day span of compa-

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rable intensity. Such intensity occupies much more than five days

worth of memory.
I present these observations to defend the fact that in these es-

says, events and people reappear. Jorge Luis Borges said that the
really great metaphors are always the same: You compare time to
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a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming. Those are the great metaphors because they respond to something essential. My memories
are not metaphors, but they are like them in their essentiality.
If I didnt set out to write these essays as a book, I did at least set

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out to write, just as I set out to climb. For many years climbing came
more easily to me with its insistence on focus, its engagement of the

senses, its immersion in the natural world. Prufrock measured out

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his life in coffee spoon; Terry Tempest Williams measured hers in

birds, at least she did during the time recounted in Refuge; for me
its mountains.

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The challenges of the blank page were harder for me to commit

to, a longer, slower road. Nonetheless, I have tried to adhere to Thoreaus dictum: If one advances confidently in the direction of his

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dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he

will meet with a success unexpected in the common hours.

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I dont know about confidently, and as far as success goes, all

I know is that I continue to climb, and write, all in the direction of

my dreams.

DDS
Anchorage, Alaska

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September 2015

Introduction

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