Friday, 18 Aug 1998 - Misadventures in Death Defying

 






I hiked up to the Alpspitze today. It is a very large, very 
forbidding hunk of rock, and it's only a little smaller than the 
Zugspitze, the highest Alp in Germany.
 The day started out nice enough; sunny, blue skies, few clouds. The 
hike up was rough, but not unbearable. The worst part about that was 
that I was stupid and forgot to bring a water bottle up with me. But 
it was only a three hour trek beyond drinkable stream water, so I 
lived. 
 As I was getting near the top and the slightest misstep would send 
me plummeting 1000 feet, I kept thinking about this book called 
"Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac that I had recently read, where Jack is 
climbing a similar mountain with some buddies,(The Matterhorn, I 
think) and as he got near the top he started freaking out because he 
had never climbed so high in his life and he was afraid of falling 
off. So he winds up chickening out and doesn't go all the way up, 
turns around and climbs down. So when I finally reached the top of 
the Alpspitze, where you can barely even see the ground you're so 
high up, they had this book in a metal box that you can sign your 
name in. So I open it up, sign my name, date it, stroudsburg, pa, and 
I write down underneath it, in quotes: "Jack Kerouac was a big fat 
hairy wuss-bag!"
 So hee haw and stuff.
 I stayed up for about a half hour, and then started down. The way I 
had gone up was to climb around behind the peak and then come up at 
it at an angle, thereby avoiding any verticle faces. The way I 
fuzz-headedly decided to go down was really the way you're supposed 
to go up, I guess. About  a 2000 foot verticle DROP. They have these 
metal spikes and rungs hammered into the cliff, along with metal 
cable for a handhold. If it weren't for these, this particular climb 
would be totally impossible. (Unless you're a K2 class rockclimber.) 
But since they were there, it was fairly managable. Until I was about 
halfway down and a big ugly cloud swamped me and started pouring 
really cold rain on me, that is. 
 If I had been hiking down the long but smart and safe way, it would 
have felt really good, actually...    But.
 So these metal rungs aren't water resistant or anything. Neither was 
the cable, and neither are weather-worn rocks and cliff faces. It got 
SLIPPERY. With a thousand feet above me and a thousand feet below me 
and no visible plateau in sight...(Not that there was much in sight 
anyway with that nasty evil cloud surrounding me like Feds on 
Freemen) Lets just say my shorts got a bit heavier.
 So the next thing that happens to help me appreciate life a little 
bit more is thunder and lightening. One bolt went off pretty near 
by... metal cable. A ONE PIECE metal cable connected by thick metal 
spikes from top to bottom. I got a small rug burn type of shock, 
nothing bad, but enough to make me really apprehensive, and enough to 
almost make me lose my manhood. 
 So it's all really rather anti-climactic, because obviously I made 
it down and alive and everything, I was just really really really 
really really scared for the final hour it took me to get down.
 But the absolute worst thing about the whole experince is the fact 
that the whole time, no matter how freaked out I was, I kept 
thinking; " If I die, my last known words are going to be   'Jack 
Kerouac was a big fat hairy wuss-bag!' "  AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!

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messiestobjects' messy adventures: Friday, 18 Aug 1998 - Misadventures in Death Defying