The kayak bobbed up and down on rolling three-foot swells as I paddled along the basalt cliffs of Lake Superior.
It was almost 9 p.m. but at the end of June on the North Shore, that still left me at least a good hour of decent light before the darkness. The ostentatious lake homes to my right gave way to depopulated state forest, where raggedy birch and aspen flashed the underside of their leaves in the offshore wind.
Then I found my cool place. It’s a break in the cliffs where the millennia of pounding surf have blasted out an alcove. There’s a rock shelf, leading up to a living room-sized space, where a visitor can stand underneath an overhang, protected from any rainfall, wrapped up in the shadow of the stone.
I paddled closer.
Waves flew in at the rock and exploded up like fireworks. Water piled up on the shelf and then flowed backwards, creating a small outward current above the waves’ up-down motion.
Even bobbing in the surf, I could still make out the telltale patch of white in the alcove’s gloom. There was ice here.
Ice! And it was almost Independence Day.
The frigid legacy of the 2013-14 winter still lingered where the ledges protected it from the sun. Maybe 20 pounds of the stuff was left now, and it was vanishing drip by drip into the lake, which had pushed it up here.
Only a few months before, Superior had been completely frozen, all 32,000 thousand square miles of it. It was the first time this had happened since 1979.
I had to get out for a closer look.
I approached the rocks with the caution of someone coming up on a dangerous animal. I would need to get up on shore right behind a wave and get out quickly before the next one crashed over me.
I popped my spray skirt off at 10 feet away; then got my feet out of the cock pit, while my butt was still in the seat, ready to swing out of the boat with acrobatic ease. Of course, nothing works as prettily as it’s supposed to.
I landed in waist deep water on an algae-slick stone slope. I almost fell over right there, but managed to steady myself against the boat — just in time for the next wave to slam it against my hips. Using a set of ballerina steps, I managed to mince my way up the rock while keeping the boat perpendicular to the waves. I finally heaved it onto the rock in front of me and dragged myself up after it.
The waves were still grabbing up the boat several feet up the ledge, so I ended up pulling it even further, before I decided it was safe to let go.
The alcove is hardly the grandest place around, not even on Lake Superior, which boasts massive sea-caves around the Apostle Islands and Tettegouche State Park. Still I was pleased to walk past the curtain of drips from above into the darker recesses. There, I could look back over the miles of water to the horizon line. The silhouetted rock framed this beautifully.
The waves had wrought a pillar out of one section of the wall, which was a nice architectural flourish. Then there was the ice. It was mostly white, though there were some transparent parts along the edges. I photographed it next to a kayak paddle to remember it. Soon it would be gone, and this made me sad.
Some of the last ice left on Lake Superior, June 30
I was proud too. No one I’d talked to about the lakeshore had mentioned this little alcove. I’m sure I was the only one who knew that there was still ice here. The place was easy enough to overlook from a motorboat skipping along the waves at high speed.
As for accessing it from land, it would be difficult, dangerous work to try to descend the walls.
I found it. Maybe this could be my place.
No, I hadn’t carved the rock, or kept the ice sequestered there, but I still felt a strange sense of ownership. The feeling is familiar to anyone who “discovers” a dive bar, a band or maybe a continent and feels like he deserves some credit for appreciating it before his friends do.
Of course, I needed to bring said friends along so that they could appreciate it too. The problem is that then, the place is no longer undiscovered, it is no longer has the quality of being unique and unknown. Imagine John Wesley Powell revisiting the Grand Canyon to find tour buses and T-shirt vendors lining the south rim.
I wish I could say I was strong enough to be an exception to this trend. I’ve been guiding customers on kayak trips along the shoreline. Could I really keep this under my hat? Already, I thought about how cool it would be to show the people in my group the last ice on Lake Superior.
Sure enough, as soon as I got back to my apartment, one of my housemates asked what I’d been up to and I told him about the ice I’d found. I couldn’t resist showing photos of the alcove to the other guides, who — unlike me — had not discovered it yet.
I wondered if I’d keep my mouth shut for the next guided tour. When I found that I was with a stronger group and we still had plenty of time left at the turn-around point, I asked if anyone was interested in going to an interesting formation a bit further down the shoreline.
I pointed to the remaining ice in the alcove and got murmurs of appreciation mixed with wonder from the visitors. It was July 1 now and the ice wasn’t going to last much longer.
Satisfying as it was to see others enjoy the ice, I knew that it was just another part of the package for them. Rambling across it myself made me feel like I’d owned a part of it, though now the guests had a claim on it as well.
Well, sharing can be a virtue also, I suppose.
In any case, not many more got to say they saw the ice. The last of it melted off during the first hot days that rolled in ahead of the Fourth of July.
Looking out at the kayak from the back of the alcove
Mount Emmons as seen from Middle Chain Lake in Utah’s Uintas Mountains
Start with ice: gray crystals laid out across the lake in a dull mat, splotches of deeper gray, tiny white sparks where the crystals reflect the sunlight just so.
A small line of translucent iridescence marks where ice meets the water’s edge. And there’s a small canal of open water between the freeze and the sun-warmed rocks that forced the ice back.
The surface scintillates in the shifting breeze. There isn’t enough room for waves, just oscillations that obscure the sky and clouds above and jostle stray ice fragments. Silent rocks sit unmolested beneath the agitation, wearing beards of algae. It’s a different story above water; only the faintest layer of lichen grows here, making it possible to appreciate the red orange striations on the stones.
Life doesn’t assert itself until at least a foot above the lake. First, there are the black clods of half-rotted moss. It oozes around the rocks, and smothers them like a dirty blanket. Not a very warm blanket. It’s saturated with snowmelt from above. Brownish rivulets run off onto shore. When I walk barefoot, the water squirts up from between my toes.
Brittle tufts of strawlike grass root by the lake edge, then the willows fill in. Their gray deathly branches have already shot out magenta shoots and buds. One of these has burst already, revealing a pea-sized catkin, coated with silken hairs. The willows only hold a small band of ground until the first pines push them out. The first of them are dwarves, their bundles of needles trembling in the wind. Further back they climb high and straight as rockets, leaving a fractal trail of green black branches behind them.
The needles on younger trees are a lighter green and seem softer as they huddle in amongst their mightier parents. They too will harden up after they see what the winter has to throw at them. Many trees didn’t make it; their dead trunks stand in place amidst the green or else bleach in full sun. My gaze moves across the lake to where the forest climbs a hill, defying the thinning air and winter’s wrath. But even they can only climb so far. Above them rise the mighty flanks of Mount Emmons.
A waste of shattered stone sterilized by frigid winds, ramparts of billion-tear-old Uinta Mountain Group stone defy the ravenous elements. Fields of snow march along their crests, rising to jagged cornices above an immense bowl. No sustenance in this bowl — five-hundred feet of snow and rock carved out by the violence of glaciations. I can see the place where a cornice has broken off and plunged down the side in an avalanche.
Ridges fly out from the mountain, blocking the trees’ advance. It is easy to imagine that the forest is under attack from on high, but in reality the mountain provides the spring melt necessary for the life below. Beyond the bowl, Emmons presents its eastern front, a wall of snow and broken rock that rises at least a thousand feet into the air. The place is its own, a clash of elemental forces, without the meddling interference of life. Or so I would have thought had I had not witnessed the tufts of grass and lichen eking out an existence there.
From where I sit, I can watch shadows march across the brutal stone and empty snow. I see that final peak stark in the face of the rending elements, a bulwark against the softening of spring and drifting clouds.
Andrew climbing up the east side of Utah’s Mount Emmons in May. The frozen Oke Doke Lake is below.
Amidst the chain stores, traffic and scalding asphalt that was Roosevelt, Utah on a late May afternoon, the snowy peaks of the Uintas Mountains to the north looked two-dimensional, a movie prop instead of a real landform.
The real world was an eternity of autos grinding down Highway 40, idling at the traffic lights, flashing blinding sun off their windshields. Stop. Go. Breathe the fumes.
I watched shoppers break sweat in the time it took for them to travel from air-conditioned truck cabs to air conditioned supermarket and fantasized about the high-country, that improbable territory where snow still lay on the slopes, ice on the lakes.
The Uinta River flows next to our trail in the Ashley National Forest in the Uintas Mountains.
The Uintas are the tallest range going east to west in the continental US. The peaks form a wall between northern Utah and southern Wyoming, blocking roads and creating sanctuary for moose, elk and black bear — not the kind of animals people typically associate with Utah. There are even miles of tundra and muskeg — landscapes that would look right at home in an Alaska photo-album. Crowds that flock to Rocky Mountain National Park or the Tetons don’t bother with the Uintas, probably haven’t even heard of them.
Andrew, Jon and I wanted to spend four days up there, including an ascent of the 13,440-foot Mount. Emmons. Our cart was stacked with cheap, dehydrated, high-calorie food; a cornucopia of wheat bread, nuts, dried cranberries, raisins, potato flakes, pasta and flatbread. Judging by the amount of beans and broccoli we’d be hauling, the trip was bound to be a celebration of flatulence.
The whole adventure from trailhead, to summit and back would be a mere 24 miles and about 5,000 feet of elevation gain. We would camp near tree line at the Chain Lakes, which lay at Emmons’s base. As for the conditions on and around the mountain, that was anyone’s guess.
No one had been up to the Lakes so far this season, the ranger at the National Forest headquarters in Duschene told me. We could expect to find deep snow, and a good number of downed trees across the trail, she said. The trail crews would clear things out after Memorial Day.
In the meantime, no one knew how many trees had come down, exactly how many inches of snow were on the ground (going east to west there was anything from a couple inches to a couple feet at other locations) or what the snow crust was like so far. That last bit of information would be key. A strong crust would mean easy travel above the snow; weak crust could mean an exhausting slog through powder or slush.
“I’d be really interested to know what you find up there,” the ranger told me.
Fresh buds emerge on the aspens of Uinta Canyon
The highway from the city into the foothills took us through irrigated cropland and cattle range to clumps of aspen and lodgepole pine. The trees closed in as we got higher, until they formed an undulating mat upon the hills. Clear, cold water from the Uinta River ran with snowmelt toward the farmer’s fields below. No longer did the mountain landscape seem like the two-dimensional abstraction on the Roosevelt skyline.
I stepped out of the car into crisp alpine air, rich with pinesap perfume. The campsite at the Uinta Canyon Trailhead was deserted, excepting a couple of pickups that turned around in the parking lot. Birds chirped quiet melodies from the trees. The Uinta River gurgled unseen from somewhere in the forest. Evening brought the whine of mosquitoes, persistent, rapacious. We swatted at them constantly as we went through our supplies.
I elected myself to carry dinner food, while Jon and Andrew took lunch and breakfast respectively. We sorted food and gear by headlamp, our efforts punctuated with slaps and vows against the insects.
I finished packing at 10 p.m.. I still had my tent and enormous negative 40-degree sleeping bag to take care of in the morning.
None of us would have light packs on this trip. After food, tent and clothes went in my pack, I lashed sleeping bag and water jug to the outside, pulling them tight with a shoelace. I cinched my snowshoes to the sides with nylon straps. They towered over my head like moose antlers. The whole conglomeration of stuff sagged outward like it wanted to fall apart already. I swung the pack up to my shoulders, almost fell over with the damn thing. The weight put steady pressure on my vertebrae. I was sure I’d be an inch shorter by the trip’s end.
Monster pack in all its glory
I carried the most monstrous sleeping bag in the group and heaviest tent. Jon’s pack, also weighted with snowshoes, looked heavy as hell, but seemed almost reasonable in proportions. Andrew took the cheese, though. He carried his backcountry skies, plus the weighty plastic boots.
A hot sun and muggy temperatures by 9 a.m. made the three of us look perfectly ridiculous tromping up the trail weighted down with winter gear.
We walked in silence. The compression on my spine and pack straps cutting into my shoulders like steel bands didn’t bring out the conversationalist in me. I was dimly aware of the new aspen leaves, which simmered like gold coins on the branches overhead, though aforementioned spine compression dimmed of my appreciation of the aesthetics.
The hazards of a downed tree
Fallen trunks and branches confirmed the ranger’s prediction about blow downs in the trail. Sometimes there would be space for us to walk around; more often, we would have to ease ourselves over the obstacles, watching out for limbs that wanted to spear our flesh and the weight on our backs that wanted to swing us, crashing into the mess of branches.
Two miles into the hike, my back and shoulders howled with pain. The real climb hadn’t even started. We rested by stream and ate food, less for energy, more for the psychological comfort against the grim toil of the pack slog.
A bridge above the river, marked the start of a thousand-foot climb out of the canyon along a series of switchbacks.
Sweat poured down my face, drenched my back. The first patches of snow appeared in the shadow of the trees.
Jon, who was walking in front, turned around and whipped a snowball. The missile flew over my head, flinging a couple ice crystals into my face. I raised my ski pole at him menacingly, but he was smiling.
“I got him!”
I looked behind me to where Andrew was brushing snow off his shirt. It had been a direct hit.
“Asshole,” he said.
The ocaissional snow patches became longer, deeper stretches along the trail after we crossed into the High Uintas Wilderness. We started sinking in.
Nylon gaiters above our boots helped keep snow out, but not forever. Melting slush near the ground found its way to our feet. Mine sloshed in an icy bath within half a mile.
We stopped briefly next to the roaring Krebs Creek where Jon discovered that the bottom of his boot had begun peeling off. We walked on.
Breaking near the Chain Lakes
Snow made the trail hard to see, and hindered progress. If the ground had been completely covered, we might have put snowshoes on, but there was still enough bare dirt and rock that we didn’t want to try it.
Andrew pointed out a stream that looked like the one on the map leading out of the Chain Lakes. If we left the trail to follow it, there would be less snow than we would find in the trees, which harbored troublesome drifts in their shade. At least that was the theory.
Unfortunately, even the bare ground around the stream was soggy with snowmelt. Pools and runoff lurked beneath the grasses, creating ice-water booby traps for our feet. We stumbled along snowy cobbles with brush slapping at our eyes.
We stopped more than once to check our position on the map. It was already getting on toward early evening and it seemed like we should be in the neighborhood of the Chain Lakes. A mountain of bare gray rock and desolate flanks of snow rose emerged from the pines in front of us. It could only have been Mount Emmons.
When we came to Lower Chain Lake, we found several dozen acres of dark blue waves and flat, white ice. The water was low, and the sun-warmed rocks along the shore had melted off most of the snow so we could walk easily there.
Unique rocks like these stood out along the lakeshore and along the streambeds
The grace period ended when we climbed up to Middle Chain Lake. We pushed through a grove of trees, sinking thigh-deep in snow, fighting branches and clambering over logs.
A pine branch whacked against the top of my pack. Down came snowshoes, sleeping bag and water jug. I loosed a string of profanity. My frustration with the hours of fighting drifts and terrain boiled over into fury at a low hanging branch, whose only crime was growing out at the perfect height to fuck up all my careful rigging. I fought to reattach the items quickly, angry that I was delaying the group. Of course I did a shitty job, and it all swung down again. I put the pack back on the ground, calling it many things that were unfair; tied everything properly, and set off to catch Andrew and Jon.
They were at Middle Chain Lake, making their way through the deep drifts gathered at the southern end. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the familiar sloshing sound behind me.
Christ! The water jug!
I had forgotten to reattach it.
I threw my pack down and went back into the woods, where I found it about 200 yards away. 26 years old and apparently, I’m already doddering on the precipice of senility.
Meanwhile, Andrew and Jon settled on a campsite on a dry area near the woods. We set up tents and cooked dinner on my stove. The game plan was to wake up early and start along the path to Emmons before the heat of the day softened up the snow crust.
Morning view of Emmons from Middle Chain Lake
We had an oatmeal breakfast and a late start. It was almost 9 a.m. by the time we set out. Jon and I wore our snowshoes, Andrew slid on his skis with skins on the bottom so that he could climb uphill. By the time we reached the north end of Upper Chain Lake, there wasn’t much now so we shifted out of our snowshoes. For Andrew this mean switching out of his skis and boots and putting their weight on his back, a lengthy process.
Approaching the mountain from Fourth Chain Lake
By the time we made it to Fourth Chain Lake, it was around 10 a.m. and we still hadn’t begun the main part of the climb. We’d had two ideas about how to get up the mountain. There was a southerly route up a bowl and then up the east face of the mountain. This was the route a Summit Post contributor recommended for the summer months, but I had my doubts as to whether we wanted to try the steep ascent in ice and snow. Our other option was a ridgeline to the north, which would involve a short, very steep ascent followed by a moderate ascent to the summit between two cliffs.
We’d been leaning toward the first option because the map showed a very steep climb to the top of the ridge. The climb looked more doable when we actually saw it. There would be a scramble up a tilted boulder field for about 500 feet to a steep cornice of hardened snow at the top. I thought I could see some moderate sections where we could climb over.
View of Emmons from the side of the ridge
Boulders the size of refrigerators shifted beneath my boots as I picked my way up the slope.
I heard a thunder fall of rocks down below, Jon’s cries, “Andrew! Look out! Look out!” Nobody was hurt, but it was a reminder that we walked upon uncertain ground.
The cornice was perhaps 10 feet tall, with a couple sections that were sloped gently enough to climb. I went to one of these spots and kick-stepped my way up the snow crust. Eventually the slope got steeper and I had to punch my fists in for more purchase. After I topped out, I made sure to get away from the edge right quick.
Andrew and Jon followed. The ridgeline afforded stunning views of the Uintas to the north, which included Kings Peak, the tallest mountain in Utah (Emmons is fourth, according to Peakbagger.com, and less than 100 feet shy of Kings in elevation, though much easier to access.)
We were well above the trees now, utterly exposed to the wind. I began to feel the altitude too. All of us slowed as we wound among the snowfields and up the rocks. More than once, I thought we had reached the top, only to find a false summit.
You can’t trust the ground you walk on
Almost two hours after we reached the ridge, we came upon the pile of rocks a battered wooden stick, and elk antlers that marked the highest point. There was a steel ammo can nearby containing a poncho, Gatorade powder and dehydrated food.
Take what you need, someone had written, feel free to donate your own stuff.
A ziplock bag held a logbook of past expeditions. The last entry was in September, 2013. Our entry: May 17. It had been about 9 months since anyone had summited, according to the records.
From on high we could gaze upon the slopes below us, down to the tundra wastes of grass and bog. I could replay our journey up from the Chain Lakes. The gutter of Uinta drained out to the green fields above Roosevelt, the gray-brown sage landscape south of Highway 40. Maybe someone in town was looking up at the movie set mountains, wondering if anything was up there.
Andrew and Jon consult the map at the summitView from Emmons looking down into a bowl to the south
Andrew who had hauled his backcountry skis this far, was determined to ride them down. Jon and I didn’t have this speedy option, but could still descend rapidly if we glissaded down the east face. I just didn’t want us to descend too rapidly — not falling end over end, not in an avalanche.
Andrew prepares for the ski descent
A couple miles away we could see streaks going down the side of a bowl, where a couple tons of snow had broken off and plunged toward the bottom. The incline was much steeper there, but it was still something to watch out for.
The two of us without skis walked carefully down the steepest, most hazardous part of the slope, while Andrew glided in a conservative traverse. When the slope lessened, he let her rip for several hundred yards, in a tight series of turns. Jon and I went straight down on our feet and butts, with kicking up trails of loose powder.
The slope became too gradual for sliding, so I ended up running with big sliding steps, chasing after Andrew who was already at the bottom of the pitch.
“My shoe came apart,” Jon said.
Jon walking down off the summit
Sure enough, the heel was completely detached from the rest. Fortunately the strap at the bottom of Jon’s gaiter helped hold it in place. I reinforced this with a shoelace cinched over top and bottom. It wasn’t pretty, but good enough to hold.
Shortly after, Andrew started back up the slope, looking for keys that had fallen out of his pack further up the slope. Shoe, keys, and water jug: none of us would walk away from the trip without owning some calamity.
Andrew found the keys about a third of the mile up the slope. We’d barely lost half an hour, but still faced the challenge of slopping through thigh-deep corn mush snow the remaining miles to camp.
A set of zig-zags and two parallel gouges marked our passage down the slope of the mountain behind us, the first tracks of the year.
A sediment rich flow of water tumbles through a wash near the Arches NP Visitor Center
The river churning down through Courthouse Wash ran Yoo-hoo brown beneath the bridge where the main road crossed over. Over a night of rain, what had been a trickle of water, wending its way through canyon and under mesa, had swelled into a dirty monster of fast-flowing current in the middle of Arches National Park — large enough to kayak to the Colorado River. That was exactly what a trio of Canadians who showed up at the crossing with a trailer and three whitewater boats had in mind.
The same run-off by the visitor center plunges off a cliff
This would be the first chance for someone to do the Wash in 20 years, one of them declared. Though this was probably an overstatement, it still made me look longingly at the lone yak in our group of three. It had come with Andrew and his brother Jon. We planned on paddling on this trip; the yak was just luggage, on top of Andrew’s Subaru, headed to Jensen, UT where the two are raft guiding this summer. One of us would get the chance to go down, or else none of us would.
The Canadians had brought their yaks intending to paddle them, but in the big water around Moab. Courthouse Wash would be an unexpected treat. They expected Class III rapids, with a Class IV ledge or two.
We eventually turned down their offer, opting to stick together, and stick to the original plan to use our backcountry permit to explore the Fiery Furnace. The Furnace is a sprawling maze of rock formations in Arches, which Andrew and I explored last year. That had been on a hot sunny day. Now it was overcast, with dark clouds and bands of rain coming at us from the south. Occasionally, there came a peal of thunder.
Andrew (foreground) and Jon hiking in Fiery Furnace before the rain came in.
It’s hard to have much more than a rough idea of what part of the Furnace you are in at a given time. We scurried between some narrow passages in the rock, hoping to find a spot where we could chimney up to a higher passage. There was one narrow spot that Andrew and I tried climbing, but it came to a dead end. It began to rain. I stuffed my camera underneath my rain jacket as Jon, Andrew and I walked back the way we came along the washes at the bottom of the canyons. Water poured in gouts off the rock faces. Within minutes, the canyon bottoms were running with several inches of brownish water.
Courthouse Wash
We tramped through the freezing current headed south. Sometimes there was a place where we could step out; more often we just had to slosh our way along. The water became knee-deep, and in a couple of places one of us would plunge in to the waist. There was a confluence in the streams that offered passage to the north and east, an area we had yet to explore.
We sloshed along for another quarter-mile, then found ourselves looking at the stream pouring off a 10-foot escarpment — right underneath an arch. Beyond it, a 20-foot waterfall, gushed over a ledge into a boiling pool.
It thundered off the cliffs like fratboy puke after a wild night of cheladas.
I went to take a picture, found that I’d fogged the camera and cursed myself. We found a path to the left of the arch and went up to the bigger cascade, which had an alcove behind it where we could step behind the falling water. We thought about other hikers we’d seen earlier who’d turned back because they hadn’t wanted to do the Furnace in the rain. For a minute, it was worth the shivering and gritted teeth.
Later we found a passage up a canyon that took us to higher ground and a tough chimney climb in between two walls. That effort eventually rewarded us with a misty view of the rock formations. The towers of the furnace looked a bit like mushrooms to me. Each pillar of soft sandstone wore a cap of tougher rock, which prevented it from eroding like the vanished material which it had once been a part of. Now, they towered over a hundred feet above the washed out desert floor. There came a sound of cracking followed by a tumble reverberating through the Furnace like thunder.
“Holy shit!” I heard Andrew exclaim.
I was around a corner and missed what happened. One of the pillars had a dry-patch at the top, like something had just broken off. Below, lay a couple thousand pounds of shattered rock. The lucky bastard had seen it all, literally, go down. Of course, all of us were lucky that we were nowhere near it when it had happened. It would be foolish to equate the size and scale of the Furnace’s towers with permanence. Indeed, the same wear that gave them shape will eventually destroy them, creating new forms as it flows through the landscape. It was interesting to think that the shape of the canyons would dictate where the water ran, but course of the water also dictates the shape of the canyon. The stone monuments and the runoff were like two voices in the same harmony. The sediment-brown waters held destruction and creation equally within their flow.
“15 minutes in!” I shouted to Steve as we cranked our bikes through the streets of Queens.
We blew through another four-way intersection, veered onto a sidewalk, then back onto the street, flying past the stopped cars and their hazardous side-mirrors. My brakes sucked ass. We had no helmets, obviously.
“The Queensboro Bridge? That can’t be more than four miles from here.” I remember telling Steve earlier. “I could run that far in 30 minutes.”
It should have been even faster on bikes — even if we had to contend with intersections and New York City traffic.
This is part of the classic pattern where I pretend to understand things in New York. It’s an easy trap to fall into when you’ve been there before, when you don’t want to let on that you’re still a rube just like the Hawaiian-shirted rabble snapping pictures from a tour bus roof.
“See those smoke stacks over there?” I asked, “I’m pretty sure those are across from the Queensboro.”
My expert knowledge notwithstanding, the bridge was nowhere in sight. Some of my earlier confidence started to wane. It dawned on me that I might have just made us eat the $4 overtime fee.
We were on the clock, but this was no race. It was the Citi Bike rental policy.
These strange bikes, ubiquitous throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, could have been product of a romance between a Raleigh and an ATM machine. In a way, they are. The bikes bear the swoop logo of Citi Group, the “title sponsor” of the new bike system, which is owned by Alta Bicycle Share. Other cities that use Alta’s bikes include Washington D.C, Boston, Chicago and Montreal.
The clunky metal contraptions have three gears, an oversize basket as well as blinky lights front and back that flash on and off when the wheels start turning. A large-print list of rules sits below the handlebars. I felt approximately the same amount of street cred pedaling one of these as if I’d decided to cruise around Manhattan in a Fisher Price big wheel.
The Citi Bike experience, starts at the bike stations or “docks” located in Manhattan and Brooklyn where users dip their credit or debit cards into a machine. The machine gives them a numerical code that they can punch in at a bicycle of their choosing and unlock it.
Steve and I went for the $10 24-hour rental policy. $10 may be a bargain as far as bike rentals go, but there’s a catch: we could rent a bike for no more than 30 minutes at a go. If we didn’t dock our bikes at another station in that time, we’d get hit with the $4 overtime fee. We’d pay $9 dollars more if we went an hour over and then $12 for every hour after that.
Steve likened the 30-minute policy to the bomb beneath the bus in the movie “Speed,” which Dennis Hopper rigs to blow if the driver slows down.
“But instead of people dying, we just pay $4,” Steve explained.
Once we docked the bikes, we’d be able to walk away from them with no responsibilities. Two minutes later, the CitiBike system would give us the green light to grab another bike, no extra charge and another race against time.
Those bike docks, so ubiquitous in Brooklyn and Manhattan, appeared to be non-existent in Queens. Thus, it was imperative that Steve and I haul ass to the other side of the East River before the clock ran down.
“You know, this is kind of fun!” I shouted. The light ahead of us turned yellow, and we pedaled balls-out, crossing the intersection just before the traffic to our right lurched forward to kill us. Buses were especially tricky. They would pull over suddenly at a stop, putting a 15-foot wall of metal and glass right across our path. Getting around meant veering out into street traffic, counting on other drivers to slow down or go around without smashing us.
Steve peered down at his smart phone now and then to check our directions.
The bridge came into view, but it wasn’t obvious if we should go under it, or weave around to the other side.
23 minutes on my stopwatch.
An old guy on a street corner told us how to get through the streets to the bike path across the river. The bike lane disappeared abruptly, squeezing us between the traffic and the curb. It turns out that the bridge wasn’t the Queensboro and we weren’t crossing the East River, but a whole other body of water to the east.
27 minutes.
Well, there goes $4.
The Queensboro was only a couple of blocks ahead. We kept pedaling hard, mindful that we still had the one-hour deadline to dodge. We climbed to the top of the crossing and bombed down the other side of the East River toward the Manhattan skyscrapers.
We swung off the bridge and Steve used his phone to bring us in to the docks. I rammed my bike forward until the mechanism clicked in its electric lock, letting Big Brother know that I’d returned my ride.
Total elapsed ride time: 45 minutes.
We’d screwed up, but at least we didn’t have to eat the one-hour fee.
The bike dock wouldn’t let us take another bike out until two minutes went by. Steve checked his phone and found there was another dock a couple blocks away. We started walking.
“Hey, what the hell? Why isn’t this letting me take a bike?”
I walked to several other bikes, until I swiped my card again in frustration. This time the code worked and we set off again for an Indian restaurant Steve knew about in Midtown. We would have plenty of opportunities to dance with traffic getting there along the way.
It didn’t matter so much what side of the road we were on going down Manhattan’s one-way streets. I’m sure the drivers hated us either way. Steve and I ducked and weaved plenty around the cars, but our antics were nothing compared to the spandex-clad speed freaks on their racing bikes.
They darted like minnows through the schools of taxis and busses, seemed not to give a damn, getting their way by daring the drivers to kill them. I saw one of these acrobats come flying top speed off of a bridge later, then cut a perfect 90-degree turn off a down-ramp through a line of metal posts.
Maybe there was something in the spring air that demanded such recklessness. After the brutal winter, where it must have been impossible to go anywhere without trundling over a snow bank or slipping on ice, there came a freedom with racing wild through the streets.
Some delicious take-out Indian Food sated our hunger, but not our appetite for riding in the city. We decided to go north again, back up to Central Park.
The next bike dock was empty save two bikes that wouldn’t come out. Frustrated, we walked up to another dock, which had rides available. Even here, several of the bikes simply wouldn’t come out of the dock. I went to several, before I managed to find a bike that came free
We were flying up Eighth Avenue at top speed when we had a dangerous encounter with David Beckham. Actually it was two David Beckhams, eight feet tall and wearing designer underwear.
The city bus bearing the soccer star’s likenesses swung out in a wide right turn across our path, then stopped to pick up passengers. I pulled left to get out of the way, praying that the cars behind me wouldn’t run me down.
“Dammit Beckham!” I shouted, waving my fist at the bus and any confused riders that might have looked in my direction.
We locked the bikes up near a Whole Foods outside Central Park and grabbed a couple of beers. The people watching included at least three sets of brides and grooms posing beneath the trees for photographs. Some park musicians taking advantage of the acoustics underneath an arch bridge to treat passerby to a Mozart rendition. There were also those who rented bikes from the Central Park venders. We did a quick walk-through here, to see if Steve’s old bike, stolen from him shortly after he arrived in New York, might be amidst the loaners.
We left the park around 3 p.m. planning to meet up with Steve’s girlfriend Reiley down around Greenwich Village.
We shot back down through Manhattan, making sure to switch out our bikes before the 30-minutes ran out. More often then not, I found bikes that wouldn’t come out of their locks or locks that wouldn’t accept bikes. It was hard to go anywhere and feel like we were guaranteed to have another ride, or not worry about an overtime fee.
The Hudson River Greenway along Manhattan’s west side offered the chance to bike without worrying about cars or buses. Gray waves churned up the river beneath the overcast skies. We could look up to the sharp angles of the Freedom Tower or across the river to the Holland Tunnel’s building-sized vents rising out of the water.
Plenty of other bikes and walkers were out on the path, which kept us busy weaving around and hitting the brakes. Every time I slowed down, my brakes let out a high-pitched squeal at top volume, a handy way to let people know that I was coming up behind them and that I was an asshole.
We pulled into Greenwich Village with the clock running down. The nearest bike rack was completely filled with bikes. Crap! How were we going to return them now? The two open slots on the dock were false hope. Both were busted.
Steve got on his phone to see if we could find another dock before we crossed the half-hour time limit. There was another one only a couple blocks away, but we would need to cross a busy road to get there. I was just starting to pedal off, when I heard Steve shout that some bikes had just left. I was able to push the bike into the empty slot just in time.
These bikes were stressing me out. I needed a break.
Greenwich Village is a good place for that, with Mamoun’s Falafel restaurant nearby and some good bars. I got a damn good falafel sandwich for around the same price I’d pay on running over the time limit earlier that day.
We met Reiley in a line outside the place we wanted to get into, and weren’t going to get into. Instead, we grabbed a beer at the bar above the Comedy Club, where Louis C.K. and Chris Rock perform amongst others. Right next door sat Café Wha? where a young musician we now know as Bob Dylan got his start. We finished up our tour at an Ethiopian restaurant. Most of the culinary elements in my travel writing concern potato flakes and burned oatmeal, which makes it feel weird describing the orgy of gastronomic excess that was my stay in New York.
The sun had gone down at this point and I figured we’d just catch a subway ride back to Brooklyn. Reiley was interested to try out the bikes, though and Steve was down to stay in the game. We decided to cut east toward the Williamsburg Bridge and get back to the apartment in two rides.
Three riders meant that there was an even greater overlap waiting for everyone to free up a bike. Reiley paid the $10 for her bike first, then Steve and I unlocked ours. We had drained four minutes on my stopwatch before we’d even started pedaling.
The blinking lights on our rides a cold white illumination upon the streets in front of us, a red Morse code at our backs. We looked a bit like cop-cars on the prowl.
The dock on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg was almost filled up. Reiley and I got our bikes put away, but the rest of the locks were busted, leaving Steve on the clock. I tried to take out a new ride so he could switch out, but none of them came off the dock when I punched in the code.
Steve got on the phone with Citi Bike’s tech support to try and get out of the fee. By the time he got someone on the line, I found a lock that would let go of its bike. He threw his bike into place a minute before $4 fee came down on him.
“I feel like everything in New York City is designed to stress you out,” I said.
“And take your money,” Steve added.
We finished our ride pedaling on the bike/pedestrian concourse above the traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge. Plenty of cyclists were still out there, blinking in the dark like weird life from an ocean trench. We could look out upon the dark waters of the East River, Manhattan’s illuminated towers shining against the night.
It was a quick plunge down the other side of the bridge to Brooklyn where there was another dock waiting for us with plenty of time to spare. But we were gamblers that night and decided to strike out a little further to a dock closer to the bar we were going to.
The decision almost cost us, when there was only one working slot in that dock. Steve, ever the gentleman, let Reiley take it leaving us to pedal double-time to another spot before we’d have to pay the $4. Once again, we made it, but just under the wire.
We sauntered back toward the bar where we met Reiley. I looked forward to relaxing with a beer and not worrying about time limits for a little while.
Even so, I could look out to the street and see more riders on their bikes, blinking ghostly white and red through the darkened streets.
No doubt one of them was already counting down the minutes on his iPhone:
“Two minutes until deadline. Where’s that docking station? Crap! CRAP!… I’m going to make it.”
What do you need to know before you and your friends go into the mountains?
How to tie a tourniquet on a bleeding arm. How to sterilize wounds with bonded liquor. How to rub cuts full of dirt, take it like a man and wear the scars with pride.
At least Hollywood would have you think so.
This March, I finally decided to learn the real stuff and take a Wilderness First Responder course (a.ka. the WFR or Woofer.)
Maybe I wouldn’t have rubbed anyone’s wounds full of dirt before this class, but I also wouldn’t have been able to go beyond basic care in a backcountry medical situation in the backcountry. I would have screwed a lot of things up.
I’ll blame a misplaced sense of rugged individualism for not getting educated sooner. The only classroom you need is out there! I’d think. Spend time in it and you will learn.
Yes, I have learned a lot out there, but it’s not always a nice classroom. It’s a place where wrong decisions deal higher consequences than a flunked exam; sometimes they lead to dead bodies and lifelong injuries. I’m fortunate not to have faced such a test in my time outdoors, but the odds increase every trip. It was time to study up and get prepared.
The classroom at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. looked a bit more forgiving than the flank of a mountain peak, or thrashing Class IV rapid. Over nine straight days of Wilderness First Responder instruction, this would be the place where I would get the facts about how to identify wilderness maladies and learn how to treat them. The course wouldn’t just be about copying notes off a whiteboard though. We were outside several times during the day, practicing medical scenarios, practicing new skills on other students with pretend vitals.
An abbreviated version of one of these might look something like this:
A fellow trainee and I walk outside to find a guy sprawled out at the base of the tree. He’s just taken a massive fall on a ski-slope in our scenario.
“OK. Scene safety. Is there anything else going on here, risk of avalanche?”
“Don’t think so.”
“What happened to him?”
“Looks like he’s taken a big-ass fall.’
“Let’s get our gloves on.”
“Anybody else out here?”
We look around, ignoring the other trios of students going through the same exercise.
“Think he’s dead?”
“Nope, he’s moving. Let’s go see what’s up.”
As soon as we get the patient’s permission to help, one of us grabs his head so he can’t move it around and exacerbate a possible spinal injury.
Then we check his airway, breathing and circulation, looking for blood underneath his clothes or on our gloves as we sweep his body.
Uh oh. The patient is complaining of chest pain. It’s the crushing kind that indicates a possible heart attack. There are plenty of false flags for heart attacks, including heartburn. Right now, I’m thinking the heart attack is more likely than a pulmonary embolism, which often exhibits stabbing pain or a broken rib that presents with point tenderness and painful breathing.
My mind is racing. How do we help this guy without killing him? Can we fix him before he dies in front of us?
The head to-toe body exam can wait, I decide. Let’s get right into vitals and his medical history.
Sure enough, vitals show elevated heart-rate (the patient tells me to add 30 beats to the measurement I get from his wrist. Systolic blood pressure is above 100 millimeters of mercury, so an appropriate dose of nitroglycerine might just be the ticket. If he has any.
I rattle down the questions about symptoms allergies and meds. History of heart problems, and … Yes! He has nitroglycerine. Just as important, the doc has said he should take it when he has chest pain.
I’ve got to watch myself though. A Wilderness First Responder is authorized to administer over-the-counter drugs as-needed. Nitroglycerine is definitely not over-the counter.
But if the patient takes the medication of his own free will, I should be able to defend myself in court if it all goes wrong.
I restrain myself even as the chest pain persists and I worry about the damage that the heart attack is doing.
“Sir, have you taken any recreational drugs today? We’re not the cops, but we need to know so we can give you the best treatment? No drugs? O.K have you had any alcohol?
Other pertinent medical information would include how much water and food the patient has had today; how much has he peed and what color, when and what his last bowel movement was like (“it’s kind of a personal question, BUT…”) Then he has to re-describe the events leading up to the crash.
The chest pain came before the crash, he tells us, an important detail.
I look at my training partner. Yeah, we should have him take the nitro before the heart attack kills him.
The patient pops his nitroglycerine and now it’s time to check the vitals again to see what the medication did to him.
Level of Responsiveness: “OK, so I’ve already asked you this before, but can you tell us your name?”
No responsiveness.
The patient isn’t breathing. No pulse either.
“Shit!”
My partner starts fake CPR, pumping his hands up and down a couple of inches above the patient’s chest. (real chest compressions can break ribs) and delivering imaginary rescue breaths.
After a couple rounds, our patient comes back to life, but he’s not a 67-year-old man having a bad day on the slopes anymore. He’s died and reincarnated back into a WFR student in his early 20s.
The student grins.
“You forgot to ask me if I was on any ED medication.”
My partner and I groan. Of course. The class had just covered how vasodilators like Viagra lower blood pressure and can take it for a life-threatening drop when comboed with nitro, another vasodilator.
It’s one to watch out for, because the same older folks that are more likely to get a heart attack are also more likely to be taking Viagra, Levitra or other erectile dysfunction drugs. Making matters trickier, a patient may not be forthcoming about his (or her!) little blue friend. It’s something that is definitely worth pushing the patient about in a heart-attack case, whether or not the patient wants to talk about it.
And what about aspirin? That was on me too. Throughout the scenario, I thought nitroglycerin would be the knight in shining armor that would save the day. I’d gotten tunnel vision that stopped me from thinking about the benefit that an adult aspirin pill might have had for the patient.
Looking at my notes, I see a garbled mess of med stats and symptoms, the product of trying to do everything super-fast, and the fact that I am still getting used to processing the oodles of data we get from patients. We have to put it all into a standardized report for the ambulance and hospital people — then maybe the lawyers.
Randy, one of our two instructors welcomed us on our first day of class by saying that we were about to journey through the scope of Western medicine in nine days.
Exaggeration or no, my pen flew across the notebook with each new topic: head injuries, splinting broken bones, using a herring-bone technique to restore a dislocated shoulder, putting a femur fracture in traction using what you’ve got in the backcountry, appendicitis, how to evac someone in a litter, conduct a search party, treat vaginitis, how to deal with it when a guy’s junk gets twisted into a testicular torsion, when to thaw frostbite in warm water, when you definitely shouldn’t thaw frostbite in warm water, diabetes, seizures, making an informed decision about whether it’s safe to rule out spinal injury in a patient, knowing when it’s Acute Mountain Sickness or High Altitude Cerebral Edema, knowing when to evac and when to deal with it on your own, dealing with it when a chest puncture creates a collapsed lung. Most important of all was learning prevention, namely having the smarts to prevent that bad shit from happening in the first place.
We would have WFR dreams, Randy told us. It was true. I’d wake up thinking about putting antibiotic ointment and gauze over a burn wound or doing a patient assessment in some dark corner of the woods.
I woke at around six in the morning most days in a tarp-tent that I’d set up in a campground 15 miles out of town. I’d take time to review notes and (maybe) wash myself over the bathroom sink before learning commenced. Sometimes, I’d mumble my way through an imaginary patient assessment on the drive.
After class, I’d finish a run before sunset and then park my car in a supermarket parking lot, feverishly reading chapter after chapter from the First Responder textbook and trying to absorb the information.
My biggest challenge was keeping my thinking straight and organized when presented with situations like the heart attack on the slopes. More than once, I charged ahead with what I thought was the proper course of action but got flummoxed when I overlooked a crucial detail. Whole chapters of data would evaporate from my head as I tried to understand why this patient was unconscious, or figure out how to treat that patient who was going into shock.
I managed to amass a small virtual body count by the end of the course.
The truth was, that this stuff didn’t come easy. Nor did I feel like I was at the top of the class. I envied the students who came up with fast and effective solutions, flowing effortlessly from one step to the next, clicking onto the pattern while I was still shuffling puzzle pieces around on the table.
Was my earlier reluctance to take the course really a fear that the new information would make my head explode?
The challenge of grabbing all the relevant information and shaping it into a coherent medical report/plan of action, reminded me of some of the big stories I’ve worked on as a reporter.
To do either job right, it is key to know how to ask the right questions and shape them into a coherent narrative, be that a 1,000 word story going in right before deadline or a plan for how to get someone out of the woods alive. Both rescuers and storytellers have to sift through the facts, thin out irrelevant or misleading ones and then do their jobs based on the best information.
There’s something else about putting things down in narrative. Explicating ideas clearly is the only way to see if they make any sense.
I reflected on my old idea that I could know what needed to be done based on experience as I drove back to my campsite at night. Thank God they don’t hand out medical degrees that way.
I still love the populism of the outdoors. Most mountains don’t have admission fees; you don’t a special permit to hike the Appalachian Trail or go bushwhacking in a National Forest. I worried that taking a wilderness course might be admitting that I thought I needed elite knowledge in order to keep doing what I’ve been doing.
Well, no. I could probably keep right on doing what I love outside WFR certified or not. Having the background in the basics of medical emergencies is definitely a tool though, and a potential saving grace in an emergency.
The other side of getting a Wilderness First Responder is that now that I have it, I feel like I can tackle more ambitious projects in the wilderness than I did before. With this, and proper planning, I would feel confident about setting out on a multi-week trip into the backcountry. I like knowing that I can rely more on my own resources now and that I’m that much less likely to need outside help to get through a situation.
Even in situations where I would need help from outside, I’d be far more helpful to rescuers as someone waiting with a set of vital signs or the knowledge of how to find a proper helicopter landing spot.
Respecting the outdoors includes acknowledging its power to punish ignorance. I realized that pursuing more knowledge — whether in straight experience, or in classes — is a way to show respect for this.
Now I see the course as a jumping-off point. I passed the test on paper; I made my way through the scenarios; if there I face the real test one of these days, I’ll know that I’ve done some homework.
A short while after I passed the course, a friend of mine slammed his finger badly. His face went pale white and he had a steady bleed.
“Yes!” I thought. “Here’s a chance to use the med stuff in my pack!”
Damn! Where were the gloves! I had the patient clean the wound himself while I found them. I used alcohol, though soapy water would have sufficed.
When I finally applied proper body-substance isolation. I wrapped the finger in gauze and ace bandaging, and had my patient elevate it to reduce bleeding.
Looking back on this, I could have done a more thorough patient evaluation. My med kit should have been better organized. I hadn’t saved anyone’s life. The job was a C-minus at best. Still, after I’d wrapped the wound (leaving a small amount of finger exposed to check circulation, sensation and movement), I felt a wave of satisfaction.
