happy idiots

by David Hagerty

Thirty years ago, when I was single and careless and still in my twenties, I visited an old college friend named Matt for a bachelor’s getaway in Los Angeles. Before I left home, he told me to bring my hiking gear.

Matt had taught me to love the dirt. Unlike me, he grew up in a family of backpackers. During college, he led me on my first hikes, and when I moved to California from the flat, featureless Midwest, he showed me all the best trails. Even during med school, when he worked seventy-hour weeks, he still made time for weekend jaunts.

After picking me up from LAX, we detoured to an outdoor adventure store.

“What for?” I said.

“Crampons and ice axes,” Matt said.

“What’s a crampon?”

I soon learned that we’d need those spiked soles to get us up Mount Baldy, which is the highest peak in the San Gabriels. Because Matt was my mentor, and because I was too young to worry about such things, I never questioned our readiness. Hands-on was how I learned to bike and row and hike, so I assumed that was how one learned mountaineering, too.

The next morning, we careened through the narrow streets of LA to pick up Matt’s friend Rahm and his black lab, Gracie. In my experience, labs fall into two categories: lean and spastic, or chunky and steady. Gracie was of the latter type, but Matt assured me that both she and her owner were hearty hikers.

Rahm was built more like a whippet—thin and made for distance running. He wore all the designer brands that I’d seen at the outdoor adventure store: convertible zippered pants, waterproof boots, and a shirt made from some high-tech fabric. Next to him, my t-shirt and shorts looked sophomoric. Plus, with a balky knee, I assumed I was the weakest link in our chain.

With our day packs and water bottles full, we drove across town to Pasadena. Even from the freeway I could see the snow-capped peak of the mountain. Its proper name is Mount San Antonio, but everybody calls it Baldy, probably due to its white head. In winter, the mountain hosts a ski resort, so a paved road climbs to 6,000 feet and the parking lot at Manker Flats. From there, several paths rise 4,000 feet to the summit. However, it was mid-summer, well past ski season, with warm, sunny, clear skies at midday, so we chose the most direct route to the top.

I don’t recall much about the lower slopes—not the kind of trees we passed or the genus of wildflowers we saw—other than that it was a tunnel of green and brown. The trail was typical of many other hikes I’d done in California, a shaded path of crunchy mulch fragrant of sap and decaying wood that inclined toward an invisible summit. I also remember the weight of the crampons in my pack, and the way the ice axe bounced against my back with every step, reminding me that I would soon need them.

Along the way, Rahm talked about how much he disliked working as a chemical engineer, which paid for his high-tech gear, while Matt one-upped him with stories of twenty-four-hour shifts in the hospital. I could have countered with complaints about the poverty pay and base work of small-town journalism, but I was too embarrassed by my low station in life, so I mostly kept quiet. I didn’t understand then that all young men must pay their career dues, and that this was our time to prove our worth.

Meanwhile, the dog investigated all the local vegetation. Even off leash, she never ventured far from us or showed any stress. She was a typical joyous lab, happy to tag along in the outdoors.

After an hour or so (we never checked the time) we passed a little wooden hut. I assumed it was an outhouse, but when I poked open the door it was empty inside and smelled of decay. How odd, I thought, a pointless structure.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

The guys both shrugged.

At twenty-four, I often deferred to the wisdom and experience of others on such adventures. I quieted any doubts and tagged along, even when my own overeducated judgement sounded alarms. Since both of my companions had done the hike before, I assumed they knew what it entailed.

To that point, it seemed pretty tame, little different from dozens of others I’d done—until we emerged from the forest at the base of an ice slope that rose for probably 500 feet at a 30-degree pitch. Baldy Bowl was the reason we needed crampons. Before we clipped in, Matt gave me a quick lesson in self-arrest using the ice axe.

“You roll on your stomach and dig in with the tip,” he said, and demonstrated on a gentle pitch. “Just be careful to keep your feet up. If you catch a crampon in the snow, it’ll blow out your knee.” Since he was studying to be a doctor, I figured Matt knew how people hurt themselves on hikes, but silently I vowed to stay upright. One bad knee was enough.

A single ski track cut a straight line up the slope and made for easier footing. Despite my inexperience, I rapidly gained confidence in the way young men do and forged ahead. My spiked soles made traction much easier than it had ever been back home in Chicago during snow season. Midway up, we were strung out with me in the lead like a Sherpa charting the course.

Then Matt yelled, “Dave, stop!”

I turned to see him and Rahm fifty paces back with the dog halfway between us, off-leash. She was crouched on the trail, clinging to the ski tracks with only her front claws, her back half sliding downhill.

“Get her!” Matt said.

We all race-walked toward Gracie, but the crampons made our pace comically labored, like the slow-mo sequences on TV. Before any of us reached her, she’d more likely rescue herself or skid down hundreds of feet on the icy pitch, which ended in a thick bank of trees. Fortunately, the dog hung fast until Matt grabbed her. Despite his oversized pack, Rahm hadn’t packed any booties to improve the dog’s grip, so from then on we kept her on leash.

By the top of the ice slope, I was feeling cocky at having survived my first hike with studded shoes. We’d risen above the treeline, and the elevation revealed a gentle slope the rest of the way to the summit, which lay about a mile and a half farther on according to our map. We sat on some rough boulders to eat and rest before starting the last part of the walk while Gracie explored the local vegetation. A breeze had blown away the smog, and the sun hung low to the west, leaving us with a clear view of the full sprawl of Los Angeles, almost to the ocean.

As Matt and I replenished our salt and sugar, Rahm sat idle, not even digging into his oversize pack of snacks. “I’m too tired.”

Matt said simply, “No.”

Among his friends, there’s a saying: “Are you sure, or are you Matt sure?” If you’re Matt sure, there’s no room for argument. Even when it applies to your own body, one conclusion is correct: Matt’s. Scientists, I’m told, prefer certainty to self-questioning, and Matt embraced such thinking. He’d been that way since we met the first week of freshmen year. While most undergrads were poking around trying to choose a major, Matt already knew he’d become a doctor.

“I can’t make it,” Rahm said. He sunk in on himself, as though too fatigued to even stand.

“No, we’re going to the summit,” Matt said.

I’d spent the afternoon following along, so I let Matt persuade Rahm to keep going, but we made it no more than a quarter mile before he stopped again and pleaded to turn around. They repeated the same argument several times, moving at half the speed we had up the ice slope. Eventually, Matt’s surety won out over Rahm’s self-doubt, and at a halting pace we made it up the final steps.

At the peak, we watered and fed Rahm and his dog, then agreed how silly it would have been to turn back when we’d been so close. A late afternoon sun warmed us, and I could look down over half the terrain we’d covered. Rahm even took a picture of the summit’s plaque that told us we’d reached 10,068 feet.

Our return trip was painless enough until we got to the rim of Baldy Bowl. Matt’s plan was for us to glissade down the snow slope—essentially sliding on our butts, using our ice axes as rudders. But as I stared over the lip of the ridge—down hundreds of feet—I could imagine myself careening out of control until I hit the forest. I didn’t know much about glissading, but I had experience at sledding during my childhood in Chicago and recalled a time when I’d crashed spread-eagle into a tree trunk.

By then, the sun hung just above the horizon, and the temperature was cooling toward night and brought with it a chill wind, but I didn’t care how much longer it took. I told Matt there was no chance I was skidding down on my backside. About that I was Matt sure. We debated a minute more until I pointed out that Gracie couldn’t use an ice axe to steer herself.

Instead, we retraced our steps down the ski track, with Matt in the lead, Rahm and his dog behind, me in sweep. We were making good progress until a quarter of the way down I noticed red speckles along the snow.

“Is that blood?” I said.

Gracie had cut two of her paws. The wounds were small, but they wouldn’t stop bleeding, even with ice to freeze the flow. Since Rahm hadn’t brought any booties, we resumed hiking with the poor dog picking her way gingerly over the crystals, but within a hundred paces all four of her feet were hurt, and she lay down in protest.

Balanced on the narrow grooves of the ski track, with miles of hiking ahead, we debated various methods of constructing a sled or a sling, but there was nothing in our packs except food wrappers and clothes—not even a rope or emergency blanket that we could MacGyver into a harness. So we trudged on with Matt dragging the dog every step. Gracie, bless her, was tougher than her owner, limping to the bottom.

Except as we paused to remove our crampons, the dog staged a sit-down strike. We tried to coax her to stand with a handful of trail mix, but she wouldn’t budge. Looking back on it, her refusal to move demonstrated the superiority of her survival instincts over ours, but at the time it felt like disobedience.

We sat on some softened tree stumps to reassess.

Sunlight had faded and along with it the heat of day. The tunnel of trees that the trail followed was already dark. The wind was building, causing the branches to creak against each other. We’d met no one along the way, so we couldn’t even ask another hiker to go for help. The only evidence that others had preceded us were those ski tracks. Back then, cell phones had no reception in such remote places, and none of us had told a girlfriend or roommate where we’d gone. Our one option seemed to stay put. Then I recalled the rickety wooden hut a short way down the trail.

“We could spend the night there,” I said.

Although I couldn’t imagine the three of us—plus a fat dog— squeezing into that tiny space, which couldn’t have been more than four feet square, it sounded better than freezing outside. Our clothes were damp with sweat, but we’d worn polyester, so at least we’d stay relatively warm. I’d also packed ski gloves and a wool hat for the trudge up the ice slope, and we’d all brought rain gear. Between us we had a few granola bars left. I imagined us huddled in that hut for hours, with our body odor condensed and contained, awaiting daylight.

“No,” Matt said. “I’ve got rounds at 5 a.m.”

“I can’t go any farther,” Rahm said.

“You can,” Matt said.

This, I assumed, was the bedside manner he’d learned in med school to calm all his patients. But it did little to persuade the dog. Plus, we had nothing to wrap her feet unless we shredded our own clothes.

Even at 165 pounds, Matt was the stockiest of the three of us and had the healthiest knees, so he decided to carry Gracie as a fireman would. With my help, he hoisted her onto his shoulders, then stood teetering under the weight as the lab squirmed with anxiety. He stumbled fifty paces down the trail, nearly falling several times before collapsing breathless on a boulder. His second and third attempts took us no farther.

“How heavy is this dog?” Matt said.

“I don’t know exactly,” Rahm said.

“What about roughly?”

“About a hundred pounds.”

Matt made one more attempt, but by then it was clear even to him that we’d never make it to the bottom that way. However, we’d reached that veritable outhouse. I again argued for spending the night, ignoring the necessity of hiking out the next morning.

“No,” Matt said, “we’re getting out now.”

Once more we sat on some fallen logs to rest and debate, with the dog lying contentedly between us. How had we gotten to this place? I could recount a half dozen errors—our late start, lack of supplies, Matt’s insistence on continuing—but no one cause. We’d been happy idiots up till then, ignoring risk and common sense. Worse, I didn’t see any options other than staying put.

That’s when I noticed Rahm’s backpack. It was oversized for a day hike, but not as large as a bag made for overnight trips. I looked at Gracie, measured her girth with my eyes, looked again at the pack, calculated, and said:

“Put her in there.”

The guys were skeptical, but after we’d transferred Rahm’s food and water to my bag, Matt lifted the dog, and I slid the pack around her. It fit as if it had been tailored. Mounted on Matt’s back, she looked as secure as a baby in a papoose, her head and forelegs just sticking out from the rim.

With her weight in balance, Matt had much less trouble carrying Gracie down the rolling slopes through the forest. I led, with a headlamp to guide the way. To keep track of him, we placed Rahm in the middle.

It was night black by the time we reached the parking lot, and we were all exhausted. Still, as soon as we removed her from the pack, Gracie scampered around sniffing at the grass. Once again, the dog proved more clever than three thrill-seekers with overpriced bachelor’s degrees.

A true mountaineer would moralize that we’d left home essential survival gear, attempted more than we could handle, neglected to set or keep a turn-around time, all of which were true. But at that age, I thought the hike proved only our ingenuity. A few years later, we proudly retold the story at Matt’s rehearsal dinner as if it were a roast.

There’s a particular kind of young man who you often see in the wilderness: single, cocky, outfitted in sport-specific gear, often well educated, but without much wisdom. You meet them on the ski runs and the mountain bike trails of our national parks and forests, and they’re usually affable until they’re called out for their recklessness. We were of this type.

Every aging hiker I know has at least one such story of ill-preparation and lack of caution. Perhaps that’s the only way to learn self-restraint. In my middle age, I’ve become far more risk averse with outdoor adventure sports and far more willing to check the bad judgment of others. Yet even now, something still drives us all out into the woods to test ourselves.

We may be older and slower and more conservative, but we remain committed to proving our readiness. We return to the woods with kids and dogs in tow to teach them the glories of nature, uncowed by past errors, unswayed by the mistakes of others, confident in our own resourcefulness, even when experience should teach us differently.

About the author:

David Hagerty is the author of the Duncan Cochrane mystery series, which chronicles crime and dirty politics in his hometown of Chicago. Real events inspired all four novels, including the murder of a politician’s daughter six weeks before election day (They Tell Me You Are Wicked), a series of sniper killings in the city’s most notorious housing project (They Tell Me You Are Crooked), the Tylenol poisonings (They Tell Me You Are Brutal), and the false convictions of ten men on Illinois’ death row (They Tell Me You Are Cunning). He completed the first of these books while earning an MFA in creative writing at Pacific University, OR. He has also published more than fifty short stories online and in print. Read more of his work here.

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