Well, I arrived in Redding California at 8pm to find the world's smallest airport waiting for me. Of course I arrived, but my bags did not. See, according to the ticket agent, they were, in all likelihood, on the 10:40 plane and would be arriving at midnight. Great, there went my whole plan of getting in early, renting a car, and driving an hour to Mt. Shasta. The agent asked me what address I would like the bags sent to and I said "OK, you got a pen?" He grabbed one and said "go ahead." I said "OK, write this down... 'The Top of Mt. Shasta.'" The agent actually wrote down the letters T-O-P, then stopped and looked up at me. "Oh," he said. "Yeah, 'Oh'," I replied.

Anyway, three hours later I had my bags and was on my way to the Mountain. I was asleep by 2 and got up at 5 to get ready. As I walked into the parking lot with my fully loaded pack, I felt a presence behind me and turned around to catch my first glimpse of Mt. Shasta, towering two vertical miles above me and thought, "Holy cow, I might be in over my head here."

Anyway, I gamely made my way over to the supermarket to meet our guides Charlie and Pete, both of whom had been my guides on a previous outing with the good people of Mountain Adventure Seminars. We then spent a couple of hours doing gear checks with them, you know just to make sure none of us was planning to climb in loincloths or anything. Our backpacks even heavier now after the addition of group gear like stoves, fuel, food, and tents, we headed off for the trailhead at 7,000 feet and three miles from basecamp at 10,000. We headed out and I have to tell you, within 100 yards I was hurting bad. I've never been very good at overland travel with a heavy bag, and at 55-60 pounds, this was the heaviest I've ever worked with. What I am good at, though, is stubbornly trudging along and ignoring large amounts of pain and discomfort. And so, despite the fact that at only 7,000 feet, this mountain was already kicking my ass, I slogged on.

   

We arrived at basecamp around 5pm and I have never been happier to get anywhere in my life. Camp was at the base of the Hotlum Glacier terminal moraine. When a glacier moves it pushes huge amounts of dirt, rock, and debris in front of it and along the sides. These are called Terminal Moraines (at the base) and Lateral Moraines (on the sides), and they are amazing piles of rock pushed where they are over many eons. Amazing stuff. The temperature had dropped significantly, but I had been working so hard for the last five hours or so that I hadn't noticed and was still in a T-shirt. Within minutes, I was bundled up to the hilt, but happy to be where we were among such beautiful scenery. However, even as Charlie finished cooking a camp meal he called Pestatoes (mashed potatoes with pesto sauce and sausage mixed in), I could already feel the butterflies beginning. This was my first mountain, and there was so much I didn't know about how I would perform, and the task looked SO daunting, I had serious doubts.

I passed out cold around 8:30 and slept straight through 'till morning. Charlie and Pete woke us up for breakfast to get ready for an acclimatization climb up to 12,500 feet for lunch. The motto of the mountaineer is "climb high, sleep low." The idea being that if you spend some time at a higher altitude, your body will get used to it, and you'll sleep better at basecamp, sleep you'll need for summit day. So, we spent the day practicing glacier rope team travel on the crevasse field just below the top of the glacier, which is always marked by what's called a bergschrund. This is the spot where the glacier starts to peel away from the face of the mounting, leaving a huge, incredibly deep, very beautiful crevasse.

   

We had set a turnaround time of 2pm, so even though we hadn't quite made it to the bergschrund (our goal) by then, we headed back to camp anyway to be in bed by five. Charlie and Pete were planning to wake us up at 1am for summit day. Trying to go to sleep at five pm, with a blazing sun beating down on your tent, is nearly impossible. I wound up just lying on top of my bag for about four hours in just my long john bottoms, praying for the sun to disappear behind the moraine. I figure I fell asleep around nine. I woke up about quarter to one when a huge wind gust nearly toppled my tent. I got up to find that in the four hours since I'd fallen asleep, an enormous wind storm, with sustained winds of 50 mph, had blown in and with it, the temperature had dropped to well below freezing. I bundled myself into every stitch of clothing I'd brought along and forced as much food as possible down my throat, as we'd been warned that we would probably burn about 10,000 calories in the next 12 hours.

The day's first two pitches would be on the lower snow fields, and so we weren't going to travel in rope teams. I was very excited and nervous to begin, so when Pete said, "OK, I'll see you at the top of the first pitch," I was off like a horse at the Kentucky Derby. I motored up the lower snow field in about 30 minutes, put on my crampons, and did number two in about 40 more. I was excited because I figured it would be the only pitch I would lead all day because they had needed one more person to volunteer for the slow rope team and as odd man out (everyone else was there with a group of friends) I'd taken one for the team. So, at about 4 am, we roped up and headed up the Hotlum Glacier. It was both amazing, and awful at the same time. Having your entire field of vision reduced to a small five foot diameter circle of light was both exhilarating and terrifying. As the hours wore on, we were treated to a beautiful moon rise, followed within minutes by sunrise. And as I watched our two teams slowly crawl up the sheer 40 degree ice-face of the glacier, I thought, "Wow, this is the real thing. I'm actually climbing a mountain!"

The only problem for me was that I was at the back of my rope team and with the wind drowning out every word anyone tried to say, I had virtually no control over our pace. And the girl in the middle of the team was having major troubles. I couldn't tell what they were exactly, but she was moving very slowly and seemed very unsure of herself. Which meant that I wound up doing a lot of standing around. This would've been fine except that I had shed my fleece underlining back on the lower snowfields when I'd been moving at my own lightning-fast pace, and now I felt like I was literally freezing to death. But there was nothing I could do. Putting the fleece back on in the middle of the glacier like that was a literal impossibility. All I could do was stamp my feet and clap my hands to keep the blood flowing, and focus on the rocky band at the edge of the higher snowfield known as The Ramp, a thousand-foot long, narrow field of snow extending left to right across the top of the mountain and leading to the final 1,000 feet before the summit. At The Ramp, I noticed our team starting to move towards the cover of the rocks.

When I got there, I found Pete radioing Charlie and his team (who had made it to the top of The Ramp and were sitting on a spot called "The Bench") to tell him that our other teammate, Kimberly, was showing signs of Altitude Sickness or AMS. The time was 6:15 am. And then Pete said, "I'm going to take her down and see if she gets any better." Charlie radioed back, "OK" and I thought "Aw shit, is that it for me? I feel great. I wanna keep going." Pete went to the bathroom while I sat and stewed in the possibilities, and when he returned he called Charlie again and asked if he would come down and pick me up. Fifteen minutes later, Charlie arrived and hooked me into his rope. I shook hands with Pete, said thanks and wished him and Kimberly well. Pete said, "You look really strong Lars. You're gonna make it. Take pictures for me." Well, that was all I needed. Charlie and I hotfooted it up The Ramp and made the Bench at 7:30, where the rest of the team had been sitting and shivering for over an hour. Some, I would later learn, had considered quitting right there, but no one did. The next two hours were, truly, the hardest two hours of my life. Somehow, the face of the mountain got steeper, and as the altitude kept creeping upwards, I got to a point where, no matter how long I rested, my legs never seemed to get any stronger. Nevertheless, I wasn't feeling any nausea and my headache was still manageable, so I resolved to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The habitual rhythm I'd gotten into--ice axe, foot, foot, ice axe, foot, foot--went on almost without me thinking about it and I shut my brain down by humming a song in my head. Over the next two hours, the summit continued to get closer and closer. I remember this one great picture that I saw but didn't take. It was at about 13,000 feet. I was on a 40-degree inclined wall of ice and stopped to catch my breath. I planted my ice axe as hard as I could, then kicked my crampons into the ice and turned around to look below me. I saw a 4,000 foot drop straight to the bottom of the Bolam Glacier, and strung out below me were the other four members of my team all roped in and slogging it up the hill. But what made it really cool, was that every loose piece of strap and webbing on them was blowing straight out and horizontal from their bodies by the enormous winds buffeting us the whole way up, and the rope was whipping out in huge arcs between each climber. If I'd had an extra hand, I would've taken that one, but alas, I chose safety over entertainment value. Sorry 'bout that.

Finally, Charlie belayed me up a final scree field and I found myself on the summit ridge.

Charlie turned around, said congratulations, and shook my hand. 14,162 feet. I'd made it.

Then we sat down and ate a much deserved lunch behind a wind break. The others arrived on the summit shortly, and we spent about an hour taking pictures and messing around.

And then we spotted it. Lars' Severed Head on top of Mt. Shasta.

The body was found moments later.

So, while the others took their pictures, I sat down behind a wind break and all the exhaustion of our eight hour assault on the summit hit me like a brick. I passed out. In my dream I was shivering and my extremities were ice cold and without feeling. I heard a voice whisper in my head "hypothermia" and I snapped awake, paranoid from the low oxygen of 14,000 feet, looked at Charlie and said, "We have to go down now." Later Charlie would say that I seemed unusually serious about my point of view. The rest of the team, a group of four friends from Canada, were in bad shape too. One guy named Mark seemed to be wandering around aimlessly and uttering sentences that didn't make much sense. So, we all got up and Charlie said, "OK guys, remember, we're only halfway there. Statistically most accidents happen on the descent." Great. And he wasn't wrong, necessarily. There was this one guy I'd been quoting Monty Python with all weekend. At one point he sat down and I said "How are you feeling?" He replied "Better." I said "Better?" realizing where he was going with this and setting him up for the punch-line, "Better get me a bucket... I'm gonna throw up." And he did, right there at 13,000 feet. Pretty cool.

But the route down was surprisingly easy and we made good time. Although I remember feeling like my brain was about three feet to the right of my head. As we neared the bergschrund, we decided to cut to the right of it, and found our way blocked by the bergschrund we had been unable to see from above. Charlie belayed me as I looked for a way around. I found a snowbridge and told Charlie I was gonna test it out. As I got there, I looked down into the gaping maw of the crevasse and realized I couldn't see the bottom. ("I get it... I'm supposed to see there's no ground, and get scared...and come back... and ha ha! There's a ground....There's a ground Monty!!!"). I looked at this gigantic hole, then looked at my harness, realized I was not roped up for crevasse rescue and decided discretion was the better part of valor. We kept going until we were able to skirt round the bergschrund. Once safely on the downslope side, Charlie hammered in a belay and lowered me into the crevasse, just to check it out. This was, truly, one of the most amazing things I have ever done.

  

And then we were down. And it was over. We'd done it. 13 hours on the mountain, working at the absolute edge of our performance envelope. I think I managed to stay awake long enough to take a few pictures and then that was it. I was out. I slept for about 11 hours, without even taking time to eat dinner first. So, that's it. One mountain down, many hundreds to go.

Laaz out.