My hiking buddy Rob Graham thought it would be motivational to remind me of a 2017 trip up Humboldt Peak, one of Colorado’s easier 14ers in the Crestones of the Sangre de Cristo Range. You could quite reasonably refer to it as a “walk up”–absolutely no technical skill is required, just keep walking up until you’re out of “up.”
That position is known as the “Sun Lizard,” or sometimes the “Dead Lizard” if you’re just walking by and see someone like this. “Looks like a dead lizard” they say as they check to see if your chest is rising and falling. Then they just leave you there. It’s not even embarrassing, because you truly don’t care about anything but not moving at this point.
This is a less refined version of the Sun Lizard, known as the “Dying Turtle.” You’ll note the jeans and cotton hoodie, things I’d never wear hiking now, but you can also see my headlamp attached to my chest strap, which means we’d started this Death March pre-dawn somewhere near Grey’s and Torrey’s Peaks in 2015, two other walk-up 14ers. You perform the Turtle rather than the Lizard when you are unwilling to remove your pack prior to collapsing. The thinking is that it is so much work to put it all back on, and if you can just lay down for a moment, just get some oxygen back into your lungs, you’ll be fine.
But you’re never fine. You lay there a few moments, and your heart stops pounding so you stand dramatically back up. But three or four steps later your heart is pounding itself out of your chest again, and now even the “Dying Turtle” seems like too much work. The shadow is of Ed Mahoney, another Colorado resident who–like Rob–never once made fun of me for assuming the position.
A lot of backpacking is about seeing how much the machine can bear. I don’t know, it might be different for younger people still feeling things out; that’s just me. Most of my solo trips are more-or-less a series of days walking as far as I can, and despite the extraordinary places my legs will take me I always eventually run out of gas. The feeling of accomplishment is in going just a smooch farther–sometimes a big smooch–on that empty tank. It is a nice feeling, and totally self-directed, so even if you don’t get as far as you’d hoped, you end each day knowing who you are just a little bit better.
Not so, Sun Lizard and Dying Turtle! These acts are entirely the result of external forces, and it is that helplessness when faced with oxygen levels I am unaccustomed to that I find highly irritating. I want to keep walking up the mountain, my legs are strong enough to keep walking up the mountain, but my heart is trying to explode out of my chest and so I think I’ll just lie down for a second. I really have no choice.
Each season it takes me a few days to get acclimated, and generally by the third day I feel much better. This kind of thing only happens in Colorado, by the way, where the mountains start high and go higher. Wyoming and Montana mountains are big and humbling, but they start lower and so even at their peaks you don’t notice that you’re being cheated out of some oxygen. Stopping is a choice you make.
The choice is not always based on being tired or finding a good place to camp. Sometimes, you just make a decision about gravity. Gravity is a physical property that is external to your will, very much like the amount of oxygen in the air you are breathing. But with gravity your body doesn’t let you know that the amount is not optimal until it is way too late. Choices like “if I fall here, I will die” or “if an avalanche starts here, I will die” leave it entirely up to you. You haven’t fallen yet, and so far there has been no avalanche. When you choose to stop you’ll never know if either of those things would have happened. Again, irritating, but not like that boom, boom, boom in your chest that you can’t do anything about.
I of course have plans for this coming season, none of which include images of me sprawled helplessly on a mountain peak. Funny how the mind works: I can imagine myself dealing with choices like turning around when the pass looks too dangerous, or deciding to carry bear spray even when I think the chances of me running into a 1,000 pound enraged carnivore do not outweigh the $40 expense. But I just can’t see having to stop because of something I can’t do anything about.
My Name is SCHOOLS 