story and photos by Sam Martin
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Riddled with coffee, I am an unstable tangle of nerves as I drive this expedition westward across the green Hill Country and into the flatlands. The roadkill along I-10 is particularly macabre tonight, introducing nauseating waves into my already churning gut. Over and over I have to remind myself of the basics.
Destination: Guadalupe Peak.
Goal: To get to the highest point in Texas.
Reason: None.
I crack the window and let the chilly midnight air molest my two snoring companions. That last detail — the no reason one — is troubling. It is true that there is no reason at all to get to the top of Texas. In fact, there really isn’t a reason to climb any mountain anywhere in the world. For the most part, however, that’s exactly why we’re going. The useless, uncomfortable, unfriendly, and semi-dangerous conditions surrounding the highest peak in Texas have become a sort of queer reasoning in themselves. Adventure, I believe it’s called. Of course, I believe the same set of circumstances has also been called stupid.
Even so, “why climb” has been a damn good question since Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jaques Balmat reached the top of Mont Blanc in 1786. George Mallory, who, along with Andrew Irvine, attempted to climb Mount Everest in 1924, sassed, “Because it’s there …” when reporters asked him why. He and Irvine later died very close to, if not on, the summit, etching that famous saying into the imaginations of every young climber since. Seemingly, Mallory’s absurd quip was good enough reason to put life at risk in order to attain the relatively basic goal of getting to the top of mountains.
Still, there has to be more to this mountain climbing thing than just doing it to do something. For one, human nature seems to embrace elevated spots and disregard the lower ones. I mean, you never see folks stringing up prayer flags or posting signs in the ground at the lowest points on earth. It’s always the highest points. I, for one, have never been to the highest point of anything. I’ve hiked to over 10,000 feet in the Himalayas, but considering the 25,000-foot peaks all around me, it was excruciatingly less than The Top. What I did manage to accomplish, however, was the quite unreasonable desire to summit a mountain.
In the world, the top of Texas is not a high spot. Still, it’s a mountain, and I’ve never been on top of one. More than that, it’s the highest place you can get to in the largest of the lower 48 states.
In Texas, it is The Top.
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photograph by Sam Marin |
Guadalupe Peak measures in at 8,750 feet above sea level, making it the single highest point in the state of Texas. The tallest skyscraper in Texas — the Texas Commerce Tower in Houston — is 1,000 feet high. The Empire State Building comes in at 1,250 feet. Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet above sea level. Since 1953, 992 people have reached its top and lived to tell about it.
I do not imagine many people have died from mountaineering in Texas, and if they have, it has more than likely been from shock at actually seeing one of the damn things in an otherwise flat state. Still, my crew and I have been careful not to take the quest too lightly. Our first concern was gear. Lots of it. A Gore-Tex-lined, hooded windbreaker is a must, as are good, heavy boots with plenty of ankle support, a four-season waterproof tent with rain fly, vestibule, and extra guy lines, a warm mummy sleeping bag, and a pocket-sized cooking stove with magnetic burner to keep the no-stick camping pot secure. Keep in mind, these are just the basics. I recommend a titanium ice axe to make you feel extreme.
Our second concern was actually getting to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. It’s roughly a nine-hour drive from Austin, and we decided to assault the task by driving in two legs, first to Fort Stockton under the cover of dark, then on to the park.
Lastly, we needed mental preparation. Much research was done into the history of mountaineering in order to achieve the proper mindset needed for a summit siege. Books like Sir Edmund Hillary’s autobiography and account of the first Everest victory, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and Peter Matthiessen’s breathtaking The Snow Leopard became required reading. We perused Outside and Blue magazines while getting to know the effects of hypothermia and other high-altitude maladies. In the end, the drive, the diligent hype, all of it, evolved into both a journey to the top of Guadalupe Peak and a quest for something much higher.
When you think about it, human ambition compels us to climb all the time. We make plans for what we do. We prepare ourselves and set goals. We overcome hardship to get there. The difference with climbing mountains is that in our quest to get to the end, our journey is one of basic, instinctual survival. Here we must feed ourselves, shelter ourselves, and stay out of harm’s way. This is where life and sport mesh.
Driving west out of Fort
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Stockton there isn’t much in the way of, well, anything. There aren’t any trees except high on the surrounding mountains. The desert is dry and littered with such mouth-puckering names as yucca, maguey, prickly pear, mesquite, snakeweed, four-winged saltbush, and pickleweed. Just outside of Van Horn, where we turn north onto Highway 54 toward Carlsbad, New Mexico and the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, we spot a bobcat crouched on the side of the highway. A little further down a coyote lays dead in the road. Just past him a black tarantula bobs up and down on the shoulder. In other words, the place where we’re going is not an overly friendly one.
At the visitors’ center, a lonely outpost on the desert floor behind which El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak lunge out of the earth like arid seracs, ready to topple over at any minute, Ranger Rod gives some careful advice. “A mountain lion was sighted recently in the area you boys are headed into,” he says calmly. “If you feel some eyes following you just make a lot of noise.” In a way, we’re much obliged to Rod for introducing a dash of real danger into our slow-roasting siege for the summit.
The trail is long and winding. It is a rocky road and an uphill battle. There is no end in sight. High above, golden eagles circle on the rising warm air while I take each steep step with clear mindless rhythm like a Zen mantra. The only sound is my boots on the dirt and the wind rushing in from the desert salt flats to the south. Before reaching the backcountry campsite, we will gain 3,000 feet in altitude, and already the air is thinning, making each breath a reaching gasp instead of a rich inhale.
Like all mountain climbers, we are simply not invited to this harsh place. There’s a reason why people don’t live in certain areas like those surrounding the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and it’s because they can’t live there. Still, herein lies an important principle of any journey that basically states: If you’re not supposed to do it, it’s more fun. In mountaineering speak: The harder it is to bag the peak, the better the peak-bagging.
We pitch our tents at around 7,300 feet, making our campsite the highest in the state. Suddenly everything we do has a tinge of sparkling first-timeness and higher-than-thou pompousness. Things like cooking and then actually eating an Earl Campbell hot link become the stuff of Guinness Book possibilities. When nature calls, I excitedly reason that I am, at that moment, the highest person in Texas taking a shit in the woods. Moreover, it is at this moment, with the cold wind tickling my exposed arse, that I realize the Faustian dilemma that has drawn me to the highest point in the state: If we shit, we are not gods. Climbing mountains gets us damn close.
That night, the moon rose over a sea of clouds covering the Chihuahuan desert for as far as we could see, some 2,000 feet below us. Meteors streaked the sky beneath the crystalline Milky Way, while the frigid wind roared around our helpless tents in speeds up to 60 miles an hour. Behind us, the peak beckoned in front of the glittering sky like a precious grail.
Just this side of Fredericksburg, Texas, Rebel Radio crackles through the static, and Junior Brown’s warm mellowtone eases into the truck. My body is a knot of muscles and aches. I stink. My hair sticks straight into the air � la Lyle Lovett, reminding me of a local saying: “The taller the hair, the closer to god.” It rings through my consciousness and is gone.
When you think about it, climbing mountains is a useless endeavor — useless in the way art is useless or poetry is useless. The only semi-viable reason we need all three is to preserve an understanding of mystery and longing. Subsequently, our urge to discover meaning at the top of things escalates once we reach one top. Our hunger grows. Accomplishment is both rewarding and unnerving — as if we’ve simultaneously fulfilled our purpose and lost it. At the top, the mystery has been dispelled.
In the clear mountain air, at the top of Texas, the salt flats on the desert floor seem like distant glaciers in their whiteness. A metal pyramid commemorating the highest point in the state stands defiantly in the wind. Next to it sits a green Army ammo box inside which lies a notebook. There I scrawl a poem by Philippe Denis that says, “To live in the way one breathes, to move on in front of one’s life — what we reach emerges from the day like the wind, blinds our breath.”
For some reason unclear to me it is why I have climbed this mountain.
This article appears in February 5 • 1999 and February 5 • 1999 (Cover).