A Mighty Wall by John Foley

Author:John Foley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: flux, teen, fiction, ya, young adult, youth
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2011-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

13

I like to think that a child who has seen those stars and those mountains will ever after, surely without ever understanding why, understand that it is important to strive but absurd to strut.

—Russell Baker

The night before my Rainier trip with Mom in late June, we ordered pizza to load up on carbs and checked our gear. Our two piles covered the whole living room. Mom had a checklist in her hand and went through her pile first. “Ice axe, check. Crampons, check. Headlamp, check. Three pairs of wool socks, check. Sleeping bags, check.”

“Obsessive compulsive,” I interrupted, “check.”

“Jordan, this is important!”

“I know, I know.”

Mom was really excited, and I must admit I was getting there myself. I’d never climbed a mountain over seven thousand feet, and here I was going for fourteen thousand, the toughest alpine climb in the U.S. outside of Alaska. Colorado has a bunch of fourteeners and California has a few, but Rainier is tougher because you start at five thousand feet. A lot of the other fourteeners have trailheads at around ten thousand feet. Then there are the glaciers, avalanches, and other stuff you need to worry about. Rainier is a whole different ball game.

The next morning at breakfast, Mom admitted she didn’t sleep well. She went back in for a nap while I put our packs in the car and called Juana and A.J.—funny, they both said they wished they were going with us. Juana had climbed Mount Hood, and Rainier was next on her big-mountain list.

We took off about noon, heading south on I-5 through Seattle and Tacoma, then heading east for a while, then south again on a country road. It was a clear, warm day, and every now and then we’d catch a glimpse of Rainier, which of course seemed to be getting bigger as we got closer. Mom started to say “amazing” when we got a view near Ashford, but caught herself and it came out “ama … ”

“I’ll watch my adjectives if you keep from whining,” she said. “Rainier National Park is a no whining zone.”

“Tell you what, Mom,” I said. “I’ll give you the adjectives of your choice at the summit. But that’s it. You start spouting premature adjectives, you gotta be mute at the top.”

“Deal.”

The trees became dense around the National Park entrance. Mom paid the fee and we drove six miles up the twisting road that runs parallel to the Nisqually River. We were booked for two nights at the National Park Inn, a sprawling old hotel with what Mom called a million-dollar view. After we checked in and got settled, she bought a wine cooler for herself and a Pepsi for me, and we sat in chairs on the Inn’s front deck looking at the south side of the mountain.

I could see why people didn’t usually climb the southwest side. It was all cliffs and pinnacles and hanging glaciers, from what I could see, and the ridges looked very steep. Everyone sitting on the porch was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.