The Dual Mountain We Call Everest

When Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the top of Mt. Everest in 1953, crowds worldwide celebrated their success as a milestone for all time. While he was at the top, Tenzing set into the summit snows some gifts he’d carried up for the goddess who inhabits the peak, known of course to him and his people as Chomolungma. Few people paid notice to this, and far fewer understood the Sherpa and Tibetan identity behind this ancient name for the mountain.

This is the story of the same peak imagined as both Everest and Chomolungma, two identities that inhabit our imagination through two very different civilizations and two different visions for inhabiting the earth. Everest and Chomolungma are concepts living in our minds like estranged step-siblings in the same royal household, each operating in different wings in the palace. One is the exalted son, regal in his mathematically ordained mandate to reign as the rock-star king for all time, even as the kingdom goes awry. The other is his elder step-sister, beautiful and rock-solid wise with deep celestial powers but fairly dismissed, misconstrued and nearly overshadowed and exiled even from memory behind the glare shined on her younger brother, even as she works in obscurity to hold the realm together.

Mt. Everest’s crown was bestowed by the Royal Geographical Society in the 1850s, starting with long-distance telescopic triangulations from the Indian plains. Calculations revealed the peak’s supreme height, and as Britain’s lords of geography quietly took the time to triple-verify their find they saw the symbolic opportunity they could not resist, to stamp it with their claim. The Society had rules to prioritize native names, and of course they owned a premier storehouse of geographic knowledge, including a French-Jesuit atlas bearing the label (based on a Chinese source) Chomo Lancma. Nevertheless, in 1857 they overrode internal controversy and those rules and named the peak in honor of their emeritus Surveyor General George Everest (actually pronounced “Eve-rest” in his native Welsh) expressly to establish title before native names could become known. The long-distance titling was barely a footnote in the Society’s epic, multi-decade Great Trigonometric Survey to order the whole subcontinent of India into a grid for governance and taxation, but the Everest claim created the everlasting symbol to inspire humanity to bring the world, however far and high, into our comprehension and fold. By the time of the 1953 climb the very name had become our synonym for ultimate challenge, and the mountain became our monument to seeing our surroundings as the great, can-do field for the ascent of man.

To understand the identity of Chomolungma, we first need to appreciate that Tibetans and Sherpas revere mountains not by comparative height. Like most of the millions of Buddhists and Hindus from Lhasa to Mysore, they understand the most revered mountain on earth to be Kailas (Kang Rinpoché in Tibetan). Kailas is an unmistakable sight and a breathtaking presence reigning over the highest western highlands of the Tibetan plateau. Though its towering snowcap reaches to not even 7000 feet lower than Everest, a nexus of remarkable characteristics–including its location overseeing the sources of central Asia’s four major rivers–give it its identity as the earthly eminence of the Axis Mundi, the mythic spindle linking earth and the cosmos around which the world turns. For centuries people of many faiths have known Kailas as the world’s loftiest site for deities and mythic human tales, and countless people have made long, hard pilgrimages to circumambulate the peak and embed themselves in its affirmation that, regardless of how bad things seem, at Kailas the world is working wondrously and as it should. At least a couple of modern mountaineers have applied to be the first to climb it, but international outcries of sacrilege prompted China to deny those plans.

Kang Rinpoche, aka Kailas, north face above nomad camp after a summer storm

From their homes near Everest, Sherpas also revere a topographically modest “local mountain” called Khumbiyula. This rocky prominence is much more important to them than Chomolungma because it’s the home of a deity who oversees their privilege to inhabit the territory and the well-being of their fields, houses, forests, wildlife and rivers. As with Kailas no one is allowed to climb on Khumbiyula.

Since 1982, from Khumbu to Skardu, I’ve spent a lot of time with Himalayan natives; trekking and climbing with them, helping harvest their crops, raising money for their kids’ schooling, helping build solar heating, celebrating festivals, sitting in their kitchens listening to their stories…and the accumulated four years of life in their hospitality has opened my eyes as much and probably more than my Himalayan climbs and panoramas. I’ve seen seemingly desperately poor people glow with life in their simple villages and nomadic camps, telling how they love their basic foods and their animals, and how men and women collaborate to hand-spin and weave their clothes. I’ve also heard them chat about herding us foreigners, “like cattle–they give a lot of milk but need a lot of attention.” Instinctively they respect how their lives run both plentiful and dire, depend on the grace of their surroundings, and how peaks like Chomolungma oversee it all.

Before modern times Chomolungma was not well known across Tibet, and not always by that name. When Brits first applied to the office of the Dalai Lama to try to climb the peak in the 1920s, the officials in Lhasa issued travel documents labeling the peak with a complex name referencing its height as so great that no birds could fly over it. This was also how Tenzing said his mother referred to it. Folks living in sight of the peak also called it Cho Kola. Had the Brits applied to climb a more deeply sacred peak like Kailas they never would have received permission, and as it was they violated the rules of their permit by mapping Everest’s surroundings and killing birds and wildlife for biological study.
Today we know that the original, Tibetan name for the peak is actually Chomolangma. The British vanguard in Tibet learned the name Chomolungma from Sherpas hired in Darjeeling. They asked into the meaning, but people from different areas told them different things, the Brits interpreted those things differently, they projected assumptions of cosmic grandiosity into what they heard, and they came up with interpretations feverishly wrong. George Mallory and others published the fantasy that Chomolungma means “Mother Goddess of the World,” and eventually the world attached to that fable and never really looked into it. I’m guessing the Brits never got it right because they rarely sought out the local lamas. In Tibetan and Sherpa societies lamas carry the core religious and cultural traditions, and as a rule they don’t usually interact casually with general society.
Researchers, authors and lamas today do explain the true definition of Chomolungma, and it starts with this: the peak itself is not a goddess, it’s the abode of a “local goddess.” Her name is Chomo Miyo Langsangma. This translates as “immutable elephant fair lady goddess.” Chomo is the term for goddess or revered female. The elephant (lang) reference is said to be an emphasis on Miyo Langsangma’s unshakeable (Mi-yo) resolve (in her role of giving generously), and the arched, grey back of her mountain. The abode, “Chomolangma” and the Sherpas’ derivation “Chomolungma,” are typical Tibetan contractions of her name.
Chomo Miyo Langsangma is one of five “local sister-deities” who can command certain local forces. Collectively they are known as the “long-life sisters,” each inhabiting different peaks. One sister leads the clan, and her name is Tseringma, Tibetan for “long-life.” Her abode is a magnificent, twin-peaked mountain west of Chomolungma also called Tseringma. (Hindus of the plains know this peak more famously as Gauri Shankar.) Each of the sisters has specific powers to help people live longer lives. Legend has it that it that centuries ago the sisters were visualized as capricious demons lurching people around with assistance and disasters rained from on high.

Tseringma peak, aka Gauri Shankar, abode of Tseringma, the local goddess of “long life.” Photo courtesy Smoke Blanchard collection

As told in The Lawudo Lama, Jamyang Wangmo’s highly regarded book portraying esoteric Buddhist traditions in Khumbu, Miyo Langsangma’s particular “long-life” power is to bestow beauty and wealth, especially successful crops and herds. She is depicted as a beautiful woman-figure boldly riding a lactating tigress, bearing in her left hand a bowl of delicious food, and in her right another symbol of proffered bounty, either a mongoose or a flower. Thus for centuries Chomolungma has stood as the home of a goddess supporting people’s prosperity. What’s fascinating to realize is that today Chomolungma brings prosperity in spades. Any Sherpa will tell you that they go to Everest for work; it’s risky but it’s the premier opportunity for glory and by far the best money in town. Thanks to Chomolungma, Khumbu Sherpas are the wealthiest natives in the Himalaya. This is a practical understanding that still respects the transcendent power and status of Miyo Langsangma. Tenzing, before he went to climb to the top of her abode, visited a lama to learn about the proper ways to respect the goddess, and he acquired a sacred thangka image of her for his home in Darjeeling.

Thangka portraying Chomo Miyo Langsangma. Taken from Jamyang Tenzing Norgay’s book Touching My Father’s Soul

As Buddhists, Tibetans and Sherpas appreciate that however virtuously we strive, even a prosperous, long and beautiful life finds suffering and troubles, and is temporary in any case. These are the Buddha’s teachings. It is said that Buddhism came to Tibet with a masterful tantric yogi, a “second Buddha” known as Guru Rinpoche, in the 8th century AD. Like a new sheriff soaring across the realm he confronted mountain deities like the Tseringma sisters and leveraged them into vows to help people by giving them earthly security sufficient to follow the Buddhist path and transcend material life. As Sherpas told scholar Jan Sacherer, “The mountain gods are for growing crops…but to purify our minds we need to pray to the Buddhist gods.” Tibetan cultures understand better than we that our definitions of mountains are projections of our imagination. Whether people believe in their gods literally or metaphorically, from a Buddhist standpoint it’s the quality and state of mind that the beliefs foster that makes the difference.
Guru Rinpoché also issued prophecies, and Sherpas believe they have lived out his foretelling that in hard times people would find hidden refuge lands called beyul. In the 16th century they fled from conflicts in eastern Tibet, and out west (Sherpa means “Easterner”) they explored south across high passes between the Tseringma peaks. In territory now in Nepal they found uninhabited and verdant mountain valleys with tumbling rivers and majestic forests, clearly beyul. On the precious and picturesque mountain slopes they made new homes and vowed not to harm wildlife or cut down whole trees, and to honor deities inhabiting the peaks. The Sherpas’ legacy is a typical if grand example of the cultural structures that inspire indigenous peoples to live with gratitude and respect for their terrain; they know their lives depend on it.

These then are the stories of Everest and Chomolungma. As the world’s most famous landmark, Mt. Everest is the alpha monument to our ascent-of-man vision for inhabiting the earth, and by that measure we’re doing well. We now ascend the once-unattainable peak regularly, and by the path of distilling the world into what we can define and succeed in we’ve advanced to the moon and so many ever-higher unimaginable heights. We’ve done well except that we look around and see the world we stand upon and depend on facing climatic, economic, political and biological crises wrought by the very hands we raise in triumph. No longer can we credibly believe that the ascent of man as we’re working it can achieve the mastery our forefathers expected. Rather, it’s more like we hope and pray that we are keeping ahead of colossal folly. Our situation feels like the lesson of uh-oh that every mountaineer learns–that summiting a great mountain is fantastic but our grand sense of completion faces the start of a vital and often perilous return to where we really live.

Chomolungma, the same mountain, is a huge emanation bearing the powers of the terrain around it. It’s a great peak that offers support to people who respect it, and it infuses people with a vision of our inherent vulnerability and dependence on our surroundings. I speak merely as an amateur observer of indigenous life, but I’ve seen in Ladakhis, Sherpas, Baltis and others a deep happiness and a respectful and active love for belonging to terrain that we with ever-mobile modern powers can barely imagine. Chomolungma focuses and enhances that vision of belonging and dependence on earth. We should not, however, confuse well-being and secure in belonging with ease and comfort, or even security in general. Indigenous living is full, difficult, and rich in hardship. Out of hopeful opportunity, dire need and heartbreaking fate Himalayan people are shifting away from their subsistence patterns. They are seeking better lives with at least one leg in the modern world while retaining their indigenous identities as best they can. In this year’s Sherpa celebrations in Khumbu for the anniversary of the 1953 ascent, I’m told that respect and rites for Chomo Miyo Langsangma were more prominent than ever. This is a sign of hope, it follows an instinct to bring the estranged step-siblings of Everest and Chomolungma together in the palace chambers of our mind. Whatever our current means, we would do well to blend in our minds both the will for Everest-inspired powers of proficiency and the indigenous respect for Chomolungma-inspired vulnerability. What other choice do we have?

Information on Chomolungma and Chomo Miyo Langsangma in this article has come from many sources. I’d particularly like to thank Edwin Bernbaum, author of Sacred Mountains of the World, and Jan Sacherer and Barbara Brower, authorities on Sherpa and Tibetan culture. The latter two recruited helpful corrections and encouragement from Ani Jamyang Wangmo and Tashi Tsering. I’d also like to thank Losang Rabgey and her amala.

About Allen Steck

Allen Steck passed away on February 23, he was 96. I was lucky to be his friend for some 25 years. We did a lot of climbing together, with me leading, back when he was 70+ years old and still ably following 5.9’s and 10a’s. He knew better than anyone I’ve known how to find quality and attainable challenge. Despite having a fine autobiography, published through Patagonia, I think relatively few people appreciate the depth and breadth of his career, for he stands as one of the greatest American climbers in history. Off the top of my head here is a summary, with added anecdotes and unchecked “facts” as I remember them.

Allen’s father was an active member of the Sierra Club, and passed on to Allen and brother George values for adventure and conservation, as well as an original copy of John Muir’s The Mountains of California, gifted and signed by Muir.

In the wake of WWII Allen went to college on the GI Bill in Switzerland, when Europe was in shambles. While there he answered a letter via the Club from a leading Austrian climber named Karl Lugmayer. The two spent the summer of 1949 climbing in Austria and the Dolomites, traveling from peak to peak on bicycles. Allen had brought from America one of the very first nylon climbing ropes (maybe the first?) to be deployed in Europe, and luckily so because on the Cima Grande an aid piton pulled and Karl took a 65-foot mostly airborne fall. The fall dinged Karl’s head pretty badly, but they were able struggle down to get it bandaged and go back and, with Allen’s lead, complete the climb the next day. He and Karl stayed in touch their whole lives, and a group of us met Karl when he flew over for Allen’s 80^th birthday celebration in Berkeley.

Karl Lugmayer and Allen Steck in Berkeley, May 2006 © Andy Selters

Soon after Allen returned to California he pulled off some big climbs in 1950, difficult and demanding adventures that history seems to have lost in the bright lights that shined in Yosemite a few years later. His year included the first ascent of Castle Rock Spire, and then the oft-tried first ascent of the north face of Sentinel Rock, with John Salathé. After that he and a team of Sierra Club guys went deep into the BC Coast Mountains, where he readily led a new route up daunting Mt. Waddington, the rock-snow-ice king peak of the range. Then they toured around that area, arguably the most profoundly alpine territory south of the Yukon, and made a bunch of additional first peak ascents.

In 1953 he and Willi Unsoeld, Bill Long and Will Siri completed the first ascent of El Capitan’s east buttress, after a couple of attempts including one where they had to lower Bill Dunmire who took a bad aid fall and was fairly unconscious with a concussion.

Around 1952 Allen quit grad school and started working at The Ski Hut gear shop in Berkeley. As he became the store manager the shop became northern California’s hub for climbing gear and info. He then got into designing gear, making efficient, top-notch “Slimline” sleeping bags and I think tents too. During this decade he married, and raised daughter Sara and son Lee into outdoor adventure values.

In 1952 he went with other Sierrans to the big Cordillera Blanca to try some notable climbs. Unfortunately Oscar Cook got high altitude illness and died. After taking his body down to Lima the team returned, and Allen and Will Siri made a couple of big climbs, most notably an alpine-style first ascent of Huandoy East.

Over time he did quite a few other first ascents in the Sierra, including the wall of Angel Wings, the SE Face of Clyde Minaret, and the “Doors of Perception” route on N. Palisade.

Allen climbing a 5.9 in the E. Sierra © Andy Selters

Allen was also an avid skier, he often toured backcountry south of Tahoe. Sometime in the late ’40s (?) he and Dick Long and others skied from Mammoth Lakes, pushed through storms, and made the first winter ascent of Clyde Minaret. In the early ’60s while backcountry skiing near Echo Summit Allen was buried pretty deep in an avalanche. Friends heroically somehow located and dug him out in time. A few years later he teamed up with Lito Tejada-Flores to write Wilderness Skiing, which became America’s backcountry ski manual for awhile. During this period he went back up to BC with another Sierra Club group and led the first winter ascent of Mt. Waddington.

In 1954 Allen joined Will Siri and partners for America’s first Himalayan expedition after the war, hoping to climb Makalu by the futuristically huge southeast ridge. Teton guide Willi Unsoeld was on the team. The approach up the Arun Valley then was virtually unexplored and an ordeal in itself. Gradually they all realized they were overmatched on their first trip to super high altitude, on a route that would not be (and not quite) completed until 30 years later.

As Sara and Lee grew out of childhood dependency Allen restarted serious climbing. In 1963 he went with Dick Long and John Evans to the Tetons, and Long prompted them to try what a few had jokingly mused, traversing all the main Teton peaks, in a day. It took them their second try, but even as thunderstorms chased them they climbed Nez Perce, Cloudveil, South T, Middle T, Grand T, Owen and Teewinot, and returned to the car before dark.

In 1965 Allen and Dick Long were the lead force among six guys in making the incredible ascent of what hopefully is understood as the biggest route in the Western Hemisphere, the south “Hummingbird” ridge of Mt. Logan. Fred Beckey in 1994 told me how incredulous he was that “those California guys” would even try the thing. “We didn’t think they had a chance,” Fred said. This became one of the great success tales of mountaineering, and I heard Allen tell it around campfires a couple of times–how they persevered over a few thousand feet of steep walls with mediocre and bad rock and sloppy snow just to get to the wildly narrow crest of the ridge. Weeks in but still a long, long way to go, they got discouraged and voted whether to go on or to retreat. The deciding vote came to Jim Wilson, who asked Long, “Dick, can you get me off of this mountain?” Dick said “yes,” so they carried on. Soon after that they realized they were on “a forward retreat,” for to reverse their way back down would be such a convoluted epic that the best way to get home safely was to carry on over the top. Allen then told how the “Shovel Traverse” actually was not the nightmare it appeared. After a couple of ropelengths they realized the snow of July was fairly firm and sculptable, and the wild cornices and meringues and walls held their tightwire of cut steps and fixed ropes for repeated load carries pretty well. It was Dick who first went on lead with their drilled-out steel shovel and found that the crust was such that he could scoop out steps more readily than with an ice axe.

Allen was a very literate man. The shelves of his house in Berkeley were dense with all sorts of books, many, including the works of Goethe, in German. In 1967 he and Steve Roper talked David Brower and the Sierra Club into publishing a literary climbing annual, Ascent. Their determination to prod good writing out of not necessarily eloquent climbing writers made it the gold standard for climbing literature and the voice for thinking more deeply about climbing as art, style and challenge. I’m pretty sure Christian Beckwith would agree Ascent was an inspiration for starting Alpinist. Later, in the late ’70s Allen and Steve over no doubt a few sessions with wine decided that the classic way to show the under-appreciated grandeur of N. American climbing was to decide for themselves the most classic routes on the continent, and do a book featuring them. Part of the project was to climb as many of their recommendations as they could. Fifty Classic Climbs became the marquee book they imagined, and except in a couple of cases where climate change has transformed the peaks all the routes still stand up as characteristic testpieces.

In 1969 Allen and Leo LeBon started Mountain Travel, and Allen wrapped the Palisades School of Mountaineering under that umbrella. MT was America’s first real adventure travel company, and it played a large role enabling customers and guides, and partners and porters (especially in Nepal) to advance their lives through the delights and business of mountain adventuring.

In 1974 Allen was part of a large group of Americans invited by the USSR to climb peaks in the Pamirs. He, Chris Wren and Jock Glidden waited out a storm on Peak Lenin, and when they made their way to the top they came across the bodies of eight Russian women who had perished in the storm.

In 1976 Allen somehow was invited by climbers and the military in Pakistan to help them make the first ascent of Payu Peak. When I was in college I had a poster of Payu on my dorm wall–it was obviously not a peak but a fantasy, a surreal dream castle. But with Allen’s guidance the team climbed it, with Allen holding himself back not far from the top to leave the success to them. Young mountaineer Nazir Sabir went on from this, his “breakthrough” trip, to become Pakistan’s leading climber.

In 1983 Allen rejoined his brother George for another ultra-adventure, a walk, scramble, climb and occasional swim through the entire Grand Canyon, from Lee’s Ferry to Lake Mead. George was the Grand Canyon veteran and it sounds like Allen loved that expedition, 82 days long.

Allen finishing the 5.10 face pitch on “The SS,” 2000 © Andy Selters

In 2000 Allen invited me to join him for what proved to be his last big climb, his fourth repeat of the Steck-Salathé route (he called it “The SS”) on Sentinel. It was appropriately too hot, on approximately the 50^th anniversary of his FA. I’d never done the route before but with Allen aged 74 I was to lead it all. From the first pitch, even though I was competent at 5.11- I got worked. The rumors were right, that climb is way harder than the guidebook rating suggests. At various points he shared memories of where he and John huddled for the nights, and how at various impasses they’d searched left and right. It was astounding how tenacious they must have been—the route is justifiably infamous for long chimneys and wide cracks, and I thrutched and strained and struggled up those cracks, rationing a couple of big cams to keep the runouts just fairly scary–and those guys in 1950 had climbed with a simple bowline around their waists, lugged shoes, and no pitons wider than ¾ inch! It took them 4 ½ days. When Allen said they carried I think 4 quarts of water, I said, “Per day, per person, or?” “No, 4 quarts total!” He went on, “When we got to the top we were absolutely insane for water. John wandered off uphill looking for some delusional spring, and I headed down the gully. Eventually he crawled down and met me at the stream…” After our climb Allen took me out to dinner at the Lodge, and handed me one of those big cams. “Here, this is yours, I’ll never use it again…”

I visited Allen for the last time just a few weeks ago. He was spending his days comfortable in his chair at a side-building at his daughter Sara’s house, here in Bishop. He filled in some of the stories I knew. First, he told how his old friend Karl Lugmayer had told him his WWII story, right as Allen was boarding a ship at Genoa to come home. Karl relayed how he had been a reluctant member of the Werhmacht, recruited for his expertise with aeronautics and gliders. As the Germans’ war effort in early ’45 became desperate Karl was sent to the front lines near Flanders, to dig a foxhole. The weather was bad with poor visibility, and when Karl saw a British troop carrier come by he hopped into the back of it. The Brits drew their rifles but he delayed their fire by explaining in his excellent English he was surrendering. He finished the war as a POW.

Then Allen told me his own war story of that same year, how he was a deck hand on the USS George, a Destroyer escort. His main tale was of their mysterious non-deployment and the disaster of the USS Indianapolis. In 1945, unbeknownst to the crew, the Indianapolis delivered vital parts for assembling the A-Bombs to the island of Tinian. Right after that delivery the Navy sent the Indianapolis mysteriously unescorted to the Philippines, through lanes they knew were heavily patrolled by Japanese submarines. The Japanese sank the Indianapolis with torpedoes, and the Navy didn’t even have communications to know of it. Most of the 1200-man crew survived the sinking but no rescue came until after most of them had perished adrift, when they were found by a passing US aircraft. The Navy didn’t disclose the story until the day of the Japanese surrender. The ship’s Captain McVay survived but was scapegoated and court-martialed, but later reinstated and re-honored–years after he committed suicide.

Going through Allen’s long life of adventures, it’s obviously impressive how he was always “going for it,” his whole life. One night I glimpsed the youthful fire he must have had when he said, out of the blue, “My God, how could you look at the Hummingbird Ridge and not want to climb it?” Well, uh, some people might balk at it…He also told how he used to pull off this party trick, doing a pistol squat standing one-legged on a milk bottle. Yet I want to point out how, for all his “going-for-it,” year after year, in places and situations few or no one had ever been, he always kept sane and safe. When things got tough, and they did on essentially every one of his big climbs, he knew how to dig in and find more will and more effort, and more common-sense smarts to stay alive and safe. Right through all of his last climbing years he was pushing himself with sound judgement.

In the same half hour that his son Lee sent me the message about his passing, I saw a post that a big rockfall had peeled off of El Capitan, just left of the East Buttress route he did with Willi Unsoeld back in 1953. These two stories seem like connected, parallel news.

© 2023 by Andy Selters

An Optimized Shoulder

Last week one of my T’ai-chi students relayed that an orthopedist had told her that we humans are prone to shoulder injuries because “the shoulder joint is not very well designed.” Yikes! My alarm bells rang red, because from a T’ai-chi standpoint this is a dangerous inversion of the vital concept of working in concert with our structure. I was tempted to spout the ancient truism: “we can’t break the rules of nature, but we can break ourselves on them.” Staying sedate though, I simply cautioned the student not to blindly accept that doctor’s line, and I explained how T’ai-chi runs with the opposite philosophy—that body success comes from following the path that optimizes our frankly amazing design. 

Image thanks to Brinkphysio

Far from being faulty, our shoulder is a super-functioning joint without peer in the animal kingdom (except, as Leonardo found, our own foot-ankle system). “The” shoulder joint is actually a double confluence of the upper arm bone, collar bone and shoulder blade. The main focus of course is at the top of the arm bone, where a knob fits into a shallow socket in the broadened outer edge of the shoulder blade. Right above this main joint the collarbone and shoulder blade meet, but barely, to help cup that arm knob. Mostly these two support bones are floating wings that anchor a sophisticated, multi-layered sheathing-truss complex of muscles, ligaments and tendons. Basically they are “wing” bones and they and their muscles are fairly floating, pulling variously with and against one another to both hold the arm in place and pull it through an incredible range of actions. 

If you look to joints with a mechanic’s expectation for interlocking bones fitting securely deep and puzzle-like, our shoulder structure looks feebly unstable. But if you see how the bones fit together just enough to enable the trusses’ dynamic functionality you can appreciate how our shoulders operate as masterpieces of action opportunity. We move our arms with power, stability and accuracy through all planes and many angles, in throwing, catching, pushing, pulling, lifting, swimming, reaching, hanging, swinging, hugging, defending…we can even put our arms to work behind our back. Only primates can do anything like these actions, and we can do them best of all because no other animal has an open-joint truss shoulder like ours. Of course all this is possible because we go around upright on two legs, with our arms freed from ground support. And this fact–that our arms are in ready command from our overall design as upright, two-legged animals–can cue us in to how to properly use our upper limbs. The fundamental idea of T’ai-chi is to move as a unified and grounded whole, and through this concept we learn that our shoulders are designed to transfer movements anchored in our spine and coordinated with our legs.

A couple of years ago I took my son took to a week of elite baseball training for pitching and hitting, and in watching his coached process I learned how the pros develop a continuously smooth and explosive, whole-body chain of force: launching off grounded legs they transfer and amplify that initiation up and out through a rotating, flexing and shifting spine and on through the shoulder(s) and arm(s), to a target. In the camp each player’s movement patterns were analyzed for problems (generally, forcings and weaknesses) that were labeled “opportunities” for enhancement. People throw and hit baseballs at 100+ mph without injury only through balanced and accurate transfers through each part of their whole-body power chain. Of course few of us put our bodies into that level of demand, but over years of more normal activity the message for effective and injury-free shoulder action is no different. The shoulder is designed not to be the source of whatever action our grasping mind might want to carry out but a hinge to transfer, enhance and direct actions initiated and anchored in our trunk and legs. Elite players develop what T’ai-chi practitioners have practiced for generations, moving from a good posture on solid footing and guiding their intention through relaxed and fluid shoulder “non-action.” When forces come at us the same body-integration gathers in reverse, from relaxed arms into the trunk and into grounded, springy legs. I like to remind my students with the phrase, “put your spine in charge, because it is.”

Many shoulder injuries arise, arguably, because we get enthralled with the joint’s amazing power and mobility and start using it literally unhinged from the rest of the body. In general I can advise to watch out for two common ways we misuse our shoulders: 1) by initiating action from the shoulder itself, and 2) by allowing chronic muscle tension, (often generated by anxiety and poor posture during sitting and driving) to hold the shoulders “up” against gravity. Don’t use your shoulder as the starting point to your push, use your torso and legs and adjust the shoulder to transmit the push solidly through the arms. And beware of how neck and shoulder tension can carry on into a chronic condition that pulls the shoulder into conflicting demands. When we forget the main of our body and ask the shoulder either to do the bulk of a task or conflicting tasks, we hurt ourselves.

Here are two additional suggestions for smoother shoulder action. First, keep a good posture and let the shoulders stay “long” and relaxed out from the neck (yay massage!), a position that keeps the truss muscles free for intended action. Second, start noticing during arm movements how you can relax the shoulder into a stronger and more stable alignment by incorporating rotation. When you’re reaching or pushing, pulling or gathering, play with turning the elbow and arm to spiral “in” or “out” some, and you’ll notice how you can usually find an optimum spiral that relaxes the shoulder and best connects the arm to the spine. A spiral is arguably nature’s most effective structure for transmitting force with stability, and when we can let the shoulder find the arm’s optimal spiral we can empty a lot of the work load off the muscles and ligaments and into the solidness of the bones. 

The irony of living is that our best signal for reaching our fullest potential is ease. Ease is the feeling we get when our complexity comes together into actions that flow with our structure. But to find ease is not easy. We have to pay attention and prioritize listening more than forcing, and as we learn to recognize genuine ease the marvelous potential in our design comes to us clear and exhilarating.

Confrontation Care

Recently the story tearing through America erupted in our little town: white cops meet a person of color, mutual suspicion escalates into a fight, and the person ends up badly injured or dead.

In this case, just a few blocks from where I write this, two deputies on a 2am domestic violence call saw a Paiute man walking with a dog through an empty gas station. They called out to him. He responded with a nervous “Hi” but became alarmed and trotted toward them in chaotic distress, both speaking threats and holding his hands in the air. Immediately the cops warned him and drew weapons. He kept approaching with his hands up, they warned and threatened again, he kept coming and at about 10 feet they tasered him. Down he went, the cops jumped over and demanded he get onto his stomach but he writhed and thrashed and did not comply. The dog freaked out and parried at the cops, they demanded that the writhing man reign in the dog, then one of the deputies shot the dog. When the man gathered himself he started walking away and the deputies followed to arrest him. He kept resisting, they brought in reinforcements including one of their dogs, and beat him into the ICU with his life in jeopardy. Videos casted the confrontation across the region and into the national news, and we learned that the man was not a suspect in the original call or in any other charge. At this writing Inyo County is conducting investigations into possible charges against both the man and the deputies.

I won’t weigh in here to either side, but I will take a step back and offer suggestions from when I walked into a similar situation.

It was a snowy winter’s night at the resort “village” in Mammoth Lakes when I walked to an art gallery, wearing a blue hooded jacket. The area was empty but by happenstance my route turned to follow about 20 feet behind a guy who’d just walked out of a drinking establishment. After a bit he turned around and said to me, “Hey, you’re following me!”

“No,” I said, “I’m just going this way.” He turned around and resumed walking on.

A few steps later he turned around again and came over to stand right in front of me. He said, “Hey, you’re LAPD aren’t you! You’re following me!” Then he gave a light push against my shoulder.

I weighed the fight; he was bigger than me, maybe 6’4” and fairly well proportioned. In my favor I had my T’ai-chi training and the fact that he was agitated, inebriated, and to some degree delusional. But in T’ai-chi or otherwise I am not a practiced fighter, and I could see he was more capable and angry than drunk. I felt anxiety swell into my shoulders and throat, and I heard thoughts bolstering my confidence that with my best quicks my odds were probably better than even. Probably. As per my training I settled into a solid alignment onto my feet and got springy. Then my mind saw the pictures of how the fight would play out—slugging, deflecting, retaliation, rage; mayhem, injury, cops, hospital, jail. Win or lose, everyone loses. Then came these words: this is not my fight. I anchored into that, and though my heart thumped against my sternum I looked right at him, neither afraid nor threatening, and watch him watch me as I stepped around him and walked on. I strode on as normally as I could, knowing I was very vulnerable and had to be ready for an attack from behind.

He followed, to my left. The hair on my neck tingled, my gut readied, I walked on straight. He strode in front of me, put his hand out and said, “Hey I’m really sorry, what’s your name?”

“Andy,” I said. We shook hands.

“I’m David. I’m a Tecumseh Indian,” he said, thumping his chest with Tecumseh.

“Ok,” I said. “I’m a photographer, I’m heading to a gallery around the corner.” 

“Ok, I’m sorry man.”

“Ok, all’s well that ends well.”

He walked on ahead, but from 30 feet away he turned around once more and yelled back, “But all you white people are motherfuckers!” 

When I recall this incident I’m still half surprised for how well T’ai-chi—the “inner” martial art—worked, just as my original teacher taught. At the crux moment I gathered David’s threat into aligning and readying my body, and that “inner move” freed my mind to see the deeper read. When I stepped around him I vacated his provocation, giving it nowhere to land and putting the ball back into his court. He was then free to make the next move, and he made the right one. Practiced T’ai-chi moves are crazy effective in a fight, but this time I was fortunate that all I needed was the frictionless essence: clarity and will to deflect a fight without a fist. Without the physical training I doubt I could have done it, ie. stayed strong and not fought back.

It’s tempting to hold up this incident as a mini-triumph of righteous non-violence, but all that really happened was that a bad situation didn’t amplify into a shit show. The bad situation continues: we Americans share our neighborhoods and nation with people we are afraid of. Racial fear inflames our security and is a major reason why we ready our cops with weapons and training as if for warfare. I’m not in a position to argue what cops need and not, but it’s an inherent truth that depending on weapons for strategic, preemptive safety tempts us to skip over our person-to-person skills and go right to those triggers, escalating conflicts before there’s even an encounter. I’m a white guy enjoying substantial privileges and I’m thankful for living in a generally law-enforcement respecting town, but I’m also wary of overzealous cops profiling me as a very unwelcome longhair, most notably when multiple patrol cars mysteriously chased down, surrounded and searched me and my buddies at gunpoint, eventually gave up disappointed at finding nothing, and reluctantly disclosed that they’d followed a deliberately fabricated charge of armed robbery in the act of buying an avocado in rural Oregon with California plates.

All these incidents amplify this point: in moments of confrontation we face a core conflict within ourselves—fight or flee, how hard, where, and which way? The reality is that when fear takes hold it wants us to do both of everything and whatever else it takes to survive and get to security. What I’ve learned from both climbing and T’ai-chi is that with body practice we can cultivate a heightened relaxation that stabilizes and uses that inner conflict as effective energy. Deliberate body movements teach us to know the feel of condensing anxiety into relaxed and solid readiness, and that process can carry us through to the advanced skills of martial art masters, who “use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds.” These incidents all show how leverage can go either way; an ounce of fear can escalate into a disaster, or a grounded and focused will can steer conflict into resolution. Both cops and citizens have powers to protect ourselves by diffusing not escalating, and we should all know there is substantial power in managing our emotions through our spine.

The real work comes on “normal” days, to notice how we walk around among one another with hidden friction, and diffuse that by getting to know the different sorts of people around us as worthy of respect.

A Climber’s Lessons in Isolation, Deprivation, and Survival

A spreading virus, compounding breakdowns; it’s a wise part of life now to withdraw, fortify and assess. I find extra value now when I tend some vegetables, hike and climb, help my son practice baseball, and practice and teach T’ai-chi. And for a sense of just-in-case readiness I ask into an experience when things got really dire.

Three decades ago I went to climb a Himalayan peak with a woman named Kitty. She and I were only acquainted when I invited her, but I knew her charming Carolina accent hid a woman tough as nails, and she said yes right away. The peak was a giant tower at the Ganges headwaters named Thalay Sagar (“monument heading a valley”) and our goal was its unclimbed north face.

Porters and our Liaison Officer arriving at Kedar Tal and our first view of Thalay Sagar

Thalay Sagar’s North Face

Thousands of feet of thin ice over steep rock called us into extended tip-toeing and riskier, deep poise than we’d ever found before. In four days we reached over half way up, high enough to look across ridges and feel ourselves in the rarefied realms. If you saw the film Meru Thalay is fairly like that, not quite as steep but icier and higher, in fact just a few miles west. At every move we calmed ourselves with the climber’s axiom; this is stressful, relax.

Kitty Calhoun starts the first pitch on Thalay Sagar’s north face

During our fifth morning a storm rolled in and started sending down waves of powder potent enough to knock us off. Out to the side of the chute we were in I found fortuitous cracks where I set a nest of four anchors I can remember to this day. From that hardware we hung our porta-ledge and crawled inside to wait. That evening we ate a half-dinner and agreed to save our remaining day and a half of food until the weather allowed us to go for the top.

Kitty Calhoun leads one of many thin-ice pitches on Thalay Sagar

Kitty assembling our porta-ledge for our second night on Thalay Sagar

Five days later we were still waiting there, getting really hungry as the storm kept on. It helped that the thin oxygen at over 21,000 feet makes lethargy the default, letting us sleep a good 16 hours a day. Each day we rationed ourselves a maintenance minimum, two mugs of warm water and a couple of spoonfuls of granola. For my larger size and higher metabolism, with Kitty’s encouragement I also took a daily spoonful of almond butter. Of course we kept tethered to those anchors. Daily highlights included reaching outside our blue-tinted micro-room to gather ice for water and to pee. These acts required coordinated counterbalancing to manage the ledge swinging. Each peek out from the capsule shocked us with the reminder that beyond the fabric waited nothing but ice-pasted buttresses disappearing into clouds. We transferred our ache to eat into discipline; yes we suffer, save reserves patiently.

Kitty in the long wait for the storm to end

On the fifth afternoon of waiting I woke from a nap noticing it had become warmer and brighter. I bolted up in excitement for clearing skies, but my wakeup timing seems paranormal because I stuck my head out at the exact moment to see a huge avalanche sailing our way. I yelled to Kitty and as it hit us we braced our arms out against the force of it. Violence pounded us, turning it dark, thrashing, shaking and battering us harder and fiercer as if ravaging us down the maw of a vicious monster. Webbing and frame bounced and strained and I expected the anchors to snap and send us off to oblivion. Finally the horror slowed, and stopped. We shoved like crazy to rid the canopy of remaining snow, then sat screaming in silent terror.

I broke the roar to say, “We gotta get the fuck outta here,” and Kitty did not disagree. Warmer snow had stuck onto slabs above, and instead of pouring down like sand it had released in tonnage all at once. We went suddenly from patient soldiers to hunted prey.

Death’s glower sent me asking why I was there, and before long I saw clearly what I had only notioned before—that I could no longer care a whit for whatever rewards a climbing success might win, and motivations for recognition back home were a dangerous trap. However brightly the glow of admiration might light the way, terrain and weather do not recognize social currency. Our task was to engage the awe and risks of Thalay as impeccably as we could, and everything else we might live for depended on it. I understood that I climbed to find that purity of excursion, a motivation rooted in closets and dreams I was barely starting to open. At this point it was obvious we had to retreat, at dawn.  Let go of habitual vision, see the challenges you really face.

But by dawn the storm re-intensified and in the two minutes it took me to descend just 50 feet multiple snow-waves swamped over us, driving icy powder into our layers. It was like doing skyscraper work in frigid surf and I realized we were profoundly screwed. With at least 25 rappels to get down some 3,700 feet we’d either freeze to death or make a fatal mistake. I jugged the rope back up to Kitty, and as waves crashed over us we had a hard time just re-hanging our shelter and diving back in. At that point reality hit harder than I could handle. We were trapped, and the determination we’d both learned to succeed by had to shake hands in the ring with despair. Thankfully cold had returned to keep the snow powder and pouring down the wall, at least for the time being. But we’d had almost no food for nearly a week and my body was dwindling. When I clenched my teeth I noticed them wiggling loose in their gums, and my mouth had an acetone taste that my biology degree recognized as a sign I was metabolizing muscles. Kitty offered that with a woman’s extra body fat she might be able to survive longer. Whatever, all we could do was lie watching snow hiss over the fly like sand through an hourglass. A path can really lead to having no options.

As we lived like corpses for two more days my will could abide no more. Every cell demanded action, anything, anyhow to escape. My mind started conjuring explanations, contriving fantasies, confronting shapeless demons and formless ghosts, rifling through its toolkit to no avail. We absolutely had to find the leverage to change the weather. Maybe we’d done something to offend the deities. How could things be so unfair? The recent monsoon had failed, bringing weeks of sun to thin the ice, and now in the supposed fair-weather season we faced the biggest storm ever? Weren’t starvation, renouncing fame, abandoning goals, and then a body pounding from death penance enough? I was ready to bargain, but with what? I never voiced my harangues to Kitty, I just kept flailing against sanity. Finally I landed at the person beside me. I insanely came to believe that the best hope to end the storm was to tell Kitty some important things. Respect your hope and ask with all your honesty if it points to true.

I told her how I had previously planned for Thalay with another friend, but he’d then betrayed what to me had been a romantic trust, making it impossible to have paired with him on an expedition. Kitty listened but offered little comment. But that evening the snow stopped, then some stars shone. Surely at last this was the storm’s end. I privately laughed to imagine how my opening up could have brought the clearing.

Alas, we woke to snowfall heavier than ever. There was no point to anything, the foolishness I’d imagined showed clear. I went back to thrashing for hope somewhere else because there was none worth the word.

When I woke again I came to admit there was more I should say. Early in the trip our excitement had included forays into our own romantic attraction, but now Kitty and I lie together sharing little besides small talk and valuable body heat. Fact was I’d privately pulled away because I’d seen roots of conflict. With Thalay looming so intimi-dating, I’d pictured a lover’s quarrel up on it as an existential nightmare. I was a searching soul, she was the most determined climber I’d ever met, and there we lie, unskilled in relating except when feeding each other rope to run with. I came to imagine that better weather and our lives depended on my gumption to clear the air between us.

I propped up and told her that I admired her and that I was glad she was my climbing partner in this tough situation, but that I was probably destined to pair with someone else. She listened but remained mysterious. We continued hanging in purgatory until I dug from my deeper history. I told her how I’d taken to mountains as a path apart from foul parenting and society gone toxic with pollution, wars and mindless jobs, how I sought to live instead by nature. Then she opened up too, telling how she also had taken to climbing out of rebellion, against expectations to be a Southern belle. Our talk unfolded further and felt cathartic, we became more like buddies. And that evening the snowfall stopped. Reach into your soul to reach out to your partners.

Dawn broke bright and clear! Salvation! But it came with brutal, sub-zero cold. We struggled just suiting up. I dropped our pot grips, and their tumble into gone reminded what falling would really mean. When we finally shouldered our packs my body had little energy even to shiver or move well, so Kitty led down. Each rappel was an ordeal, she searching to craft each new anchor, both of us struggling to slide down the ropes frozen stiff like cables, then gasping to team-heave them down. Each clip of a tether and each bite of an ice screw was life-crucial, and each wait for the other was temptation to give in to a blessed rest into forever. By early afternoon she said she was spent, but I’d revived enough to take over the lead. Come evening I re-faded but she’d revived, and I realized that without designing it our deepest reserves were coordinating.

As it grew dark she yelled up that she couldn’t find an anchor. I came down to join the search, then she slipped and broke our remaining headlamp. By feel I scanned the granite and found a slit to pound in a couple of small pitons to tether ourselves to for the night. We chopped a pitifully small ice seat, then broke out the stove to cook our long-saved final dinner packet, just as lightning flash-lit our gaunt faces looking to each other in shock, and it began to snow again. This was beyond appalling but we were too desperate to fret. Kitty pulled the fly over us while I operated the stove between my knees, and as we huddled like derelicts on a Himalayan sill I knew that if we didn’t get that food into us we would die. When we leaned against each other and dipped our spoons to bring the precious stew to our mouths the chewing and swallowing felt so unfamiliar and magnificent that the snow pouring over us merely registered. By midnight it cleared again and hope hung on.

Kitty Calhoun packing gear across the rocky glacier below Thalay Sagar

The next day we finished our last rappel, we’d made it! We sat on our packs as if hallucinating; after two weeks on the wall the freedom to walk was a miraculous reunion. But next we had to wallow through new snow a dozen feet deep for a couple of miles. By dark we reached a boulder to spend the night under, then we dragged for another day to basecamp. There we collapsed, disoriented and stunned for how far we’d traveled since departing that grassy haven. It felt as if we’d been apart from humanity for a long time, and as we toured to the Taj Majal and to a guiding assignment in Nepal we took in all our encounters with child-like wonder. Kitty and I went our different ways and remained friends, climbing many more seasons and both rearing sons.

Kitty and I cooking up our first food back in basecamp

I can’t recommend extreme climbing to anyone who doesn’t hear its outrageous call, but it is reassuring to know you’ve got extra reserves, and a journey to life’s edge informs all other experiences. No one risks their life without reasons that may be hidden, and this ordeal wrenched me into a lot of asking. With today’s breakdowns circling like vultures, we are called to venture out of our comfort zones; but into what?

It’s humbling to recall how when hope disappeared my sanity went chasing after it. I became like a ravenous don Quixote hailing and snarling at windmills, concocting self-serving delusions. I recognize this pattern in today’s news; at first we’re ready to endure, then as losses and confusion eat into us we retreat into despondence, act out in anger, and contrive wishful solutions.

What came like the cavalry to my rescue were three essentials. First was a hardening resolve at the inner belly/front of my spine. It was something like the force of life from the four directions collecting there to declare that I had willpower deeper than food nourishment and I’d better use it. It was a body-core determination to dismiss hunger and delusions and work through the location and situation we faced no matter what it took—and if we didn’t make it so be it.

That deep-belly tenacity wrestled me through nets of despair into the second essential, clarity. I recall wondrous moments of ultra-aliveness, moments when I could see all the things around us and their roles in our living on. I knew who I was and why I was there, and I could look at the details in our gear and the seams of the mountain and see it all fitting together. Just as the dropoff constantly reminded us to stay tethered to anchors, our utter isolation kept telling us to take our cues for action and patience not from fantasy but from our connection to Thalay and its weather. Living on is a matter of resonating with the things around us.

Third, I doubt we would have made it down alive without looking out for each other as well as for ourselves. When things got dire we opened up enough to fortify our little blue lifeboat with respect for our mutual vulnerability and will to live. We paddled our little dinghy of fabric and care for each other down the stormy abyss, operating beyond pride, entitlement and fear, partnering with each other’s strengths, foibles and mistakes like the nothings and everything they were. Dire challenge drew us beyond habits into what seems in retrospect like a state of instinctive grace.

We alpine climbers chase into absurd situations that force us out of our comfort zones into all kinds of letting go. Mountains teach us the hard way that it’s a dangerous mistake to project our ambitions and concepts onto them. It can take a lot of experiences to let mountains be mountains and take simple joy in tactile, technical and personal resonance with their edges and contours. That’s when we climb our best.

Today what I fear is our cultural inertia—that’s been so powerful for us—telling us we can forcefully design solutions independent from our surroundings and observable truth. We succeed only to a point, seeing through acculturated lenses and pulling social levers, but if we’re untethered and dissonant to the mountains and skies, oceans and cities, rivers and farms, and grizzlies and viruses we live with and live from, we risk all sorts of mayhem. Perhaps the corona virus can show us that despite our sophisticated civilization we are still both hunter and hunted, all mutually vulnerable and part of the whole. What civilization’s powers do for us is shift the predation on us to blowback from our own actions. We certainly suffer isolation these days, but what’s truly isolating is living as if our remarkable powers are untethered from the ferocious wonder around us.

Kitty resting on our hike out from basecamp

As things get tough and likely tougher I’m confident that any of us can find amazing tenacity, if we can find the clarity.

Kitty Calhoun on a bus in northern India

A clear image that speaks true is the “earthrise” photo taken by astronaut Bill Anders, looking back at home while orbiting the moon. That’s all of us in our blue-marbled lifeboat, rich with with many remarkable colors shared with all known living things, spinning through a fascinating and fathomless void.

Earthrise from lunar orbit, 1968. Photo by Bill Anders courtesy NASA

 

Freeing the Knee

Here is a case of holistic methods successfully treating an injured joint. Somehow I hurt my knee while simply playing catch to warm up my son, who is a high school pitcher. I’ve thrown baseballs a million times, but this time with each throw my left, landing leg hurt progressively more. I tried to baby it, but after 5 minutes I had to limp to get around. Then I batted grounders to him, and even as I tried to reassure myself that no injury had happened, the pain worsened and forced me to get off my feet. The next morning it still hurt badly and I had to face an unwelcome fact; something indeed had happened. It seemed like the bell had tolled, for me to go to an orthopedist, get “imaged,” and, gulp, accept the consequences. Or?

 A guiding principle of T’ai-chi is to look toward the body center, and I knew that the next joint up from the knee, my hip, had been not operating smoothly for some years–likely the long-lingering effects of a serious 2001 accident to my lower spine. Also for some years I had been nursing a damaged achilles tendon on that leg, which I believe was the result of taking ciprofloxacin antibiotics. I pondered the fact that in regular activity, without a serious blow or twist, the knee is very unlikely to be the source of its own injury. While it might be the knee that was in pain, likely the injury came from ungainly transmissions of forces via those adjacent joints, and the knee is the strain point.

I called my friend Margy Verba, a former Pilates instructor who has moved on to master an avant-garde, gait-based analysis and therapy system. She emphasized that it is likely that a person of my many years, much less someone with my heavy activity mileage, has something amiss in the knee that a surgeon would find reason to operate on. But knee surgery wouldn’t change the way my adjacent joints worked, in fact immobility after surgery easily compounds problems. She suggested that I first visit her protégé, Jessi DeLong. Jessi is a Pilates and yoga instructor in Bishop who’s also trained in that gait-based system.

 

Jessi DeLong teaching at her studio

I limped into Jessi’s studio, and she took videos of me standing and walking as normally as I could. On her iPad I watched her analyze the subtle angles, movements, and non-movements in my train of stride, and in about 45 minutes she came up with a theory of what my body was doing and not-doing well. She took me through a set of exaggerated,  “re-training” movements to do at home, sent me reminder videos of her doing them properly, and wished me luck.

In doing Jessi’s recommended movements, I noticed right away that it felt surprisingly “unnatural” in my lower back to turn a certain way while simultaneously lifting my arms, flexing my spine, sinking my hips, and weighting a foot. I wasn’t challenged with strenuousness or range, the movements just felt strangely unfamiliar. But this was a clue that Jessi had correctly found movement territory I was not accessing. I was subtly skewing my gait away from a healthy range of movement. I soon realized too that her seemingly complicated suggestions were all about sending healthy spiral action through the bones and joints, similar to what we work to do in T’ai-chi. Immediately after finishing her movement sequences I felt my stride travel subtly easier, slightly fuller and more balanced. Three days later my knee started feeling better.

Me doing “press the wrist” in the T’ai-chi form

Three weeks on now, my knee is pain-free, and I’ve even completed some pretty demanding mountain jaunts and lifted heavy loads in construction work. Jessi’s prescribed movements didn’t heal the knee, they re-trained my hip, spine, pelvis, ankle, foot and knee all to work better as a unit, absorbing and transferring forces better, and freeing the knee to heal.  Obviously I didn’t have a serious injury, but probably a significant strain. Jessi graciously emphasizes that my T’ai-chi practice gives me an unusually “smart body,” more easily able to accept suggested new movements. And that’s the lesson: we are highly sophisticated and resilient mind-body systems with a billion ways good and not so good to carry out an intended action. And our subtlest movement habits can build strain and breakdown, or wellness and strength.

 

Explorations with Barley

Recently the post-lady dropped at my door an epic new opus, the first two volumes of The Book of Barley–Tibetan Barley Tsampa, by Lorenz K. Schaller. I scanned the first 500-page volume to see chapters like “Wild Origins,” “Permaculture in 1700 B.C.,” “Ancient Barley Culture in Ireland,” and “Origin of the Tibetans and Their Barley.” Opening this work is like crawling up into humanity’s attic and finding it filled to the rafters with amazing family archives that resonate today. It came to me because for the cover image Lorenz chose one of my photos, a shot of two Ladakhi women winnowing barley into an afternoon breeze.

I first met Schaller in about 1992, when I gave a slide show at UC Santa Barbara on an audacious 1987 bike tour I did with Deb Martin across Tibet. Over the years Schaller stayed in touch and I learned he’d founded the Kusa Seed Society, “a collaborative network of people working to advance the knowledge and understanding of ancient cereal grains…for modern nutrition.” Lorenz is absolutely absorbed with the wonder of grains feeding us, and he dreams of and works for an enlightened world that thrives in appreciation for the plants that we live from.

Tsampa (in Ladakhi it’s called ngampé) of course is roasted barley flour, and it is because barley thrives in difficult, arid highlands–as high as 13,000’–that Tibetan civilization could come to flourish. Schaller in fact makes a case that Tibetan barley cultivation is a remnant from the original and peaceful Neolithic grain-cultivating societies of Asia Minor. We can marvel at many things beyond the Himalaya, but what’s impressed me most has been seeing people apply farming craft with fairly heroic effort, pride, patience, and concern–really the majority of most every aspect of their lives goes into their barley and wheat. Every year requires preparing soil, sowing seeds, fencing animals out and channeling waters in; then harvesting, transporting, sorting, threshing, winnowing, roasting, storing and grinding…. In watching I came to understand that “living simply” is not simple, it simply means you do all the work that more commonly now is swept into our complex social, mechanical, economic and digital machinery. That epic work fosters a super-dense network of family and neighbors, all entwined with the seasons and land. Barley roots run deep and far; exiled young Tibetans who’ve never seen Tibet nevertheless identify themselves as“tsampa-eaters.” There’s even a “tsampa-eater” rap song.

Ladakhi women winnowing barley from chaff, 2014

Like a dude rancher, on my travels I’ve put in occasional days to help my village hosts. My awkward efforts to harvest, bundle and haul (ok, I’m actually good at playing mule) gave me stiff muscles and enduring appreciation. Come nightfall they’d seat me at the guest’s spot by the stove and prompt me to toss back a spoonful of product (tsampa tastes like powdered Cheerios) and wash it down with butter tea or chang (home-brew barley beer). Embedded with all that toil and care, the simple food soaked into me like an odyssey reaching denouement.

Me carrying a load of peavines for fodder. Grain loads usually are about 4 times this big.

My lessons deepened when at the close of a Ladakhi New Year’s (“Losar”) celebration I walked with my host through the snow to a small shrine at the edge of their village, where he set out a dish of their best seasoned food– “a gift for the gods.” At first I thought that offering was a waste of hard-won people-food. We both knew that likely the cows would lap it up. But gradually I came to see that it was a statement of grace from people who know the importance of giving back to what’s essentially a mystery. I came to understand that these folks smile a lot and laugh in contentment not because their lives are easy or even secure, but because on the stony slopes in the Himalayan rainshadow they understand to their bones that they inhabit a soil-to-food gambit that is an almost miraculous sort of collaboration with practically everything around them.

 

I’ve seen other expressions of special regard for tsampa. On that 1987 bike ride we stopped in Shigatse’s market street to replenish supplies. Tsampa boils quickly into a tasty porridge, perfect for travel-camping, so I enquired variously to buy some. But most stalls had only Chinese commercial stuff. As I pondered the irony of no tsampa in the middle of Tibet I found a man who opened up his personal stash. How much did I want? he asked. “Kilo phet,” I answered, and he filled my plastic bag with about a pound. When I pulled out my renminbi, he refused any money. I insisted and still he refused. Obviously he was poor so I insisted again, and he dismissed me like the tourist I was. This and other incidents say that for Tibetans some core things–like religious offerings, pictures of the Dalai Lama, and apparently often tsampa–are kept uncorrupted by money, only for sharing out of good will.

Much of The Book of Barley is a romantic exploration of the holistic integrity of Tibetan barley culture, salted with warnings for how upscaled, corporate-state food systems in contrast treat soils, crops, and consumers as resources in a supply chain in the grand social scheme. As our systems keep up-scaling they separate us ever farther from how our food grows. Something keeps telling us this is risky and maybe not healthy, and not without reason. As we rose with technology through the 20th century we also chased from one war, pandemic, dust bowl, market failure, race riot, traffic snarl…from one dream and crash to another. It’s no coincidence that for much of the century people looked to blank-on-the-map Tibet for a “Shangri-La.” We searched as if for something lost, some refuge of wiser, contented days “hidden behind the ranges.”

I’ve spent no little time studying and venturing around the Tibetan plateau, trying to sort myth from reality, and it’s clear that Tibetan societies have also long been subject to stormy politics, delusions and wars. But beneath those storms people have indeed carried on with a stability and contentment that we find elusive. Their lives are more hard-working, closer to the land and each other, less romantic and more skilled and human than we imagine. I’ve gotten more than a few hints that they look at we foreign visitors with a combination of envy and curious disdain, to them we look like privileged children. Schaller is I think accurate with his case that a large part of their satisfaction in life is in their growing grain. I think they learn at a young age automatically that life doesn’t come with any guarantee of ease, in fact the opposite. But just like our forefathers they often see the promise of ease and excitement in modern life as a real future. They debate and discuss at great length what to do.

Ladakhis harvesting wheat, 2012

Today, tsampa culture is diminishing. International forces have spread throughout the Tibetan plateau and are uprooting most everything traditional. Even as we in our hyper-monetized world are creating anti-scaled, “locavore” systems, the field-to-table integrity of original farming is becoming pretty rare. Villagers ache to have machines and markets ease their work load. We could imagine an ideal that progress would build upon the strengths of traditional culture. But industrial-techno forces most always just replace traditions with their own future plan. On a Ladakh trek in 2014 we saw this too clearly. My group descended to a village, not far from the one where I took the picture that’s on the cover of The Book of Barley–and the upper fields were fallow. Those terraces had been hard-won–cleared, leveled, channeled and walled by forebears–decades back, and they’d provided vital food for some generations. In a previous decade leaving them unused would have been an unthinkable neglect. A mile lower I enquired with a woman and she told me what I suspected; the owners of those fields had taken jobs in Leh and elsewhere, and they were no longer farming.

Harvest time, Hushe Valley, Baltistan, 2008

Earlier in the trip we’d seen Bihari road workers brought up for the summer from the plains of India. They were breaking rocks with sledge hammers and spreading asphalt for just rupees per day. Those nearly destitute, landless people were a warning to Ladakhis that modern systems are no paradise. There in Ladakh though, life options today are skewed in part because the strategically-minded Indian government heavily subsidizes industrial flour, rice, fuels and other goods trucked over the Himalaya to support the vulnerable border frontier facing China and Pakistan. 

In Tibet proper I’ve visited on only two long excursions, and it’s unclear to me how much Tibetans today are allowed to farm as they know. On those trips we saw plenty of traditional farming and herding, but those were during times of relatively liberal policy experiments under the Chinese government. Reports tell that ever since China moved in in 1951 they’ve issued wild policy swings like absurd crop mandates, heavy taxation, redistributions and more that have been very destructive to traditional barley culture.

Comparing agriculture across continents and centuries sifts out what seems like competing modern and traditional assumptions about life. Do we thrive by advancing the march of our given society, or by maintaining fidelity with the essential elements of our lands? These mandates need not be at odds, but rarely are they not.

At times in my village stays I’ve walked alone past the edges of cultivation, to look out at the mountains and canyons. It’s still hard for me to imagine the skill and tenacity it takes for villagers to garner everything they need to live in these magnificent but inhospitable places. Climbing the peaks seems also like a pretty remarkable engagement with terrain, but rambling in as we do with advanced gear and supplies and buying local support, in comparison it also seems like sophisticated tourism.

Often my walks out from a village lead me to some nearby special place–a scenic hilltop, a spring, or a stream junction–where the people have erected a lhato, a little house-shrine to offer respect and invite good will from the spirits of the landscape. I don’t know how or if the people give defining shapes or names to the spirits they see in their wild surroundings, but I do know they understand that gratitude and respect are our best hope to survive in a cosmos that’s not to be taken for granted.

A Ladakhi lhato, a house for the land-spirits

A Porta-Ledge in the Himalaya

Thalay Sagar’s north face

This is the story of the custom-made hanging “porta-ledge” tent that Kitty Calhoun and I used on our epic 2-week attempt on the north face of Thalay Sagar in the Garwhal Himalaya, India. Elsewhere you can find our tale of extremely exposed climbing and starvation survival. In this article I’m adding a chapter to the history of porta-ledges as compiled here by the legendary big-wall climber and gear innovator John Middendorf.

Kitty and I went to Thalay in September of 1986. We were professional guides and climbing fanatics, but in Bellingham we were a bit isolated and we went to Thalay not knowing that the face was one of the most notorious unclimbed objectives in world alpinism. Many parties–mostly European elites–had tried the face, all by fixed rope sieges, going up and back down every day. Neither did we think of ourselves as gear pioneers. We just wanted to be ready for climbing in a faraway land on a cool-looking objective that I wrongly thought would be just moderately difficult.

The whole porta-ledge concept came about as climbers started taking on routes so big and continuously steep as to take many days and offer basically no place to lie down. The overhanging aid climbs on the east face of El Capitan was where climbers started bringing ledges. There, easy access and pulley-hauling in almost friction-less space made the extra weight of a ledge a minor concern. In the Himalaya though of course every pound burdens so much more. John Roskelley and his partners took porta-ledges on their first ascent of the granite wall of Uli Biaho in the Karakoram in 1979. Before that, the examples we had of extreme sleeping solutions in the Himalaya were Don Whillans’ (aluminum) boxes on Everest and Annapurna, and Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker’s suffer-fest of 20+ days on Changabang in Garwhal–sleeping in hammocks. I had found it pretty difficult to get a decent sleep in a hammock in comfortable Yosemite spring, and the thought of a week of extreme high-altitude vertical camping–melting ice for water and such while hanging like a sack of potatoes in bitter cold–sounded, well, Tasker and Boardman could have that.

It was Michael Kennedy, editor of Climbing, who recommended Thalay to me. He sent me a photo of the face, with one spot marked not quite halfway up as a possible bivvy. His attached note suggested that a porta-ledge might be helpful. His snowy picture was from a very stormy season and I interpreted the face as a snow climb with a few technical pitches in the upper-middle and near the top. It looked like there ought to be opportunities to dig sleeping spots, but it would be such a wasteful bummer to get there and realize we needed a porta-ledge and not have one. so I started calling around to gear designers.

It was just three months before the trip when I recruited Kitty as my partner. She had never been to Asia before, and neither had she ever climbed in Yosemite-wall style with hauling and jumaring and ledge or hammock sleeping, as I had. But she was very fit from a lot of alpine climbing, and she was as determined as any climber I’d ever met.

The main commercial ledge then was Gramicci’s, and their 2-person model weighed, as I recall, about 14 pounds. That seemed way too heavy. I called Jeff Lowe, and we talked how the whole idea of sleeping arrangements on severe alpine routes was a serious next-level challenge. He suggested that I should reconsider hammocks. I remember thinking yeah, the weight saving would make some suffering worthwhile for maybe a night or two with a good forecast. But…also in the equation was how, in a two-person porta-ledge partners can share a sleeping bag, staying extra warm and paring a good 3 pounds or so off the sleeping system. And I had a secret alpine weapon, a fairly lightweight yet very warm 2-person Gore-tex down bag complete with separate down “helmets.” This was the genius of my friend Chuck Kennedy, who had been a luminary in the outdoor and gear design scene in Arcata, CA, while I was going to college there at Humboldt State. Chuck’s little company was called Down Home. Back then I worked for our friend Fred Williams, the owner of Moonstone Mountaineering, and I had learned to sew on Moonstone’s first machines.

My criteria for a lighweight 2-person ledge did not interest many, until I went down the street in Bellingham to my friend Rick Lipke. Rick was a big, Nordic-looking, Skagit search-and-rescue and martial-arts guy who ran a gear shop and little factory making “Extreme Use Equipment.” He enthusiastically jumped into the porta-ledge problem. He started by having Kitty and me lie down on the sidewalk. I was 6’2”, and Kitty was 5’1”, and as we lie there he drew a chalk triangle around us–me on the hypotenuse in-side, and Kitty out on the out-side. That became the dimensions of the triangular hanging bed we would share on Thalay.

The next key was the corner design. Rick decided to use the system that Eureka tents used on their ridgelines: a short and extra-wide joint tube with angled holes accepts the adjoining side poles. We researched the different types of aluminum tubing, decided on (by my best recollection) 2024, and found we could get it at Boeing Surplus. Kitty drove down to Seattle and picked up the tubing, while Rick and I started work on the sewing. I called Jeff again, and he recommended that to minimize condensation on the inside of the fly we should sew in vents screened with speaker foam. I knew that a vital fly feature would be to have the fly fit snugly to shed spindrift snow, and to this end we put in a shock cord around the bottom.

I made the joints simply by eye-balling a big drill through the wider joint tubes, then refining the angled holes with a round file. Rick fabricated the main poles with male-female pull-apart joints midway. The frame all stayed connected with shock cord. He designed a tight fly out of blue Gore-Tex tent fabric, a bed-span of buckle-tensioned pack cloth, and suspension webbing with a buckle on the outside corner to adjust for different slope angles. The anchor point at the top was an integral loop through the fly, so we we could stay always clipped in to full-strength webbing. Voila! The whole thing weighed under 9 pounds. It folded up nicely into a reasonable size, and deployed without any separating parts.

Another key to our camping was a hanging stove. None were available in the U.S., but I had an Austrian Markill kit that worked with Bleuet stoves. I’d picked it up in Kathmandu two years previous, just noting then what a cool idea it could be. I also sewed up some stuff-sacks with tie-in loops, because I knew that on a wall all your stuff has to hang.

A week before we left we took it all out to a little sandstone cliff at Chuckanut Beach, and it all seemed to work, pretty cool for a backup anyway….

When we got to Delhi we learned the monsoon had failed, and when we got to Thalay Sagar we saw a very big and very different looking wall than what Michael’s picture suggested. It was a 5800-foot granite fang with patchy ice. Yikes. A bit of scouting confirmed we would definitely want the porta-ledge.

Kitty Calhoun starting Thalay Sagar

The first night we set it up we had to hang it from ice screws–three of the old Chouinard hard-crankers that were the state of the art then. We knew that ice melts under pressure; would our total of 325 pounds of persons and gear hanging for a whole night melt out the screws? Had anyone really tested sleeping from ice screws before? We slept fine, and in the morning everything was secure.

 

Kitty and the ports-ledge

Kitty setting up our ports-ledge

The second day went pretty well too. I showed Kitty how to haul our packs with a pulley and jumars, and even on the 60-degree ice we found that hauling was much easier than climbing with them. Just before dark we set up again. When I poked my head outside I could see steam streaming out through the upper vent of speaker foam. Nice!

The porta-ledge

While breaking camp the next morning though, we screwed up. The problem was, we’d hung our packs from the main anchor and they hung below the ledge, and we tried to haul them up to us, between the wall and the tubing, while still kneeling in the ledge. It wasn’t working, and in frustration we just tried a big heave. Rip! An outside pole tore through its joint tube.

“Kitty,” I said, “We are fucked.”

“We’ll fix it,” she said, which I knew meant that I would fix it. The weather was still perfect, so I figured we’d worry about it come nightfall.

The broken joint with my repair cord

Luckily I’d brought some parachute cord, and indeed that night I could lash together that joint to hold, albeit with the foot segment sloping off some.

As we got higher the climbing steepened and the ice thinned. We moved more slowly and found very few anchors. Clouds came in as we neared the crux pitches, and snowflakes started to fall. We decided to stop and see the trend. Off to the left of our couloir I found a place to drive in a couple of pitons and set a couple of cams. Thank God, because….

Kitty sleeping in our blue room at 21,000 ft.

Four days later we were still there waiting out what proved to be a big storm. Spindrift poured down in continuous waves, night and day, and spilled off the triangular cone like magic. Then one day it warmed up. I happened to look outside just in time to see a huge avalanche coming down. I shut the door and yelled to Kitty to wake up and we braced our arms against the fly just as the first blocks hit. We felt the ledge flexing and straining under who knows how much force. It grew dark. It was so easy to picture the next blocks wiping us off the face like bugs into a fatal plummet. But everything held.

There is of course much more to the overall story, but the porta-ledge saved our asses. When the storm finally cleared several days later we descended, over two days of rappelling. Some months later, back in Bellingham, I gave a slide show on the trip at Rick’s shop and we hung the ledge for everyone to see, like a NASA capsule that had come back from space. I kept the ledge stored at the shop. A few years later the building burned down.

Some Notes on My Friend Allen Steck

A couple of weeks ago Allen Steck, age 91, was introduced to a packed hall here in Bishop. Allen took the lectern and started reading from his new book, A Mountaineer’s Life, just published by Patagonia. As we listened we could study a grand photo projected on the wall, a black and white shot of a man in vintage flannel on a snowy summit eyeing a spectacularly steep and fluted Andean peak. Gradually Allen told us that the man in the shot was himself, in 1952, on the summit of Huandoy, looking over at the daunting, untried wonder of Chacraraju. The everyday garb in the picture and rope simply knotted around his waist seemed far out of place in the ultra-high realm that today we assume requires space-age gear. He was imagining how one might climb Chacraraju, and we understood that that photo of him looking out to the barely possible was simple, and symbolic for his life. The audience was a mix of young and old, climber and hiker, savvy and green, and in the half hour that Allen spoke he gave us all just a sample from a soul embedded in mountains to a depth and breadth few of us can imagine. Many walked away with signed books, but even when they read the whole volume they’ll get only a partial image of where Allen has journeyed.

I befriended Allen in the late 1990s. I think we first met out of something to do with the mountaineering history book I was writing. Allen still loved to climb, and he recruited me to lead harder pitches that he and his friends could follow. I really enjoyed climbing with Chris Jones, Joe Fitschen, Joe Kelsey, Eric Beck, Steve Roper, and others. Owens Gorge, Rock Creek, Joshua Tree, Granite Basinm, Lover’s Leap (which has Allen’s favorite crag route ever)…we went a lot of places. The “golden” guys would usually max out at 5.10a or b or sometimes c, pretty serious for people in their 60s and 70s.

At the end of one cragging day in 1999 Allen said, “You know Andy, next year is the 50th anniversary of the S-S.” I thought for a second and realized he was referring to the Steck-Salathé, the famous route he’d done on Yosemite’s Sentinel Rock. My eyes opened wider, and he said, “Do you want to do it?” So Allen and I did that. He had recently turned 75. A warning: don’t let any guidebook 5.9 rating deceive you into thinking that the route is reasonable. It’s not. It’s absurdly strenuous. I strained and pressed inch by inch for pitch after pitch, with sticky rubber on my feet and a big cam or two on my rack. I tried to imagine being up there with light boots and the rope just bowlined around my waist, a few pitons and bolts and three cups of water per day for five days, and I just can’t. That tenacity is lost to history. During our struggles Allen pointed out the sloping, uncomfortable niches where he and John (who was then 51) had slept 50 years previous, and ways that they’d negotiated sections a bit differently.

For years people prodded Allen to write his memoirs, and he kept putting it off. He always had better things to do, like go climbing in new places. Once when asked at a campfire in Joshua Tree how the writing was going, he grumbled and said, “I’d love to climb in Morocco! Let’s go next summer!” I believe he went.

Finally at about 87 he slowed substantially and in the winter of 2015 I drove across California with my scanner and laptop and spent a week with him at his place in the Berkeley hills, going through his hundreds of pictures to scan for the book. California climbers tend to think that Yosemite holds most of what counts in climbing, and few appreciate that for Allen Sentinel Rock was just a local tour, a launch site to major climbs worldwide. As we pored through his file cabinets of slides, prints and negatives, I understood. The first American attempt of an 8000m peak in Nepal, with Willi Unsoeld. Great first ascents in British Columbia. Of course Mt. Logan, the biggest climb on arguably the biggest peak by volume on the continent. An 80-day walk through the Grand Canyon. There was no time and space to put in a lot of other notable stuff. He put me up in a spare room with a window to the bay and a bookshelf burdened with the complete works of Goethe, in German.

I could muse about so much that hanging out with Allen has taught and meant. But here’s just a few background pictures. Just go get the book, and read it after you’ve done your climbing.

A Note to My Son on Truth

We’re in Donald Trump’s world now, casing the scene, and wow, have you ever seen so many people wondering and arguing where we are and where we’re going? How can it be that some of us say this territory feels like exile in howling-hell, while others say they’ve opened the gates to the promised lands? It’s an Alice’s Wonderland.

Appropriate for his age, my 13-year old son doesn’t much bother with politics. He has friends of all stripes. But when he came home from school the other day the first thing he said was, “Dad, did you hear Trump went to the White House and met Obama? It sounds like they had a good meeting.” That’s when I knew the election was affecting him. He’s seen guys wearing “Make America Great Again” hats marching down Main Street and brandishing Confederate flags. He watched on election night and told me how his mother turned ill “like she had PTSD,” and after sleepless nights fell sick with a cold. I understood that he was looking up to me for hope that, if Obama and Trump can meet and even praise each other, maybe he was growing up into a peaceful story after all.

What could I tell him? For years Trump campaigned that Obama was an immigrant fraud, then he denied that and blamed Hillary for the rumor. He labeled Obama as a traitor and one of the worst Presidents in history, won on the platform that the country was a disaster and that he would right us by overturning every last thing that Obama has done. And now he trumpets Obama as a good man? Which legacy are we marching from, or to?

Well son, Trump’s deal is to make himself both the messiah we hope for and the satan we fear. Because he is both he is neither. What he is is the salesman pitching fears and hopes and turning them into his capital. He exaggerates here and vilifies there, destroys now and denies then, ransacks first and then promises and reverse-promises, always selling himself long. Reporters ask him his policies and which truth was true and he keeps us all guessing, fort he is not interested in facts or policy or what he said moments before. All the million things from the wonder of a night sky and a warbler’s song to mathematical proofs and discovered truths in general are churn in his wake. As a public persona at least he is a soulless huckster, living large on the trumped up fears and hopes in his grasp, taking into his portfolio of outrage the power to be, (as he’s stated) the arbiter–the soul arbiter–to the very disarray he sows. With apparently no hope or fear of his own at stake, he stands as the one to decide whose fears and hopes will take precedence.

As I ponder my son, tall, blond, athletic and thoughtful–a great kid who many other kids admire, I discern to tell him: Look, we all live through alliances, and that means that politics–deciding who you ally with–is as inevitable as shopping at the store. The trick is to never sell your fears and hopes. We have to find them and own them, and knowing  truths that cannot be sold we can welcome this sort of challenge. We humans have the skills to see truth through our eyes, know it with our heads, test it in our guts, and feel it pulsing in our hearts. Take measure up and down your body this way, and go into alliances and relationships trying to listen well and speak mindfully. In just a few years, far too soon, you will be of age to take up arms or not for the land you stand for, and the choices you make will be very real.