Part 3 of 3: Summit to Camp to Trailhead
~8 mi / 7k ft descent / 8 hours

We summited Mt. Baker around 7:30am, a little over six hours after the initial start, and though the joy in these summit photos was real, you can’t see the struggle it took to get up there — the hours climbing in the dark with headlamps just to be captured as big smiles in front of bright blue skies. You can’t see the beginnings of struggle that crept in on the final ascent, nor the tears, total mindfuckery, and acute pain in my feet and shins that were all part of the forthcoming descent.

I knew what goes up must come down, and I’ve done enough hiking to know the descent is often, frustratingly, harder than the ascent. It’s the opposite of logical. So even amid the summit excitement and feelings of accomplishment, I was already weary of what it would take to go back down that damn Roman Wall. This time I was facing away from the mountain, having to literally lean into the fear and away from the side of the mountain where gravity told me I was safer.

The descent of the Roman Wall was where I started to crumble. The coach and challenger in me knows myself well enough to recognize this was an opportunity to be led and coached by someone else. I was, after all, on this trip to be taught by the best — a woman of my same size and stature, whose guiding accomplishments around the world, particularly on Rainier and Everest, put many men and women alike in total awe of her.

It wasn’t that I was scared of falling off the mountain. I was scared of injury and being rushed to the point of losing my mental toughness. Still roped up to each other, it just felt like I couldn’t get confident in my foot placement while moving at the pace required of me. Remember, you follow the group’s pace, foot in the boot mark ahead of you. And on the way down, you’re not allowed to be slowly side-stepping. It’s just toes pointing straight downhill at a very steep decline. Every few feet, I’d take a step and feel my ankle slightly roll or my boot slide in the snow — totally freaking me out. I knew I would have felt better if I could just take slightly slower steps to be more sure of my placement.

On a couple of occasions, I begrudgingly allowed myself to be the girl who asked my team to take a brief pause or slow down “just a little.” But the reality was, Melissa knew I didn’t need to. We kept our pace. She wanted me to practice despite the doubt. I am not someone (in any facet of life) who asks anyone to slow down. This was hard for me to accept on that on this mountain, I suddenly was.

I choked back tears as she told me I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but she could tell just by looking at me that my fear was causing me to tense up and feel like I was failing. I had to loosen and ungrip from myself. She asked that I just trust that my twelve-point crampons would catch a fall and that if I did fall, I wouldn’t go very far. I made an extreme point to take and apply all of her tips, suggestions, and encouragement, even when they felt incredibly contradictory and overwhelming, as I tried to descend with more confidence.

The entire descent was hard. Even beyond the Roman Wall, where the slope was still incredibly steep, I felt out of control with every step, but I kept moving. I could feel myself shutting down emotionally, just ready to get off the mountain. Running on one hour of sleep and now moving in our ninth straight hour, the energy I had on the ascent, welcoming the challenge, had shifted into a full-on sense that this no longer felt fun. I was ready to be done. 

As the slope started to ease and we were sweating in the sun in our lightest possible layers, still roped together and moving as fast as we could down toward camp, conversation got easier and lighter again for all of us (also, I had taken half an Ativan at the last break, zero shame). The snow was now slushy from the sun, and I just had to give in to sliding step by step back to camp, trying relentlessly to cover every inch of skin from the sun.

We got back to camp just one minute shy of 10 hours from when we began. We were so tired there wasn’t much of a celebration. We went right into the arduous task of changing into whatever less-sweaty clothes we had left and packing up camp. The longer we stayed, the harder the five-mile downhill trek back to the trailhead would be.

CAMP BACK >>

And I completely underestimated that trek back to the car. Those three hours were the pit of my experience, which seems crazy, because the physical demands were nothing compared to what I’d just done on the glacier for the 10 hours prior. But with my 40lb pack back on my body and my now swollen, throbbing toes jammed back into my once-roomy hiking sneakers, every step literally felt like torture.

Prior to my trip, my friend and astrologer @rebeccalenn had told me this trek would be an emotional release for me, that I’d need to tap into every grounding method in my arsenal to keep myself steady. Understatement of the year. I could barely access those methods I typically teach others, let alone stop myself long enough to pick a playlist that would stabilize my emotions and energy. I knew myself well enough to turn inward and try to find a pocket of space alone.

What I don’t normally do, though? I let myself cry — mostly when each step caused me more toe pain, and each river crossing overwhelmed me with exhaustion and the desire to sit down. With plans in place to do two more climbs in the next six months, I was refactoring everything. Did I even want to do this again?

I had so many spiraling thoughts.
 Should I really be putting my body through this much pain by choice? I spend so much time and money keeping my joints healthy.
 How can I negotiate my way out of my next two planned climbs?
 Or how can I hack them to make them easier?
 Can I sell all my new gear on eBay?
 How will I tell everyone that I hated this whole thing I so strongly invested in and sought after?

My team of now-bonded peers balanced checking in with giving me space. Typically, I am the one holding space for someone having a hard time in a group trip setting, so it was a wild thing to let yourself be the one having it.

The only time I cried last year on my trek in Nepal was when I was upset I was eating lunch inside a dark teahouse when the largest mountains of the Himalaya were just steps outside the door (lolll — classic Pittsburgh girl energy. If it’s nice out, I. MUST. GO!). This Baker cry was a very different type of breakdown. Driven by acute pain in my toes and shins, and unknowingly probably exhaustion, my mental toughness was now down to full-on illogical negotiation with myself.

Back in the car, with a two-hour drive ahead of me, all I could conjure up to report back to friends and family was, “I’m alive and I’m rethinking everything about doing this again.” In that moment, it didn’t feel like a hell yes in any capacity. It felt like a win clouded in so much discomfort that celebrating wasn’t deserved.

But back in Seattle, with the sunset on the water and a wine in hand, I finally let the exhaustion, pain, and the fact that I was the crier of the group take a backseat to my accomplishment.

The next day on the flight home, I could see the mountain I’d actually stood on top of from the window. It stood alone, the only white-cap glacier in that direction, and it hit me how large of a thing I had just done.

I started to better understand what people really mean by Type 2 fun. I thought I’d had Type 2 fun before, scrambling up a 14er or trekking 80 miles over 10 days in Nepal, but this was so different. I’d enjoyed every moment of those experiences, even in the challenge. This was my first real experience being in total, utter, momentary misery doing something I actively sought out, trained for, paid a lot of money to do, and (you guessed it) eventually enjoyed in hindsight.

I’ve done plenty of challenging things before, but nothing that took me to this place. It feels like a rite of passage in many ways. On this trip, I moved the “hardest thing I’ve ever done” needle far more forward than I anticipated I would. And I have to ask myself, if I had only been challenged in a way I could have anticipated, had I been challenged at all?

Despite swearing to myself that I’d be selling my crampons and ice axe instead of using them again, I now better know my own emotional and physical tipping points and how I recover when those points are crossed. I know that my physical training method for the mountains is pretty damn good. I may need some footwear tweaks, but now I have a new baseline for my mental mountain toughness that I will work to strength in the future.

I also now know what to ask about future climbs. I now know the Roman Wall is my barometer for steepness, and what I’m willing to do in the future will first be compared to that. I now know that the shit you see on Instagram is way harder than it looks. I now know that in order to be truly challenged and not just gently, safely self-challenged within a realm of my own understanding, I need leaders like Melissa who see possibilities in me that I can’t yet see and who are willing to push me toward them.

And I know now, too, that I can welcome discomfort, overwhelm and pain (even if my big toe is still a little numb), because I may find something pretty incredible when I look back on it just 36 hours later. So, yes, TLDR; I’m doing this shit again… soon! 

Trip Total: 16.6 miles / 50,290 steps / 7,745 feet of incline/decline / 26 hours car-to-car / Plethora of laughs and tears.