Ticking. Tapping. No, not tapping, a tone, beeping pulse. What is that? What is that sound?
Swirling darkness dances, murkey time and atmosphere surreal lull me around in my dreamworld like an aroma on the wind. Pulse pulse pulse pulse... the world opens up like glass orange wedges, and i am in my sleeping bag. My watch alarm is toning my brain beneath my head.
Oh, yea. Midnight.
Time to get up.
My legs and arms are bound inside a warm sleeping bag that I've been calling home for four weeks now. Here and there i am cold where snow has melted through to my skin, and it is dark. The tarp plastic ceiling hovers four feet above my blurry eyes, my head cradled in the open end of the bag. I glance about at the snow wall to my left and dark shape low on my right, and i remember the twelve people slumbering around me. "i wonder if I'm the first one awake..."
I don't wonder long. Rustlings and groanings as people stir to life in the darkness.
I fumble for my headlamp so i can see to pack up my stuff. I see others sitting up with sleeping bags around their shoulders, arms emerging like locusts shedding skin, and it occurs to me. We're really doing it. We're climbing a mountain.
We twelve kids pack up our stuff and duck low out through the snow entrance to our Bivvey. The evening is dim. Headlamps turn on here and there about me as I load up my backpack for the day hike up Downs Mountain. Sleeping bag. Warm layers. Crampons. Snacks. Rope. Harness. Rain layers. Glacier goggles. Mitten Shells. Camera. Bieners. Webbing. Water. The lunch food bag. Pioule. Backpack. All you need to climb a mountain.
I, packed, look around our camp as people bustle sleepily with their things, pools of light from headlamps dart about like the stars themselves were out searching for something. And the stars were bright. But something caught me off guard for a moment. There, near abouts to where i was used to seeing a horizon back in Ohio, sat a strange milky jaged swath across the nighttime oasis of burning embers out of the heavens, a strange up and down brighter than the rest of the snow and rock valley that we were encamped. Then i realised, it was moonlight. Moonlight caught like glowing dust on the tops of the mountains nearby. Apparently, our grand satellite had passed low behind some peak of Downs Mountain out of sight, but it's last rays for the evening still caught the peaks up high. Ah, the setting moon.
Our everything was together. We break down the Bivvey together, hide the stuff we're not taking to the summit under big rocks, and gather together in the crater that all twelve of us had slept in for a meeger four hours, packed like sardines in the snow. Now we circled with the instructors and prayed together, talked a little more about what we were about to do, and then we were gone.
Single file out of camp, further up and further in.
They call it an Alpine Start. The plan and general theory being that you hike all night through the frozen pack and get to the top and back down again before the late morning sun starts melting your foot placement. I was up front with Tim Edris acting as a sort of scout, but not really. Tim zipped all across the hard snow like he thought nothing he was doing was out of the ordinary. I struggled to keep my balance.
We crested some talus and the view opened up. Wide and expansive was the foot of Downs. A basin of rock and ice. Even at one thirty in the morning, the contrast between snow field and rock fingers was evident under the stars. Besides the blackness of the sky and rock, besides the dim, hazy, almost imagined grey of the snow, besides the stars that winked and rumbled slowly past in the night, the only other thing to see, the only feature to give a sense of depth, now that the moon had set completely, the only way to judge just how far the head of the line had come and where everyone else was in relation, was the icy blue whisper of sixteen headlamps bobbing, looking, spinning, seeing. At one point, after descending a talus field(big rocks piled on top of eachother) the three of us at the front stoped and turned to take a look. Behind us, like a connect the dots for lightning, swayed and moved only little lights against a backdrop of blackness. There was no real evidence that people were connected to them at all. We couldn't see the frame of shoulders, the flash of teethy smiles, the reflection of eyes. The distance was too great for that. No, only delicate and far off moving lights in a broken file up the ascent to the bivvey site. It was like someone layed down glowing cat toys up the hill and turned them all on so they would vibrate and bounce down the plain. Only much more beautifull. Tim eluded to Lord of the Rings, saying it was like each and every one of us had little vials of starlight around our heads.
You could drink a moment like that.
Eventually, kicking our way into the snow, and feeling it slowly grow harder and more compact under the tread of our mountain boots, the instructors had us stop at a field of rock pile for a break to drink, snack and get crampons... on.
After everyone sufficiently "bathroomed" and drank, we harnessed up and got into rope teams. From here till who knows when, it was up and up.
