The Mount Massive pain cave

A good day with old friends.

Photo by P.J.

I was flat on my back on the top of the world.

Above 13,000 feet and my quads were cramping. Not enough oxygen. The best way to fix it was to lie down in the trail and let the lactic acid flow away from the muscles.

I sucked a little water from my CamelBak and stared at the blank blue Colorado sky. When my legs finally allowed me to stand, I pushed myself up on my poles and began to walk again.

I crested the ridgeline to find Bo and S. scrambling down from the summit.

“Dark wall of death!” Bo said. “It’s not even 10 a.m. Let’s go!”

My vision was blurry, but I could see well enough to recognize the contours of a black cliff of clouds moving toward us.

“Sorry, I’m so slow,” I said. “I keep cramping up.”

“Here,” Lars said. “Let me hold your pack. Run up to the summit. I’ll wait.”

It was adrenaline, surely, but I ignored the pain in my legs and quickly scrambled over the last 30 yards of jagged rock, found the USGS metal sign marking the summit, and took a selfie. There was lightning in the valley below the black wall. I turned around and got back to Lars as fast as I could.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t have summited if you hadn’t done that.”

“Could you carry more shit? Way too heavy,” he said, handing me back my pack. “We gotta get down.”

The temperature dropped and that dark cloud spat graupel, pellets of soft hail melting as they hit our faces. The rest of the group, Alfie included, had not waited for me to summit, and as we descended, we realized we had overshot the turnoff and were off the trail. For a minute, we couldn’t see the other group or the right way back.

But Lars and I had been through a lot together. We’d get through this.

~~~

I wouldn’t have come to Asia if it weren’t for Lars.

When I graduated from college, I had flirted with the idea of moving overseas to teach English, but instead had stayed in the U.S. and started my career as a journalist.

Despite a few good years in California, I still wanted to live in another country. We came back into each other’s lives sometime around 2005. We were in our mid-20s, both back home in our small Nebraska town, wanting to get away for a bunch of reasons, and Lars had lived for a year in Jeonju, the city with some of the best food in Korea. He couldn’t stop talking about it.

I teased him about starting every sentence with “In Korea …” but I was interested. We talked ourselves into buying the big ticket for the flight across the Pacific. We were still kids, really, but we wanted adventure. Both of us believing that a psychologically rich life was something to value.

More than 15 years later, after we’d both married Korean women and started our families, we were together again on the second-highest mountain in Colorado, trying to outrun a storm.

The night before the hike was the Fourth of July. We had cooked pasta and tried to get to sleep early in our Leadville vacation rental house. Wrongly, I had assumed the mountain town would be quieter than the cities of the Front Range, where the neighborhoods were riddled with the blasts of fireworks nightly for the past week or more. Leadville wasn’t any different. The boom of artillery shells echoed through the streets and into our bedrooms well past midnight.

Still, we were up and loaded into my old pickup before 5 a.m. I’d maybe slept an hour. Nammin seemed OK with staying behind to watch Jia and not embark on this sufferfest.

As soon as he sat down in shotgun, Lars started twisting the dials on the heater and turning the fan up. “This isn’t your truck,” I said. “I’m driving. Stop touching shit.” But I also didn’t really care. I’d known this guy since we were 4.

Sturgill Simpson sang about turtles as we drove through the cool forest. We had decided on the non-standard southwest route of Mount Massive because it was shorter, steeper, and less likely to have a conga line of fellow hikers. You also needed a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel drive to access the trailhead.

We came to the exposed rock in the access road where we needed to choose the correct line or risk tearing off the truck’s back bumper. I knew Bo had driven many mountain roads like this and trusted him to get out and guide me. He directed me to crawl over the rock without causing any damage. The stock Chevy Silverado extended cab was plenty capable after I put it in 4-Low.

“Dude, that might be the most exciting part of the day,” Bo said as he hopped back in.

It was, until it wasn’t.

As expected, we were the only group at the trailhead. The first part of the hike was cold, through shadowy trees. The soft sun of dawn lit up the east bank of the valley. From the trail, we had views of the Sawatch Range and Mount Elbert, another mountain I had climbed with P.J. a few years prior. He was also on this hike, his usual positive, comedic self.

Lars had a torn meniscus but had still maintained his habit of running, now that he was living again in our hometown to make his fortune. He set a fast pace.

It was the second year of the pandemic, and I had not been getting out nearly as much as I should have been. I was a new dad and working from home, and my daily step count could have been much higher. I was exhausted and probably not well hydrated enough.

A lot of excuses, when what I mean is I could have been in better shape.

The group stayed together for the first few hours of the hike. Alfie chased the pika and marmots, as free and happy to roam that cold mountain in the middle of summer as any Northern breed could be.

The hike became steeper, more switchbacks, and we were trudging along, feeling the altitude and becoming more aware of the difficulty that awaited us as we climbed into thinner air, when we were overtaken by a young woman wearing baggy running shorts, trail runners, a T-shirt and a hydration vest.

We were all hauling backpacks with food and water, layers, hats, gloves, hiking poles. I had boots on and my DSLR camera. And here this woman was, almost running past us up the mountain. Bo recognized her as Courtney Daulwalter, one of the best ultrarunners in the world, winner of many 100-mile races. She lives in Leadville and trains by running around on these mountains. She left us behind on the trail like we were statues.

Maybe they were inspired by that moment, or it was just a natural separation by levels of fitness and athletic ability, but slowly Lars and P.J. and the rest of the group started putting distance between us.

That’s when my first cramps set in, my quads seizing up just as I went above treeline. I had to lie down on the trail and stretch out before I could keep going. I was in the pain cave that Courtney talks about, forcing myself forward one step at a time, first by counting to a hundred steps before resting, then fifty, then twenty, then ten.

Cramping, alone on the trail, knowing the group was going to be relaxing and enjoying themselves on the summit, I pushed on, nauseated, stumbling on burning legs. When I finally got to the ridgeline, I saw them coming back. That’s when Lars waited for me with my pack. I summited quickly and turned around, my body feeling the instant relief of moving down the mountain.

The quickest summit selfie.

Through the graupel, I could clearly see the trail down the other side of the mountain, the standard route we had not taken. That would lead us to a trailhead that was miles down the road from the truck. But it would get us away from the lightning.

“We’ve gone too far,” Lars said. “We need to go up there.”

Lars turned and started back up, the direction my body did not want to go.

“Can you see the trail?” I yelled.

“I can see them,” he said. Through the spitting soft hail, I saw the rest of the group turning down a switchback and disappearing.

“We gotta get up there,” he said.

~~~

Lars grew up in town directly across the street from my grandparents, and I would go to his house to play when my grandmother was watching me. He had all the GI Joes, and I had all the He-Men, and I wonder if that had anything to do with how our personalities developed and differed. Probably not much.

Another friend described him once as “some kind of secret genius,” and I understood why she said that. He has a way of seeing and processing reality that is his own, that he developed over years of studying philosophy and all the experiences he had both in Asia and America.

One of my favorite Lars stories is from when we were in college. We had been close friends in high school and went to the same state university, but there we split and each went our own non-standard route.

When I saw him for the first time in months on the campus sidewalk, I stopped to talk to him.

“Yo, how’s it going?” I asked.

He just smiled.

“Where you living these days?”

A little wider smile.

“Are you still taking psychology classes?”

The same look.

I felt like an idiot asking questions, so I just laughed and went on my way. It was weeks until I saw him again.

“What was that about the last time I saw you?” I said.

“I was taking a vow of silence,” he said. “Wasn’t talking to anyone.”

But it didn’t matter. We’d gone in and out of each other’s lives at many different phases. We also assumed we’d see each other again.

~~~

I let out a combination grunt-yell, then pushed down on my poles and hauled myself up the trail to the turn off. I was fine once we were traveling downward again. We moved as quickly as possible to get to treeline. There was thunder around us, and the graupel stung our faces. The melting pellets made the rocks slippery. Lars’s knee buckled from his torn ligament but he carried on, probably regretting that he had waited for me and was no longer with the rest of the group.

The exhaustion was extreme. I hallucinated that I saw my truck up ahead. It was just a large boulder in the trees.

We finally made it back and the rest of them were in the camper shell eating sandwiches, including the dog, the rain falling on the pickup. I started it up and turned on the heater.

“Can we all take a moment to appreciate how amazing that day was?” P.J. said.

We got to do the rock crawl again on the way down. Fun but nothing compared to the excitement of a lightning storm at 14,000 feet.

Now Lars is back in the only place I know of that is truly home. If you see him, tell him I said hello. Maybe I’ll be back on the plains again one day and our lives will be peaceful and we can tell stories about each other just like this one.

Try to stay out of the pain cave.