Emigrant Wilderness, Relief Peak (Oct 22-23, 2005)

"Failure is not an option", Diederik said as we began to scramble on the west face of Relief Peak, through gravel and grassy areas that soon turned into a more and more vertical cliff. We had long debated whether we should approach the peak from the south, along reasonable slopes, or attempt the almost vertical climb, but the latter was deemed more "fun" and Diederik's remark got us started.
The view was great. As we reached a lone tree some distance up, however, the general agreement was that basic probability would place our survival rate pretty low if we continued. So we decided to slide down the scary chutes we had just climbed, keeping some distance between each other so the rocks we unvoluntarily detached would not fall on someone else. I guess this is why Neel was hiding behind a larger rock as I slid down, my two unsteady feet on both sides of the chute. I finally made it to a more secure area. It was neither the first nor the last time on this hike that I was happy to be alive and, to have additional proof, I felt the need to have a picture of myself taken.
It had all begun the day before, Saturday October 22, 2005. Our group met in the Kennedy Meadows parking lot, just off highway 108, around 9:15am. The sky was blue, the trees yellow, the bagels good, the peanut butter creamy. At this point, we did not yet know what was going to happen and we were all smiling: Diederik (a bit too confidently), Dave, Jacqueline, Eu-Jin, Neel, and me, Olivier, a bunch of Stanford students on a Redwood hike, coming to Emigrant Wilderness with no definite plan and only a bit of a clue.
The first part of the hike was flat and uneventful: river, golden trees, autumn colors. The atmosphere was that of a field trip to the zoo, with Eu-Jin and me rushing with our cameras to whatever looked lovely at the time.
We then crossed a bridge and passed by a big sign that pointed at the trail. These details were going to play a crucial role the following day as we were running along the trail at night with no headlamp (this was also deemed "fun"). But at the time, we felt no need to pay attention to the topography and rather than treat the bridge as an important survival factor, Diederik engraved his name in the old paint. I could not believe such a pure heart had turned into a vandal.
The trail was getting steeper and we passed another bridge.
We were walking higher and higher in more and more open space, and eventually discovered Relief Reservoir, an artificial lake.
We passed Saucer Meadow. In about 5 hours, including breaks and lunch, we had covered a total of 5 to 7 miles, as measured by Diederik's little finger curved along a thick line on the map.

But an old hip injury started to bother Eu-Jin, so we made another break and sat down on some rocks by the trail. And we also looked up at the west face of Relief Peak. The picture below actually shows the exact moment when Diederik, in the yellow shirt, blinking his eyes at the mountain, had this revelation from God that we would attempt to summit Relief Peak from the west, "just because it's there."

We decided to set up camp.

Our somewhat democratic discussion had also produced the following plan:
  1. Saturday: hike, off-trail, to a region that features a lot of little lakes.
  2. Sunday: attempt Relief peak.
  3. Extra rule: leave late so it's dark when you come back.
It was too early to leave for the lake region, so I applied rule 3 and took a few pictures around camp.
It was then 4:30pm, the sun was dangerously close to the mountain and it was clear we would be in the shadow pretty soon, so Dave, Diederik, Neel and me started to hike up to the lake region while Jacqueline and Eu-Jin stayed at camp. We made our way through a glaciated landscape, sometimes crossing stretches of forests and even discovering isolated snow patches.
In about one hour we reached the lake region and had a very peaceful time, at least until a group of noisy hikers approached.
Pushed by scientific interest, I tried some savory leaves, tasty berries and delicious roots, while Diederik and Neel danced a traditional flemmish dance. After a few attempts they even managed to be synchronised.
Around 6pm we started to make it back to camp. It was soon getting dark and a mischievous night fell upon the Valley. Nothing is more similar to a tree at night than another tree at night, and the same goes for rocks, roots, branches, so we got at little bit lost, and it is only with the help of our headlamps that we found our way back to camp around 7:45pm, where Jacqueline and Eu-Jin were preparing a dinner of angel-hair pasta with pesto sauce, sausages and sun-dried tomatoes. Diederik lit a fire. Neel, instantly attracted, brought his mat, laid down, and began to sleep, waking up at times only to grab a shot from the Cabernet-Sauvignon bottle that was being passed around. He did not seem to mind the burning ashes that were raining down on him.

The next morning, Diederik pretended that he had made a "huge fire" later that night, but around the same time he was speaking to me in German, so I'm a bit doubtful.

The night was pretty quiet. Dave and Diederik did not use tents. On Sunday morning Eu-Jin lit up a fire in which Jacqueline disposed the leftover pumpkin pie / cheesecake. A note about equipment: Eu-Jin was sporting an ultralight ultraperformant XTS-26 jacket and assorted pants, while Diederik embodied the old school of layering multiple clothes until he was warm enough: he had good ole' woolen socks and sandals, World War I pants, a purple fleece jacket over which he weared a Bearathlon tie-dye t-shirt and another black Redwood jacket, a scarf, and his signature De Geest Sport cap (zeer goede kwaliteit).
Again rule 3 was applied scrupulously and we made sure to wake up late and have a long breakfast. Around 10am the camp was packed and the support team, Jacqueline and Eu-Jin, started hiking back to the cars while the other four of us turned into a commando to attempt Relief Peak (move quickly, use paramilitary tactics, hide from squirrels). Some of us were feeling bad about the supposedly short distance we had covered the day before, which we characterized as "lame" or "so much Redwood". We had to catch up. So, from then on, a very competitive spirit inhabited us. We would walk and run the whole day, from 10am to 8pm, allowing breaks that would only last until someone would lament "oh no, this is turning into a Redwood trip again", and this would be the signal for our guilty selves to stand up and keep hiking.

It is with these dispositions that we got into our first west face attempt of Relief Peak, which turned out to be the failure mentioned at the beginning. We reached the lone tree around 11:15am. But the words of our fearless leader, "failure is not an option", were still resonating in our hearts. Our commando decided to follow the longer route from the south, and fulfill the mission. The trail led us to Lunch Meadow, a scenic plain sprinkled with trees where a quiet river was meandering.

Around 12:45pm we left the trail and hiked straight up, discovering desertic slopes covered with gravel and very little grass, an almost lunar landscape. In fact this part of Emigrant Wilderness has a volcanic origin, with characteristic ridges and peaks, and this makes it very different from the area we hiked through earlier, which is more granitic and polished by long-vanished glaciers.
This time, we did a good job finding a route from the map and we did not run into any obstacle. Once we reached the ridge, we discovered a small lake on the other side and the walk to the summit of Relief Peak was just a matter of minutes. We summited around 2:40pm.
We discovered a summit register with some entries dating back to the 1960s and showing that only a few climbers get here every year -- maybe because they all die attempting the west face. At some point in the 1970s the telephone was invented and people started writing their phone numbers in the log. Then in the 1990s Al Gore invented the internet and we were the first people to write an URL in the register (http://redwood.stanford.edu)!
We took a few more victory shots at the summit. It was 3pm, and since leaving the parking lot the day before, it had taken us 29 hours to get here. So surely we could make it back to the car in three hours, before sunset, right?

Wrong. But anyway, we ran down to camp to pick up our backpacks and tents, in a race against the clock.

So of course it was soon getting dark, and of course those of use with long legs were walking fast, and those of us with shorter legs had to run to keep up the pace, and of course it was more fun to do it in the dark rather than use our headlamps. So of course there are some rocks on the trail we did not quite see, and that we barely avoided at the last second. And of course, without a light, we might well miss something as big as a bridge.

Dave had the good idea of taking his headlamp out and was for this reason a bit behind us. After a while I noticed, however, that he was not following us anymore and I begged Diederik and Neel to stop. They decided instead to hide in the forest (fun?) but I soon found them and we waited for Dave. No Dave. Diederik was sent back to search for him, but returned to us with the revelation that we missed the bridge and that Dave probably saw it and followed the right trail. So then, with a walking pace and our headlamps on, we made it back to the car where indeed Dave was waiting for us. It was about 8:20pm.

Dave had believed for the whole time that we were ahead of him. As he ran back to the parking lot and noticed nobody there, he thought that it was a bad joke and that we were hiding in the forest.

And believe me, that's exactly what Diederik would have done.

* * * * *

A few days have already passed since the Emigrant Wilderness hike, but tonight my whole body still hurts. I light a candle, and in the semi-darkness, try to lay my painful back down on the couch. Neither drugs nor acunpucture have given me any relief. I just groan as the last tablet of ibuprofen slowly dissolves in my stomach and is released into my bloodstream. The hike has taught me a lot about belgian folklore, but now is the time to reflect on the commodities of modern life, the comfort of my grad student dorm (!), the admiration I have for the Cro-Magnon man that was so exposed to the elements. I ponder life and death. Relief Peak obsesses me, it has become huge, mythic, "just because it's there", in my memory. On the website summitpost.org, I discover a photograph of Relief Peak taken from Granite Dome and posted by Alpinist. I look closely and everything is there: a big wall, the west face, "drops off dramatically" as the caption says, while on the right of the picture the south slopes extend peacefully, looking quasi-flat. I close my eyes and smile. And as I fall asleep the last word that comes to my lips is "crazy".

Last picture from summitpost.org