Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled-and Knuckleheaded-Quest for the Rocky Mountain High
289
Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled-and Knuckleheaded-Quest for the Rocky Mountain High
289eBook
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Overview
The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik's rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is no walk in the park, although sometimes it's A Walk in the Woods -- but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only twelve hundred have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?
With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife's orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito. Along the way, Obmascik experiences the raw, rowdy, and rarely seen intimacy of male friendship, braced by the double intoxicants of adrenaline and altitude.
Though danger is always present -- the Colorado Fourteeners have killed more climbers than Mount Everest -- Mark knows his aging scalp can't afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik's summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation's most famed religious shrines). As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things -- the summits of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age -- like summit height -- is just a number.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416567264 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| Sales rank: | 857,774 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I was fat, forty-four, and in the market for a vasectomy. My mortgage was half gone, but so was my hair. Crabgrass bugged me.
After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I completed each other's sentences. Most were about our boys. We had three, though they sounded louder. Because Merrill traveled for her job, and I stayed home for mine, my three sons saw a lot of me. I changed their diapers, cooked their meals, coached their soccer, and harped about their homework. I was around so much that when our three-year-old woke in the middle of the night, he usually screamed for me. Our pubescent twelve-year-old, however, usually screamed at me. The eight-year-old could go either way.
It was a chaotic life, but a fun life, and I knew how to live it -- until an emergency phone call rocked my world.
"Dad," our twelve-year-old said from his Colorado summer camp, "they're taking me to the hospital."
Turns out Cass and a bunch of camp buddies were climbing Pikes Peak, elevation 14,115 feet, when he tripped and slashed open his shin to the bone. Now I was the one screaming.
"Dad," he said, "calm down. I summited. It was amazing. I saw the sunrise from the top of the mountain. I slipped on the way down, but I made it to the top -- two-and-a-half miles above sea level."
"How bad does it hurt?"
"I summited, Dad. I summited."
With ten surgical staples in his leg, Cass actually let me hug him in front of his friends. He even hugged me back. Then we did something more surprising: We talked.
He told me that mountains over 14,000 feet were called Fourteeners, and that Colorado had a bunch of them. He asked if I knew anything about them.
I did.
Our home state has fifty-four peaks higher than 14,000 feet -- more than any other state or province in North America. Every year more than 500,000 people try to climb a Fourteener, but fewer than 1,300 people have ever reported standing atop them all. Colorado's Fourteeners have been summited by skiers and snowboarders, racers and amputees, dogs, cats, cockatiels, monkeys, and horses, people as young as one and as old as eighty-one. One Texan spent three weeks pushing a peanut to the summit of one peak with his nose. There have been gunfights and cannibalism, avalanches and helicopter crashes. Hundreds have died and thousands have been maimed.
One blond boy even survived America's most famous Fourteener with a Frankenstein scar on his leg.
Nice one, Dad, he said, but how do you know all this?
Once upon a time, before I was a husband or a father -- back in the days when my inseam had more inches than my waistline -- I somehow managed to climb a few Fourteeners.
My son was shocked. For a fleeting millisecond, he even looked at me as if I were almost not embarrassing. Teetering on the edge of a truly touching father-and-son moment, I was ready for another hug, but he was overcome by another surge of testosterone.
Dad, how about if we climb a Fourteener together?
Well, when I was climbing mountains -- that was a lifetime ago, back when I liked to exercise. These days I like to eat. I've packed so much on my hips it would be like climbing with a pony keg of beer in my fanny pack. Imagine lugging all that extra weight up the 1,860 steps of the Empire State Building, four times, and doing it in highaltitude air with about a third less oxygen than Manhattan. All that work would be just one Fourteener.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
My mind was racing: Could I do it? Was it even possible for me to try? Back when I was in shape, those five Fourteener summits were still about the hardest sport I'd ever taken on -- harder than two-aday football practices as a high school punk, harder than weeklong bike tours that sent me, an alleged adult, four hundred miles over and around the mountain ranges of Colorado. Still, the beauty of the Fourteeners was something to remember. Standing on the roof of the Rockies, high above the trees and the clouds and the everyday worries, always made me feel like I was halfway to heaven. Now I'm forty-four, and my life is halfway there too.
Cass kept looking at me. I wondered what he saw. Someone to argue with? Someone to avoid? Someone who once did something cool, but way before he was even born? My face must have betrayed my fear: The older I get, the better I was.
Then he said the magic words: Dad -- please.
I couldn't resist.
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Obmascik
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Failure 5
Grays Peak
Torreys Peak
2 Religious Experience 11
Mount of the Holy Cross
3 The Mission Takes Shape 22
Huron Peak
Quandary Peak
La Plata Peak
Mount Sherman
Mount Yale
Mount Princeton
4 The Monkey 35
Creston Needle
Humboldt Peak
Mount Elbert
Grays Peak
Torreys Peak
5 Man-Date 59
Missouri Mountain
6 Panic 72
Mount Antero
7 Shock 81
Mount Massive
8 Bulldog 97
Mount Shavano
Tabeguace Peak
9 Punishment 107
Mount Columbia
10 Blown Away 111
Mount Evans
Mount Bierstadt
11 The Elephant 118
Mount Belford
Mount Oxford
12 One Benjamin Franklin 123
Culebra Peak
San Luis Peak
13 Gravity 137
Little Bear Peak
Blanca Peak
Ellingwood Point
14 Guts 148
Wetterborn Peak
Uncompahgre Peak
Redcloud Peak
Sunshine Peak
15 Scruples 175
Mount Democrat
Mount Lincoln
Mount Bross
16 Gnawed 182
Mount Lindsey
17 Day at the Office 188
Pyramid Peak
18 Limits 196
Maroon Peak
Castle Peak
19 Man Maker 207
Missouri Mountain
20 The Needles 212
Mount Eolus
Sunlight Peak
Windom Peak
21 The Bald Leading the Blind 228
Wilson Peak
22 Homestretch 236
Handies Peak
Mount Sneffels
Snowmass Mountain
Kit Carson Peak
Challenger Point
Mount Harvard
Capitol Peak
El Diente Peak
Mount Wilson
North Maroon Peak
Crestone Peak
23 Return 249
Longs Peak
24 Summit 260
Pikes Peak
Bibliography 267
Acknowledgments 271