Spryte Rider & the Eleventh Essential

About thirty-eight years and a couple months ago, I was involved in a mountain climbing incident. Not an accident, but an incident - which are preventable. The proximate causes of the incident were: 

1) being 17 years old; and
2) having that young male sense of invulnerability
3) making some stupid decisions; followed by
4) some better decisions; while
5) being on a sketchy part of a mountain; during
6) a long stretch of bad weather.

Toward the end of the interlude, we were able to get to a better part of the mountain when the weather improved. A thousand or so vertical feet up the mountain, we saw an orange snow vehicle let some climbers off, and then it turned and made its way down to us. The passenger door opened, and a mountaineer got out and looked us over. Then he asked "Are you the climbers we are looking for?" 

One thing led to another, and we accepted a ride back to Timberline Lodge. The tracked vehicle was a Thiokol Spryte, and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. And I decided that someday, I would like to live somewhere that we needed one to get around in winter. 

Twelve years later, Laura and I spent a year at Holden Village. One of my responsibilities that winter was driving a Spryte. And it was cool. I was hoping to get to drive it this winter too, but alas, have not. 

Holden Villages Thiokol Spryte

The Spryte has a cabover body, with an inline six cylinder gas engine between the driver and the passenger. Direction and speed are controlled by two sticks, like a bulldozer. It is noisy inside the cabin - ear protection is more than recommended. The tracks are forty-four inches wide each, and the overall width is about eight feet. This Spryte has a six way tilt blade on the front, just like the one that was on Mt. Hood back in 1976. I sometimes wonder if they are the same one... 

The incident netted us a ride in a Army Reserve Huey down through the clouds and a stay in a hospital for frostbite, and perhaps to feed us up a bit. We had been up there a good while, burning calories that we could not replace. 

My older sister - a newly licensed nurse - came to visit me in hospital, and washed my greasy hair while my hands were swathed in bandages. My mom and dad came too - a long drive; I was not too proud to tell them I loved them. A few weeks later, my uncle Jim came by, and picked me up (literally) and set me on the banks of the Cowlitz River and we netted smelt - something people have been doing there for millennia. 

I missed about six weeks of school that winter. But a few short weeks after the incident, we attended a debriefing on the Search and Rescue (S&R) effort. It was pretty humbling. Afterward, the searcher who had met us with the Spryte asked us to step aside to a private alcove for a moment. I figured some choice words and phrases would be given to us and I was prepared to say Yes Sir and No Sir and Thank You Sir. 

But all that I needed to say was Thank You. Dave Paulson gave us a poem by Rene Daumal, and I have kept it ever since. I wish I could tell him what a great gift that poem has been for me. But I think, that like many or perhaps all mountaineers, he knew that already. 

The Eleventh Essential

"You cannot stay on the summit forever. You have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this. What is above has seen what is below. What is below has not seen from above. One climbs, one sees, one descends, one can no longer see, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions based on what one has seen from above."

-Rene Daumal

Our Mom & Dad, and our aunts and uncles raised us to have a healthy respect for and a deep appreciation of places that are apart, that have stream music, where the chickerees chip, and the voice of the turtle - or at least the voices of the ringneck dove and the raven - are the loudest things. Mom & Dad belonged to The Mountaineers, and made sure we well-educated in the ways of the mountains too: I was probably five when I learned to not step on rope. We kids new enough to be ready when we went out.  Even now, it is hard for me to go for even a day hike without having the ten essentials with me. The eleventh essential is never left behind.