Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25248
attach from your harness to the main rope. There's a waist prussik and a leg prussik. You use them for self- rescue should you fall into a crevasse. Don't worry, you'll learn how to tie them yourself during the trip." And that's how the instructional model of Alaska Mountain Guides works: You learn a skill, such as planting rectangular metal "pickets" in snow, which steady rescue ropes during climbing or crevasse rescue, and then you use it the next day when you summit a peak with a scary name. It's a nearly ideal tutorial method: The student sure pays attention. The question was, Would I learn enough in a week t o tickle Denali with my crampons? I l ooked around at our crew and noticed one thing about mountaineering: Even beginners l ook professional. I was wearing strange things like carabiners, an ice axe, a harness and a helmet, which, it occurred to me, would be useful in my everyday life, given my general proclivity for falling. I could see myself tying off on icy parking lots. I tied on to the practice rope and climbed up to the warehouse rafters relatively successfully by loosening and raising my prussik knots with Eli and Cedar's helpful coaching . What had been foreign to me an hour earlier--knots and l oops and harnesses--were already becoming familiar. The five of us rode in two tortured rigs up an old gold-mine road until it ended, at 4,000 feet, in an alpine wildflower meadow near the base of Flower Mountain, some 50 miles from Haines, less than that from Glacier Bay National Park. Clear weather (the sky's only appearance for seven days) meant I could see the Canadian border station in one direction and the 3 , 000-year- o ld Tlingit v illage of Klukwan in another. Ahead of us lay another stretch of Alaska's unnamed glaciers. Panoramically speaking, it was one of the most beautiful places in the world to pee. It was also the last night we'd camp on actual ground for the next five. As soon as the tents were up, we grabbed our ice axes, strapped on, and I tripped over my crampons . We practiced climbing technique on a nearby snowfield, which glowed magenta with a coating of watermelon algae. We learned techniques like "French stepping" for heading up inclines, "plunge stepping" for coming down them, and my favorite, "glissading," baSically French for butt-sledding down fast. Perhaps most important, for hours we practiced "self-arresting," the process of planting your ice axe and then your toes when you or someone in your group falls. It prevents you from sliding off 400-foot cliffs. "Most mountaineering deaths occur due to failure to self-arrest," Cedar told us. "Was I fretting over prussiks just this morning?" I asked myself, trying to self-arrest but really glissading on the snow. "Would I have the presence of mind to 'self-arrest' when tripping, say, at 18,000-feet up Denali?" Midway through this day, the sun went away and the rain started, but we were having too much fun to notice. I went to sleep that night feeling like there was time for everything I wanted to accomplish in my life. But something deeper nagged my dreams: would I remember these new skills on an actual big peak? Your whole metabolism is different above 15,000 feet. That's Yeti territory, not human terrain. And this class didn't get above 10,000 feet. Even ยท more important than altitude is the technical difficulty of a c limb . Some peaks, like 14,410-foot Mt ~ainier, you can pretty much walk up. Even Denali is not known as the most technical Big Mountain in the world. But would I be ready for 20,000 feet in just six days? I just couldn't see it. Mountain climbers seemed a different breed of person from scared-ol' me. 46