Dirtbag Days

The author skiing on the Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska

“Going to the mountains is going home.”—John Muir

When I was a homeless hitchhiking hippie, I did have one place I could still call home. The High Sierra, John Muir’s “gentle wilderness” was my refuge whenever I could collect some dehydrated soup, tea bags, and pilot bread.

Hiking, climbing, and skiing took me into beautiful country where I could camp next to a mountain stream or a flat section of a glacier above timberline. I was Fifteen years old when I started disappearing into the mountains for weeks at a time.

Here’s an excerpt from Lightbulb Coffee:

The backpacking trip to Evolution Valley was a great adventure. Alan and I got blisters and sunburn. We crossed creeks rushing so fast and deep that we had to belay each other across with a rope. On the far bank we would drop our packs and pull off our soaked boots, wool socks, and britches. After wringing out as much water as we could, we put them back on, and they dried as we hiked. On the third day, after trudging up thousands of feet of sun-blasted granite switchbacks, we humped into Evolution Meadow.

At 9,500 feet of altitude, the wide rippling creek meandered through alpine grasses and massive granite boulders. A cool breeze flowed down from summer snowfields on the granite peaks above us. Most of our expensive, dried backpacking rations were exhausted by now.

We had already gobbled up the most easily prepared items, like bacon bars, powdered eggs, and pilot biscuits. Some of the backpacking foods such as cracked dried beans would simply not cook at high altitude. They remained rock-hard, even when simmered over the campfire for hours. After all the physical effort we’d expended climbing up here, we were hungry, all day and night. We tortured ourselves by describing fantasy meals we would eat when we returned to civilization.

I dropped a fishhook baited with a live grasshopper into a pool of the creek. Almost immediately, I felt a tug on the line and pulled out a trout! In a few minutes I had caught my legal limit of ten fish, and I still had grasshoppers left over in the Prince Albert can. I raced back to our camp with my full stringer to show Alan. He looked up from his Herman Hesse book with hungry eyes.

The regular climbing trips into the Sierra toughened my body, while hitchhiking to and from the trailheads taught me patience and kept me humble. I lived the life of a dirtbag climber for four years. When I finally had a home, a job, and a wife, I went on more ambitious expeditions to the Cascades and even Alaska. Over the years I had lots of close calls in the mountains, and I knew other climbers that were gravely injured or killed by their sport.

An axiom goes like this: There are old climbers, and there are bold climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers.

Several adventures and close calls are recounted in Lightbulb Coffee or How I Survived the Sixties, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books Inc. In this memoir, you will find out how I succeeded in becoming an old climber.

John Schnick