We hiked and we hiked, and then we hiked some more. UPHILL we hiked, hour after hour, mid-morning becoming late afternoon, on a trail so steep that the numbers on my hiking companion’s altimeter flashed by as if we strapped the thing to a supercharged Fourth of July bottle rocket and launched it into outer space.
My friend and I were in Central Washington last Saturday, climbing a mountain that neither of us had done before, a route not technically difficult, just long. I mean l-o-n-g. And though both of us are in pretty good shape because we’ve done mountain hikes or climbs nearly every week for the past several months, by the time we made our summit Saturday, we were pretty well spent.
We dropped our packs and gazed triumphantly off toward all the peaks that were below us...except for one summit, maybe a mile away, that looked higher than the point where my friend and I stood.
“Neil,” I said, “That peak over there looks higher than where we are. There shouldn’t be anything nearby that’s higher, should there?”
“No,” Neil said. “There shouldn’t be anything higher.” We pulled out the map (which we hadn’t bothered to consult till that point,) and realized, to our chagrin, that we had climbed The Wrong Damn Mountain.
It was late in the day. Storm clouds looked to be heading our way. We were tired. We really needed to start heading down.
“Let’s give ourselves an hour,” I suggested. “We’ll head over there and see how high up we can get in an hour.”
Fifty-nine minutes later we were on the summit. The Real Summit. Nothing higher for miles around. And this time we certainly didn’t need to check no stinkin' map to know we’d climbed The Right Peak.
