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Outside Magazine September 2001

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A World of Hurt (Cont.)

AFTER TWO MONTHS I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to do a trip. I couldn't yet come close to doing a pull-up. I couldn't do a push-up. But what of it? All that meant was that I couldn't climb or kayak or mountain bike or ski or carry a heavy pack. I still had legs. I could still hike. A mountain with maximum elevation gain but minimal technical requirements would be just what the doctor ordered. (Ha!)

It occurred to me that if injuries are little clues that we are mortal, there's at least one mountain in the world that mortals were once not permitted to ascend: Mount Olympus. In Greek mythology, Olympus was the exclusive abode of the immortals—Zeus, the forever philandering god of the sky; Hera, goddess of marriage, his jealous and cruelly conniving wife; the ugly but good-hearted Hephaestus, god of fire; Aphrodite, goddess of good sex; and the rest of that fractious pantheon. Nothing pleased the Greek gods more than good, old-fashioned adventure (consider the struggles of Prometheus or Hercules). For a recovering invalid, climbing Mount Olympus seemed an appropriately hubristic first foray back into the backcountry.

Not any partner would do. It had to be someone who had suffered as much as I from his own stupidity, preferably more. Stephen Venables—friend, colleague, renowned British alpinist, and author of humorous books about Himalayan climbing—came immediately to mind. Stephen had lost most of the toes on his left foot after bivouacking high on Everest in 1988, and yet claimed that "losing the little piggies wasn't really an injury at all, just occupational wear and tear—or, shall we say, unfortunate erosion." In 1992, at the end of an otherwise safe, successful expedition to the Indian Himalayas, a piton popped during a rappel and he took a 300-foot fall, breaking both legs. In his book A Slender Thread, Stephen describes this episode with such characteristic British understatement and wry comedy that you almost forget he nearly died.

Stephen responded to my first e-mail with "sounds like good fun" and to the second with "deification imminent." A week later we met in far northern Greece on the shore of the unbelievably emerald-blue Gulf of Salonika.

Mount Olympus rises 2,917 meters, 9,570 feet above sea level. We started our hike in the village of Litóchoron, some distance up from the topless beach, giving us a healthy 9,000-foot ascent. Penetrating the Enipeus River gorge, which cleaves the eastern flank of the massif, we passed through terrain seldom associated with Greece—a deep, mossy forest of giant beeches, walnuts, and holly oaks, matchless terrain for Artemis, goddess of the wilderness and the hunt.

Not one hour into the woods I knew the gods were with us. We had stopped for some bouldering on a pristine block of limestone. I set my sunglasses aside and they promptly vanished. After 45 minutes scouring the hillside, we abandoned the search effort. Kneeling to shoulder my pack, I spotted them, crushed into the gravel underfoot in a spot I had probed ten times. Hermes, the mischievous god of thievery, was up to his old tricks.

High in the cleft we passed the ruins of the Monastery of Saint Dionysus (splendid to think of the god of wine and debauchery transformed into a chaste Christian icon), switchbacked through Balkan pines with trunks four feet in diameter, and spent the night in the Spilios Agapitos hut.

Zeus was out carousing well into the wee hours, bellowing with lecherous laughter, tossing thunderbolts left and right, apparently chasing every virgin nymph and maiden this side of the Acropolis.

We set off for the summit at dawn, passing beyond the timberline into jagged alpine country. Stephen, formed of equal parts madness and wisdom, stopped so often to admire, name ("Campanula oreadum, Jankaea heldreichii"), and photograph the alpine flowers that I took to calling him The Gardener. The night before, Zeus had left an inch of new snow on the last thousand feet of the climb. It was no more than a steep scramble up into dark shrouds of mist, but the snow made the limestone slick and treacherous, giving my rebuilt shoulder a good test.

Aeolus and his four chiefs of the cardinal points—Boreas, Zephyr, Notus, and Eurus—were wrestling ferociously when we reached the sharp summit, throwing us one way, then the other. Clouds were springing to life on the leeward side of the peak, obscuring the view down, but off in the distance the Aegean Sea shimmered like the Golden Fleece. We humans are not immortal—we fall, we break, we die—and yet, to fulfill our own mythic dreams, we must live as if we were. Stephen and I shook hands, two gimps at the top of Greece.

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