In This Economy?

It’s been two months since I last was able to fulfill my role as Travel Correspondent for In This Economy?, but that’s mainly because my ITE bosses here seem to believe the best journalism is free journalism. And my real bosses seem to believe that I should be at my real job more often than not.

Anyway, I went to Albuquerque last weekend to see how the economy has affected New Mexico. A full report will follow this week. But until then, I offer this October 2005 blog post from my first trip to ABQ (originally published on MySpace). I was so young.

A mountain built on the corpses of unwitting hikers: Sandia Peak at sunset.

4 years earlier

So I went to Albuquerque to visit a friend, his wife and their new baby. Let’s call them Chad, Karrie and Chloe, respectively, just to give them labels.

The other, much-hyped objective was to hike up Sandia Peak, settle in at one of the restaurants, watch the UT football game, drink a lot of beer and then take the tram back down to civilization (this particular tram brags that they don’t call it a ride, they call it a “flight”; it was actually a ride… no flying involved whatsoever).

I can totally see the cables.

I had promised to complain the whole way up, being a lazy city-boy. So on Saturday morning in cool, cloudy conditions, we (sans the new baby, who had been traded for a new pair of hiking boots) began our ascent along a trail called La Luz. Chad had sent me a description of the trail a few days earlier. Words like “strenuous” and “steep” combined with words like “nine” and “miles” were alien to me and thus, didn’t provide the warning I assume was intended. I’ve driven 9 miles in less than 9 minutes, I thought. How long could this possibly take?

We hit the trail, and my complaints and jokes were flying fast. Tell my wife I love her. Ha ha ha. Save yourselves. Ha ha ha. If we see a bear, I’m throwing Karrie at it and running. (This was not actually a joke or a complaint, but a promise.)

Things were going swimmingly for the first few miles. The altitude did not affect me like it was supposed to. My legs were brave and strong. I had plenty of water strapped to my back. The scenery was gorgeous, and I appreciated it despite my inner desire to deride and mock it.

Mother Nature is a whore

Then we reached the halfway point. It started to drizzle. No big deal. A little while later, it began to rain. Still acceptable. We broke out the rain ponchos and dared Mother Nature to do her worst. She obliged wholeheartedly.

The rain came down harder, the drops larger. Suddenly, I realized that my legs were wet, and the water was working it’s way up my body as if it were hiking up a SurlyZ mountain. To the water’s credit, it never stopped for a break or considered throwing itself off of me to its merciful death. That’s where me and the cold leg-water differed.

Now my jokes were becoming death threats to my so-called friends. Oh, how sweet it would be to carve them open and let their warm blood wash over me. And that’s how I knew I was getting delirious.

Chad and Karrie kept saying, “We’re almost there. Not too much longer.” Which would have been great, but here’s what they really meant: “We’re almost to the hard part. It’s a slick, steep, rocky section that make you think you’re not going to live through the hike.” Not that I could tell the difference. Everything seemed like the hard, rocky part, and all of it made me want to die.

They promised a somewhat easy last mile if we just got past the rocky,
bouldery section, and that was supposed to keep me going psychologically. It didn’t.

The temperature was now below freezing, and I couldn’t feel my feet, my legs, my hands or my face. Thankfully, I could feel my lungs. And they burned like the fires of hell. So, I take back the “thankfully.”

The slow and the dead

We made it to the “hard” part. Karrie decided to go at breakneck speed because she was freezing (she beat us back by more than half an hour, went to the bottom of the mountain, drove to the closest store — Wal-Mart — and bought us all dry clothes; at the time I didn’t know any of that was happening; all I could think about was all the crappy moments of my life that were flashing before my eyes; what a waste of 30 years, I thought).

That left just Chad and me. He was not feeling top-notch, but he’s generally more
positive than I am. I was ready to give in, curl up under a rock, go to sleep and wait for death to take me to warm place filled with fire and brimstone (aaaaaahhhhh!). I could barely lift my frozen legs, I was mumbling weird and insane things to myself, and i was starting to think I could fly.

All hiking and no whiskey makes SurlyZ a frozen boy.

Chad pulled out all the tricks like, “Just a few more switchbacks” and “Come look at this view” and (my favorite) “What’s your favorite Journey song?” Let’s be clear here. Chad hates Journey. Personally, I love them more than I love my friends and family.

So… my favorite Journey song, eh? Oh, well, there are so many. It’s like choosing your favorite child, though I’m sure I could do that if I had more than one child. I’d probably go for the smarter, quieter child and kick the outgoing, athletic one to the curb. I would teach my favorite child all about the best movies, the genius of rock ‘n’ roll, the dangers of organized religion, why dogs are better than cats but how cats have their moments and how great it would be to have a cat right now so it could catch a mountain squirrel and I could eat it and feel rejuvenated and then stand next to the mountain and chop it down with the edge of my hand like some kind of child who knows voodoo.

“How about ‘Don’t Stop Believin’?” Chad interrupted. Good idea. I began. “Just a small-town girl…” No, that doesn’t apply. Skip to the next part. “Just a city boy…” Yes, that’s better. “Born and raised in south Detroit.” Damn this song. Skip to the first guitar solo. Then to the chorus. Add a million syllables to every word just like Steve Perry. Repeat one hundred times.

I have seen the top of the mountain. And it blows.

“We made it!”

At first I thought someone from Journey is talking to me. Maybe original drummer Aynsley Dunbar. Then I realized it was Chad. And the “we made it” really only applied to getting past the “challenging” part and moving on to the last mile.

Good enough.

I suddenly had drive. I could taste the whiskey at the end of the rainbow. I began to shuffle my frozen feet. It wasn’t raining anymore. It was fucking snowing. But the snow was better than the rain, I convinced myself.

It still took forever to get to the end, but we made it and stood for 30 minutes in front of the automatic hand-dryers in the restroom of the nearly deserted restaurant (who would come up to the top of the mountain on a god-awful day like this?).

I ordered hot chocolate and green chile quesadillas. We watched the third quarter of the UT game and caught the next tram “flight” down the mountain. We picked up their baby (who, it turns out, was not traded for hiking boots) from the babysitter. We went home. We took showers. Separately. I put on warm clothes, took a shot of whiskey, drank a beer and noticed that I couldn’t lift my right leg.

And I still can’t.

The End.

Tags: Albuquerque, hiking, hypothermia, Journey, mountain squirrel, New Mexico, Sandia Peak, whiskey

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 9:25 AM and is filed under Human Encounters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.