“Daddy, will there be snow on the big mountain?”
“No. Are your boots comfy?”
Buffet breakfast, Marriott Hotel, Flagstaff, Arizona. 6.00am, but the television is on. Forecast for a clear, sunny day. 29 October 2007.
Outside, a thin frost on the hire car. It’s not quite dawn. Black triangles rise into a cobalt sky: the Kachina Range, topped by Humphreys Peak, 12,633 ft, the highest point in Arizona. Me and my two children, aged 8 and 5. Is this a mad idea?
The switchback road snakes up through forest. Beyond the car park, a broad sloping prairie they’ll soon be using for skiing: the Arizona Snowbowl. We reach a dark line of forest.
“The Gruffalo lives in here, Daddy.”
“What does the Gruffalo eat?”
“Owl ice cream, owl ice cream!”
A trail leads into the woods, deeper and deeper. But these aren’t half-tame British woods. They’re home for puma and black bears (obviously, I triple-checked all potential risks!) but more to the point, there are fallen trees across the trail. Trees bigger than any I’ve seen in Britain. Each one is a five-minute obstacle course for us to clamber over or tunnel under, which the children enjoy more than I do. Between the branches high above us, the moon looks down on our efforts. The sky is pale now, as the sun begins to climb.
The trail is narrow but clear, weaving this way and that way through the woods, but with every step it climbs steadily, like a well-built stalker’s path.
Of course, I don’t expect to reach the top. A five year old child summitting a 12,000 foot peak? But I hope we’ll reach the col between Humphreys and its equally imposing neighbour Agassiz.
As we wander along, I tell them stories of my schooldays. “Daddy, were the children naughty at your school? What was the naughtiest thing they did?”
The trees are much smaller now, and there are patches of scree and dusty, barren slopes. And then I see the first one. “Look, there it is! A thousand times older than you are.”
It’s one of the world’s oldest living things - a bristlecone pine. It’s small and scabby. If there was such a thing as a toilet brush tree, then it would look like this.
Amid the scattered bristlecones, suddenly, we’re here. The col. A new view open below us, and the scale is stupendous. The col is a low point on the rim of the caldera of a monster volcano, perhaps the height of Kilimanjaro, that exploded two million years ago. Humphreys, Agassiz and their many satellites are the jagged rim of the resulting crater.
We have an early lunch, and admire the astonishing view. The children scamper about and try to climb a bristlecone pine. I thought this would be our turn-round point, but they’re full of energy.
So on we go. The caldera edge towers into the sky ahead of us, a tall fin of basalt, but the trail weaves cunningly round to the right of it. A short, Cuillin-ish scramble, and we’re on the crest. Time for another break, and a post-lunch snack, and plenty of water.
From here on, the ridge is broad and bouldery, a volcanic jumble. We reach one false summit, then another.
“I’ve invented a drink, Daddy. I mixed up the ingredients last night. It’s in my water bottle”
“What’s in the drink?”
“Cream soda, coca cola and sweets. And chocolates, they melted in my pocket. Do you want some, Daddy?”
We sit down, and they share the drink. After a while , we get up and walk up another section of rocky ridge.
And then it stops rising. Ahead, beyond a cairn, we’re looking
down.
There’s a piece of wood on top of the cairn, with the altitude written on it: 12,633 ft. It’s as if the mountain is saying to us “Yes, you’ve done it.”
The world below feels rather like looking down from space: everything is small. Major landscape features - Monument Valley, the Ship Rock in New Mexico, Meteor Crater - can be made out, but they look tiny. Even the Grand Canyon is a thin dark line along the horizon. But the children are very pleased to spot Flagstaff below us, like the tiniest toy town surrounded by vast forests, and on a little hill the Lowell Observatory which we visited yesterday.
Another walker appears: the first person we’ve seen all day. He takes our photo, we chat, and we soak in this extraordinary moment.
“We’re up in the sky here, Daddy.”
It’s a long walk down. Back in the forest, the number of fallen trees we have to clamber over seems to have doubled. But finally, we step out of the forest and look across the prairie, with the setting sun silhouetting the faraway peaks of the western Mogollon Rim.
“I can see the car!”
“Who wants pizza for tea?”
I’ve not put in a photo - they are all there in my TR at
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