My hands quiver as I fumble with the carabiner on my harness. The rain - a light drizzle moments before - has suddenly turned to hail; my sunglasses are fogging up and I'm doing disoriented things with my fingers and this piece of gear attaching me to an ice axe.
I look at the tip of Mt Shasta - California's fifth-tallest peak - looming above me like a beacon.
"It's just a little summer rain," I tell myself. I push the axe deeper into the snow. Nothing to panic about.
"Hey guys." I hear the voice of Graham, who has organised this trip and encouraged me, the baby mountaineer of the group, to come along. There's an ominous sing-song force in his tone and immediately I start yanking on the axe while trying to unclip myself, making duck-like backward movements before he even finishes his sentence: "Let's just get out of here." Suddenly a crack and a flash illuminate the snow around me and I freeze up. In my right hand is an ice axe. In my left, is the carabiner, still unclipped.
Between white powder and sky, I am one of 14 people clothed head to toe in metal.
I see Graham fling his ice axe to the side and drop down to the ground, covering his head. Tom, the most experienced of us, is ripping steel crampons off his boots, and yells up at me, the only one still attached to the side of the hill: "What are you doing?
" I'm frantically trying to peel the wet lining of my new gloves off so I can detach; they are suctioned to my fingers. Another flash and a crack. I give in to the panic and just start flapping my hands around, gloves half off, and shrieking: "I can't get them off me!" Twenty-four hours before, my new pair of Black Diamond gloves were slid over the counter to me with my credit card and receipt.
"Looks like clear skies next couple days." The clerk at the gear rental shop nodded.
Graham, Tom and I - along with two truckloads of co-instructors and friends - were making last-minute purchases for the next two days. We all nodded, nice and relaxed, because that's what our weather report said too.
The sun outside burned over the town of Shasta as we left the shop and put our shades on. Its namesake mountain shadowed us at 4322m, the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range that stretches from southern British Columbia down to Northern California.
While the town is still set up to plug into the dormant volcano's status as a spiritual source (the mountain drew attention as a "power centre" in the late '80s for believers of the Harmonic Convergence), our plan was to grab last-minute climbing gear, fill up on petrol and water, check the weather report (ha) then get out of town.
We made the hour drive - partly on the highway, mostly on a pothole-riddled dirt road that serpentines its way up the mountain - to the Northgate trailhead at 2130m.
After dividing up stoves, fuel, food and climbing gear, we hit the trail at a clipped pace for the steady elevation gain that took us through the pine forest and eventually above the treeline.
At twilight, nearly five hours later, we reached a rocky outcrop next to a stream - our base camp for the next two days - and set about making chicken Alfredo by headlamp and nibbled on chocolate afterwards.
I crawled into my sleeping bag with a full belly that night and gazed at the stars. I tried to push my anxiety away. While most climbers would go out of their way to avoid a crevasse - the deep, deadly fissures in a glacier - we had actually driven seven hours north just to find one.
Summiting Shasta via the Hotlum-Bolam ridge on the north side was the carrot for these guys - crevasse rescue training on the way up was the reason why we had chosen a more technical approach.
(There are 17 established routes to the peak, the easiest and most popular being the traditional John Muir route on the mountain's south side.) I secretly suspected I was only asked along because they needed a victim to dangle into the abyss of a crevasse for a few hours while they practised their knots. Imagining how this would work made it hard to sleep. But my goal this weekend was not to ruin this by being a wuss, or by being ill-equipped or out of shape, or by doing something stupid, or by dying.
And now, in the middle of a lightning storm, it looks like I've pretty much failed at all of this within a few hundred metres of base camp.
"What's up, G?
Crevasse rescue training is flagged (I summon up my best bummed-out face) but even summiting Shasta is looking grim. We sit in under a tarp, in a tangle of limbs, packs, wet jackets and gloves, and watch the sky.
"I want a pedicure." Jamie, one of two other girls on this excursion, pulls a wool hat down over her head. I decide I want a hot bath and a beer, and maybe an ice-cream sandwich. But Jamie can climb circles around most of the boys - she's allowed to mention frivolous yearnings. I keep my mouth shut.
The skies clear a little and by late afternoon we emerge to make pizza from scratch - a two-hour affair (these guys know how to eat well in the back country) - then brush teeth, lay out gear, fill up our water bottles and call it a night by 6pm.
If it looks like another storm in six hours, we won't attempt it.
If skies are clear, we go.
I go to sleep with pink streaks of sunset mixed with dark clouds on my left and the peak beckoning on my right - "Lonely as God, white as a winter moon," wrote the poet Joaquin Miller of Shasta - and my stomach turns with anxiety. It hardly seems as if I've closed my eyes, when someone shakes my shoulder.
It's just after midnight. The stars are bright in the clearest of night skies. The moon is high and full. The weather couldn't be better.
An hour later, I am roped to three tall men - Colin, Spinner and Peter - and my steps are about half of theirs. We are crunching our way through up a snowfield in the dark, and I am trying not to whine.
Exhaustion is in the mind, I tell myself, trying out the different steps I learned in snow school - and I come up with a combination that resembles a penguin searching for its mate. I lean heavily on my ice axe. I do rest steps. I search my mind for happy places to go.
By the second hour, I want to vomit. Headaches come and go.
Every few steps I have to tell Colin "pause please", so he doesn't yank me over. Peter tries to get me to eat a power bar. I almost choke on it. Spinner points out the faint hint of light in the sky. That's code for "move".
We stop on a field of rocks as the sun rises over the clouds. It is achingly beautiful. I want to sit on this rock for hours. I want to tell them to go ahead without me. I turn to Spinner to tell him "I quit" and he turns his back on me and starts moving. Later, he said he knew exactly what I was going to say, but he wasn't about to give me the chance to get it out of my mouth.
Nearly eight hours after leaving base camp, we reach the summit. I burst into tears.
It is 9am and there is nothing but vistas of California and Oregon around me. An aeroplane passes by below us.
This is the highest I have ever climbed in my life. The wind nearly knocks me over. I have a bloody nose and I hold my jacket to my face as I sign the register book, locked into a black box with climbing stickers all over it.
I am the last person of the 14 to get here.
But I am here.
On the way down, the snow is soft and slippery.
We navigate the steeper fields, then get on our butts, take off our crampons, stick each of our axes into the snow as brakes and start sliding. The mountains fly past us as we glissade down.
The wind stings my face and I feel my panic at being out of control slowly turn to pure joy and adrenaline - I am a dog in the back seat of a pick-up, ears flapping madly.
At the bottom, Colin holds up his ice axe for a high five.
We return our gear to the rental shop in Shasta by closing time. I refill my water, running across the street in jandals. I know I will hurt tomorrow, but without plastic boots on, I feel like I could fly. My shoulders feel like iron. I look up at the mountain, rising up in the flat land like a beacon, and wonder about its validity as a "power centre".
Then I take a bite of my ice-cream sandwich and shoehorn myself into the truck with Jamie and the boys, counting down the hours until my hot bath and a beer.
If you go:
Getting there
Mount Shasta is between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, off Interstate 5.
By air, the easiest international connection is through San Francisco International Airport or Sacramento International Airport - both are about 320km from Shasta township.
Accommodation
- Travel Inn, 504 S Mt Shasta Blvd, Mt Shasta, CA 96067. 530-926-4617
- Mount Shasta Resort, 1000 Siskiyou Lake Blvd, Mt Shasta, CA 96067. 530-926-3030
Guiding services
Shasta Base Camp LLC316 Chestnut St, Mt Shasta, CA 96067. 530-926-2359
Rentals
The Fifth Season, 300 N Mt Shasta Blvd, Mt Shasta, CA 96067. 530-926-3606
Up the mountain
Climbing information, weather reports and directions to trailheads can be found at www.climbingmtshasta.org
• Gwyneth Hyndman grew up in California, but now lives in South Otago
