Reversing your path is how a person can grow eyes on the back of their head. Spoons in the trail expose faint forks, a slice in the path that can add minutes to your hike like pats of butter adding grams of fat to a meal. The bloated approach, like the fatty meal: solo aiding becoming quintessentially American in its excesses.
I have made the approach to the base of Leaning Tower five times in my climbing career. At night. I have gotten lost on the approach to the base of Leaning Tower five times. At night.
The larger boulders, ghost ship hulls breaking into the night, echoed silhouettes against the peripheral of my headlamp. My beam sweeps left and right, looking from each cairn to the next, a map of granite breadcrumbs that leads me further uphill, towards the looming shadow I know is the Tower that hangs above me. As the cairns move uphill, my headlamp does double duty as a windshield wiper against the wettening stones. I find myself between two layer of cold and wet, one of the air and the other terrain.
The moss and green of the boulders stands upright, frightened in the dark with ice-white spots covering the surface, a mold across the skin of a fruit left out too long in the kitchen. The granite loses its speckled nature of white and black with bits of gold. As I gain the hill, these granite stones dress in browns and greens, silver jewelry adorning everything
At night, without a moon, your headlamp chokes your eyesight. Exchange distance for clarity, you find 50’ of certainty but lose the rest of the world. A compass spins in its place, uphill curves to a sideways drift against the path of switchbacks. With my headlamp off, I sit at the top of a flat boulder, let the distance of the horizon return. To my right is the looming top of the tower. To my left, I see the moving white of Bridelvaille falls. This is why the air is filled with bits of water. The mist from the waterfall, weaponized and airborne, floats and swirls in the slight breeze, a single drop in a cast of millions, somewhere between fog and rain. Against the temperature of this night, the air changes, becomes something between solid and gas.
I notice this when I breath in, the air, a white hit against the back of my throat, spilling down my windpipe until it sits like a rock in my lungs. Temperature like this changes the world around it. Enough breaths can turn a pair of lungs to blocks of ice, sustaining the heart of a lost hiker and offering extra time for revival. The mist becomes drops of frozen sand, miniscule and ragged, it remains light enough to swirl like mist should, but holds it shape against the skin and clothing that is falls against. A hardened snowstorm, delicate crystals replaced by bits of glass, these midnight dewdrops feel like a sandstorm darkening the desert night.
Rather than be a bit of hue changing the shade of a color, this mist remains on the surface of the skin like syrup, clumping, rolling, creating a snowmen when a passing branch scraps them along the arm and deposits them at the cuff of the sleeve.
With the headlamp turned on the sandstorm of water specks shimmers in the air and creates a bridge to the frozen leaves, tendrils of moss, and brittle sticks that create the surface of the boulders, no path left to be found, only the cairns that lead back towards the car and the darkness that leads toward the base of the Leaning Tower. I click the headlamp to off, the storm disappears as the frozen night reveals the thumb of the West face of the Leaning Tower, the arrow on the compass I commit to memory before returning to a smaller, more manageable, headlamp beam shaped world.
