Cold warriors

IT’S 10:30 ON A MOONLESS FRIDAY NIGHT IN THE EASTERN SIERRA. IT’S darker than the inside of a cow and colder than a well digger’s caboose. I’m stomping a flat spot in snow that must be 85 miles deep, getting ready to pitch a tent the size of a straitjacket.

Which somehow seems appropriate, given my companions once were ordinary people with regular jobs. Then something in their lives snapped: They signed up for a wilderness training course. They wanted to touch the void. Experience the liberation of wilderness. Conquer the elements. Discover the freezing point of snot. And I decided to join them.

After 10 weeks of training, snow camp, as it’s called, is the final test. It separates survivors from snivelers. Sure, they could do this in the summer, but then they wouldn’t be able to wear teal fleece long johns. Or learn how to build an ice table. Or slog around on snowshoes. And they wouldn’t be able to brag that they’re tougher than the toughest member of the Donner Party.

Which starts me thinking. I’d better size up the team. I watch Howard Schweizer. He seems like a healthy guy, slightly pudgy and easy to subdue. For the rest of the trip, I keep my words with him to a minimum. No sense making friends with dinner.

Meet the class

Of course, I could have said no. There is a moment in the life of every accidental outdoorsman when the folly of an endeavor comes clear for one brilliant moment -- like a sunny spot in a blizzard -- and then vanishes.

For me, that moment was meeting Mike Adams. Adams is a squat man with long, fidgety strides and a raspy voice that sounds like wind over a scarp. He looks like a cross between a Celtic wee person and Jack Nicholson frozen in the maze in “The Shining.” Scary. Funny-scary, but scary. There’s only one thing he hates more than granola and oatmeal: snivelers.

Adams teaches and leads the Long Beach One group in the Sierra Club’s Wilderness Travel Course. If there’s a guy to whom you would tether yourself, it’s Adams, and more than a few expert mountaineers have done so. At 55, he has climbed high peaks worldwide and taught novices for more than 25 years. Don Holmes dedicated his “Highpoints of the United States,” a bible to peak collectors, to Adams and two other climbing partners. Adams has gone to Denali three times, but never summited, each time because of concerns for his own safety and for those in his party. He likes to repeat an old climber’s adage: Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

His crew and students are a mix of neophytes and veterans. Dave “City Boy” Meltzer, an assistant leader, once accidentally set a picnic table afire (to his credit, Adams put it out). There’s Gary Novotny, a whippet-bodied marathoner whose idea of fun is to not tell you what you’re doing wrong on snowshoes until he’s done laughing (“You might try clamping down with your toe, Geoff.”) There’s Lisa Springer, aka Princess, an Amazon who just wants to find a man who doesn’t turn into a wife. There’s Kim Clark, the guy who I suspect is responsible for the inflatable penis balloon that appears atop Adams’ tent. Still no idea who blew it up.

“The most important thing,” Adams rasps to me early on, “is that you don’t take yourself too seriously.” This is great news for someone like me, who doesn’t know a dingle from a dell but has heard of both.

The course, which is taught at four locations, costs $210 for Sierra Club members, $225 for nonmembers -- plus the approximately $4,754.92 in equipment that will earn you a hefty dividend at REI -- and teaches you what that mirror on the compass is for, creative ways to fashion a splint, and those things mom always told you: Don’t get lost. Dress warmly.

The object of snow camp is to find out whether you were listening in class when they explained declination (amo, amas, amat?), why wet cotton will kill you (it’s wet?) and whether you remember the survival rule of threes: three minutes without talking, three hours without coffee, and three days without e-mail. It’s a tough-love course that will leave you screaming “Siiiiiiiiiiimon!” like abandoned British mountaineer Joe Simpson in “Touching the Void” -- which also happens to be the feature movie on the bus we take to the trail head southwest of Bishop.

I thought the film was a comedy. I was corrected when I caught the fear-wracked faces of my fellow captives reflected in the bus window against the white maw of death known as the Sierra Nevada, an indigenous word that translates as “place where white men eat their own.” I wished I’d memorized the 23rd Psalm.

The sun was down by the time we reached the point where South Lake Road turns to snow. For approximately the next hour, the bus driver attempted to execute a million-point turn. He left us beside the road, where we wrestled with backpacks and snowshoes.

“Five minutes!” Adams shouted.

Half an hour later, we tottered off like ants carrying insect carcasses. I’m loaded with 6,532 pounds in a backpack stacked taller than the Watts Towers, and strapped to my feet are snowshoes that look like flattened beavers. We cover two miles in approximately 14 years.

The misery index

“This course is not about going into the mountains; it’s about looking at life differently,” Adams whispers. “You’ll always think about being prepared.”

The last time -- and I really thought it would be the last time -- I nearly froze my potatoes was in a blizzard atop the Salang Pass in Afghanistan. I was with a Pashtun driver who kept opening the door of the van to cough up blood-flecked phlegm. This went on for about 10 hours.

I have camped in the wilds for extended periods. The last time -- and this time I really mean it -- was with the 3rd Infantry in Iraq, and other than the sandstorms, heat and shooting, it was loads of fun.

In short, I look very tough on paper. In truth, I am a sniveler.

When we arrive at our destination, the Table Mountain Group Campground, I say a silent prayer of thanks to the U.S. Forest Service, which has left the latrine unlocked. Someone also has dug a staircase down to it. Never have I inhaled the warm fetid atmosphere of a pit toilet and had a Martha Stewart moment. This trip is changing my life already.

By the time I put up my tent, Muhammad Maznavi, a 63-year-old Sri Lankan physician who never backpacked in his life, arrives dead last, escorted by City Boy. It’s a position Maznavi will hold humbly and proudly all weekend.

Maznavi is the oldest student, but a youngster next to assistant leader Bob Beach, a retired aerospace worker who is about to turn 81 and has been to snow camp about a dozen times, as a birthday treat. His pack looks like it was used by John Muir, and his tent is a nylon worm from an evolutionary cul de sac off the branch that brought us the geodesic designs that soon dot the snow. My tent, on further inspection, is the size of a box of kitchen matches. As I crawl in, I realize that the nuts and berries diet has made me flatulent.

Later that night, much later, I have to relieve myself. It’s 2 a.m. The program teaches sleepy hikers to urinate when you need to, or you won’t sleep. At 3:30 a.m., I get out and bore a yellow hole in the snow that appears to reach to Hades. Millions of stars mock me.

By 7 a.m. the smell of white gas fills the air. Students fire up stoves, and suddenly it is clear how City Boy torched a picnic table. Fortunately our table is made of ice, built by digging a foot-wide trench in a rectangle. We sit on the ground, feet in the trench, and hunch over stoves. I nearly lose my eyebrows. The smell of melting fleece fills the air.

A liter of water boils at 8,500 feet at exactly the moment when Adams yells “Five minutes!” Oatmeal goes cold about three seconds later.

Seventeen minutes later, we leave our 600-pound tents behind and toddle up the road to begin climbing. I discover something about the Sierra in March. Once the sun comes up, it can be about 60 degrees. Once it’s 60 degrees, snow takes on the consistency of a Slurpee. We squunch 967 miles up an unmarked slope before Adams allows us to eat our nuts and berries. Maznavi arrives last. He has his gaiters on backward.

Adams and Novotny dig a trench to show the layers of snow and explain avalanche risks. There’s a famous film of an avalanche taken from two miles away, according to Adams. It’s famous because it killed the guy filming it.

Then we split into two groups. One for the rational; the other for the hard-core climbers who want to impress Princess. I choose the latter. Sheryl O’Rourke, a program veteran, is the only woman in this group. On a day hike in the San Bernardinos a couple of weeks ago, Adams had told us that expeditions with women tend to survive. Men never admit they’re tired, scared or lost.

I break the mold. I’m tired, scared and lost. I also have to go potty. (I’m not allowed to tell all the details, but I need to say that die-hard environmentalists pack the toilet paper out with them, and high-altitude mountaineers pack everything out.)

We top 10,000 feet. I am coated with sweat. I didn’t pay much attention in class, but I think sweat is made of water. At that elevation, water freezes at about 2 p.m. when the sun ducks behind the jawbone of the Sierra.

It is at this point when Novotny explains that I would fall a lot less often if I toe into the snow on the down slope. I concentrate. God hears my prayer. He sends Novotny into a spectacular face plant. I can feel my life changing.

The only thing that keeps me going is the fear of having Beach leave snowshoe prints on my back. I barely beat him to camp. It is getting dark. I am yelling “Siiiiiiiiiiiiiimon!” No one is answering.

A cheesy epiphany

Then I smell pizza. With pepperoni. And freshly roasted peppers. And goat cheese. Maybe I have hypothermia. No, I’m still in hell. But it’s there beside me, inside an aluminum contraption over a jet-fuel stove. Novotny and his sensible wife, Kay, have made pizza. Adams has made scallops Alfredo. Suddenly, the epiphany strikes: I love snow camp!

I love Kim’s cheese fondue! I love every dish equally as it passes me. I especially love Janet Yee when she whips out a double-chocolate birthday cake for Beach. Howard’s safe.

Others have slightly different epiphanies. Princess, who reads “The Mastery of Love” by Don Miguel Ruiz on the bus, has recovered from a yearlong bout of depression and a string of bad boyfriends by taking the program and taking to wilderness. “I’ve never had a sad day since,” she says. Muhammad finds his mountain. “It’s like a second childhood,” he says when we finish the weekend on Sunday afternoon. He is beaming. His jacket is inside out.

City Boy, who once got lost in Will Rogers State Historic Park, is well on his way to becoming a leader like Adams. And was that the natural quaver of Adams’ voice, or a snivel I heard when he declared snow camp over?

Marisol Hollerbach, approximate weight 6 ounces, puts down her pack for the last time and admits she was about to cry the first night out, hauling her husband’s backpack, which is far too big for her. But he loves the wilderness, and she loves him. Enough, it turns out, to have waited two years in Tijuana before immigration authorities would let her cross the border to live with her husband. Their marriage is open country.

Howard sees me admire his “Rubber Room” T-shirt with the dominatrix on the back. He gives it to me. I feel bad about thinking of him as dinner.

Long after the beer and potato chips are gone on the bus ride home, I am feeling the change too. I watch the clouds bring brutal weather into the Sierra. Adams, who has been stuck on many a mountain, says wistfully, “I wish we’d been blasted at least one night.” I understand what he means. I could’ve made it. We all could have.

When we get back to Long Beach, I whip out my cellphone and begin to sing of brave Ulysses to the lonely Penelope. “I’m glad you had fun, dear,” my wife says. “Can you bring home a gallon of milk?”