I Won the Lottery!

And it’s better than I expected

I scream when I read the email. I imagine this is what it’s like to learn you passed the bar, got your dream job as a food-taster, or book-reader. Pure elation—the feeling that life is about to begin. I’ve been selected. I am one of the privileged few.

I call my daughter, Karli, first because she agreed to be a part of the adventure.

“I won the lottery to climb Whitney!”

Her excitement doesn’t match mine, and she sounds somewhat incredulous in her response. “You can’t just start a sentence with, ‘I won the lottery.’”

“Well it feels like I won the lottery. It’s even better than the lottery.” I’ve heard tell of people trying to get a permit to climb Whitney for years and not having this kind of luck. This is the first year I ever considered it, and now I get to spend four months planning and preparing to climb the highest peak in the contiguous United States with my sister, daughter and aunt.

I haven’t been this happy in months. It’s been almost six months since I published my memoir. This is a state of being which feels like something one must crawl out of, which I did not understand and didn’t believe when authors would warn about it. How very much it is like having a child. You are at once proud, terrified, in love, and absolutely none of it is what you expected it to be.

There is a levity in me for the rest of the day. When I arrive at the most challenging of my restaurant jobs, I can’t help but tell everyone who may or may not care the news.

My boss says, “I did that once a long time ago,” and then walks away to whatever task is next. This leaves me even more excited that maybe there’s some way I can finally relate to this porcupine who is perpetually in khaki pants.

During a lull I ask him to tell me his Whitney story. I am horrified as he relates that he was fifteen, and his “hippy stepdad” didn’t want to buy him new hiking boots and just lent John an old pair of his own that was one and a half sizes too small for his feet. I’m horrified as he tells me of the blisters that formed after the first three miles and made it so painful that he had to turn around and walk the three miles back and take a bus home alone.

The story is the opposite of what I expected, and softens my perspective on his quills for a few hours.

I appreciate the story of failure, and know that for our group, even though we are all strong women, we might not summit. We might come back with a tale of the time when we did not make it to the top of the mountain. I’m the only one of our foursome who has backpacked, and feel some responsibility for whatever outcome. We have four months to prepare, train, and make sure our shoes fit well.

First Training Hike: Nordhoff Peak 9.5 miles 4,485’ out and back climb via Pratt trail

Karli refuses to wake up for this one. I knew there was a 50/50 chance of this. She just started two new jobs and could probably use the extra sleep more than she could use a ten mile trek up into the Los Padres Forest even though the Karli of yesterday agreed to go on the hike. I sit on her bed and pet her calico cat while I give her a chance to be sure she doesn’t want to come. Sometimes she just needs to be more awake to make the right decision. I try not to push too hard as she has only recently started loving to hike. No bad vibes are allowed on the mountain.

So Trish and I haul our waist hydration packs into my little Toyota and drive up the 33 to pick up Jessica. If we had done this hike a week ago, the mountains would have been frosted in snow, but the temperature today is expected to be mid-70s and we are in that one moment when all the hills of Southern California are the magical green color of life. Jess lives on the way to the trail and would be a perfect fourth on the Whitney trip, but she refuses to camp.

On the trail, spring blooms have started but are nowhere near their peak. It’s only mid-march. The most prominent is the wild lilac. If you pick a cluster of these tiny blossoms and rub them between your palms with water, they make a lather you can use like soap. I fight the urge to demonstrate this because I don’t know if it’s one of those things I’ve repeated to my sisters since learning of it.

We are less than a quarter of the way when Jessica ponders, “What it is about this that makes us feel so good?.”

“For me, it’s all the plants and the sounds and the smells, and there aren’t cars or people, or anything and probably the exercise.”

“I think it’s just the exercise,” She answers back.

We are almost to the part of the mountain where we can watch the birds fly from above. There is the faintest trickle of the creek floating up from the canyon. It’s the exercise yes, but it’s more that we haven’t seen more than two people since we started. That the sun is warming our shoulders. that when we stop and look to the south we can see the lake, the ocean and the Channel Islands all at the same time. There is an exclusivity to this that has nothing to do with how much money we make or how good-looking we are or whether anyone chose us to be their wives.

You can’t cheat your way up the trail. It’s just one footstep followed by the next. This trail in particular is a twelve mile out-and-back with a peak of 3000 feet. For a long time I used to hate out-and backs, I preferred the loop and thought that out-and backs were making me experience the same thing twice until I really started paying attention. The trail on the way back is entirely new if you consider perspective. When we are almost to the top, Trish walks slowly and shows signs of heavy vibes. She warns us that she is going to have to trim her toenail once we summit so that it won’t curl into her flesh on the downhill.

Jess and I each pick up a different rock along the way for this purpose and I tuck them into the pockets of my fanny pack. Mine was a small blunt sandstone and Jessica’s a metamorphic, gray and sharp. When she gets to work at the peak,Trish declares Jess’s rock to be superior as she uses it to file down her toenail.

Jess says, “better luck next time, Ju.”

But I am lucky this time, at the top of a mountain with my sisters, doing possibly my favorite thing in the world, about to head down, about to imagine how delicious my lunch will be and how soothing the shower will be as the hot water carries the dirt that’s stuck to my ankles down the drain.

I want to write a book about the climb and the months leading up to it. Maybe not a mind-blowing travel memoir but I haven’t been this excited in a while. I am considering doing it in kind of the same way I did my memoir, where I publish each chapter for paid subscribers. I want to write about the training and the heaviness and lightness of it all. I’m curious about whether anyone would want to read about it. Did you enjoy this peak?