Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled--and Knuckleheaded--Quest for the Rocky Mountain High

by Mark Obmascik

Overview

Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can’t resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, Obmascik, addled by the thin air, decides to keep his head in the clouds and try to scale all fifty-four of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners—and to do it in less than one year. The result is Halfway to Heaven, a rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing chronicle of an outrageous adventure that is no walk in the park. This "hilarious midlife picaresque" (Publishers Weekly) has garnered wide critical acclaim, was named an "Editor’s Pick" by Parade, won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and made one reviewer laugh so hard he "blew beer out of [his] nose" (Colorado Daily). Like the author’s critically acclaimed debut, The Big Year, it brings a keen eye and sharp humor to an obsessive subculture: climbers who share the author’s crazed passion of scaling all fifty-four of the famed and feared Fourteeners.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416567004
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	05/11/2010
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,021,122
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Mark Obmascik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Big Year, which was made into a movie, and Halfway to Heaven. He won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for outdoor literature, the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism, and was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Denver with his wife and their three sons.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

I was fat, forty-four, and in the market for a vasectomy. My mortgage was half gone, but so was my hair. Crabgrass bugged me.

After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I completed each other's sentences. Most were about our boys. We had three, though they sounded louder. Because Merrill traveled for her job, and I stayed home for mine, my three sons saw a lot of me. I changed their diapers, cooked their meals, coached their soccer, and harped about their homework. I was around so much that when our three-year-old woke in the middle of the night, he usually screamed for me. Our pubescent twelve-year-old, however, usually screamed at me. The eight-year-old could go either way.

It was a chaotic life, but a fun life, and I knew how to live it — until an emergency phone call rocked my world.

"Dad," our twelve-year-old said from his Colorado summer camp, "they're taking me to the hospital."

Turns out Cass and a bunch of camp buddies were climbing Pikes Peak, elevation 14,115 feet, when he tripped and slashed open his shin to the bone. Now I was the one screaming.

"Dad," he said, "calm down. I summited. It was amazing. I saw the sunrise from the top of the mountain. I slipped on the way down, but I made it to the top — two-and-a-half miles above sea level."

"How bad does it hurt?"

"I summited, Dad. I summited."

With ten surgical staples in his leg, Cass actually let me hug him in front of his friends. He even hugged me back. Then we did something more surprising: We talked.

He told me that mountains over 14,000 feet were called Fourteeners, and that Colorado had a bunch of them. He asked if I knew anything about them.

I did.

Our home state has fifty-four peaks higher than 14,000 feet — more than any other state or province in North America. Every year more than 500,000 people try to climb a Fourteener, but fewer than 1,300 people have ever reported standing atop them all. Colorado's Fourteeners have been summited by skiers and snowboarders, racers and amputees, dogs, cats, cockatiels, monkeys, and horses, people as young as one and as old as eighty-one. One Texan spent three weeks pushing a peanut to the summit of one peak with his nose. There have been gunfights and cannibalism, avalanches and helicopter crashes. Hundreds have died and thousands have been maimed.

One blond boy even survived America's most famous Fourteener with a Frankenstein scar on his leg.

Nice one, Dad, he said, but how do you know all this?

Once upon a time, before I was a husband or a father — back in the days when my inseam had more inches than my waistline — I somehow managed to climb a few Fourteeners.

My son was shocked. For a fleeting millisecond, he even looked at me as if I were almost not embarrassing. Teetering on the edge of a truly touching father-and-son moment, I was ready for another hug, but he was overcome by another surge of testosterone.

Dad, how about if we climb a Fourteener together?

Well, when I was climbing mountains — that was a lifetime ago, back when I liked to exercise. These days I like to eat. I've packed so much on my hips it would be like climbing with a pony keg of beer in my fanny pack. Imagine lugging all that extra weight up the 1,860 steps of the Empire State Building, four times, and doing it in highaltitude air with about a third less oxygen than Manhattan. All that work would be just one Fourteener.

He looked at me. I looked at him.

My mind was racing: Could I do it? Was it even possible for me to try? Back when I was in shape, those five Fourteener summits were still about the hardest sport I'd ever taken on — harder than two-aday football practices as a high school punk, harder than weeklong bike tours that sent me, an alleged adult, four hundred miles over and around the mountain ranges of Colorado. Still, the beauty of the Fourteeners was something to remember. Standing on the roof of the Rockies, high above the trees and the clouds and the everyday worries, always made me feel like I was halfway to heaven. Now I'm forty-four, and my life is halfway there too.

Cass kept looking at me. I wondered what he saw. Someone to argue with? Someone to avoid? Someone who once did something cool, but way before he was even born? My face must have betrayed my fear: The older I get, the better I was.

Then he said the magic words: Dad — please.

I couldn't resist.

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Obmascik

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Failure 5

Grays Peak

Torreys Peak

2 Religious Experience 11

Mount of the Holy Cross

3 The Mission Takes Shape 22

Huron Peak

Quandary Peak

La Plata Peak

Mount Sherman

Mount Yale

Mount Princeton

4 The Monkey 35

Creston Needle

Humboldt Peak

Mount Elbert

Grays Peak

Torreys Peak

5 Man-Date 59

Missouri Mountain

6 Panic 72

Mount Antero

7 Shock 81

Mount Massive

8 Bulldog 97

Mount Shavano

Tabeguace Peak

9 Punishment 107

Mount Columbia

10 Blown Away 111

Mount Evans

Mount Bierstadt

11 The Elephant 118

Mount Belford

Mount Oxford

12 One Benjamin Franklin 123

Culebra Peak

San Luis Peak

13 Gravity 137

Little Bear Peak

Blanca Peak

Ellingwood Point

14 Guts 148

Wetterborn Peak

Uncompahgre Peak

Redcloud Peak

Sunshine Peak

15 Scruples 175

Mount Democrat

Mount Lincoln

Mount Bross

16 Gnawed 182

Mount Lindsey

17 Day at the Office 188

Pyramid Peak

18 Limits 196

Maroon Peak

Castle Peak

19 Man Maker 207

Missouri Mountain

20 The Needles 212

Mount Eolus

Sunlight Peak

Windom Peak

21 The Bald Leading the Blind 228

Wilson Peak

22 Homestretch 236

Handies Peak

Mount Sneffels

Snowmass Mountain

Kit Carson Peak

Challenger Point

Mount Harvard

Capitol Peak

El Diente Peak

Mount Wilson

North Maroon Peak

Crestone Peak

23 Return 249

Longs Peak

24 Summit 260

Pikes Peak

Bibliography 267

Acknowledgments 271

Editorial Reviews

Obmascik's saga revels in off-color jokes and humiliating pratfalls; the result feels like a raucous bowling night, with moderate oxygen deprivation, on the brink of an abyss." —Publishers Weekly

"The effort is recounted with wit and style, a much easier read than climbing those mountains."
—Sports Illustrated

From the Publisher

In this hilarious midlife picaresque, journalist Obmascik (The Big Year) set himself the goal of climbing all 54 Colorado mountain peaks that are higher than 14,0000 feet because it was both hard, and not too hard-thousands have completed the technically undemanding circuit. He hit the gym, pared two pounds from his flabby frame and spent a summer plodding and wheezing up the "fourteeners," trying to keep up with the better-conditioned women and older men who cruised past toward the summits. Obmascik dodged lightning bolts, took a few hair-raising tumbles, admired the majestic scenery and experienced the exaltation of having truly earned his post-climb bacon double-cheeseburgers. Above all, he bonded with his "man-dates"-male climbing partners who head to the hills seeking refuge from woman troubles, fear of needles and numbing desk jobs. Their slightly feckless masculinity harmonizes with the shaggy-dog stories the author sprinkles in about the miners, cannibals and odious Texans who populate Colorado's mountain lore. Instead of the rarefied spirituality of typical mountaineering narratives, Obmascik's saga revels in off-color jokes and humiliating pratfalls; the result feels like a raucous bowling night, with moderate oxygen deprivation, on the brink of an abyss. (May 12)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A middle-aged former journalist sets out to summit all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot-plus peaks. Obmascik (The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, 2004), who led the Denver Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Columbine massacre before turning to nature writing, proves an engaging, convivial host as he leads us up the slopes of the Rockies accompanied by a parade of colorful climbing partners. The author often conquered several adjoining peaks on the same expedition, and each climb introduces us to a different companion, each with a unique back story. The partners were the result of a demand from Obmascik's wife Merrill that her neophyte mountaineer would never climb alone. At one point, she filled the role of climbing partner herself, only to discover a few feet from the summit of Snowmass Mountain that she was afraid of heights. The author's desperate quest for hiking companions took him through friends, neighbors, old college buddies and his reluctant teenage son. Through the Internet, he joined forces on other mountains with a Boeing engineer who climbed in shorts, another who chain-smoked Marlboros, a 70-year-old with two artificial hips and the legendary Erik Weihenmayer, the only blind man ever to summit Mount Everest. Obmascik encountered mountain goats, several hungry marmots (who ate his climbing poles), two gnarly old gold miners and even a few lovelorn females. Throughout, the author maintains a breezy narrative style, a keen eye for nature's beauty and a self-deprecating tone that makes his marathon journey fly by. His story and those of many of the free spirits he meets along the way vividly demonstrate the thrill of taking the road less traveled.Highly readable, entertaining and educational.

Kirkus Reviews