Carrots and Peanut Butter: Zen and the art of post-hol...no that s#*! just sucks... deep thoughts and deeper post-holes

Providence, Rhode Island. This historic north-eastern city is a hotbed of learning, art, and culture, replete with quaint architecture, a vibrant food scene, and great hipster-watching. Unfortunately, Rhode Island is notably devoid of topography, a key ingredient, I think it’s fair to say, for most kinds of climbing.

Mid-March, and New England is locked in dubious battle with the icy clutches of Old Man Winter: snow blizzards are starting to alternate with bone-chilling sleet, north-facing sidewalks are still locked in treacherous ice, and my situation is looking grim. It’s been almost two months since returning from Argentine Patagonia and the alpine-high is starting to fade. My classes at the community college are slow, I haven’t found work, and the hiring market seems to be frozen every morning along with my windshield. I find myself sliding rapidly down a slick rabbit-hole of coffee snobbery, experimental pancakes, and binge-surfing Mountain Project. I need a fix; I crave adventure. The urban life is comfy but isn’t enough to sustain the soul. I need to try really hard, I need to get pummeled, I need to get into a situation that actually sucks and requires me to dig deep and expend real willpower! Grit! My girlfriend raises her eyebrow and looks at me like I just volunteered to plow the whole city myself, naked. “Just make sure you finish the dishes, and put your laundry away.” “Sure babe, see you after work. I’ll pick up groceries.” Yep. The great thing about an honest partner is how they point out the silliness of our private manias before we take ourselves too seriously and do something stupid.

…Or, at least they make us pause and reflect on our inherent stupidity before we plunge in regardless. In the depths of the March doldrums, philosophy was not going to cut it: I needed to get my ass kicked, and I had the ice-tools to do it. The trick was, I needed a partner, but luckily I’d finally found one. I met Craig in the parking lot of the rock gym in Providence, and I could smell the Rockies on him before we even spoke. A well-worn Colorado Mountain School hoody confirmed my suspicions. Desperate times call for desperate measures; after 5 minutes of meet-and-greet in the parking lot we had a playdate set to climb ice in the White Mountains. That was 2 months ago. This time, Craig proposed an objective that would surely involve a dash of suffering along with good clean fun, and after some schedule-juggling and consultation of our significant others we successfully left Providence way behind schedule on a Thursday night, heading north for the White Mountains.

Cannon Cliff is one of the proud granite walls of New England. When we arrived at its base the next morning after sleeping in a snow-plow lot, the cliff was shrouded mysteriously in a thick wet fog. We slogged through the snowy forest, picked our way painstakingly across snow-covered talus, and finally got a good look at our objective: the Black Dike, an all-time classic New England winter climb. The convoluted rock appeared to ooze with swollen boogers of ice as fresh spindrift poured down from above at regular intervals. The forecast for the day: snow, then wintry-mix, then rain, high 34°. Yum. As Craig began scratching up the first marginally-protected pitch and we both kept dropping our heads as gloppy spin-drift covered us, it occurred to me that most people make a point of staying indoors in weather like this. Well, we didn’t drive all this way to have an easy time of things, did we?

The Black Dike was an excellent outing, proving to me once again that mixed climbing is pants-pissing scary even at moderate grades. Something about feeling my picks scraping at little rock edges and wondering if they’re going to pop off gives me the willies. We each enjoyed an exciting lead and were able to purge any demons that needed purging before it started to actually rain. Luckily Cannon Cliff is only a few pitches tall, so we were soon crawling up sugar snow into the forest above and all that remained was to scramble up to the trail and saunter down through the woods back to the car. Right?

Wrong.

As things turned out, our combined knowledge of the descent consisted of my glance at a short blurb on Mountain Project during a caffeine-induced packing session the evening before. Why have I played out this scenario so many times? Here we go again. To be fair, we also knew the general shape of the landform of Cannon Cliff. I mean we weren’t trying to descend a sheer Patagonian spire riddled with hanging glaciers and crevasses, we just needed to walk down a roundish hill and avoid the single cliff. We celebrated with a spongy high-five, coiled our sodden rope, and set off into the woods to accomplish this modest task.

It soon became apparent that any forward progress whatsoever was going to require a lot of work. The snow was bottomless, formless sugar that supported a human foot about as much as day-old tapioca pudding would support a brick. We weren’t exactly excited about the prospect of wallowing up to our waists down the whole hill, but it was downhill, how bad could it be? We took our best guess as to the location of the cliff, offset our direction accordingly, and plunged merrily along.

People talk about “bottomless” snow, but I never really pondered this phrase until I found myself floundering up to my chest in the forested slope above Cannon. It was like quicksand in a bad dream; if I pulled with my arms and pushed with my legs, my limbs would just sink deeper into the snow. My shoulders were now even with the surface and Craig was giggling as I squirmed uselessly in the hole. I had to wonder: Does this ever stop? Would I just keep going down, like Alice in some freakish sugar-snow wormhole?

We wallowed, we bumbled, we waded up to our chests, we plunged between submerged logs and fell on our faces. We discovered that we could swing our axes into trees to extricate ourselves from holes, and this provided modest entertainment. We slid down a steep slope on our butts, bouncing off trees to check our speed.

Eventually the terrain leveled out and we intercepted some ski tracks. We were thus able to take heart in two of the classic lies of being lost:
1) Someone has been here so it must be the right way.
2) It can’t be far now.
These are pretty much always wrong, but you’ve gotta believe in something, so why not indulge?

We soon realized we’d stepped out of the frying-pan into the fire….if the fire was a gentle slope of formless sugar snow, glazed with a thin pseudo-crust just strong enough to hold about half your body-weight, before collapsing and letting you plunge irremediably to the crotch.

There is nothing so demoralizing as post-holing in a flat forest. Distances that should take mere seconds to cover end up taking minutes. We human beings, the upright apes, triumphant in our bi-pedal progress over the earth, are reduced to tedious crawling. In the flattest spots I actually started crawling, like an infant, as this equally exhausting and completely demeaning technique was slightly more efficient. But nothing was actually efficient.

Nearing a stream bank, I plunged into a log, flipped over, rolled down the bank, and lay at the bottom feeling wet snow seep into my neck and underpants. “Do you get the feeling that someone is watching us and controlling the snow, laughing? It’s like some Gary Larson version of hell.” I pictured a guy with bifocals and a toupee in a control room watching us through hidden cameras, his hands atop buttons titled Hidden Log, Resist for 2 Seconds and the ever-popular Total Collapse. You could almost hear the laughter echoing through the soggy forest.

Craig pulled himself out of a face-plant and grinned maniacally, snow plastered to his moustache. “Life is like a post-hole, kiddo. Just when you think you’re gonna make it, you get totally screwed.” At least we both got a good laugh out of that one before sinking back into silent, tortured monotony of our glacial progress.

After experimenting with various forms of locomotion, including crawling, butt-scooting, and the belly-craw-roll-to-butt-scoot combo, we concluded that there is absolutely nothing one can do to make post-holing easier. There is no option but stoic endurance. Each motion feels like a massive effort of penitence, as if I was paying my karmic debt with the frozen north-land presiding in stern judgment. What were we doing today? We drove three hours to risk bodily injury while clawing up a frozen vertical gulley, then slog uselessly through a snowy forest? I guess so. Nothing to do but take another step. Step, plunge.

Three and a half hours later, after descending into the exhausted silence of our private karmic purgatories, we arrived at a packed snow-mobile path. “Careful, it might be a mirage,” Craig said. I crawled out of the stream-cut and flopped onto the path, my cheek meeting a hard, unyielding surface. Packed snow never felt so good. We stood up, brushed ourselves off, took some tentative steps forward, and reveled in the amazing luxury of walking.