#41: Suffocating in the Enchantments 🫁
lofty expectations in an adverse environment
On Saturday, I thru-hiked The Enchantments, 22 miles of alpine lakes and staggering peaks in eastern Washington. A year ago, I did this same hike and it was one of the most beautiful, intense things I’ve ever experienced. This year, it was a struggle to remain present amidst the wildfire smoke that smothered the entire region. On both occasions, in the evening before, we coordinated a car drop-off at the end of this point-to-point hike, camped nearby, and set our alarms for 3:55am. Actually, everyone else’s alarms were set to 4am, but I just really hate being woken up to an alarm, so if I have to, I’d rather be tortured awake by a sound of my choosing.
Life in the past few months has been moving fast. Almost too fast. Now that I’m feeling ready to take on more, I’ve been eagerly pursuing opportunities and leaning into my curiosities. I was supposed to take my sweet time driving up from the Bay, but I delayed my departure by four days in an attempt to do it all. Last Tuesday, I had a call with the former president of a $70B public company who reached out to me after reading my climate newsletter. The next day, I feasted family style in Chinatown surrounded by climate founders and VCs. It was in the private room of a restaurant I’ve been to multiple times before, except this time we ordered all the expensive market price seafood dishes that my friends and I would usually not order.
To attend this climate tech dinner, I compressed my road trip from a chill meandering across four days to eight straight hours from the Bay to Bend. My original plan was to arrive before sunset to snag a last minute camping spot, but once I got there, a thick layer of smog was standing in place of golden hour. I changed my plans and showed up in a dinky motel lobby just a few minutes after making the booking online. Last year, I strolled among wildflowers along the Deschutes River at sunset. This year, I pulled back the curtains at 6:30am, saw the contorted sunrise through the smoke, 291 AQI on the iOS weather widget, and GTFO’d.
Change of plans
This was not the blog that I intended to write. For weeks, I thought that this blog would be about the beautifully intense. The idea itself has been with me for years now, but only recently crystallized in my mind. I decided to line up writing about beauty with The Enchantments so the concept would be supported by a freshly experienced personal adventure, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. The wildfires from the northeastern Rockies of British Columbia filled our lungs and laced the sky. Visibility plummeted and the deep alpine blues were nowhere to be seen. To be honest, throughout much of the hike, I wasn’t fully present because I was so occupied with evaluating potential risks (beyond just a little smoke). Not exactly what is typically meant by “breathtaking views”.
Instead, this blog will suffice as a jumble of half-baked, disconnected thoughts. A reflection of my scatterbrained mental state, strained eyes, tight hips, and sore knees after 22 miles and 5k vert through the haze.
The actual hike
Yeah - I concede it is pretty shitty to wake up before 4am to hike 22 miles in smog, but it wasn’t all bad. There’s a certain sense of camaraderie when it comes to type II fun and our group of nine (included three of us who had done it together last year) came in with high levels of stoke. The night before, the campsite picnic table was laden with gear, snacks, and pre-hike caffeinated beverages ranging from canned coffee to orange Monster which Tim referred to as “orange juice” and then after actually sipping it, renamed it to “like SunnyD but shittier”.
Part of the fun is also seeing how different people approach the same adventure. Each person with an understanding of their own needs had a unique take on hiking poles, insulation, footwear, hydration, and food. This time around, I went without poles, left my puffy in the car because I heat up fast, and made a risky bet in going with Under Armour trail runners that I had only worn once prior. For nutrition, I credit my overall performance and relatively decent recovery to the turkey sandwich, ~25 dried dates, beef jerky, ~50 mixed nuts, RX bar, kids’ fruit smoothie pouch, electrolyte powder, and six hard-boiled eggs. Enough food to feed a small village (or one big boy on the move). Whenever my legs started to feel any bit of tiredness, I popped a few dates, sipped some water out of my CamelBak bladder, and visualized the glucose streaming directly into the bloodstream of my thighs.
Although the smoke ruined the views (and probably our bodies), I was still decently pleased with how it went down. Thanks to the constant stream of calories and water coming in, I stayed properly fueled up and never fell anywhere near the danger zone. With a few monotonous miles left, I jogged the remainder and found Tim waiting for me by the river. I jumped in, but it was freezing, so I only stayed submerged long enough to wash the bloody cuts and dirt off my legs.
In all, took me around 10 hours to finish. The lack of crystal clear lakes and cathedral-like mountains cut down on photography time. I suppose the smoke also sped me up with urgency. Three hours faster than last year.
On Climate
My body might’ve held up well, but my mind was adrift. When the terrain was rocky or super steep like Aasgard Pass which at times required all four limbs, I looked down and coordinated my feet so I wouldn’t stumble. But when it was smooth and leveled, I let my mind wander and started to view this experience as a metaphor.
With my lungs burning and eyes tearing up (either due to sweat, smoke, or both), I remembered the California wildfires of 2018 which is when I first started to pay attention to the climate crisis. As an individual somewhat voluntarily experiencing discomfort, pain, and lack of dope AF views due to the wildfires, I zoomed out and viewed myself as a microcosm of a broader collective. If my temporary, mild suffering in The Enchantments is any indication of what’s to come, then extrapolating this in terms of time and geography paints a pretty grim picture. In other words, unfortunately shit is going to get worse before it gets better.
Recently, I asked a friend who’s on the job search if he had any interest in climate tech. Since quitting my job, I haven’t been too plugged into the job market, but it seems kinda brutal out there right now. He replied with a sleight-of-hand, “nah, I’m personally not that interested” to respectfully decline my offer to connect him with climate companies, but also not oppose my own interest in climate. I thought to myself, that’s totally fair; to each their own. But it’s been days and I’ve still been thinking about that moment. Why did it feel weird to me?
Fundamentally, framing climate change as a set of symptoms that some experience and others don’t is myopic and shortsighted. Startup pedagogy instructs wanna-be founders to solve their own problems. “Be your own customer” is one of the many pithy adages from Silicon Valley. I think that’s pretty good advice for most problems, but not appropriate for all. In the context of climate, waiting to become “your own customer” is a fool’s errand for us privileged coastal elites who are free to evade heatwaves by ducking into AC’d buildings and flee flooding by air travel. Waiting to become “personally interested” is futile. By the time it’s your personal problem, it’ll be too late.
Seeing is believing. And what I saw on Saturday reaffirms my long-term commitment to playing some role in climate. To those that remain skeptical, I say “Go and see.” Okay, so maybe it doesn’t require hiking in smog for 10+ hours, but still - go and see.
Reflecting on my decision-making
Investor and fellow fan of keeping Earth inhabitable, John Doerr says “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”
In hindsight, if I had known what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone. There were multiple opportunities to bail. The day before, there was some chatter in our group chat with a few links being shared about the air quality forecast. At the campsite, I was the only person who voiced my concerns about the smoke. And about 6 miles in, before the 2.5k ascent up Aasgard Pass, we had an informal check-in to see if we should keep going. I was concerned about the smoke, but my plan all along was to outrun the smoke by hiking faster. So if it sounds like I’m being self-righteous, it’s actually quite the opposite. I was stubbornly locked in to completing this thru-hike.
All things considered, the consequences were pretty low. But this smoggy adventure reminded me of something in Quit, a book I read last year that helped me navigate the sabbatical journey. In this true story, an experienced climber Jeffrey was on the last expedition of his quest to climb the 100 highest peaks in New England. Apparently, in the climbing world, this is a BFD. When the fog and heavy rain rolled in, his climbing partner decided to turn around. They disagreed and Jeffrey continued. His body was found a few days later. The real kicker is that this guy Jeffrey was a psychology professor who conducted extensive research on the escalation of commitment.
Today, there’s a never-ending fire hose of self-help books, decision-making frameworks, and life-guiding principles. But ideas are cheap for a reason. As the author Annie Duke says, knowing is not the same as doing. My experience in The Enchantments and Jeffery’s much more unfortunate case confirm this.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
- Albert Einstein
