I thought about him often as the first snows began to fall,
the soft, cold flowers of winter drifting down from a grey, imposing sky.
They fell with an innocent laziness, no purpose or agenda, merely frozen water
driven by wind and gravity. The snow clung to the edges first, the
crevices, shunning the smooth open faces. The chilled needles of the
pines up high were ready, the trees' sap already long retreated into their
cores. The summits of the high peaks lay cloaked in heavy cloud, the rocks
and crags catching frost feathers and ice. The pikas and marmots had
given up for the season, driven into burrows deep in the hard jumbled talus,
the pale granite, the dark tortured splinters of metamorphic rubble. Save
for a few tough, masochistic souls, the Sierras were vacant, the hikers and
tourists and mountaineers mostly content to stay where the snow is scarce, the
sun warmer. There's a fireplace, a friend, a lover, a glass of
wine. Why go up there? Matthew was up there. He's up there
still. He never came down, but he stays with me, creeping into my
thoughts, a breeze off the ridge above, a smile I can't quite place, eyes that
look back at me with a certain knowing. I understand those eyes, that
smile. Matthew Greene and I have never met, but I know him just the same.
No doubt Matthew was frustrated. His faithful Subaru, after so many
trips, had blown a head gasket. Marooned in Mammoth Lakes? He left
the car at a shop and stayed at the Shady Rest Campground near town, paying day
to day in anticipation of getting back into the mountains, the peaks and spires
that filled the skyline around the remote ski town. He was itching to get
back up there. On July 16th, 2013, Matthew called his father
and sent a text to a friend. It was the last anyone would hear from him.
Days passed. His car was fixed. Friends and family wondered where
he was. We still don't know. Matthew loaded up his pack, took his
hiking gear, left his remaining equipment at the campground, and vanished into
the backcountry. A strong man, almost forty years old, he was no stranger
to adventure and long distance travel. Friends say that thirty miles of
hiking in a day wouldn't worry him. He was as strong as he would ever
be. The mountains were warm, the sun high in the summer sky. As far
as anyone can tell, he hiked into the rugged Ritter Range, a wild fractured saw
blade of dark peaks, spires, and needles of often loose and unforgiving
volcanic rock. We can imagine his quickening stride, the pack settling
onto his hips and shoulders, the creak of the straps, dust rising up from his
boots on the trail. He was tall and lean, almost six feet, one hundred
and fifty five pounds of energy and forward motion. A brilliant smile
spread across his strong face, intense blue eyes scanning the trail ahead, the
high country of his intense longing.
This is how I like to think of him, alive, humming with the thrill of
adventure, the pounding emotions that draw us to wild places. I know
Matthew Greene. I am Matthew Greene. I've lived those same moments
when nothing in the world was more important, more exciting than lifting the
pack onto my back and seeing what lay beyond that next ridge, climbing exposed
ridges, vertical walls, heart in my throat, afraid sometimes, but using that
fear, working with it to find those still points within, moving inward to
discover, above, a sense of calm, a feeling that everything suddenly makes
sense, that up there, in the thin air and sharp stone that not a single moment
has been wasted.
In my early twenties, my right knee still recovering from a pulled tendon, I
packed up my classic 1972 white Plymouth Valiant, the small block V8 model, and
left the coast of California, bound for the High Sierra, alone. The big
engine rumbled across the miles, the hot August air of the Great Central Valley
blowing in through the windows. I don't recall if I told my parents where
I was going. All that mattered to me was that I was going. The high
country had me in an unbreakable tractor beam, and I went. For this
mission, the mightiest range, the Palisades, called the loudest. I hadn't
climbed many of the 14,000 ft. peaks of the Sierra, so Mt. Sill was on the
agenda, perhaps some others. I had days of food. Even with the
wounded knee, I was strong, having built up a solid base of extreme hill
running, climbing, cycling. I knew I'd make it through, somehow.
At the trailhead, I hoisted the massive load and hiked up into the dreams of my
youth, the Romantic narrative that all mountaineers craft for themselves.
We are the heroes of our own stories, Lord Byrons with ice axes and a taste for
steep rock, too easily forgetting the debt we owe to others, the family and
loved ones whose hearts we carry with our own. My parents, my brother and
sister, the friends back on the coast, they were stuffed in my pack, too,
though I couldn't be bothered to recognize it at the time. What mattered
was up there, and I was young and full of fire and joy and wonder.
Two days later, I crawled from my tent beside the glacier and looked up at the
stars back lighting the tremendous crest of peaks above me--Mt. Sill, North
Palisade, Mt. Winchell. Oh, this was the real thing, the drug I'd come
for: Fearsome ice gullies, soaring buttresses, fields of talus, a world so
beautiful and different from the sidewalks and ballparks of my suburban
childhood that I had to know it more intimately. A vicarious knowledge
would never suffice. I pulled a headlamp over a knit cap, switched on the
small, feeble beam, and set out over the frozen snow as the skyline paled to
the east. I carried a helmet, crampons on my pack, an ice axe dangling
from one hand until the slope steepened, a small diameter rope for my escape
down the steep summit rocks. Nowhere in the basin, on the peaks, for as
far as I could see was another human soul.
Before long I climbed onto the shoulder below the north couloir and into the
full morning sun. Fortunately, the snow was just soft enough to kick
steps, so the crampons stayed on the pack. Breathing hard now, at over
13,000 ft and climbing, I worked on settling into a rhythm, the steady kicking
of steps and moving the ice axe. The snow ramp steepened up into the
heart of the mountain, of what mattered most. A shadowed headwall of
broken stone capped the gully. By 8AM, I stopped to catch my breath at
the top of the couloir. Below, a thousand feet of snow swept out and down
to bone-breaking rocks. No place to slip or lose heart. Above, a
vertical maze of fragmented granite led to a small notch from which I could
gain the summit. The climbing wasn't difficult, but it was steep, the
consequences of a mistake absolutely fatal.
I changed into rock shoes and left the heavy mountain boots at the base of the
vertical climbing. With a deep breath, muttering "Don't screw this
up!" I set off, grabbing the big holds, avoiding the slippery ice holding
some of them to the mountain. I danced confidently from hold to hold,
testing everything that looked suspicious. Could this one pull?
That one's junk. Ah, this one is good. And on and on.
Easy, really. In only a few minutes, I was at the notch. I stashed
the rope, and lit out for the summit, grabbing fistfuls of granite, moving
quickly, almost running. I couldn't stop myself. Everywhere around
me plunged vast chasms of air and light, most of the peaks below me. I
was a bird, a hawk, a falcon set free. These movements, this summit were
everything.
And then it was done. I stood on the top of Mt. Sill. I had no
illusions about this being a climb for the record books, but looking out over
the Sierra, a scattering of clouds painting shadows across the deep furrows of
glacier scoured granite, I connected with something bigger, deeper, older than
my small life, and in this connection was more than I had been. Some
might call it God, but I didn't have a name for it. It just was.
It was light and air and power and the promise of my youth.
I sat for a time on the summit blocks, watched the clouds drift above, and
eventually made my way back to the notch. Carefully, I put a sling over a
stout horn of rock, slipped the rope through, and smoothly lowered myself back
to my boots. All that remained was some simple down climbing and sliding
of the snow gully. Well before noon, I was back at my camp, the small
stream, shelves and slabs of white granite surrounding the tent.
I had done it. I would live to hike out, drive back to my home, hug my
parents, continue with my college courses, earn a couple of degrees, get
married...the long chain of challenges, events, triumphs and tragedies that stretched
out into the future because I came back from my solo climb of Mt. Sill.
Matthew Greene had a future, too, family and friends expecting his
return. Dean Rosnau, a climber and search and rescue expert in the
Mammoth area, learned as we did about Matthew's disappearance and took it upon
himself to mount a number of searches in the Ritter Range, going out with a few
friends and scouring the peaks he sees almost daily. Dean exchanged
messages often with Matthew's father, Bob, who lived back in Pennsylvania.
As a father himself, Dean knew he had to help find the missing son. Bob
wanted to help in the search, and Dean could feel the man's pain and need to be
out in the mountains, working to bring his boy home. But Dean knew how
difficult such work could be and told the 67 year old what he would be
facing. As Dean put it, "I threw EVERYTHING at him to talk him out
of it. This was the beginning of my discovery of who Bob Greene is…and what a
father does for a son."
What followed are scenes of aching poignancy that we can only imagine.
Bob Greene took one of his son's packs, loaded it up with forty five pounds of
whatever he could find, and stepped out into the Pennsylvania countryside.
Out of shape, the bulk of the pack bearing down on him like the weight of his
loss, Bob Greene walked roads and hills and trails through a hard eastern
winter, the force of raw emotion propelling him forward. Day after day he
went out, bent under the weight, and didn't break. He grew tough and
strong and more determined with each mile. In the spring of the next
year, he rented a condo in Mammoth and continued his training as the snow
retreated from the high country. When the time was right, Dean and Bob
began a series of treks into the Ritter Range. They didn't find Matthew. With his strength and drive, the man could be
almost anywhere, but Bob Greene was able to touch the mountains that touched
his son, to hike in his footsteps. There must be some solace in that.
The wheel of summer turns now, heating the rocks where marmots and pikas lounge
in the sun. The good days stack up one after another, but even now the
angle of the light has begun to change, and it looks as if another year will
pass with no signs of Matthew Greene. He's up there, of course, waiting,
patient. Perhaps he doesn't want to be found, or perhaps being found is
missing the point. Matthew Greene is part of those mountains now, and
he's never coming out, whether they find his body or not. But we can find
his spirit if we choose. We need only look up to the crest, watch the
rocky summits rake the clouds, listen to the creeks bounding down the cliffs,
hear the Clark's nutcrackers complain in the pines, turn our faces up to the
sun and feel the warmth of another day in the High Sierra.
Matthew Greene:
Climb on, brother. You were meant for the mountains.
