Maybe Next Time. Maybe Not

summit fever and/or souvenir fever

This is a photo of the southeast ridge of a mountain called Sentinel Peak, at the north end of Lake Hawea in New Zealand:

The guy in the photo is my friend Martin. I took this photo on March 6 on our way down from the summit of Sentinel Peak, because, I mean, look at it.

This is a photo of my brother-in-law, Tim:

He’s Australian but has been living in New Zealand for eight years now, after he and my sister-in-law, Whitney, got married. When I got back to his house after coming down from Sentinel Peak with Martin, Tim said something like, “Well, now you should do Corner Peak.”

This is the previous photo of Martin, cropped:

(Corner Peak is the one with the yellow highlights above it)

This is a photo of my current favorite coffee mug:

It’s been my favorite coffee mug since last April, when I bought it. Or maybe since August 2023, when I saw it for the first time but didn’t buy it.

This is a Google street view of Spielman Bagels & Coffee on SE Division St. in Portland:

It’s kind of an institution in Portland, supplying more than 50 wholesalers with bagels, and operating four locations throughout the city. I didn’t know that when I walked over from our Airbnb to get a bagel. They had a bunch of coffee mugs for sale and I thought, hey, maybe I should buy that one, and then thought, nah, we have way too many coffee mugs. Then we drove home. The mugs were designed by Raf Spielman, artist, musician, and son of Spielman Bagels’ founder, Rick Spielman, but I didn’t know that at the time.

This is the elevation profile of the hike up Corner Peak:

As you can see, it gains a bit of elevation.

This is a photo of Jay, our little guy, at the National Transport & Toy Museum in Wanaka:

By the time I started poking around the internet looking for info on Corner Peak, we had already had a very full trip to New Zealand. I had run the Motatapu Ultra, and then had a couple days of hiking some steep peaks with Martin, and some nice trail runs, all while juggling childcare with Hilary, trying to work, and getting our taxes done. We were starting to think about our trip home, but had a few days left.

This is a photo of the playground down the street from Tim and Whitney’s house, which we visited just about every day because Jay loved it:

Also there was a food truck at the north end of the park, where they sold large orders of french fries for $11 NZD (about $6.25 USD). You can see Corner Peak from the playground. I told Tim he should hike the peak with me, since he hadn’t done it before, and he was tentative but seemed maybe into it enough to go with me.

This is a photo taken from the beach at the south end of Lake Hawea:

That’s Hilary’s head poking out of the water. She loves to swim in cold water. Jay did not love watching her swim in the lake, especially when it was windy and there were big waves. As you can see, Corner Peak is quite prominent on the east side of the lake.

This is a photo of the road from Wanaka to Lake Hawea:

We drove this road many times, coming back from the grocery store in Wanaka, and the Wanaka skate park (which Jay loved), and the playground in Wanaka where they have a giant slide shaped like a dinosaur (which Jay also loved). At certain points, the gap in the trees above the highway feels like it’s filled with the southwest ridge of Corner Peak.

This is a rendering of human rhinovirus 14, one of the viruses that causes the common cold:

Tim and Whitney’s 14-month-old daughter caught some sort of bug, and then Whitney got it, and then Tim got it, and the morning we had decided we’d do Corner Peak, he was definitely not feeling good enough to go. It was also quite breezy in Lake Hawea, which probably meant it’d be windy on Corner Peak. I decided I’d go up by myself and see, and if it was miserable and/or dangerous, I’d turn around and come down.

This is a photo of our cabinet of coffee mugs at our house in Missoula:

It’s basically one-in, one-out at this point. It is very hard to make a case for buying yet another coffee mug—as you can see, we could probably each use a different coffee mug every morning for two weeks and still not run out of mugs. (This is not including our extensive collection of travel mugs, none of which we have ever paid for)

This is a photo of the sign for the Corner Peak route:

From the trailhead, you hike/run some singletrack, then take a two-track road, and after about 0.8 miles, you get to this, and the route starts climbing on STEEP singletrack. It would have been nice to have Tim to hike with here, but I also remembered that he kept saying he wasn't in great shape right now (14-month-old kid, full-time job, just moved into a new house, etc.) and that I'd told him he could use my trekking poles.

This is a photo of some sheep:

It is a unique feeling to toil in earnest chugging up almost 2,000 feet in 1.5 miles and find hundreds of sheep just chilling there as if they wandered over from the tiki bar on the other side of the pool. At this point, I was quite happy Tim had decided to bail, because he’s a great guy and all, but holy fucking shit was I glad to have trekking poles. And I wasn’t even halfway to the peak yet.

This is a photo of Corner Peak:

(It’s the pointy one in the middle, under the cloud shadow.)

This is a photo I took 12 minutes after the previous photo:

The route is marked by these orange-topped posts, which gives you a bit more confidence that it goes through there somehow. Sort of.

This is a photo of a section of the sheep fence:

The fence winds up and over and through what feels like very improbable terrain (and probably really annoying for whoever had to hammer in all those t-posts—I assume a helicopter delivered them up here somewhere because if not, WOW). It’s funny, thinking humans (or maybe just me) exerting all this effort to get to this spot in search of some sort of meaning or self-actualization, and you’d have a hard time convincing probably 99 out of 100 human beings that coming up here is “worth it,” and YET. They have to build a fence up here to keep sheep out, in case, you know, they amble over here in the middle of lunch.

This is the sign that lets you know you’re crossing into Hawea Conservation Park:

It also says there is “No poled route to Corner Peak” and “Suitable for very experienced parties only.” At this point, I had about one more mile and 1,000 vertical feet to go—pretty much 80 percent of the way to the summit.

This is a photo of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale:

[Ldecola/Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beaufort_wind_scale.png#Licensing ]

About halfway through that last mile, the route crosses a saddle, and at that point, the stiff breezes I’d been feeling were funneled into a steady blast across my path, not quite enough to knock me down (70 mph) but definitely strong enough to turn my steps into a stagger and make me cautious about the cliffs 10 feet to my left. So maybe “Strong Gale.” Also enough to make me wonder if maybe I should turn around? But the summit was right there. I had trekking poles for balance, and I was an experienced party (wasn’t I?).

This is a drawing representing one interpretation of a human life.

There are no numbers for age on it, because lives are different lengths and I think people evolve differently. The idea is: That life is divided into two periods—the first, when you think you’ll have time to come back to a certain place again in your life, and the second, when you think you might never have time to come back to a certain place again in your life. It could be halfway around the world, or with a friend at a breakfast place a mile from your house. Depending on the situation, this idea can be a motivator, or dangerous.

This is a photo of the other side of my favorite coffee mug:

About seven months after the first time I saw this coffee mug in Spielman Bagels & Coffee, I happened to be back in Portland for a book event. I was in a hurry to get back to Missoula (it’s an 8.5-hour drive), but I made time to swing by the bagel shop. I ran in, bought the mug, no bagel, no coffee, just the mug, and drove home.

This is a photo of me on the summit of Corner Peak:

It was a little less windy up there, and the view was incredible.

This is a photo facing the other direction from the summit:

I mean, look at this place. If you lived 7,800 miles away, like I do, you might consider yourself lucky to get here once in life.

This is a photo I took later that afternoon:

That’s Jay riding his strider bike in front of the aforementioned food truck at the aforementioned playground near Tim and Whitney’s house. Corner Peak is over there on the right.

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