I am going to set this down because Varela asked me to and because my eyes are still not working right and I have nothing better to do than sit in this room and talk while someone else writes it. I was on the mountain. I went up it and came back down. That is the fact of the matter and I do not especially care whether it is believed, but Varela says it should be recorded and so I am telling it to Varela and Varela is writing it and that is the arrangement.

My name is Gideon Shale. I have been trapping in this country for eleven years, working circuits between the Missouri settlements and the mountains of what was, until recently, Spanish territory. I know this country as well as I know anything. I know how the altitude changes the air and how the air changes a man and I know the difference between a hard climb and a climb that is trying to kill you. I have done both kinds. The mountain is the second kind, and I want that on record before I tell you what I saw at the top of it, because when a man comes down blind and tells you what he saw, the natural question is whether he was in a condition to see anything reliable, and I want it understood that I knew what I was doing when I started and the blindness came after, not before.

The Spanish officer — Pike, the American — attempted it in November of 1806. I know this because everyone in the trapping country knows this, because he failed in a way that men talk about. He looked at it in November, with winter already on it, and he thought he could knock it out in a day. He had no proper cold gear. He had men who were already wearing out. He went up partway and the mountain turned him back and he wrote in his papers that the summit was probably unreachable and would certainly never be ascended by a man. I have read enough of what he wrote to know he was estimating from the conditions he met in November at an elevation well below the summit, and that his estimate was wrong, and I climbed the mountain in July of 1812 to prove it to myself, not to anyone else.

Why I Went Up

I am going to be honest about this because there is no reason not to be. I went up because a man in Santa Fe told me it could not be done and offered me forty dollars if I could prove otherwise. That is the whole of it. There was no scientific purpose. I am not a man of science. I trap beaver and sell the pelts and I live well enough and I do not require a larger reason than forty dollars and the fact that someone told me a thing was impossible.

I had been looking at the mountain for years. It sits on the eastern front of the range like a sentinel — you can see it from the plains a hundred miles out, this single enormous peak standing ahead of the others as if it stepped forward from the line. Every trapper in the country knows it as a landmark. I had camped at its base multiple times and looked up at it and thought about it and done nothing, because there was no reason to climb a mountain that had no furs on it and no water worth diverting from its course. The forty dollars was the reason I had been missing.

I went alone. I want this noted. I am not saying this to make myself sound more capable than I am — a man alone on a mountain that size is a man making a mistake, and I knew it — but I went alone because there was no one I wanted to ask and because alone is faster and because if I was going to fail I preferred to fail without witnesses. I told Varela where I was going before I left Taos. Varela did not believe I would actually do it. He said so. I said we would settle the question when I came back.

What the Mountain Does to the Air

I have hunted above ten thousand feet before. The air thins as you climb and your body knows it — your breath shortens, your legs tire faster than the grade warrants, your head begins to ache in the place just behind your eyes. This is normal and you push through it and your body adjusts within a day or two and you continue. I knew this going in. I was prepared for it.

What I was not prepared for was what the mountain does above twelve thousand feet, which is something different from ordinary thinning air and which I do not have a proper name for because I have never discussed it with anyone who has been up there and the medical men I have spoken to since dismiss what I describe as symptoms of exhaustion or fever rather than altitude. I am telling you what I experienced and you can call it what you like.

Above twelve thousand feet, the light changes. I do not mean the quality of light you get at high elevation — the sharpness of it, the way shadows go blue — I mean something about how the light lands on objects. Things at a distance seemed more distinct than things close to me, which is the opposite of how vision normally works. I could see, with extraordinary clarity, a hawk turning above a ridge a quarter mile away, while the rocks under my own boots looked slightly soft, as if the ground were not entirely committed to being solid. This lasted for several hours and then passed as I continued to climb, and I attributed it to the altitude and kept moving.

The headache at that elevation is not a headache in the ordinary sense. It is pressure — total, symmetrical pressure — as if the skull has been packed from the inside with something that is very slowly expanding. You learn to breathe around it. You take shorter steps and breathe deliberately between them and you do not let yourself think about it directly. The moment you think about it directly it becomes worse.

I camped at approximately thirteen thousand feet on the first night — I am estimating, I had no instrument — in a hollow in the boulder field where the wind was somewhat reduced. I ate cold and I did not build a fire because there was nothing to burn. I slept badly. I woke before dawn and the stars above me were wrong — not in their positions but in their brightness, which was too much, as if the sky at that elevation had less between it and the stars and they were coming through unfiltered. I lay and looked at them until it was light enough to climb and then I got up and continued.

The Summit

I reached the summit on the morning of the second day. I will tell you plainly what I found there and you can do with it what you want.

The summit is a plateau — not a sharp peak as it appears from the plains but a broad, flat area of broken rock, perhaps a quarter mile across, entirely above the treeline, exposed on all sides to the full force of the sky. There is no shelter on it. The wind at that elevation is not wind in the way wind normally operates — it is a physical force without interruption, constant and cold even in July, and it comes from multiple directions simultaneously in a way that does not make mechanical sense and that left me unable to determine, for a time, which direction I was facing.

I sat down on the rocks and looked east.

I will try to describe what I saw and I will fail, and the failure is part of what I am trying to tell you, because the failure to describe it is what got my account dismissed, and the dismissal is part of what happened to me on that mountain as much as the climb itself.

The plains stretched east beneath me for a distance I cannot calculate. Hundreds of miles. Flat, brown-gold in the July morning, fading at the edges into a haze that was not cloud but simply distance — the point at which the eye gives up. Beneath that haze, beneath the horizon, I understood in a way that was physical rather than intellectual that the earth curved away. I could see the curvature of it. Not dramatically — not the way it looks in an illustration — but as a subtle wrongness in the straight line I expected the plains to make, a slight bending away on either side that told me I was standing at an elevation from which the shape of the world itself was visible.

The clouds were below me. Not all of them — there were clouds above as well — but a layer of broken summer cloud lay several thousand feet below the summit, and I looked down through the gaps in it at the foothills and the lower slopes. I was above the weather. I was in a layer of air that the weather moved under rather than through.

I stayed on the summit for perhaps two hours. I could not have said, then, how long I stayed. Time at that altitude behaves strangely — I do not mean this as mysticism, I mean that the ordinary sense of minutes passing was absent, replaced by something more like the passage of light rather than time. The sun moved. I know that because my shadow moved. The rest I cannot account for.

I ate the last of what I was carrying. I looked at my compass, which gave me a reading that conflicted with what I understood to be north given my position on the mountain, and I noted the discrepancy in my mind and attributed it to instrument error or magnetic variation and did not investigate further, which was a mistake, because the discrepancy is one of the things that was later used to argue I had not been where I said I was.

I began to descend.

Coming Down

The snow-blindness did not begin until the second afternoon of the descent. The summit plateau, in full July sun at that altitude, reflects light off the remaining snow-patches and off the pale granite in a way that is not like any other reflected light — it comes from below and from the sides as well as from above, and there is no shadow to rest your eyes in. I was not wearing anything over my eyes because I had not thought to bring anything over my eyes, because I had not known the summit would be what it was. By the time I understood the problem, the damage was already begun.

It came on gradually and then suddenly. First a persistent ache behind the eyes that I confused with the altitude headache. Then a gritty sensation, as if sand had blown into both eyes simultaneously. Then a narrowing of what I could see, the edges going white, until by the time I reached the treeline on the second afternoon I was navigating by feel and memory rather than sight, and by nightfall I could not see anything at all.

I camped by sound — found running water, followed it until the grade flattened enough to suggest a clearing, and stopped. I spent two nights on that mountain unable to see. I knew the direction of Taos by the angle of the sun on my face and by the wind. I walked out of the mountains in three days by those methods alone and arrived in Taos on a Thursday morning and walked into Varela's trading house and sat down and told him I had been on the summit and that I could not currently see.

Varela wrote it all down. He believed me, or he believed that something had happened to me that was consistent with my account. He sent for a man who knew something of medicine and the man treated my eyes with a compress and told me the sight would likely return, which it did, over a period of two weeks, imperfectly. I still do not see well in bright light. I still cannot look directly at snow in full sun without a covering over my eyes.

What They Said About It

The geographers and officers who reviewed Varela's record of my account dismissed it on four grounds, which Varela communicated to me and which I will set down here as accurately as I can remember them.

First: the description of the world visible beneath the clouds was considered impossible at any altitude attainable on that mountain. The geographers' current understanding of the peak's height placed the summit below the typical cloud layer, and a man claiming to have looked down at clouds was taken to be exaggerating or confused. This understanding of the mountain's height was incorrect. I do not know by how much it was incorrect, but the summit was above the clouds in July of 1812 and I stood on it and looked down at them, and that is not an exaggeration.

Second: my compass reading conflicted with the accepted bearing of the summit from Taos. I had recorded north as several degrees off from where my compass indicated it should be. The geographers said this meant I had not been on the summit — that I had climbed some lower peak and mistaken it for the main one. I believe the compass error was magnetic variation combined with the iron content of the granite at that elevation, which I had no way of knowing about and which the geographers also did not adequately account for. The error does not mean I was on the wrong mountain. I know which mountain I was on.

Third: a man who returns snow-blind from a summit he claims to have reached is a man whose powers of observation are in question. The blindness, which should have been evidence that I had been somewhere bright enough and exposed enough to damage my eyes, was instead taken as evidence that I was not in a condition to reliably report what I had experienced. This is the argument that I find the most irritating of the four, because the blindness came down, not up. I was seeing fine when I stood on the summit. I described what I saw when I could still see it.

Fourth: I am a trapper. This was not stated directly, but it was present in every response I received. The man who reached the summit and recorded it properly, with instruments and witnesses and official sanction, would be a different kind of man than I am. That man came eight years later, with the Long Expedition, and his name was Edwin James, and for a brief period the mountain was named for him, and then the gold rush came and the name was changed back to Pike's, after the man who had looked at it in November of 1806 and decided it was probably unreachable.

The mountain is named for a man who failed to climb it. The man who first reached the summit is not in the official record. I am also not in the official record, and I was there first, and I have made my peace with this, because the mountain does not care whose name is on the maps and neither, at this point, do I.

What I have not made peace with is the light. There is something that happens to a man who stands above the clouds and sees the curvature of the earth beneath him and understands, for the first time, through his own eyes rather than through someone else's description, what the world actually looks like. I saw it and I cannot unsee it, even now, even with the blindness. It is part of my understanding of where I stand in things. The mountain gave me that and then took my eyes for a fortnight as payment, and if that is the bargain then I would make it again.

Tell anyone you want. Or tell no one. I have said what I came to say.