Game On

California has 15 summits of more than 14,000 feet. For peak freaks such as Russ McBride, a wild race is on to catch Jack McBroom, who bagged the Fourteeners in a record 4 1/2 days

The Sierra Nevada mountains.  Marilyn Newton/AP

It's a few minutes after 1 a.m. on a cool September night, the kind that makes for good hiking here in the lonely heights of the Sierra Nevadas. Above a ragged peak line a full moon shines down like a celestial flashlight, illuminating Russ McBride as he adjusts his headlamp, slips on his small backpack and heads out to chase a little history.

Less than 16 hours from now McBride will be crumpled on a boulder, sobbing in frustration, having failed in his quest. For now, however, he's confident, and his strategy appears to be sound. Or as sound as possible when you consider his goal: to summit all 15 of California's 14,000-foot peaks in less than a week. The 34-year-old McBride has done the math, studied the topo maps and is confident not only that he can do it but also that he can eclipse Jack McBroom's record time of four days, 11 hours and 19 minutes. Starting here, in the gut of the state, where all but one of the 14,000-foot mountains are clustered in a 1,500-square-mile area, his game plan is to climb the seven peaks that make up the Palisades Group (the hardest section), then White Mountain, then the six summits in the Whitney block and finally, after a 450-mile drive north, Mount Shasta.

It won't be as easy for McBride as it was in 1998, when he set a record on a relatively leisurely nine-day jaunt with two other climbers. To break McBroom's mark, he must endure moments of extreme suffering in which altitude and sleep deprivation stir a witch's brew in the brain, creating half-seen things among the alpine boulders. The aerobic output will be the equivalent of, in McBride's words, "running 20 marathons, combined with some free-soloing at 14,000 feet."

But it will be worth it, McBride insists. Why? He ponders the question for a second as he strides uphill on Thunderbolt Peak. The only sound is the scritching of hiking boots on earth. "It's about seeing how far you can push yourself," he says, looking up at the craggy silhouette of the rock face. "It's just you versus the mountains."

This sounds Zen-like. Alas, it's a complete crock. When tomorrow comes and he throws in the towel -- metaphorically at least, for an ultralight hiker would never carry such a trivial item -- McBride will not see it as some sort of Karmic destiny but rather as a failure to break the record, to catch Jack.

McBride will have missed a golden opportunity to take the lead in the race for the Fourteeners, this crazy statewide game of can-you-top-this that has energized California's community of peak freaks. The game is best described as a run-hike-climb-and-drive scavenger hunt at altitude, and its unofficial rules are these: 1) You must attain the highest point on each summit, and 2) once on the trail, you can receive no assistance.

For the disparate group of actual and would-be conquerors of the Fourteeners, the lure is the feat's accessibility. As opposed to an Ironman triathlon, a far-flung Eco-Challenge or a speed record on El Capitan -- all exclusive competitions contested by athletes who train year-round -- the 15 California peaks are eminently conquerable. Think day hiking on steroids. If you have above-average climbing skills and a good set of lungs, you've got a shot. "Boys are boys, and we're just grown-up boys," explains McBroom. "After a while we want to make games out of stuff. You can race on something superhard like the Nose of El Cap, but only a handful of people have a prayer of doing that. Instead, how about these mountains? All it takes is running, climbing and a certain amount of boldness. That opens it up: Now there are thousands of people who can be in the game."

He grins. "So let's play."

To play, one has to know the competition, and McBroom is the rabbit the rest are chasing. Head 90 miles east of L.A. to the town of Hemet, where McBroom teaches high school chemistry and biology, and it's easy to pick out which house belongs to him. In a cookie-cutter cul-de-sac lined with manicured lawns and sensible cars, McBroom's place is the one with the 1967 VW Westphalia van out front and the dusty yard teeming with palm trees and cacti. "We did it partly for the environmental reasons, to save water," McBroom says as he looks out at the Death Valley tableau he and his wife, Melody, have created. "But we did it as much for the money. Water's expensive, man!"

He lets out an explosive laugh. With his bare feet, bead necklace, shoulder-length gray hair and thick silver goatee, the 45-year-old McBroom is the portrait of an aging hippie. That he doesn't own a TV, doesn't get newspapers ("You always find stuff out eventually," he says), likes to navigate by the stars, says stuff like "I totally dig it!" and plays a mean 10-string classical guitar further cultivates the image.

Don't be fooled: McBroom may be mellow of mind, but he is fleet of foot. As a teenager he ran a 4:23 mile (fast enough to earn him a scholarship to Oklahoma Christian), and among many other feats, he's finished the Western States 100 and come in 19th (out of 69) in the Badwater 135-mile race from Death Valley to Whitney Portals. Last year he participated in his first Eco-Challenge (his team finished 39th out of 55), and this week he's back with another Eco team in Fiji.

McBroom first heard about the Fourteeners in the fall of 1996, when he met two hikers who were in the midst of a two-week sojourn up the 15 peaks. Intrigued, he searched the Web to see if there was a record and found an account of the nine-day, 10-hour run made by McBride, Tony Ralph and the celebrated rock climber Hans Florine in 1998. (As far as anyone knows -- and keep in mind that there isn't an Elias Sports Bureau in mountaineering -- only two other people, brothers Quade and Tyle Smith in the late '70s, had done all 15 in succession before McBride's group.)

Nine days? McBroom figured he could top that. But then he found another web post, this one written by a 25-year-old climber from Arizona named Josh Swartz. The account, replete with summit photos from all the peaks, detailed how Swartz had done the circuit -- unassisted, no less -- in five days, 23 hours and 41 minutes in August 2001. Near the top of the page Swartz had issued a challenge: "To my knowledge, this is the new record. If anyone has done it faster, please stand up!"

McBroom says his first impulse was to stay seated. ("I saw Josh's number, and I was like, Ooooh, six days, that's kind of fast.") Others had a different reaction. After Swartz threw down the gauntlet, it seemed that every adventurer wanted a crack at the mark. Florine tried. McBride tried. A handful of others, lured by word of mouth and modem, tried. All of them failed.

Then McBroom decided that he wanted to play.

After a recon trip in June and a false start in July (when a nearby forest fire halted his attempt), McBroom headed back to the Sierras in mid-August with his friend Paul McGuffin, who served as his driver and support person between trailheads. Starting with the Palisades, McBroom cruised through the peaks as if they were attractions at Disneyland rather than the daunting challenges some climbers consider them to be. (Starlight Peak, for example, has a final spire that inspired Stephen Porcella, author of California's Fourteeners, to write out a will before climbing it.) To cut down on flat hiking time, McBroom made a strategic adjustment to Swartz's route, linking the first seven mountains; in other words, instead of going up and down each mountain, he worked his way along ridges from the side of one mountain to the next. As an ultrarunner, McBroom was also able to jog approximately 40 of the 125 miles he covered on foot, even running over stretches of talus, boulders that protrude from the earth like rows of misshapen molars. "That's the key to this," says McBroom. "There are plenty of triathletes who could kill me in a road race, but get them on the rocks and they don't know what to do. Me, I love the rocks."

McBride is loving the rocks too. It's 11:30 a.m., and he's on fire. Ten hours into his expedition he has already cleared the first five peaks and is ahead of McBroom's pace. He has moved fast enough to stay warm in just a wicking shirt, Lycra tights and a thin jacket, despite temperatures in the 30s at night. He also has yet to sleep -- a good thing, since he didn't bring a sleeping bag, just a space blanket.

A graduate student in philosophy at Cal, McBride is logical and efficient. To prepare, he dropped 15 pounds off his already lanky 6'3", 185-pound frame and spent a week at elevation to acclimatize and prevent the nausea, retching and dizziness of altitude sickness. He's also carrying a heart-rate monitor, which he has been checking every few minutes to stay near his goal of 145 (155 at higher altitudes).

The only nagging concern he has as he heads toward the sixth peak is the disappearance of his Endurox energy drink powder, which he left by a stream on the far side of Bishop Pass. But who needs food when one has endorphins? Heading down the slope of Mount Sill, McBride pumps his tiny MP3 player to full volume and breaks into a run. As he hurtles down the hillside, he revels in the rush of adrenaline, thinking, I'm a god, I'm a god, I'm a god.

Now is the time to grab the Fourteeners record. "Eventually a bifurcation is going to occur," says McBride. "As more and more people say, 'Hey, I could do that,' a smaller subset of them will be capable of setting the record."

Until then, however, there is lots of room for improvement. Take the driving thing, for example. Since time behind the wheel counts toward the record, what's to prevent someone from tearing up I-5 at 120 mph to save three hours? "Nothing, absolutely nothing!" says McBroom with a cackle. "I'm waiting for someone to get a Maserati."

McBride disagrees. To even the playing field, he proposes a set time of 12 hours for the drive. Others think Mount Shasta should just be eliminated. Then there's the thorny issue of Mount Williamson, which is closed during the second half of the year for the bighorn-sheep-mating season. Florine and McBride think this restriction should be honored, and McBride thinks a good alternative is climbing Tyndall three times. Swartz and McBroom just went ahead and climbed Williamson, rules be damned.

It's 4:10 p.m. on Day Two, and defeat towers over McBride in the form of his sixth peak, Middle Palisade, a skyscraper of rock that looks, he will say later, like the Nose of El Cap. Partway up he can make out a 600-foot, 80-degree headwall, a vertical football field of slick rock. It looks too tough, it is too late in the day, and he is too low on food. To make an attempt now would be to risk getting marooned on the wall in the dark, like a cat stuck halfway up a tree. "I knew Middle Pal was going to be the linchpin, but I wasn't ready for it to be so hellacious," McBride says later. "Me being somewhat arrogant, I figured, Class 4 [in which one scrambles on rocks but does not have to do any technical climbing] -- not a problem, I'll just find a route. I was very wrong."

Nonetheless he will be back. McBroom's record, all parties agree, won't stand for long. Swartz thinks he can shave off a full day. He calls the record "very soft" and wrote in an e-mail that "sub-3 days might be possible." (He plans to try again next August.) McBride and McBroom both say they have a game plan that they believe will get them around 31Ú2 days. What none of the three climbers realize, since they don't communicate with each other, is that the two Mc's have the same "secret" plan: to link the set of peaks in the Whitney block, as McBride tried to do in his most recent failed attempt, thus eliminating a substantial amount of hiking and elevation change.

Each of the three men holds a particular advantage. McBroom is the best runner and probably the best navigator. McBride, who was once a pro climber, is the fastest on vertical rock. And Swartz appears to have a head for strategy (not surprising for someone who says he once "dabbled" in applied math and cryptography as a graduate student at Arizona). Of course, who knows how many others are planning to take a whack at the record? Says McBroom, "I've heard rumors that dozens of people are going to try. Personally, I'm hoping one of them breaks the record. Then I'll have more motivation to try again."

The morning after bailing out on Middle Palisade, McBride awakes early. Despite his promises to his girlfriend to forget the Fourteeners for a while, he is hunched on a couch in a rented condo, hair sticking up in pillow-molded wedges, with a collection of creased topographical maps spread in front of him. He turns the maps this way and that, examining routes. "I can't get Middle Pal off the brain," he says, shaking his head. "There's gotta be an easier way up there."

The game is far from over. It's just beginning.

Issue date: October 14, 2002

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