Mountain Man

I was more than halfway up the mountain, exhausted, drenched in sweat—which was now freezing—when I realized I had been climbing the wrong one. That was when I most distinctly understood two truths: I am a dumb person; and I might actually die up here. 

While visiting Salzburg a few months prior I’d seen an advertisement for a multi-day  “hut-to-hut” hiking trail in the Austrian alps called the Karwendel High Trail. That night at my  hostel, I looked it up and found that the entire season was booked up except the first week of September: the last week the trail was open before snowfall made travel untenable. Not considering the fact I had no prior mountaineering experience, I paid the deposits on the bookings and forgot about it. 

Several months later, I found myself leaving my apartment in Prague at 6 a.m. to get on an 8-hour bus journey to the town of Sharnitz, in Northern Austria, arriving around 2 p.m. Packed in my 55L Osprey travel backpack were a couple changes of clothes, some cookies,  peanut butter and Nutella, and a sleeping bag tied to the bottom of my bag.  

The first day’s hike took about 5 hours through gradually ascending gravel trails leading into the mountains. As dusk approached, I realized I had begun hiking too late in the day and had to run the last hour in order to make it to the hut while there was still light. I arrived in almost  pitch darkness, using my phone’s flashlight to guide my last kilometre of travel, to find the hut manager outside, leaning over a railing, smoking a cigarette. The ember dangling in the darkness. 

“Hallo?” he asked, evidently surprised to see someone arriving so late. 

“Hi,” I heaved.

“Are you staying here tonight?” 

“Yes,” I said. We were on a literal mountain. Where else would I stay? 

“Dinner is already finished.” 

“That’s alright. I brought food.” 

He led me inside, to what I quickly realized was not a “hut” at all, but a beautiful log  cabin, adorned with wood paneling, rustic wood-carved furniture, and a full-on bar with beer taps and everything. Inside the small dining area, at the elegant, stained wood tables, sat several  middle-aged women, with all the tight hiking gear and lean bodies to prove their mountaineering-ness, eating a light dinner of beef goulash, accompanied by a respectable pour of white wine. I’d thought this was going to be some kind of backwoods journey, but it now looked like I was going to rubbing elbows with the upper echelon of middle-aged Austrian society. 

Contemplating the grandeur of this place, I took off my boots, and the moment I removed  my foot from its leather seal a rank stench assaulted both me and the refined air about this place.  In only moments the miasma had filled the hallway. I was well aware that at any moment one of the middle-aged Austrian ladies would push their dinner plates to the middle of the table,  gingerly rise from their chair, delicately slide it back under the table, and approach me to say, as politely as possible, “Excuse me, sir. There is a distinct odour coming from your feet. It is making it difficult to eat our meals. Could you please remedy this before returning to the dining  area?”  

But I wasn’t going to give those ladies the satisfaction of telling me my feet reeked. So I ran to the shared bedroom, threw my bag on my bunk bed, and changed my socks before one of those refined gentlewomen could get the chance. 

Now clean socked and starving from hiking for the past five hours, I brought the victuals I’d packed, cookies and peanut butter, into the dining room, which was now packed. I could only find room to sit next to two older, very demure looking blonde-haired Austrian women, their taut red snow burnt face skin stretched perfectly around their angular faces. They both wore immaculately fluffy wool sweaters and mountaineering pants, while I wore a threadbare grey sweater and muddy jeans. Too hungry to greet them, I tore open my bag of cookies and opened my jar of peanut butter, which I began slathering onto my cookies—which were absurdly hard to chew. The crunching noises that followed sounded like I was chewing hard cookies. I feel that people know how crunchy cookies can be and that sentence does not require a simile. 

Across the table, the two Austrian women glanced at me in apparent awe that someone  could be so brazenly childish as to disturb their peaceful nightcap by eating the loudest and most rock-like cookies in the world. The lines in their brows read, ‘poor boy. He does not understand the simple rules of propriety.’” 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I missed dinner.” 

“Ah.” One of them nodded. “Is there none left?” 

“No.” I shook my head. Mouth full. Chewing a laborious challenge. “But I have cookies,” I croaked. 

The women rejoined this comment with a trying smile. 

After more than a minute of persistent and commendable hard work, I had consumed one cookie. And while still extremely hungry, I was too embarrassed to continue cement mixing cookies in my mouth and decided to just go to bed hungry. To this day I stand by that decision.  

The trying looks of those Austrian women were more painful than any hunger pangs I suffered that night. 

The following day’s hike was quite a short one—only about two hours or so to the next  hut—so I decided to take a short detour. The travel blog I was using as guide for my journey suggested I summit a mountain nearby, so I did what I was told. It was a tiring climb but not technically difficult until I neared the summit, which all involved scrambling on exposed rock, which was slick and icy this late in the season. I climbed for only a few minutes before finally deciding it probably wasn’t smart to continue considering I had no prior scrambling experience. So I headed back down, and went to the next hut, feeling a little dejected at having given up so quickly. 

The next hut was similar to the last: cozy, cabinny, and luxurious. I was determined to get my dinner this time, so I got there early. And as I sat there waiting for dinner, at the table across from me sat four very pretty Austrian girls, chatting in their cute Austrian nonsense. The longer I sat there, the more I began to think to myself: you should go talk to them. Ask if you can sit with them. That’s what people do when they travel. They introduce themselves to new people. And then I thought, No. They don’t want to talk to you. They’re speaking German. They’re with their friends. They will all have to speak in an entirely different language just to accommodate you.  Don’t ruin their dinner—ah fuck it, they’re pretty, I’m gonna go talk to them.  

But just as I decided on ruining their dinner, a middle-aged American man and his son, who was about my age, approached my table.  

“Do you mind if we sit here?” the older man asked. 

So close to speaking to those beautiful Austrian girls, I begrudgingly said yes, but it  turned out that the three of us actually had a very nice conversation that evening. We drank a few beers, spent hours engaged in an emphatic conversation about Haruki Murakami’s books. I was glad for the conversation, even if it wasn’t with pretty Austrian girls. 

The following day’s hike proved a far more challenging one. Before I left, the hut owner told me that the previous day several people had canceled their reservations due to the heavy snowfall. He recommended I do the same.  

“I’ll be careful,” I assured him, although I had no mountaineering experience and no idea what “being careful” actually meant. 

On my way towards the mountain pass, I came across two of the Austrian girls I’d seen at dinner the previous night. They stood in a saddle between two mountains, and both were raising their phones towards the sky. 

“Hallo,” I said, showing off my proficiency in the German language. 

“Hello,” they both responded, somehow knowing immediately that I couldn’t speak  German.  

“Which way are you heading?” the blonde girl asked. 

“That way.” I pointed toward a snow-covered mountain pass. 

“Ah, we just came from that way yesterday. It is very snowy.”  

“You’re going that way?” I pointed in the direction I’d come the day before. 

“Yes, but right now we are trying to get a phone reception so we can register for our university classes.” 

“Ah that makes sense.” 

“But we can’t get any here, so we’re going to try down there.” She gestured to the hut I’d stayed in on the first night, now a small brown blip at the bottom of the valley. 

“Ok, good luck,” I said, sounding so cool and composed talking to a pretty girl. 

As we parted, I considered the huge mountain towering in front of me, and the notion struck me that I should climb it. The travel blog had said there was another mountain I could  summit on this route, so I inexplicably assumed it was the enormous one in front of me. Without  any further thought, I began towards it with one thought crossing my mind: 

Up. I should go up. 

The bottom of the trail consisted of steep rocky switchbacks, but as I ascended, the trail  became snow covered. Very soon the snow was so deep that the trail was entirely covered. I  began slipping and started leaning on my hands for support—a technique I would later learn was called scrambling—as I continued on. Scrambling on, incline steepening, my body got so hot that my winter jacket was soon soaked several times through with sweat which seemed to be excreting from the marrow of my bones, in spite of the freezing wind burning my cheeks. And  the higher I got, the harder it was. I considered heading back down but opted not to. I had to  prove to myself that I could summit a mountain. So I kept climbing, over snow, rock, and ice. 

At one point I slipped very badly, and just barely caught myself near a cliff edge, with at least a forty foot drop off below. So close to falling so far. This frightened me enough to pause and check the trails app on my phone, where I saw that not only was I nowhere near the trail, but  I was also climbing the entirely wrong mountain. That was when I realized I had very seriously, possibly fatally, fucked up.

I sat down to collect myself, and as I did, noticed the remarkable distance I’d ascended. I was so high up that I could just barely see the Austrian girls, now returning to the saddle where we’d met, as little orange and blue dots in their colourful winter jackets.  

The wind suddenly picked up with a newfound intensity and the wet hairs covering my hairy white body began stiffening and freezing me into one large sweatsicle. Shivering, I contemplated how I could possibly get down. It was so steep. I’d slip if I tried hiking back down the way I’d ascended. At that moment I wished that someone would call a rescue helicopter to  come get me. But just as soon as I thought this, I blocked the notion from my mind. I didn’t want that. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of being airlifted off a mountain I’d idiotically chosen to climb in the first place. I’d gotten myself up here and I could get myself back down. Even if it  killed me. Death is always preferable to embarrassment.  

Because walking seemed too dangerous given the slipperiness of the slope, I decided the safest method of descent was to slide. Sitting on my butt, I used my hands to slow myself, and let gravity pull me down the slope. My asshole hit a few rocks on the way down—which wasn’t  great—and at one point I bounced too high and nearly toppled over but managed to right myself and continue sliding. After about ten minutes of exhausting stopping and starting again, the snow finally ceased, and I could safely, if weakly, walk the remainder of the way down. 

As I made it to the bottom of the mountain, exhausted, defeated, and feeling like I wanted  to cry just a little bit, I noticed that the Austrian girls were still there, but was too shaken to smile at them as I passed. Walking by, I stripped off my large travel backpack, winter jacket, and t-shirt, the latter of which clung to my body. I wrung it out and sweat splashed onto the rocky  ground. One of the Austrian girls approached me as I did so.

“How was the climb?” she asked. 

“You saw me up there?” 

“Ya, I could see you from all the way down there.” She pointed to the hut. “And I  thought, ‘I know that guy!’” She laughed. 

I still couldn’t manage a smile. “Uh, well, it was not good. I was like almost at the top  when I realized I was climbing the wrong mountain.” 

“Ah, that’s never good.” 

“No, it isn’t.” 

I removed my sopping gloves from my jacket pockets and wrung those out too, and a surprising volume of liquid rained down. I did realize that wringing out several sweat-drenched items of clothing in front of two beautiful Austrian girls might be taken as uncouth, but I cared nothing about couth at that moment.  

Looking at the sweat stained rocks beneath me, one of the girls said something to her friend in German. I looked at her because I thought she was talking to me, which forced her to translate: “I asked her if she thought that was sweat.” 

“Ah no, it’s water, from climbing on my hands in the snow up there … but also yes, it’s  probably sweat too.” 

“Ah.” She nodded.  

“It was so scary up there,” I found myself confessing to her, suddenly desperately  needing to share what had just happened. “When I realized it was the wrong mountain, I was already so high up, I thought, ‘I might actually die up here.’” I said this latter part lightheartedly, to hide the anxiety I still felt—and also because I wanted them to think I was funny—, and it  worked, they laughed. 

“It is good you came down.” 

I tried to smile. “Did you manage to register for classes?” I asked, attempting to act like a regular human being that hadn’t almost just died. 

“No we didn’t. We asked some of the women there if there was Wi-Fi and they said no. I could tell by the way they looked at us that they just thought we were young people who couldn’t  live without our phones.” 

I snorted. It sounded like they had met the same ladies as I had. 

As we talked, I learned that they were actually pretty German girls, not pretty Austrian girls. I told them I also currently lived nearby, in Czechia.  

“Ah Czech Republic,” the brown-haired girl said. “I learned a bit of Czech in school. I  grew up in a town near the Czech Republic.” 

“Oh cool.” 

“Mahm, prooyem. Do you know what that means?” 

“Say it again.” 

“Mahm, prooyem.” 

“No idea.” 

“It means, ‘I have diarrhea.’” 

“Wha—” I laughed—and continued laughing until the laugh grew into a high-pitched  hysterical one with tears streaming down my face. “That’s a very useful thing to know.” 

She laughed, proud of how funny I’d found her comment. “Yes, I think so too. What if  you have diarrhea? It’s very important for other people to know.” 

I laughed, again a little hysterically, and realized I was partly laughing at the fact that I was still alive. I felt so fortunate to be able to get in at least one more laugh at diarrhea, which in reality was never funny but always messy and unfortunate, and I was glad to be talking to these kind girls who generously shared their diarrhea translations with me. 

As it became time to part, I thought for a moment, should I ask them for their  Instagrams? And then immediately followed that thought with, Why? They live in Germany and you hardly know them. Just relax, take a deep breath, and say goodbye. That’s how regular human interactions work. You shouldn’t have to see pictures of every person you meet for the next ten years until you decide social media is causing you anxiety and delete the app, and then see them a few weeks later when you redownload it. You’re on a literal mountain. Instagram has no power here. Be natural. Just say, ‘It was nice to meet you. Have a nice rest of your hike.’” 

And I did exactly that and continued on my way. 

The trail to the next hut continued through a steep mountain pass, covered in a blanket of sticky white snow, that the sunlight had begun to melt, making it was extra slippery. Luckily there were guardrails and ropes to hold onto along the way because I probably slipped and fell  more than thirty times along the way. It was an exhausting climb, and I often took breaks to replenish my energy by dunking my rock cookies into my jars of peanut butter and Nutella,  which were both empty by the end of the day. 

When I reached the next saddle, I came across another mountain the blog told me I could summit—this time I double checked it was the correct one—and while my near-death experience had occurred only hours ago, my abundant stupidity encouraged me to go for it. And fortunately this mountain, unlike the other, had a very clear route trodden through the snow, and it only took me about an hour to summit it. And just like that my confidence in my mountaineering abilities was renewed. 

At the hut that night, dinner consisted only of a small bowl of indiscernible meat stew, hardly enough to satisfy my ravenous appetite. I could’ve paid for a three-course meal, dessert, and breakfast the next morning, but then I wouldn’t have had enough cash to order beers,  which—that night and all nights—I wanted to drink more than I cared about being hungry. 

At dinner, I sat across from two men speaking German. I was eyeing their rice pudding with envy when the older of the pair, perhaps about seventy, with long white hair and a beard, asked me, “Do you speak English?” 

“Yes. Do you?” 

“A little. My friend here speaks almost none. But I’d like to practice.” 

And so we did. I learned that his name was Henrik, he’d been hiking his whole life, and this was the third time he’d done Karwendel. We had a long conversation, he recommended I watch some Jim Jarmusch movies—which I have now watched and see he had pegged me correctly—and also to read Stanislav Lem, a Polish Sci-Fi writer, which I have yet to do, but will soon because I now see that he was indeed a very wise man and Jarmusch is a cool filmmaker. Henrik strangely resonated with me in a way that no other person I’d met other than my grandpa did. I felt strongly that he held a deep knowledge about this life, and felt safe in his presence. 

Before I went to bed that night I said to him, “Thank you very much for the conversation. I really enjoyed and appreciated it.” But to my surprise, he recoiled at what he evidently saw as an effusive show of sentimentality. 

He pursed his lips and said, “Goodnight.” So much for being my grandpa. 

The following day was my final on the Karwendel trail, which serendipitously coincided with a snowstorm. The hut owner warned us about it the night before, so I left at 7 a.m. in order to the beat the snowfall and make sure I could get to Innsbruck for my 2 p.m. bus back to Prague, especially since my parents were visiting me the following day. My mother would not have taken too kindly to my being in Austria when she arrived. 

By the time I left the hut the snow was coming down hard, and after an hour of hiking, it  had become so dense that I could no longer see the trail markers. I soon realized that I had gone the wrong way and returned to the hut to ask for directions. The hut owner looked worried when she saw me return in my wet jeans and panic-stricken voice, but I assured her I could find my way, but of course, I couldn’t. 

About an hour later, I had once again lost the trail, believing I could see it through the  slight gradient shift beneath the snow, I now realized I had made a wrong turn some time ago. I  was now in the mountains with no idea which way I should chance. What was ground and what  might be a deceptive patch of snow with death underneath it? 

When I think back to this day, I like to think that if I were really lost, I would’ve just  headed back to the hut and waited for the storm to die down. But in reality, I fear I have too much of the “main character” syndrome to have really believed that anything bad could have happened to me. After all, this was what had allowed me safe return from the last mountain I erroneously climbed. So, feeling safe in the reality that I was the protagonist, I continued  wandering in the snow looking for the trail. And thank God I eventually came upon footprints. I  am almost certain that these prints saved my life, because after I found them, the trail became  considerably more dangerous, scaling narrow and snowy mountain ridges. If I had been blazing  this trail alone I would have almost certainly misstepped. 

I followed the footprints for about an hour before spotting in the distance that German man, who had frowned at my thanks the previous night, marching nobly ahead with his younger friend in tow, seemingly undeterred by the poor visibility and inclement weather. I soon reached him and told him I’d lost the trail but was able to follow his tracks back to safety. 

He nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe these mountains are not so safe.” 

“Yes, maybe,” I agreed, perhaps finally having learnt something—but most likely just  having reaffirmed my belief that I am the protagonist, even though I only found my way by literally following in someone else’s footsteps.

Want to learn more about the story and author? Visit our interview with Jackson Mattocks!