Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain Jonathan Bloom (free children's online books .TXT) 📖

The Presidential Range is made up of a chain of peaks in the White Mountains named after various presidents of the United States. Among them are Mount Jefferson, Mount Adams, Mount Quincy Adams, and Mount Madison. The Traverse is a twenty-mile trail passing by a subset of those Presidential peaks, including Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the American Northeast.

The hike is not technical. No special climbing equipment is required except for crampons. An ice-climbing axe should be brought along in case of emergencies, but generally is not needed. After the initial ascent from the trailhead to the top of Mount Madison, the climb mostly follows ridgelines which also make for relatively easy hiking.

However, one cannot quantify the difficulty of an expedition purely by enumerating its technical challenges. Although her height pales in comparison to peaks in the Pacific Northwest, the Alps, and the Himalaya, Mount Washington is known to have an erratic temperament. Loose snow up to one’s chest can make for excruciatingly slow progress. Storms and high winds arise out of nowhere. The highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was at the summit of Mount Washington, which rises to an impressive height of 6,288 feet. Deaths occur on its faces and ridges regularly, especially in winter.

Junk drove to the trailhead and viewed the mountains from the road. Walking in about a half-mile, he found the snow to be deep, at times up to his waist. At eleven in the morning, he estimated the temperature to be about twenty degrees, and that was with no wind at an elevation of only one thousand feet. There would be no backing out of this. In his forty-five years, he had never backed out of anything, and that would certainly not change when the stakes were this high. The money was irrelevant, as his dignity was on the line.

Over the next two months, Junk had two goals: Exercise obsessively and learn everything there was to know about William Hoyt. The former was no problem. Junk made constant trips to the Blue Hills Reservation outside of Boston, running through the woods with weights strapped to his back. He also spent time in the local gymnasiums. Constant walking and avoidance of a desk job had kept Junk fit his entire life. The bigger challenge would be overcoming the alien terrain that was the wilderness. But Junk made quick business of this by purchasing a tent and camping out at night in the woods. The transition was painless, actually pleasurable. He took a shine to the smell of pine trees and the sighting of a snow owl. He was escaping the cold calculus of business life and the right angles of the South End. Best of all, this “escape route” did not take him through drinking benders or other games of chance.

As for his other goal of brushing up on William Hoyt, Junk read through every magazine article and newspaper society page he could get his hands on that made even a passing reference to the sourpuss. Junk also interrogated any acquaintance at social functions who had spent even a fleeting moment with Hoyt. Not surprisingly, Junk was disgusted by the picture these sources painted. Being born into wealth was already enough to leave Junk seething. But making the package ever more distasteful was the fact that Hoyt was a teetotaler and notoriously bad in social situations. As a last strike against him, Hoyt was religious and quite active in his church. As one article put it, Hoyt “was deeply invested in his walk with Christ.” If there was one thing Junk could not brook, it was avid churchgoers. After years of business dealings with the ostensibly pious, Junk had grown sick of the hypocrisy of his clientele. For weekends in his youth he would see these devout souls in their Sunday best; yet they were the same gamblers, charlatans, and hussies he would see reeling about the night before. Junk did not know Hoyt’s sins, but he was sure they were profound if the man was “deeply invested in his walk with Christ.”

The one unassailable part of Hoyt’s background was his mountaineering abilities. At forty-four, Hoyt had already climbed the Matterhorn, the Eiger, the Dolomites, Mount Rainier, and was planning his first trip to the Himalaya, where he was going to lead an American team to the top of Nanga Parbat. Fellow climbers described him as a woefully dull man, but unrivaled in his climbing expertise. Junk, the man who always gambled the well-researched odds had clearly gotten sloppy and placed an enormous bet without doing his homework.

As young buck, William Hoyt had taken up climbing while vacation in the Alps with his lady friend Wizzy Dodge. That new avocation came to a quick end when Hoyt’s father, Spalding, forbid his son from ever climbing again. The younger Hoyt “felt like a window had opened up for a brief moment and then promptly slammed shut.” While it had been open he had seen a universe much like this one, with the major exception being it was vertical instead of horizontal. It rose to glorious heights and ranged in atmospheres, unlike the present world which made only lateral changes that meant nothing. The window had not only closed in front of him, but the shades had been drawn. No light shown through. The father had essentially told the son he was not allowed to live.

William realized he simply could not face the future without his new-found hobby. But at the same time, he could not disobey his father. He had no choice but to lead a double life. He would lie to his father, promising to never climb again. But behind his father’s back he would continue. William graduated from college, got a small flat in Manhattan, and worked for Spalding. But all he cared about was going up more mountains. Climbing became a