Many years ago on Mount Shasta in northern CA, my group returned to a climbers hut near the timberline. We’d turned back because of 60mph winds (90mph near the summit) and snow. We noticed a group we’d seen the day before, and they were all huddling around one woman wrapped in a blanket. Turned out the group aborted their summit try (before the winds kicked up) because they’d seen a body in a do-not-enter-this-is-rockfall-city area called “The Heart.” They found this woman at about 12,000ft wearing street clothes and deck sneakers, hunkered down and fast on her way to dying. They hustled her down to the hut, got her out of her wet clothes and filled her with soup and hot chocolate.
Turned out she was from Berkeley, CA, and on a total whim thought it would be (her words) “cool to commune with the mountain.” She hopped in her car as she was dressed, drove the five or six hours to Shasta, slept in the car that night and in the morning just started walking up. Up, up, up, with no idea of what routes were safe and which weren’t, until she couldn’t go any further and couldn’t get back down.
We sat on the stone bench with her. One of my friends asked if she understood what that group had given up to save her. She shrugged. “At least I got to commune with the mountain. It was beautiful.” She then noticed the crampons strapped to my heavy boots. She asked what they were, and I explained their purpose. “Do they make them for sneakers?” she asked. I explained that if one needs crampons, one had damned well better have better footgear than sneakers. I underlined that by pointing out our parkas, ropes and ice axes. She stared at me as if I were the most pitiful idiot on the planet. “Well, do they make crampons for sneakers?”
I spent the next few seconds picking up my jaw. “Somebody’s gonna risk their ass pulling your corpse off this mountain someday soon, aren’t they?” She simply asked if we had more hot cocoa.
Shake her? I wanted to smack her head against the stone wall of the hut. Probably would’ve busted the rock, though, and it ain’t polite to abuse the climbers hut.
Another time, I was camping by myself at the treeline on Shasta one very cold Spring night. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a solo climber who’d tried the mountain in one shot, with no sleeping bag, tent or stove. It was now past 1am. He was just carrying a little food and water, and he was cold. I offered to let him sit in the tent. “No,” he said, “I’m real cold. Can I warm up in your sleeping bag?”
What the fuck?!? “Sorry, man, I’m already in it.”
“Well, can you get out of it so I can get in? I’m freezing just standing here!”
If I’d had a gun I’d have used it. “Listen, asshole, if you keep walking you’ll stay warm and then you’ll reach your car and you can get a room in town.”
After a minute or two of pissing and moaning, he left. He presumably lived.