It doesn’t get any easier with time. Gravity still works at the same constant, erosion has yet to noticeably diminish the mountain and encroaching age hasn’t caused muscles and joints to work any more easily. Perhaps my load is a little lighter only because with time, I’ve figured out how to carry less gear.
Carrying gear is an ambiguous burden. When I want or need the stuff, there is no substitute for having it. When I’m hungry, I’m glad to have carried maybe a little extra food. When it’s cold and starts to rain, I’m damned glad to have carried the extra jacket and rain gear. If I skin a knee, I’m glad I carried my first aid kit.
By the same token, all that stuff is heavy. Even if I keep things I need to an absolute minimum, my pack is mysteriously heavier than the sum of what it carries. As I add more stuff, items I probably won’t need but might want to enjoy on my trip, my pack increases weight not arithmetically, but geometrically. Some people carry books to read at an inspiring vista; I carry mining tools in case I find a shiny rock I can’t resist holding in my hand.
More accurately, I used to carry mining tools, back when I had the energy to haul them up the hill and the stamina to haul chunks of rock back down the hill. I collected shiny rocks and boasted a decent rock collection. My father admonished, “If everyone took just one thing home with them, there wouldn’t be anything left for someone else to see.” If he only knew.
Back when we used to go a-mining, I carried a variety of heavy tools. Certainly a rock hammer is still de rigueur; no self-respecting rockhound would venture into the high country or onto a scree field without one. I always carried a tool called a gadpry, used for wedging into crevices and prying. My kit included a variety of chisels: long boy, fat boy and a couple of babies, all designed for prying into various sized crevices and pockets.
I acquired a set of dental tools for cleaning pockets and prizing crystals from the pocket wall. Sometimes I carried a tool called a crack hammer, heavy with a wide head, to bust up the big stuff. At one point I even bought a long-handled hammer that could also serve as a walking stick. It was one macho, big hammer.
When digging for orthoclase near West Maroon Pass, we carried that gear and more. Our mining operation there required large screens made of hardware cloth to separate crystals from the gravel. We used a shovel to move gravel and hand-rakes to comb through it.
We carried our gear in and the gear and minerals out. We filled multiple Kelty BB5s with bags of orthoclase for the trek down to Schofield Park. Inevitably, we fortified ourselves with slugs of Jack Daniels, but just as inevitably, with or without fortification, we still had to carry loads back down the hill. No mules; we carried it on our backs.
At that time, Maroon Bells-Snowmass wasn’t yet a Wilderness Area, and we were free to stake our claims, carry all that gear up the hill and start moving dirt. Certain values hadn’t yet articulated in our mindset and world view. We didn’t then know how fragile and vulnerable the place was to our machinations. We had no experience of its sanctity.
It was all pretty low impact stuff, though. We tried our best, but we never leveled any mountains or caused excessive erosion. We didn’t fill valleys with waste rock. We never trashed the alpine environment, although from the gear we carried it was obvious we were trying. I have returned to most of the places we “mined,” and have found no visible trace of our industry.
Intervening years have tempered my enthusiasm for carrying tools, but also my desire to posses the shiny rocks tools help me get at. I still carry a rock hammer, but as much as I use it, it is more ballast than tool. It lives in my pack, down near the bottom where its weight rests on my hips. I leave the other tools at home not only because I don’t want to carry them, but because I have discovered the value of “leaverite”: leave ‘er right there.
Leaverite is pretty good stuff because its value appreciates over time. Over and over again, people can enjoy the beauty of the shiny rock or crystal of leaverite there in its rocky habitat. And since I know right where it is, I can go back and see it again whenever I want. Each time I visit is more valuable than the last. And leaverite doesn’t weigh a thing on the hike out.
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