#4. Hiking Mount Raymond, Salt Lake City, Utah: 20 June 2019

It had been a challenging year professionally. Julie Hernandez and I worked with our Congolese colleague Dr. Arsene Binanga to secure an ambitious new project for family planning in the DRC from the Norwegian government. These initiatives are never easy, but this one had taken more political maneuvering than usual. When it finally came through, Julie and I had the same reaction. Let’s go climb a mountain.

Our window of opportunity was June 2019. By now, I was all too familiar with the very real possibility of deep snow in the mountains well into July, and I wanted no part of it. Our operational question: What snow-free mountains have a trailhead within 20 minutes of a Delta hub city with nonstop flights to New Orleans? One clear answer: Salt Lake City.

I would have been happy to return to Mt. Olympus, which I’d hiked with Ilene Speizer a few years earlier. Julie convinced me I needed to try a different mountain, and her research led us to Mount Raymond in Utah’s Wasatch Range in the Rocky Mountains. It was advertized as a strenuous hike, 7.8 miles round-trip to the summit, with 360° views at the top. It sounded manageable.

Although we were playing hooky for 48 hours, work was never far away. From the Delta lounge in New Orleans to touchdown in SLC, Julie remained online with our colleagues in the DRC, programming a survey questionnaire onto smartphones for an upcoming evaluation of quality of care in our community-based family planning program. For once, the difference in time zones was in our favor. At 11 pm SLC time, it was 8 am in Kinshasa, and our colleagues would just be starting the workday. Arriving at our Airbnb near midnight, Julie put in another half hour with the team in Kinshasa, trying to make enough progress that they wouldn’t miss her during the eight hours we’d be on the mountain.

We rallied the next morning for an early start, grabbing bad coffee and a sugary donut from a gas station en route to the trailhead. In how many American cities can you start climbing a half hour from the center of town? To avoid aggravating my back, Julie volunteered to play Sherpa and loaded some of my gear into her pack. We were off.

Once on the trail, we counted our lucky stars, enjoying the stunning views of mountain ranges on all sides. The weather was perfect: blue skies, comfortable climbing weather. Because it was a weekday, we met few others on the trail. Usually, I considered it a sacrilege to get out my cell phone on such excursions, except for photos. But Julie was glued to hers, dividing her attention between questions from the Kinshasa team and details ofnthe closing of a new house she’d purchase the following week.

The climb was blissfully uneventful. I had completed my highpointing adventure the previous year, reaching 46 of the 50 highpoints in the United States. Mt. Raymond was one of the few mountains I’d climbed in recent years that didn’t “count” toward my highpointing quest, and I luxuriated in enjoying the hike for the sheer pleasure of being outside in this exquisite setting.

Fortunately, in stark contrast to any mountain climbed during the highpointing quest, I didn't have my heart set on summiting. Three hours into the hike, we began to encounter patches of snow that became larger and more frequent as we ascended. The snow was slushy, not icy, but we didn’t have crampons.

We finally reached a point where we could see the summit through the trees, but getting there would require crossing several large banks of crusted snow. Julie ventured out onto one icy slope and kicked “stairs” into the embankment that would allow me to follow in her steps. I managed to inch across 100 feet of snow, an experience that led us to the same conclusion. We did not need to push beyond my limits in this remote area where we hadn’t seen anyone for two hours.

During my highpointing days, different guides had asked me the same two questions: Do you have the energy to get to the summit? And if so, do you have the energy to get back safely? In this setting, I decided the answer was no. We headed down, relieved that we hadn’t courted disaster by pushing too far. Julie might have harbored some pent-up frustration, since she could have easily hustled up to the summit on her own. But it was tempered by the relief that she wouldn't have to deal with any mishaps far away from help.

By the time we returned to the trailhead, I did not doubt that we had made the right decision to forego the summit. Mount Raymond has delivered on the two criteria for these eight annual extraordinary outdoor excursions: a physical challenge and stunning natural beauty.

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