Being on the summit with Brett and Chris was a both wonderful and detached experience. The two guys obviously love one another and their enthusiam for the mountains is inspiring. It was... touching, really, seeing them together on top of Rainier, sharing the summit.

A few minutes before topping out we had signed the register and Brett and Chris had left for the summit. I was left by myself for a few moments before I started up the last 30 or so vertical feet to the top. It is a place, just below the penultimate, that I have been and savored on many other mountains, a place and a feeling I remember and cherish perhaps more than any other part of a climb or emotional component of climbing. It is a place just below the highest of points, where one knows that topmost point will be gained, but you take your time and enjoy those last few steps. You commit them to memory. You remember the steps and the way the true summit looks while you come up to it. It is a poignant memory because it is assured, and it is sweet.

Nearly a full year to the day prior I had been on another mountain in the Cascade Range, Mt. Shasta, where a small group of us were looking for a friend. That friend was John "Zippo" Miksits. He and his partner Craig Hiemstra had been involved in a climbing accident on the mountain in April of 2000. Craig had been found dead at 10,000 feet. John had not been found in the wake of the accident, even after extensive professional and volunteer search and rescue operations had continued for two weeks. On 28 May 2000, at 11,800 feet, just over the col above Cascade Gulch, we found John's body after more than a month had passed since he had gone missing. It gave closure to a family that had been waiting in limbo, but it was obviously very, very difficult for everyone. John was a great friend to a great many people. He was, by all accounts, a loving father who left a wife and two children behind when he didn't come back down from the mountain.

I thought about John just below the summit of Mt. Rainier. I thought about John and his children, how they would never see their father again. I thought about his wife and his brother and sisters. I thought about my own father, with whom, after 30 years as father and son, we had shared a summit together in the Shenandoah Valley, our first and possibly last. I thought about Chris and Brett and their father, now deceased, who introduced them to climbing at a very young age, and to whom they referred many times on the mountain.

I thought about fathers and sons and daughters and families just below the summit of Mt. Rainier. And it made me both sad and overjoyed, and in that conflicted vein, I was left longing to stay in the mountains forever, and to be with those I love, forever.

And then I walked up, and it was sweet.

Today I heard from Jeff Keeney, another climber and friend who was part of our Shasta search party. He remembered the date and its significance. I was happy to hear from him, and, I told him, I'd been thinking about him. There will always be a bond there. But I also added that the memories I had of that spring and its aftermath had turned from mostly sadness and depression to a finer appreciation and caring for friends, family and loved ones and a heightened sense of what is important and what is now... and also for what is fleeting.