“Doing something that’s hard is part of it,” Southwestern Michigan College President Dr. David Mathews says of his passion for mountain climbing. “I don’t know what people get out of running marathons because that’s just hard. I really like the fact that, unlike today’s society, where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame, like suing when you pour hot coffee on yourself, the other end of it is you are completely and totally responsible for yourself and your partner.”

As a mathematician who was Dowagiac’s valedictorian in 1978, recreational rock climbing is challenging in a way that keeps his mind limber, too.

“Can I do it? I don’t know. You don’t do really easy stuff because it’s not entertaining, but you always push yourself to the next higher level,” Mathews, a former scuba diver, said Friday reflecting on his successful second try at Mount Rainier, Wash., in July. “Skydiving is all of the fun with none of the exercise. I’ll probably go back to that when I’m too old and tired and broken down to do this stuff. All of these things have a huge range, from easy to impossible. Climbing is hugely mental, keeping it together mentally. I climb best when I’m just paying attention to about three feet above me and as far as I can reach. That’s where my concentration, focus and energy are. ‘Don’t look down’ means pay attention to what you’re doing. I don’t know if ‘second time’s a charm’ because it wasn’t quite a charm, or ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try again,’ because it was tough,” with an upper respiratory infection to remind him.

“To me, among all the types of climbing, I like trad climbing — going up a rock face, securing your rope as best you can using hardware, then your partner comes up behind you and gathers up equipment, and you do it again and again to scale great heights. I will ice climb, rock climb and mountain climb in whatever proportion opportunities present themselves. For mountain climbing, which is grueling and time-consuming, you’ve got to spend a lot of time hiking at Warren Dunes or Lawless Park carrying a heavy pack,” he said.

Mathews, a former Army Green Beret who took up rock climbing in 2007, stayed a few nights at the mile-high Paradise Lodge to acclimatize himself to the altitude and completed two one-day mountaineering training courses.

“This was so different from when Jack (Crouse) and I went (in June 2008 when a freak blizzard which killed a hiker cut short their climb in the month known locally as “Juneuary”). We were on the other side of the mountain, where Crystal Mountain Ski Resort is, but it was shut down and desolate. I was freaked out by what a zoo it is. Japanese tourists. Central American tourists. Kids sliding. A big parking lot. We’re not used out here to 70 degrees and perennial snow.”

The second day of school refreshing skills for rope glacial travel — “practicing how to pull people out of crevasses if they fall in” — fog shrouded the area instead of sunshine so bright reflecting off the snow it can burn beneath your chin and climbers wear glare-guarding “glacier goggles.”

“It’s very similar to what you do on ropes” in rock climbing, “you just have to secure the ropes differently because you don’t have rocks to connect them to,” Mathews explained. They shared the steepening slopes leading to 100-foot ice cliffs with marmots, a rodent he calls “snow groundhogs. It’s a beautiful park with a big waterfall as soon as you start going down to 3,000 or 4,000 feet.”

Mt. Rainier “is permanently glacier-covered,” he said. “It is typically, in the United States, one of those good starting points if you want to do high-altitude mountain climbing. It’s 14,410 feet to the top, so you have all of the issues — twentysome glaciers, easier routes and very tough routes. Like runners, if they want to marathon they start by looking for easy, flat ones. Denali (Mount McKinley in Alaska, which can take weeks due its remoteness), at any altitude, there is more oxygen near the equator than there is near the poles. At the top of Rainier there’s a third less oxygen than at sea level. Even at that height on Denali there would be even less oxygen in the air. The weather’s brutal. Nobody climbs it in the winter with 150-mph winds. It’s probably the worst place on earth. The highest peak in the lower 48 states is Whitney (in California, 14,494 feet).”

Mathews points out peaks in the distance. “I think that’s Mt. St. Helen’s,” he said. “It’s got no top” since the volcano erupted in May 1980.

The first night the expedition of 12, including four friends from Atlanta, pitched their tents on rock rather than snow.

“Four guides and eight clients,” he said. “Every threesome had a guide and two clients on a rope so there’s one person who can unequivocally stop a rope slide.”
On top of shoes that look like ski boots, climbers strap on spiked crampons.

With bright sun beating on the snow during the daytime, “It’s like walking in a snow cone,” Mathews said. “You’re not walking fast at any given time,” unlike untethered Ueli Steck scrambling up the Eiger in Switzerland in a dizzying two hours and 47 minutes.

Their second camp perched partially on a rocky outcropping. “We went to bed about 6:30 at night and got up at 10 after 3 1/2 to four hours of sleep. Between 10 and midnight we ate, got our gear on (one guy in a headlamp looks like he’s exploring a cave). Two of those tents (including his), would be lost. That’s the last we saw of them right there (two miles above sea level; they “caught” a third tent that blew in like a tumbleweed from someone else’s camp higher up).

“When we returned to our ‘high camp’ at about 10,500 feet from our 12-hour push to and from the summit,” Mathews related, “we found that two of our four tents, and contents, had all been blown away by the wind. This necessitated us retreating off the mountain rather than camping and resting one more night — making for a 23-hour day! Weather’s always a variable in mountaineering.

“Starting at midnight, we climbed for about an hour up to the Kautz ice cliff. We had to lower some by ropes to negotiate around the base of this thing, then we started the equivalent of vertical rock climbing, but on ice covered with a lot of snow, looking down on clouds,” Mathews said. “This is 8 a.m., climbing since midnight, when we finally got to the top. There was no exhilaration or ’let’s have a party,’ it was a very inhospitable place,” so they turned around and began their descent away from 40-mph wind gusts and 15-degree temperature. “You could almost not hear to talk to people” because of the roar of the wind.

“A break is a real misnomer,” Mathews adds. “A break is when you stop to adjust your equipment. You put on sunscreen. And you try to eat or drink something, then you go again. You have to keep going all the time to make the kind of progress you need.”

Descending as the weather deteriorated to leave the mountain by 9 p.m. proved a “long, horrible slog,” Mathews said. “We got to Paradise at 9 p.m., but we had gotten up at 10 o’clock and had been climbing since midnight. They have six different routes they take guided groups on. Koutz is what I would call an intermediate climb. There is one harder route I’m thinking about doing, Liberty Ridge. I am going to keep climbing in general, but rock climbing and mountain climbing have a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. Just before Thanksgiving I went out to Nevada and climbed Red Rocks. It was an awesome 2,000-foot, multi-pitch climb. To me, the greatest thrill was climbing Solar Slab. In Las Vegas in November, the sun comes up at 6 in the morning and it’s pitch dark at 5 p.m.”

“The first time I was ever on vertical rock and thought, ‘This is scary and cool’ was in Mountain Ranger School. I had mountaineering opportunities in Special Forces,” Mathews said. “You were always on difficult terrain, so it was good to know basic rope techniques. I got to end up on top of the Continental Divide one winter in Montana. That was cold, but I didn’t live anywhere where rock climbing made sense. I wasn’t into rock climbing until 2007. I asked the kids what they wanted to do for spring break. Michael said mountain climbing. We went to Joshua Tree in California and went through rock climbing school. Michael (an eighth grader) and I have kept up since then” and especially enjoy winter ice climbing.

His wife, Sarah, “doesn’t see the attraction of being cold all the time,” like zero-degree weather in Canada.

“In 2007, I climbed 25 days. In 2008, I had my appendectomy and shoulder surgery, I only had 11 vertical days, plus Rainier. In 2009, I climbed 68 days. In 2010, I climbed 88 days,” which counts the campus rock climbing room.

“I log this because I’ve done formal instruction and instructor training for the climbing gym, but not guide certification,” he explained. “I’m not the best climber in the world, but I’m the safest. I’ll probably migrate more to bigger rock climbs,” like Yosemite and the Tetons.

“In the Lower Peninsula, there’s only Grand Ledge,” where he’s taking the SMC climbing club in October. “Then you have to go to the UP. There’s Pictured Rocks, but it takes so long unless you happen to live up there. One of the Top 10 climbing destinations in the country is Red River Gorge, Ky., where I’ve taken the climbing club the last two years. It’s just a seven-hour drive from here. I haven’t been over to outside of Toronto in the Niagara escarpment. There’s supposed to be a lot of good climbing there.”