The Alpine Divorce

A hike from hell

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Looking back now, I should have said something right from the start. Way before we were three hours in, with three more to go. Far before we had finally reached the summit, looking down on sheets of ice cascading down the dark side of the mountain like silk. Very slippery, treacherous silk. I should have said no when he mentioned we’d have to wake up before dawn. I should have realized something might be off when he asked if I had hiking poles. I had no poles for hiking or otherwise. Also no “spikes.” I have spiky heels but no spikes for hiking shoes. I had a friend’s hiking boots and warm running clothes, which I figured would suffice. I was incorrect.

Let’s start here. I am not a hiker. It’s not that I don’t do a lot of it; I hike to the F train on Smith Street, to the Trader Joe’s all the way down on Atlantic Avenue. And while most of my hikes occur on concrete, nature does appeal to me! I like to touch grass and be among the trees and birds and various non-slithering creatures. I had just gone on a little trip with some other writers to the Catskills where we did a mile-long hike to a waterfall where we opened a nice Burgundy and shared spoons of stinky cheese and torn pieces of crusty French baguette. We hiked home in the late day sun, and I felt the world fall away, the worries and the fears and the doubts of life vanishing one step at a time.

So when he suggested a hike, I pictured something similar, but imbued with the romance of a fresh relationship: kisses over vistas and hand-holding through dappled sunlight. I had the romantic comedy movie montage playing in my mind. What I got was more of the horror genre, a seven hour hike as hellscape, a high speed ascent and slip and slide free fall into the demise of our relationship.

I managed to take a photo when we got to the top. Other than that I had to move to quickly to get many others.

The day was sunny, and not as cold as it could have been, mid-thirties going into the low forties. He had suggested a hike earlier in the week, and I merrily agreed, happy to have someone plan something for a change. But when he mentioned we’d have to get up before the sun, my first alarm bell sounded.

“Why do we have to get up so early? How long is this hike?” I asked with a smile in my voice.

“About 8 hours,” he said, without skipping a beat.

“I think that may be a bit much, that seems like a lot of hiking,” I said, trying to maintain enthusiasm while conveying alarm and heavy amounts of disinterest.

“Oh, well we can do one peak instead of two if you want,” he offered.

“OK that sounds better,” I replied.

“But we should still get up early, I like to be there first.”

The second alarm bell went off. Were we racing, or hiking? By the time we got to the trail head I realized it was the former.

From the moment we got off the Metro North at 9am (we had taken a train that left Grand Central at 7:30am), he was in high-speed motor mode. I was in “it’s Sunday morning and I’ve only had one cup of coffee” mode, and “oh this is a cute town, let’s meander” mode. When I yelled up ahead to him asking why he was walking so fast, he said he liked to beat the crowds and be first on the trail, so it would be more peaceful. I suggested we could just be really slow and let everyone else go ahead of us and it would be equally peaceful and without cardiac arrest. He didn’t seem to agree and kept soldiering on without me. I wonder looking back on it now, why I did not stop things then and say, “Hey, you seem to be on a mission to be in a documentary about the fastest hikers in America. Maybe we can regroup here and recalibrate our expectations about what a hike means for each of us.”

But I kept quiet, and tried (unsuccessfully) to keep up. By the time we walked the 30 minutes to the trailhead, I was exhausted and kind of confused about what was happening. The hike had not even started yet.

Photo by Adam Hornyak on Unsplash

He waited for me to catch up to him at the trailhead, and as we began hiking he pushed forward in front of me again, picking up his pace so that soon he was only a lone figure, a shadow up in the distance. I trudged along, alone, but found myself more and more confused. Was I really that slow? And also, even if I was, were we in a race? Were we not hiking together? When would we have our romantic hand-holding and kissing over a vista? When would we talk about when we were stopping for (and what we were having for) lunch?

Finally, I piped up, yelling towards his silhouette ahead of me. “Hey! Can we slow it down? I’ve never done this hike. Or really any hike! I want to take pictures, I don’t want to rush.” “Okay,” he said, and he stopped and waited, but like you might be forced to wait for someone who’s taking a long time in the bathroom; clearly was not happy about it. As soon as I finished with my photos, he turned and fled, powering onward, leaving me behind again to climb this beast of a mountain on my own, scrambling up steep scrappy hills, at times on my hands and knees.

I had not signed up for this. Hands and knees? Nope. I was sweating, exhausted and needlessly rushed. He kept turning around to make sure I was still there, yelling, “You good?” To which I tried to reply, but was honestly too out of breath to even speak. I am someone who has run three marathons. I do a half marathon every year, if not twice a year. I consider myself fit, but apparently not enough for a hike up a mountain. I could not enjoy the setting or the trees or the views, my head was down, making sure my footing was sure, not tripping on rocks or roots; at the pace we were going, a fall could mean a broken bone.

I will spare you the next three hours, but that’s how long it took to get to the peak, at which point we sat and had our sandwiches. There was no wine, no soft stinky cheese, sadly. but also no warmth. A couple sat on the same flat rock as us, laughing and kissing, smiling and leaning into each other. I envied them. We sat next to each other, quietly eating our sandwiches— turkey and Swiss on a hard rolll — not speaking. I felt alone and pissed; Confused about how I had ended up spending the last three hours chasing a man up a big fucking hill.

I decided to try to make light of things, my defense mechanism. “Are we getting an Uber down? Where is the pick up spot?”

“Ha! No, and we have to get going or we won’t make it back before dark.”

“How are we getting down? I asked. Not sure why I thought there was some secret shortcut but somehow I had pushed the reality of the return trip downhill from my mind.

“We have to head down the back of the mountain, but it may be icy because it’s not sunny there.”

“Icy? That doesn’t sound good.” My heart started to race.

When we made it to the path down the back of the peak, it was a mess, a full on glacier had formed, and when he tried to climb down, even he said it was too dangerous.

“We’ll go back the way we came,” he said,

“But it was so steep, how are we gonna get down?” I was terrified.

“The same way we got up here,” he said. He didn’t seem to understand my issue with cliffs.

We started down and I was frozen with fear. I had no experience hiking down such steep rocky trails. He made it seem easy, floating down with excessive amounts of grace, like a ballet dancer antagonized by Timothee Chalamet.

I tried to keep up, but I kept slipping and sliding on gravel or slick slabs of granite, barely catching myself on tree limbs. The sun had gone behind the clouds, it was getting colder, and the path was getting icy, melted spots freezing over with slick sections of ground. I was not at all confident in my ability to get down such steep paths, so I got down on my butt sliding down the mountain a few times on my tush, feeling like a fool, but at least a fool without any broken ankles.

An hour passed this way, and I finally just stopped myself. I had to catch my breath and give myself a pep talk. I sat on a cold rock, rubbing my hands together, looking out over a beautiful valley of mountains, raw, bare trees against a winter sky drained of blue, now fully gray.

He was on his own, way ahead of me, and I was still alone as I had been for the entire hike. It occurred to me that this might be a moment to pay attention to. A sign that this might be about something more than just a hike. Perhaps I would be spending more of my time in this relationship walking alone, trying to catch up to someone.

Photo by Stephen Harlan on Unsplash

He called back up to me from his vantage point well ahead of me down the mountain: “You good?!” I just got up and started again, didn’t bother answering. If he thought things were good, if that was his question, this was truly over.

When things got very icy, he stayed by my side, finally realizing that I was perhaps going to expire from fear and that if he didn’t help me we might not ever make it back. The hike finally ended after seven hours (!) and one massive fall on my part. I slipped on a sheet of black ice, my feet flying out from under me, like cartoon character. I landed flat on my back, but luckily on my backpack, which had a change of clothes in it for after the hike, so it acted to cushion my fall. He helped me up. “You Good?!” he said, looking down at me. “Are you okay?” “Yes, I think so,” I said. I didn’t want to make a fuss. I wanted to get home. I stood up, brushed myself off, and soldiered on. When I finally saw the trailhead come into view, I nearly sobbed.

We made it back into town and stopped at a pub for a few beers and some dinner. A football game was on and it was crowded. We didn’t talk much. When we took the train home, he passed out. The next day he kept complaining about how sore he was. I ended things that week.

A friend sent me this story after I told her about our hike from hell, about a phenomenon now known as The Alpine Divorce, a term actually trending now on social media that refers to a situation where one partner abandons another during a hike or some sort of outdoor wilderness adventure, often leaving them to find their own way back. The fact that this is happening made me recall the question often asked to women - who would you rather run into in the woods: a man or a bear?

To be fair, I was not abandoned or left to find my way back, but the sentiment seemd to be there. Honestly, though, I kind of wish he had just left me alone. I would have been happier hiking solo, taking the path I felt comfortable with, the small mile-long loop, not the 10 mile trek up and down the sheer face of a mountain named Break Neck Ridge. I would have preferred to be alone, truly alone, not just alone because the person I was with did not care to hike with me. I would have loved to have taken my time, strolling slowly through the woods, resting when I wanted, stopping to observe something beautiful or strange or small that moved me. I would have loved to have taken a route and a pace that felt safe and good for my body and soul instead of feeling like a slow drag on someone else’s day, an inconvenience.

Photo by Elric Pxl on Unsplash

Experts say these Alpine Divorces stem from big egos and poor communication. I’d say that’s accurate. I take part of the blame, too. Actually no, I don’t want to blame myself. Rather than blame, let’s be curious as my therapist would say. Okay then. I am curious about why I didn’t push back more, ask more questions, or just stop after an hour of that fresh hell and say: “This is not gonna work for me. You go ahead and I’ll go back to the town and wander around the cute vintage shops and have a nice lunch. I’ll find a bookstore. Meet me when you’re done.” Or I could have just turned around and said, “There’s something in the way this day is unfolding that tells me I should not stick around for the rest of this day to unfold. Bye!”

Alas, I stuck it out. Why do we stick things out? Why don’t we cut our losses when people show us exactly who they are? If I’m honest with myself, something I reserve apparently for very rare occasions like writing this substack, there were signs before the hike that the connection we had was not great, that he was perhaps tone deaf and far more focused on himself and his needs than me or us. I just didn’t want to see what he was showing me until it was too late and we were three hours into a big fucking hill.

The next time someone asks me to go on a hike my answer will be a series of questions, a short google form perhaps, about route, mileage, speed, incline, snacks served and wine poured. The only kind of Alpine experience I’d like is one with fondue.