From Here to Eternity
She gazed longingly from her wheelchair at the treacherous mountaintop. Her son-in-law promised he would take her there . . . someday.

By David Von Drehle
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

This story begins on an August afternoon in 2002 when the baby needed a nap. Or possibly in a different year with a different baby taking a different nap: We had several children in quick succession, and some of the details have blurred. On the vast scale of time that this tale will ultimately encompass -- a scale so stupendous the human mind cannot fathom it -- a year or two, give or take, is nothing.

What I can say with certainty is that this story begins in Colorado, near the town of Estes Park. The wife, kids and I were visiting my in-laws at the YMCA of the Rockies, a big, wholesome spread in an alpine valley northwest of Denver. A baby needed a nap. I decided to take her for a peaceful drive. A quiet car is like Xanax for a baby, and I would be free to admire some mountain vistas. On impulse, I asked my mother-in-law, Marilyn Sue Mohler Ball, if she would like to ride along. We had never done anything of the kind, just the two of us, before. To my surprise, she said yes.

We headed down toward town, but before we got there, Marilyn pointed to a right-hand turn that bypassed the tourist traffic and carried us south. The road skirted the grounds of a camp where I had spent happy days as a boy, and then it climbed a hill through dry pines before leveling out in a wide meadow perhaps a mile square. In the center of this meadow was a space to pull off the road. Marilyn asked me to stop there.

"This is my favorite view in the whole world," she said. Or words to that effect. Having typed them, I'm not so sure. It sounds pretty effusive for Marilyn, the levelheaded daughter of Missouri farmers. The words are more credible, though, if you happened to be sitting in that meadow, looking west. Perfectly centered through the windshield, sharp as carved stone, was Longs Peak, 14,255 feet above sea level -- the tallest mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park. Longs Peak wears the distinction well. It stands apart from and a little above its attendant peaks, mounts Meeker and Lady Washington, as a king stands among courtiers. There's nothing to match it along the hundreds of miles of front range north of Denver into Wyoming, not when you ponder the rounded head and broad shoulders and stunning East Face, which features a 1,000-plus-foot diamond-shaped cliff, sliced sheer and dire straight down from the summit. James Michener, in his novel Centennial, called Longs Peak simply "the best mountain of them all."

We sat there looking and talking as the engine idled and the baby snored softly. We said the sort of things folks say in the presence of the sublime. "Wow!" And, "That sure is something!" And, "Makes you feel small, doesn't it?" Somehow we wound up talking about climbing the mountain, which was just talk because Marilyn could not walk more than a couple of steps at that point, and those only with the help of a cane.

"Oh, well."

That I remember clear as a bell. Marilyn's sensible singsong. "Oh, well," she said. "Maybe when I die, my ashes can get there."

I answered without thinking. "If that ever happens, and I'm still around, I'll take you."

It did happen, three years later. Marilyn died. And when she did, it dawned on me that I had a promise to keep.

There are more than 100 proven routes to the top of Longs Peak, none of them easy. The most difficult go nearly 2,000 feet straight up the East Face, including the Diamond, which has been called the most spectacular high-altitude technical climbing in North America. At the other end of the scale of difficulty -- the end I might conceivably be able to manage -- is the Keyhole Route, a 15-mile round-trip undertaken by an estimated 15,000 people each year and completed by perhaps a third of them. Hiking this trail is like flying an airplane or playing the "Moonlight" sonata: challenging for amateurs, routine for experts. On clear days in August, 100 or more people make it to the top. According to the Yosemite Decimal System, a 1-to-5 scale of climbing difficulty, the Keyhole is a 3-plus, which means essentially that you don't need ropes or technical skills, but a wrong step in certain places can kill you. Outside magazine called the route "a thrilling nontechnical walk-up," for which "you'll need to cultivate a climber's steely nerve."

"Thousands of people do it every year," I told my wife. How hard could it be? Then we returned to Estes Park for Marilyn's memorial service, and I got a fresh glimpse of the peak, snowcapped in autumn. The weather was sunshiny and blue-sky peaceful in the valley, but a gale was blowing up there, shrouding the summit in streamers of white. Being the tallest thing for miles around (hundreds and even thousands of miles in some directions), Longs Peak makes its own, often violent, weather. Even in the mildest months, it can be dangerous to be on top past noon, when the daily fronts roll over, and lightning hammers the schist and wind scours the granite.

Standing in October sunlight while watching a wild storm on the peak more than a mile overhead was sobering, and it forced me to admit that Longs Peak would be a very hard climb for me. Growing up in Colorado did not make me a mountaineer; my few youthful expeditions routinely failed because I slept too late or turned back too easily. In my 20s, I resolved to try again, and planned a week-long trek of about 50 miles through the Swiss Alps, more than 40 miles of which I wound up circumventing by bus. (The beer in the villages, I can report, was excellent.) Something had changed about me, though, since those days. I had become a man in his mid-40s, a middle-age man, as we say optimistically, as if deaths before 60 weren't more common than deaths after 90. I had been cured of the illusion of boundless time, awakened to the fact -- concrete, no longer theoretical -- that opportunities slip away, doors close. There is not always another chance at another mountain on another day.

I started training harder than I had trained in years, logging hours on the bike and stair-climber, walking to work, shunning all elevators in favor of the stairs. I told lots of people about my plans, deliberately escalating the shame of failure. I enlisted two companions, both good bets to reach the summit. The first was my brother-in-law Joel Ball, Marilyn's only son. Joel, 47 at the time, is a dashing fellow: a computer whiz and freelance photographer who lives in palmy California with his wife and young children. He surfs and bikes and plays soccer against men half his age and makes it all look easy -- until you get to know him better and understand his fierce will to win. Joel would get to the top if he had to drag himself there by his knees and his teeth.

My second partner was Jim Somerville, an experienced hiker who has bagged prominent peaks from Washington state to New Hampshire. Jim's a guy I would be tempted to resent if only I didn't like him so much, because while I've begun falling to pieces like a '75 Pacer on a rutted road, Jim -- whose birth certificate claimed he was 47 -- remains as youthful as a bronze Apollo, perpetually 32. He would, no doubt, scamper up the mountain, pausing only for sets of push-ups and abdominal crunches. Once he got there, he would come in handy, too, on account of his doctorate in divinity. Jim is pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington.

On the Internet, I found dozens of personal accounts of Keyhole climbs by amateurs such as myself. As I read them, the basic contours of the hike began to feel familiar. The secret was to begin well before dawn, leaving plenty of time for slow going through the steep and hairy parts. The best time for an inexperienced climber to try the mountain is between mid-July and early September, when most of the ice should be melted and before the blizzards set in. These Internet essays typically projected astringent joy -- the pleasure of an arbitrary challenge conquered and a brief, optional hardship endured. I couldn't help noticing, however, that certain words cropped up again and again: words such as "vomit" and "pain" and "fear."

What little I know of Marilyn's biography is stitched from my wife's stories and family photo albums. She began life as a round-faced girl with braids and a baby brother. Her father farmed corn and soybeans in Holt County, Mo., near the Nebraska border. In those days, this was rich, gently rolling, nearly empty country, and it still is today. The great American sprawl is just a rumor there. Marilyn was a bright girl, a whiz at geography, an eager reader, and she graduated from a little neighborhood college, now defunct.

She married a red-haired, blue-eyed fellow from Arkansas named J.N. Ball. Most people call him Jay.

They had four kids in about as many years -- the second Eisenhower term was pretty much nonstop diapers -- with number five coming along a few years later. Jay worked for the telephone company in Kansas City. Once the kids were in school, Marilyn worked as a substitute teacher and, later, an executive secretary. They advanced from the working class to the middle class, and were just entering their retirement years when I met them in the early 1990s.

Something about Marilyn was immediately familiar -- her unflappable demeanor, sunny on the surface, steely underneath, stoic at the core. She reminded me of my father and his relatives who, like Marilyn, descended from the German American immigrants of the Midwest. Fascinating, complicated people, if I may speak in wild generalizations: extremely well-mannered, emotionally reserved, often strung tighter than snare drums. Easy to meet but hard to get close to. Reluctant to admit their complaints even to themselves. Ditto their joys. You'd never guess what strong opinions they have until you stumble into one, and it bites you like a bear trap. They like a good laugh but cannot imagine such a thing as a good cry. Because I was wise to the ways of her tribe, I could tell she had her doubts about me, perhaps just the standard doubts of a protective mom. Not long after I started seeing her daughter, Marilyn had the good fortune to bump into one of Karen's old boyfriends, who, she was delighted to report, was just as tall and handsome and polite and smart and successful as ever -- and did she mention handsome? Over time, though her reserve never melted, I think Marilyn became fond of me, and I know I grew fond of her. I was drawn most of all to a quality she had in great abundance:

Courage.

Death knows many ways to make an entrance. There's the lightning bolt, the massive heart attack on a pleasant afternoon, the load of heavy pipe spilling from a wrecked truck on an overpass just as your car passes below. There's the raw cruelty of a childhood cancer. There's the gift of a quiet departure at a venerable age surrounded by loving family. There's the humiliation of a long, helpless decline.

It's almost as if death becomes bored with itself and seeks variety. I recall reading once about a young man who stood beside a lake with a gun in his hand. Seized by an obvious impulse, he aimed into the deep water and squeezed the trigger. But instead of plunging, as he expected, the bullet skipped like a stone from the water's surface. It flew a long way, steadily losing velocity. By the far shore was a road, and on the road was a car. Car and bullet converged. By then, the projectile was moving so slowly it couldn't even break a window -- but the window was down, so it flew a few feet farther until it found a soft and lethal spot in the driver's head.

Sometimes death comes in a slow parade of one darned thing after another. That was the case with Marilyn. She was a little heavy, which worsened her arthritis. The arthritis made it painful to walk, so she walked less and less. Without exercise, she added weight, especially when her doctors prescribed steroids to treat the arthritis. A downward spiral.

In the dozen years that I knew her, Marilyn went from walking with a cane to maneuvering mostly in a wheelchair to almost complete incapacitation. She was in constant pain. Her mind never slowed a step -- I stayed in her good graces by sending her books full of New York Times crossword puzzles. She tried having various decrepit joints replaced, to no avail. I don't recall ever hearing her complain.

In Western Massachusetts, there's a famous cemetery plot known as the Sedgwick Pie. At its center are the graves of a prominent judge, politician and abolitionist named Theodore Sedgwick, his wife, Pamela, and their maid, Mumbet, a former slave whose freedom Sedgwick had won. For two centuries, descendants of the judge have been buried around him in concentric circles, with their feet pointed toward the center. The story goes that Judge Sedgwick prescribed this odd pattern so that when the trumpet sounds on Judgment Day and the dead are raised, all his progeny will rise up facing him.

The idea of physical resurrection has a long history, much older than Christianity, which until recently limited the acceptance of cremation. It was thought that when God decided to restore the dead, He would prefer to find them in one piece. The taboo is rapidly changing, though, as society grows more secular and many faiths and denominations have given their blessing. A generation ago, less than 10 percent of America's dead were cremated each year; by 2005, the year of Marilyn's death, the number had climbed to about one-third. In some Western states, including Marilyn's adopted home of Colorado, cremations now outnumber burials. There are many reasons for these changing attitudes, including lower funeral costs and milder environmental impact, but there can be little doubt that changing religious views play a part. Cremation rates still tend to be lower in places where Protestant fundamentalists and theologically conservative Catholics are concentrated. Take Jay's home state of Arkansas, for instance: Only about 20 percent of corpses are cremated there.

In fact, Jay worried at first that his wife had made the wrong choice, and I think it was a tribute to his respect for her that he followed through with her wishes. Over time, though, he seemed to gravitate to my wife's view that Marilyn had been set free of a body that had given her too much pain and too little joy for too many years. The idea of leaving that wheelchair and mounting the winds, of gliding into eternity from her favorite mountaintop, had a poetry that drew him in. This image certainly helped Karen. As the months went by between her mother's memorial service and our trip to Longs Peak, waves of grief ebbed and flowed unpredictably. And I sometimes overheard Karen singing a gospel standard, just above a whisper, the one with the refrain that goes:

I'll fly away, oh, glory!

I'll fly away.

When I die, hallelujah by and by,

I'll fly away.

Meanwhile, I researched the federal government's stance on scattering ashes in the wilderness. I discovered a less-said-the-better attitude. The national Forest Service, for example, declares on its Web page that it has no regulations on the subject. The National Park Service is more enigmatic, directing inquiries to the individual parks, few of which have anything to say one way or the other. At Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii, you can't scatter ashes in the crater, which is rather ironic. You need a permit to scatter ashes on Mount Rainier.

I read carefully through the regulations for Rocky Mountain National Park, but I couldn't find anything. So I sent an inquiry using a form on the park's Internet site. When that produced no answer, I sent a letter to park headquarters. This, too, went unanswered.

Which made perfect sense to me. Why should rangers be typing at computers or processing mail when they could be outdoors saving paradise? They really don't need a policy, because scattering cremated remains on a windswept granite peak has zero environmental impact. The intense heat of cremation, well over 1,000 degrees for several hours, is an effective antibiotic and disinfectant. Chemist Gayle O'Neill of TEI Analytical once analyzed the residue, and found it to be about half phosphate (fertilizer), a quarter calcium (it's mostly bone), 10 percent sulfate and dwindling amounts of potassium, sodium, various oxides and silica (also known as sand). Trace metals also showed up in her test: magnesium, iron, zinc. Perhaps someone's last meal included a multivitamin.

We settled on July 27, 2006, for the climb, about 10 months after Marilyn's death. Joel and I decided to take our families to Estes Park a few days early so that they could vacation while we adjusted to the altitude. Having five little kids around made it impossible to feel morbid. They scampered up mini-mountains and gulped root beer and stalked the nearly tame elk of Rocky Mountain National Park. Jim Somerville spent those days backpacking with old chums near Aspen. He finished that trip on the 26th, then drove five hours through the mountains to Estes Park, arriving stiff-legged and footsore at about 10 p.m. Four hours later, the alarm went off.

The weather report called for clearing skies, but when I stepped outside to check, lightning danced behind a scrim of clouds, glowing, vanishing, here, there. A muffled storm stretched in every direction.

We drank coffee and ate danish in near-

silence. In one daypack, we loaded extra water and hard candies; in another, camera gear; in the third, Marilyn. Joel's grown children, Katie and Zach, decided to join us for the first few miles of the hike. Some of us swallowed ibuprofen to get ahead of the aches and pains, then we packed into the rental car and set off along the same roads I had driven with Marilyn on the day I made my promise.

Pulling into the trail-head parking lot at 3 a.m., we found nearly every space already full. We waited at the trail-head register behind four fellows from Texas dressed in snazzy gear and looking ready for the Matterhorn. When our turn came, we checked our watches and signed our names. It was 3:10.

I told myself the lightning flashes were moving gradually eastward, away from the peak, but I wasn't really sure. It wouldn't matter much until we were above the timberline, so we started up a smooth, wide trail through pine forest, gradually gaining altitude, finding our footing by the light of headlamps.

After an hour of easy walking, we were huffing and puffing a bit. The trees were shrinking, and we heard the sound of rushing water. We came to a bridge made of rough planks across a little chasm filled with wildflowers and a plunging freshet. Just beyond the bridge, the blaze-orange letters of a warning sign caught the beam of my lamp:

LIGHTNING HAZARD, it said.

The sign continued in carved letters painted black. "When electrical storms approach, turn back if possible. Avoid high points, horses, ridges and campfires. Take shelter in low pockets away from the trail." Lightning kills hikers every year in the Colorado high country. We studied the sign, looked up and decided the flashes overhead were moving toward the prairie.

Above the tree line, we found ourselves on the edge of a huge, sloping meadow, strewn with boulders, dotted with scrub and blossoms. From here, we could see the trail ahead for more than a mile, winding like a snake and rising gently. The headlamps of dozens of hikers marked the way, like a string of itty-bitty Christmas lights. Behind and below us, the lights of Denver, Boulder, Longmont and Fort Collins glittered by the millions on the flat bed of the high plains. To the west, in the gray hour before daybreak, loomed the dark dome of Longs Peak, seeming very, very far away.

The Keyhole Route circles almost all the way around the mountain. From the timberline, we would be moving north, then west, then turning south when we reached the far side of the mountain, only to turn once more for the final climb facing east. The peak is so well guarded by cliffs, overhangs, chasms and sheers that the trail must hunt the whole mountain to find a way through.

Rising between us and our goal was a homely rock pile called Mount Lady Washington, 13,269 feet. Thousands of people hike past it each summer, yet no one has ever bothered to mark a trail to the top. Being the mountain next to Longs Peak is, geologically, like singing backup for Beyonce. Over Lady Washington's shoulder, Mars twinkled in the clearing sky.

We were making fine time, reaching Granite Pass at 5:50 a.m. -- just as the sunsphere bubbled up in the east. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a sunrise, though I've witnessed some fine ones: on the mirror surface of a Maine cove, in a steaming gray-green English pasture, through a window casting an aura around the downy head of a newborn baby. This sunrise was less intimate than any of those. It seemed to be happening far away, in another world. The passing storm clouds hung in a low, black line parallel to the straight, dark prairie horizon. Together, these lines framed daybreak as if it were some cosmic performance. We could actually watch Earth turning, scrolling slowly down the face of a fireball the terrible color of a blood orange. That morning, the normally mundane recurrence of sunrise evoked the original miracle, the original power, suggested by God's first command: Let there be . . . light.

Nearby, boulders lay scattered and stacked as if some boy-giant had been playing here the day before. After a rest, we continued up the trail through delicate alpine tundra. What the tundra lacks in scale, it makes up for in color -- but you have to look closely. Tiny wildflowers in whites, yellows, purples and blues. Moss and lichens jet black, creamy and the electric yellow-green of original Gatorade. Steel-colored rocks -- gneiss, schist and granite -- striped with bronze and white, peppered with black and silver.

Farther on, the tundra petered out in an acreage of boulders, where the way forward became a matter of hopping from one huge rock to the next. This area is called (no surprise) the Boulder Field, and years ago, a stone cabin stood here, a way station for tourists and their guides to rest overnight before setting off for the summit. The lodge is long gone, but the Boulder Field remains popular with campers who want to break the climb in two. Low walls of piled rocks, used as windbreaks, gave the campground the feel of a Stone Age village and hinted at the misery of a gale-swept night on the mountain.

We were now on the north slope of Longs Peak, more than five miles and 3,300 vertical feet from our beginning. For the past hour, Mount Lady Washington had obstructed our view of the goal, but in the Boulder Field, we could see the wide summit thrown up into space, then halved as if by some terrible cleaver. In a patch of perpetual shade, a band of dirty year-round snow adorned the fat middle of the bare mountain like a sash on a sumo wrestler.

A couple of climbers struck out straight ahead toward the peak, but that route required skill and ropes, so we continued on the circular path up a river of rocks toward a distinctive gap in the ridge called the Keyhole.

The path turned suddenly steep.

By late autumn of 2004, Marilyn's health was collapsing. Her joints were nothing but pain, and her pain medications seemed to be doing more harm than good. Her circulation was terrible. Doctors warned of congestive heart failure. She was losing what little mobility she had. The indignity of it all was demoralizing to Marilyn, and the job of helping her was grinding Jay down. Shortly before Christmas, they decided she must move to a nursing home.

Her whole family gathered in Colorado for the holiday in a grim commemoration of the circle of life: her five children, their three spouses, 11 grandchildren. Marilyn visited from the nursing home, pale and breathing from an oxygen tube. I found myself wondering how long she would keep going. Her brains and wit -- sharp as ever -- could do her little good in the current crisis. The only way she might dodge death was to get up out of bed and start exercising, no matter how much it hurt.

As the new year began, I braced myself for the phone call I imagined was coming soon, the one that would break my wife's heart. Instead, to my amazement, Marilyn threw herself into physical therapy, dragging herself up from the bed and inching across the floor on ruined legs with such fortitude that she was soon able to return home.

The Keyhole is an unlikely calamity, a nearly complete circle gouged in the northern shoulder of Longs Peak. Stone fingers almost close overhead as hikers cross the ridgeline. The spot is so picturesque, and marks such a dramatic turn in the Longs Peak trail, that I found myself thinking it might have been fabricated on a Disney World back lot.

But an even stranger feature at this turning point reminded me of the hard reality of this great mountain. A stone hut, about eight feet high and eight feet across, shaped like a beehive, was mortared into the steep terrain a few yards below the Keyhole. A bronze plaque explained that the shelter is dedicated to Agnes Wolcott Vaille, the intrepid daughter of a wealthy Denver businessman. A skilled climber, she set out in January 1925 to make a winter climb of the perilous East Face with a Swiss mountain guide named Walter Kiener.

Deep snow slowed their hike to the mountain, and they were still climbing when night fell. They felt their way upward through the darkness. As Dougald MacDonald, author of a fine book about Longs Peak, tells the story, Kiener's thermometer read 14-below near the summit. Vaille was so exhausted she could barely take a step, and a fresh storm moved over the Peak.

Climbers have a saying: You're not done until you're down. Vaille and Kiener crossed the summit to descend the North Face to the Boulder Field, but when they came to an almost vertical pitch, Vaille slipped and tumbled 150 feet into a snowdrift. Kiener dragged her to her feet, and she staggered a little farther, dazed, battered and frozen. She begged Kiener to leave her and go for help; his heroic race down the mountain and back with a rescue crew cost him all his toes and several fingers from frostbite. A would-be rescuer, Herbert Sortland, was lost in the blizzard and froze to death. Agnes Vaille's body was found where Kiener had left her -- within sight of the spot where the hut now stands.

I looked inside. The shelter was as cold and damp as a New England tomb. It struck me as a huge effort, but somehow pointless; after all, what was the chance that someone would make the same mistake in the same place? I was about to say so when a voice behind me remarked: "I know some people who were awful glad it was here when the storm hit yesterday."

Stepping through the Keyhole felt like stepping onto the ledge of a skyscraper. After 41/2 hours of traveling through forests, meadows and broad glacier tracks -- more "Sound of Music" than "Eiger Sanction" -- we found ourselves looking down a precipitous slope into a rocky valley about 1,500 vertical feet beneath us. The abrupt change made the drop look even sharper than it really is. A slip at the wrong moment probably wouldn't mean a quarter-mile fall. You'd bounce to a stop after a few hundred feet.

The view to the west was spectacular. Across a gray valley studded with black lakes, we saw the jagged peaks of the Continental Divide and the Never Summer Range. East of us within 50 miles lived millions of people, but the country to the west could be reached only by the hardiest of them. There wasn't the slightest sign of human existence. It was like looking through a time machine into a world stripped to its prehistoric elements: rock, sky and water. I shivered.

This is a point where many Longs Peak hikers turn back. "Beyond the Keyhole," MacDonald wrote, "Longs is a more serious mountain, unusually difficult and steep for a popular fourteener in Colorado . . . Of the dozens of people killed by falls or exposure on Longs Peak, nearly one-third died not on the technical climbing of the East Face but along the hiking route between the Keyhole and the summit."

One death in particular haunted me: Gregory Koczanski was, like me, a Washingtonian in his 40s, married with young children. He was an important man in town, a lobbyist for the financial giant Citigroup and a member of the Federal City Council. We never met, but we knew some of the same people. In August 1999, shortly after passing the Keyhole, while feeling his way along the narrow path known as the Ledges, Koczanski lost his balance in a sudden gust and plunged 450 feet.

I took a deep breath and started along the path, which is marked at intervals by bull's-eyes painted onto the rock. The Ledges were perhaps three to five feet wide in most places, roomy as a sidewalk, but a sidewalk can be intimidating when death waits just over the curb. We came to a point where an iron handhold was drilled into the wall; we had to grab on, lean out over the abyss and step around an outcropping to go forward. The newspaperman in me thought briefly what a good first sentence could be written on the obit of a man who died on the way to scatter ashes.

This section of trail led slightly upward until it reached the bottom of a long, steep stretch of boulders and scree known as the Trough. We were now above 13,000 feet, where breathing is an ordeal for flatlanders, so the ascent through the Trough was a slow, unhappy slog: two or three steps up, pause to pant, another step or two, another pause. And each step must be chosen with care to avoid sending loose rock cannoning down the chute toward hikers below.

Jim Somerville's superior fitness began to show as he opened a lead of two or three minutes. I found myself glad for all the Metro escalators I had climbed two steps at a time. The Trough seemed to last forever, but after about an hour of steady progress, 10 vertical feet per minute, I caught up to Jim at the tall, slippery stone marking the end of the Trough. Ahead of him were two hikers flummoxed by the smooth block. They couldn't figure out how to climb it -- a reflection of its trickiness, yes, but also of the muddling effects of oxygen depletion. "How are we supposed to get up there?" one of them asked. Jim surveyed the impediment for a moment, then grabbed a tiny handhold with three fingers and pressed the toe of his boot against another rough spot and raised himself high enough to scramble over. I followed, marveling at the fact that serious climbers ascend massive walls with no more purchase than this.

We squeezed through a notch in the cliff at about 13,700 feet and entered a section of trail called the Narrows -- another ledge system, steeper and tighter than the one before. Eyeing these little ledges and the long, long drop, I felt sick but kept moving because I realized that, if I stopped for more than a few seconds, my fear could master me. About two-thirds of the way along the Narrows, we met a hiker who had stopped too long. She was a strong young woman, obviously more than a match for the trail. Nothing ahead of her was any more difficult than the challenges she had already met, but her fears had accumulated until they froze her. She couldn't see how to move forward or back. As she sobbed, her hiking partner tried gently to persuade her to take just one more step.

There was nothing we could do to help, so we edged past and continued around one last left turn, which revealed a stunning view of empty air between us and Pagoda Mountain and, rising above us, a nearly vertical ramp called the Homestretch. The granite of this final test shone golden in the morning sun, striped black where rivulets of ice melt oozed from the cracks and moistened the already slick incline.

The top, about 30 stories up from where we stood, seemed to be pulling us toward it, but earlier Jim had warned us of such moments. "Gravity," he said gravely, "it's not just a good idea. It's the law." I reminded myself of hikers -- such as Boy Scout Robert Silver, a teenager as I was on a June day in 1980 -- who have slipped here, so close to the goal, and died on the rocks 300 feet below. Testing each step, breathing heavily, I moved slowly up the last few feet, popping my head over the rim of the summit at 9:30 a.m.

Marilyn, who had been dying at Christmas, felt so well by autumn that she decided to join Jay on a drive from their home in Loveland, Colo., to the 50th reunion of his Navy shipmates in Branson, Mo. Her recovery had been arduous and impressive, and I give her all the credit. She

didn't have to get up from that nursing home bed and take one more step, or another and another. The pain of rehabilitation was intense, and the payoff -- a few labored steps, at best -- seemed modest. But she did it.

Her doctor wasn't crazy about the idea of her spending several long days in a car, and Jay was inclined to listen to her doctor. Neither man knew, though, how important it was to her to get moving again. She had not struggled up from the bed just to stare out the window. Marilyn overruled them with a pleading determination. She simply had to go.

Marilyn and Jay covered about half the distance on the first day, a long, easy drive, one of those pleasant days when long-married people remember some of the things they love about each other. The next day, they stopped to visit Jay's sister near Kansas City, and that's when Jay noticed what looked like a blood clot behind one of Marilyn's knees. This was precisely the thing her doctor had worried about.

She was admitted that night to a small hospital and dosed with anti-clotting agents. But instead of dissolving, a clot floated free and traveled to her lungs.

It all happened quickly. A sunny phone call announcing that they were making good progress. Then a partly cloudy call reporting that Marilyn was in the hospital but that everything would be fine. Then a more ominous call from Karen's sister, who was on the scene and said Marilyn had worsened and was about to be transferred to a bigger hospital. Karen dialed her father's cellphone and reached him just as he stepped out of Marilyn's room. Her agony was too much to watch. As they talked, Karen overheard a nurse saying that Marilyn couldn't survive without life support. A moment later, Marilyn Ball was dead at 73.

In the days and weeks that followed, I thought a lot about that car trip of hers. Wasn't it foolhardy? What was the point of risking so much? Marilyn stood to lose not just additional days or months of pain, but also days or months of her husband's love and the smiles of her grandchildren. Eventually, I decided that getting in the car wasn't a death wish, but an affirmation of life, which is measurable not only in length but also in depth.

That's what I was thinking up there on top of Longs Peak, among other things. The morning had turned perfect. Not a trace of the pre-dawn thunderheads could be seen. The sky was the color of water just after a child has dipped her blue paintbrush, and the afternoon's weather was still white cotton balls and wisps of cirrus to the west. We were on top of the visible world. We could see more than 100 miles in every direction, line after line of peaks, indigo and snowy, stretching away to the west and south. The Great Plains unrolling forever to the east. And down below us to the north lay the valley where Marilyn had so often sat, tired and crippled, gazing up at her favorite mountain.

The summit of Longs Peak is a surprise: enormous -- four acres -- and almost as flat as a board. Perhaps two dozen people shared the space with us, mostly conquerors of the Keyhole Route -- though we looked with awe on the climbers who surfaced from the East Face, trailing ropes and exuding competence. After catching our breath and congratulating ourselves, Joel, Jim and I walked a good distance away from the others to a spot where we could look down on Estes Park.

Jim asked me if I wanted to say anything. I choked out a few poor words about courage. Joel did much better, reciting from memory a spirited passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poetry:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! --

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

When Jim took over, he kept it pretty low-key for a Baptist preacher, which Marilyn would have appreciated. He affirmed how thankful we were to have reached this place, and talked of all the people who would have liked to be there with us. He spoke of the beauty of Creation and the beauty of a life well-lived.

Then he took the plastic bag and began to shake out the remains of the body that had kept Marilyn down there when she dreamed of being up here.

The gray ash was barely noticeable on the gray stone. It wouldn't stay long. Indeed, some rose immediately into the breeze and vanished. I pictured Karen in the valley looking up in our direction and singing to herself: No more cold, iron shackles on my feet . . .

We took turns flinging ash downwind until the bag was empty. We huddled together for a little prayer. Then we piled a half-dozen stones into a cairn to mark the spot, although I can't say why or for whom we did that.

Over the years, I have done more than my share of thinking about death, but I can't say I've figured much out. I tell myself: Everyone does it; how hard can it be? Still, it scares the bejabbers out of me. Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician and philosopher, put it well in his Pensees: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and can even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened . . . the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

As we made our way back down Longs Peak, I tried to picture some of those infinite spaces. Longs Peak seems timeless if anything can be, but it, too, has a life story. The Rockies of today are actually third-generation mountains. The striped schist and gneiss boulders we admired along the way were once softer shale and sandstone at the bottom of a primordial sea. Then, about 1.7 billion years ago, the plates of Earth collided, crumpling the crust of the planet. In incomprehensibly slow motion, mountains rose above the sea, while the friction created a furnace so hot it changed the soft undersea stones into the very hard stuff of the Rockies.

Meanwhile, granite was cooking down in Earth's crust, and, for some reason not yet understood, a great vein of it was pushed up under the mountains when they were about 300 million years old. Then the wind blew endlessly, and water ran and froze, and ice thickened and retreated and so on for 800 million years -- until the mountains were worn flat, leaving the granite and the schist and the gneiss exposed.

Another sea spread over the land, and, after 200 million years, another collision of plates thrust another range of mountains skyward, and these, too, wore away. And another sea spread.

About 130 million years ago, it happened again. Tectonic plates collided. Volcanoes erupted. A sea withdrew. Soft rock eroded. And if this eternal story of rising and falling mountains were compressed to the span of one hour, we would now reach the last three or four seconds. That's what 2 million years looks like to a rock.

Two million years of freezing and melting. Great glaciers, hundreds of yards thick, carved the smooth slopes of the mountains into steep valleys and sheer cliffs. Each new ice age deepened and sharpened the work done by earlier glaciers. Longs Peak took shape.

The last glaciers began to recede about 15,000 years ago, an eyeblink in geological time but almost eight times the interval from Caesar Augustus to Marilyn Ball. Presumably, after more eons of wind and another sea, even Longs Peak will pass away.

Why do we dread the eternity ahead of us so much more than the eternity behind? Hamlet's question is a false choice: To be or not to be? Our moment of being is but a hiccup in the normal order of not-being. As we passed back through the Keyhole and down the Boulder Field, it struck me that Marilyn had dignified both of these conditions. She lived her moment as if it mattered. And when it ended, she surrendered her molecules gracefully. Creation can reuse them as the Creating Force sees fit.

I guess I had been trudging under my burden of imponderables, because suddenly Jim Somerville burst past me into the lead of our little group and began bounding down the trail. "Enough of this sleepwalking!" he called over his shoulder. Until that moment, I thought I was worn out. Joel and I took off after him, and together we galloped three miles back to the parking lot, laughing, feeling our blood race, alive.

David Von Drehle is a Washington writer. He can be reached at 20071@washpost.com, and he will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.