Mark Obmascik has a lock on obsession.
His first work, “The Big Year” (2004), was built around three men vying for bragging rights on who saw the most bird species in a year. His subject this time is, literally and figuratively, much closer to home: He takes on the challenge of climbing each of Colorado’s fourteeners, all 54 of them. He takes the reader along on an entertaining and occasionally heart-pounding trek.
In his opening paragraph, Obmascik tells the reader that he’s not a natural candidate for the journey that is about to unfold: “I was fat, 44 and in the market for a vasectomy. My mortgage was half-gone, but so was my hair. Crabgrass bugged me.”
A phone call from his eldest son, Cass, then 12, changed his world. Cass and his camp buddies had been climbing Pikes Peak “when he tripped and slashed open his shin to the bone.” What sticks in Cass’ mind isn’t the fall, or the surgical staples that left a “Frankenstein scar” on his leg, but the feeling of watching the sun rise on a summit more than 2 miles above sea level. And he makes a pivotal request, for a father-son fourteener climb.
Obmascik, a former reporter for The Denver Post, faces the request with trepidation. He’s a long way from the days when he climbed mountains and enjoyed exercise.
“These days,” he writes, “I like to eat. I’ve packed so much on my hips it would be like climbing with a pony-keg of beer in my fanny pack. Imagine lugging all that extra weight up the 1,860 steps of the Empire State Building, four times, and doing it in high-altitude air with about a third less oxygen than Manhattan. All that work would be just one Fourteener.”
All it takes is one climb with Cass — they don’t summit — to get bitten by the climbing bug. He then tests his mettle alone on the Mount of the Holy Cross; success is a kick in the testosterone. Over the summer of 2006, he spends time climbing on his own, rediscovering the magic that comes with the combination of solitude and physical exertion. At the end of the summer, he decides he wants to go for more.
Merrill, his wife, asks that a rule be imposed: No more solo climbing. “And so I entered the winter of 2006 with two major problems — too many pounds and too few friends,” Obmascik writes. The former leads him to the gym, the latter to the Internet and the website .
If Obmascik’s narrative focused solely on his pursuit of fourteeners, it would be an amusing but ultimately too self-involved work to be of interest to a non-mountaineering audience. His self-deprecating prose is often funny, as when he describes a glissade (a slide down a snowy field on one’s backside) as his true mountain calling: “My fat behind has plowed out a plush luge run (for the climber who follows him down).” He broadens the appeal of his work by lacing it with facts and anecdotes about the mountains and mountain experiences.
He recounts a harrowing story of two climbers, familiar posters on the . message board, who face disaster on Humboldt Peak, and brings the reader close as the tale unfolds. He talks about his series of “man-dates” with the climbers he recruits to join him, and what brings each of them to a mountain. He touches on the history of the peaks and their nearby towns, succinctly describing Colorado’s wilder, earlier days.
Obmascik is an award-winning journalist, and it shows in his pacing and careful selection of detail. The result is a rich narrative that goes down more easily than it goes away.
“Halfway to Heaven” is, at heart, a story of obsession. And while each obsession is unique, a common force drives them all. In the right hands they make for compelling stories. Obmascik’s hands, in this case, are both skilled and sure.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post.
Author discussion
Mark Obmascik will discuss “Halfway to Heaven” at the Boulder Book Store (1107 Pearl St., Boulder) at 7:30 p.m. on May 12, and at the Tattered Cover downtown store (1628 16th St.) at 7:30 p.m. on May 14.
