Stories: Top Of The World:TTU

Stories: Top Of The World

"It was timeless zen. The sort of experience he climbed for. The sort of experience he lived for."

By the summer of 1997, the government has all but written off the backcountry of American wilderness areas as therianthrope-controlled badlands. But outdoor diehards like Chris aren't about to let little things like wildlife encounters stop them. After all, what's the worst that could happen at the top of a remote mountain?

Meta-Data

Author

BaxilDragon

Release date

Nov. 18, 2003

Word Count

2,450

Author Comments

Another BaMoTTuSto Reader's Choice winner. I suspect its popularity has a lot to do with the descriptions and dialogue that bring the remote, rocky peak alive.

Story Data

Major Characters

Chris, a climber
Dean, a dragon
Skyree, a gryphon

Dates of Story Events

July 23, 1997

Era: EraFromCausesToCrusades

Locations

A peak in Yosemite National Park (unspecified, but above 12,000 feet elevation).

Significant Cameos and References

The newcomer at the end of the story mistakes Dean for Metal, who appears in StoryHissAndPurr.

Trivia

The lyrics Chris sings are from Rush's "Bravado." Except the last line, which he made up.
As routes go, a 5.7 approach is fairly trivial for an experienced climber. On the other hand, Chris is free-solo climbing it.
Dean's circuit of "all the state's 12s" is a hell of a lot harder than he's letting on! He has to hit 209 peaks in the Sierra Nevada alone (1), and 15 more peaks around the state (2). That works out to a steady 2-1/3 per hour ... if he doesn't sleep for four days. Not to mention the 350-mile flight between the peaks in the Mount Shasta area and the rest of them in the Sierra.

He's not making it any easier by starting in Yosemite (the one Dean meets Chris on is his seventh register entry); this means he has to fly south to round up the High Sierra peaks and then north again for Shasta. On the other hand, he might have started with Shasta's three peaks and flown south from there ... though if he did, I suspect he skipped some. Or he may have decided that a sweep south through the Sierra and then north up the White Mountains was the most efficient flight path.