The night I twisted my ankle
The night before the climb, the Oregon Episcopal varsity intramural league played indoor soccer in the gym. I went up for a header, came down on the side of my foot, and rolled my ankle hard enough that I knew before I hit the floor I wasn't going on the mountain in the morning. We iced it on the bench and the rest of the team finished the game.
It was May 11, 1986. I was a sophomore at Oregon Episcopal School. I had trained for the climb. The annual school climb up Mount Hood was something the older kids talked about for months — the kind of thing that put a sophomore in the same rope team as a senior they'd never have spoken to otherwise. I'd been looking forward to it the way you look forward to anything you've trained for at fifteen.
My ankle was the size of a softball by the time my mother got me home. I called the school and told them I couldn't go.
The climb left the next morning, May 12, 1986. Three adults and ten students. They were going for the summit and back in a single day — Mount Hood is normally climbed that way, ropes and crampons and ice axes, weather permitting. About 10,000 people attempt it every year. The Cascade Range weather can be deceptive, with visibility dropping from miles to arm's length in minutes.
The visibility dropped that morning. By the time the group should have been turning around they were already in white-out conditions. The lead chaperone, Father Tom Goman, made the call to dig in and shelter rather than try to descend in zero visibility. They built a snow cave. They waited.
The blizzard didn't break for two days. Search teams in helicopters couldn't see the mountain. By the time the survivors were located in the snow cave, seven of my classmates and two of my teachers were gone.
That number gets reported a lot of different ways. The plain way to say it is: out of thirteen people who went up the mountain on May 12, 1986, four came down alive.
The names
The list, in the order I read them in 1999 at the summit, is this:
- Patrick McGuinness
- Allison Litzenberger
- Susan McClave
- Erin Oleary
- Erik Sandvik
- Marion Horwell
- Father Tom Goman
- Tasha Amy
- Rich Haeder
Some of these people were my closest friends. We were planning to go to the same colleges. We had bands together, we had concerts together, we had inside jokes that nobody else knew. They were teenagers, the way I was a teenager. The teachers were the kind of teachers you remember thirty-nine years later.
I was supposed to be on that climb. I should have been one of the names.
The dark road
I don't have a clean way to say what came next. KATU's Steve Dunn put it gently when he interviewed me about all this in 2016: "It was really the beginning of a really dark road I went down for a while." I said it that way to him because I didn't have a better way. The honest truth is that I was sixteen and I had no framework for what had happened, and I didn't know how to be the one who lived. I would look at Mount Hood from anywhere in Portland — and you can see Mount Hood from almost anywhere in Portland — and I would feel it physically in my chest. The mountain held a dark power over me, was how I put it then. I don't know if I'd say it differently now.
The thing that pulled me out, eventually, was the saxophone.
I don't say that lightly and I don't say it as a feel-good narrative. I say it because it's what happened. Music was already where I went when there was nowhere else to go — that was how it had always worked for me, since elementary school. After May 1986 it became the only thing. I practiced like a person who needed to. I joined every group that would have me. I went on the road as soon as I could. By 18 I was on the tour bus of the two-time Grammy-winning singer Diane Schuur, and that was where I taught myself how to be a working musician.
It would be twenty-six years before I told anyone in the music business about the mountain.
Going back, June 12, 1999
Thirteen years to the month after the disaster, I climbed Mount Hood with a group from Portland Mountain Rescue.
I had been working on getting myself there for years. Portland Mountain Rescue is the volunteer team that has been on the mountain for decades — they were there for our search and recovery in 1986, and they have been there for every other accident on Mount Hood since. They train, they recover bodies in conditions most people can't imagine, and they don't ask for anything from the families they bring closure to. I climbed with their guides because I knew if I was going to do this without quitting halfway up, I needed to be with people who knew this mountain in a way I never would.
We summited on the morning of June 12, 1999. I had a small laminated card in the inside pocket of my jacket that I had typed up the week before. I unfolded it. I read it out loud, and the wind took most of it back across the snow.
As I climbed Mount Hood, Saturday June 12, 1999, I thought of Patrick McGuinness, Allison Litzenberger, Susan McClave, Erin Oleary, Erik Sandvik, Marion Horwell, Father Tom Goman, Tasha Amy, Rich Haeder. As these flags wave in the air, may they bring love and peace to our friends, and a happy and loving existence to them, wherever they may be, and to all beings everywhere, continuous blessings of love and compassion. May we all have peace and understanding.
— Patrick Lamb
I stood there for a long time after that. I'd thought about what it would feel like to summit, and I had been wrong about all of it. It didn't feel like closure. It felt like the beginning of being able to look at the mountain without losing my breath.
We descended without incident.
What I owe
There is a thing people sometimes say to me, when this story comes up at a dinner or after a show. They say: that twisted ankle saved your life. I don't know what to say to that. I know it's true and I know it's also nothing — the ankle didn't decide. I was lucky in a way that has nothing to do with anything I did. The kids in that snow cave were as good as I was, and the teachers were better than any of us.
What I owe to the people I lost — and I think about this almost every day — is to do something with the time I was given that I wouldn't have had. I don't have a precise theology for that. I just know that there is no version of the rest of my life where the mountain isn't on my shoulder.
So I show up. I do the gigs. I work for the beneficiaries. I try to be the best saxophonist I can be in any room I walk into, even — maybe especially — the ones where I'm worried I won't be enough. I try to make a Tuesday-night audience in a Beaverton restaurant feel as cared for as a Java Jazz Festival audience. I keep in touch with the families through Facebook and the occasional phone call. I show up for OES events when I'm in Portland, and I take a long minute to look at Mount Hood when I'm flying in.
I also try, when I can, to talk about it. Not as the centerpiece of who I am — there are a lot of saxophonists, and I want to be one of them on the strength of the playing — but as a piece of context, when the context is asked for. KATU's Steve Dunn asked for it in 2016 and the interview that came out of it has run quietly online ever since. I'm grateful for that. It is the only public, independently sourced telling of what happened to me with the mountain, and I'm aware that it's the only reason any of this story can be told the way I'm telling it now.
A note on the disaster as a public event
The 1986 Mount Hood disaster has its own Wikipedia article. It is one of the deadliest mountaineering accidents in United States history, alongside the 1967 Mount McKinley expedition and the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. It changed the way Oregon schools approach high-altitude trips. It changed the way Portland Mountain Rescue trains. It is taught in case studies at outdoor leadership programs around the country.
If you came to this page looking for information on the disaster itself, I would point you to the Wikipedia article and to the Outside Magazine retrospective before you look at anything I've written. Their accounts are written by people who do this work for a living. Mine is just one OES sophomore's memory.
If you came here as a family member of any of the nine people we lost — I think about all of them. I always have. I always will.
Sources
- KATU News, "A twist of fate leaves musician Patrick Lamb wondering why he was spared Mt. Hood tragedy," Steve Dunn, May 7, 2016. katu.com.
- "1986 Mount Hood disaster," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
- "Oregon Episcopal School," Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
- Outside Magazine retrospective on the 1986 disaster. outsideonline.com.