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No end in sight

A pass is not a voluntarily skipped turn, a document allowing entry somewhere or a proposition.
A pass is something different to hikers.
It's a piece of purgatory come to Earth -- at least the Kearsage Pass was.

In mythology, the gods condemned Sisyphus to roll a big rock to the top of a mountain again and again. If they really wanted to mess with him, they should have made him roll the rock up the endless twists and turns of Kearsage Pass again and again.
After lunch, my trailmates took off on their much more in-shape and nimble legs. I continued to trundle to the top as trees and greenery became more and more scarce.
Eventually, the landscape resembled a spent volcano's domain. Black gravelly rock and an occaisional big rock seemed all that was left of the world.
My feet seemed to have giant tubs of chicken-fried steak weighing them down -- which they did but in a more figurative sense.
I was barely plodding along when I finally ran into another hiker going down.
"How far? How far?" I puffed.
"What?" he said.
I silently cursed him for making me waste more valuable oxygen on talking.
"How far to the pass?"
"Oh, not too far. Pretty soon you'll be able to see it," he said.
Thank you, Lord.
Well, if there wasn't much more to go, heck, get out of my way, world.
I managed a much quicker plod for two switchbacks.
These things called switchbacks are torture devices. They go on forever. You get to the end, and then there's another one right in front of you.
After a couple of hours, I couldn't see any pass (that liar), and I couldn't see any end to this very first stretch of a six-day, 50-mile trip. I felt like I'd already gone the 50 miles. I was ready to go home now.
Pick me up. Where's the rescue helicopter? Where's a cute ranger who can get me to a ranger station? Where's ANYTHING that will take me off this Godforsaken trail.
Turns out, I was the only one who could take me off the trail.
If I didn't keep going, then the high-altitude vultures were going to swoop down and pick my bones.
So I kept going. I played a game. All I had to do was make it to the next rock.
"You can do that, can't you, Trish? You gave birth, graduated from college -- twice -- and ... ."
Yes, I was talking to myself by then. But sometimes I ran out of breath even in my mind.
I was resting two to three times a switchback, but I was still going. People I would see several switchbacks below me caught up and passed me.
Great. It was confirmed. I was the slowest hiker on the High Sierras, maybe in the world. But since I was so far from civilization, I'd never know for sure.
Sometime during the haze of constant tromping through the volcanic fields at high altutide, I looked up and saw some tiny heads above me.
Could that be my friends?
"Yes, Trish or whoever your name is, that's your friends," the voice in my head said. "That must be the pass. You can make it now. Keep going. Try to go a little faster. Wait. Not that fast. That'll kill you. Yes, perfect, one foot after another."
About an hour and a half after I first spotted my friends, I crested the pass.
Wow. It was high. My trialmates clapped and cheered. I loved them. I loved the world. I drank water and took sustenance. Life was, indeed, perfect. I could do this hiking thing, no problem. Shoot, it was a breeze.
Then I realized I'd have to go down the other side.
Life sucked.
But, of course, going down wasn't half as bad as going up. The main thing, in fact, was not to go down too fast. I slid to my bottom a couple of times in the scramble down, but I didn't care.
I had survived the first leg of my journey, and, sometimes, survival is victory.

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