Neither Troy Castle, left, nor Garrett Krstich had climbed a single mountain before taking on Mount Rainier (photo by Alpine Ascents International).

The end of the spring semester can mean a number of things to students who are finishing up their college degrees. There’s the ceremony at which friends and family gather to watch as students receive a handshake and a diploma. It can mean a nice dinner, or perhaps a brief vacation. For others, it means last-minute preparation for that new job.

Troy Castle and Garrett Krstich have not always followed the path chosen by their teammates. Each came to SMU with the intention of joining the football team, Castle as a defensive back/linebacker from Gig Harbor, Wash., and Krstich a quarterback from Carlsbad, Calif. Each made the team, each eventually earning a scholarship. Each graduated, and each earned a Master’s degree.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the way the teammates (and roommates) celebrated their first steps into the working world was by taking some more unusual steps — lots of them. While teammates were celebrating their graduations in more conventional ways, Castle and Krstich climbed Mount Rainier over Memorial Day weekend.

Mount Rainier is the tallest peak in the lower 48 states. At 14,416 feet above sea level, its summit stands above the Cascade Mountains and can be seen for miles on a clear day. Castle grew up looking at the peak from his home … which is almost 60 miles away.

The climb was the first for both. It’s the mountaineering equivalent of playing golf for the first time at Augusta National.

INSPIRATION

The idea, not surprisingly, was Castle’s.

“I think it was my idea, originally,” Castle said. “There (were) three reasons that made me want to do it. One of them is that I grew up in the Northwest, and on the few sunny days we would get, I’d be able to see the mountain and appreciate the view, and wonder what it would look like from the top. It’s kind of a symbol of the Northwest, Mount Rainier in the background of Seattle. No. 2 was (that) our playing days are over, so I was looking for a new challenge — you want to continue to stay in shape and train for something — and then the last one was that my dad’s an old mountain climber, and one of my favorite things growing up, and still to this day, is to sit around and listen to him talk about mountaineering stories, asking him different questions about stuff, and I have been trying to get into it ever since I was little. I just never had time for it because of school or sports. But now that I’m graduated and my eligibility is expired, I figured now is a good time to get into it.”

Before he got married, Castle’s father, Don, climbed the world’s highest mountains, including Alaska’s Mount Denali — the highest summit in the United States — and the world’s highest: Mount Everest. Troy knew of his father’s exploits and stories, so although the challenge was considerable, the lure was at least understandable. Shortly after the conclusion of the 2015 football season, Castle signed up with a guide service and went about training for the climb, pounding away at the stairclimbers in the Mustangs’ weight room.

To say that Krstich didn’t have the same background would be an understatement. Castle’s hometown of Gig Harbor is less than an hour southwest of Seattle. Krstich’s hometown of Carlsbad is a beachfront town, almost 90 minutes southeast of Los Angeles. When asked to name the biggest climb he had done before embarking on his trip with Castle, Krstich laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might be the hill in (Gerald J.) Ford Stadium.”

Castle and Krstich spent two nights in tents that were anchored into the slope on the side of Mount Rainier (photo by Troy Castle).

When Castle approached his roommate about the idea of joining him on his climb, Krstich was understandably tentative.

“I never thought about climbing a mountain before, so it wasn’t really on my agenda, or bucket list,” Krstich said. “He said ‘there’s another spot on my expedition, if you want to go.’ So I looked into it a little bit more, and I started to realize it would be a pretty cool opportunity, because you don’t get many chances to take the time to go do something like that. It’s something to train for, and I thought it would be something that’s pretty exciting and pretty cool to do. So I called my mom and asked her if that’s what I could do as my graduation present, and she was all for it. She was all for it — she wanted me to do it.”

The players’ parents, naturally, were concerned about their sons’ safety, and made them promise to be safe and smart; if altitude sickness set in, they promised their families their pride would not prevent them from turning around.

“You go into something like this thinking the goal is to reach the summit of the mountain,” Krstich said. “That’s not it. The goal is to make it back down safely.”

Only after she encouraged her son to join Castle on the climb did Krstich’s mother, Gwyn, discover just what lay ahead for the duo.

“She found out it wasn’t as safe as … it’s not like hiking up a ski mountain — that’s just completely wide open,” he said. “You’re going up really steep surfaces. They’re uneven, there’s drop-offs, cliffs, exposure … so it was a lot more dangerous than I thought it was when I first signed up, but it was pretty fun. I would do it again. If not the same mountain, I would do another climb.”

Castle and Krstich spent their final semester at SMU balancing their academic responsibilities, training for SMU’s Pro Day and training for the climb — a regimen that had to prepare them not only for the miles they would spend hiking up and down the mountain, but the strength they would need to make the trek while carrying a backpack that weighs in the neighborhood of 50 pounds. They drove from Dallas with Don Castle, stopping in Moab, Utah for a day-long hike in a national park, and then stopped in Idaho for their first and only hike at any notable altitude.”

ONWARD AND UPWARD

The expedition consisted of about a dozen people, with twice as many clients as guides. The trip started at a lodge, about 5,400 feet above sea level. The first day consisted of a six-hour hike through “really bad conditions,” including white-out (flying snow) that severely diminished visibility and 40-mile-per-hour winds. They trudged through those conditions for about six hours, covering about 4.7 miles and climbing a little over 5,000 vertical feet, ending up at Camp Muir, also known as “Base Camp,” at around 4 p.m. At that altitude, the group was above the cloud line, and wildlife was virtually non-existent. The guide service had left tents at Camp Muir, which was shared with climbers from other expeditions. Dinner offered far more in the way of fuel than fine cuisine, and the exhausted climbers fell asleep at around 8:30 p.m.

The second day started with a 6 a.m. wake-up call. Before embarking on the next leg of the climb, the guides put the climbers through training for the climb ahead. After walking on the first day with the aid of climbing poles, climbers were now roped to each other behind a guide. Crampons — a metal plate with spikes to add grip when walking on ice and rock — were strapped to the bottom of the climbers’ boots in preparation for crossing glaciers. The afternoon climb brought them to “High Camp,” at 11,500 feet. At that point, the vibe surrounding the entire climb changed.

“This is where you felt like you were really on a mountain,” Castle said. “There’s nobody else around you. It was just me and him, sharing a tent at 11,500 feet. The winds are ripping through, you’re looking down at the clouds, and you’re on the side of a mountain. It was relatively flat, but it was still a slope. The tent was anchored in pretty good, but that’s all that keeps you there.

The hours and energy spent climbing, the minimalist meals and the need to maximize time spent climbing in sunlight completely skewed the climbers’ internal clocks. Dinner at High Camp was at about 4:30 p.m., after which the climbers needed no coaxing to try to get some rest, although the excitement of the next day’s push toward the summit made it difficult to get much sleep. The guides appeared at 11 p.m. to awaken the climbers for “breakfast” and head for the summit. “We had a bowl of oatmeal, put our harnesses on, strapped up, put our crampons on and roped in,” Castle said. “There were three rope teams: it was us with a guide, and then there were two brothers from Canada with another guide, and then there were three other individuals with a guide. We were the middle group, and we left for the summit at 1 a.m.”

As they headed out and upward in the night, Krstich and Castle focused on the details necessary to climb … and thought about SMU head coach Chad Morris.

“One of the things Coach Morris always says is that ‘you can only go about 30 feet a day,’” Castle said. “We were laughing about that, because I think we have a much deeper appreciation for it now. Because when you’re climbing at 1 a.m. with your headlight on, literally all you can see is about five feet in front of you. So you’re worried about the next step, and the next step. The next step is just as important as the last one, which is just as important as the one before that. So you can’t worry about the glacier you’re going over in 1,000 feet. You have to worry about the next step in front of you.

“There was about 20 meters between (groups). It was the guide at the front, Garrett was in the middle, and then I was in the back. You can see the light (of the group in front of you), but can’t see the footing or anything. You can just see that there’s a light.”

To say the conditions were less than ideal would be an understatement. The groups of climbers plodded along with no light except the lamps strapped to their helmets. Progress slowed because of sub-zero temperatures, crampons skidding into some measure of traction on the glaciers and ice below them. Wind blew so strongly that communication, even with climbers just a few feet away, required shouting.

“We left for the summit push, and this is where the terrain and the climb start to get pretty hazardous. We were maybe 10 minutes into the climb, and I was looking around, trying to get my bearings, and I step over a crevasse that was probably (a couple of feet wide). But I looked down, as I was doing it, and you can’t see the bottom of it. I yelled at Garrett: ‘Dude, where was the warning on that one?’ I was looking around with my headlamp, trying to see if I could see anything cool, and what if I had just stepped right in it? He just said he didn’t get (a warning) either, and we just kept going, because that was about all the energy we could expend.”

The summit push was broken into three separate segments. The first was a 1,200-foot climb to a destination called “Disappointment Cleaver.” Krstich and Castle agreed that the ice and rocks made that section the hardest part of the climb. Rocks fell around them, the rope between climbers shortened to as little as five feet.

The group of climbers, each of whom was carrying a pack that weighed around 50 pounds, were roped together for safety (photo by Troy Castle).

“That was the longest leg — that took us two hours, and we were fresh,” Castle said. “That’s where a lot of accidents happen, because it’s literally putting one foot right in front of the other, like you’re doing a sobriety test or something, and to your right, there’s a dropoff of about 60 feet. That was a lot more exposure than I thought there would be. I expected crevasses, but I wasn’t worrying about this kind of exposure — I mean, if you’re not careful, it’s disastrous. You make one mistake, or lose a little bit of attention to detail and something happens — something bad happens.”

The second leg of the summit push ended up at 13,500 feet, at a place called “High Break.” The sun was out, allowing the climbers to see where they were, but also offering false confidence about how close they were to reaching their ultimate goal. The process became taxing mentally, as well as physically.

“(Seeing where you are) almost made it worse, because when the sun came up, you realize ‘I just climbed that, but I still have more to go,’ and you look out and see all of the different mountains around you — Mount Adams, Mount Helena, Mount Saint Helen’s,” Krstich said. “So you can look around and see everything, and at that point, it was like, ‘damn, we still have a long way to go, and we can’t even see the top yet.’ Because of the pitch of the mountain, the steepness, you couldn’t see the top — you could only see where you were going, what’s right in front of you.

“It was really more challenging mentally than it was physically, because we’re in pretty good physical shape, but when you’re just climbing for so long, and you don’t know the end point, you start to go crazy. You have to tell yourself to keep going, because there (were) a lot of times I just wanted to put my ice ax down and just sit down and go, ‘alright — this is far enough.’

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY

It was High Break — the last break before the summit — where the elevation caught up to Krstich.

“I got to 13,500 feet, and I got really out of breath — I couldn’t catch my breath,” Krstich said. “I think, physically, I was doing fine, but I was light-headed and couldn’t catch my breath. We were on a little ridge line — and they check you every thousand feet, just to see how you’re doing. They’ll say, ‘one to 10, how are you doing?’ … and I wasn’t doing so hot. For some reason, I really couldn’t catch my breath.”

The competitor in Krstich wanted to press on, to make a push for the summit with his friend. But intelligence and rational thought won out.

“I looked up at the last little bit and thought ‘I’m going to call it,’” Krstich said, “just because they tell you that even if you can get up to the top, you have to have enough energy to get yourself back down — they can’t roll you back down, they can’t slide you back down. You have to be able to get your stuff and walk back down without falling. Because if you fall … you’re roped into people. Technically, that’s supposed to be so they can save you, but if you fall, it’s really a big safety hazard to everyone else.”

Castle said he naturally wanted Krstich to join him at the summit, but it was obvious that the decision to send Krstich back down right away was the right one.

“You can feel the effects of altitude sickness coming on,” Castle said. “He got it pretty bad at High Break, and they made him turn around. It was the end of the second leg of the summit push, and we took a break right before the final leg to get to the summit, and he was getting all disoriented, and unzipping his jacket and took his helmet off. (The temperature) was low, and then you have got the wind chill, with 30- or 40-mile-an-hour winds, which made it in the negatives. When it’s like that and you start taking off your jacket …”

Turning back was new for Krstich, who always was able to fight his way through the toughest football workouts.

“We had a lot of hard (football) workouts, but I always felt like I could finish it,” Krstich said. “I never felt like there was a point when I thought I had to sit down, or I wasn’t going to be able to get through it. When you’re out there with all your teammates, it’s like, ‘I’m not going to be the one that quits.’ It was kind of the same way with the climb, but the only guy I was friends with was Troy, so it was a little bit different. It’s just a different kind of beast — I don’t think you can compare it to a workout or a practice or a game. You definitely take away things we learned from football, like how to be mentally tough and overcome adversity, and other clichés.”

He knew turning back was the right decision … and the guides made sure he made the right choice.

“They made me turn around,” Krstich said. “I was happy with it, because I think I could have gone, physically, to get to the top, but I don’t think I would have been good to get back down — my mental state and my breathing was just all off. I was struggling on the way back down from there (High Break). I had to keep sitting down and putting water and food in my body, because I was getting really light-headed. As much as they tell you to eat or drink, they can’t do anything else for you. You have to just get up and go.

“It was kind of bittersweet, because I’d come that far, and I wanted to make it (to the summit), but at the same time, I realized, ‘I’m not in a good state. I’d rather survive. I’m not going to die climbing this mountain.’ It was like what (Castle’s) mom said: just be honest with yourself and your body. So he and two other people pushed to the top, and everyone else went back, because once that starts hitting you, they need to immediately get you back down. At one point, one of the other guys who was headed down was struggling and I was getting my legs back, so I ended up carrying his back, in addition to mine.”

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

As Krstich headed back down, Castle was among the group of eight who pressed on to the summit, sorry to do so without his friend but grateful that Krstich had made the smartest of decisions.

“It was rough,” he said. “I was feeling really strong at High Break, and that’s why I was trying to encourage Garrett. I was like, ‘you’ve got this, you’ve come this far,’ but eventually I looked at him and said, ‘you’ve got to get back down.’ Like I said, I was really proud of him for making that decision, because that’s a tough decision to make, especially when you know you can probably push through to the summit, but then you’ve got to worry about coming back down 10,000 vertical feet. So if your mind’s not in the right place at High Break, you need to turn around. That mountain has false summit after false summit after false summit,” he said. “You don’t really know how high you are, and you’ve been climbing for hours. You think there’s no way, because ‘if there’s anything higher than that, I would be able to see it.’ But then you walk flat for a while, and then there’s another 500-foot elevation.

With an elevation of 14,416 feet above sea level, Mount Rainier is the highest peak in the lower 48 states (photo by Troy Castle).

Castle reached the summit at 7:15 a.m. "That’s when I crossed the crater."

“It was surreal,” he said. “It was awesome. It was the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen. But we stayed on the summit for maybe three minutes. It was clear, but very windy. I got to use my dad’s ice axe from when he climbed Everest, which was really cool.

“So I spent three minutes, maybe, on the summit. Took pictures, and then we left. I didn’t get emotional at the summit at all — I didn’t really realize what had just happened. I was just ready to go and get back down. I was tired, and coming down … you go faster, but it’s harder on your knees and leg muscles, and you’re doing that all the way down — you’re doing that close to 10,000 vertical feet, all the way back down.”

After a few minutes on top of the Pacific Northwest, the party headed back down the side of the mountain, which the two agreed can be even harder on the legs than the ascent. Krstich’s group had a head start, and beat Castle’s group back to the lodge by somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. Their parents were waiting — Krstich explained that Castle would be reaching the lodge soon — and hugged their sons.

RECOVERY, REFLECTION

“I have never been that tired,” Castle said. “We went and had a burger and a beer, and I couldn’t even finish my burger, I was so tired.”

The physical toll was considerable. Both suffered badly chapped lips and windburn on their faces. Krstich said he lost seven or eight pounds in the three days, and hyperextended his knee “a few times on the way down, because you get going in a groove, and then you catch just a little ridge, and … they carry a first aid kit, but there’s not much to it.

“My legs didn’t hurt as badly as my lungs. When I got back down to the lodge, I couldn’t take a deep breath. My heart and lungs were just maxed out. I was fine breathing, but I couldn’t get a deep breath in. It’s kind of like if you lift and then you’re really sore the next day — you can still lift something, but you’re really sore. That’s how my lungs felt.”

Castle laughed when listing the inventory of what hurt in the days after the climb, and reiterated the message that he and Krstich had been taught about the goal of climbing.

“The next day, I got up, and I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t walk for two days. I couldn’t stand up straight. The hardest part was coming down — quads, calves and knees, for sure. Two-thirds of mountaineering accidents happen on the way down, because people expend so much energy to get to the summit, because they get to the ultimate goal … when the ultimate goal is to get back safely. So however high you can go and know that you can come back down safely, that’s a successful climb, no matter how high it is — that’s what the guide told us.”

Krstich and Castle look at the climb with understandable pride — grateful, above all, for returning safely, and they agreed that the experience might have been just as emotional, if not more so, for their parents than it was for them.

“We were so happy, because I don’t think we really understood how much exposure was really on that mountain,” Castle said. “We thought it was going to be 100 percent safe the whole time, and there was so much room for error. When we made it back down, we were pretty happy to be able to hug our moms.”

“We didn’t have cell service, so (the parents) went without talking to us for three days and not knowing what’s going on, you know? And then, of course, they were doing some research on Mount Rainier while we were up there, asking each other if they we’re OK, as if they would know if something was wrong, right?”

The two are embarking on their careers, but already have talked about another climb … or at least Castle has.

“We’re starting work, so it’s got to be work-permitting, but the next one’s probably Denali (20,308), in Alaska,” he said. “My dad has climbed that a couple of times. It’s the tallest peak in North America — it’s about 20,300 feet.”

Krstich said he loved the experience, and “would do it again,” but was a little more deliberate in his enthusiasm.

“I’m going to need to look and do some research,” he said, laughing. “I’m still in recovery (a week later). My legs hurt for the first couple of days, but the windburn on my face didn’t really hit me until two or three days later. I woke up and my face just felt like someone put clay on it — I couldn’t move it.”

Ultimately, the climb was what the two had hoped it would be: a shared adventure that tested them and taught them about a part of nature they had not really explored before, and about athletes of all kinds, including themselves.

“Nothing prepares you for it, and nothing prepares you for coming down, at all — I think that’s more of where my body really took a toll,” Castle said. “It gave me a deeper appreciation of the world around me. Because you get so used to staying in a routine around where you’re at, but to get out in the world and explore a little bit … I mean, the world is awesome. There’s so much different stuff to see, to explore. When I was sitting at High Break with Garrett, watching the sun rise … that was pretty cool. We were sitting on the highest mountain in the lower 48, watching the sun rise, with 30-mile-an-hour winds ripping by us and we’re sitting there, having a PowerBar and watching the sun rise. It was really cool.

“It gives you an appreciation for all types of athletes. There (are) fast-twitch, explosive athletes, like we were the last five years; there’s endurance athletes who are long-distance runners or swimmers; there’s technician athletes like golfers and divers. Everybody’s specialty and expertise is different, and it makes you appreciate that once you try to cross over into their realm, you know?”

Troy Castle reached the summit of Mount Rainier using the ice axe his father used to climb Mount Everest (photo by Alpine Ascents International).