As You Are, I Once Was

As you are, I once was. As I am, you shall be.

This is about "old times." Wait around long enough and you can play along too.
Recently I located the results of my first ultra— Baldy Peaks 50k, September 1989. Looking at the finisher list, I saw  I saw “David Harrah, 63.” I remembered him well. Now I’m as old as he was. 

He was always at the races. Painfully slow, with the tiniest feet imaginable. But there.
This article is expanded from the interview for the SoCal Ultra Series quarterly newsletter late 1999.

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David Harrah had an active boyhood, a shortened WWII Army stint (Graves Registration, Southern France and Normandy), then undergraduate school. In 1950 he was the lead man of 5 on Mt Yerupaja, the 2nd highest Peruvian peak. They were attempting the first summit. 

Mount Yerupaja is fearsome, as described by Summitpost:

“Yerupaja is Peru's second highest peak and the highest point in the massive Amazon River watershed. Yerupaja crowns the stunning Cordillera Huayhuash in the north central Peruvian Andes, a compact range that boasts several peaks over 6,000 meters.

Yerupaja is sometimes overshadowed by its more flashy neighbors, which include the beautiful Jirishanca and the imposing Siula Grande (a peak made famous by Joe Simpson in his epic Touching the Void). However, Yerupaja is an imposing world class mountain all by itself. Before it was finally climbed in 1950 by Jim Maxwell and Dave Harrah, Yerupaja was the highest unclimbed summit outside of Asia. It would be sixteen years before the mountain saw another successful summit bid, this time by Jorge Peterek and Canadian Leif Patterson. That same year, a pair of up and coming mountaineers received their first taste of high altitude climbing by summiting Yerupaja via the unclimbed East Face and bagging the first ascent of its smaller cousin -- Yerupaja Chico. They were none other than Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, who would both go on to do some fairly impressive climbing on even higher mountains.

Like all peaks of the Huayhuash, Yerupaja rises in a nearly vertical wall of rock and overhanging ice. It also possesses a knife edged summit ridge draped with the beautiful but brittle snow flutings that are so prevalent in the Huayhuash. Not surprisingly due to the combination of these natural defenses and its high elevation, Yerupaja sees very few successful ascents.”[1]

Of the 5, only David and James Maxwell were to summit, as the others weren’t up to it. 

On the way back down, a cornice cracked beneath his feet. Dave was still roped, and the near-death fall and recovery resulted in an overnight glacier cave bivouac. Frozen socks left him with 10 frostbitten toes. Harrah and Maxwell hiked down to high camp,and crashed for 24 hours. He then rode a mule for 2 days. The blackened toes were amputated by an American doctor and nurse in the first available hospital in a remote village. David comes back to the US. Now he’s a graduate student at Stanford. He still climbs. 

 He was written up in the Stanford Daily, August 9, 1950.

Dave Harrah Frostbitten In Andes Ascent

Dave Harrah, a Stanford student, is being treated in Lima, Peru, today in an attempt to save his frostbitten feet after he and a Harvardstudent friend climbed a mountain in South America. The mountain, known as "The Butcher of the Andes," is four miles high and until Harrah's expedition was unsealed and unconquered. 

Harrah, 23, of Seattle, a senior philosophy student, and James Maxwell, 24, of Braintree, Mass., a Harvard University student, conquered 21,769-ioot Mount Yerupaja • —the highest previously unclimbed peak in the Americas —Saturday. 

They reached the summit late in the afternoon and, when darkness descended, were caught on the way down without fire, food, or sleeping bags in gale winds and sub-zero cold. Harrah was rushed 135 miles to Lima yesterday for medical treatment. Maxwell suffered a frostbitten toe but did not need to be sent to Lima. 

The two climbers were with a party of three other Harvard students and Charles C. Crush of Pacific Grove, who took his Master's degree in education at Stanford in 1949. Harrah and Maxwell left their 20.600-foot "high camp" Saturday at 10 a.m. in the expedition's fifth assault on the summit. The pair soon gained the ridge and fought their way to the top. They struggled upward through the afternoon, knowing that to continue might mean a terrible night on the ice-capped peak. At 5 p.m. they became the first men in history to scale the peak. 

A rescue party met them coming down 24 hours later. 

The party of Stanford and Harvard Alpine Clubbers left Miami June 22 for their scheduled 70-day expedition in the Andes. In addition to climbing Yerupaja — their chief objective — they planned to undertake a geological survey and chart weather in the unmapped, uninhabited area.[2]

When David turns 40, he decided to run “just for the hell of it”, stumping around a track in Keds Converse. I have my toes, but I remember the feeling. 

David does OK, and gets into 10ks. At 50 he decides to run his first marathon. Then somebody tells him about Baz Hawley’s San Juan Trail 50. He runs that. He attempts the Angeles Crest 100 five times, and is nailed by the cut-offs every time, usually around Chantry Flats (75mi). This is a disappointment, but he continues to run. It’s about being out in the mountains more than anything else.

Some days are better than others. A favorite loop is a 35 miler on Mt San Gorgonio (western Riverside Co, W of Palm Springs).

As of July 2019, he’s philosophy prof emeritus at UC Riverside. He taught logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of language.

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2055290803_David_Harrah

So that's a unique story about a pretty relaxed guy. Some of us might have passed him in a race, maybe falling prey to vaguely superior thoughts. The truth is if he’d kept his toes, he would have kicked all our asses a long time ago. 

...and you might have missed this one:
Tarahumarans and Ultras

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1] from https://www.summitpost.org/yerupaja/151071

2] https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanford19500809-01.2.2&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------

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