(Nickolas G. is a pseudonym, the author wishes to remain anonymous.)
“How the hell am I gonna continue paying rent in this expensive-ass area?” asked Steve, who after recently leaving Eugene, Ore., ended up living in the Bay Area.
“You need to get a job, man!” I said as we drove around Hicks Road in San Jose, one of the few places left where there are no stops and only one lane each way with crazy turns. All the while we were passing the pipe back and forth, thinking of a way to make money.
I met Steve running on the cross-country team at West Valley Community College. Both of us had previously been accepted and were given scholarships by San Francisco State, but the coach changed schools two months prior, so we were stuck at some junior college. Steve came down to the Bay having no idea how expensive living was, and was told by the junior college coach that Saratoga was twenty minutes from the city and ten minutes from the beach. So here he was paying $500 a month for a single room with a shared bathroom and no kitchen. Plus, his financial aid was almost out and the coach lied.
“Why don’t you just move into my family’s house and live there, man?” I said, partly to get him to shut up.
“That’s a great idea. And I’ll pay you back when my next financial aid check comes, in like, three months or something,” Steve said joyfully, as if he just led me up into saying he could move in.
The deal was this: he would live with me and my family for three months, and in return he would pay for the both of us to go to Costa Rica. Why? Because its capital is San Jose too, and it’s cheap.
In late May, we touched down in San Jose, Costa Rica, along with my friend, Gianni, who was attending Humboldt State at the time. I had learned a lot of Spanish from playing soccer and just hanging out with the homies back home, but none of us spoke much of the language; we all admitted to having cheated through class. Steve went into culture shock after he realized that he was a minority in a whole new country, not just in the east side anymore. The Fuerza Policia walked with automatic rifles and drug dogs everywhere in the city. We were stopped plenty of times for passports. Police don’t seem to change much. The itinerary was to see as much of the country as possible with the amount of time and money we had. This meant staying only a few days at each spot, then hopping on some crusty old bus packed with people coughing, singing, begging, and suffering the occasional heart attack.
Our fourth stop on the list was Chirripo National Park. This is the home of Chirripo Grande. At 12,533 feet it stands as the  highest peak in Costa Rica, and second highest in Central America. From the town of San Isidro del General, it is a 12-mile, snail-paced five mph bus ride up 1,000 feet to the base of the park where lodging is available. Other than wanting to get to the highest mountain, I had read that both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are viewable from the top. The word Chirripo means “Land of the Eternal Waters,” as named by the indigenous Talamancans, from which the mountain range that stretches into Panama is called.
So, from the base to the top is 11 miles one way, with a gain of more than 6,000 feet. As you climb, you pass through six types of vegetation, from misty rain forests to moon-like rocks and small shrubs. Our plan was to not pay the $12-a-day entrance and camping fee at the 10,000-feet mark and do the whole trip in one day before the bus left at 5 p.m. at San Isidro the next day.
The evening we got there we met some British and Dutch kids who were talking about all the cool places they’d been to and blah, blah, blah. We sparked a joint and began to ask them what they thought of our plan. They laughed and called us “crazy Americans” and said that it took them 10 hours just to reach camp.
“There’s no way I’m paying and camping at the top of that mountain, man,” I said to them.
“Yeah, we could do it. Screw you guys,” Steve said, beginning to wonder if we could make it.
 The next morning we were up and on the trail by 5 a.m. It was a cool 65 degrees, and all we packed were two water bottles, two Power Bars and a joint for the top. We hauled ass! The views were crazy and it rained on and off. Up and up the trail went. By the time we reached the 10,000-foot mark, we were singing to keep our sanity. Here we filled up our bottles from the spring water and trekked on. We passed about twenty people on the way up who had camped that night and we still had enough energy to pass them up. The last steep half-mile up was incredible. The temperature dropped to about 30 degrees, but there was no snow.
Reaching the top of the mountain was the greatest high I’ve ever had—natural or drug-induced. The exhaustion, high elevation and pure joy of actually making the top were amazing!
So, we sparked our victory joint, and man, was that cool.  The clouds flew by and little by little the views could be seen. Both oceans I saw, but not the supposed 30 lakes, though we did pass a shit load on the way up. A little later the group from Delaware arrived, and they brought victory alcohol! It was great, even though it took us ten minutes of arguing for them to believe we did it one day. By the time they arrived it was 10 o’clock. It took us five hours! We had planned to arrive at noon.
After everyone was wasted from weed, wine or both, a Delaware dude pointed to this hole in the clouds. Nothing else was visible, and we all pretty much said or thought at the same time that “it was like a portal to heaven,” or something like that.
After a couple hours of chilling, literally, we decided to head back down the same 11 miles. The way down was difficult. It rained the whole time and we were exhausted and now trashed. The only thing that kept us going was to see the look on the Brits’ faces. Man, that was cool. They couldn’t believe it, and we played it like we weren’t even tired. Later we saw the same people we saw heading up, still only halfway there.
We were dead tired when we got back to base. Everyone looked at us like we were crazy and couldn’t believe that the two gringos made it. But the look on our faces and our body movements clearly explained it all to them because we sure as hell couldn’t talk. It was worth it.
Would I do it again? No, unless I got paid or some people dared me to.
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