Liberty Bell traverse I walked into the room, and there had to be 100 people in the class. My first thought was this is the whitest places I had ever been too. It was the @boealps mountaineering class, I wanted to learn how to climb big peaks and live to tell about it. I scanned the room for anyone who looked different and there was only one other person who look like me, Jas. I knew of him but I did not really care to be his friend, because it would be cliché, the two Asian men in class had to become friends. As the weeks went on in class, various people would mistake us for each other. I lost count of how many times people would call me Jason, in that 10-week span. We look completely different, no other Asian person would say we look alike but other people thought we did. That was one of the reason why we became such good friends; we both knew what it was like to be invisible. It drove us to be the best possible Alpinist, if they can’t tell us apart, we might as well both be good. The Liberty Bell range, is a famous mountain range with five jagged peaks all next to each other in North Cascade National Park (pic 2 @r.a.mattingly ). If you are an alpinist in the PNW, you come here to test your skills. There are no tourist, no bolts, just climbers plugging in gear to get to the top. We took the class in 2016, and started climbing in this range in 2017. We had done one or two of the peaks in a day, in 2018 we talked about doing all 5 peaks in a day aka the Liberty Bell traverse. At the time we both were delusional thinking we could do it, their is a difference between thinking you can do it and knowing you can. We tried that year but got our asses handed to us after the third peak, we ran out of food, water, time, we played that game that all climbing partners play with each other, when their scared. The game where you just keep asking each other questions. JT: Do you want to keep going? AC: I don’t know, what do you think? JT: I think so but only if you want to go? AC: I feel good, but do you really want to go? It went on like that for a while, and anytime you have to ask yourself that many questions on a mountain, you know it is time to bail. [Cont. Comm