Pat Cross Quit Smoking Cold Turkey to Climb Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier is 14,411 feet. You can see it from Seattle on a clear day, this massive white presence on the horizon that looks like it belongs to a different world. I’ve stared at that mountain my entire adult life. And for twenty of those years, I stared at it while smoking a cigarette.

I’m Pat Cross. I’m forty-three. I live in Seattle, work as an electrician for a commercial construction company. I smoked from the time I was twenty-three until I was forty-two, and I quit cold turkey because I decided I was going to stand on top of that mountain or die trying. Turns out quitting smoking was the harder part.

Twenty Years of Winstons

I picked up smoking on a job site. My first year as an apprentice electrician, 2006. The journeyman I was assigned to, a guy named Craig, smoked Winston Reds on every break. He’d light one up and start explaining circuit theory while the smoke drifted between us. I started joining him, first just to listen, then because I liked the rhythm of it. Work, break, smoke, learn, repeat.

By my second year I had my own pack in my tool belt every day. Winstons, same as Craig. I stuck with them for twenty years. Something about the taste felt like mine. I know that sounds weird. But smokers have their brand the way people have their team. You don’t switch.

At my worst I was at a pack and a half a day, which was during a stretch in my early thirties when I was going through a divorce and working overtime on a hospital build in Bellevue. Most of those years I hovered around a pack a day. Do the math on twenty years and it’s roughly 146,000 cigarettes. I breathed in and out every one of those.

I was also outdoorsy. That’s the contradiction that defined my life in Seattle. I hiked on weekends. Backpacked in the Cascades. Did sections of the Pacific Crest Trail. And I smoked through all of it. I’d hike five miles uphill to some gorgeous alpine lake, sit on a rock with a view that would make you believe in something, and light a cigarette. I was the guy on the trail who smelled like smoke. You know the one. You’ve walked past him and thought: what’s the point of being out here if you’re doing that?

I thought the same thing. Every time. And I lit another one anyway.

Three Strikes

My first quit attempt was 2014. I was thirty-one. I tried patches. The generic ones from Walgreens. They helped with the raw craving but I couldn’t handle the skin irritation. I’ve got sensitive skin and those adhesive patches left angry red welts that itched for days. I tried different locations, my arms, my back, my chest. Same reaction everywhere. After two weeks of looking like I had a skin disease, I gave up and went back to smoking.

Second attempt, 2018. Cold turkey. I made it fourteen days. Two full weeks. The first week was the typical withdrawal hell: insomnia, irritability, that constant nagging feeling like you’ve forgotten something critical. The second week the physical symptoms faded but the psychological pull got stronger. I was standing outside a bar in Capitol Hill on a Friday night, watching people smoke under the overhang, and I bummed one from a stranger. I told myself it was a one-time thing. Bought a pack the next morning.

Third attempt was 2021. I tried a vape. Bought a JUUL thinking I could step down the nicotine gradually. Instead, I ended up dual-using. Smoking cigarettes during the day at work because I couldn’t vape on most job sites, and hitting the JUUL at home in the evenings. I was taking in more nicotine than before. After two months I tossed the JUUL and went back to just cigarettes, which felt like progress at the time. It wasn’t.

Three attempts in twenty years. Each one taught me what didn’t work. None of them taught me what would.

The Rainier Decision

Summer of 2024. I was forty-one. I did a day hike up to Camp Muir on Rainier, which is the base camp at 10,188 feet. It’s a popular training hike, about nine miles round trip with 4,600 feet of elevation gain. I’d done it before, years ago, and remembered it being hard but doable.

This time it nearly killed me. Not literally, but close enough. The snow was firm and the switchbacks above Pebble Creek were steep, and by 8,000 feet I was stopping every fifty steps to catch my breath. My heart was hammering. My lungs felt like they were wrapped in plastic. People twenty years older than me were passing me, some of them with packs twice the size of mine. A couple in their sixties went by me chatting easily while I was bent over my trekking poles wheezing.

I made it to Camp Muir. Barely. I sat on a rock and looked up at the summit route, the Disappointment Cleaver, the glaciers, the final push to Columbia Crest. I’d always told myself I’d do the full climb someday. But sitting there at 10,000 feet, gasping, I realized that if I kept smoking, someday would never come. My lungs would not carry me another 4,000 feet of elevation. Not a chance.

I sat there for a long time. When I started back down, something had shifted. Not motivation exactly. Decision. The kind that sits in your bones. I was going to climb Rainier in the summer of 2025. And to do that, I had to stop smoking. Not cut back. Not switch to vaping. Stop.

Quitting for the Mountain

I set my quit date for September 1, 2024. Gave myself a full nine months of training before a July summit attempt. I went cold turkey because patches didn’t work for my skin and I didn’t trust myself with nicotine substitutes after the JUUL disaster.

Day one was a Sunday. I woke up, made coffee, and reached for the pack on my kitchen counter that wasn’t there because I’d thrown it away the night before. That first morning without a cigarette and coffee together was disorienting. Like wearing the wrong shoes. Everything felt slightly off.

Days two through five were bad. The headaches came back, same as before. The irritability. The brain fog. I was working on a retail build-out in Ballard and I wired a junction box wrong on day three because I couldn’t concentrate. My foreman noticed. I told him I was quitting smoking and he said, “About time,” which was both supportive and annoying.

But here’s what was different this time: I had Rainier. Every time the craving hit, I thought about the mountain. Not in a motivational-poster way. In a practical way. Smoking today means I can’t summit in July. That’s it. That’s the equation. And the summit mattered more to me than the cigarette. For the first time in twenty years, something actually mattered more.

Training Through Withdrawal

I started training on day one. Nothing crazy at first. Walking the hills in my neighborhood. Then hiking on weekends. Then adding a loaded pack. Then stairs. I went to the Columbia Center downtown, the tallest building in Seattle, and climbed the fire stairs with a thirty-pound pack. Seventy-six floors. The first time I did it, I wanted to throw up at floor forty and my lungs were screaming by sixty. But I made it to the top, and standing in that stairwell dripping sweat, I could feel my body doing something it hadn’t done in years: adapting.

Every week my lungs got a little better. By October, a month in, the burning sensation at the start of hard cardio was gone. By December, my resting heart rate had dropped and I could do the Columbia Center stairs without stopping. By March 2025, six months smoke-free, I was doing weekend hikes in the Cascades with 5,000-plus feet of elevation gain and keeping a steady pace the whole way.

The cravings didn’t follow a neat timeline. They came in waves. Some weeks I barely thought about smoking. Other weeks, especially when work was stressful or I was around other smokers on job sites, it felt like the first week all over again. I learned to ride the waves. They peak and they pass. Three minutes. Sometimes five. Never more than ten. You just have to survive those minutes.

The Hardest Moment

It wasn’t during withdrawal. It was in April, seven months into my quit. I was at a buddy’s birthday party at a bar in Fremont. Beers flowing, loud music, everyone loose and happy. I stepped outside to get air and found myself in the smoking section without thinking about it. Muscle memory. Twenty years of going to bars and stepping outside to smoke had wired my legs to walk there automatically.

A guy next to me lit a Winston. A Winston. My brand. The smell flooded me with two decades of associations. Job site breaks. Post-dinner decompression. Friday nights. That first drag in the morning. All of it condensed into one whiff of smoke.

I stood there for maybe twenty seconds, and in those twenty seconds I wanted a cigarette more than I’ve wanted anything in my life. My mouth watered. My fingers twitched. I could feel the ghost of it, the weight of it, the way the smoke would fill my chest and the world would go soft and quiet for a moment.

I walked away. Went back inside, ordered a glass of water, and texted my climbing partner Ben: “Almost slipped. Seven months. Not giving it up now.” He texted back a picture of Rainier at sunset. That was enough.

Summit Day

July 12, 2025. I climbed Rainier with a guided group through Rainier Mountaineering Inc. Two-day climb: up to Camp Muir the first day, summit push starting at midnight.

The push from Camp Muir to the summit took about seven hours. We crossed the Ingraham Glacier in the dark, headlamps bobbing, crampons crunching on ice. The air got thin above 12,000 feet. My breathing was heavy but controlled. My lungs were working. Not perfectly. Not like someone who’d never smoked. But they were working. Each breath at 13,000 feet was proof that quitting had done something real and measurable to my body.

I reached the summit crater at 7:15 AM. The sun was up. Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood were visible to the south. The Puget Sound was a blue stripe to the west. I stood at 14,411 feet and took the deepest breath I could. My lungs filled. All the way. No tightness. No burn. Just cold, thin, clean air filling lungs that I’d almost ruined.

I didn’t cry. I’m not much of a crier. But I stood there for a while and just breathed, and if you’d asked me in that moment if twenty years of smoking and ten months of quitting had been worth it, I would’ve laughed at you for asking.

Nineteen Months Later

I’m still smoke-free. Nineteen months and counting. The cravings are rare now, maybe a flicker once every few weeks, usually gone in seconds.

I’m planning a climb of Mount Adams this summer. After that, maybe Mount Baker. The Cascades are full of mountains and I’ve got lungs that work again. That’s not something I take for granted.

I’ve saved roughly $5,700. That money’s gone toward climbing gear, gym memberships, and a trip to the Canadian Rockies that I’m booking for next fall.

My ex-wife told me she was proud of me. That surprised me. We’ve been divorced for eight years and don’t talk much, but she texted me after Jennifer, a mutual friend, told her about the Rainier summit. She said, “I always knew you’d figure it out.” I’m not sure I deserved that, but it felt good to hear.

To You

If you’re active and you smoke, you already know the contradiction. You know what your lungs could do if you stopped poisoning them. You’ve felt the gap between what your body wants to do and what your lungs will let it do. That gap is the cost of smoking, measured in breaths.

Find your mountain. I mean that literally and figuratively. Find the thing you can’t do while smoking. The thing that forces you to choose. And then choose the thing that’s going to make your life bigger instead of shorter.

Cold turkey is brutal. I won’t lie about that. The first two weeks are a fight. But it’s a fight with an end. The cravings fade. The lungs heal. The mountains wait.

You’re not alone. Millions of people have stood where you’re standing, staring at something they want and something they’re addicted to, trying to figure out how to pick one. You can pick. You just have to decide that one of them matters more.

My name’s Pat. Twenty years of Winstons. Three failed attempts. One mountain. Zero cigarettes for nineteen months. The view from the top is worth it.