The Ledge (19 page)

No way.

The left wall is my only chance, but there’s a big problem: It turns vertical quickly, then, about twenty feet from the top, juts out about three feet in an overhanging ice roof. If I make it that far, I’ll have to fight my way past that overhang. It’ll be like climbing up a sixty-foot wall, then three feet out beneath the horizontal ceiling,
and then up another twenty-foot wall. The only good news is that the ice-wall section above the ceiling doesn’t appear as steep—maybe eighty degrees.

“See,” I say to myself meekly, searching for some positive in this mess, “maybe I can climb that last part.”

My trickle of confidence erodes as I keep looking up and realize that the last section is plastered with scary-looking chunks of rotten debris—the dollops of snow and ice that had slapped my face as I ricocheted between the walls.

Postponing any commitment to try climbing, I yell again. Between shouts, I wonder if anybody is coming, if anyone saw us fall in.

“Help! Help! Help!”

I want someone to save me, to make this scary situation just go away. If someone else solves the brutal difficulties, then I won’t have to.

“Help—down here!”

I sense the crevasse walls grabbing my shouts and swallowing them.

I close my eyes, trying to picture where we were before the accident. I remember seeing a rope team far below us, but they were headed down, and thus not looking back uphill at us. I think about those two guys we’d passed, but I figure they were at least three hundred feet above us, and around the corner of an ice block. If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see us.

Nobody saw us fall in. I understand that with no one coming for us, to escape I will have to climb up the overhanging ice wall.

Doubt flares in my mind. I survived the fall and I dug myself out and I’m not hurt bad. I’m not going to get myself killed trying to climb something I know I can’t. I’m going to stay here until someone comes to get me.

What if no one comes?

Mike and I had filled out little cards at the White River Ranger
Station to register our climb, but as I think it through, I realize it will be a day before anyone will consider us overdue. Even then, on such a big route, the rangers might wait another day in case we’re just slow.

Once the rangers decide to search, I figure, they’ll start at the base of the Liberty Ridge, on the other side of the mountain. They’ll follow our footprints up and over the top, if they can; then they’ll lose our tracks among all the other climbers’ prints. Maybe, eventually, they’ll narrow their search to this glacier. Then maybe they’ll start looking inside crevasses. But there are hundreds of crevasses on this glacier, maybe thousands. It will be two or three days before a serious search starts, and probably another two or three days before they look in this hole, in this crevasse—if ever. Five days, maybe six until they might get here. I wonder: Can I last that long down here?

I have a pan, a stove, and a pint of fuel. I have a little food I can stretch. With two sleeping bags, maybe I can place one inside the other and hunker down.

Summoning a decade of climbing experience, I assess my odds. My gut tells me that the supplies might last three days, maybe even four. Maybe.

I try imagining what waiting down here will be like, and immediately recognize that there’s no way I’m going to live a couple days.

I’m soaking wet, shaking, exhausted … when it gets dark in here tonight, what’s going to happen?

I know that nightfall will bring bitter cold. The crevasse might shift, or close shut with me in it. And tonight it will get dark—very dark. I sense that I am already teetering on the edge physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, here on this terrifying ledge with the body of my good friend just inches away. I won’t last through the night down here.

If I am still in this crevasse when darkness descends, I will not be alive when the sun returns.

I look at my watch. It is just after noon. I figure I have nine hours of sunlight up on the surface.

My only chance is to climb.

I GLANCE DOWN
at my pack, crushed against the frozen crevasse wall. Thoughts swirl through my brain, rushing at me as I try to figure out what I need, what to do.

“Crampons,” I hear myself say, and I crouch down and make out the spiky black frames inside my pack. I immediately feel a mixture of relief and fear—I’m glad they’re inside, not clipped to the outside and jammed against the frozen wall, where I might not be able to reach them. Without my crampons, there’s no hope of climbing out. But I’m also scared that one wrong move will send them tumbling out of my grasp and into the depths, sealing my fate.

Moving with the care of a bomb-squad technician, I reach into the pack, wrap my fingers around the crampons, squeeze hard, and pull them up to my chest.

In an instant, a be-careful-what-you-wish-for realization sweeps over me: Now that I have them, I’m going to have to use them.

I ignore the anxious feeling and delicately step into them, one at a time. The affirming sight, solid sound, and reassuring thump of each crampon’s heel lever snapping to my boots eases my tension. After buckling the safety straps around my ankles, I release a long, slow breath. The crampons are on me now, and I’m a step closer to
being ready to climb. I question whether the walls of centuries-old ice are too hard for my front points to penetrate. I kick once, and the spikes protruding from my boot’s toes bite into the ice a half inch—the wall is hard, but not as unforgiving as I feared. It’s climbable.

My eyes travel up the steep walls of the crevasse again. As I ponder trying to climb out, doubt swells in my mind.

You’ve never climbed anything like this in your life. What makes you think you can climb it now, all beat up and scared? Without any mistakes? If something goes wrong, you’ll wind up at the bottom of this crevasse. Alone. Corked. That’s where you’ll stay
.

I have never led or even followed anything this steep before. But logically I know I have only one chance, and that is to act.

You should climb out now, while you still can
.

Emotionally, I still can’t accept the idea.

But if I try climbing out now, then I take the huge risk now. I’ll just wait and take the risk tomorrow if I have to, but I’m not going to take it now if I don’t have to
.

I recognize what’s going on: Part of me is trying to talk myself out of climbing, to avoid the risk and the commitment. Another part of me, meanwhile, lays the situation out bluntly:

You won’t be able to climb tomorrow. Either the ledge you’re standing on will collapse, the snow bridge above will fall on you, your spirit’s going to be crushed, or something else will happen. If you wait until tomorrow, you won’t be able to climb out. If you’re going to get out, you have to do it yourself. Today
.

I recoil from the brutal analysis. I don’t want to climb this myself. I can’t. I won’t.

What I really want, I suppose, is for someone else to come along and solve this for me, to throw a rope down, to rescue me. I hear my voice again. This time, the words tumble from my mouth in a flat tone, disembodied. It’s like I’m listening to someone else talking. Out loud I say, “You’re totally alone.”

Hearing the blunt truth aloud is terrifying. It’s as if I’m in another world. Thoughts of Gloria pop into my head—I can see her in my mind, her auburn hair, and in the waking vision I sense other people with her, too, my family and friends. Their proximity makes longing well up in my chest. The thought of never seeing them all again is too much, so I look away. My eyes settle on Mike, at my feet. The emotional grasping gets slapped hard by the unforgiving physical reality right before me.

Standing in place, I shuffle my feet about aimlessly. I don’t want to climb these walls. Anything would be better than that. I consider trying to stem sideways, out toward the down-mountain end of the crevasse; I could bridge myself like a big X between the two ice walls, putting one foot and one hand on each side and using oppositional forces to hold me up. In this way I could crab my way laterally and straddle the crack all the way out. But I realize I don’t have enough rope to make the far end—the slot stretches sideways two hundred feet or more and vanishes into blackness. Besides, I might go all the way to the end and be stuck there, in a worse jam than I’m in now. Traversing sideways down-mountain won’t work.

Traversing the opposite way, in the up-mountain direction, is no good either. That will only take me deeper under the glacier, and that is certainly no solution—somewhere that pulverizes bedrock to dust is no place to head toward. I concede that there is no easy way. The only way out is straight up.

I have no more vague alternatives left to offer myself. Only the awful truth remains, and it is painfully clear. I have to climb out of here myself.

My crampons are on my boots—a good start. I look down at my pack and see a nylon ditty bag that holds the rest of our ice screws and hardware. It hangs partially out of the hole I cut in my pack. I realize that, as with the crampons, if the hardware drops away, any hope of climbing out vanishes. Crouching down slowly, I focus on
making my moves surgically sharp. I hear Dad’s voice echo in my mind: “Do it like ya mean it.”

When I get about six inches away, my right hand flashes down, grabbing the yellow sack as if I’m seizing a wild air hose. I close my eyes in fear and pull the bag close to my chest and hug it for a second.

One by one, I pull gear out of the sack and rack it on a sling looped over my shoulder and head. I realize I have only the two ice screws in the wall and four around my neck—that’s it.

We have a seventh ice screw, but one of the teeth is broken, and it’s in an outer pouch of my pack, on the underside of the ledge, tantalizingly close and out of reach at the same time. I think about trying to get to it but decide that one more broken screw isn’t going to make a difference.

Methodically sorting the gear, I rack it as I would if I were leading any climb. Extra biners in the front, the ice screws next, and in the back, the hardest place to reach, the items I likely won’t need: the two camming units. Maybe I can work them into an ice crack.

As I crane my neck to study the walls again, my climber’s mind whirs, trying to analyze the choices. Logic, experience, and gut instinct sift the variables, searching for the easiest, safest, most successful way to escape. I reconfirm that I have to climb the steeper wall, as it leads directly to the existing hole through the snow bridge. I shake my head at the irony. Damn!

The crevasse is only a few feet wide for the first twenty feet over my head. I can probably stem my way up between the walls and make fast progress until the spread grows too great for my legs to span. That will help launch me up the lower wall; above that, perhaps I can aid climb. By relying on the gear to advance when it gets really steep, maybe I can work around my inability to free climb overhanging ice.

But, really, I’ve hardly ever aid climbed before. I’ve done only a
little, on warm rock in Yosemite and Montana, well protected by a partner holding my top rope.

That measly experience sure doesn’t qualify me for this. But I know the principles. Maybe I can figure it out.

Dredging my memory, I scrounge up aid-climbing tidbits from stories I’ve heard, manuals I’ve read. Like when starting a new rigging job with Dad, I compare the gear I need against the gear I have.

To aid climb well, I definitely need aiders, the ladderlike slings with five or six steps that I could scamper up after clipping them to an ice screw. I need at least two aiders; I have none. Scanning my rack, I see that I do have an assortment of simple nylon slings. I’ll have to make do, dangling slings of various lengths from each ice screw placement and standing in them as best I can. It might work.

As I consider my options, Gloria, my dad and mom, my climbing buddies, and my sisters make cameo appearances in my mind. I remind myself that it’s just me, that I am alone. If none of those others can do anything physically to help me at this moment, I just can’t think about them now.

But I can’t stop thinking about Mike. My friend lies at my feet on this tiny ledge. It’s so cramped that I stand next to his shoulders, the edge dropping off immediately to my right. I scoot back a crowded inch to avoid pressing against him. When I recognize that I haven’t been looking at Mike much, and that I’m trying not to think about him, an ugly pang of guilt hits me. Instinct tells me, though, that this is okay, that I have to focus on getting out of here.

Finally, I finish racking the gear. I have ten short slings, two long slings, three Prusik cords, a belay/rappel device, and two cams. I wish I had aiders to hang from or mechanical ascenders to scale the rope. I smirk a bit when I hear an old line of Dad’s run through my mind: “Wish in one hand, crap in the other. See which fills up first.”

For ice screws, I have the four on me, plus two already in the wall. Maybe I will pull one of those two anchor screws and take it
with me. Leaving just one screw for our bottom anchor is incredibly risky, but having a fifth screw up on the wall will really help.