The Ledge (23 page)

That done, I clip my rope onto the screw with a biner. I should be safe now, but I am still unsure of my jury-rigged self-belay system. I slide the Prusik knot until the other end of the cord snugs against my harness. I’ve got to test my system now; I can’t afford to climb far up the wall and then find out the hard way that my improvised safety net won’t hold.

I figure I can ease myself onto the self-belayed rope, but I’m also nervous that it’ll fail, so I pull out a sling and hook one end to the screw, the other to my waist harness. If my Prusik knot fails, the backup sling will hold me.

I stretch up, pull my ax out from the ice, and sort of step off the wall, falling about half a foot.

Weighted nylon creaks and a loaded biner clicks against the ice screw’s eye, but my system holds tight.

I feel a subtle confidence boost. I’ve taken a test fall—a small one, for sure—and the rope and the screw and Prusik loop did the job I had imagined they would. I’m calmer now. I have figured it out.

I look down: I am fifteen feet above the ledge. One-fifth of the way to salvation.

My watch says it’s one-ten
P.M
. It took me more than an hour to get off the ledge, and I calculate that I’ve got at least seven hours of good sunlight—maybe eight. I’m climbing well. I make another move up, but the walls are spreading away from each other. With one foot planted on each side wall, I rest spread-eagled, the muscles in my groin stretched so far they burn. Momentarily, I glance down between my splayed legs at the yawning crevasse below me. I peer hard into the shadows back at the ledge, then stop myself. I should not think about the darkness down there, only about the light above.

I catch my breath, resting my aching left shoulder, and stare at
the walls looming above me. I cannot stem up any higher—the gap has grown too great. I have to pick one wall and commit to it.

Even though I can see better from up here, my analysis is the same: If I climb the easier right wall, I face the dangerous task of chopping through the weak snow bridge to reach the surface. The left wall is vertical, then overhanging, and sports that protruding ice roof, but it leads right back to the hole, to the light.

I commit to the left wall. There is no going back.

I’M GETTING PUSHED
off the wall. The ice is a hair steeper than vertical now, and it forces my chest back a bit, tipping me off balance. If I keep free climbing, using my tools and crampons, I might lose my purchase and fall, maybe crashing past Mike, maybe dropping all the way down until I’m corked. But if I can just make another move or two before I begin aid climbing, I can get a little higher before tapping my limited gear supply.

I am almost twenty feet above the ledge—above Mike. Every foot I ascend gets me closer to the sunshine, closer to the warmth. But it’s a good-news, bad-news situation: The higher I go, the easier it will be to crank in the screws, but the easier it is to twist them in, the weaker they will be. I’m only a quarter of the way out, and already the ice is noticeably softer than it was down in the depths. Up toward the surface, the ice is rotten—that’s why the snow bridge collapsed beneath my feet; that’s why I’m in here.

When I hang from an ice screw to rest, the weighted harness bites deep into my thighs, even through three layers of clothing. Wiggling my hips momentarily eases the discomfort, but it makes the climbing rope jostle the screw holding me. Unsettled, I stare at
the buried ice protection and wonder about its strength. I nervously scan the rope I hang from, no thicker than my pinky.

Tightly gripping the shafts of the two ice tools, I pull hard. Immediately I feel the weight in my arms. Fatigue burns through my already tired forearms, a fiery exclamation point on the challenge I face. Ice climbers call this “getting pumped,” and if you can’t get your weight off your arms, it usually ends in a fall. The pump is coming on fast. I know I have only a minute before I take a ride.

Fighting to stay calm, I kick the front points of my crampons into the wall. They sink a quarter of an inch into the ice—good enough. I stand up on the footholds, straightening my knees, and push my whole body up fifteen inches. Now I have to get an ax out and quickly resink it higher on the wall. Being bent backward by the overhang reduces my leverage and my ability to use my upper-body strength, so I can’t get my ax to budge. The pick has bitten too deeply, and I wrestle it, desperate to pull it out of the ice wall. I yank harder.

Suddenly, it breaks free. The sharp metal edge of the adze smacks me an inch above the eyebrow, square on the helmet—Mike’s helmet. The shocking blow knocks me off balance. I tip backward, ripping the hammer out of the ice wall. That’s it—I’m falling.

My head smashes into the opposite wall, five feet away. Mike’s helmet takes the impact, which shoves the dome forward, down over my forehead, and drives the brim into the bridge of my nose. I slump to a stop six feet lower, dangling halfway between upside down and sideways, swinging back and forth. Slings of climbing gear droop off me, jumbled around my arms and ice tools.

I struggle to right myself and then tilt the ill-fitting helmet back so I can see again.

Three feet up sits the single protective ice screw from which I now am suspended. I’m relieved that my screw and my Prusik loop
worked just the way I hoped they would. Using my self-belayed rope system, I start pulling myself upward. Just then a low rumble echoes through the crevasse. A section of the snow bridge snaps off far above me and hurtles my way.

I scramble up closer to the screw, pressing myself against the ice, trying to make myself smaller. The collapsing snow sails past a good twenty feet off to my right, but even so it shakes me. I clutch the rope against my chest and hang on while I force myself to breathe rhythmically, waiting for the terror to pass. As my thumping heart slows, I think about my next move. I can’t risk taking many more falls like that one. Even though clawing higher with my crampons and ice tools would help me conserve my limited climbing gear, such risky free climbing has to stop. It is time to aid climb.

Aid climbing means I’ll have to sink an ice screw roughly every three feet, clip my rope into it, and hang directly off it. This is going to deplete my gear really fast.

God, if I just had more screws
.

I started with only six, and I’ve already used two: one back at the ledge to give me a bottom anchor and to keep Mike secure, and the one I am now suspended from. Three days of alpine climbing have left them—and my picks—dull, but I’ll have to make do.

To make the most progress, I reach as high as I can to place the next screw, struggling with stretched-out arms to get it started. Once it is seated, I insert the tip of my tool’s pick into the screw’s open eye and crank around and around until it is in deep. I clip my climbing rope to the screw above me and tighten the Prusik loop so that I am protected as I make my next move. I take a pink sling three feet long and half an inch in diameter and clip it to the screw as a substitute aider. With my left hand on a buried ice ax and the other on the screw’s eye, I pull myself up and twitchily wiggle my right foot into the dangling aid sling. It is a struggle—the pointy tips of my crampons keep snagging on the floppy nylon. Finally, I work my
bulky boot and crampon through the sling’s small opening. Pushing my boot down, I stand in the loop, then kick the front points of my left boot into the wall for balance.

Grasping at the ice screw in the wall near my waist to steady myself, I fight to catch my breath. I have advanced up just three feet, and I’m wiped out. I rest, then start a new placement farther above. Repeating the same awkward process with ice screw, sling, and rope, I work my way up, and fifteen minutes later I have advanced another three measly feet. Between the free climbing earlier and this slow aid climbing, I am now about twenty-five feet above the snow ledge where Mike lies. I’m a third of the way out. I’ve got to make it before dark.

I SETTLE INTO
a routine. One foot in a sling, the other foot kicked into the wall. One ice tool stuck in the wall, the other in my hand as I pound and crank my next screw in. I have the pattern down, and my pace quickens a little, but every step is a fight. The slings snag and the rope kinks. My gloves won’t fit easily through the ice tools’ skinny wrist loops. Then, after I finally wiggle and twist and shove them in, when I need to remove them later, they won’t come out.

I set a new screw every three feet or so, using them up fast. My moves are getting sloppy, a little desperate, and I pay the price for that. As my gloved hand fumbles gear from the rack, a sling slips from my grip. I make a lunging grab for it but miss. As it slithers down my leg, I swing my boot, hoping to snag the webbing with a crampon point, but the deserter escapes, twisting as it falls into the darkness. I watch the lime-green sling spiral down, drifting just right of our ledge, floating past Mike’s feet. I automatically project a silent plea to Mike:
Get it. Hook it with your foot
.

Then it drops into the throat of the crevasse and disappears.

If I have even one or two more slip-ups like that, I’ll never get
out. As I vow to be more diligent, I peer down at Mike, covered by the sleeping pad. My hacking at the frozen wall has already knocked snow and ice onto the pad, so I’m glad I put it there to protect him. But I am also struck from this perspective by how small the ledge is—two feet wide and about seven feet long. A few feet to either side and we would have missed it entirely. Of the entire length of the corridor that I can see, we landed in the only spot where we could stop without getting corked.

I notice something else: Already it seems a little darker down on the ledge than where I am now. I think that is a good sign—I am making the transition from the darkness up to the light.

I get back to work, executing my aid-climbing process again and again, fidgeting with cold, stiff fingers to work the Prusik knot up the ice-crusted rope. Finally, I reach a point about thirty-five feet above the ledge, probably forty to forty-five feet from the glacier’s surface, and I place the fifth and final ice screw.

I am out of screws and I’m not even halfway up the wall.

I NEED TO
descend and pull out my lower screws so I can use them again higher up. To get down there, I have to rappel off the top ice screw. Trusting my life to a single piece of pro is risky and unwise—if it yanks out, I’ll plunge fifty feet to the bottom of the crevasse—but I have no other option. I feed a loop of rope through the tubular rappel device and attach it to my harness with a locking biner, leaving my mobile Prusik cord attached to the climbing rope as a backup. After double-checking my system, I slowly feed rope through the rappel device and descend back into the darkness I just fought so hard to escape. Giving back my vertical gain also feels demoralizing and counterproductive, like losing yardage in a football game.

I descend roughly fifteen feet to reach the first screw I placed. I
twist it out of the wall, clean the ice core out of it, and clip it to my harness. I will need to leave an ice screw in the wall every fifteen or twenty feet to protect myself from a long fall. But I can’t know exactly how much farther I have to climb, so it is tough to judge how many ice screws to leave in for protection and how many to remove for reuse higher up. There is no good answer, but I still need to make a decision.

I pull out three screws and leave three in the wall: the one I’m hanging from, my bottom anchor, and one in between as protection.

After pulling each screw I fight my way back up, kicking my front points into the wall, swarming up the slings, swinging my tools, pulling and pushing to regain the vertical territory I’d surrendered. With every precious foot recovered, I must work my Prusik back up the rope to keep myself snug and safe. The friction-producing knot is the key to my system, allowing me to move down or up the bottom-anchored climbing rope. But the clinching knot constantly seizes up on the wet rope in this frozen chasm, frustrating my progress.

Climbing the dangling rope in a slightly overhanging section, I push off the wall with one crampon, which sets me spinning. I twist slowly. I try ignoring it, but staring down into the twirling dark recesses of the crevasse scares me, and looking up at the snow bridge rotating over my head nauseates me. I wait until the twisting stops, recover my poise, and get going again.

Eventually I push and pull my way back to my high point. Three recovered ice screws dangle from my waist. It is now sometime after two o’clock. I am beat and want to rest again, but the thought of losing momentum scares me.

So I climb on, exhausted, sopping wet from the snow bridge’s dripping meltwater. Soon I settle into a routine. I pull myself up, drive a screw into the wall, clip the rope in, and rest. Then I hang a
sling from that upper screw, fight my boot into the sling’s narrow loop, stand up in it as if it were a one-step aider, and rest. Set one tool higher, pull down on the screw above me, and hoist myself up a few feet. Once there, I clip my waist harness to the screw and rest again.