The Ledge (25 page)

I will be on a much easier section of the wall if I can just get past this crux overhang. I have to keep moving.

I struggle back up, reach out, and continue my slow progress of cranking the ice screw into the wall. My position is awkward, and just balancing in delicate tension while I turn the screw consumes huge amounts of energy. It is like standing on a wobbly chair in a hallway and bending underneath a doorframe to work on the wall in an adjacent room.

After advancing the screw a few rotations I slip, falling onto my rope with a jerk. I need a rest. I want to just hang there—five minutes at the most, no more.

My mind drifts back home, and I start thinking about what it will mean to my family if I get out, what it will mean to Mike’s family. And what it will mean to all of them if I don’t make it—how no one might ever find out what happened. Thinking of all the grief that this will cause makes me sad and guilty. Sensing these emotions softens me up, and I feel my energy drop.

As my spirits sink, I wonder how much more I can take. My mind loses focus. So tired.

PAIN. MY FOREHEAD
stings. Drowsy, I reach up to make the sting go away. I touch the wall and realize that my head is against the ice. I shift in my harness to move away, and when I lift my arm, my jacket feels stiff. Newly formed slivers of ice in the crook of my elbow break away, swirling down into the darkness like little translucent leaves.

How did I get like this? I heft my arm up slowly and look at my watch: four-thirty. How can that be? I drifted off for almost half an hour, sixty feet above the ledge, twenty feet from freedom.

But hanging motionless for so long on the rope has left me
almost catatonic. My mind is dull, my energy is low, and the many pains all seem magnified. Just lifting my arm makes my neck burn.

I’m not sure I can take it anymore. Maybe this is as far as I am going to get. I toy with the idea of not trying to go any higher, but then I remember everyone back home. They wouldn’t want me to quit, no matter how much I hurt right now.

I understand that I have to keep going, keep taking the pain for my family. For Gloria. For Dad. For Mom and my three sisters. For Mike’s brother, and his mom and dad, so that they will know what happened.

For Mike.

I have to take the risk and misery for everyone in both of our families. And somehow, in my sputtering mind, I guess that might be twenty people, maybe more. I reason that if I take all the pain and effort and divvy it up among all of them, then it won’t seem quite so overwhelming. The suffering I have to endure to see any one of them again is individually quite small. Even one foot of anguished progress for each important person will get me up the remaining twenty feet. All I have to do is work a bit harder, endure a little chunk of pain for each of those people, and then just do it over and over again. Repeatedly doing small things, one for each person that matters to Mike and me—that I can do.

I realize that this is not really even about me anymore. I want to live, but I am so far gone now that it’s not guaranteed. Even if I can’t rally back to action for myself, I must be resilient enough to carry on for the people I love. They have made me all I am and given me all I have. I owe it to them to keep trying. The same is true for Mike and his family: I owe it to them to do the best I can to get us out.

I certainly owe it to Gloria.

Seeing Gloria almost seems too much to hope for. Sharing a long future with her is what I want, but I don’t know if I can realistically
expect that now. With my body and spirit so battered, I’m not sure I’ll actually live very long after this.

Even if I make it out of the crevasse and get to see her for just a minute, that would be something. At least she wouldn’t have to live the rest of her life not knowing what happened to me, with me having just been wiped off the face of the Earth. Knowing what happened to us would probably make it easier for Gloria to rebuild her life. So even if I reach the lip of the crevasse, get onto the glacier, and die there—that’s a win. Because then she’ll know.

This new perspective soothes me. I no longer have to worry about the distant future, or if I’m busted up inside. All I have to do to win is get out of here. And if I get my life back, well, that’s a dream almost too big to hope for.

Slowly, I begin moving again. With jerky arms, I stiffly brush the ice crystals from my sleeves. I crane my neck to scout the overhang, then grimace through clenched teeth as pain knifes through my left shoulder. After each rest, it’s harder to get going.

If I let myself stop one more time, I may never be able to start up again. But if I just keep moving, I have a chance to make it out alive.

For them.

I AM ALMOST
through the crux—another couple moves and I’ll be past the hardest part. I’ve seen the headwall beyond the overhang, and once I clip to the screw above the roof’s lip, the climbing should get easier. Still a little rattled by my slip into a stupor a few minutes ago, I rush to anchor myself to that upper ice screw, snapping a two-foot-long sling to my chest harness.

Having already made several trips out to the lip, I’ve got the moves wired. I scoot my left foot high, push my left hip tight under the ceiling, and hook my ax pick through an anchor carabiner clipped to a screw at waist level. Then I stretch to the right and stabilize myself with body tension. My abdominal muscles, torn in the fall and fatigued to their limit, ache and tremble.

To increase the upper screw’s strength before I commit to it, I twist it in one more turn with my hammer before my power ebbs. That will have to be good enough.

The leash for the new screw dangles from my chest harness with a carabiner attached and ready to go. I grab that biner, extend my arm toward the nearly buried screw, and open the carabiner’s gate. Hooking the biner through the screw’s eyehole, I feel a solid tap when the two metallic pieces meet each other, and I see the carabiner
settle in. Having finally anchored myself above the dreaded overhang, I pull my left tool free, sagging happily onto the leash that connects my chest harness to the upper ice screw.

And it’s then that disaster strikes.

My body slumps, driving my shoulders up toward my ears, and in an instant, both arms fly above my head, hands flopping uselessly, squeezing my lungs empty with a deep grunt.

My head is too far below the ice roof. Why am I so low? And when I try to breathe, I can’t. My lungs are smashed inward. A tight nylon sling pushes hard against my face.

Now I understand: I’ve blown it.

When I clipped the screw on the headwall with a sling directly from my chest harness, I didn’t think it through. Settling all my weight onto that leash yanked the chest harness up and drove it into my armpits, forcing my arms above me and crushing my torso. I hang from my chest harness, suffocating.

I kick my left foot, but my crampon skitters off the ice. Both legs paw the air.

Flailing my trapped arms, my heart pounding, I get my right hand on the two inches of ice screw protruding from the wall. I grab the screw’s eye and pull hard, easing some pressure from the cinching chest harness and letting my arms move more freely. Gasping, I suck in a short breath. Then I lose my grip on the screw and slip down an inch. My arms pop back up, and the fight resumes full force.

As the chest harness cuts deep into my armpits, numbness sears my arms. I hear the gurgle and strain of my constricted breathing. The front points of my crampons scrape across the wall, but I find no purchase.

My left hand bumps into the tight leash leading up to the screw. I grasp and pull hard, taking some weight off the harness. With my body an inch higher, I push down with both arms, levering my triceps against the nylon strands of my chest harness. This pumps me
up another precious inch and transfers more weight from my chest to my arms. Getting a crampon into the wall lets me push up even higher. Clutching the protruding screw, I do half a pull-up and lift my weight from the chest harness. I pant and recover a bit, but the arm strain builds; I can’t hold myself here very long.

With my right hand, I grab the carabiner connecting the leash to my chest harness. If I disconnect, I’ll drop below the overhang and lose ground, but if I don’t, I’m going to strangle. I fight the biner off my chest harness, unclip, then let go. The anchored rope arcs me back under the overhang, slams me face-first into the ice, and leaves me hanging from my waist harness, stunned but okay. Cowering under the roof, I pant fast, trying to calm myself, pressing a palm against my chest to check for my medal. I chide myself for breaking my pattern and for making such a serious error.

The good news is that the ice screw above the overhang must be solid, and with that piece and leash already in place, clearing the roof should be simple now.

Once I recover, I reach up and clip my climbing rope to the dangling sling first, the way I should have done before. I adjust my Prusik loop tight, then release my grip on the piece below the roof. My torso swings out beneath the upper screw, and my feet slingshot toward the opposite wall. Hanging in free air below the screw, I pendulum back and forth. I close my eyes, worried about the screw pulling out. After the swinging slows, I kick a crampon into the wall for traction, hook a tool on the upper ice screw’s shaft, hoist myself up, and connect my sit harness directly to the upper screw. Now secure, I relax my limbs and slump my helmet against the ice wall.

And with that, I’m past the overhang.

THE HIGHER I
look, the less steep the headwall seems. It’s about eighty-five degrees right here, then eighty, then maybe only seventy
degrees about fifteen feet above me, near the top. The climbing should keep getting easier.

With three screws strung out below the overhang, the bottom anchor screw, plus the one I’m hanging from, I have only one ice screw left. I reach up to start pounding it in, but a moment later power drains from my arms and I stop to rest. As I resume twisting the screw into the wall, the wet ice yields easily—a bad sign. The last screw placement was pretty bad, too. I know these will never hold if I fall, and I wonder whether they’ll even hold my body weight for long. If one screw pulls and the next can’t catch me, I might plummet, ripping out one piece after the next in a zipper fall.

After clipping into the second placement above the overhang, I’m out of screws. The one back below the roof is not doing much good anymore, and I consider dropping down to retrieve it. I’d have more gear, but I worry that I don’t possess the arm strength to scale the roof again. If I go down there, I might not be able to get back up. It’s too risky to try. I’m exiled to the headwall now.

A new texture on the crevasse wall surprises me. It’s coated with hundreds of rough, spherical ice globs ranging in size from plums to grapefruits. Ever-changing frozen environments sculpt water and moist air oddly, but in ten years of winter climbing I’ve never seen ice blisters like these. I figure the protruding lumps can serve as footholds, so I set a boot atop one, easing the strain on my lower back.

Three and a half straight hours of balancing in jittery aid slings has kinked my back into knots. The new body position provides long-needed relief. After five minutes, I switch feet to give other muscles a break, but as I step onto an orange-sized ice globe, it snaps off the wall. I drop hard onto my sit harness, my foot pawing empty air.

Startled by the mini fall, I curse the ice as adrenaline blasts through me.

I had contemplated aiding up by looping some webbing over the protruding ice globs, just like I’ve done on rock faces—threading slings around knobby bedrock protuberances we call “chicken heads.” But if these ice chicken heads are that weak and untrustworthy, I can’t risk hanging from them.

Suddenly, the slide and slump of collapsing snow echoes in the crevasse. Terrified, I throw both arms over my neck and lean into the wall. Holding my breath and listening, I hope I am not in the fall line. Ice chunks splinter in a shattering crash far off to my right. Then I sense a voice nearby: “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

The man’s voice came from directly behind me, just a foot away. My brain knows the words were only imagined, but my gut tells me someone is here. I casually glance over my right shoulder, into empty space. I resume facing the milky wall before me, but I sense a strong presence, maybe two. Remembering an old tae kwon do lesson, I stretch my peripheral vision sideways without turning my head, trying to snatch a glimpse. It feels like two people are right behind me, just out of sight.

I casually glance to the right, then whip my head left 180 degrees to see if I can catch them, but all I see is blue light bouncing off the other wall. Of course no one’s hovering behind me, and yet I can’t shake the strong feeling that two people are there. I feel no fear—I sense that whoever it is, they’re on my side, and that they seem to understand better than I what’s going on. Closing my eyes, I try to detect their presence.

It’s Dad and Mike.

I feel less alone, somehow, even as I struggle to understand it all. With the headwall’s angle easing off, I consider free climbing it. It’s only about fifteen feet to the top—fifteen feet to freedom, fifteen feet to life. The lure of salvation beckons me.