by Steve Gannon
“So maybe I screwed up,” Travis retorted. “I still think—”
“Forget it,” Tommy interrupted curtly. “What’s done is done. Gimme a hand breaking camp.”
“In a sec. Nature calls.” Irritated by Tommy’s criticism, Travis tossed the dregs of his coffee, grabbed a wad of toilet paper, and headed for a stand of gnarled pines fifty yards above their campsite.
“Make it quick,” Tommy called after him.
When he reached the trees, Travis dug a shallow trench in the soft layer of needles and loam at their base. Still stinging from his brother’s reproach, he dropped his trousers and squatted, spending several moments contemplating the placid surface of Franklin Lake far below. Although deep shadow still engulfed their camp, the snowfields capping Tulare Peak across the water already glared in the morning sun, and as Travis watched, the demarcation between light and darkness began to creep down the mountain’s chocolate-brown slopes, illuminating a peppering of sparse, twisted pines clinging to its flanks. Only the bright blue dome of their tent seemed alien in the otherwise pristine, beautiful surroundings.
A thousand feet above lay the approach to the pass, with unbroken snow covering the trail for the final third of its serpentine ascent. An unusually heavy snowfall the previous winter had kept the pass closed until now, and Travis knew it would be a tough slog to reach the wall on Needleham Mountain they planned to climb. Grudgingly, he had to admit that Tommy’s eagerness to get moving made sense.
Still, after finishing, Travis delayed returning to camp a few minutes more, breathing in the crisp Sierra morning and enjoying the harsh beauty of the high country. As he looked down from his perch high on the ridge, he saw his brother withdrawing their tent’s collapsible poles, causing the blue fabric to deflate like a punctured beach ball. Once it had fluttered to the ground, Tommy turned and scanned the slopes above. “You fall in or something?” his call echoed up.
“I’m coming,” Travis called back.
It took Travis several minutes to make his way down. By then Tommy had the tent rolled and stowed, both sleeping bags stuffed, and the climbing rope lashed to his pack. “Damn,” said Travis, shaking his head. “A couple more wipes, and you’d have had everything done.”
“You’re right about that,” Tommy replied impatiently. He eyed the cook kit, which still needed cleaning from their morning’s breakfast. “It’s your turn to wash,” he added. “C’mon, Trav. Let’s get going.”
When the two brothers set out twenty minutes later, Tommy quickly assumed his usual position well ahead. Since they’d been boys, each had always hiked at his own pace, with Tommy out front unless Dad was along—in which case he’d take the lead and neither brother would see him until the end of the day when he’d catcall them into camp, gleefully accusing them of being whiners and pussies and wimps. Nonetheless, this isolated hiking style suited Travis, who for most of the time on the trail had little energy for chatter and found the rhythmic movement of steady walking a perfect background for introspection and daydreaming. Now, as he plodded along, his mind returned to a subject he’d found increasingly troubling as the summer had worn on: the climb.
Why did I let Tommy talk me into it? he wondered for the hundredth time, regretting his role in his brother’s typical rebellion against their father.
You know why, a perverse voice inside him whispered.
Travis picked up his pace, battling to ignore the voice within. Tommy always has to play the big man—prove he’s as good as Dad, he thought resentfully. Well, the hell with it. Why don’t I just tell Tommy to forget it?
You know why, the voice whispered again.
Oh, yeah? Why?
You don’t want to admit to him that you’re scared.
“Shut up,” Travis said aloud. “That’s not it at all.”
Yeah, sure, the voice persisted. The truth is, Tommy tries to act like Dad and you try to act like Tom, and you know it. You also know you can’t climb like him. He’ll have to lead most of it, and if something goes wrong . . .
Two hours later, after negotiating the summit snowfield by following in Tommy’s posthole footprints, Travis joined his brother atop Franklin Pass, 11,250 feet above sea level. Momentarily forgetting his misgivings, he paused in silence on the Great Western Divide, gazing with awe into the heart of the High Sierra. Five hundred feet below he could see the trail emerging once again from its dazzling blanket of snow—winding down a rocky slope on the far side of the pass in a series of tortuous switchbacks to a runneled alpine meadow. Farther east the grassy fields surrendered to a dense forest of pine, beyond which lay a huge canyon, carved over millennia by the Kern River on its southward rush to Isabella Lake. And in the distance, rising silent and majestic into a sky as clear as diamond, stood the easternmost spine of the Sierra Nevada—the range’s final cataclysmic upheaval before plunging ten thousand feet to the floor of the Owens Valley beyond.
Welcoming the break, Travis shrugged off his pack and glanced over at Tommy. “I’ll bet you can see for a hundred miles,” he said.
Tommy, who had already shed his pack, turned from his own quiet introspection of the rugged wilderness below. “Yeah,” he agreed, his anger following their earlier argument regarding Arnie apparently forgotten. “Speaking of miles,” he added, “we’ve still got a few to go ourselves.” Without awaiting a response, he reshouldered his pack and started down the far side.
Just before noon, after slogging their way down the eastern snowfield and continuing north past Little Claire Lake, Tommy and Travis paused at the base of Needleham Mountain. With a shiver of excitement, Travis stared up at the peak’s daunting southeast buttress, struck silent by the sheer size and scale of the granite wall before them. It rose more than eleven hundred feet from a chaos of shattered stone at its base, terminating in a broad shelf capped by a rocky outcrop. Although initially the rock face ascended moderately, it soon increased in pitch, turning vertical by the time it had risen a few hundred feet from the valley floor.
Thrilled in spite of himself, Travis studied the rock, trying to pick out the route they would climb. In the center of the wall, extending from the talus foot to within a hundred feet of the final shelf, broad sections of stone had exfoliated over the centuries, peeling from the monolith in layers like the skin of an onion. The resulting loss had carved a giant overhanging arc, a monstrous roof looming eight hundred feet above. The right side of the wall consisted of a blank, soaring face of stone; on the left a tremendous dihedral—two flat, intersecting granite planes—formed its westernmost boundary, rising like an open book for several hundred feet to a large vertical slot. Above, after passing a huge chockstone jammed into the top, the slot gave way to a system of cracks running all the way to the summit shelf, beyond which the rock continued upward at a gentler pace—a fourth-class scramble—to Needleham’s peak.
“Damn, it’s a lot bigger than I remembered,” Tommy observed.
“It sure is,” said Travis, still staring at the wall in amazement. “Want to bail?”
Tommy opened his pack and pulled out a Mineral King geologic survey map. “No way. We can do it,” he answered confidently. “This map isn’t much of a guidebook, but it’s better than nothing,” he added as he began comparing the rock’s features to the lines on the quadrangle.
Travis found himself unable to contain his growing apprehension. “Well? What do you think?”
Tommy folded the map, smiling at his brother’s nervousness. “Six pitches, maybe seven,” he answered, squinting up at the mammoth dihedral. “Nothing tougher than 5.11, 5.12 at the most.”
Travis felt his heart plummet. At one time the climbing community had allocated a 5.10 rating (on a scale ranging from 5.0 to 5.10) to the most difficult technical routes; since then limits had been pushed to 5.13 and beyond. Although Travis had followed Tommy and their father on a number of 5.12 climbs, he had never led anything harder than 5.10.
“Here’s the plan,” Tommy continued, his eyes lighting with enthusiasm. “We as
cend the dihedral to the slot, then climb the chimney to the cracks. From there we traverse right, get above the overhang, and then up to the summit. I’ll lead the tough pitches; you take the easy ones.”
“What easy ones?”
Tommy glanced at the sun, which by then had risen well into the sky. “Hell, there’s bound to be at least one,” he said with a smile. “Come on. If we don’t want to spend the night up there, we’d better get humping.”
Reluctantly, Travis dug his climbing shoes from his pack. He pulled them on and began tightening the flat nylon laces, watching as Tommy ordered their gear on the equipment rack—smallest stoppers first, larger hexagonal nuts next, and finally the cam-shaped Flexible Friends—arranging the variously sized pieces of wire and metal that the lead climber would wedge into cracks and flaws in the rock for protection on the ascent. Next, after both boys had stepped into their sit-harnesses and fastened the thick protective belts around their waists, Travis passed Tommy a handful of climbing slings—lengths of nylon webbing tied in two-foot-diameter loops. As Travis started to close his pack, he noticed a pair of metal ascenders lying on the bottom. “Want to take the Jumars?” he asked. Clipped to the climbing rope, the Jumars could be used to bypass a difficult section of rock, allowing one to move up a rope fixed from above much like climbing a ladder.
“What for? Think you won’t be able to follow my leads?” Tommy snorted. “Leave ’em. I’ll haul your ass up if I have to.”
With a shrug, Travis closed his pack and leaned it against a boulder.
“Ready, bro?” asked Tommy.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Travis lied, realizing it was too late to back out.
“Good. Let’s do it.”
With Tommy out front, they scrabbled over broken rock to the base of the dihedral. Once there, Travis uncoiled the fifty-meter line that would connect them throughout the climb. Tommy shrugged on the rack and slings. “This is gonna be great, bro,” he said, grinning at Travis with unconcealed enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” said Travis, attempting to return his smile.
By tacit agreement Tommy took the first lead.
After both had tied into the rope using a secured bowline knot as their father had taught them, Tommy moved to the base of the wall. Travis passed the rope around his back and wedged himself between two large slabs of granite. “Belay on,” he said, his pulse quickening.
“Climbing,” Tommy answered, slipping into a terse argot used by climbers to minimize the chances of a misunderstanding on the rock. He dipped his right hand into a bag of gymnastic chalk hanging from his sit-harness, then his left. Next he placed a foot in the crack that split the dihedral. Twisting his foot, he locked it in. His left hand followed, then the other foot. Alternately wedging his hands and feet progressively higher, he started up the nearly vertical face.
Ready to catch him should he fall, Travis slowly paid out the rope, watching as his brother ascended.
Using an aggressive, gymnastic style of climbing, Tommy powered through the first pitch, or rope length, placing a protective nut every twenty feet or so and clipping the line to each through a sling and carabineer. Twenty-five minutes from the time he began, following a strenuous series of moves 140 feet up the dihedral, he anchored himself in. Hanging in his harness, he then belayed up his brother, steadily pulling in slack line to ensure that if Travis slipped on the way up, he wouldn’t go far.
“Man, my lats are cooked,” Tommy announced cheerfully when Travis finally reached his airy position forty minutes later. “Want to take the next lead?”
His breath coming fast, his limbs shaking with both excitement and exhaustion, Travis clipped himself to Tommy’s anchor, then passed him the protective pieces he had removed on the way up. For Travis, the first part of the dihedral had proved extremely difficult. Several times he’d been forced to resort to dynamic lunges and risky swings for the next hold, attempting heart-stopping moves he would never have considered had he not been roped from above. Once, if he’d had the lead, the climb would have ended right there—and the next section appeared even more treacherous. “I’ll pass,” he said, paradoxically both proud and terrified that he had somehow managed to complete the first pitch.
“You sure?” Tommy chuckled, amused by his brother’s reluctance.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
After a short rest Tommy led the second pitch, and then the third—his moves a study of technique and strength that bordered on physical poetry—ascending without incident to the large slot at the top of the dihedral. While the following pitch up the chimney eased somewhat in difficulty, it presented little opportunity for the leader to place protective pieces.
Again Travis gave Tommy the lead.
By now their climbing had assumed a smooth, easy rhythm dictated by the rock, and as Travis belayed his brother from below, he finally felt himself beginning to relax. Shortly after Tommy disappeared over an outcrop, Travis let his eyes roam the valley, employing his sense of feel to maintain contact with his brother.
Suddenly he heard Tommy shout down from above. “Tension!”
Travis’s mouth went dry. He tightened the rope around his waist and leaned out, peering up the face. “What’s happening?” he yelled.
“I . . . I can’t . . . oh, shit. Get ready, Trav.”
Travis’s heart began slamming in his chest. “Tom? What’s going—”
“Falling!”
A split second later the rope snapped tight around Travis’s waist. Several feet of line hissed around his back and through his hands before he managed to clamp down and stop Tommy’s fall. Face slick with sweat, he stared up the taut line. “Tom?”
Nothing.
“Tommy?” he called again, close to panic. “You okay?”
“Yeah. No problem,” his brother’s casual reply floated down.
Travis leaned out even farther, straining to see past the outcrop. There! Ninety feet up, dangling at the end of the rope below his last protective piece, was Tommy. Thank God the piece had held. “What happened?” Travis shouted.
“I screwed up, bro. I paid for it, too.”
Heart still racing, Travis held the rope fast, watching as Tommy struggled to regain the rock. The fall had swung him out of position, and he had to strain to get his hands and feet back on opposite walls of the chimney.
“Okay,” Tommy called down seconds later. “Slack.”
Nervously, Travis eased tension on the rope.
A pause. Then Tommy’s voice again. “Climbing.”
Business as usual . . . for Tommy.
A little over three hours into the climb, Travis joined his brother in a small cave at the top of the slot, just beneath the chockstone they had noticed from the ground. Seeming tiny and insignificant, their packs lay at the base of the talus far below, while across the valley a thicket of clouds billowed into the afternoon sky, casting a patchwork of dark and shifting shadows on the eastern reaches of the Sierras.
“Nice lead,” said Travis, clipping himself to Tommy’s anchor.
Tommy nodded. “Thanks, bro. That fall I took got the old adrenaline pumping, though.”
“No argument there,” agreed Travis. “I may have to change my skivvies when we get down,” he added, attempting a smile.
Tommy grinned back. “Me, too. You think it was hairy on your end of the rope, you should’ve seen how it looked on mine.”
“No, thanks.”
The brothers rested there, talking quietly and taking in the view. Then, all too soon to suit Travis, Tommy decided it was again time to move. But instead of taking the lead as he had before, he slipped off the equipment rack. “Last chance, Trav,” he said, offering the rack to his brother. “After this one it’s a scramble to the top, then a walk off the back.”
Travis hesitated. Despite the difficulties experienced during the initial pitches and the unsettling memory of Tommy’s fall, as the climb had progressed, he had felt his fears gradually being eroded by a growing sense of confidence and accomplishme
nt. Presented now with the prospect of leading the final pitch, his terror came flooding back, stronger and more pervasive than ever.
“Come on, bro,” Tommy prodded gently. “You can do it.”
“Guess I can’t let you do all the work,” Travis replied, wishing he could refuse but knowing he couldn’t. Trying to keep his hands from shaking, he took the rack.
He spent several moments nervously arranging the equipment, sorting slings, and replacing the pieces he had cleaned on the preceding pitch. Next he dipped his hands into his chalk bag, finding, to his embarrassment, that he had to dust them twice to dry his sweaty palms. At last, filled with a presentiment of disaster, he leaned out, placed a large stopper in a crack above his head, and clipped in the rope. He looked down. The wall fell away in a sickening plunge to the jagged rocks below.
“On belay?” he said, hoping Tommy didn’t catch the tremor in his voice.
Tommy passed the rope around his back. After checking the anchor to make sure it would take an upward tug, he braced himself in the cave. “Belay on.”
Travis took one last look down, regretting it immediately. Then a deep breath. “Climbing,” he said.
Trembling with anticipation and exhilaration and fear, the rock cold and unforgiving beneath his hands, Travis edged out over the void.
Chapter 1
Earlier that year, on the final Friday of spring, Detective Daniel Kane arose well before dawn. Without waking his wife, Catheryn, he slipped out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks, and quietly descended the worn wooden stairs to the beach-level deck below his house. There he began his morning ritual of exercise, working out for fifty minutes without pause, gradually pushing the limits of his six-foot-three, 220-pound frame. By the time a faint palette of reds and oranges and yellows in the sky over Santa Monica to the east heralded the birth of a new day, he had completed a rigorous regimen of sit-ups, push-ups, bar chins, and dips, and a sheen of sweat covered his body as he faced the dawn.