The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  On June 16 my parents drove to the airport in Portland, Maine, to pick me up. This was before the days of satellite phones, so I had no way to communicate with the outside world to let them know I still had 2,000 feet of big wall hanging above me, we were running out of food, and the ice in the fjord was beginning to melt. If it broke up and turned into pack ice before we could top out, we’d be stuck back in the fjord for six more weeks waiting for ice out, when the Inuits could come in and get us with a boat. I had no way of telling my parents—or anyone else—that our survival might depend on our success hunting seals with ice axes.

  We topped out two weeks later, on July 2. We were supposed to radio our Inuit friends when we got back to base camp, but when the ice breakup was imminent and they hadn’t heard from us, they rode out to Sam Ford Fjord to check on us. As we were straggling into base camp, we heard the drone of their snow machines laboring over the slush-covered sea ice.

  When I got home, I went golfing with my dad. After seventy days in the Arctic, the grass was greener, the buzz of the crickets more all encompassing, the sky a deeper shade of blue than I remembered it. When my dad swung his three wood I’d swear I saw tracers as his club whooshed through the air. I felt like I was high, but I wasn’t on drugs. After some introspection, I realized the strange sensation I was experiencing was from being in the “now,” something I had only previously experienced while climbing or skiing powder. After living in the moment for thirty-nine days on the side of an Arctic big wall, I found I could enter the now when I was strolling down a fairway or looking out the window at a birch tree swaying in the breeze. That’s what cemented it, when I knew I had found my calling, the reason I was alive—to seek out and climb the great big walls of the world, wherever they might be.

  * * *

  —

  WE NAMED OUR ROUTE the Great and Secret Show, after a Clive Barker horror novel we all read while on the wall. The tallest big wall in the world at the time was John Middendorf’s and Xaver Bongard’s Grand Voyage on the east face of Great Trango Tower, at 4,400 feet. When we topped out on Polar Sun Spire, our altimeter read 5,000 feet. The climb had started about 250 feet above sea level, which made the wall around 4,750 feet tall. But we didn’t want to overstep, so we called our route 4,300 feet (two years later we flew past the summit in a Twin Otter, which again pegged the summit at 5,000 feet). We won a Golden Piton Award from Climbing magazine, which named the Great and Secret Show one of the best ascents of 1996. I put together a submission of my best photos from the climb and sent them all to the North Face, along with a ten-page “trial report” on the jacket and pants. My goal was a simple one: to give Conrad more than he was expecting. The expeditions I now wanted to go on weren’t cheap, so somehow I would have to work my way up to the Dream Team.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD BEEN READING ABOUT Jared Ogden’s exploits for a few years. He had recently won the ice-climbing competition at the Winter X Games, beating out Alex Lowe, among others. Two years earlier he had climbed the north face of Nameless Tower (the smaller but more visually striking of the Trango siblings), vaulting him to legendary status in my book. In the magazines, his photo often ran alongside Alex Lowe’s.

  We met at a coffee shop in North Conway, New Hampshire. “Hey, dude,” said Jared, “thanks for offering to show me around.” He stood about five feet eleven inches tall and had a small silver hoop in his left ear. His shaggy blond hair and the way he spoke, dropping the word “dude” multiple times per sentence, reminded me of a California surfer. I had heard through the grapevine that he was brash and cocky, but I found him easygoing and self-deprecating. He played the drums on the dash of my still-dented Subaru on the way to the cliff as we talked about climbing. “Take me to your hardest route,” he said matter-of-factly, when we pulled into the parking lot.

  As far as I knew, the hardest route at Frankenstein Cliff was a two-hundred-foot-tall, six-foot-wide green-tinged pencil of vertical ice called Dropline. I had recently led it for the first time, a rite of passage for a wannabe hard-man ice climber.

  “Here it is,” I said proudly, after a short hike down a railroad track, pointing to where it hung from a dark brown cliff looming above a copse of birch trees.

  Jared peered upward, then looked at me and said, with a tone that I found mildly condescending, “Is there anything harder?”

  “Seriously?” I replied.

  “I don’t want to waste my time climbing that thing,” said Jared. Okay, I thought, maybe now I’m beginning to see why some people think he’s cocky.

  We shuffled farther down the tracks to a spot called the Hanging Gardens, a forty-foot overhanging cliff festooned with glittering icicles.

  “Fuck yeah, dude,” said Jared. “This is what I’m talking about.”

  Several of the icicles touched the ground. These were established routes with names like Within Reason, Without Reason, and Clawcicle. Jared fired all of them as his warm-up and then walked up beneath an overhang in the center of the cliff that had three widely spaced daggers of ice, none of which came near to touching down. The descent for Frankenstein’s Standard Route passes directly under this wall, and while I had climbed here many times and had previously done the routes Jared had just dispatched, I had never once given more than a passing glance to the section of cliff he was now eyeing. No one had. In New Hampshire, climbers talked about whether a route was “in,” meaning, was there enough ice to climb it safely. As I was about to find out, Jared’s definition of “in” was a little different from ours. “Put me on belay,” he declared. “I’m gonna lead this.”

  The hanging daggers were barely big enough to hold his weight, and he couldn’t actually strike them to set the picks on his axes or they would have snapped off. So he gently tap-tap-tapped until the pick of his ice ax had poked a hole through the translucent curtains of ice. If he kicked even slightly, the icicles would break, so he twisted the front points on his crampons back and forth to make tiny divots, which he gingerly used as his footholds. In several sections there were no foot placements and he dangled solely from his axes, cranking one-arm pull-ups like a chimp swinging from one tree to the next. To protect himself from hitting the ground, he slotted camming devices into chinks in the rock and pounded some pitons into the ice-coated cracks. By the time he pulled over the lip, a small crowd had gathered, and a hearty cheer rang through the cold woods. With his very first climb in New Hampshire, Jared had just added a full grade to our rating system.

  Word got around, as it always does with climbers, and that night we were invited to dinner at an Indian restaurant by Ruthann Brown, a local woman who worked in marketing for Polartec, the company that makes the fleece and filling for the North Face jackets and sleeping bags. Also in attendance was her partner Randy Rackliff, a friend who had been at the Hanging Gardens that day, plus two special guests, Alex Lowe and Greg Child, who were in town for the Ice Fest. It was my first time meeting these legends, and I tried to play it cool even though I was feeling high from sitting at the same table and sharing a beer with two of my climbing heroes. Greg immediately established himself as the group’s entertainer. His wit and mental sharpness, and the inventiveness in the way he used language and the natural flow of the conversation to create humor, was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Ruthann, in particular, appeared to be in love with Greg, and at one point she said, “Greg Child, something about you makes me wild.”

  “Thank you, Ruthann,” said Jared. “Now I know what I’m going to call my new route—Something about You Makes Me Wild.”

  Alex shared in the good humor, but I had the sense his mind was elsewhere. Before calling it a night, we made a plan to take Alex to the Hanging Gardens in the morning, where he had hoped to make the second ascent of Jared’s route. And he did, but not before it spit him off a couple of times. Granted, the icicles had been hacked up and there wasn’t much left to work with, but still, Alex Lowe, who was univ
ersally acknowledged as one of the best climbers in the world, had barely made it up Jared’s route.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME JARED LEFT New Hampshire, I realized I had learned something from him that would forever change the way I climbed. Skillwise, I wasn’t that far behind him, yet he was climbing at an elite level, and I wasn’t. Why? I had just spent several days witnessing exactly what made him so great: the heart he put into his climbing. Climbing with Jared made it painfully obvious that I wasn’t trying my absolute hardest—not even close. Spanish climbers have a saying for the way Jared climbed—a muerte—to the death. It doesn’t mean you’re trying to kill yourself, but rather that you’re going at the climb with a grittiness and determination that leaves everything you’ve got on the cliff.

  The caveat was that you could flick this switch only when you were ready, when you understood your limits instinctively and knew right where that imaginary line is that you can’t cross. Flick the switch before you’re ready, and you might well be going to your death. Jared showed me that it was time for me to flick it and that I was ready. And that all I had to do was decide I wanted it that badly.

  It was time for something big.

  * * *

  —

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, I was on my way to Pakistan with Jared to climb Shipton Spire, a rock tower that lies a few miles up the glacier from Trango Towers. Our team consisted of the two of us, plus our cook, Karim. We hired nine porters to help us carry our equipment on the fifty-mile trek to base camp. When we arrived in the lush meadow on the edge of a rubble-strewn glacier below the tower, and Karim realized we would be working on the climb for the next six weeks, he asked if he could go back to his village and return when we got down. We gave him some spending money and off he went.

  Weeks later, at our high camp, we got pinned by a snowstorm that kept us tent-bound for several days. We had one Walkman between us, and we’d lie side by side on our sleeping pads, each with one headphone, listening to Jared’s mix tape Funk You to Death. Whenever a decision needed to be made, I would throw out an opinion, expecting Jared, like Warren always had, to counter. But he never did. Not once. In Jared I had found a true kindred spirit and a partnership in which we made a team that was far stronger than the sum of its individual parts.

  Shipton Spire’s first ascent had been made only two years earlier by Greg Child and three other guys, but they hadn’t actually stood on the 19,700-foot summit. They turned back somewhere around fifty feet from the top, afraid that the overhanging snow mushroom that capped the peak would fall off if they tried to climb it. Jared and I found better snow conditions, and in the middle of the night we took turns belaying each other up to the tippy-top of the mountain, a blade that culminated in a pyramidal spearpoint of snow so tiny I didn’t dare try to stand on it.

  * * *

  —

  DOORS WERE BEGINNING TO OPEN. Conrad brought us both onto what he called “the B Team.” Then Greg Child and Alex Lowe invited us to team up with them for a National Geographic–sponsored expedition to Baffin Island in the summer of 1998. Our job was to find Baffin’s biggest unclimbed wall, scale it, and come home with an article for the yellow mag that Greg would write and a film for National Geographic Television.

  There was drama on that Baffin trip, mostly between Greg and Alex. As a junior member of the team, a “subbie,” I managed to stay neutral and in a way felt honored that both Greg and Alex had confided in me. “The camera guys are like moths to a candle with Alex,” said Greg during one of these confessionals.

  High on Great Sail Peak, we sat through a six-day storm at a hanging portaledge camp tucked under a small roof. When the storm broke, Jared and I, stiff and cranky from a week of inactivity, set off up the fixed ropes to push the route higher. The sun broke through the clouds, illuminating a thick white blanket lying over the valley, above which we dangled on the white static lines like spiders on a thread. A ten-year-old with a point-and-shoot could have made award-winning photos on that day, so Jared called down to invite Gordon Wiltsie, the team’s still photographer, to come up with us to shoot.

  “Thanks for the offer,” said Gordon, poking his head out from the portaledge in which he was lounging, “but I’ve already got a plan to do a photo shoot of Alex brushing his teeth.” I can’t remember Jared’s exact choice of words, but it had a lot to do with where Gordon should put his camera.

  * * *

  —

  THE EXPEDITION COOK, Gulam Rasoul, once told Greg Child that the name Trango probably comes from the Balti word tengo, which means “hair-oil bottle.” There are two bottles that rise from a ridge between the Trango and Dunge Glaciers. The more northerly tower is called Nameless, a flawless obelisk of granite whose summit is guarded on every aspect by sheer 3,000-foot walls. Its neighbor, Great Trango, is one of the largest pieces of exposed granite in the world, a complex massif of gullies, hanging glaciers, and soaring rock faces. The 5,000-foot pillar on its east face was first climbed by Norwegians in 1984. High on the wall, the team of four realized they didn’t have enough food, so two of them rappelled down. Five days later, they saw their companions top out the wall and reach the east summit. But on the descent, something went wrong and the pair disappeared. Their bodies were later spotted at the base of the wall, before being buried in an avalanche.

  The Trango Towers, while impressive, are mere foothills when compared to the 8,000-meter giants that lie forty miles to the north along Pakistan’s border with China. Everest may be the tallest mountain in the world, the crown jewel of the Himalaya, but any serious mountaineer will tell you that it’s not the world’s ultimate peak. That distinction has always belonged to the world’s second highest, K2, aka the “Savage Mountain.” The rather unimaginative name derives from the mid-nineteenth-century Survey of India, during which the six highest points visible from Mount Haramukh in Kashmir were named K1 through K6. The K, of course, stands for Karakoram, a Turkic name for the black gravel that covers many of the dry glaciers in this region. As of 2016, only three hundred or so people have stood on K2’s summit, while around 5,000 have climbed Everest. Even the easiest route to K2’s summit, the Abruzzi Ridge, is far steeper and more technical than Everest’s standard South Col route. The summit of K2 is the most elusive, dangerous, and hard-to-reach place on earth. For every four people who stand on top, one dies trying to get there.

  When viewed on a map, the three-hundred-mile-long, east-west-oriented Karakoram appears to be the northwestern extension of the Himalaya, but it’s technically its own distinct range, separated from the Himalaya by a fifty-mile-wide plain bisected by the Indus River. Both mountain ranges were formed by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, but the Karakoram was formed more recently and has grown more quickly, and this has resulted in its mountains being more heavily glaciated and densely packed.

  In the center of the range lies an area informally known as the “third pole,” an ice cap that holds the planet’s largest reserve of freshwater outside the polar regions. One of the glaciers that spokes off the third pole is the Siachen, which runs for more than forty miles down the center of a disputed area over which both Pakistan and India have claimed sovereignty since the mid-1980s. Hundreds of troops are stationed along the disputed border at heavily fortified high-altitude camps. Every year more of the troops die from exposure to the Karakoram’s harsh weather than from combat.

  The Karakoram is also far less populated than the Himalaya. Unlike Nepal’s, its topography is ill suited to farming or raising livestock. Once you venture forth from the main towns, there are no Balti villages, no lodges or teahouses, no amenities of any sort—just raw mountains, glaciers, ice, and rock.

  * * *

  —

  I APPLIED FOR A PERMIT to climb the northwest face of Great Trango in the fall of 1998, not long after we returned from Baffin. Jared and I had talked about inviting Greg and Alex but decided we’
d have more fun if it was just the two of us. We had gelled as a two-man team the previous year on Shipton Spire, and all the negativity of the Baffin trip made us both wary of ruining that chemistry. I took point on the application, and in the blank where it asked for the expedition leader, I put my name.

  In the past four years, Jared and I had both been successful on every big climb we had attempted. After we returned from the Great Sail Peak expedition, the North Face promoted us to the A Team. We were now pulling down a modest salary from “the firm,” and between other small sponsorships, writing gigs for Climbing magazine, and slideshow tours, I was making a modest living as a “pro” climber. I had “sold out,” but after years of dirtbagging and banging nails in Colorado, I was deeply in love with my new job. I had no boss, I made my own hours, and I climbed all the time.

  So I was crushed when the North Face rejected my first official expedition proposal as a member of the A Team—to give Jared and me 12,000 dollars so we could attempt the unclimbed northwest face of Great Trango Tower. We had thought it was a sure thing.

  “What do you think about inviting Alex?” I asked Jared one day. It went without saying that our sponsorship prospects would be significantly improved if we added the Mutant to our team. Jared agreed we might as well, since the trip evidently wasn’t happening otherwise.

  I called Alex, and he signed on without hesitation. “I’ve always wanted to go to Trango,” he said. With Alex Lowe on the roster, we refloated our sponsorship proposal to the North Face. This time the answer was a resounding yes. Then Climaco called to tell me about Quokka.