by Jim Davidson
This can’t be real. But the terror burning a hole in my chest says it is. We’re going all the way to the bottom.
Flopping like a rag doll, I sense I’m going to hit very hard, very soon. An image of myself as a loose-limbed falling man flashes in my brain. This takes my mind somewhere unexpected—to the old Wide World of Sports TV show’s iconic footage of a ski jumper tumbling out of control on a takeoff ramp and crashing limply to the ground below as announcer Jim McKay intones something about “the agony of defeat.” In spite of his brutal landing, that skier had not been seriously hurt, I had read somewhere, because he had not tensed up during his wild fall.
Voices erupt in my head—the same ones I’d heard in difficult situations for years, playing out my options.
Go limp.
You think that’s going to make any difference?
That’s all I can do.
Just then, the right side of my face grazes the icy wall—merely a kiss of a touch, but it’s enough to deflect me the other way. I bash into the opposite wall hard, snapping my head sideways, and pain knifes through my left shoulder.
I pinball back to the first wall, smashing against it with my right side, jamming my helmet down over my forehead and into the bridge of my nose. The blow stuns me; then I ricochet into the far wall again, faster and harder this time.
Aaah—my leg!
I can’t take much more.
The ice walls are pinching closer together. I’m getting near the bottom of the crevasse.
It’ll all be over soon.
My heavy pack is underneath me, dragging me down. Trailing behind me, my arms and legs flop wildly, smashing against the ice walls. I’m starting to go head-first, a perfect setup to get corked.
And then … WHAM!
My back hits first, and it feels like someone has driven a two-by-four right between my shoulder blades. I hear the air forced from my lungs in one loud, grunting burst. My torso has stopped, but my limbs arrive a fraction of a second later. Both my legs smack to a stop, splayed out; then my arms bounce off hard walls and flop to rest across my chest.
My head snaps back violently, wrenching the tendons in the front of my neck, shooting hot pain through my chest muscles.
I blink and gasp and try to grab a staccato breath in that panicky moment that comes after the wind has been knocked from me. Gulping air, I touch a wall with my right hand, and my glove makes no noise. I reach out with my left hand and feel another wall right next to me. Again, silence. Since the side walls aren’t moving, I’m not moving either. Slowly, my brain becomes convinced that I’m no longer falling.
Joy briefly flickers through me.
I’m alive.
I JUST FELL all that way, I’m alive, and I’m not too badly hurt.
I suck in a smoother breath, wiggle, and feel pain stab down my neck. I’m on my back, with my feet a little lower than my head, and I’m looking straight up through the near darkness toward a small point of light far above me. The crevasse walls are about two feet wide here—just inches from my shoulders.
Bewildered, for an instant I don’t understand why I stopped. I can only assume I landed on a snow pile on the crevasse bottom.
I see moving darkness, a confusing image as the pinprick of light far above my head vanishes and reappears, almost as if some unseen being is waving a dark curtain in front of a distant spotlight.
Then something about the size of a grapefruit lands on my belly. Whump—a handful of wet, clumpy snow. The pinhole of light flickers again, and a double handful of sloppy snow hits me in the face. The light blinks once more, and another load of slush splashes down onto me. It’s falling faster and harder, like someone up there is dumping slushy snow and ice down the crevasse onto me.
Whump, whump, whump.
Arriving faster now, the snow pours in like concrete rushing down a chute, filling over my shins, my thighs. I stare dully at the pile growing on me. Like a lone voice trying to rouse a stuporous crowd, some small corner of my brain urges me to respond. My sluggish mind finally realizes that the light above me sputters off when falling snow blocks my view. The light flickers rapidly. More snow’s coming.
The momentary relief I felt when I realized I had survived the fall vanishes as fear rushes in. I try sitting up, but my shoulders are pinned. More desperate now, I attempt to force myself upright and feel my stomach muscles burn with the effort. The harder I try curling my body up, the deeper I feel the pack straps cut into my shoulders and hold me back. I can’t get up. I’m trapped.
You’re going to get buried. Dig.
I throw my hands up in front of me and dog-paddle as fast as I can, pawing at the falling snow, shoving it away in a race for survival. The slop splats onto me ever faster, and I feel its building weight press down my belly.
My thrashing arms feel weak, and a tinge of hopelessness rises within me.
You’re losing. Dig faster! Keep that snow off you!
I flail my arms like some crazy cartoon character whose limbs spin perpetually but don’t really accomplish anything. Snow covers my inclined body from my chest down to my toes. My legs feel heavy and compressed.
Keep your face clear.
Now it’s really pouring in. Far above my head, the hole we punched through the sun-rotted snow bridge has made it even weaker. The bridge, I realize, is disintegrating and collapsing in on me. The cascading slop rumbles in my ears as it sprays in around me.
The light far above me goes dark, and doesn’t switch back on.
Something big’s coming. Cover up.
In that instant, I throw both my hands over my face and turn my head slightly to the right. Survival tips from old avalanche classes race through my mind, so I open my mouth to grab one last breath before I’m covered. I gulp in the air, but I’m too slow closing my lips, so the incoming snow packs grainy wet crystals into my mouth.
A huge load smothers me in a swirling crash, blowing my right arm away from my face. My head’s buried now. I can’t see. Rough ice crystals poke my cheeks. Still pouring in, the wet debris builds up above my ears and sounds become muffled. I hear more snow landing on the pile that grows thicker upon my head.
No deeper—just stop, please.
The sound of each impact is softer than the last, and I know the top surface of the snow is moving farther away as I get buried deeper.
No more—that’s enough.
Stop!
CHAPTER 5
BY THE MID-1980S Mike Price had found a kindred spirit in Everett Ruess, a young Californian who’d ventured into a still-wild West in the early 1930s, wandering and thinking, writing and painting. Setting out while just a teenager, Ruess explored the California coast, the mountains of the High Sierra, and the deserts and canyonlands of Arizona and Utah. He captured the stark beauty of the wilderness on his notepad and in his photographs and memories, and he carved those scenes onto linoleum blocks that were used to make prints.
Ruess’s writings underscored his love for the outdoors, for the mystery waiting over the next hill, his words a poignant articulation of what drove him.
“I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.… It is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.”
Ruess scaled remote canyons, and he sometimes scrawled “Nemo” high on rocks—Latin for “no man” or “no one,” or possibly a reference to Captain Nemo, who fled civilization in his submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Then, in November 1934, near Escalante, Utah, he inexplicably vanished into the wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again. He was just twenty when he disappeared, and over the ensuing decades, theories abounded. Perhaps Ruess had been murdered. Plunged to his death while climbing a canyon wall. Set out on an adventure with no intention of returning to his old life.
A half century later, Mike Price became fascinated with Ruess, ultimately deciding to write
his master’s thesis in English literature on a young man who, like himself, represented a confluence of intellectual ability and love of the outdoors.
And as Mike set out to write that thesis, he didn’t only research it; he lived it.
TRYING TO UNDERSTAND the meaning in Ruess’s life—and maybe in his own—Mike struck out into the red rock desert canyonlands of southeast Utah, not only searching for answers to an enduring mystery but pursuing the romantic ideals that had inspired the young wanderer. Mike did not check into the Motel 6 in Moab and take a couple of day hikes. Instead, he slept alone in the sand, hiked under the blistering sun, hunkered down in torrential rains, and scaled canyon walls, all as he looked for clues about Ruess, for those hand-scratched “Nemo” marks.
Mike slept on the ground along a river turned silver in the moonlight, nothing covering him. He awakened at dawn, the call of canyon wrens the first sounds he heard. He sat in the rain reading, oblivious to his soaking clothes—or the protection of his nearby truck.
And he wandered the canyonlands, searching. He climbed into a cave, where he found strange drawings of human hands on the wall. Later he recounted the experience in his thesis.
“The hair on my arms stands on end; goosebumps march down my skin. But the markings lure me on; my fingers tremble; I burn from inside. The closer I get the more the burning increases; my hands are on fire when I reach the back wall of the cave. Ruess was here. I feel it. I feel it. When I lift my hands to the strange green hand prints my fingers match the fingers on the wall; my palms match its palms.”
Overcome with weakness and nausea, Mike took a nasty spill—falling out of the cave and crashing to the sand in the canyon below, knocking himself out. As he awakened beneath the unrelenting desert sun, Mike soothed himself by writing of cooler places he had been: “Waterfall ice under the coldest cold a Colorado winter can offer … The outlet streams after a week of subzero nights … Time and motion both stopped, frozen into a moment lasting days, weeks, months until stirred into life again by the springtime sun.”
BY 1990, MIKE was an established instructor at the Colorado Outward Bound School.
The program took young people out into the wilds for weeks or even a month. There, leaders like Mike taught them the outdoor skills needed to survive, and led spiritual journeys of self-discovery that encouraged the students to contemplate the meaning of their lives.
In late September 1990, Mike backed his battered pickup out of his brother Daryl’s driveway in Colorado and headed west on Interstate 70, bound for Utah and a month-long canyonlands course in the windswept country that called to him as it had to Everett Ruess.
Near Grand Junction, just a few miles from the Utah border, Mike pulled alongside a car and glanced over. He recognized the woman at the wheel—Deb Caughron, a fellow Outward Bound instructor also on her way to teach—and he held his speed steady with hers. For the longest time, she didn’t glance over; she was a woman, traveling alone, on a lonely highway. But Mike just held his truck right there, a giant cowboy hat on his head.
Eventually, she looked over, and when she did Mike tipped his hat and winked. The gesture earned him the nickname “Cowboy Bob.”
A year later, Joanne Donohue, a slender New Jersey girl with tumbling locks of golden hair, came west for a thirty-day Outward Bound canyonlands course. For much of it, Mike was the only guide for Joanne and five other crew members (an assistant instructor joined them late, then exited soon after to walk out an injured student). As her crew worked its way through the desolation that is red rock country, Mike’s gentle guidance, goofy songs, and quiet confidence settled on her.
Each night, she lay in her sleeping bag with a pen and her journal. Much of what she wrote was about her being twenty-three and living a great adventure. But day after day, at some point, her thoughts turned to Mike, and how he was able to make her believe in herself in a way that helped her get through one of the most challenging experiences of her life:
“I popped up and made this incredible climb up over this hump. The wind was actually shearing me off of it. Mike was running around, bounding back and forth on this moon-like landscape taking pictures! Then the most sweetest thing anybody has ever done—Mike starts singing that hickish cowboy song [with the line] ‘You Don’t Have to Call Me Darlin’, Darlin’.’ I’m groaning over this unbelievable climb with no handholds and I’m inching up with the wind screaming so hard that I can barely hold on and Mike is off to my right singing as proudly as can be, singing this cowboy song. I knew why he was singing it, so that maybe I wouldn’t tense up and get frustrated on the rock. I just can’t not laugh when he sings that song and he knew it. I was laughing so hard that I almost couldn’t make it up. But I did … You’re in these life/death situations and it is so reassuring to hear his voice because he guided you from the beginning. I’d trust Mike with my life. If there was anyone on Earth I’d trust it to—it would be Mike.”
On the sixth day of the adventure, Mike and his charges ascended a three-hundred-foot sandstone face in Arch Canyon. Joanne struggled, slipping as she started up the rock, unsteady and unsure.
“Relax, relax,” Mike told her.
She turned to him.
“Mike, I don’t think I can do this,” she said.
“You can,” he told her, and grabbed the back of her pack and hoisted her and it up.
A little later, she complained again, unable to steel herself.
“You keep saying, ‘I can’t,’ Joanne,” he said.
They were the last words he uttered to her. She climbed to the top.
“He allowed you your own raw discoveries, and the rewards that come with it; they are the only ones you remember anyway,” she would say later. “He knew that. We didn’t. And in those terms, he was the ultimate guide.”
MIKE PRICE’S ADVENTURES in the desert working on his thesis were another step in the journey he’d begun during those thirty-seven days he and three friends spent in the Yukon. In that frozen desolation, Mike had tested himself in extreme weather and examined his own being in an unforgiving landscape. Near the end of the trip, he opened a green spiral-bound notebook—his third journal of the trek—and looked out on his surroundings.
“Our 34th day almost over,” he wrote. “Three more. And off the ice by tomorrow night! And then—‘somewhere over the rainbow’ in Kansas. Should be able to maintain a good psyche the rest of the way. Esp. as we get off this ice.
“Everything on the glacier is melting, shifting, cracking, avalanching—we are just now watching a three-quarter-mile-long all-rock avalanche from a mile away!—and making all kinds of noises, reinforcing the air of instability. Incredible. I would enjoy the ‘wonder’ of it all a lot more if I did not have to camp on the ice again.”
Mike’s blue ballpoint pen moved across the paper, and in the words that flowed from him he found some answers. And maybe some insight into the biggest question of all: Why do people climb?
He opened one passage by noting a friend’s admonition to heed another writer’s description of a mountain’s beauty as something more than the tableau of its colors and shapes and textures. And so he sat outside the team’s crimson tent, in the late-afternoon light, and poured out his thoughts:
“Seeing the long-shadowed brown furrows cut into the low green-gentle slopes of Observation Mountain is a landmark symbol to me. Perhaps the most important-inspiring one of the trip—to me. Overlooking the Slims Valley, the Kaskawulsh and the South Arm’s lower stretches, Observation Mountain is the last bend. Once around it, the homestretch 15 miles of dirt, grass, flowers and trees is all that’s left. Soothing … Observation Mountain. 5,300. A low peak—a ‘nothing’ mountain—but very beautiful, even more so than Mount Kennedy, in its own right. Green and living, shadowed in the evening arctic sun of mid-July … Nothing awesome, nothing forbidding; a simple easy convergence of peace. The weary way-worn sailor has nearly made it home. The worries of Odysseus are not over … I think I am on the road to being satisfied and it is a road to
peace.”
Mike turned a page and kept writing.
“Pure quiet—except for the ‘making camp’ noises and the sound of water running on the ice … I am in the best spirits now of the entire trip … Tears in the corners of my eyes—of pure emotion—joy—happiness … I feel totally unburdened. The load has been lifted off my back, off my mind. I have to do nothing more to prove myself. This is not for others but for me—and to me. Observation Mountain is a beautiful place. A beautiful rare mood. A few precious moments of ecstasy somehow not meant for—or translate-able into—words. Language fails where the tears begin.”
As Mike sat and wrote, a crystalline blue sky stretched over his head. The red tent the four shared was at his back, and in every direction he looked snowcapped peaks reached for the sky.
Sitting on his backpack, he kept pouring his thoughts down onto the pages of the spiral notebook.
“I think it was Thoreau—or Krutch—who said you must see a place a hundred times before you’ve seen it. I’ve seen Observation Mountain a hundred times, probably twice two times that, under a varying guise of names and places. But only now I’ve ‘seen’ it. As far as peaks go, it is commonplace. Nothing special. Nothing that would attract a mountaineer. But it has touched me—the hopeless-helpless romantic—and I am filled with the energy of life—my spirit is restored—my wounds healed … From the most desolate ice desert I’ve ever been on. I don’t have to ‘prove myself’ to anyone … If I never climb a peak higher than Longs or harder than McHenry’s—it will be o.k.—I will have done well … And this pertains not only to mountains … but to everything I do … There are not ulterior motives. No lusts, no wild drives, to be ‘satisfied’ like a junkie’s habit. Just ‘the seeing’ and ‘the doing.’ Mystical … The sublime beneath the dust …
“A chill wind picks up from behind, blowing through my clothes and urging me to get up. Things to tend to, things to do. Always. 34 days out for a few brief moments of ecstasy—no summit could ever possibly offer. The exchange rate is not equitable. Life isn’t either. It isn’t meant to be. But I have something here. I have something—I cannot accurately and easily express it—but I am onto something for sure …