by Jim Davidson
With one hundred feet to go, I saw my partners on the summit. Pat let out an encouraging whoop. I breathlessly yelled back, “Damnit … I’m … gonna … make it!” and we both cheered. The last painful steps somehow seemed fun.
Hugs from my elated teammates greeted me on top. Our last team member joined us ten minutes later, and after a summit photo by the sticker-covered metal cross, we descended with light snow swirling about. I had broken my personal altitude record by over 8,000 feet.
But the trip was notable for another reason, for it was through one of my teammates that I met a wiry young outdoorsman with a mop of unkempt sandy hair and a quiet demeanor.
His name was Mike Price.
Mike had wanted to join the Aconcagua trip, but he simply couldn’t afford it. Still, when we’d departed for Argentina, he had gamely volunteered to drive us to the Denver airport. Amid a pile of gear-filled duffel bags, Mike and I had shaken hands good-bye. Grinning, he had wished us well, then driven off, madly beeping the van’s horn as he went.
THAT I’D EVENTUALLY ended up at CSU was not a surprise, for it was the natural extension of the life I had built over the previous three years. When I’d returned to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall of 1983, I had turned all my energies to geology and climbing. At twenty-one, I had already identified the focus points of my life.
I climbed with college friends whenever I could, learning the skills I would need for bigger, more challenging peaks. I found out I could endure subzero temperatures during a twenty-two-hour summit traverse across Maine’s remote Mount Katahdin. I learned the value of diligent map work after a navigational mix-up forced us to march eighteen miles toward Oregon’s Middle Sister with little drinking water. That mistake left us so dehydrated that we drank skanky pond water laced with swimming insects. Still, we summited the snowy volcanic peak the next day.
I explored the White Mountains of New Hampshire, taking in the adage that if you can deal with the harsh conditions of Mount Washington in winter, you can handle the weather on any peak in the world. Though my young ego hoped it was true, I had my doubts. I sensed that greater peaks must hold greater challenges, and so they must be the best places to learn more about the mountains and myself. And I wanted to find out. I longed for higher, harder peaks and began scheming ways to include such mountains in my life.
At an Appalachian Mountain Club course on winter outdoor leadership, I met a quiet and capable climber my age named Patrick Heaney. Together we went on an ice-climbing binge across New Hampshire. We started climbing short, frozen slabs that allowed us to discover each other’s skills, strengths, and weaknesses in low-risk situations. Later we moved onto multipitch ice routes, where we took turns swapping leads. Soon we were chasing classic alpine climbs across the White Mountains, and I gradually became a competent lead climber on both rock and ice.
But I longed to return to a place where the mountains started at 10,000 feet and went up. After I graduated, in the spring of 1985, Patrick and I went climbing in Colorado. We hitchhiked and climbed our way through the Indian Peaks Wilderness and Rocky Mountain National Park, huddling under a green nylon tarp propped up by our ice axes at night, awakening at sunrise to the perfume of spring wildflowers and the gurgling of melting snowbanks. We scaled a half dozen high summits, including Longs Peak (14,255 feet), by the icy Notch Couloir. As we hobbled down the trail on our last day, Patrick said, “I hate to leave.”
“Yeah,” I answered, “it would be great to live here and climb these peaks all the time.”
That Rockies trip strengthened my resolve to make a life in the mountains. The physical exertions and mental fortitude that the mountains demanded forced me to face fear, manage doubt, and take action, even in the face of uncertainty. In short, the self-imposed challenge of climbing made me more resilient. People find self-reflection and self-improvement in a variety of ways—through running or music, therapy or bonsai. For me, the moving meditation of mountain climbing yielded these benefits, along with the bonuses of visiting remote places and experiencing wild beauty.
AFTER A YEAR in Massachusetts working as an environmental geologist, climbing, and spending time with Gloria, I was accepted into graduate school at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
Gloria and I excitedly made plans to move to the Rockies together, and in August 1986 we settled into a simple apartment about a mile from campus. Within weeks, I’d secured the grant-funded job, the tuition waiver, and a spot on the Aconcagua team. And I had a new friend, Mike Price.
One Friday afternoon, my Aconcagua teammate Scott Anderson, Mike, and I met up at a geology department beer party. Scott and I discovered that we hailed from adjacent towns in Massachusetts—he from Lexington, me from Concord. When Mike heard that, he asked me what I thought of the classic Concord-based book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Though I had only superficial comments about the book, Mike got a kick out of the fact that as a kid I had taken swimming lessons at Walden Pond. A second-year grad student in English, Mike loved literature about wilderness, nature, and philosophy.
Mike stood two inches taller than me, at five foot nine, but was about thirty pounds lighter. Though he was not the most outspoken guy, his unassuming exterior hid an energetic fireball of a young man. I was impressed that Mike worked as an outdoor instructor and had been on a wild expedition deep into the glaciated wilderness of Canada.
While graduate school kept us both too busy to climb much, Mike and I socialized together and became good friends over the next eighteen months. We knew that we wanted to climb together, so as soon as I wrapped up my master’s degree, Mike and I hit the crags. The spring air chilled our skin, but the rock was warm enough to climb. We set out on a moderate route in Eldorado Canyon, a popular climbing area near Boulder. The route included the Bastille Crack, a five-pitch ascent up a steep buttress of red conglomerate sandstone that sits right along a dirt road.
Mike was the better climber, so he led the first pitch, with its short, tricky section that required shifting from one crack over to the next. I followed him, and then I took the next pitch. We switched leads until we reached the top, about 300 feet above the canyon floor. This fine day of climbing confirmed that we moved well together. Our climbing partnership had begun.
TWO MONTHS LATER, Mike was busy, so I went to California to climb in Yosemite National Park with my old Appalachian Mountain Club buddy Patrick. Early one morning we watched the rising sun paint Yosemite Valley’s soaring rock walls deep orange, then gentle gold. By the time they settled into a granite-white hue, we were huffing up the approach trail to Middle Cathedral Rock for our climb up the East Buttress. The fifth pitch of this 1,000-foot wall is the “crux” section—the hardest part of the route. This route’s crux can be free climbed with difficulty, or it can be aid climbed using an existing series of eight drilled-in bolts. Aid climbing involves hanging from gear to assist with the ascent; free climbing means advancing by one’s hands and feet with gear present only as protection in case of a fall. Almost all the climbing we had done over the years had been free climbing. The only aid climbing I’d ever done was fifty feet of practice six years earlier in Montana.
Aid climbing requires complex gear, rope, and knot systems that collectively allow a climber to move up. Many pieces of specialty equipment are needed for proper aid climbing, including aiders, which are flexible webbing steps, and ascenders, sliding, mechanical rope clamps that allow a climber to raise himself up a dangling rope. We didn’t have any special aid gear, so Patrick aid climbed the short bolt ladder in a quick and dirty style by clipping gear into the next highest bolt and then pulling down on the dangling sling.
I followed in a jury-rigged fashion, yanking on gear Patrick had left clipped to the bolts for me and standing in nylon webbing loops that served as barely functional substitutes for real aiders. This allowed me to swarm my way up the nearly blank section while Patrick belayed me from above. With a mess of gear dangling from my neck, I soon flopped onto his belay led
ge like a netted tuna hauled onto a boat deck.
“Graceless, but effective,” Patrick said.
I smiled, nodded, and panted.
Since aid climbing relied so heavily on gear, I had thought it wouldn’t be hard. In fact, hoisting myself up the 30-foot section with no ascenders or aiders wore me out in just minutes. I now understood how tiring aid climbing could really be.
ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY JOBS were plentiful in 1988, and though I already had a good offer in Fort Collins, I applied for a position as a corporate hydrogeologist with Shell Oil. The work would entail studying and remediating fuel leaks from underground storage tanks. It was a high-profile position overseeing subsurface cleanup projects across eighteen states. I was thrilled when Shell offered me this dream position.
There was only one problem: The job was in Houston, Texas.
I did not want to live in flat, humid Texas, and I didn’t want to move away from Gloria, but in the end the Shell opportunity was too great to reject. I accepted the position with an unsettling mixture of professional glee and personal dread.
Our loose plan was for me to go there at the summer’s end and start work. I would fly often to see Gloria in Colorado, where she was a sales manager, and in few months we would decide if she should join me in Texas.
Before I left for Houston, Gloria and I embarked on a big tour of western national parks. In the Northwest, we stayed for several days at Mount Rainier. The snow-covered volcano loomed above our campsite.
One morning, we hiked a trail on the mountain’s southern flank to the Paradise Glacier ice cave. The ice tunnel burrowed under the glacier, and the oval entrance was thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, squashed by the massive weight of ice overlying the cave’s mouth. Having studied glacial geology, I knew this was a melt channel formed by a subglacial river. Although I tried convincing Gloria to join me, on the premise that no ice collapse was likely to happen during the few minutes that we would be in the cave, she refused to enter. Nervous but excited to actually experience such a rare geologic cavern, I scampered thirty feet inside the tunnel.
My eyes took a minute to adjust to the dark, but soon I could see the smooth, scalloped ice walls, dripping with meltwater. I stuck my hand out and caught a few frigid drops. Squatting, I poked a finger at the contact line where the underside of the glacier met the bedrock beneath. This basal interface is precisely where glaciers grind solid rock into a fine grit called glacial flour. Imagining the weight of all that ice above me and the titanic power required to pulverize bedrock, I suddenly felt small before such unstoppable forces of nature.
Crack! A stone clattered onto the floor, somewhere deeper in the cave. My head snapped up and I stared into the darkness, surrounded by the steady gurgle of water flowing among the broken cobbles littering the ice cave’s floor. All this water had once been snow farther up the mountain. Growing unease urged me from the cavern.
I tilted my head back and stared up at the dark ceiling. The ice surface undulated in water-smoothed waves, and a few glacier-entrained rocks remained frozen in the cave’s ceiling. Four feet to my right, a pumpkin-sized boulder hung down.
I should have a helmet on in here.
“Jim, come out of there,” Gloria called from outside the cave. When I turned toward her voice, light pouring through the rough-hewn entrance nearly blinded me, yet I could make out her silhouette. Direct sunlight angling in illuminated a patch of the rock floor, marking the way out. I blinked while my eyes adjusted, then emerged from the gloomy ice room, back to Gloria.
“How was it?” she asked.
“Very cool, but scary. It’s dark and damp. It’s pretty creepy being underneath a glacier.”
A FEW WEEKS later I was in Houston, miserable. The environmental job at Shell was great—everything I’d hoped for. But my personal life was nonexistent. When I tried to hike in a state park, the sun and the bugs drove me back. When I ran, I grew so nauseated from the heat that I sagged against a chain-link fence like a puking drunk. Gloria, my friends, and the mountains were all back in Colorado. I would have to make do with frequent Rocky Mountain visits attached to my many business trips. I settled into a pattern of flying to Denver every other Friday, and returning to Houston after forty-eight hours.
A month later, Gloria and I officially got engaged.
We agreed to a long-distance engagement so that I could finish out at least a year with Shell. We trudged through the next thirteen months, me flying to Denver about twenty times, and both of us traveling to Ohio twice to plan our wedding. I didn’t see Mike or my other Fort Collins friends much.
Finally, in October 1989, I drove my overloaded pickup out of the Houston sprawl, heading northwest, back to Gloria and the mountains. We got married two weeks later in front of eighty friends and family members near Gloria’s Ohio hometown, and then settled into a new apartment in Fort Collins.
NOW THAT I was back in Colorado working as an environmental consultant, I could climb once again with Mike. He would be away for weeks or months with Outward Bound; then I’d come home to hear some variation of the same message on my answering machine.
“Hello, Jim and Glo, this is Mike Price. I’m in town and over at my brother’s. Just wanted to say howdy and see if you wanted to drink a beer.”
Hunched over frosted mugs a few hours later, we’d get caught up, then make plans for a climb.
Over time, we journeyed together on rock, snow, and ice. Mike and I developed faith in each other’s abilities to climb well, to move safely, and, just as important, to extricate ourselves from trouble when it appeared. Each of us understood our own capabilities—and those of the other—and we gently spurred each other to strive harder. By urging me beyond my comfort range, and supporting me when I was out there, Mike helped me slowly push back the boundaries I used to define myself. This made me grow more capable, both on the rock and off.
With his higher skill level, I am not sure that I helped him improve much as a climber. But I was capable enough that he did not have to instruct me or watch me for mistakes. Spending eight months a year herding and fretting over his novice students wore on Mike. He once told me that he enjoyed climbing with me because he did not have to worry.
“Even when I can’t see you or hear you,” he told me, “I know you’ll do the right thing and make it through.”
His extensive wilderness time also meant Mike was always in better climbing shape than I was. My career as a hydrogeologist kept me office-bound, and that left me with slightly lesser skills and conditioning than Mike. That didn’t seem to bother him, though, so I tried not to let it bother me. Because I could not be as good a climber as Mike, I worked hard to be a good partner. I carried my share of the weight, arrived prepared, and moved fast when my turn came. When things got scary or uncertain, I lightened the mood with silly comments or wisecracks.
One day, a rattlesnake surprised Mike on a trail west of Fort Collins, and he instinctively leapt off the path and bounded through scrub oaks to safety.
“What do you call that move—the Oklahoma Two-Step?” I asked playfully.
Later, though, he got even. When I jammed my fist into a three-inch-wide crack while I was leading on another climb, I sensed movement in the fissure, then peered in to see two onyx eyes and folded black wings near my hand—a bat. I let loose a startled yelp and scurried across the rock to get away. Mike laughed so hard he had to sit on a boulder to compose himself.
On the drives and trail approaches we talked and joked. We always aimed for a full day of climbing, but delays and rainouts didn’t really matter because we had a good time regardless.
We climbed extensively on Lumpy Ridge’s granite spires in Rocky Mountain National Park. We scaled frozen waterfalls. And we skied in the pristine backcountry, whooping and hollering as we dropped down through lustrous powder fields in the shadow of the Continental Divide.
ONE WARM JULY morning we headed to Lumpy Ridge for the third day that week, set on rock climbing in an area called the Bookend. A
s Mike steered his midnight-blue pickup the last mile up the dirt approach road, I read aloud from the guidebook and pointed out landmarks to help us find the right cliff.
We pulled into the gravel parking lot, Mike glancing up at the crags while I intently studied the guidebook. Suddenly, the book slapped my forehead, the floorboard bucking and grinding beneath my feet as we slammed to a stop. Looking up at the cliff instead of out the windshield, Mike had driven right onto a basketball-sized boulder at the parking lot’s edge. Startled, I looked up, wide-eyed. Mike seized the moment.
“Well,” he drawled nonchalantly, “that oughta be close enough.”
We moved well together that day, swinging leads, gracefully flowing up the rock. A day later, determined to keep our momentum, we hit Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder.
The drive south to Boulder always provides a great view west over the mountains, and we noted a few puffy clouds looming on the horizon—the usual. After parking in Eldo, we hiked the short approach to Anthill Direct, a fine climb with steep rock and exhilarating exposure. The route goes up the biggest face in the canyon and requires a fairly complex descent.
Mike led the first two strenuous pitches. As I followed the second pitch, a hard wind picked up from the west, and the temperature plunged about fifteen degrees in minutes. Trying to hustle, Mike handed me the gear rack and I started leading the third pitch. As I traversed left, the wind screamed down the canyon and my confidence sputtered. While traversing, a good leader places rock gear in a crack to protect both climbers from a dangerous, swinging fall. While I struggled to set protection, the wind roared so loud that when I looked at Mike, just twenty feet to my right, I saw his mouth moving but heard no words over the din.
We were halfway up, with the hardest climbing behind us. The wandering nature of the rock face we’d already climbed made rappelling off from there an uncertain prospect. We might wind up in the middle of the face, away from the crack system, stuck with no rappel anchor options.