by Jim Davidson
Mike and I each looked up and down the cliff, quickly considering whether to push on or bail off. I pointed down to indicate the rappel option, and waggled an open hand to indicate the iffiness of bailing from there. With pulled-down eyebrows, Mike shook his head, telling me he concurred that rappelling was a bad choice. I pointed my right forefinger up and lifted my eyebrows. With a firm nod, Mike agreed: The way down was up.
The situation was deteriorating, so I wanted more rock protection before starting the next steep section; we couldn’t afford any mistakes.
I looked down at my right hip to select another piece. Just then the wind shifted, and a huge gust blew straight up the cliff. The webbing slings around my neck floated as if lifted by invisible puppet strings, and the updraft flipped the full chalk bag on my right hip upside down. As gravity dumped out my climber’s chalk, the wind racing up the cliff threw that white cloud into my face.
Powder clogged my mouth, nose, and eyes. Clutching the handholds tighter, I spit and snorted and wiped my face on the shoulder of my T-shirt. I blinked but couldn’t see much, and my confidence vanished. Groping blindly below me, I down-climbed, leaving the gear in place. Mike fed me slack through the protection I had placed, and I worked my way back to him.
I leaned in close and said, “If I keep leading, I might fall. You’d better take it.”
Mike looked annoyed. He understood that I’d been shaken, but he didn’t like it that I’d turned back. The rope work necessary to swap the lead around wasted more precious time.
In the minutes it took us to get reorganized, the sky darkened. With rock walls blocking our view westward, we had not been able to see the storm approaching—a fairly common situation on Front Range climbs. Now it was right on us. With my top piece protecting him, Mike flew across to my high point, then continued leading where I’d left off. I fed rope out, wiped chalk from my face, and watched the storm build overhead.
In awe, I saw the sky get so dark that the streetlights in the lower canyon blinked on. Big, heavy raindrops splattered onto my arms—not good. We were about to get clobbered. About half the rope had paid out, and Mike’s pace slowed as rain slickened the rock. The rope twitched out more slowly, then stopped.
Come on Mike. Find a belay.
Squinting up into the driving rain, trying vainly to spot Mike, I saw rivulets of water rushing down the rock face.
Crap—how am I going to climb?
The rope pulled, then began racing out. I hustled to maintain a belay until I was sure Mike was no longer climbing but just yarding in rope. I fed Mike slack as fast as I could. As we neared the end, I worked the rope loop clear of my belay device. Then the rope yanked hard at my waist and I held my breath, feeling the cord for more tugs. Yank, yank. That makes three—he’s got me on belay.
I removed the anchor pieces, confident that though we could not speak to each other, Mike’s pace and signals meant he was ready for me to climb. Though sure he could not hear me over the pounding rain, out of habit I yelled, “Climbing!”
Already chagrined that I had relinquished the lead to Mike, I was determined not to come up short again. I had to climb fast and well, even though the route was growing more difficult with every raindrop.
Slightly crazed with fear, I pulled hard on whatever I slapped my hand on. Mike knew that it was desperate on the face, so he kept the rope tight. This was no longer about clean or stylish climbing; this was a rushed race for safety, and maybe even survival.
Taking out Mike’s protection, I didn’t waste the few seconds needed to clip it to my gear rack. I just let it pile up on the rope in a dangling jumble. When I cleared a steep section, the rock angle eased. But horror gripped me—water was pouring down the rock slab in a broad sheet. It was as if someone fifty feet above were soaking the stone face with a full-force garden hose. To touch the rock I had to put my hand into the moving veneer of runoff. My forearm presented a new pathway for the rushing water. Some of it rooster-tailed off my elbow, and the rest gushed into my armpit.
I pawed at the biggest holds and pulled. My smooth-soled rock shoes sometimes skated off the shimmering face as I struggled for a foothold. Finally, I saw Mike twenty feet higher.
Almost there. Don’t blow it.
I slowed a bit to reduce the chance of a mistake. By making it safely up the slippery pitch in the lashing rainstorm, I had redeemed myself. Stepping onto our sloping belay ledge, I longed to clip into a nice strong anchor, but there wasn’t one. Mike had been forced to belay from a sling draped over a mushroom-shaped rock protrusion the size of a saucepan. There were no good cracks, so he’d had to make do.
When I realized how marginal an anchor we had, and how close I had been to slipping off the wet face, a small wave of nausea hit me. A minor error by either of us could have been disastrous. We squatted on our haunches, trying to make ourselves a smaller target for lightning. Thunder echoed back and forth across the canyon. We hunkered together, holding our one daypack over our heads as meager protection from the heavy rainfall.
“Mike, that was an unbelievable lead with this weather,” I said. “Awesome, man.”
“I don’t know how you followed in the gushing water. I was scared that you might whip off. Way to go.”
“Thanks. Now if it’ll just slow enough to let us off here.”
We were about 150 feet below the top. The rock ahead looked easier, but we had to wait out the rain. Flat-bottomed thunderclouds scampered past the canyon and onto the eastern plains beyond, taking the rainfall with them. The wind settled into shifting gusts, which dried the rock face but chilled us. One of us swiped the rock every ten minutes, checking to see how it was drying. Two hours passed before we thought it was dry enough to climb. Mike shivered and seemed a bit withdrawn. For once, my extra body fat served me well—I was not hypothermic like my skinny partner. Seeking the easiest way off, I led us up and to the left. The angled direction of our escape route forced us to climb three pitches before we reached ground flat enough so that we could unrope and begin the tedious descent. Rappelling short cliffs and fighting thick brush, we finally reached the truck in the dark, utterly spent.
Though the day had been more scary and less fun than we’d planned, we had held it together. Climbing—whether on rock, ice, or snow—is a carefully orchestrated dance between partners. It requires teammates with skill, patience, determination, and strength, both mental and physical. It requires partners who can work together even when the mountain blocks their view of each other, or when howling wind and driving rain sweep away shouted instructions. That day in Eldo, we both had to be fully worthy of each other’s trust.
Each of us knew that the other was, in the highest praise one mountaineer can give another, “solid.”
Our partnership was cemented.
CHAPTER 8
IN THE LATE fall of 1991, Mike Price hits town after leading another Outward Bound course in the canyonlands of Utah—just him and six young men and women, out climbing and backpacking in the solitude of the red rock country. Mike spends about two hundred days a year in the desert or the mountains, and he blows into Fort Collins between trips for three or four days, crashing at his brother’s place, just a few blocks from my house.
We settle in at the end of the C.B. & Potts bar with stories to tell and plans to make. By now, we’ve been buddies for five years. I pay for two pints of 90 Shilling draft. Mike lifts the icy mug, stares at the amber liquid, and says, “Ah, my favorite type of beer: free.”
Whenever we get together, Mike recounts his latest trip. I relish his tales—it’s a chance to vicariously taste the life of an unencumbered wilderness teacher.
Tonight he’s in his usual city clothes: checkered western shirt with shiny snap buttons, battered jeans, scuffed cowboy boots. His shoulders curve forward, a reminder of the scoliosis he endured as a kid. He’s as even-keeled as ever—for him, life is an adventure that should be taken with equal parts seriousness and laughter, reflection and relish.
Mike describes h
is comical instructions to his field crew—his advice to them if they encountered another group on the desert trail, which might represent competition for a coveted camping spot near water. “Tell them,” he had said, “that we are a prisoner-outreach program from the hospital of the criminally insane. People leave in a big hurry.”
Most of these sessions are one-sided—Mike recounting his latest wilderness escapade, me with nothing similar to share. I hike and climb and ski with passion, but my work as a self-employed environmental geologist keeps me otherwise all too busy. And while Mike is single, I am married to Gloria. All that means that I struggle to rack up one-fifth the mountain time Mike does. But I’d recently logged some trail miles, and this time I have a story to share.
A few weeks earlier, Gloria and I set out to hike Longs Peak. Five hours after leaving the trailhead, at about 9,400 feet, we’d ascended 4,000 feet along rocky trails and rugged boulder fields. We were close to the summit when a horrifying scene unfolded in a place called the Narrows, a hundred-foot-long ledge only a few feet wide. Just ahead of us, another hiker stumbled off that ledge, cartwheeling 70 feet down the mountain and landing, seriously injured, among a pile of rocks. We were among a dozen volunteers who kept the patient alive in the first critical hours. In the end, I spent eighteen hours with him, staying to help some National Park Service rangers and a few other die-hard volunteer rescuers carry him on a metal stretcher through the night, buffeted by subfreezing temperatures and eighty-mile-per-hour winds. When loose rocks clattered toward us in the dark, the rangers shouted for us to lean over the patient to protect him. At dawn the next day, we handed him off to a second rescue team, and six hours later they got the young man onto a helicopter and to the hospital. I was thrilled that he survived, but the rescue strained my body to its limits—I lost ten pounds in twenty-four hours—and tested my technical-climbing and rope skills during our night-long effort to lower the man over 1,000 feet of craggy mountainside.
“Nice job, Jim,” Mike says. “You guys put yourselves on the line, and got him down. You earned some stripes on that one.”
Mike raises his beer in toast, and we tap mugs, but soon our focus shifts. We’d talked for years about climbing something “big.” All serious climbers think, at least fleetingly, about Nepal, but at this point the Himalayas seem out of our league and beyond our budget. We’ve talked about the Grand Tetons, and other places too, but one mountain—Rainier, in Washington State—keeps creeping into our conversations. This night, in the cacophony of a college-town bar, we decide what I think we both have known deep inside for a while: that we will go there. The postcard-perfect mountain, its volcanic slopes covered with glaciers, attracts thousands of climbers a year, the bulk of them headed for the top via the Disappointment Cleaver route or the Emmons-Winthrop route. It is as unforgiving as it is beautiful—an average of two or three people lose their lives on the mountain each year, and in 1981 it was the scene of the country’s worst climbing disaster, when an avalanche swept eleven people into a crevasse.
We recognize that there are dangers, but we accept them. For us, earning rewards in adventure and personal growth means challenging ourselves with bigger mountains and, sometimes, bigger risks. As we talk, our determination solidifies. Rainier it will be. And we aren’t going to climb a standard route; we are going to push ourselves on an elegant but challenging ascent up the north side of the mountain. Up the Liberty Ridge.
SIX MONTHS LATER, during our final preparations, I call the National Park Service ranger stations on Rainier three or four times, checking snow conditions, ice coverage, and avalanche danger. I learn that it has been a low-snow year, that the crevasses on the Emmons and Carbon Glaciers are not too bad, and that it has been unseasonably warm. In one call, I speak with Mike Gauthier, one of Rainier’s climbing rangers, who tells me the avalanche danger is nil and that upper parts of the Liberty Ridge are covered in hard water ice. If you’re ready, he says, for technical ice—and we are—it may not be too bad. But he also says that snow bridges are melting rapidly, exposing crevasses.
“It looks like July around here,” he says, as I scribble down the information.
Crevasses.
Clinging to Mount Rainier’s flanks are twenty-six glaciers—giant rivers of ice slowly creeping downhill, replenished by the snow that pummels the summit all winter long. In a twelve-month span in the early 1970s, 1,122 inches of snow fell on Rainier. At the time, this set a U.S. record.
Rainier’s glaciers are complex geological formations, hundreds of feet thick, layer upon layer of ice of varying consistencies and thicknesses that can stretch for miles. The Emmons Glacier alone is comprised of an estimated 23.8 billion cubic feet of ice. Glaciers pack an unrelenting force, carving valleys and pulverizing boulders the size of houses. Thousands of years after they have receded, they will have left unmistakable imprints on the land.
The movement of glaciers is a simple matter of gravity. Once enough snow accumulates and hardens to ice, the combination of mountain slope and the gravitational force exerted on the ice layer begins pulling the mass downhill. Free water beneath the ice accelerates some parts of the glacier, while a rough bedrock base slows movement in other areas. The glacier’s different flow rates and directions open up tension cracks in the ice, called crevasses.
The top 150 feet or so of a glacier is under less pressure than the deepest layers, and so the shallow ice is more rigid—and more prone to fracturing under the enormous tension that builds up as the frozen mass unsteadily works its way downhill. Those ever-changing cracks can open slowly and later be concealed by snow and ice that freezes over the top of the slit. The process repeats itself innumerable times and is so insidious that a snow bridge a few feet thick can conceal a giant, yawning crevasse 10 feet across and 120 feet deep.
We have to prepare for the worst, so a couple of days before our flight, Mike shows up at the home Gloria and I share. On the lawn we uncoil a 165-foot length of Mike’s 8.8-millimeter climbing rope—the perfect kind for tackling glaciers. We are going to practice a crevasse rescue system that one of us on top of the glacier could use to extricate the other from a slot.
Though we have both done it before, we want to practice setting up a Z-pulley system. The arrangement rests on a simple principle: Dividing one long rope into three smaller sections, all threaded through pulleys, greatly increases one man’s leverage and lifting power. When rigged properly, the three sections of the rope form a giant Z. We practice for a simple reason: No matter what Hollywood movies suggest, no climber in the world can haul his partner back up a cliff, or out of a crevasse, without mechanical help.
We each know that if one of us plunges into a crevasse, the other must flop onto the ground and dig in with an ice ax to stop the fall. Then the climber atop the glacier will have a real chance to pull the other out with a Z-pulley lifting system.
So out there on the shaggy grass, we practice our backup system, just like Dad always taught me. On the mountain, our anchors will have to be ice screws and metal-bladed snow flukes buried securely in the glacier, but here in my yard we use a black walnut tree and the deck railing. Seventeen months ago, Mike spent a season in Antarctica, where he was on the McMurdo Sound search-and-rescue team that pulled two men and their load of dynamite from an enormous crevasse after their bulldozer crashed through a snow bridge.
Since he knows the details better, he leads me as we put together a Z-pulley. Then we take it all apart, and I do it on my own. Mike observes quietly as I feed the rope through carabiners and pulleys. Gloria stands behind him on the deck, grilling steaks for all of us. She watches and listens as we work with the rope, talking about different self-rescue scenarios.
“You guys seem to be putting a lot of effort into this,” she says, scowling. “How likely is a crevasse fall?”
I’m quiet for a second. She is mountain-savvy and knows there must be some risk; otherwise we wouldn’t be doing all this. But I don’t want her to worry, so I say casually, “Well, not very likel
y. We’re just being careful.”
“Besides,” Mike adds, “if anyone busts through a snow bridge, they usually go in only ten feet at most. Then the other guy can just haul on the rope to help them scramble back out.”
Gloria looks at me, then Mike, seemingly unconvinced; then she turns back to the grill. I glance at Mike, eyebrows raised, feeling a bit guilty that we’ve minimized the danger. Still, her worrying the whole time we’re on the mountain won’t help anyone.
In the past, she has expressed her concerns about me getting hurt or killed in the mountains. But Gloria’s climbed some rock and ice with me over the last decade, and she’s seen how safety-conscious I am. She also knows how highly skilled a climber Mike is, and how well he and I climb together. So, although she’s a bit nervous about Rainier, she doesn’t press the issue.
I finish packing on June 16, 1992; then Gloria and I meet Mike at a local bookstore for a lecture by Royal Robbins, a Yosemite Valley rock-climbing legend. In his talk, he urges the audience to follow less-known paths in life. Dreaming of our departure the next day, I feel we are following Royal’s advice.
At six in the morning, Gloria sleepily drags herself downstairs to see me off. As is our custom before all my big climbs, she kisses my protective medal, slips it over my head, and gives me a good-bye kiss to send me on my way. When I drive up to the home of Mike’s brother, Daryl, Mike’s bags are stacked in the driveway. Three hours later, our Continental jet is in the air. The adventure has begun.
ON A PHOTOGRAPH of Rainier’s north face, the line up Liberty Ridge is, in the language of climbers, “elegant”—a distinct route up and up, toward the snow-shrouded summit. The cleaver-like ridge juts out between two great walls. On one side is the Willis Wall—4,000 feet of steep volcanic rock, interbedded with crumbling ledges of ash, mud, snow, and ice, much of it poised to fall away. On the other side of Liberty Ridge stands Liberty Wall, imposing at 3,000 feet and with a terrifying reputation for even more frequent ice-cliff collapses and rock falls.