As he climbed higher, he could feel a cool breeze blow against his face and into his nostrils. He judged that the temperature was about thirty-five degrees. Still climbing, he looked down at the zipper on his jacket that held a mini-compass and thermometer. He read it: thirty-three degrees.
“Good guess,” he said out loud, longing to hear a human voice and settling for his own.
Nearly two and a half hours later, Jack was now cresting the 1,000-foot slope he’d just ascended. He felt relieved that a third of the climbing was under him. As he gazed up at the wall in front of him, his relief was overcome by worry and dread. There, in front of him, was a wall of ice. It was steep and it went on forever. He estimated it was over a thousand feet high.
Before the climb, he figured he was going to run into some short pitches of ice here and there, the same kind he found while climbing the north ridge. This extended cliff of ice, on the other hand, he did not figure on.
In climbing steep ice, just like in steep rock, you must place protection into the ice periodically in case of a fall. As you ascend a pitch of ice, you drive in or screw in tubes of metal called ice pitons or ice screws. With the help of a carabineer, a climber would clip his rope into the ice protection and continue climbing. If a fall were to occur, a climber would drop the length he climbed above the carabineer and then that same length below it, essentially falling two times the length of unsupported rope.
Jack recalled from past experience that he could climb steep ice at a pace of seventy-five feet per hour, which included climbing, placing protection every five to ten feet, rappelling back down, then climbing back up and ‘cleaning’ the protection out of the pitch. Looking up at the steep icy face above, he calculated that it would take him fifteen hours of continuous climbing to reach the top. If it were higher than 1,000 feet, it would be just that much more, something he wasn’t sure if he had the provisions for.
He pulled back the sleeve on his red North Face mountaineering jacket and checked the time. It was a little after 2pm. There were only about five more hours of sunlight left. He looked to see if there was anywhere to bivouac higher up. There was none. The wall above was a blank wall of ice.
Jack would have to consider three options: he could make camp and start at daybreak tomorrow; he could start climbing immediately, and before it got dark bivy on the wall of ice, suspended from his ice axes and ice protection; or he could climb through the night with his headlamp.
For Jack, the decision was a ‘no-brainer’. He took off his pack and rested it on the ground in front of him. Opening up the top portion, he pulled out his headlamp and strapped it to his climbing helmet. He was going for it, making the decision to climb through the night. He felt that he just didn’t have the food and water for any other choice.
With ice axes in hand, he started off. He climbed slow at first, until he found a routine, then moved quickly up the ice face, hammering in ice pitons and clipping his rope into them as he climbed higher. Just as he did on the ridge, he would drive the pick of his right ice axe into the ice, then drive the front points on the toe of his right crampons into the ice. Pulling on the now embedded axe and standing on the points of the crampon, he then would drive the pick of the left axe into the ice higher and drive the points of his left crampon higher. Over and over the cycle repeated itself, gaining altitude slowly as he worked.
Two hours later, Jack had climb to the end of his rope, rappelled back down and climbed back up, cleaning the pitch of all equipment. Getting ready to start his next pitch, he noticed a few snowflakes. This was nothing unsurprising on a snowy mountain. There were always snowflakes blowing about while he climbed. These flakes were slightly bigger than he normally observed, though.
He looked up into the sky and immediately blinked as snowflakes entered his eyes. He covered them and looked again. To his horror, the sky was a mass of grey swirling clouds, and it was now snowing steadily. Not wanting to descend, he rationalized that the snow was lightly falling and that there was really no need for alarm. He swung his ice axe and planted it in the ice above him, starting the next pitch of the route.
The pitch of the face had steepened somewhat, making this part of the route more strenuous. Thirty minutes into the pitch, Jack could feel occasional droplets of sweat running down his neck and soaking his shirt under his jacket. He wanted to climb without his coat, but knew that that was a dangerous idea. If he fell and became hurt, his chances of dying due to hyperthermia would be very high.
‘Better to sweat and live than to not and die,’ he thought to himself.
The temperature started to drop and the ice was becoming more brittle because of it. An hour into the next pitch, he swung his ice axe and heard a sound like a dinner plate cracking. At the point where the axe entered the ice, tiny circular cracks fanned out from the center of the pick. He pulled lightly on the axe, and a thin, circular chuck of ice, the size of a large dinner plate, popped off the icy face, his axe coming with it.
The event by itself wasn’t anything to worry about; it just meant that now Jack needed to be more observant of deteriorating conditions, something he was already on heightened alert about with the snow falling. If more ‘dinner plates’ started to appear, he would need to slow down and make more careful placements. This could be time-consuming. Jack was already pushing the limits of his stay. If the ice was becoming more unstable, he might have to consider a retreat, a word that really wasn’t in his vocabulary.
He swung his axe into the same spot as before. This time it held nicely. As he climbed higher, he noticed the snowflakes were looking slightly larger. They weren’t coming faster; just larger.
An hour later, Jack reached the end of his rope and had completed the standard routine of rappelling and reclimbing the pitch. He was now ready to start the next, when he noticed the snow was now falling much heavier. He looked down at the temperature: it read twenty-four degrees. With all the overheating from the previous pitch, he hadn’t noticed the temperature drop. It was getting cold.
He looked at the pitch above and could see that it looked just as steep as the previous pitch. With an hour or so left of daylight, he knew that he would be finishing this one in the dark. He looked down at the snowfield far below. He was a long way up now. He guessed he was now nearly 2,300 to 2,400 feet above the previous night’s bivy.
With the wind whistling in his ears, he started up the next pitch.
Higher and higher he climbed, placing ice protection every few feet now due to the steepness of the face. Feeling the day’s exhaustion, he took a small rest while hanging off his ice axes, then continued. Thirty minutes into the pitch, near dusk, Jack hit another large dinner plate of ice. It popped off and hit him in the leg.
“Shit!” he cried out in pain.
The dinner plate was a very large chunk of ice that landed edgewise in the middle of his thigh. If he’d been wearing shorts, it would have cut his leg. As it was, the impact would probably leave a black and blue welt for days. Again, Jack swung the axe at the same spot, now ignoring the pain in his leg. The placement held but sounded strange to him. He thought about trying a different location, but decided to trust it. He placed his weight on his left foot and weighted the axe. He was now ready to move higher with the right ice axe.
He quickly searched for a good spot and found a slight bulge in the ice face above him. He took aim and planted the pick on the top part of the bulge. It looked and sounded like a good placement. Jack tugged on the axe to test its strength. As if in slow motion, he watched as the placement ‘dinner plated’ –only this time it was no ordinary fracture. The entire surface in front of him, an area the size of a coffee table, lifted off, taking out his other ice axe. With his hands still clinging to both axes, he fell backward as the block of ice slid down the face and landed on his mountaineering boots, severing their connection to the mountain.
In less time it took to blink, Jack went from being securely attached to the cliff face to free-falling down the mountain. The speed that he
fell was blinding. In less than a second, he fell eight feet past his last placement of protection. As the rope ran from below, up through the ice piton and back down to Jack, it became taut. The load on the piton was too great for the strength of the ice holding it. The instant the rope became taut, the piton popped out and the ice shattered all around it. Jack continued free-falling. As he fell past the next point of protection, once again the rope became taut. This time the ice protection held.
Jack had fallen more than twenty feet, a tremendous distance in ice climbing, the entire fall taking less than a second. He came to a rest hanging by his waist harness, inverted, his head dangling below his legs. He lay unconscious from impacting the wall on his way down.
The snowfall had increased in intensity and was no longer a flurry. With the billions of snowflakes falling, the sound as they made contact with the mountain had grown dramatically louder. The loud hissing noise was only broken by the rush of tiny spindrift avalanches as the snow accumulated in depressions higher above, breaking free under its own weight and sliding down the vertical face, thousands of feet below.
Further out in the valley, as the weather front moved through, the winds howled as they raced through the irregular terrain below. Higher up, in the fluted trenches on the northern side of the mountain, Jack was relatively protected from the force of the wind by the long, deep furrows etched into the mountainside.
Jack blinked. The snow melted as it landed on his eyelids. It mixed with his sweat and seeped into his eyes, the salt causing a burning sensation. He blinked hard in reaction.
Coming out of his unconscious state, his head throbbed and his vision was blurred. As he tried to gain his bearings, he looked around and noticed the world was upside down. With the blood rushing to his head, he had trouble seeing. His vision came into focus and he started to recognize his surroundings, finally becoming coherent as more snow melted and streamed into his eyes. The previous traumatic events flooded his mind and snapped him back to reality.
“Oh my God. I fell,” Jack mumbled.
Fear was the first emotion that struck him as he realized he was hanging upside down. Frantically and instinctively, he tried to right himself. With his head throbbing, he reached higher for the rope. His hands had trouble working at first, but finally found the rope and he was able to right himself. He checked himself for injury, starting with his extremities and working his way through his limbs. Aside from soreness in his shoulders and hips, caused as result of impacting the wall on the way down, he had sustained no real injuries.
“Phew, that was close…” Jack said, as he breathed a sigh of relief, then added, “Man, I gotta stop saying that.”
Jack’s fall could easily have been fatal. Not by blunt force trauma, but by any small injury that could have prevented him from climbing higher or descending lower. Without the ability to move, he would eventually die a slow death in that very place he came to rest, from hyperthermia or shock, suspended thousands of feet above the ground. In this remote part of the world, the likelihood of ever being found would be zero. He would eventually become a frozen, icy bulge on the mountain face, undetectable even if someone climbed over the top of him. The only evidence of his existence would be his tiny plane that might be uncovered during a rare warming spell.
Jack’s head was pounding, but the feeling in his hands was now coming back. This was a relief. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but knew it was longer than a few minutes due to the fact that his hands had fallen asleep as they dangled below his head. He shook them out, trying to regain the feeling in them once again.
He looked around him. Darkness was almost upon him as he switched on his headlamp. The snow was falling heavily now and started to accumulate in his lap. The fall had shaken him psychologically. Self-doubt toyed with his subconscious.
Looking above, he could barely make out the upper slopes near the top of the mountain. It was a long way away. He looked down toward the ground. It, too, looked equally far. He sat for a moment, thinking about his dilemma. Suddenly, it dawned on him. He realized that he was only being held to the mountain by a single point of contact. With the kind of force a fall can generate, there was no telling what kind of condition the anchor was in.
“Holy shit! What the HELL are you doing?” Jack called out in fear. “You’re not out of the woods yet. Get moving, you idiot.”
He rotated around and faced the mountain. Swinging his axes above, he planted them solidly into the ice, then stabbed the front points of his crampons into the ice too and stood up. He felt sore all over from the fall and was shivering from the cold. Prior to the fall, he had been sweating profusely while working his way up the steep face, but as he hung unconscious, the sweat cooled his body down to an uncomfortable level. He knew if he didn’t start moving soon, he would run into a hypothermic situation. He started back up the face, forcing the moves through pain and soreness.
A few minutes later, he had reached the ice screw that had been holding him. It was still solidly placed.
“It looks like it could hold a building,” Jack said to himself in relief.
He looked up and saw the spot where he’d fallen from, five feet above. He looked down to reevaluate his situation, and realized that darkness had now overtaken him. He hung there for a moment, realizing that this was the moment of truth for him; the moment that would define him for the rest of his life. If he quit now, he would always wonder if he could have made it, but if he continued, he could be climbing into a deadly situation.
Jack didn’t need to think about it any further. He raised his axe and swung it above his head. He decided that he wasn’t going to give up. He was going to dig deep, like he had done so many times in the past few years, and try to succeed.
Minutes later, with only the light of his headlamp, he moved past the huge scar in the ice left behind from where he fell. He moved a little higher and screwed in another ice screw. He looked down into the blackness, then continued.
Jack climbed the next three pitches at a slower, but safer pace, figuring that there was no rush after choosing to climb through the darkness. The snow had been falling steadily, but had not increased in its intensity. He was relatively warm, and the soreness he felt many hours before was now completely gone. Looking down at his watch, it read 2:15am; he’d been climbing for nearly seven hours straight since the fall.
The steep icy face had now turned into a gentle hill, easy to climb without the use of his hands or equipment. He surmised that this must be the top of the 1,000 foot face and that he was now nearing the section of the climb that was obstructed from view the previous day. What lay ahead, Jack could only guess.
DAY 3
Jack set off into the darkness, aided by nothing more than the light from his headlamp. An hour after leaving the icy face, the pitch of the hill increased, but not enough for the use of ropes and ice protection. With his confidence growing, so did his pace.
Higher and higher he climbed through the snow, as the pitch of the mountain became steep once more. He needed his hands now for balance, as well as the use of his ice axes on several short bulges of ice, but he was still making great time.
Hours had passed since Jack had stowed his gear. He had anticipated the need for their use higher up on the mountain, but strangely, the difficultly level was little more than a strenuous hike.
On mountains the size of Destination B, when visibility is obscured by either darkness or foul weather, it is conceivable to climb to lower ‘false summits’, thereby missing the true summit entirely.
Jack began to worry about the route he was taking and the possibility that he wasn’t on a line that would lead him to the top. He checked his watch again. It read 6am. With daybreak just around the corner, he decided to continue on until it was light.
As the dawn broke, Jack tried to search the upper slopes, but had trouble seeing through the falling snow. It had slowed quite a bit, but not enough to allow for a visual sighting of the summit. As he pressed on, his anxiety began to
build and the worry about his direction became more intense.
A few hours later, tired and thirsty, Jack stopped for a moment as he reached another flat area just beyond the steep climb. While sitting in the falling snow, he drank more water and ate a peanut butter sandwich. At his elevation, his body hadn’t quite acclimatized to the altitude, and he was now feeling its ill-effects.
Jack had been climbing for more than twenty-four hours. He knew his body craved energy, but the altitude sickness he was feeling made the thought of food repulsive to him. He knew better than to trust the false feeling, and he forced the sandwich into his mouth anyway. As he was finishing, the snow dramatically slowed.
Instantly, Jack could see the peaks of other mountains extending high above the clouds. He’d seen this sight before when he climbed up above the clouds on Mount Rainier in Washington State. The cloud bank extended from ground level up to the exact point that he was sitting. A few feet below him it was snowing, but at his location, the sun was out and it was clear.
Hidden Courage (Atlantis) Page 9