Classic Krakauer

by Jon Krakauer

—

  Out in front of the NASA team, hours into the long ascent from the depths of Lechuguilla, I round a bend to encounter something so strange and unexpected that it takes me a few moments to recognize what it is: a cool breeze blowing across my grimy, sweat-drenched skin. A little farther and I arrive at something even stranger: a ray of sunlight, leaking exquisitely through a crooked fissure overhead. I am almost back to the surface.

  The last remaining obstacle is an overhanging, 60-foot climb out of the guano-spackled entrance pit. Muscling up the final strand of free-hanging rope is exhausting, but I am so relieved to be escaping the underworld that I scarcely notice my labored breathing and cramping arms. Just before noon, I pull over the lip and emerge into a brilliant New Mexico morning.

  Sunlight washes over my chest and face. I inhale a greedy lungful of desert air, savoring the scent of juniper and sage. The colors that flood my light-starved retinas—the blue of the sky, a pale green drift of cactus, the creamy palette of the clouds—seem electric, surreal, almost overwhelming. An involuntary whoop of joy erupts from my throat. I feel as if I’ve just escaped from a supermax prison.

  Inebriated with a newfound appreciation of the ordinary, I imagine for a moment that I’m getting a taste of what an astronaut might experience on his or her return from a mission to Mars. Then I remember that I’ve been underground, away from the world, for a mere five days. My God, I wonder: If I’m this discombobulated by an absence of less than a week, what would it feel like to return to earth after a journey of two or three years?

  PUBLISHED IN SMITHSONIAN AIR & SPACE, NOVEMBER 1995

  After the Fall

  August 22, 1986, dawned clear and still over Jackson Hole, promising fine weather for climbing in the Tetons. Jim Bridwell rolled groggily out of bed and put on a pot of coffee. Bridwell—the fabled Admiral of Yosemite, the first man to climb El Capitan in a single day, the first to ascend the notorious East Face of the Mooses Tooth in Alaska, a veteran of the planet’s most horrific rock walls—was spending a relatively mundane summer working for the Exum Mountain Guide Service and School of American Mountaineering, instructing tourists in the rudiments of rock-climbing. At 8:30 A.M., he called the Exum office and learned that a group of clients who were booked to depart with him that morning on a two-day guided ascent of the Grand Teton had canceled. It was unwelcome news, for Bridwell—perennially strapped for cash and hounded by creditors—could ill afford the loss of income.

  A minute later, however, the phone rang, and Bridwell’s luck appeared to take a turn for the better: A guide was needed right away to teach an intermediate rock-climbing class; was he interested? “Sure,” Bridwell replied without hesitation. He gulped his coffee, grabbed his climbing gear, and hurried off to the Exum headquarters—a small cabin beside Jenny Lake.

  The class consisted of four men, all friends, the oldest of whom was an affable, heavyset, forty-one-year-old attorney from Houston named Edward Carrington who had played tight end for the Houston Oilers of the American Football League from 1967 to 1969. Bridwell made sure that each student had signed a standard acknowledgment of risk form and was outfitted with a helmet and climbing harness; then they all caught a boat to the west shore of Jenny Lake, bound for some crags near Hidden Falls known as the Exum Practice Rocks. The four clients—perhaps slightly awed to find themselves under the tutelage of one of American mountaineering’s most notorious and celebrated figures—bantered cheerfully about the climbing to come.

  Nobody had any reason to suspect that before the day was over, Edward Carrington would be dead from a bizarre accident, the precise cause of which remains murky to this day. Each year, according to the American Alpine Club, some twenty-five to forty people are killed in climbing accidents in the United States (a fatality rate, according to actuarial experts, that makes climbing slightly less hazardous than operating a power mower), and for the most part these tragedies have little impact beyond the self-contained miasma of grief that descends upon the family and friends of the deceased. Carrington’s death, however, would figure prominently in the decision of Yvon Chouinard, founder of this country’s oldest and largest manufacturer of climbing hardware, to take down his shingle and quit the business. It would also send legal and financial shock waves through the American mountaineering community for years to come.

  According to National Park Service documents, Jim Bridwell’s class started off like any other. (Bridwell was unavailable to comment for this article.) The group spent a successful morning at the practice rocks, reviewing the fundamentals of tying in, belaying, and placing hardware for protection, and completed two short climbs along the way. After lunch, they roped together and, with Bridwell in the lead, embarked upon what was meant to be the culmination of Exum’s intermediate climbing course: a three-pitch route called the Hole in the Wall, with a difficulty rating of 5.7. The first two pitches went smoothly enough, and by two P.M., all five men were crowded on a belay ledge in the eponymous Hole, an alcove cut deep into the cliff’s granite facade, which to a neophyte climber contemplating the crux moves above can feel both claustrophobic and exposed. Carrington, in fact, mentioned as much to his guide, confiding that the place scared him.

  Bridwell reassured his client, made sure everyone was anchored securely, and then edged out of the Hole and worked his way up the final steep slab that led to the top of the route. Carrington was next on the rope. After cautioning his three buddies, “Check your gear!” he started climbing, protected by a snug rope from above. Moving awkwardly off the ledge on the small handholds, Carrington managed to struggle only a short distance away from the Hole before his companions heard him shout, “Hold me!” and watched as he abruptly popped off the rock. Bridwell, alert to the possibility of such a slip, immediately cinched down the rope, arresting Carrington’s fall after he’d dropped only a foot or two.

  Carrington retreated back to the security of the Hole, composed himself, then gave it another try. Once again, he scrabbled clumsily away from the ledge, and once again, his arms gave out just a few feet from the Hole. Forty feet above, Bridwell heard him cry, “Falling!”

  “I felt a short jerk,” the guide later told a Park Service investigator, “and then nothing, as if Ed were back on the rock but somehow different. I looked down and saw him falling.” In horror and confusion, Bridwell watched him bounce down the rock face, somehow disconnected from the rope. For a moment after starting to fall, Carrington maintained an upright posture, and it was possible to pretend that nothing was really amiss, that something would arrest his slide, that everything would still turn out all right. But then he was flipped upside down by a sharp blow against the cliff and began to tumble like a rag doll, accelerating earthward amid a shower of stones knocked loose by his repeated collisions with the wall. It became apparent not only that Carrington was going to go all the way to the ground, but that he was hurtling directly toward an unsuspecting group of Exum students gathered around their instructor, Peter Lev, at the foot of the climb.

  Overcoming his shock, Bridwell managed to blurt out a warning to those below. Lev—part owner of the Exum school—shouted at his four students to scatter. “It was horrible,” Lev recalls, still haunted by the memory. “Carrington was a very large man. He weighed over two hundred pounds; the earth actually shook when he hit. If I hadn’t jumped out of the way at the last second, he would have nailed me.”

  Carrington bounced once and came to rest in the lower branches of a tree, after falling approximately 150 feet. Lev sent a student down to the Jenny Lake boat dock to summon help, then rushed to Carrington’s side, where he was soon joined by a student trained as an emergency medical technician. Carrington, severely injured about the head, lacked any vital signs. One by one, Bridwell’s clients rappelled down from their ledge in the Hole. The first to reach the ground was the victim’s brother-in-law, James McLaughlin, and Lev was forced to break the news to him: Ed Carrington, his neck apparently snapped by the fall, was dead.

  At the time of the accident, C
arrington, like all Exum clients, had been wearing a Culp Alpine Harness manufactured by Chouinard Equipment Ltd., a standard climbing harness with no previous reputation for problems. Immediately after Carrington fell, Bridwell rappelled down from the top of the route to join his stunned students in the Hole. As he swung from the face into the alcove, he caught sight of Carrington’s empty harness still dangling from the rope. He pulled the harness into the Hole after him, examined it for a moment, then dropped it onto the ledge with a curse. The harness was intact, but the strap that should have been secured around Carrington’s waist had slipped completely through the metal friction buckle during his second fall, dropping him without warning. This was particularly shocking because the Culp harness had been specifically designed to work even in the event of buckle failure. If the harness is used correctly, the knotted end of the climbing rope rather than the buckle itself is primarily responsible for keeping the ends of the belt mated securely; the harness should have held Carrington even if he’d failed to fasten the strap through the buckle.

  What was to gnaw at Bridwell—and to puzzle the scores of National Park Service rangers, Exum guides, Chouinard personnel, attorneys, and insurance adjusters who would investigate the accident over the months to come—was why Carrington had not been tied in correctly. A single glance at the harness as it swung at the mouth of the Hole told Bridwell what had escaped his notice during the course of the climb: Carrington had not tied in as he had been painstakingly taught earlier in the day. The rope, instead of being threaded directly through the harness tie-in loops as specified by the manufacturer, had been tied to a locking carabiner, which in turn had been clipped to the waist strap of the harness—a simpler, faster method that made the integrity of the harness wholly dependent on the integrity of the buckle. As the initial shock of the fatality began to subside and finger-pointing commenced in earnest, when—and why—Carrington had attached the rope to his harness in this hazardous fashion were questions for which a great many people were eager to find answers.

  As one might imagine, more than a few of those people were lawyers. On August 22, 1988, exactly two years after the accident—and a day before the statute of limitations was due to expire—the Houston law firm that had employed Carrington brought suit against Bridwell, the Exum school, and Chouinard Equipment on behalf of Rosa Carrington, the victim’s widow.

  Because the harness had obviously been misused, the case against Chouinard, on the face of it, seemed shaky at best. Exum, the oldest and perhaps most respected company of climbing guides in North America, had suffered only two previous fatalities in its fifty-five-year history (and none at all since 1964) despite logging approximately 3,000 client-days annually—a remarkable safety record that appeared to stack the legal deck in Exum’s favor as well. If one was looking for a fall guy to feed to the plaintiff’s attorneys, Jim Bridwell seemed to be the leading candidate.

  A number of figures in the American climbing community felt that Bridwell did not deserve to be a scapegoat. “A client can’t simply switch off his brain because he’s being guided up a climb,” argues a longtime professional guide who prefers to remain anonymous. “In the end there’s only so much a guide can do to counter a client’s acts of carelessness.”

  (Indeed, on a guided ascent in the Tetons in 1967, an act of carelessness by this author nearly resulted in an accident very similar to Carrington’s. I was thirteen years old, had graduated from the Exum intermediate rock-climbing class two days before, and was being led up the Grand Teton by a guide named Greg Lowe. I had been carefully tutored, but on this particular morning, I botched up the bowline around my waist, and the knot came untied high on the peak, midway up the crux pitch. I was able to work my way down to a belay ledge and retrieve the rope without falling, and suffered nothing more than an impassioned chewing-out from Lowe, but the consequences of my sloppy knotcraft could just as easily have been terminal.)

  In the other camp, Rosa Carrington’s lawyers at Fisher, Gallagher, Perrin & Lewis maintained that even if Carrington had incorrectly attached the rope to his harness, Bridwell should have caught the error and rectified it. They said Bridwell, as a professional guide, had no duty more important than ensuring that Carrington—a rank beginner who had been introduced to technical rock climbing only the day before in an Exum basic rock-climbing class—was correctly tied in at all times. Indeed, the Exum guides manual plainly and repeatedly admonishes the guides to “check all knots.” Bridwell has insisted all along, however, that just prior to the fatal climb he did indeed check to see that Carrington was correctly tied in, with his harness securely fastened.

  Bridwell’s defenders have advanced the theory that at some point during the ascent—most likely on the belay ledge after the first pitch—Carrington untied without Bridwell’s knowledge, perhaps in order to urinate. He then could have hurriedly reattached the rope to the harness incorrectly, using the quickie carabiner system that one of Carrington’s companions speculated he’d learned during a guided ascent of Mount Rainier in 1984. This theory is certainly plausible, but it is weakened by the fact that one of the group remembers Carrington relieving himself immediately prior to the Hole in the Wall climb, making it unlikely that he would have done so again only a few minutes later. None of his classmates, in fact, recalled him doing so.

  Regardless of when or why Carrington changed his tie-in, the fact remains that he would have gotten away with this quick-and-dirty carabiner attachment method—a method that many climbers employ, with care, in special situations without fearing for their lives—had he fastened the buckle of his harness correctly. By themselves, neither the improperly fastened buckle nor the unorthodox tie-in would have killed him, but the two errors in conjunction sealed Carrington’s fate.

  Bridwell had worked as a professional mountain guide for the better part of two decades without incident; a wealth of evidence suggested that he was an able teacher and a conscientious, even conservative guide. Nevertheless, his supporters worried that the Admiral might find himself facing an image problem, thanks to an article in the May 8, 1986, issue of Rolling Stone, which presented him as something of a dissolute thrill junkie. At one point in the article, Bridwell enthusiastically spoke of an experience he’d had with a UFO. At another, climber John Long—a well-known Bridwell protégé—described his mentor as “an occasional abuser of everything, including himself.” Such an image, they feared, would not serve their friend well when it came time for him to stand before a jury of Rotarians and housewives.

  Once word of the Carrington lawsuits spread, conventional wisdom in the American climbing community held that Bridwell would probably wind up taking most of the rap for the accident, with some of it spilling over to the Exum school simply for being Bridwell’s employer. When I phoned Larry Boyd, Rosa Carrington’s attorney, in March of this year, I was thus surprised to hear him say that he didn’t think Bridwell and Exum were primarily to blame. “The real culprit,” he declared, “is the company that designed such an unreasonably dangerous climbing harness.”

  Whatever the legal merits of Boyd’s case against Chouinard, cynics were quick to point out that Chouinard’s were the only “deep pockets” around. Bridwell was virtually penniless, and the assets of the Exum school amounted to little more than a few dozen ropes, a typewriter, and a locker full of climbing hardware. Chouinard Equipment, on the other hand, took in $6 million annually in gross receipts and could in theory be linked by a clever attorney to Yvon Chouinard’s clothing company, Patagonia, Inc., a $100 million cash cow. When a potential liability claim exists and even the faint scent of that kind of money is on the breeze, lawyers for the plaintiff are going to sit up and take notice.

  Yvon Chouinard, a legendary rock and ice climber in his own right, literally built his equipment business piece by piece. In 1957, after three years of climbing using the primitive hardware of the era, he taught himself blacksmithing, figuring he could supply himself and his friends with better pitons and carabiners than those that were c
ommercially available. He sold the pitons out of his car for $1.50 apiece—five times what European pitons cost, but climbers gradually came to appreciate that his were stronger and better designed, and they were soon buying them as fast as Chouinard could make them. In 1966, Chouinard Equipment opened for business in a tin shed, fondly known as the Skunkworks, next to an abandoned slaughterhouse in Ventura. Receipts totaled about $3,000 that year, but sales doubled the next year and for four years after that.

  The company owed its early successes to its cutting-edge design and high quality of material and construction. But pieces of Chouinard hardware, most often crampons or ice axes, occasionally broke during use. Since Chouinard did extensive product testing even back then, his products probably broke less than his competitors’, but scores, maybe hundreds of his products did fail. Although no climbers died as a result of poorly made Chouinard gear, more than a few were injured. Yet no lawsuits were filed. Climbers, in those innocent days, simply accepted a certain rate of equipment failure as one of the intrinsic hazards of the game—like avalanches or sudden electrical storms—and prepared for it by carrying an extra ice ax on ice climbs and backing-up belay anchors whenever possible. In 1979, while I was soloing a frozen waterfall a long, long way off the deck, a Chouinard crampon broke and fell off my boot. It was an extremely serious situation. I got myself out of it, but I was predictably upset and fired off an angry letter to Chouinard Equipment. Nevertheless, when the company, unbidden, sent back a replacement part that enabled me to bolt the broken crampon back together, I considered the matter closed. Wow, I remember thinking gratefully at the time, they didn’t even charge me for it.

  Not long after that, Chouinard established the most sophisticated quality-control program in the industry, virtually eliminating equipment breakage. It was ironic, therefore, that in March 1986, a window washer in Atlanta named Gilmer MacDougald brought a product liability suit against the company, the first in Chouinard’s twenty-nine years in business. Even more ironic, the equipment in question, a locking carabiner, had in no way failed to perform as intended. MacDougald had fallen from high on the side of a building after improperly twisting down the sleeve that locks the carabiner gate in place, and he was severely injured. His suit claimed the design of the device was “defective and unsafe for its intended use.”