The Ledge (24 page)

After three exhausting rounds of this, I advance a dozen precious feet up the wall and am out of screws. Yet again I will have to give back some of my advance to replenish my gear. So I lower myself down over the hard-won ground to retrieve two screws from below, then grapple my way back up. Leapfrogging the gear up the wall is working, but it’s taking a huge toll on me.

My mind and body feel strong, confident, and fluid one minute, weak, hurting, and stalling the next. Each low point has the potential to discourage me. Summoning the willpower to rebound from each setback is wearing me out. I sometimes catch myself mentally checking out for a few minutes.

Every time I try to slide my crampons into the nylon slings that I must stand in, it is a little like trying to fit a foot into a stirrup on a galloping horse while wearing cleats. And the leashes on Mike’s ice ax and hammer are too short for me. When I place the tools overhead, the leashes snap tight prematurely and restrict the natural arc of my swing, limiting my power, forcing me to smash the tools repeatedly before I get a solid stick. All these sapping issues coalesce into draining fatigue.

For reassurance, I poke my chest until I feel the pope-blessed medallion Gloria gave me all those years ago.

IT IS MIDAFTERNOON
.

After my second round-trip down to retrieve screws, I return to my high point. I estimate that I am thirty to thirty-five feet from the
top, and as I look up I contemplate the blue bag dangling from my waist. I consider throwing the gear bag up through the hole in the snow bridge—a kind of signal flare that might attract the attention of climbers who are trudging down the glacier from the summit. If they see it and investigate, maybe I’ll be found.

It won’t be easy though—like throwing an oversized snowball straight up at a streetlamp. It’s tempting, because if it works, I won’t have to climb all the way out. Staring thirty-five feet above me at the ragged portal leaves me wary: I doubt I can throw this lumpy gear bag straight through it on my first and only shot. If I miss, the bag will disappear down the crevasse with all my meager supplies. Besides, I’m afraid that tossing the bag might be a signal to myself that I have given up on my plan to climb out. And if I’ve learned one thing so far, it is that I have to act confident, like I am going to make it, even if deep down I’m not sure that this is true.

I decide not to try tossing the gear bag through the hole and instead to count on myself. There is nobody else.

I KNOW FROM
all my training and experience that I need to force down water. But even small sips burn; they loosen the blood clots in the back of my throat, making me spit up red-black slime. Seeing the blood reminds me that something could be seriously wrong inside me. This shakes my already tenuous confidence, so I lose interest in drinking.

When I packed my blue gear pouch back on the ledge, hours earlier, the thought of food had turned my stomach, so I didn’t bring any with me. Now I badly need those calories but have nothing to eat.

I look down at the ledge, but I can no longer really see the inflatable pad anymore—just the shadowy outline of Mike’s feet. I figure
it is good that I can’t see him, that it is better to focus on the climb. Thinking about him fills me with a sadness that threatens to crush me. The piled snow and padding that separate us make it easier for me to concentrate on what I have to do—
climb
—and leave the bitter sorrow to deal with later.

Hanging, exhausted, my mind drifting, I find myself wondering,
What’s Mike’s spirit doing now?
In that moment, I have a sense—a comforting feeling—that he is still here with me in the crevasse. Not just floating in a portion of the yawning crack, but filling the entire void.

Perhaps that explains all the times falling ice and snow have sailed past me harmlessly. The upper snow bridge has by now collapsed in several crackling fractures, huge slabs of snow that plunged to the depths of the crevasse. Any one of them could have swept me off my stance or even suffocated me, yet none of them has, and I feel that Mike’s spirit is the reason. My partner’s still watching out for me while I do my best to get us up this wall.

HAVING LEFT BEHIND
several screws, carabiners, and slings as protection in case I fall, now I have to use anything I can to help me claw my way up. With no spare slings left now, at the next screw I clip in a rock-climbing cam, figuring I can use it as a small, open step. I stick my front points into the cam’s trigger-wire mechanism and torque my foot sideways. Metal screeches on metal. The fragile cam wires bend grotesquely, but they hold. I stand up, gaining another two feet.

I have one thing going for me that dates all the way back to boyhood: I’d bought the best climbing gear I could. Dad was a blue-collar painter, but he never skimped on safety equipment. He used to say, “Fudge it when ya can to save a buck, but don’t be cheap when it comes to gear that people’s lives depend on.”

So even as a nearly broke college student with big climbing dreams, I scrounged in other areas of my life so I could afford the best mountaineering gear out there, poring over catalogs, comparing specifications, searching out the best deals. Saving money was important, but not as important as having strong equipment.

IT IS A
netherworld inside the crevasse. The air near me is below freezing, yet up above—along the snow bridge that looks like a dappled veil, light leaking through in places—the summer solstice sun bakes the snow to the melting point.

Meltwater falls constantly in a frigid drizzle, then freezes after it lands on my jacket and my rope. Each time I move my Prusik along the climbing rope, I fight with that layer of ice, rubbing and scraping at it with gloved hands, trying to clean the rope so the friction knot can bite down. It is clumsy and slow, but I push on, and each foot closer to the surface I sense more light around me. I keep spitting up blood, not knowing the source. It seems like I don’t have any major injuries, because I have been climbing for several hours now. But what if something is still wrong inside me? Maybe a broken rib or lacerated lung? The pending sunset has been my self-imposed time limit, but what if I don’t have that long?

I look at the wall in front of me and hawk a bloody mix of saliva onto the ice. It drools down for a moment, then freezes in place, distracting me, entertaining me. And it gives me an idea. The bloody spatter will be my tick marks—my equivalent of the small chalk swipes that rock climbers sometimes leave on a wall to chronicle their high points. Those bloody spots of sputum, I decide, will prove to anyone who descends into the crevasse that I tried to get us out, that I tried hard. In some warped way, I seek to turn negatives—like spitting up blood—into positives that will help propel me up, to find tenacity even in the things that scare me.

AFTER A FOURTH
, shorter trip down to retrieve my ice screws, I reach a point about sixty feet above the ledge and twenty feet from the top. It is nearing four
P.M
. and I have been leading—out front, alone, forging the route, placing gear—for about three hours.

My heart aches for Mike; an off-center feeling deep in my gut constantly reminds me that something in the world is very wrong. When I shift my weight from one foot to the other, water squirts out the top of my boot—a blend of meltwater and sweat. Wet nylon clothes cling to my skin and suck heat from my core.

The wall here, already leaning past vertical, juts out several feet to form a small, horizontal ceiling above me. I saw this roof before leaving our ledge and worried then that it would be too big for me to reach past. Now hanging just beneath it, I extend my arm out toward the lip and confirm the worst: I can’t stretch the tips of my fingers beyond it. And I am down to just two spare ice screws.

I think about going way back down and pulling out the ice screw near the bottom of my rope. Another one would make life easier. But by now I am so exhausted that if I descend that far, I might not make it back up; I abandon the idea.

I feel tired, so tired. My mind floats to Gloria. Dad. The rest of my loved ones. Thoughts of my family make me wonder about Mike’s family. What am I going to tell them?

Thinking intensely about the important people in my life, I feel their energy. I sense the strong presence of Dad, Mike, and some fuzzy blend of my climbing partners hovering nearby. They are silent, watching me closely. Gloria stands a few paces behind them. She, too, holds back from saying anything, but she looks upset. I want to ease her anxiety and tell her not to worry, but I know I can’t.

TRYING TO CRANK
back up, I lift my ice ax. My arm slowly sinks, my muscles powerless against gravity. Numbness tingles in my left arm and leg. Temporarily unable to advance, I study my position. When I look between my feet, I see my yellow rope trailing down the ice wall, clipped into the three protective ice screws I have left behind every fifteen feet or so. Dangling beneath the overhang with all the vast dark space beneath and around me, I feel like some kind of floating astronaut.

Then I notice something else: Facing one fear after another for hours has tempered me to a resilient calm. Repeatedly grappling with obstacles and adversity has led me to tap wells of fortitude that usually lie hidden and unused. I sense that if I can persist through these moments of fear and doubt, a relieving wave of tenacity will eventually rise to aid me. Just knowing this encourages me to keep hanging on.

When a little strength returns to my arms, I pull myself up until my helmet bumps against the underside of the ice roof. With one foot in a sling, I poke the tips of my other crampon into the ice for stability. I creep that free foot up, then push off hard to lever myself away from the wall in an effort to get a bit more reach. I swing out to the right, like a barn door on its hinges, and stretch out as far as I can, reaching, wincing, and get my right hand up and beyond the edge of the overhang.

With my abdomen muscles quivering with fatigue, I lean back precariously and am able to crank an ice screw about two turns into the wall just above the overhang. Then I run out of energy and let myself drop a few feet in a controlled fall. I sag onto the sling attached to the ice screw just below the roof and rest. After a few minutes, I fight back into the stretched-out position, reach past the lip,
and twist the screw a bit deeper into the ice. With about one-third of the screw’s length into the frozen wall, I figure it can hold part of my body weight. So with my right arm I hook my hammer over the protruding screw’s shaft and pull my upper body high enough so that I can peer past the overhang.

To my great relief, the view up the wall looks less steep than what I’ve been climbing. Excited that easier ground awaits, I gleefully spit a blood clot a foot higher up the headwall to prove I reached that high. Straightening my right arm out, I lower my head and chest below the roof’s lip and intentionally collapse back onto the screw underneath the roof. Guilt jabs me: I saw the wall above, but I hadn’t climbed onto it yet, so when I spit my blood mark I cheated. It seems silly, but this somehow sullies the real work and achievement that have gotten me this far. I recognize that no one knows and no one cares about this little progress game except me, but it still feels wrong.

Realizing that I should not have claimed that ground prematurely, I grunt my way back up and out along the roof. I stretch my ice tool farther up the headwall and use the pick to scratch off the red frozen tick mark. Once I have scraped away my own false claim, my conscience is eased, but my arms are tired. I settle back below the overhang, satisfied that I have made amends.

Worn out from that one-minute penance, I rest again, pondering the tough overhang ahead—the crux. Because the crux is the most physically difficult section, it’s also usually an ascent’s most mentally challenging part. The trick to getting past it is to act confident even though I might be racked with doubt. Hesitating or stalling at the crux wears you out, but acting confident and moving past it boldly will lead to easier ground ahead. Setting protection, then moving on is usually best, so Mike and I have always reminded each other by saying, “Pro and go.”