Reversing my climb back down the mixed ice and rock dihedral would lead to a death fall. I couldn’t go down; I couldn’t stay. I had to go up, as improbable as it seemed. Plucking my axe from its last placement in the ice, I swung it hard into the frost-heaved earth above a grassy knob. I hardly trusted the mud to hold my weight, but my left hand couldn’t pull on the last remaining rock lip—my glove was too slick. As the crampon points of my left foot skittered off their balancing point, I lunged my right hand onto the head of the ice axe. The point held fast in the frosted tundra, but I was desperate; if my axe had popped when my foot slipped, I would already be dead at the bottom of the gully.
Fraught with stress, I leaned my head to the left with my neck outstretched, and bit the cuff of my left glove in my teeth, ripping my hand free. Letting the glove dangle from its wrist loop, I crimped my fingers around the rock lip and pulled simultaneously with both arms, staring at the axe pick stabbed into the mud. It was as hard as any 5.8 rock-climbing move I’ve ever done, making it the most difficult free solo maneuver I’d ever attempted. Add in the altitude, remoteness, and the fact I was doing it at high exposure in the dark, and it was easy to understand why my body collapsed onto the first flat surface I could find. I was sweating so hard I needed to be wrung out, but all I could manage was to open an energy gel packet with my teeth while I reached to don my left glove. It wasn’t there: My glove wasn’t dangling from my wrist.
Then it hit me that I hadn’t put my wrist loop around my hand that morning. When I’d torn off my left glove to make that last move, it had dropped all the way down the gully. Damn, damn, damn! Again I debated whether or not to go down, but I knew it would mean bailing on the climb to retrieve my glove. Could I afford to risk more frostbite damage? Well, no; but I did have an extra set of liners to prevent ice-up like what had happened on Capitol. I took off my right outer shell, turned it inside out, and put it on over my spare left liner, adding my spare right liner over the one I was already wearing.
Okay, Aron, the rest of this should be easy compared to what you just did.
My heart hammered at its maximum output for the next two hours as I gained the remaining 2,300 feet to the top of the couloir just in time to watch the sun rise over the summit of Pyramid Peak three miles to the east. The shadows of the Maroon Bells swept halfway to the horizon, where Snowmass Mountain and Capitol Peak gathered their first rays of dawn under a dramatic black sky. It was an early reward for the demanding climbing I’d done in the dark, and my first winter sunrise from near the top of a fourteener. I took a long break, reenergizing with some food bars and water, then set off up the fourth-class slabs and snowfields to the summit of South Maroon, which I reached with hoots and smiles at eight-fifteen A.M. An hour later, I was back at the saddle above the Bell Cord, ready to ascend North Maroon Peak. The ridge of the Bells is one of four technical high connecting traverses on Colorado’s fourteeners, the others being Blanca–Little Bear, Wilson–El Diente, and Crestone Peak–Crestone Needle. I’d climbed them all in the summer, but the Bells would be my first of the foursome in the winter. Encountering deep and fluted snowdrifts on the west side of North Maroon’s south ridge, I climbed up to the snow mushrooms on the ridgetop and tunneled a hole through one of the seven-foot-high pillows clinging to the rock to make my way to the summit. I have had few mountaintop experiences when I felt the excitement and jubilation that I did on top of North Maroon. Waving my ice axe in the air, I shouted with joy at my forty-fifth winter fourteener solo, my completion of the Elk Range in a single winter and the last of the technically hard routes, and the singular experience of a double traverse of the Maroon Bells ridge. Turning to the south and a view of my tracks winding over and through the surreal snow formations of the ridge, I let loose a “Yaaahooooo!” and imagined my exuberance bouncing off alpine summits all the way to Crested Butte.
Back at the notch above the Bell Cord at noon, I felt giddy that my scheme had worked exactly as planned. I raced down the 3,400 vertical feet to my camp, picking up my left glove from the debris at the base of the “shortcut” gully, all within forty-five minutes of departing the head of the Bell Cord.
On my descent, I recalled the first time I’d rung both the Bells in a day on July 2, 2000. My best friends and closest climbing partners, Mark Van Eeckhout and Jason Halladay, and I had climbed North Maroon, traversed the ridge to South Maroon, and descended the slushy ice runnels in the East Face Couloir in a fifteen-hour round trip. Despite the gnarly descent, I remembered a moment of downclimbing blocky purple rock into the yellow-lichen-coated central notch at the head of the Bell Cord and looking out to the west over the lush velveteen green of Fravert Basin. The colors were so rich, I thought I could smell them. I felt the love of beauty to a greater extent than I ever had before. Two things became certain to me in that moment: first, that I would visit Fravert Basin and see close up the vision of nature that called to me from that rocky perch; and second, in whatever vague recess of my mind that is in charge of these life decisions, I knew that one day I would call Aspen my home. If the subject of a winter traverse of the Maroon Bells ridge had come up at that time, I would have dismissed the idea outright as an impossibility. I had done it though, not just once but twice in the same day, and five hours faster in the winter than I had done it in the summer.
Seven
Day Three: “Push on till the Day”
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
—HORACE
WHERE HAVE ALL THESE mosquitoes come from? I wait out two of them and return their spirits to the cosmos when they alight on my right forearm. Up until a half hour ago, I hadn’t seen a single insect all day, and now a half-dozen bloodsuckers buzz around my head. Sitting in my harness, suspended from the anchor I built this morning above the chockstone, I execute them one by one until they are all gone. Bizarrely, it occurs to me that I could eat the flattened mosquitoes. It’s a ridiculous and unnecessary thought: The bugs couldn’t possibly sustain me, and besides, I still have most of two premade burritos. That’s a good five hundred calories, and much more appetizing than dead insects.
Must be the sleep deprivation. It’s making you dumb.
Yet another breeze brushes past me on its way to the Big Drop, stripping me of what little warmth I have. Later in the afternoon like this—or early in the evening, I guess—the winds come more frequently, and a crispness anticipates the arrival of night.
My gumption for chipping at the boulder is gone. I continue with the fruitless effort solely to stimulate my metabolism and push into the background the shuddering weakness brought on by the chilly winds. Even still, I work only a fraction as much as I did yesterday. I’ve already acknowledged the inutility of hacking at the chockstone, but some irrational part of my brain hasn’t yet acquiesced to the helplessness of my situation. It insists that if I work harder and take fewer breaks, I will eventually get free. I rationalize my lethargy with the impossible thought that I don’t want to get free with night approaching—I could stumble right off the Big Drop rappel in the dark, or get lost in the lower canyon.
Like you’re going to get free. You’re lazy and you know it. You’re in the fight of your life—a fight for your life, no less—and you’re too lazy to get over a little fatigue and do some work. You slothful waste. You’re killing yourself here. You’re going to die.
There it is, my prognosis in black and white, like an X ray held to the light. I have a terminal condition. Without being able to meet the needs of my body, I can expect to live another day and a half, perhaps. Or two days, but what would that matter? No expectation had prepared me for this tormenting anxiety of a slow death, thinking about whether it will come tonight in the cold, tomorrow in the cramps of dehydration, or the next day in heart failure. This hour, the next, the one after that. Anytime I’d come close to death before, it had been in the context of a flashing crisis, a dramatic vision. Whether the circumstance was experienced or en
visioned, the chop came as an executioner’s blade, fast as gravity in the form of a falling ice block, a smothering avalanche, a failed self-arrest, a peeling backflip from high on a rock face. I knew my last sounds wouldn’t be any profound passing of wisdom but a muttered “Oh shit,” maybe the thought “This is it,” and a crushing exhale, a spattering of blood, crunching bones. I’d never imagined fading in a protracted departure. I figured I could handle just about anything that would provoke a drawn-out struggle: fighting through a storm; finding my way when I was lost; dragging my body back from injury or illness. No, I wouldn’t sit down to dinner with death, talk introspectively over a lengthy visit, and end on “Well, that’s it, then, guess it’s time to go.”
I had been lucky so many times that even the glimpses of my final destiny had become a toy I played with to bring on a certain intense feeling, the ultimate contrast between the fear of immediate doom and the desire to live fully. I think some people would consider these the thoughts of an adrenaline junkie, but I relished more the control of my adrenaline than the ride it would give me if I unleashed it. On less dangerous but still adventurous trips, I pushed my limits for endurance, engaging in prolonged experiences of cathartic suffering to break down my interior walls, to cleanse my spirit for purer emotions than boredom and stress, and to surpass myself. Periodically, I would have a euphoric realization taking me beyond the filters of my brain, in which I understood that the fear and the pain existed only in the gap between a pair of neurons. I called it getting over myself. How I will get over myself now, in this canyon, is beyond any perceived powers of mind over matter I think I have—my situation is physically impossible to overcome. I am over the pain, I have the discipline to survive the fear, but I can’t get over my body’s need for water.
Water. I pick up my charcoal-gray Nalgene bottle and swirl the precious contents. For the last day, I’ve been sipping about two ounces every three hours. Hmmm. That means the ten ounces I have left will get me through tonight. I need it to last longer than that. It’s after six P.M., but I haven’t had any water since I put away my video camera at three-fifteen. I should skip it this time, save it for later. I feel all right, I guess. My tongue isn’t unusually swollen or squishy or hard. My lips feel normal, too. I’m thinking about water fairly frequently, but maybe this stage of dehydration is like that part of fasting when I’ve thought I would die if I didn’t eat soon, but after another half a day, the disrupting fantasies of food ceased and my hunger dissipated. Somehow I doubt thirst is like that. I bet this is just the beginning.
Whatever. Quit thinking about it; put the Nalgene away somewhere. Stick it in the sand so you’re not staring at how much you have left. Better yet, do something. Get yourself ready for night.
Yes, it’s better to focus on my plan. I put my Nalgene below the chockstone in the sand and consider the coming evening. It will be pitch-black at nine P.M., and then there will be nine hours of darkness. I know it’s only nine hours, but especially when I’m not producing internal heat, it will last like a polar winter. I’ll sip at nine, midnight, three, and six A.M. I’ll take smaller sips than last night; that will conserve more for tomorrow. I’ll need it to eat the rest of my burritos. That first bite three hours ago was so dry it turned to pasty glue in my mouth; the rest will only be worse. OK, then, that’s what I’ll do.
That leaves me with the question of how I’ll stay warm. The air seems colder than it was this time yesterday. There were a few more layers of clouds passing by today, keeping the temperature lower. But now the clouds are gone, and there’s nothing to insulate me once the sun goes down. One of the few laws of heat transfer I recall from engineering classes is that radiation, or emissive heat loss, between a ground source and the night sky is proportional to the temperature difference raised to the fourth power. If I remember correctly, space is about 400 degrees Kelvin colder than my body. Take that to the fourth power, multiply it by a little constant I’ve forgotten, and that’s still like twenty-five billion units of whatever. The bottom line is, I’m emitting a lot of heat into the sky. I’ll need to do a better job of keeping myself warm tonight, especially since I won’t be working as much. I’m just going to make it through to the morning and then worry about what’s next.
Taking off my pack, I fish out the small black cloth sack in which I stowed my digital camera. Holding the sack’s open end in my teeth, I take my knife in my left hand and punch out the stitched end of the bag, trying to keep from stabbing myself in the face. The lightweight material tears easily, and I thrust my left forearm into the fabric tube. Tugging with my teeth, I pull the closer end of the sack up over my elbow, creating a makeshift long sleeve for my left arm. I dismantle the runners from their spot in my pulley station and retie two more lengths of purple webbing around my right arm, pulling the strands between my forearm and the wall where I can’t situate the insulated CamelBak. Also from my anchor system, I take in my teeth the extra length of yellow webbing and, applying tension against the tied-off loop, slice off a five-foot strand with my knife. I put the remaining two thirds of my first burrito in my left pocket, drop the unopened whole one into the bottom of my backpack, and wrap my right biceps in the plastic grocery sack that I was using to store my food. I tie off the plastic bag with the yellow webbing and have a long sleeve for my right arm, too.
Now to do the same for my lower half and somehow make pant legs out of the remaining 170 feet of my climbing rope. The dirty green and yellow line lies in a heap on the rock shelf in front of my knees. It takes me twenty minutes for each leg, but I manage to wrap them both from my thighs to my socks with about thirty neat loops of rope. I laugh at myself. The ropes stack like coils of potting clay; it looks like I’ve been attacked by two identical half-inch-thick green pythons. The coils gather and pinch at my knees when I sit in my harness, so I loosen them and make an adjustment on the daisy chain fixing me to the anchor, lifting me two inches higher in my seat. This is the most comfortable I’ve been since I was trapped.
With the ropes wrapped around my calves, I can lean in to the rock shelf in front of my shins—the one I was afraid I would trip over backward if I’d tried to move out of the way of the falling chockstone. Even if I had fallen, I would’ve been better off with a tib-fib fracture. Did I think about that, or was I worried about my head? It happened so fast, but it happened so slowly, too. How much time had I really had to react? There had been a lot to consider in that fraction of a second when I made my decision to push against the falling rock. Why did I do that? Maybe I thought I could steer the chockstone away from my head, like I had done with a similar-sized boulder on the Crestone Needle.
That time I certainly had no choice. If I hadn’t redirected the boulder, it would have crushed my chest, and I would have plummeted from 14,000 feet in free fall. I had been making a traverse on the ridge between Crestone Peak and the Needle in the spring of 2000, after soloing the Northwest Couloir on Crestone Peak with hiking poles and sans crampons. I was in a ballsy mood, and instead of taking the documented and cairned route of least resistance on the traverse, I made up my own variation of adventure along which I found myself covering a considerable stretch of ground on the north side of the summit-to-summit ridge. The normal route never crosses onto the north side, and for good reason: Twice I was on-sight soloing broken and loose fifth-class rock in my mountaineering boots. I felt every inch of the three thousand feet from my position down to the Upper South Colony Lake. Cliffed out by the Black Gendarme in front of me, I knew I had to find my way over the ridge crest to the south side and easier ground. Fifty feet above me, a short and steep gully of loose rockfall debris ended in a ten-foot-high roof. It over-hung a little, but the gully was only three feet wide at its head, so I figured I could stem up to the roof, chimneying myself higher until I could pull over it, probably putting myself right onto the knobby conglomerate staircase where I would finish the traverse to the Needle’s summit.
Except it hadn’t happened like that. I had been four feet off the r
ubble in the fifty-degree gully when I yarded on the overhang and the whole roof dislodged. A thick piece of slab came unwedged from between the two towers that formed the narrow chimney. Shit! I hugged the boulder to my chest, and we fell backward as a single object until my torso twisted to the left in midair. My back hit the right-hand wall, and the boulder momentarily compressed my chest, forcing out a puff of breath. As I slid down to land in the steep scree, I shoved at the falling boulder, deflecting it away from my upper body and down into the gully just past my feet. With the wind knocked out of me, I collapsed forward, and my hands caught on the opposite wall, with my head slumped downhill. I saw the boulder bounce twice in the scree, then catapult over the lower lip of the ravine in a half-mile-long shower of crushed stone and pebbles. If my back hadn’t hit the wall and kept me upright, allowing me to redirect the boulder, I would have taken a tandem ride with it. I recovered my breath but not my confidence and found myself reversing the gully to an easier crossover to the south side of the Needle.
A half hour later, within thirty vertical feet of the summit, I backed off an easy move. My head couldn’t let go of the near-miss accident. I didn’t even bother to switch into my rock-climbing shoes and try the final move a second time. I’d had it. I bailed off the traverse, making a heinous descent across the south face of the Needle, maneuvering down a series of four jagged rock ribs and intermediary ravines laced with rappel slings, evidence that I wasn’t the first to flee from the finish to the traverse. Until my feet hit level ground at 13,100 feet, I was consumed with desperation and a wish that I had the luxury of rappelling. Back at my vehicle, I plugged my favorite Pink Floyd CD into the truck stereo and repeatedly listened to “Fearless.” I sang along, the opening lines engraving themselves in my psyche: “They say that hill’s too steep to climb. Climb it.” Crestone Needle had beaten me down, but inspired by the music, I went back up the next morning and tagged the summit, peering down to my high point of the day before, just a few yards from the top. I learned what a fragile thing is confidence, how thin a strand it is that tethers my body to my mind through unlikely situations. What I didn’t learn was that it might not always be the best plan to redirect a charging boulder with my hands.