127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (16 page)

Back over the intermediate peaks and the two summits of Notch Mountain with my reloaded backpack, I got to my stashed skis at dusk and skied the remaining nine miles and four thousand vertical feet under the silvery light of the moon. At about nine
P.M.,
speeding down the wide track of the summertime approach road, I spooked an elk in a sloping treeless area. It dashed off into the forest, plowing through four to five feet of powder with little strain. Remembering my clumsily slow pace pushing skis up through the forest in the same snow, I gave a moment’s appreciation to the elk’s prowess, though I knew how lumbering it would seem to a pack of hungry wolves.

On Tuesday of the week following my thirty-mile trip on Mount Holy Cross, my roommate Brian Payne ended up in the ICU after a serious skiing accident left him in critical condition. Minutes after I arrived at Aspen Valley Hospital to visit Brian, I found out my friend Rob Cooper was also there, to undergo surgery for a snowboarding accident that had crushed his right arm, wrist, and hand. Brian spent five days in the ICU and another five days in recovery, with a collapsed lung, a crushed kidney, and six ribs broken in twenty-two places. Rob stayed for two weeks. I visited Brian and Rob twice more before I left on Thursday night to drive to Boulder for a pair of climbs on Longs Peak, shorter but more technical than Halo Ridge. Although my primary concern was for their well-being, their accidents also reminded me how lucky I had been on my recent trips.

Just as Holy Cross had been the last fourteener of the Sawatch Range for my completion list, Longs Peak would be my last summit of the Front Range. I met my friend Scott MacLennan for a team attempt on the north-face cables route (named for the cableway built in the 1930s to assist hikers up the most direct ascent of the upper mountain). Horrendous storm winds hindered our approach, but we arrived in the Boulderfield and our advance camp location by nightfall. Unfortunately, Scott suffered ill effects of the 12,600-foot altitude, compounded by yet another malfunctioning stove. I warmed a foil packet of lentil stew on my stomach, but it was insufficient to properly restore our bodies’ reserves for the climb. As rest had not alleviated Scott’s altitude woes by morning, we prudently abandoned our trip and returned for hot food and recuperation in Boulder.

The next morning, a Saturday, Scott dropped me off at the same trailhead, with a plan for him to return in ten hours. I hiked up the trail alone, prepared for my solo attempt. Longs Peak is unusual in that it is so windswept that it is best climbed without skis. Up at 13,000 feet, as I rounded the Keyhole for the first time in eight years, I saw that the windward slabs and towers of the west face and north ridge were coated in thick layers of rime. Wind accelerates over the peak, chilling the air below the dew point, and then frost condenses on every exposed surface as the supercooled water vapor slams into the upper mountain. Ice mushrooms pillow from the ridgeline features most exposed to the westerly storm winds, especially along the rock rib extending to the west of the top of the Trough Couloir and the Narrows. My ascent took me over the same route by which I’d climbed the peak as my first fourteener.

Since I still hadn’t put on my crampons or removed my second ice tool from my pack, I chose a route that avoided the too-thin verglass on the Homestretch in exchange for two hundred feet of steep snow, connecting a series of ledges that ended in a vertical-walled chimney with a short overhanging finish. Pressing my legs against the right wall with my back against the left wall of the chimney, I removed my pack to make the final squeezing moves out the top around the overhang. My climbing skills were up to it, but my basketball skills failed me.

I tried to hurl my pack over the blockage onto the summit. It was a bad idea. My throw was weak, and instead of landing on the football-field plateau beyond, my pack hit the overhang and careened out to my left. Still off balance from the throw, I twisted around in time to watch my pack bounce over my head, clear of the wall. Free-falling for a hundred feet, the pack cratered into the snow to the left of my ascent tracks, then slid downhill, gathering speed toward a two-thousand-foot chasm. I watched in disbelief as the pack miraculously jerked to a stop, caught in a two-foot-wide crack in the middle of a rock slab.

My amazement at this stroke of luck dissolved as I realized my crampons and ice tool were now unavailable for my planned descent of the Homestretch. I topped out around the overhang, walked over to the highest discernible point on the plateau, and took a few photos. Dangling my legs from a huge boulder above the Diamond—the well-known east face of Longs—I set aside my dejection and enjoyed the tremendous drop-off below my feet. But in the back of my mind, all I could think about was how I would retrieve my pack.

A few minutes later, I walked over to the Homestretch. Lips tight and forehead wrinkled, I dropped through the first five moves facing out from the mountain into the storm clouds. I quickly encountered loose snow cloaking a treacherous layer of smooth ice that transformed the only usable footholds into slippery smears. I turned my body to face the rock slab to my right, my left boot hunting for purchase. Watching my foot and trying to ignore the chasm that menaced in the background, I brushed some snow off a small protrusion that supported my boot sole when I weighted it. Three more downclimbing moves, tapping my axe’s pick into the half-inch-thick smear of ice for a grip, and I reached an inset section protected behind a boulder. I turned outward again and, keeping my bottom in contact with the slab, scooted down onto another tiny snow patch coating the underlying rock.

I needed to descend another thirty feet to a pair of thin detached flakes of rock that stuck out an inch where they had separated from the adjoining slab. They enticed me with the prospect of encouraging handholds for a twenty-foot-long swing to my right. I had two options: Moving to my left as I faced down the slab, I could make a few easy moves that would leave me with a fifteen-foot-long slab traverse back to my right, which would be exposed, but it was clear of snow and ice; or I could go straight down a snow groove to the right of the slab, following the usual ascent/descent route, and skip the exposed slab traverse.

Go with the snow; there’s no handholds on that slab; it’s too risky.

The first four times I moved my feet down into the furrow of snow, I managed to find solid footholds and made comfortable downward progress. Still facing outward with my rear end on the snow, I extended my arms out to either side of the groove and pressed my hands against the grayish-brown granite, palms down. My ice axe dangled from its leash around my left wrist, clanging against the rock each time I rocked my upper body forward to relocate my hands farther down the rock. After easy gains for about ten feet, my left boot heel skittered on some ice hidden beneath the snow. Lowering myself until my right foot bent all the way under my buttocks, I stretched my left foot farther down the furrow, but it skidded off at every attempt. I could really use those crampons.

I took the head of my ice axe in my left hand and planted the pick side into the snow until it struck rock. Weighting the axe, I was then able to extend my left foot another six inches, though without finding an ice-free foothold. This would be child’s play with some metal spikes on my feet. Just at the point when I was berating myself for dropping my pack, I made a mistake. I pivoted too far forward on my right haunch, flattening the sole of my right boot on the snow. It peeled out of its divot, and I fell. Instinctively, I rolled over onto my stomach and grabbed the ice-axe shaft with my right hand. I was in the self-arrest position, but my torso slipped below the axe, both my feet skidded onto the rock slab, and my weight fell on the ice pick too abruptly. It jerked out of its placement, and I slid down the last of the snow onto the forty-degree rock slab. Gaining speed, I could feel the crystals of granite grab at my waterproof pants under my knees. From inside my closed eyes, I saw the maw of the chasm rear up behind me, and I gasped. “This is it,” I thought. “I don’t have a chance.”

Trying to drive the axe into the slab to make myself stop, I rotated my shoulders until the full weight of my torso pressed into the axe, grinding it in a hideous squeal of steel on rock. I spent as much energy squinting my eyes shut as I did gripping the axe; I couldn’t bear to witness the rock slip away faster and faster until gravity grabbed me by my collar and I tumbled backward down the ever more precipitous face, bouncing like a rag doll into the two-thousand-foot void.

The axe screeched for another moment, and then it caught on something, and I jolted to a stop. The fact that I was no longer falling stunned me into momentary paralysis. Still holding my breath, I opened my eyes cautiously, certain that even the twitching of my eyelids would end this intermission and cause me to break free, plummeting me to my death. I saw first that I was still on the featureless slab, having slid only about two body lengths down the rock. What was holding me in this improbable position? Tilting my head to the left, I peeked under the shaft of my axe. My gaze zeroed in on the tip of my pick…and saw nothing. To all appearances, I had ground the pick into the granite with such pressure that I welded it straight onto the bare rock. There was no other obvious explanation. No shelf, no knob, no lip, no ledge, no crack; just the microscopically featured granite, rough as unfinished concrete, that had cropped up directly in the path of my pick and snagged me from the clutches of imminent doom. In disbelief, I gave in to my body’s need for oxygen and took a series of panting breaths. It was a full minute before I moved, and then only my head, to peer over my left shoulder toward my escape route.

I don’t know how I got out of the self-arrest position and to a secure shelf behind a boulder to my left, but soon I was standing on my feet, looking over the rest of my descent. What I do know is that I never once looked at the chasm, centering my attention instead on the remaining traverse below the two flakes. Soon after reaching the first flake, I discovered more ice under the twenty-five-foot-long snowfield. Desperately overgripping the in-cut upper lip of the flake with my right hand, I swung my axe in my left hand, using the adze to chop footholds for the front tips of my boots in a descending traverse across the ice. In ten minutes, I had crossed this last obstacle of the Homestretch and rejoined my ascent tracks, eventually reaching the fissure where my bag was lodged. Immediately, I retrieved my crampons from my pack and strapped them onto my boots, then re-crossed the slab. I was at last equipped for my descent, and down I went to Scott, waiting for me at the trailhead.

With two technical routes and three long-distance routes in four weeks—including skiing the northeast bowl of Snowmass Mountain, another Elk fourteener—I felt ready for the biggest challenge of my project: solo climbing Capitol Peak. In my experience, Capitol has the longest stretch of difficult climbing of all the fourteeners, as technical as Longs and Pyramid put together, and is as dangerous as the Maroon Bells (aka the Deadly Bells). But I knew the approach, I knew the snow conditions, and I was at the top of my fitness and acclimatization. The peak is known for the Knife Ridge; a hundred-yard-long ridge at 13,500 feet that drops fifteen hundred feet away to the east, down steeply corniced flutings that end high above the Pierre Lakes Basin, and twenty-five hundred feet down the west side to Capitol Lake. While the exposure gives the Knife Ridge its infamous reputation, the most arduous sections of climbing come after the ridge, on the upper pyramid of the peak.

On February 7, 2003, I woke to sub-zero temperatures at my advance camp on the frozen rocky perimeter of Moon Lake. Ascending in the hyperborean conditions, I skinned on alpine-touring gear until the grade became too steep for my ski skins to hold on to the slope. Still below 13,000 feet, I removed my skis, mounting them on my backpack, and wallowed through bottomless powder, trenching six- and even eight-foot-deep troughs up the forty-degree snow slopes to the 13,600-foot-high subsidiary peak, locally known as K2. Stashing my skis at K2 in anticipation of the long powder-field descent, I continued across the Knife Ridge with crampons strapped to my randonée boots. Halfway across, I came to a disturbing section of the precipitous ridgeline, which was broadly corniced on the left-hand side. Due to prevailing westerly winds, snow had solidified in a cantilevered lip extending from the east side of the ridge.

I had been straddling the apex of the ridge to move across it, but at the overhanging snow cornices, I had to add to my technique, moving forward now with my ice axe poised to latch on to the rock rib if I should tumble off my saddle position. While I was safely perched with my weight balanced on either side of the knife-blade ridge, the cornices continually broke away from under my left leg, vacating space in a startling silence. Each collapse jolted me onto the Knife Ridge’s edge under my crotch. An accompanying sense of airiness frightened me, as I knew without looking that coffee-table-sized sections of compacted snow were dropping from under my left buttock in muted free fall. I focused on the rhythm of placing my right crampon in a convenient crack on the west side of the ridge, then humping my body forward another six inches or a foot. Soon enough, I was across the Knife Ridge. Euphoric with the rush of having completed the daunting traverse, I pulled my digital camera out of my jacket for a self-portrait. The huge smile on my face said it all.

I dug my way up the final five hundred feet. At twelve-forty-five
P.M.,
I summited Capitol Peak and fulfilled a dream of five years. My entire project had been building to the day that brought me safely to the top of the mountain, my forty-third winter solo fourteener. It was the test piece of the project. With a second traverse of the Knife Ridge still to follow on the descent, I hustled off the high point after recording an exultant video and snapshot footage from the summit, and returned to my skis at the top of K2. As the day grew longer, I dropped into the freezer-box shadows of the upper mountain and had to periodically remove my gloves to knock ice from their linings. All the trenching and wallowing in the snow on the ascent had soaked the gloves and packed them with snow that quickly solidified into ice with the dropping afternoon temperatures.