The Ledge (6 page)

And he wandered the canyonlands, searching. He climbed into a cave, where he found strange drawings of human hands on the wall. Later he recounted the experience in his thesis.

“The hair on my arms stands on end; goosebumps march down my skin. But the markings lure me on; my fingers tremble; I burn
from inside. The closer I get the more the burning increases; my hands are on fire when I reach the back wall of the cave. Ruess was here. I feel it. I feel it. When I lift my hands to the strange green hand prints my fingers match the fingers on the wall; my palms match its palms.”

Overcome with weakness and nausea, Mike took a nasty spill—falling out of the cave and crashing to the sand in the canyon below, knocking himself out. As he awakened beneath the unrelenting desert sun, Mike soothed himself by writing of cooler places he had been: “Waterfall ice under the coldest cold a Colorado winter can offer … The outlet streams after a week of subzero nights … Time and motion both stopped, frozen into a moment lasting days, weeks, months until stirred into life again by the springtime sun.”

BY 1990, MIKE
was an established instructor at the Colorado Outward Bound School.

The program took young people out into the wilds for weeks or even a month. There, leaders like Mike taught them the outdoor skills needed to survive, and led spiritual journeys of self-discovery that encouraged the students to contemplate the meaning of their lives.

In late September 1990, Mike backed his battered pickup out of his brother Daryl’s driveway in Colorado and headed west on Interstate 70, bound for Utah and a month-long canyonlands course in the windswept country that called to him as it had to Everett Ruess.

Near Grand Junction, just a few miles from the Utah border, Mike pulled alongside a car and glanced over. He recognized the woman at the wheel—Deb Caughron, a fellow Outward Bound instructor also on her way to teach—and he held his speed steady with hers. For the longest time, she didn’t glance over; she was a woman,
traveling alone, on a lonely highway. But Mike just held his truck right there, a giant cowboy hat on his head.

Eventually, she looked over, and when she did Mike tipped his hat and winked. The gesture earned him the nickname “Cowboy Bob.”

A year later, Joanne Donohue, a slender New Jersey girl with tumbling locks of golden hair, came west for a thirty-day Outward Bound canyonlands course. For much of it, Mike was the only guide for Joanne and five other crew members (an assistant instructor joined them late, then exited soon after to walk out an injured student). As her crew worked its way through the desolation that is red rock country, Mike’s gentle guidance, goofy songs, and quiet confidence settled on her.

Each night, she lay in her sleeping bag with a pen and her journal. Much of what she wrote was about her being twenty-three and living a great adventure. But day after day, at some point, her thoughts turned to Mike, and how he was able to make her believe in herself in a way that helped her get through one of the most challenging experiences of her life:

“I popped up and made this incredible climb up over this hump. The wind was actually shearing me off of it. Mike was running around, bounding back and forth on this moon-like landscape taking pictures! Then the most sweetest thing anybody has ever done—Mike starts singing that hickish cowboy song [with the line] ‘You Don’t Have to Call Me Darlin’, Darlin’.’ I’m groaning over this unbelievable climb with no handholds and I’m inching up with the wind screaming so hard that I can barely hold on and Mike is off to my right singing as proudly as can be, singing this cowboy song. I knew why he was singing it, so that maybe I wouldn’t tense up and get frustrated on the rock. I just can’t not laugh when he sings that song and he knew it. I was laughing so hard that I almost couldn’t make it up. But I did … You’re in these life/death situations and it is
so reassuring to hear his voice because he guided you from the beginning. I’d trust Mike with my life. If there was anyone on Earth I’d trust it to—it would be Mike.”

On the sixth day of the adventure, Mike and his charges ascended a three-hundred-foot sandstone face in Arch Canyon. Joanne struggled, slipping as she started up the rock, unsteady and unsure.

“Relax, relax,” Mike told her.

She turned to him.

“Mike, I don’t think I can do this,” she said.

“You can,” he told her, and grabbed the back of her pack and hoisted her and it up.

A little later, she complained again, unable to steel herself.

“You keep saying, ‘I can’t,’ Joanne,” he said.

They were the last words he uttered to her. She climbed to the top.

“He allowed you your own raw discoveries, and the rewards that come with it; they are the only ones you remember anyway,” she would say later. “He knew that. We didn’t. And in those terms, he was the ultimate guide.”

MIKE PRICE’S ADVENTURES
in the desert working on his thesis were another step in the journey he’d begun during those thirty-seven days he and three friends spent in the Yukon. In that frozen desolation, Mike had tested himself in extreme weather and examined his own being in an unforgiving landscape. Near the end of the trip, he opened a green spiral-bound notebook—his third journal of the trek—and looked out on his surroundings.

“Our 34th day almost over,” he wrote. “Three more. And off the ice by tomorrow night! And then—‘somewhere over the rainbow’ in Kansas. Should be able to maintain a good psyche the rest of the way. Esp. as we get off this ice.

“Everything on the glacier is melting, shifting, cracking,
avalanching—we are just now watching a three-quarter-mile-long all-rock avalanche from a mile away!—and making all kinds of noises, reinforcing the air of instability. Incredible. I would enjoy the ‘wonder’ of it all a lot more if I did not have to camp on the ice again.”

Mike’s blue ballpoint pen moved across the paper, and in the words that flowed from him he found some answers. And maybe some insight into the biggest question of all: Why do people climb?

He opened one passage by noting a friend’s admonition to heed another writer’s description of a mountain’s beauty as something more than the tableau of its colors and shapes and textures. And so he sat outside the team’s crimson tent, in the late-afternoon light, and poured out his thoughts:

“Seeing the long-shadowed brown furrows cut into the low green-gentle slopes of Observation Mountain is a landmark symbol to me. Perhaps the most important-inspiring one of the trip—to me. Overlooking the Slims Valley, the Kaskawulsh and the South Arm’s lower stretches, Observation Mountain is the last bend. Once around it, the homestretch 15 miles of dirt, grass, flowers and trees is all that’s left. Soothing … Observation Mountain. 5,300. A low peak—a ‘nothing’ mountain—but very beautiful, even more so than Mount Kennedy, in its own right. Green and living, shadowed in the evening arctic sun of mid-July … Nothing awesome, nothing forbidding; a simple easy convergence of peace. The weary way-worn sailor has nearly made it home. The worries of Odysseus are not over … I think I am on the road to being satisfied and it is a road to peace.”

Mike turned a page and kept writing.

“Pure quiet—except for the ‘making camp’ noises and the sound of water running on the ice … I am in the best spirits now of the entire trip … Tears in the corners of my eyes—of pure emotion—joy—happiness … I feel totally unburdened. The load has been lifted off my back, off my mind. I have to do nothing more to prove myself.
This is not for others but for me—and to me. Observation Mountain is a beautiful place. A beautiful rare mood. A few precious moments of ecstasy somehow not meant for—or translate-able into—words. Language fails where the tears begin.”

As Mike sat and wrote, a crystalline blue sky stretched over his head. The red tent the four shared was at his back, and in every direction he looked snowcapped peaks reached for the sky.

Sitting on his backpack, he kept pouring his thoughts down onto the pages of the spiral notebook.

“I think it was Thoreau—or Krutch—who said you must see a place a hundred times before you’ve seen it. I’ve seen Observation Mountain a hundred times, probably twice two times that, under a varying guise of names and places. But only now I’ve ‘seen’ it. As far as peaks go, it is commonplace. Nothing special. Nothing that would attract a mountaineer. But it has touched me—the hopeless-helpless romantic—and I am filled with the energy of life—my spirit is restored—my wounds healed … From the most desolate ice desert I’ve ever been on. I don’t have to ‘prove myself’ to anyone … If I never climb a peak higher than Longs or harder than McHenry’s—it will be o.k.—I will have done well … And this pertains not only to mountains … but to everything I do … There are not ulterior motives. No lusts, no wild drives, to be ‘satisfied’ like a junkie’s habit. Just ‘the seeing’ and ‘the doing.’ Mystical … The sublime beneath the dust …

“A chill wind picks up from behind, blowing through my clothes and urging me to get up. Things to tend to, things to do. Always. 34 days out for a few brief moments of ecstasy—no summit could ever possibly offer. The exchange rate is not equitable. Life isn’t either. It isn’t meant to be. But I have something here. I have something—I cannot accurately and easily express it—but I am onto something for sure …

“The view from Observation Mountain. Not from the summit, mind you. But from within. I ‘saw’ for the first time. I saw a mountain! I saw into a mountain!”

THAT COMBINATION OF
introspection and wonder was well developed five years later as he ventured into those desolate canyonlands, looking for the secrets of Everett Ruess, and for insight into himself. On one of his many forays into a no-man’s-land, he found himself in a precarious predicament, isolated in a maze of narrow canyons as a storm-churned sky swirled over his head. He headed into a meandering slot barely three feet wide, looking for a way to escape the powerful rains he sensed looming, realizing that this narrow canyon could be a death trap—a cloudburst could easily, and quickly, leave it teeming with rushing water. Finally, he reached a cavern with a slot ten feet up that looked promising, but as he struggled to climb to it, his feet clawed ineffectively on the water-slickened rock.

He yanked off his pack, fighting his nerves, looking for an answer. He found it within himself—deciding he could climb out of the cavern without his pack and drag it up after him with his rope. The ascent from the narrow slot pushed his mind back to the Yukon, back to a crevasse that nearly claimed him.

“A sharp crack like a gunshot rings in my ears, and suddenly I am falling, falling through a hole in the ice and snow that widens as I crash through it. My feet dangle and kick helplessly in the open air, but the top-heavy load on my pack forces me to fall forward, driving my face into the lip of the crevasse. Somehow I manage to plant my ax and arrest the downward momentum. For a moment I teeter on the brink of the abyss, my body a lever against the icy mouth of the crevasse, my chest the fulcrum. Gingerly, I am able to slither out of the hole without dislodging the ax.”

WHEN I TOLD
my parents that I was going camping in the dead of winter, Dad was skeptical and Mom was distraught.

It was just after Christmas in 1980, and I had five weeks off between semesters at the University of Massachusetts but hardly any money. So I cross-country skied through the woods near our Concord house and I read mountaineering books from the library, and in them I saw that most expedition chronicles contained horrific stories of surviving brutal snowstorms. Though I had backpacked in summertime, I wanted to find out if I was tough enough to sleep out in the snow. I did some research and gathered gear for my first winter campout. To minimize the risk, I decided to camp in an area I knew well—and one that offered a fast retreat in case things went awry—so I chose Boy Scout Island in Warner’s Pond, just a quarter mile from home.

After having me explain the plan a second time, Mom leaned across the kitchen table toward me and said, “Honey, this doesn’t make sense. Is there something wrong?”

Confused, I asked, “Do you mean, like, am I in trouble?”

“No, with you.”

“You mean mentally? Why would you think that?”

“Jimmy, it’s not normal to want to leave your nice warm home and go suffer in the cold.”

I tried clarifying that this was a critical step on my path to adventure, but I failed to sway her. To prove that my plan was sound, I pointed out the built-in fail-safe: “Besides, it’s so close that if my feet freeze, I can even crawl home from there.”

I was surprised that instead of making me seem wise, this perspective somehow confirmed to her my apparent instability.

Despite Mom’s concern, on the afternoon of January 27, 1981, I marched out of the yard wearing the only backpack our family owned: my sister’s bright yellow pack with the Girl Scout logo emblazoned across the top flap. Though embarrassed by the feminine label, I doubted I would run into any buddies from the neighborhood. Following the old credo “Wet wool is warm,” I’d stuffed my ill-fitting pack with itchy wool clothes, along with a summer sleeping bag and a hammock. To toughen myself faster, I’d eschewed a tent.