Scott Backes leads a sunny pitch on the east face of Howse Peak. That afternoon I lead what became known as “The Pitch,” an extremely difficult line of thin ice, that as of this writing, over 10 years later, has not been repeated. STEVE HOUSE
Farmboy
Scott Backes leads a sunny pitch on the east face of Howse Peak. That afternoon I lead what became known as “The Pitch,” an extremely difficult line of thin ice, that as of this writing, over 10 years later, has not been repeated. STEVE HOUSE
Canmore, Alberta, Canada: March 27, 1999
KNOCKING THE SNOW OFF my boots, I push open the door to the Drake Pub. A large cheer hits me. I smile and step aside to let Scott in. Someone lets out a shrieking whistle and applause scatters across the room. I see Barry sitting on top of a large table near the center of the room surrounded by people. He has one foot on the ground. The other straightened leg, encased in a hip-length plastic brace, is extended on the table in front of him. Two full glasses of beer sit next to him; he holds another above his head to signal us.
“Hey,” Barry chuckles, his still damp hair hangs around his shoulders. His roots are the color of pewter; the ends show the jet-black of his Native American heritage. “It’s the great white hope of American alpinism, and the old guy.”
“Yeah, Bubba,” Scott says, slapping Barry on the shoulder and pulling him into a one-armed hug. “I may be old. But at least I’m a has-been.”
“Beer? They keep bringing them,” he says, gesturing with his glass to the surrounding crowd. “Catherine did all of this. I knew she was organizing a party, but I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I’m glad we made it off the route when we did. She was pissed, and rightly so, that we only got off today. Plus this, eh?” He raps one knuckle against his braced leg. “Doc said I have a hairline fracture of the tibial plateau. Six weeks.”
“Could have been a lot longer than six weeks,” Scott says. He stretches for both glasses and passes one to me. “Here’s to having Bubba alive.” Raising the glasses we each look the other in the eye. Scott’s eyes are shimmering and intense; Barry’s dark and distant.
“Here’s to Steve’s pitch,” says Barry, lifting his glass again as he smacks the beer foam off his unshaven upper lip.
Scott gives me a half-serious look. “The great white hope.”
I drop my gaze to my glass. “You know I hate that name.” And I draw in the bracing bitterness of the beer.
Scott laughs. “I know. I know you do. And that just proves my point.”
East Face of Howse Peak, Canadian Rockies: March 22, 1999, (five days earlier)
The rope comes tight; I reach up and swing one ice tool into the white icicle that dangles over the black stone lip. Thunk. It makes a hollow sound followed by the rattle of ice chips cascading down onto the front of my new mango-orange Patagonia parka. The jacket is one piece of the free kit the company sent me six weeks ago, apparently on Barry’s recommendation. I gently thread my pick into a hole in the ice that Scott left behind. I start upward, straining to move quickly. The weight of the pack increases as I kick up the vertical ice.
I reach the belay panting. The rock leans out above the ledge Scott stands on. Forty feet above him, like the tail of a mythical frozen serpent, hangs a great dagger of ice.
As I make the last steps to the anchor, I examine the nearby rock for cracks. One or two good cracks lead up from the ledge, but are squeezed shut by the dark monolithic limestone that caps the rock roof 20 feet higher.
“No gear,” Scott says. “The cracks all pinch off. What this route is sayin’ is fuck all y’all.”
I’m disappointed; this icy snake had been our new goal, having decided, once again, not to go into Mount Robson due to an unstable weather forecast. Just then Barry pulls onto the belay ledge. With his head bent upward, he takes two blind steps, and sinks to his knees in the snow.
“Doesn’t look good,” Barry says. “Not good at all. No cracks. No cracks, no gear.”
“No gear, no go.” I finish the little mantra. It’s the same mantra Alex taught me in Cody. As long as you can get gear in, there’s no harm in going for it.
Barry looks down, plunges his tools into the snow and shifts his gaze to Scott and me. “Well, I thought that might happen. But we’re here. Wanna head over that away and have a look-see?”
“Where?” I ask. I’m hesitant to give up so easily on our main objective, but it obviously isn’t possible without going back down, bringing a bolt kit, and drilling holes in the rock, which none of us are willing to do. Reinhold Messner famously derided such tactics as the “murder of the impossible.” Uncertainty is the essence of alpinism; ignoring that destroys the experience.
“This way,” Barry says, pointing to the right. I was focused only on the route ahead. The topography of the rest of the wall is completely foreign to me. Barry, however, seems to have an inkling of another possible route.
“Okay. Lead on Bubba.” Scott passes Barry the rest of the rack and Barry traverses right.
When we regroup, Barry has the anchor set far off to the right, near a bare, black rock wall. Up and to his left is an ice smear that looks like a giant undercooked pancake. Most of it is batter-white; it’s not really ice, but instead a thin frosting of vertical snow plastered on rock. Blue areas do reveal some solid ice in places. I check my ice screws and reach for my ice tools.
Scott leans back on the tangle of gear and looks up at the vertical veneer, then says, half to himself, half to Barry, “How come House ends up with the hardest pitches?”
“You’ve not climbed much with the Farmboy, have you Scotty?” Barry’s wife Catherine, who thinks me wholesome, has nicknamed me Farmboy. Barry puts his hand on the taller Scott’s shoulder. “He always gets the hard ones.”
“How does that happen?” Scott asks, looking at me with feigned incredulity.
“God only knows man, God only knows,” Barry slowly shakes his head.
“Well,” Scott says, digging into his pack and pulling out a big down parka. “I’m just here for the show.”
Canmore, Alberta, Canada: March 12, 1999, (10 days earlier)
“I came out of retirement for you. I had to see for myself,” Scott says after he sets down his duffel bags on Barry’s living room floor. Laughing, he continues, “Okay. Okay. I lie. I lie. I did it for Barry too.” The spark in Scott’s eye sets off his graying temples and the weathered crow’s feet of a man who has spent much of his 40-odd years outside.
As he unpacks his gear later that evening he dons his climbing helmet and asks rhetorically, “How do you get an old guy to climb hard?”
Barry chuckles with anticipation as he raises a delicate glass of Scotch whisky to his lips, sips, and then takes the bait. “I don’t know, man. How?”
“You put a gun to his head.” Scott says, pointing to the sticker of a black Glock nine-millimeter handgun on the right side on his blaze-red helmet. His laugh bursts from his open mouth with such force, I start laughing too.
Suddenly serious, he sets his helmet down and looks at me. “I am here to pass the alpinist torch to your generation. Mugs isn’t here to do it.” He punctuates the point with a thrust of his index finger. “Twight won’t give it up even though he’s through. And Barry,” he waves the back of his hand at Barry, still perched on his stool. “Barry doesn’t know he’s done yet.” He lifts his hands in front of him, pointing all 10 of his fingers at himself. “So you get me.”
“You’re wrong Scott about one thing.” I counter, pointing at Barry with my own scotch. “I don’t think Barry really is done.”
“Nope,” pipes in Barry, tapping his heel on the carpet and looking at the sleeping dog stretched at his feet. “If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I would have been hunting buffalo on the plains. Hunting, working for my own survival is, as near as I can tell, just like alpinism. And though it’s true that I’m getting older, I still like to hunt.”
The next day Barry is off early to guide a multiday ski tour. Scott and I go to climb the classic ice route, Nemesis. While leading, he suddenly exclaims, “Fuck all y’all,” quoting rap music for no apparent reason.
That evening Scott bursts through the door at Barry’s house and raises his hand in triumph. “Now we’ve downgraded that mothafucka, too. It’s only two pitches. No more three-pitch route, not Nemesis! Two pitches now.”
We had utilized a new, longer 80-meter rope. Most climbing ropes are 60 meters. Our ascent was no better than the hundreds that came before it, but it gives Scott something to crow about.
After I’d soloed the new route Beauty Is a Rare Thing, on Denali in 1996, Scott, whom I had not yet met, labeled me in the climbing press as “the great white hope of American alpinism.” Like many of his monikers, it unfortunately stuck.
East Face of Howse Peak, Canadian Rockies: March 22, 1999
Watching Scott enjoy himself now, pouring a hot shot of coffee from his thermos, preparing to watch me lead the first hard pitch of this route, it occurs to me that he has nothing invested. He has nothing pending on success or failure.
As I move away from the belay my resentment builds. “What a bastard,” I think. “He’s here for the show. Now I have to perform, do I? What am I, a damn pony?” Briefly, I feel a rebellious urge to tear off my new sponsor’s jacket, rappel off, and go home.
The ice rears back to vertical. I pause to whip in an ice screw at the base of a difficult section. I look up at the ice and attempt to draw in my focus with a sharp breath, tasting the frozen air. With the razor-tipped ice tools I rapidly work the ice above me. Short, sharp swings probe for the densest ice, ice strong enough to support me. Most of the frozen snow won’t. Fueled by my quick flash of anger, I climb several body lengths.
Well up on the vertical ice, the burn begins – the pump caused by over-gripping the tools. I struggle to place a second ice screw. To continue without protection would be to risk a bad fall onto the sloping ledge below. Hanging by my left arm I spin a screw with my right hand. Cranking, cranking it around to drive it home. I start to hyperventilate. Numbness creeps up my left arm. I abandon my efforts at the screw, quickly replace my right ice tool and then drop my left hand seeking relief. I breathe deeply, steadily now. Switching again, I return to the screw, drive it flush to the ice, and clip in the rope.
I am secure now, safe from a bad fall, but the climbing does not relent. As I climb, my emotions dissolve; my awareness focuses on just this moment.
As the early darkness of the Canadian Rockies’ late winter envelopes us, Barry and I put the finishing touches on one of our “torpedo tubes.” The ledges in the Rockies are too narrow and steep to take a tent; we worked out the torpedo tube style of snow cave on our first attempt on Mount Robson.
We start by carefully probing the snow drifted onto a ledge to find the deepest snow. Then we excavate from one end, creating a long, narrow snow cave parallel to the face. Our first tube, going right, ends abruptly, 15 feet deep. Going to the left, Barry ekes out a one-man tube barely sufficient to shelter his five-foot, eight-inch length. Scott happily burrows back to the end of the long cave. I follow him in. The snow tunnel is tight; I can’t quite sit up. Lying on my short insulating mattress I assemble the stove and start the task of quenching our thirsts with fresh snowmelt turned to tea and soup, and eventually ramen noodles.
Scott lays his long, yellow suit-clad frame out on his long pad and disgorges a massive, six-pound synthetic sleeping bag from his pack – mine weighs two pounds, but I count on shivering half the night. Unzipping the bag he pulls out a pillow.
Recognizing my indignation he laughs as he lies back to wait for his drink. “What can I say? I’m aged and saged.” He launches into a new round of laughter.
Bear, Bubba, Blanch. His fortieth birthday is in four days and a hundred people are expected to help him celebrate in his hometown of Canmore. He has spent many of those 40 years at the forefront of Canadian climbing. He has numerous friends and countless memories. Bubba was my teen idol. I kept a photo of him ice climbing taped to the inside of my high-school locker door. Someday, I plan to tell him that.
When I wake up to my alarm at 4:30 am the next morning, I find an unhappy Bubba. The wind blew into his tiny cave and drifted snow onto his down sleeping bag which is now wet and flat. Barry is chilled and shivering. But he’s got the stove purring and passes me a hot pot of sugary instant coffee as soon as I sit up.
After I finish the coffee and gnaw down a Pop-Tart, I extend the length of my tie-in so I can get outside the cave to pack my bag. Slithering out, I stand and gaze up at the dark wall. The first hints of daylight illuminate tapered white streaks that cascade down the steep, black rock. The rock wall itself rises, monolithic and impenetrable: an eternity of stone.
Guess we’ll be going down now, I think to myself as the sleeping bag, stove and fuel disappear into my rucksack. I don’t know what Barry was thinking coming up here. I don’t see where the route can go. The only possible line looks damn hard, too hard to do up here.
“My lead, eh Scott?” comes Barry’s snow-muffled voice from his cave. “That pitch of snow climbing yesterday didn’t count.”
“Whatever you want Bubba,” comes the reply.
“Where you going to go Barry?” I ask.
“I think up and left, there is a corner system. Leads up to some white stuff that might be climbable. I’ve seen that line come in before in my travels through these mountains. Looks hard up higher, but that’ll be your lead.”
I hadn’t even realized there was a line on the left, but now, as I look, I can piece it together. Across the snow, up that little rock step. That doesn’t look too bad. Then step left into that corner. Yeah, there is a crack in there. The corner gets steeper at the top, but it looks like it goes to the right, and as far up this wall as I can see. Maybe to the top of it.
“So Barry, what’s above this wall?” I ask.
“If we can get up this first wall there is a gully that takes us up under another big triangular-shaped wall. That wall is overhanging, so from there you would most likely traverse right to the couloir that George and Joch climbed in ‘71.” The alpine climbing brotherhood is so small Barry can refer to George Lowe and Joch Glidden by their first names.
“Secure!” yells Barry.
“That’s Canadian for off belay,” I tell Scott, as we dismantle the anchor.
“Yeah? I’ve known that since you were in second grade,” Scott replies. I think about it for a moment, and he could be right. I make an extra effort to climb slowly and carefully. I’ll need the warm-up for that pitch higher up.
Scott joins me at Barry’s belay. It’s his lead, so he racks up and leads off, climbing quickly and with confidence. The sun shines and I give a hoot, causing him to look over. I snap the picture: yellow suit bold against the white frozen ice and black wall cleaving the deep blue sky.
Following Scott’s pitch, I admire his effort. He ran it out for speed and placed gear that is solid. The climbing is steep, and getting steeper and more sustained.
I rack up for the next lead; the rack is heavy. The sun has gone, leaving us in the big winter wall’s gray light.
“Up there you think, Bubba?” I ask, pointing to where the crack disappears in a mess of snow mushrooms.
“I think so, maybe up that steep snowy groove. Or if not, you could try traversing out right, but it looks thin over there.”
I start, moving a few feet before placing my first piece, the beginning of the safety net that will protect me if I fall. The route above looks unlikely. The groove overhangs and is choked with heavy, snow mushrooms. As I reach the groove, I slot one tool into the crack and lean back. Overhanging snow stretches above. I reach up and gently smack one of the white orbs with the broad side of my ice axe. It breaks off and grabs at my ice axe, nearly tearing it out of my hand. It zips downwards and explodes on the wall next to the belay.
“Maybe not,” I shout down. “I’m going to try right.”
To the right the climbing is less than vertical as it traverses below a black rock overhang. Slowly I step to the right, kicking at the snowy bits to uncover edges beneath. The climbing unveils itself by a snow-burlesque: footholds revealed slowly as I clean off the snow.
The bulge above ends and the traverse deposits me on a small, less-than-vertical, bulletin board of hard snow. Up to my left I place my largest cam. The wall rears up to vertical. I’m standing on a kind of snow-ice, sometimes called snice. It starts as snow that is deposited on the wall during storms, then by slow melt-freeze cycles, it hardens. Sometimes it’s climbable; sometimes it just looks climbable.
I reach up again and again, ripping through the snice with my pick. Ten times: nothing solid. Twenty: the pick slips through it like it’s whipped cream. Shifting my feet just a bit higher I stab the pick far out to the right. It sinks in, this time with a bit of resistance and a squeak. Careful not to break the precious ice away, I lever my pick out and tap it back in with just a bit more speed, a bit more power. A high squeal confirms the steel point is set.
Just above that tool there is a gap in the ice caused by a four-inch-wide roof in the rock. This is the turning point. From here I could down climb to the last crack, the last protection, and retreat to safety. That will not be possible after this next move. I take a deep breath and go.
Carefully setting my tool under the small roof, I climb. I see the next gear placement. I breathe loudly and focus on reaching it. The ice is getting thinner and more prone to shattering under my ever-gentle taps. As I reach the crack, the smear under my feet breaks away. I struggle to lift my feet back up. I place one crampon point on an edge that had been hidden under the ice. I step my right foot out far to the side to form a secure platform.
Stemming between two tiny wrinkles in the rock, I let my ice hammer hang by its leash on my wrist and grab for the medium knifeblade piton. Reaching right I press its tip into the crack a few millimeters. I tap it gently with the side of my hand. Carefully, quickly, I grab my ice hammer and take aim. A glancing blow will send the precious piton soaring down the wall. I deliver gentle taps, each driving the pin in a few more millimeters. With a third of the piton’s tip buried in the seam, I take the hammer by the end of the shaft and drive it home with a few hard, fast blows.
Above me the ice narrows again and dissipates under another small rock roof. I scrape my left foot to a higher edge, then bump the right foot up. The ice is too thin – just a half-inch thick – to take a pick. One misplaced swing and I’ll send it all down leaving nothing to climb. I pause and look all around me. Trying to see everything: every feature, every lip, every fold. There is nothing else for my ice tool. With the tip of the right tool twisted in the piton crack, I carefully chip away the top edge of ice. Working at it, one little bit at a time, until I have created a tiny platform one centimeter thick and a few centimeters wide, an edge upon which I can place the pick of my tool and pull down.
Forcing my upper body in close to the wall, I lay the teeth of my axe sideways and set the pick on the edge. Working my foot higher and trying to keep my body pressed in close, I pull hard with my left arm, and push down and out with my feet. I lift the tip of my other ice hammer as high as I can and am just able to reach past the roof. The pick scrapes against featureless rock. I try again – more to the left – and my pick bounces off bare stone again. I shift my right foot farther up until I’m fully extended, stretching and reaching as far as I can. Nothing. Gently, I shift my head back, but not too far. Even such a subtle shift in weight could cause me to lose my balance, and a fall here would be unacceptable.
Tilting back, I see a tendril of ice. It looks gray, the color ice gets when it’s older and has distilled itself of air bubbles. Mentally mapping the ice, I drop my head down to maximize my reach. With my arm fully extended I hold my breath and draw my wrist back. Tap. I have it. The tip of the ice hammer feels solid. I pull up.
Higher, the angle relents and easier ground leads to a stance where I build an anchor. I have only ice screws; I left every piece of rock gear on the pitch. I use all eight screws, but only one of them goes in to its full depth. With my remaining cord and some climbing rope I equalize them and tie in the ropes. I shout for the lads to start up. I look at my watch: the pitch took three hours.
Shivering, my sweat freezes on the inside of my jacket. Barry is cleaning the pitch using ascenders, rope clamps that slide up the rope but not down. I eavesdrop on his self-talk as he removes each piece of gear. “Ooh. That was a good one.” And later, “Glad he didn’t fall on that!”
Barry arrives and eyes the eight tied-off screws holding us all to the mountain. “Scott,” he yells down. “Wha’d’ya think, eh?”
Scott ascends another body length in silence, apparently contemplating the shattered ice and scratched rock edges. He looks up with a wide grin. “I consider myself to be good at this type of climbing. And maybe I could have followed it. But I bet there are less than a dozen men in the world that could have led it!”
Later, this lead became known as “The Pitch,” and in each retelling the experience has receded into the mist; simultaneously diluted and inflated. I wonder now if it was really that difficult. We named the route M-16, a play on Scott’s Glock and in mockery of the popular grade of high-level difficulty, road-side, bolt-protected, mixed climbing of the time: M-8.
But all of that would come later. Now I am too cold, too hungry, too jaded by Scott’s previous declarations. I want the food and water he has in his pack.
Barry takes the next and final pitch of the day, a wave of ice that steepens and turns to snow. He backs off, returns to rock on his left, then aid climbs. Soon he is up the short aid section and disappears into the snow bowl above. We follow.
The next morning our little snow cave is full of activity in the predawn blackness. We’ve burrowed into the top, right corner of a large rectangular snowfield, just 10 feet right of where the ice flows down and over the wall we climbed yesterday. We’re getting ready to gun for the summit. While I stuff my bag into my pack, Scott unblocks the cave entrance.
The scene illuminated by his headlamp is horrific. A storm has come in overnight and we’re camped on the edge of a snow version of Niagara Falls. Avalanches constantly pour from the steep headwall above, funnel down past our cave entrance, and into the gully below. Most is spindrift but some of the more clamorous sloughs hide chunks that alarm us as they fall, unhurried, thousands of feet to the glacier.
We’re stalled. Scott replaces the snow block that seals the door. “Guess not,” he says, his voice flat and matter of fact now. “We can’t go up or down.”
“Well,” starts Barry, “we’ll just have to wait a bit. If it improves in the next few hours we can still try for the top. If not, we’ll have to go down tomorrow. We only have one more dinner.”
With nothing to do, we remodel the snow cave into a comfortable three-bedroom with a central kitchen. We make the door more robust and Barry tinkers with our rock anchors to make staying tied in more comfortable.
With sleeping bags resituated, I’m now the one who can see outside. I pry back the snow block door: it’s still snowing hard and the avalanches continue.
Gradually we settle into a long day of conversation. This is my third alpine route with Barry, and I learn more about him on this one afternoon than I have on all our past days of climbing together. He tells stories of Viennese lovers, near misses on his first trip to the Alps, delivering milk with his milkman uncle, getting beat up for being half native in the bad part of Calgary.
Scott’s tales are even more foreign: punk concerts, hard drugs, and stunningly bad pickup lines that worked. I ‘fess up to the picture in the locker, from which Scott gets a huge laugh. But my stories are much tamer. In high school I bucked 80-pound hay bales for summer work. I met my wife Anne at the outdoor recreation office my first week of college. I seduced her by bringing diet Pepsi to her late-night study sessions. Once I inadvertently passed a police car on my motorbike, and gunned it.
The last light fades as we take inventory: eight ounces of fuel, one instant soup packet, some almonds, four nutrition bars, and 18 GU packets. As the night matures I peek out to see the first flash of moonlight and a patch of stars. We decide to try for an early start and settle in to wait.
It is 4:30 am. Barry has the stove humming before anyone else is up. The moonlight has been shining off and on through my view hole, and the cave is overflowing with confidence. We are packed before the coffee is brewed. I’m the first one out, and the first to have his heart broken. It is snowing and the avalanches have begun. We slip back into the cave and make the obvious decision: retreat.
The decision’s made but as I sit, slouched against the wall, I’m haunted by “The Pitch,” the crux. It was my best effort, an ideal of hard mixed terrain high in the mountains. I stay quiet as we eat the last of the hot food. I slurp down my share of soup in silence.
We’ve failed, I keep thinking. This is always hard to digest, and I can’t deny how deeply I still want to finish the line. The crux lead is wasted, lost. I try to let go of my disappointment, but I want to finish this line and be able to stare up at it from below.
Suddenly Scott announces, “Why don’t we just go up and see how it goes? If we can’t deal, we’ll go down. Let’s not just assume it can’t be done.”
Barry perks up, “Yeah, I’d do that.”
When they look at me, I stare back in amazement. “Are you guys sure? I mean, we’re out of food, we should probably use this window to go down in.”
“Let’s face it Farmboy,” starts Scott. “How do I put this? Okay. Barry and I have been climbing a total of what, like 40 years Bubba?”
“Something like that,” Barry says, giving Scott his full attention.
“Well, correct me if I’m wrong Bubba, but neither of us have ever seen anyone climb a pitch like the one you climbed yesterday. If we go down now, you might not ever be able to repeat it. Or the ice – or whatever that was – might not form like that next year or for the next 10 years. We’ve got to finish this route, at least to the ridge, so that your pitch can take its place as what it is, one of the most brilliant pieces of climbing ever done.”
Scott pauses, and looks at Barry. When he looks back at me he reads my posture: knees up, arms crossed, forehead on my arms. “I know, I know. You hate to hear that. But you have to. Its your time now, Steve. I told you when I got here what I was here to see. What I was here to do. I’m not done yet. We have to finish this route.”
I wasn’t prepared for this. I want to go on, but all three of us must certainly understand that we’re making a bad decision for highly questionable reasons.
I stand in the door of the snow cave and belay as Scott charges the lead. He climbs well, leading up an ice-filled gully before beginning a long traverse over steep, Andean, snow flutings. The traverse finally intersects the Lowe Couloir, which cuts deeply into the summit of Howse Peak.
The old guys want it! Barry Blanchard, two days before his 40th birthday, about to climb into the spindrift of the Lowe Couloir, high on the east face of Howse Peak. He came to regret that he didn’t put his hood up. STEVE HOUSE
We make a short 30-foot rappel onto the thick ice of the gully and nestle ourselves safely against the rock wall. Barry takes the next lead, venturing out to the center of the gully. The snowfall is picking up: big, wet sticky flakes – cow pies. The flakes accumulate above and every few minutes release as a vicious avalanche.
Every time another avalanche bears down on Barry, Scott and I shout a warning. Barry leans into the ice and holds on. If he should lean out at the wrong moment and catch the full force of the snow, he’d be plucked off as easily as a peach in August. I know that what he is doing is insane, but I am proud that he’s still got it in him to try this hard. Barry stretches the rope and builds an anchor as far to the side of the avalanche path as possible. Dutifully, Scott and I follow him into the maelstrom, into his madness.
We’re close to the top, but the avalanches continue to pound us. I inch my hood back just enough to sneak a look at the rolling blue ice in this deep gash. Such a wild, inhospitable place, a place where long-term survival is impossible. Even our temporary residence is an extreme gamble.
We hunker down against the punishing snowfall. Bubba belays just below the ridge crest directly beneath a cornice. It juts out 40 feet from the face, sheltering us from the snow and wind. Above us lies the summit, just half a pitch away. Gusts of wind blow streamers of snow out onto the face below us.
Here we must make a decision. We could climb the remaining 40 feet out of the gully. Dealing with the snow and wind looks like it would be more difficult than the actual climbing. Then we would have to traverse the summit, descend the east ridge, traverse over another peak, climb down to a saddle, descend 3,000 feet to our skis, and ski six miles to the car. Or we can descend our route, sleep in the cave for a third night, and rappel the rest of the face in the morning.
We have one headlamp and three packets of GU each. Each GU contains 100 calories. We have no water. We left our sleeping bags in the snow cave to save weight. No words are said. I look at Barry, his whiskers etched with snow. Barry looks at Scott.
Scott breaks the silence. “So it’s my turn then?” And he drills an ice screw into the ice and starts rigging the ropes for a rappel.
I feel neither the sting of defeat, nor any swell of victory. Only gathering relief as each rappel brings us closer to the safety of the snow cave. Scott is leading us down, setting the anchors and tending the ropes. Each time I look around, cornices and snow mushrooms peek out from behind cloudbanks. I harbor an uneasy feeling.
“Off rappel Barry!” I yell as I arrive at the last anchor. From within the snow cave I catch the muffled clanking of pots as Scott, the first one down, fires up the stove. As I anchor myself safely to the wall I am annoyed that Scott hasn’t tied in the ends of the rappel ropes. This means if the anchor were to fail while Barry is rappelling he would fall the length of the face: Bubba and our ropes would be gone.
I pull up the ends, tie a good knot and clip them in to the anchor. At least this way if Barry goes, Scott and I might still survive. Just as I think this, I cock my head to the gathering rumble of another avalanche. A huge powder cloud tears down the gully. In the maelstrom I see dark chunks I can’t identify screaming towards the glacier like ghosts from hell. I hope one wasn’t Barry.
“Barrryyy!” I shout.
The ropes still stretch up to the anchor, so he must be there. I strain to see a sign, some movement. Anything. The gully is a mass of impenetrable white.
“Baaarrryyyy!” Long seconds pass and I draw several forced breaths. Deep inside the cave Scott hasn’t heard a thing. I shove my head into the cave’s entrance. “Scott! Barry!” and turn around again. My lungs are screaming. “Barrrrryyyyyyyy!”
I look up and see Bubba fumbling to place an ice screw. He has been pushed to the edge of the gully and hangs below a single remaining piton. The rest of the anchor is gone. His pack is gone – shorn from his back by the slide.
I can tell he is injured by his stiff, awkward movements. I feel nauseous, balanced on the edge of the trauma of another tragedy unfolding before me. Slowly he begins to rappel. I cling to the ends, guiding him to our sanctuary on this mammoth wall. He is white, white from the punch that packed his collar, zippers, gloves, helmet, harness – even his nose – with snow. He is white with shock and fear. Only his eyes are black.
He gropes his way onto the ledge with one leg held stiffly behind him. Reaching his harness, I clip him to an anchor and hug him as he lies there. Panic gives way to tears. Barry’s clothing emits the ammonia odor of fear. I can see it in the recesses of his dark, unfocused pupils.
Scott is beside us now. He and I shuffle Bubba to the cave entrance. He kicks with his one good leg. Scott goes in first and pulls him inside by his armpits. Immediately Scott covers him with his big synthetic sleeping bag.
We have nothing to eat. We use the last of the fuel to make a hot-water bottle and a cup of tea for Barry. Once I am settled into my bag I go through the trash, pulling open used packets of GU and licking out the insides. Bubba is past the shock now; he and Scott snuggle in the sleeping bag. I listen to the weather forecast on Barry’s two-way VHF radio. The barely audible forecast for tomorrow: clear and sunny. Exhausted, I fall asleep and, luxuriously, suffer no dreams.
I wake in the middle of the dark night, my stomach aching for food. I pull back the door and see many stars. The storm has passed. Without calories I am cold, so I do sit-ups in my sleeping bag to keep from freezing.
The piece of sky framed by the door slowly brightens. “Hey guys, it’s getting light.”
I push my sleeping bag and bivouac sack into my pack. I toss the useless stove, the trash, and my headlamp in on top. We have little left; packing is quick and simple. Scott and Barry have the one sleeping bag draped over them like a blanket.
“Did you sleep?” I ask.
“No,” Scott laughs. “But Bubba did, and you were doing a fine imitation of an Oregon lumberjack for awhile.” Barry grunts and sits up, his head just missing the low roof. His left leg is stretched out before him. He lifts it manually, and grunts again.
“My leg is fucked. It’s really stiff.” Registering my alarm he adds, “I think it will be okay once we get out to civilization. But I won’t be doing any skiing out of here. Once we get out onto the broad part of the face I’ll have better radio reception. I’ll try to call the wardens and see if they can pick me up from the glacier with a chopper.”
I help him out of the cave. Standing up with a perfunctory snarl, he quickly discovers that weighting his leg hurts.
Whenever I lead, whether it be climbing up or rappelling down, I feel the weight of responsibility for my partners and by extension the hopes and fear of those who love them. That love weighs especially heavy this morning as I begin making fall line rappels down the gully. Quickly we are out onto the glittering openness of the crux wall. The sunlight is weakly warming.
As I leave the next anchor I see Barry take out his radio to call the Canadian park wardens.
“Did you get through?” I ask as he descends to the next rappel.
“I got through, but it was really hard to understand them. I don’t know how well they heard me. I did understand them to say that Catherine had been calling them concerned. It’s been raining in Canmore the last few days.”
The final rappel anchor is a spare ice hammer pick driven downward behind a flake. Barry is working his way down awkwardly when we hear the whump-whump of a helicopter. The radio is of no use to contact them – it’s shorted out now.
A rescuer attached to the end of a 100-foot, short-haul line sails in towards the wall. He is a little too high and a little too hot. He hits the wall violently, ricocheting off.
“Uff-da,” comments Scott. “That’s gotta hurt.
The chopper pulls back and hovers for a moment, seemingly to get a better read on the wall. The rescuer comes in again. This time his crampons spin wildly around our heads. We all duck and the chopper pulls back a second time.
The pilot hovers again and then takes a third pass. The rescuer smacks into the wall again. This time he is a few feet lower and his crampon points perfectly pierce the knot on the webbing into which we are all clipped. Thinking quickly Barry grabs the rescuer’s daisy chain and clips him into the same knotted sling that is tied to the driven pick head which serves as our anchor.
Our guest rapidly unclips from the heli’s line and speaks into the helmet mike. Quiet comes back to the wall as the helicopter dives away from the wall and flies toward the highway six miles distant.
“Welcome to our world,” Scott says.
Ignoring him, the rescuer asks, “So who wants to go first?”
None of us want to go; none of us wants anything to do with those sketchy aerial acrobatics. He agrees to our plan to rappel with us, and then down climb to the glacier. Then he spots our anchor: the driven pick.
“Oh, no. I’ve got children to go home to, eh? I’m not rappelling off that. No sir. No way.”
Ten minutes later, Barry and the warden soar straight out and away from the face. Scott and I perch on the steep slope, alone in the stillness.
Scott reaches down and picks up the ropes, holding them towards me. “After you, Farmboy.”