Eli Helmuth (right) and I pose at the top of Motorcycle Hill, July 2, 1995. The Father and Sons Wall is bathed in afternoon sun behind us. We staged our first ascent of the wall from the West Buttress route’s 11,000-foot camp. ELI HELMUTH
A Punk in Crampons
Eli Helmuth (right) and I pose at the top of Motorcycle Hill, July 2, 1995. The Father and Sons Wall is bathed in afternoon sun behind us. We staged our first ascent of the wall from the West Buttress route’s 11,000-foot camp. ELI HELMUTH
Father and Sons Wall, Denali, Alaska: July 1, 1995
WITH MY BOOT I PUSH the downy snow off the top of the small rock outcropping. The black steel of the crampon scratches as it drags against the ice. Eli hacks away rhythmically. With a slow 4/4 count, he swings from his shoulder, slowly flattening and smoothing our little perch. With the snow cleared, I take up my axe and join in. Whack-whack. Whack-whack. Whack-whack.
“Looks good, huh?” Eli says 30 minutes later. His worn bibs come high on his chest. With the thick white sun block on his cheeks and the dark mountain glasses he looks like an extra in a zombie movie.
“Good enough for government work,” I say, my arm aches from chopping. Using the axe, I brush snow from above the ledge and place a couple of ice screws. We both tie in.
Clipping off my two mismatched ice tools – the hammer blue and short, and the axe black and longer – to the anchor, I work off my crampons and then carefully clip them in as well. Balancing on the slick blue ice, I pull out my bivy sack, sit down on our small ledge, and pull the nylon sack over my feet and up to my chin. In turn Eli kicks his toe into the ice, reaches down, and snaps off his crampons. In the bivy sacks we wear our parkas and mittens, but we have no sleeping bags to insulate us. I grunt and twist to adapt to the lumps, half-lying on my backpack, half-leaning against the slope above me.
Eli laughs. “Comfy?”
“Yeah, great.”
Warmth and comfort have been sacrificed to our credo of light and fast. It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve been on the move nonstop for 22 hours. We’re hungry and thirsty. I lie back, Eli flicks a lighter and the stove sparks to life as he lifts his glasses, pushing back his thick, unwashed hair. He turns up the gas and the stove starts to growl. It feels good to lie down after so much effort. My muscles are still warm from the climbing; the tension seeps from my legs out into the refreshing coolness of the ice underneath me.
Due to Eli’s attentiveness to the small aluminum pot, we soon have water. Water means we can eat: ramen soup, a bag of molasses cookies, energy bars. I look down and across the wall to where I can pick out climbers on the normal, West Buttress route. I imagine them gazing back, taking in the view of the massive wall. We are hidden by the wall’s vastness. The summer sun bakes down, warming us as an afterthought.
Light and fast means cold and hungry. As the hard hand of shadow replaces the caress of sunshine, I am pulled from slumber. We have dozed just two hours. With a shrug, Eli shifts and turns away from me. Neither of us offer any words against the silence. This is our second straight month together, having just guided Denali’s West Rib route. After that trip, we tossed around a few ideas for a climb. It was too warm for lower-elevation objectives, like the Ruth Gorge. So between pints of Häagen-Dazs, we settled on the Father and Sons Wall. It’s a well-known objective; Mugs Stump had been attempting it the year before his death.
To shake off my drowsiness, I push back the green hood of the bivy sack. Below us a cloudbank, gray and thick, laps at the base of the wall, a great lake on a steep, inaccessible shore. I look out across the clear sky. It has darkened to a lovely midnight blue.
It is my turn to work the stove, and once I have the blue flame melting ice, I stare into a glacier wilderness. The Peters Glacier flows down and gives in to the darkening greens and browns of tundra that march north into the Alaskan interior. I can’t identify anything human anywhere. The climbers visible earlier have moved on. We are supremely isolated. I find this strangely comforting. Not long ago, I would have been profoundly discomfited by this solitude. Fears are overcome incrementally. Increasing skill, ambition and experience has eroded my fear of exposure and isolation. Experience has dispelled my existential fear of this universe of rock and ice and snow.
But then I look down, and it hits me that we are 4,000 feet up a previously unexplored, unclimbed wall on North America’s highest peak. I close my eyes and take a deep breath against my building anxiety and look up. Break it down, I think. We have 2,000 feet of technical ice climbing above us, and maybe four hours of easier climbing beyond that to regain the West Buttress route. Rejoining the normal route will allow us to circle back down and around to the tents we left at the 11,000-foot camp.
There is no way now that we can retreat down our ascent route with the little equipment we have: two 165-foot climbing ropes, a half-dozen ice screws, and a small handful of rock-climbing hardware. Up is the only way home.
Neither of us has ever been out this far before. We’re living the science fiction of legendary climber Mugs Stump soloing the Cassin Ridge in a day; the ideal that Mark Twight and Scott Backes lived the year before while climbing and descending a new route on Mount Hunter in 44 hours. The stories we’ve read of men climbing the biggest mountains, even Everest, in marathon 30-plus hour days.
Thinking about the climbers who preceded us renews my confidence. I can see that without heavy packs we can go much farther than I ever imagined. By embracing one kind of risk – not being equipped to stop for more than a few hours, no matter what the situation – we are stretching the safety net of speed to another level. The less time we’re on the wall the less chance we have of being caught in a storm. With our crampons and ice tools we’re climbing this idea into action.
A pewter twilight filters our world; all is shades of gray and black. Darkness itself is held at bay by the recent summer solstice and our northern latitude. Our strategy relies on the never dark Alaskan night. Assuredly, we clip dulled crampons back onto boots, pack our few belongings into our small packs, and resume climbing.
The climbing now is easy, but dangerous. We take more risks to climb faster. We place one ice screw and clip the rope to it, simulclimbing together – both climbing at the same time with the rope stretched out between us and the screw serving to keep us from going to the bottom of the wall if one of us slips. Nevertheless, such a fall would likely result in a painful, slow demise. Broken legs and arms a more likely outcome than the quick finality of a ground-fall death. I wonder if it wouldn’t be safer simply to unrope. In my frazzled state the prospect seems too harrowing to suggest. With our partnership as a crutch we hobble up the last few hundred feet.
I’m in front, and having placed the last of our six ice screws, I drive my ice hammer solidly into the ice and clip our rope into it. I climb to the end of the rope and I place my one remaining ice tool and belay Eli by knotting a sling over the head of the axe, using the tool as the belay anchor.
Eli leads through wordlessly, glancing sideways at my ice-axe belay. He already has all the gear from cleaning the last pitch and there is no need to discuss, critique or dwell on risks already taken.
Trance-like, we move together up the wall; the features that we memorized from photographs morph into place and actual scale. A couloir that we thought would be two feet wide is 30 feet wide. Aspects we thought flush, angle sharply off to the side.
As soon as the angle relents, about 200 feet below the top of the Northwest Buttress, Eli stops. We’ve climbed the last several hundred feet without a running belay; just soloing while roped together. No shared anchor to arrest us as in simulclimbing, thinking we are only moments away from topping out. I shiver in the thick chill of the Arctic night. Eli kneels in the snow, bent over with stomach cramps from dehydration.
It is too cold to stop in the middle of the night and wait for the stove to cheer us. “Straighten up, man,” I admonish. “We can’t stay here.”
“I know. I know. Just give me a minute.”
I lie down on the hard snow, arms flopped to my sides, digesting my own pain. The cold seeps quickly in. I roll onto my stomach, press onto my hands and knees, and slowly stand up. “Come on,” I say, and we strike for the top.
The apex of the Father and Sons Wall is at 15,400 feet. From there the ridge crest curls a lazy design to Denali’s north summit, 4,000 feet above. The top looks close in the still, blue light of Alaskan midnight, but we know better. We are briefly tempted by the romance of climbing all the way to the summit. Our goal, however, has been to climb the wall, not necessarily to reach the summit. planning otherwise would have compromised our 20-pound packs. Eli and I stand at the top of the Father and Sons Wall at half-past midnight.
We stumble down through snowdrifts and crevasses, unaccustomed to the flatness. The glacier here is windblown and we walk across bare ice, jumping thinly veiled crevasses. Soon we start up the snow-laden northern slope of the West Buttress. We have 1,200 feet to ascend and it goes slowly. I pause every few steps to catch my breath, leaning against snow so deep it comes to my belly. I shovel and collapse the snow by hand and move up two steps. I switch leads with Eli. He does five steps.
The temperature drops further and an icy breeze trickles down from the upper mountain, numbing our faces. I work my jaw to keep my face from freezing; the skin feels wax-like and stiff. When we finally arrive at 16,200 feet we are on familiar ground, the normal route, and our descent. We walk past gently flapping tents while people snore peacefully inside. Our survival is assured. In a couple easy hours we are back in our own tents.
American Alpine Institute, Bellingham, Washington: September, 1995
Neither Eli nor I have seen our pictures in a magazine before. But now our photographs accompany the news of our new route, which we named First Born, in the pages of Climbing, Rock and Ice, and eventually the estimable American Alpine Journal. I am torn between excitement and dismay at the publicity.
“Those people don’t care. They don’t understand what we went through to do that climb.” I toss the magazine back into a pile at the climbing shop.
I need a new goal. I recall a potential route that Eli and I saw on our way to First Born: an unclimbed direct line on Denali’s Washburn Wall, which is accessed from the same approach we used for First Born. Having just completed my undergraduate ecology degree, I decide not to apply to a masters program and choose instead to spend the winter guiding in Ecuador, where I log time at altitude and bank most of my pay. Though I earn only $75 per day, it leaves me plenty of free time and allows me to build fitness and gain valuable experience at high altitude.
My college classmates write from their graduate school jobs with tales of endless titrations completed in science labs, of 80-hour weeks researching their professor’s theses. I slowly kick steps up 20,000-foot volcanoes and resent my lack of intellectual challenge. Knowing my goals are solely mine, I scoff at those who went to grad school, or took so-called real jobs. That is the ultimate sellout: to work for the man. To cast your only soul into a hell of cubicles and workstations and dollar bills. And if they don’t see this, they don’t deserve the chance to find out who they might become.
I am a punk in crampons. Living to climb. Climbing to live. A lucky rabbit, saved not by my own brilliance, but by the odd-chance that in Slovenia I had been shown the Wonderland trap door of climbing. I am sure that alpinism can reveal everything I need to know as a human being.
My boyhood friends turn detractors. They try to take me down with logic borrowed from their church of success. “What are you going to do when you’re old and your knees are shot? Are you saving for retirement?” I laugh at them, the laugh of the cornered villain who knows his escape. I will succeed because I must. Their slings and arrows are excuses for their failure to be brave enough, their failure to believe in themselves, their failure to commit to an unmapped future.
Their born-again indoctrination makes them blind to the benefits of process. I trade stock in the future for cash in hand. I equal their fervor in my admonitions that their notions of success are meaningless. I charge that they are motivated by expectations that are not their own; busy with empty dramas that belong only to them.
I have exorcised my own expectations and embraced life in the moment. The socialistic Slovenes showed me the way with their actions, their spirits, and their thoughts. They lived in a country with no future. Redemption, they taught, can be achieved only by showing great spirit, style, and fortitude.
That is how I see it. Time may soften my piety. Maybe I will gain a greater appreciation for teachers and scientists and taxi drivers. And perhaps alpinism will not be able to teach me everything that I need to know.
I have read all the books and know that none of the legendary climbers had done their first great climbs later than the age of 26. At 24, Reinhold Messner soloed the north face of Les Droites in eight hours, thereby revolutionizing ice climbing. Deep down I know that I have something great in me, something that will suit my strengths. Something alpine, icy, and committing.
To achieve it, I will need to commit everything to my art.
Washburn Wall, Denali, Alaska: June 20, 1996
By chance, my wife of seven months, Anne, and I are reunited at the 14,000-foot camp on Denali. It is her birthday but she’s too embarrassed to let anyone know, limiting our celebration to a hug and a kiss. I am descending from guiding a successful trip up the West Rib route. Anne is apprenticing as a guide on the West Buttress. Eli, my co-leader on the Rib trip, gracefully offers to continue down to base camp with the clients. Secretly I am overjoyed to be left here alone. I’ve kept my plans for a new route to myself. I have not told Anne.
Flexibility is one key to success in the Alaska Range. I plot a couple objectives: The new route I saw last year on the Washburn Wall or a fast solo of the Cassin Ridge. I scrounge a good stockpile of food and borrow a second ice tool. Anne’s group heads up to high camp. I say goodbye and begin recording cloud cover, barometric pressure, and wind direction in my journal.
After several days the weather seems to have acquired a pattern: clear and cold in the morning, breezy in the afternoon, squally and showery in the evening. I decide to go look at the new route: the northwest face of the West Buttress. Commonly known as the Washburn Wall, a gesture of respect to Bradford Washburn who explored, photographed, suggested, and climbed many of the mountain’s major routes.
Putting my climbing harness on over patched nylon pants, I leave the camp at 14,000 feet and jog down around Windy Corner in plastic boots and crampons. I carry only a water bottle, one extra pair of gloves, and a couple of energy bars. I meet with more than one admonishing glance from the heavily laden mountaineers plodding their way up. My own thoughts are equally reproachful. “There ain’t nothing light or fast about those guys.”
Forty minutes later, I veer off this well-worn path, take a deep breath, and follow the descent route Eli and I pioneered last year. Facing in toward the slope I down climb steep snow to an ice gully that after two hours deposits me at 10,000 feet on the Peters Glacier.
From there I can see 1,800 feet of 50-degree ice stretching to meet the steep granite rockband in the middle of the face. I take large bites off an energy bar and a few measured sips of water as I trace white streaks of what may be climbable ice cascading through the rock. Above that a web of gullies and ice slopes connect the remaining 4,000 feet in a simple, direct pattern.
I cruise up on soft, polished ice. No rope, no partner. Just two, three, sometimes four metal points holding me to the mountain. Occasional spindrift hisses harmlessly to my left as I weave along the edge of the icefield. I focus on the rhythm of the climbing. As I get higher the vastness of Denali looms large, blocking the sun. Into the shadow I climb.
Near the rockband I pause to look up with increasing frequency and concern. I stop, chop a small platform in the ice, and clip into my tools. My path has ended as quickly as it began. There is no ice where I had imagined the route would go. The bare rock is too steep, too blank, to climb alone.
I lead one of the first steep pitches of First Born on the Father and Sons Wall. I established three new routes on Denali: First Born in 1995, Beauty Is a Rare Thing in 1996, and Mascioli’s Pillar in 1997. ELI HELMUTH
The traverse to the right, over to the only existing route on the face, doesn’t look bad. That route was climbed a few years before by the veteran team of Phil Powers, Greg Collins, and Tom Walters and looks to be easily within my capabilities.
Allowing my disappointment to digest, I scan the wall above me, suddenly noticing a vertical flow of tan water ice camouflaged by the copper colored stone. It is not more than a 100 feet from where I stand. My heart beats faster as I nervously trace the undulations for several hundred feet to where it disappears over a bulge. I force myself to sit and study my options. For an hour I watch, but nothing falls down my newfound line.
As I move towards the icy corner I remind myself of the stakes: my life. Part of the beauty of soloing is that the risks are so high and so obvious. I whisper my promises. “Don’t climb up anything you can’t climb down. Listen to your intuition.”
With the first easy stick of the ice axe’s swing I scream, “Aaarghh.” I shout to banish doubt and to make sure I’m awake. A buzz of adrenaline lights me; I’ve never been more alive.
Each foot of altitude gained deepens my commitment. I have no rope with which to rappel or make a belay. No radio to call for help. One Denali guide, an old friend from years before, knows where I went today. I’m on a smooth smear of gray ice 200 feet into the rockband. The ice is barely a foot wide here and near vertical. I think of my sister’s wedding next week. I mustn’t ruin that with my funeral. Above me the ice widens and rolls back to 60 degrees before kicking up to vertical again and disappearing out of sight.
While climbing I talk to myself. “This kind of steep climbing can’t last on an alpine face.” And “the ice is incredible.” Farther up, “I could belay off of that ice tool.” As the runnel steepens I am forced to call upon my strength. I step a foot out left and place my crampons on a good square edge for balance. My self-talk continues. “Climb smart Steve. Technique. Relax and breathe. Climb smart Steve. Relax. Breathe.”
I look down at my feet to step up; the face is laid out below me. Fields of snow-streaked ice and bands of wet rock fall unbroken to the virgin-white glacier. Fear grips me and I see myself skidding down this ice, slamming into the rocks, and spinning out away from the mountain. Dead before I hit bottom.
The ice slips back from vertical. I scramble carefully into a small alcove where I can stand without fear that a small slip will kill me. Above to my left rises a large gully that steepens to where it is stacked with plates of loose, rotten rock. Three other ice smears run up the right side of the chimney, each white and nearly vertical. The first smear is less steep, the middle is the broadest, tallest, and steepest, and the highest is less steep still, but rocks pierce the thin ice.
I climb up the first ice flow, each step is a decision, the summation of time-tempered judgment. I feel vastly experienced, invincible. The smear rolls back and I pause. To the right a small icefield tapers off and ends in steep, blank, and impassable rock. Above, lower angled mixed rock and ice climbing offer a possible exit. A few body-lengths higher I pause again. Here I will have to either commit to steep drytooling or descend. Pick by careful pick I reverse the last 100 feet of climbing.
The highest flow is less steep and the mixed climbing required there looks easier than what I just retreated from. I scurry up to its base and make a few moves. Two body-lengths into it I test the rock by striking it with my hammer. The veneer of ice holding it in place gives way and a shower of stones sail past my feet. I step back down.
My remaining options are to climb the middle flow or to down climb the entire face. I’ve down climbed vertical and near-vertical ice many times on toprope to train for this possibility. By necessity I down climbed vertical water ice on lead once. If I climb this vertical pitch, and am later forced to down climb, it won’t be for practice, it will be for keeps. I focus my eyes, take three deep breaths, and swing an axe into the middle flow. The ice at the start is thin and close to vertical. I try my tools in several areas, testing the ice’s strength and thickness. Satisfied that it will support me without breaking, I step my right foot out, push against it in a stemming position, and strike high with my tools.
Each moment requires precise judgment. The consequence of a single erroneous decision is beyond contemplation. I employ every instinct, every sense. To that end I have ears to hear the staccato crunch of a well-placed crampon strike. Eyes to see the warm-blue of solid ice. Skin to feel whether the temperature may be creeping above the all-important mark of 32 degrees, or plunging below zero and into an inhuman zone in which only the mountain itself can exist.
The ice thickens at the top as it blends into easier, 55-degree ice that I follow to the left. I can see the easy gully now. From there I will still have 4,000 feet of climbing, but it will be simple compared to this, and I will be able to move quickly and make good time. But I’m not out of the woods yet.
Between me and salvation is a short section of mixed climbing. The rock is nearly vertical and blocky. But it’s not that far, 10 feet of horizontal climbing. I place one ice hammer solidly in the ice, as close to the rock as I can get it. The tool is bomber and will catch me if I fall in the first few feet. I reach to a large foothold, and kick it. Satisfied that it is solid I step onto it. Reaching out with my other tool I tap a few possible handholds. They all stay put. I drop the hammer so it hangs from my wrist and wrap my fingers around the best hold.
I reach the gully and let out a hoot. Looking back over what I just climbed, I feel satisfaction and immense joy. I glance at my watch and altimeter: 6:45 pm and right at 12,000 feet. Later I name the route Beauty Is a Rare Thing.
I wonder what is it, exactly, that I expect alpinism will teach me? Today, climbing has shown me a courageous, strong side of myself, a beautiful bravery. Other days I’ve seen pitiful weakness. I’ve watched myself crawl, belly-flat, across a mountainous landscape of fear. Climbing has shown me that I am all of these things: strong and weak, brave and cowardly, both immune to and at the mercy of the fear of death, all at the same time.
Denali from the west, showing the Father and Sons Wall on the left and the Washburn Wall on the right. BRADFORD WASHBURN
Risk is the fee to learn these lessons. The cost is not negotiable. It is a price that, for now, I pay gladly.