5 |
BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA |
When we awoke at our camp on the Kahiltna Glacier, menacing clouds had already encircled Mt. McKinley’s 20,320-foot summit, 2 vertical miles above us. By midmorning, when we started hauling a sled-load of supplies up the glacier, the cloud ceiling had plunged to 10,000 feet and snow was falling so thickly we inhaled dozens of huge flakes at every breath.
In May, the peak climbing season, the Kahiltna Glacier is so heavily traveled by climbers attempting the West Buttress route that a virtual trail leads to the summit. Skis, snowshoes, and boots pack a trench into the snow as climbers avoid trail-breaking by following in each other’s footsteps. Climbers further mark the trail with bamboo wands flagged with orange surveyor’s tape. Heavy storms, however, like the one now assaulting the mountain, knock down and bury the wands and fill in the trail. Landmarks vanish, and a whiteout ensues. Glacier, clouds, and mountain become indistinguishable, and all sense of direction vanishes. I’ve seen climbers in whiteouts step calmly off 5-foot-high ice cliffs, completely oblivious to the cliff’s existence until they planted a foot firmly in air.
Such a whiteout was quickly overtaking us. We had anticipated that the West Buttress would be crawling with the usual hordes of climbers, their packs sporting orange forests of wands, and so we had brought only a few wands of our own. Now we were regretting that decision. Only a few wands marked the trail behind us, and drifting snow was rapidly filling the track itself. Soon all trace of the route back to our tents would disappear. The tents themselves would be invisible from only 50 yards away. Continuing uphill now might make relocating our camp a few hours later difficult indeed.
I called a halt and urged my teammates to retreat for the day. Reluctantly they agreed. We cached our loads and bolted for camp.
Fortunately several teams behind us had beaten down the trail, so finding our tents turned out to be easy. My friends gave me glances that said, “Next time, don’t be such a wimp.” We settled into our sleeping bags to wait for better weather.
In the morning, when I slipped out of the tent, I saw a line of climbers appearing slowly, one by one, over a low ice hummock well off the correct route. Each step seemed to demand tremendous effort. Their haggard faces told of a sleepless night. Soon their story unfolded. All were from the University of Idaho. They had pushed a little higher than we had the day before, turned back a little later. The trail had vanished, buried by wind-driven fresh snow. When they reached the level glacier only a quarter of a mile from their tents, they lost their way completely. Tired, in failing light, they dug a huge snow cave and waited for dawn, without sleeping bags, foam pads, food, or water. The temperature dropped to 15 degrees.
This incident occurred in 1987, long before GPS units were readily available. It’s a textbook example of a situation where a GPS receiver would have been invaluable. Today I wouldn’t embark on a major mountaineering expedition without one.
Even in 1987, however, foresight could have prevented a very unpleasant night. On glaciers and big snowfields, where whiteouts can sweep in quickly, it’s often essential to create your own landmarks by placing wands every 180 feet or so. Climbers should always travel roped up on a big glacier as protection against falling into a crevasse. Most teams use a 150-foot rope. If the wands are spaced every 180 feet, the second climber can stay at a wand while the leader goes out to find the next. That way the team is never out of sight of a wand.
Once the Idaho climbers lost the trail, they had few options. Bivouacking in a snow cave, out of the wind, where they could share body heat, probably prevented any serious hypothermia. If they had been determined to keep searching, their best bet would probably have been to head back uphill, using a course taken off the map, until they reached the first steep rise—proof positive that they were above their tents. Then they could have zigzagged slowly up the slope, from one side of the glacier to the other, until they found one of the remaining wands. From there they could have measured a course on the map straight down the glacier. Then, after fanning out but remaining in sight of each other, they could have started searching, following the bearing downhill. The method certainly wouldn’t guarantee them finding their tents, but it would at least keep them moving and warm until morning.
Another glacier 8,500 miles away in Argentina put me in a predicament similar to the Idahoans’. The experience taught me a lot about navigating in the real world.
I was making a one-day, solo attempt on the summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere at 22,834 feet. I had started at 19,000 feet, at the foot of the Polish Glacier, at 2 a.m. Thirteen hours later I was still 500 feet below the summit. A flu virus had stolen my voice, my muscles had become lard, and a flotilla of black clouds was rolling in from the Pacific. I headed down.
And none too soon. By the time I reached the broad snow bowl at the foot of the glacier, it was nearly dark. A few wands materialized out of the gloom, left by some previous expedition. They seemed to be leading too far to the right, or south, but I followed them anyway. I knew that just beyond the foot of the glacier was the top of a large cliff. My camp lay below the cliff; I had walked around the north end of the cliff in the predawn darkness sixteen hours before. The clifftop would act as a catching feature, alerting me that I needed to turn left, to the north, to begin my end run around the cliff.
I walked off snow onto rock and stumbled ahead. Suddenly an abyss yawned before me out of the darkness and flying snow. I had reached the clifftop. The crux now was to find my way back through the complex, broken cliff bands that formed the north end of the cliff.
I began scrambling northward along the junction of snow and rock, thinking I was only minutes from my tent. But nothing looked familiar. The cliff shrank and ended, but now I confronted a talus field studded with outcrops and small cliff bands. In darkness and storm, dehydrated and exhausted, I could not find the way back to my tent. I croaked, “Hello, anybody there?” a couple of times but got no reply. I started thinking about digging a snow cave and waiting for dawn.
Then, barely audible over the wind, I heard a voice. I stumbled in that direction. A tent appeared, inhabited by some American climbers. They pointed me in the right direction at last, and I soon found my tent only 300 yards away. Too exhausted to eat the dinner my body desperately needed, I drank a quart of soup and collapsed into my bag.
I had made a serious mistake that had almost cost me a forced bivouac on a subzero night at 19,000 feet. I hadn’t built a cairn, or series of cairns, to guide me around the cliff. After all, the weather had been perfectly clear when I started, and I expected to be back before dark—the oft-repeated refrain of lost hikers and climbers everywhere. In situations like that, it’s best to plan for the worst case, not the best.
How “Aiming Off” Can Help You Find Your Way
But I had done some things right. I had used a technique called “aiming off.” Instead of aiming directly for the north end of the cliff, I had aimed to the right. Then, when I reached the edge of the glacier, I knew I had to turn left. If I had aimed directly for the cliff end and missed even slightly, I would have wasted even more time than I did wandering in the dark amidst the cliff bands and outcrops forming the cliff’s indistinct end, wondering whether to go right or left.
You can apply the same technique to following a course through the woods back to a road where you parked your car. It’s impossible to follow a course with complete accuracy. If you miss by even a couple hundred yards, your car may be hidden by a bend in the road and you won’t know which way to turn. So instead of aiming directly for the car, set your course about 10 degrees off. Then, when you hit the road, you know which way to turn.
The same principle applies in other situations: finding a bridge or ford across a creek, a snow bridge across a lengthy crevasse, a camp you’ve placed along the shore of a large lake. Road, creek, crevasse, and lakeshore are all “catching features”: They tell you unmistakably that it’s time to change course. Once you’ve made the turn, they can be considered handrails. You can follow them without further references to your map or compass. Thinking about those two concepts can often make your route-finding easier. Instead of heading cross-country for several miles, navigating through thick woods with a compass, it may well be easier to walk an extra quarter mile to a stream or lakeshore that parallels your course and serves as a handrail. It will almost certainly be easier to walk that far to a trail rather than bushwhack. Then look for a catching feature to tell you when to resume your original course. It might be a prominent side stream. It could also be a particular bearing on a prominent peak that you can see from the handrail.
It’s all too easy, when you’re traveling through the woods, to decide you’ve reached the feature you want to use as your handrail when you actually haven’t. In fact, it’s remarkably easy, if you’re careless or in a hurry, to make the map seem to fit what you’re looking at in any situation. Joe Kaelin and I demonstrated that perfectly in 1979 in the Canadian Rockies.
Admittedly the map was poor: a 1:250,000-scale topo on which 1 inch equaled 4 miles. And the clouds were hanging only a few hundred feet above the valley floor. Our intent was to cross the Sunwapta River and hike up Habel Creek to Wooley Shoulder. We made a crude estimate of the distance we should drive from Sunwapta Pass to reach the junction of Habel Creek and the Sunwapta River. When we’d driven about that far, we spotted a side creek and told the driver who had given us a lift to drop us off.
After three hours of hard work and 2,000 feet of elevation gain, the fog lifted from both the terrain and our minds. We realized we were in entirely the wrong drainage. Habel Creek intersected the Sunwapta a mile farther downriver. We descended almost 2,000 feet, reached the right creek, and climbed 3,000 feet to Wooley Shoulder.
Even with our small-scale map, we should have done much better. Habel Creek clearly occupied a deep valley much larger and much less precipitous than the one we’d so laboriously climbed. Any kind of careful map study would have told us very quickly that we were gaining elevation much too fast and were in much too shallow a ravine to be in the Habel Creek valley. More careful measurement of the distance from Sunwapta Pass to our drop-off point would also have helped us get started correctly.
A couple of years later, when I was a bit wiser, I encountered a similar situation on my trip to Aconcagua. Our map there had 500-meter contour intervals. Once again we were traveling along a major river, the Rio de las Vacas, and were looking for a side canyon occupied by a stream called the Relincho. The Relincho, we knew, drained the entire eastern side of Aconcagua, including the Polish Glacier. We passed several side canyons, including one the assistant guide thought for sure contained the Relincho. But none of the side canyons seemed to me big enough to contain the outflow of a major glacier. A few miles farther up the Vacas, we turned a corner and found ourselves gazing up a deep side valley at Aconcagua rising 2 vertical miles above us.
As my experience on Aconcagua and in Canada shows, simply identifying valleys and side canyons on the map, without considering scale, is not enough. You have to use your head too.
What to Do if You Think You’re Lost
Using your head is good advice as well for correcting route-finding mistakes that have left you temporarily confused, shall we say, about your location. If you’ve been identifying your position on the map periodically and kept track of the direction you’ve been traveling, you can’t really become lost. All you need to do is backtrack to your last known location and then think through all the possible errors you could have made after you first passed that location. Since there’s always a possibility that you will need to reverse course, for many reasons besides getting lost, you should glance over your shoulder frequently to memorize what your route looks like when you’re heading in the opposite direction.
If you’ve been following a course and think you should have reached your destination by now but haven’t, stop and analyze possible mistakes. Did you compensate for declination? Did you compensate in the right direction? Could you have overshot your destination? Or are you just moving more slowly than you thought, and it’s still ahead? Often it pays to go to a nearby clearing or bare-topped knoll. The clear view may help you identify landmarks. Whatever you do, don’t panic, and don’t blunder off in some hastily chosen direction, compounding your confusion.
Following a stream downhill is sometimes good advice, if you’re in a pretty civilized area well cut by roads. In real wilderness, however, you could find yourself walking a long, long way. In Canyonlands National Park, for example, following a stream downhill could take you to the Colorado River. No road parallels the river; there isn’t even a bridge across the river for a hundred miles.
If you’re absolutely convinced you cannot determine your location, and if you notified someone where you were going and when you expected to be back, your best bet is to stay put and wait for searchers to find you. Nearly all wild areas in this country are within the response area of some kind of search-and-rescue organization. You’ll make their job easier if you can move to a nearby location that’s easily visible from the air and the surrounding terrain—a ridgetop or some kind of clearing. Building a small fire—if you’re utterly convinced you can keep it under control—makes you easier to spot and will certainly keep you warmer inside and out.
But all this doom-and-gloom stuff should happen to the other guy, not to you, if you find your position on the map at the beginning of your trip, pinpoint your position periodically, and always know the direction you’re traveling. Sure, a GPS receiver is a great backup if you truly get lost, but that’s a subject for another chapter.