Chapter 14

The three of them stood at the top of the cliff.

“You’ve been training with ropes?” Jeremy said, handing them harnesses.

“Yes, for three months,” her father said. He’d made Kendal go rock climbing at a gym every Sunday. It took her a dozen times to finally make it to the top, but she had slowly gotten stronger and faster and her arms stopped shaking halfway up.

“Good,” Jeremy said. “We won’t be scaling any cliffs, but like I said, we need to be prepared. So I am going to teach you what to do if you need to descend in an emergency and there is nothing to secure your rope. This is the deadman anchor I mentioned before.”

Jeremy got down on his knees and began to dig in the snow as if he was digging a small grave.

“You have to dig deep, at least two feet,” he continued. “If it’s an emergency, you’ll likely want to rush this part, but fight the urge. The cleaner the walls, the deeper the trench, the stronger the anchor.”

He signaled Kendal and her father to start digging their own trenches.

“Not deep enough,” Jeremy said, looking down at Kendal’s trench. “You can’t take shortcuts on this. You have to be sure it is deep enough.”

She dug deeper and made sure that it was at least two feet wide.

Jeremy continued, “Place your ax into the trench and create a sling with the rope. If you don’t have an ax, you can stuff a sack with snow.”

He placed his ice ax in the hole and signaled Kendal and her father to do the same.

They all stood over their trenches and then Jeremy showed them how to fill them in.

“Starting from the back of the trench, firmly stomp the snow down. Pack the snow good and hard until you have a large block of flat, well-compacted snow all around the anchor. Then give it a couple more stomps just for good measure. You have to be sure that it will stay in place, that it will hold your weight as you descend over the edge.”

Then Jeremy clipped himself to the rope and went over the edge of the small cliff, proving that it would hold.

“Do you trust your deadman?” he yelled up at Kendal and her father.

This time, even her dad looked uncertain.