The Ledge (10 page)

There was only one problem: The job was in Houston, Texas.

I did not want to live in flat, humid Texas, and I didn’t want to move away from Gloria, but in the end the Shell opportunity was too great to reject. I accepted the position with an unsettling mixture of professional glee and personal dread.

Our loose plan was for me to go there at the summer’s end and
start work. I would fly often to see Gloria in Colorado, where she was a sales manager, and in few months we would decide if she should join me in Texas.

Before I left for Houston, Gloria and I embarked on a big tour of western national parks. In the Northwest, we stayed for several days at Mount Rainier. The snow-covered volcano loomed above our campsite.

One morning, we hiked a trail on the mountain’s southern flank to the Paradise Glacier ice cave. The ice tunnel burrowed under the glacier, and the oval entrance was thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, squashed by the massive weight of ice overlying the cave’s mouth. Having studied glacial geology, I knew this was a melt channel formed by a subglacial river. Although I tried convincing Gloria to join me, on the premise that no ice collapse was likely to happen during the few minutes that we would be in the cave, she refused to enter. Nervous but excited to actually experience such a rare geologic cavern, I scampered thirty feet inside the tunnel.

My eyes took a minute to adjust to the dark, but soon I could see the smooth, scalloped ice walls, dripping with meltwater. I stuck my hand out and caught a few frigid drops. Squatting, I poked a finger at the contact line where the underside of the glacier met the bedrock beneath. This basal interface is precisely where glaciers grind solid rock into a fine grit called glacial flour. Imagining the weight of all that ice above me and the titanic power required to pulverize bedrock, I suddenly felt small before such unstoppable forces of nature.

Crack!
A stone clattered onto the floor, somewhere deeper in the cave. My head snapped up and I stared into the darkness, surrounded by the steady gurgle of water flowing among the broken cobbles littering the ice cave’s floor. All this water had once been snow farther up the mountain. Growing unease urged me from the cavern.

I tilted my head back and stared up at the dark ceiling. The ice
surface undulated in water-smoothed waves, and a few glacier-entrained rocks remained frozen in the cave’s ceiling. Four feet to my right, a pumpkin-sized boulder hung down.

I should have a helmet on in here
.

“Jim, come out of there,” Gloria called from outside the cave. When I turned toward her voice, light pouring through the rough-hewn entrance nearly blinded me, yet I could make out her silhouette. Direct sunlight angling in illuminated a patch of the rock floor, marking the way out. I blinked while my eyes adjusted, then emerged from the gloomy ice room, back to Gloria.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Very cool, but scary. It’s dark and damp. It’s pretty creepy being underneath a glacier.”

A FEW WEEKS
later I was in Houston, miserable. The environmental job at Shell was great—everything I’d hoped for. But my personal life was nonexistent. When I tried to hike in a state park, the sun and the bugs drove me back. When I ran, I grew so nauseated from the heat that I sagged against a chain-link fence like a puking drunk. Gloria, my friends, and the mountains were all back in Colorado. I would have to make do with frequent Rocky Mountain visits attached to my many business trips. I settled into a pattern of flying to Denver every other Friday, and returning to Houston after forty-eight hours.

A month later, Gloria and I officially got engaged.

We agreed to a long-distance engagement so that I could finish out at least a year with Shell. We trudged through the next thirteen months, me flying to Denver about twenty times, and both of us traveling to Ohio twice to plan our wedding. I didn’t see Mike or my other Fort Collins friends much.

Finally, in October 1989, I drove my overloaded pickup out of the
Houston sprawl, heading northwest, back to Gloria and the mountains. We got married two weeks later in front of eighty friends and family members near Gloria’s Ohio hometown, and then settled into a new apartment in Fort Collins.

NOW THAT I
was back in Colorado working as an environmental consultant, I could climb once again with Mike. He would be away for weeks or months with Outward Bound; then I’d come home to hear some variation of the same message on my answering machine.

“Hello, Jim and Glo, this is Mike Price. I’m in town and over at my brother’s. Just wanted to say howdy and see if you wanted to drink a beer.”

Hunched over frosted mugs a few hours later, we’d get caught up, then make plans for a climb.

Over time, we journeyed together on rock, snow, and ice. Mike and I developed faith in each other’s abilities to climb well, to move safely, and, just as important, to extricate ourselves from trouble when it appeared. Each of us understood our own capabilities—and those of the other—and we gently spurred each other to strive harder. By urging me beyond my comfort range, and supporting me when I was out there, Mike helped me slowly push back the boundaries I used to define myself. This made me grow more capable, both on the rock and off.

With his higher skill level, I am not sure that I helped him improve much as a climber. But I was capable enough that he did not have to instruct me or watch me for mistakes. Spending eight months a year herding and fretting over his novice students wore on Mike. He once told me that he enjoyed climbing with me because he did not have to worry.

“Even when I can’t see you or hear you,” he told me, “I know you’ll do the right thing and make it through.”

His extensive wilderness time also meant Mike was always in better climbing shape than I was. My career as a hydrogeologist kept me office-bound, and that left me with slightly lesser skills and conditioning than Mike. That didn’t seem to bother him, though, so I tried not to let it bother me. Because I could not be as good a climber as Mike, I worked hard to be a good partner. I carried my share of the weight, arrived prepared, and moved fast when my turn came. When things got scary or uncertain, I lightened the mood with silly comments or wisecracks.

One day, a rattlesnake surprised Mike on a trail west of Fort Collins, and he instinctively leapt off the path and bounded through scrub oaks to safety.

“What do you call that move—the Oklahoma Two-Step?” I asked playfully.

Later, though, he got even. When I jammed my fist into a three-inch-wide crack while I was leading on another climb, I sensed movement in the fissure, then peered in to see two onyx eyes and folded black wings near my hand—a bat. I let loose a startled yelp and scurried across the rock to get away. Mike laughed so hard he had to sit on a boulder to compose himself.

On the drives and trail approaches we talked and joked. We always aimed for a full day of climbing, but delays and rainouts didn’t really matter because we had a good time regardless.

We climbed extensively on Lumpy Ridge’s granite spires in Rocky Mountain National Park. We scaled frozen waterfalls. And we skied in the pristine backcountry, whooping and hollering as we dropped down through lustrous powder fields in the shadow of the Continental Divide.

ONE WARM JULY
morning we headed to Lumpy Ridge for the third day that week, set on rock climbing in an area called the Bookend.
As Mike steered his midnight-blue pickup the last mile up the dirt approach road, I read aloud from the guidebook and pointed out landmarks to help us find the right cliff.

We pulled into the gravel parking lot, Mike glancing up at the crags while I intently studied the guidebook. Suddenly, the book slapped my forehead, the floorboard bucking and grinding beneath my feet as we slammed to a stop. Looking up at the cliff instead of out the windshield, Mike had driven right onto a basketball-sized boulder at the parking lot’s edge. Startled, I looked up, wide-eyed. Mike seized the moment.

“Well,” he drawled nonchalantly, “that oughta be close enough.”

We moved well together that day, swinging leads, gracefully flowing up the rock. A day later, determined to keep our momentum, we hit Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder.

The drive south to Boulder always provides a great view west over the mountains, and we noted a few puffy clouds looming on the horizon—the usual. After parking in Eldo, we hiked the short approach to Anthill Direct, a fine climb with steep rock and exhilarating exposure. The route goes up the biggest face in the canyon and requires a fairly complex descent.

Mike led the first two strenuous pitches. As I followed the second pitch, a hard wind picked up from the west, and the temperature plunged about fifteen degrees in minutes. Trying to hustle, Mike handed me the gear rack and I started leading the third pitch. As I traversed left, the wind screamed down the canyon and my confidence sputtered. While traversing, a good leader places rock gear in a crack to protect both climbers from a dangerous, swinging fall. While I struggled to set protection, the wind roared so loud that when I looked at Mike, just twenty feet to my right, I saw his mouth moving but heard no words over the din.

We were halfway up, with the hardest climbing behind us. The wandering nature of the rock face we’d already climbed made rappelling
off from there an uncertain prospect. We might wind up in the middle of the face, away from the crack system, stuck with no rappel anchor options.

Mike and I each looked up and down the cliff, quickly considering whether to push on or bail off. I pointed down to indicate the rappel option, and waggled an open hand to indicate the iffiness of bailing from there. With pulled-down eyebrows, Mike shook his head, telling me he concurred that rappelling was a bad choice. I pointed my right forefinger up and lifted my eyebrows. With a firm nod, Mike agreed: The way down was up.

The situation was deteriorating, so I wanted more rock protection before starting the next steep section; we couldn’t afford any mistakes.

I looked down at my right hip to select another piece. Just then the wind shifted, and a huge gust blew straight up the cliff. The webbing slings around my neck floated as if lifted by invisible puppet strings, and the updraft flipped the full chalk bag on my right hip upside down. As gravity dumped out my climber’s chalk, the wind racing up the cliff threw that white cloud into my face.

Powder clogged my mouth, nose, and eyes. Clutching the handholds tighter, I spit and snorted and wiped my face on the shoulder of my T-shirt. I blinked but couldn’t see much, and my confidence vanished. Groping blindly below me, I down-climbed, leaving the gear in place. Mike fed me slack through the protection I had placed, and I worked my way back to him.

I leaned in close and said, “If I keep leading, I might fall. You’d better take it.”

Mike looked annoyed. He understood that I’d been shaken, but he didn’t like it that I’d turned back. The rope work necessary to swap the lead around wasted more precious time.

In the minutes it took us to get reorganized, the sky darkened. With rock walls blocking our view westward, we had not been able
to see the storm approaching—a fairly common situation on Front Range climbs. Now it was right on us. With my top piece protecting him, Mike flew across to my high point, then continued leading where I’d left off. I fed rope out, wiped chalk from my face, and watched the storm build overhead.

In awe, I saw the sky get so dark that the streetlights in the lower canyon blinked on. Big, heavy raindrops splattered onto my arms—not good. We were about to get clobbered. About half the rope had paid out, and Mike’s pace slowed as rain slickened the rock. The rope twitched out more slowly, then stopped.

Come on Mike. Find a belay
.

Squinting up into the driving rain, trying vainly to spot Mike, I saw rivulets of water rushing down the rock face.

Crap—how am I going to climb?

The rope pulled, then began racing out. I hustled to maintain a belay until I was sure Mike was no longer climbing but just yarding in rope. I fed Mike slack as fast as I could. As we neared the end, I worked the rope loop clear of my belay device. Then the rope yanked hard at my waist and I held my breath, feeling the cord for more tugs.
Yank, yank. That makes three—he’s got me on belay
.

I removed the anchor pieces, confident that though we could not speak to each other, Mike’s pace and signals meant he was ready for me to climb. Though sure he could not hear me over the pounding rain, out of habit I yelled, “Climbing!”

Already chagrined that I had relinquished the lead to Mike, I was determined not to come up short again. I had to climb fast and well, even though the route was growing more difficult with every raindrop.

Slightly crazed with fear, I pulled hard on whatever I slapped my hand on. Mike knew that it was desperate on the face, so he kept the rope tight. This was no longer about clean or stylish climbing; this was a rushed race for safety, and maybe even survival.

Taking out Mike’s protection, I didn’t waste the few seconds needed to clip it to my gear rack. I just let it pile up on the rope in a dangling jumble. When I cleared a steep section, the rock angle eased. But horror gripped me—water was pouring down the rock slab in a broad sheet. It was as if someone fifty feet above were soaking the stone face with a full-force garden hose. To touch the rock I had to put my hand into the moving veneer of runoff. My forearm presented a new pathway for the rushing water. Some of it rooster-tailed off my elbow, and the rest gushed into my armpit.

I pawed at the biggest holds and pulled. My smooth-soled rock shoes sometimes skated off the shimmering face as I struggled for a foothold. Finally, I saw Mike twenty feet higher.

Almost there. Don’t blow it
.

I slowed a bit to reduce the chance of a mistake. By making it safely up the slippery pitch in the lashing rainstorm, I had redeemed myself. Stepping onto our sloping belay ledge, I longed to clip into a nice strong anchor, but there wasn’t one. Mike had been forced to belay from a sling draped over a mushroom-shaped rock protrusion the size of a saucepan. There were no good cracks, so he’d had to make do.