The Ledge (13 page)

“You’re on belay now,” I shout.

“Thanks.”

“You wanna keep going or you wanna come down?” I yell.

“I better come down,” Mike hollers back.

A few minutes later, we decide to back off this section of the ridge. We’ve lost an hour, and we’ll have to retreat and work our way around the ridge and approach it from the distant western side. Losing some more time, though, is better than risking a big fall. It is probably somewhere in that frozen, muddy hillside that we break a tooth off the tip of one of the ice screws. We still have seven screws, but now only six are fully functional.

IT IS ALREADY
late morning, and we feel a twinge of disappointment about the wasted time as we cut downhill, around the toe of the ridge, and ascend the western side of Liberty Ridge, heading for a spot called Thumb Rock.

The snow is better on this shady side of the ridge, and we simul-climb again, sinking screws into the occasional ice patch for protection, moving in tandem as we zigzag our way up, swapping the lead.

The afternoon sun bakes the mountain, and the heat sometimes causes rocks to break free from the ice and tumble. I am out front when I hear a clatter above me. Climbers normally keep their helmets pointed uphill rather than risk a rock in the face, but I sense that it is still far away, so I raise my forehead and see a basketball-sized rock hurtling down the mountainside.

“Rock,” I shout. And then, as it bounds crazily toward Mike: “Scramble right, scramble right.”

Mike scampers sideways and the rock bounces over the rope between us, then crashes out of sight. We start climbing again. A little later, Mike, out front, stops suddenly.

“My foot’s in a small crevasse,” he says.

I take two steps downhill to stretch the slack out of the rope, drop onto my belly, dig my ice ax into the glacier surface to anchor us, and yell, “Go ahead.” Mike pulls his foot free. The crevasse isn’t big—maybe two feet across and thirty feet deep, hidden beneath a snow bridge. Mike steps across it easily, and I follow.

But it’s a reminder that we are crossing ice sheets pocked with thousands of cracks—some obvious and open, some covered by snow bridges that conceal the danger. As we climb, we constantly scan the glacier’s surface, looking for a swale, or a telltale sprinkling of dust settled in a low spot—clues to a sinking snow bridge.

Early in the afternoon, we reach Thumb Rock, where a lot of climbers attempting the Liberty Ridge route camp on their second night. Mike and I survey the clear sky and decide to push on. We still have seven hours of daylight.

I lead us up a short, steep gully during the hottest part of the day. The sun-softened snow sucks at our feet with each step. It’s like walking in shin-deep oatmeal, and the risk of an avalanche is growing. We need the temperature to drop and the snow to freeze up again, so we stop and wait.

The stove thrums like a miniature jet engine, reducing chunks of ice to water, and we share soup and tea, resting for a couple of hours. At this point, high on the protective shoulder of Liberty Ridge, we are safe, but close enough to the Willis Wall to watch an incredible series of debris falls. We stare, mesmerized, at the explosions of falling ice, some so powerful that they trigger secondary avalanches, which rumble and roar as they rain down the lower wall. Balancing a half-full soup bowl on my knee, I watch a black boulder—who knows at this distance if it is the size of a refrigerator, a van, or a house—bounce off a ledge and plummet 500 feet before crashing onto the Carbon Glacier far below us.

As the sun swings around to the western side of Rainier, the mountaintop puts us into shadow and the temperature drops.
The snow firms up, and by around five o’clock we are moving again, starting a sort of second shift to the day.

We cross a rock buttress, and I place the spring-loaded, retractable cams into a rotten crack as I lead. Peering around a corner, I’m surprised by a sheet of ice more than 500 feet wide, stretched as far up as I can see. That ice sheet lies at about forty-five degrees, with a few steeper sections. It is the shimmering slope we’d seen from the campground the first night.

“Holy smokes,” I say, staring up.

“What?” Mike asks from below me.

“You’ll see when you get here,” I say.

A few minutes later Mike reaches me, and his eyebrows arch up above his big round sunglasses.

“Whoa,” he says, surveying the ice field. “Maybe three pitches.”

“Four to five,” I guess as we consider the number of rope lengths it will take us to get to the top.

“You’re crazy,” Mike says. “It isn’t that long.”

It’s about seven o’clock, and there’s not a flat spot anywhere to camp on, so we keep going, fighting the heavy packs, which shift back and forth. There’ll be no simul-climbing here—a fall could mean a sickening slide before a deadly 2,500-foot plunge over the shoulder of the Willis Wall, like those boulders we watched earlier. I shake the unsettling image from my mind and double-check my belay station—two ice screws on an equalized sling, backed up by a deeply driven ice ax. We have no choice but to belay every pitch, a time-consuming endeavor. I feed the rope as Mike heads up the ice slab, a tool in each hand, placing the occasional ice screw for protection. After he reaches the end of the rope, he sets an anchor and slowly pulls the lifeline back in as I climb to him.

I lead the next pitch. It is hard glaze ice, and my crampons and picks bite into it solidly. About every thirty feet, I look for a low-angled ramp to stand on while I crank in an ice screw, hooking the
pick of my hammer through the screw’s eyehole and using the ice tool as a lever. It is awkward and tiring work. After clipping our rope to the screw with two carabiners and a nylon sling, I feel my tight shoulders relax and my heart rate slow a bit. I’m safer now, the potential fall shorter. I catch my breath, then resume leading.

Around eight-thirty, I look up and, for an instant, don’t believe what I’m seeing: a single climber with no rope making his way down toward us. He moves slowly, backing down the steep, frozen mountainside, kicking in his crampons and swinging his axes, one at a time.

As he draws closer, I move about three feet to one side. I am afraid that if the guy falls, he might slide down and knock me over like a bowling pin.

“Hi, how’s it going?” he asks after reaching me.

“Good,” I answer. “How about you?”

“Tired.”

“Where you coming from?” I ask.

“The top.”

“The top of the mountain?”

“No, just the top of Liberty Cap.”

“Where’s your partner?” I ask.

“Well, I don’t have one,” he says in a scratchy voice. “He was gonna come with me but he got sick and he couldn’t, so I’m soloing.”

“How much more of this water ice?” I ask, pointing at the slope above us.

“A thousand feet,” he replies. I don’t believe him.

“I soloed up from Thumb Rock this morning, and I’m going back tonight. If you fall on this, you go all the way to the bottom of the ice slab, and you’d go right over the Willis Wall,” he says, giggling.

“Yeah,” I answer, “I guess you would.” This guy seems wacko.

“You’ll never reach the top before dark,” he says.

He must be wrong, I think. But what if he’s right and we’re still on this ice slope when night catches us? I feel a surge of anxiety. He heads down, and I continue the pitch.

That’s the thing about meeting someone going in the other direction. It can be invigorating: You’re almost there. Or depressing: You’ve got a long way to go.

As he passes Mike below me, they exchange a few words, but there’s no time for chitchat. Darkness is coming fast, and we are in a race. As I climb, I continually scout the terrain, trying to memorize it before we lose the light, searching for a place to sleep. Over to my right, I see the tops of some big rocks, suggesting the edge of the ice and maybe a flat area—our best chance to find a spot for the night. Otherwise, we’ll have to lead more ice in the dark—a bad option. I set a quick anchor and belay Mike up.

“Why’d you stop?” Mike asks as he reaches me, seemingly perturbed. “We still had slack.”

“I think there’s a flat spot over there,” I tell him.

It is so dark by now that we dig into our packs for our headlamps.

“Well, where is it?” Mike asks.

“It’s off to the right,” I say. “About seventy-five feet out.”

I settle in to belay, using ice screws and my tools as anchors.

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Mike says, flicking on his headlamp and heading into the darkness. As I feed out the rope, the light bounces off the ice. He moves in the middle of the glow, a ghostly image in a world of ice, cold, and blackness. I turn off my headlamp to save the batteries, and when the darkness closes in on me, fear rises in my gut.

As Mike angles farther away, it gets harder to see his light. Then
it disappears behind an ice bulge. Two minutes go by. Then five. Then ten. The rope twitches a few inches, then stops. I mutter aloud, “Come on, Michael, find us something.”

Now I know I’m anxious—I call him Michael only when the situation gets really serious.

“I got it,” Mike finally shouts from somewhere off in the dark, and I breathe easier. We’re going to be all right. After Mike pulls the rope tight, I traverse across the ice toward him, pulling out the screws as I move. Finally there, I see that the spot isn’t great; the ice-and-rock shelf, about the size of a picnic table, tilts downhill. There’s no flat place to set up the stove, and we’ll have to sleep in our harnesses, roped to ice screws. But it will do.

It is eleven
P.M.
, and exhaustion overwhelms us as we crawl uncomfortably into our sleeping bags, our rope ends leading out of the bags, back to the anchor screws. Through the night, we fight a constant battle, creeping down the sloped ice ledge to the ends of our anchor slings, awakening, then worming back up the hill in our sleeping bags and resting, fitfully, a little more.

I OPEN MY
eyes in the early morning light. Below me, to my right, is the ice field we’d come up. Sunrise colors reflect off the slick surface for 500 feet below me, until the ice slab plunges off over the shoulder of the Willis Wall. It is a precarious place to awaken.

“Whoa,” Mike says just then, and for a moment I assume we’re both looking at the same stunning thing.

Then I turn and see that Mike is actually staring in the opposite direction. I wiggle over to him, the nylon of my sleeping bag scratching on the rocks, and suck in a sharp breath. We are looking right down the Liberty Wall, with 2,500 vertical feet between us and the glacier we stood on yesterday afternoon.

“Holy smokes,” I say.

In the dark of last night, we’d stumbled onto this almost-flat spot just a few feet from the sheer drop-off down the wall. We are just below the Black Pyramid rock formation.

“Man,” I say, “I’ve bivouacked out a little bit, but I’ve never bivied anywhere like this.”

“I’ve bivied out a hundred nights,” Mike answers, “and I’ve never bivied like this—I don’t even know anyone who has.”

Our nerves jingle and our muscles ache. Even in the daylight, there is still no good place to put the stove, so we carefully pack up and resume the climb, headachy and dehydrated, our water bottles nearly empty.

Mike leads first, then me. We swap the lead a couple more times, moving like molasses, hunger racking us. By ten
A.M.
, we are out of water. We battle altitude and thirst, feeling as if we have hangovers, as if our legs and packs have doubled in weight.

Late in the morning, after crossing a badly crevassed area, we reach easier ground, light the stove, and melt ice. We eat, replenishing our bodies, and fill our water bottles. We’re at about 13,300 feet, roughly 800 feet below the Liberty Cap.

We rest awhile, and then start up again. Mike takes the lead, kicking steps in the knee-deep snow. I lead for a short while, but I am so weakened by the altitude that I am painfully slow. Mike volunteers to take the front again. Out of guilt, I protest, but Mike correctly points out that we’ll be faster if he just keeps leading. Chagrined, I bring up the rear, promising myself that whatever it takes, I will not make Mike wait on me. I force myself to match his pace.

Finally, we approach the last steep section, topped by a dead-vertical ice wall that is 40 feet high in places. Mike finds a section where the wall is maybe 20 feet high, swings his tools and kicks his crampons, and starts up, moving smoothly. He reaches the top, pulls himself up and over, onto solid ground. Still belaying him from
below, I see handfuls of ice chips fly over the edge as Mike chops out the next belay spot.

The rope snaps tight, and I climb, my nose pressed against the steep ice as I struggle up. I reach the top, sink one of my picks, then the other, pull myself up, get a leg on top, and muscle my way over the lip.

“Welcome to the Liberty Cap,” Mike says, a big grin breaking across his tanned face.

Too tired to respond, I bend over my ax and pant like a dog on a one-hundred-degree day. All the tough terrain is behind us—ahead is easy snow climbing to the summit.

I am finally feeling better, and at the same time Mike starts deteriorating, the toll of leading for so long wearing on him.

“Sorry, man,” Mike says as we’re getting ready to head across the next section. “I just can’t kick steps anymore.”

“No problem, amigo,” I say. “You carried the ball for a while. Now it’s my turn.”

I’m glad that I am able to rally and lead again. We grind our way to the highest point on the Liberty Cap, at 14,112 feet. We snap a few pictures, eat a little, then start moving down the east side of the cap. Mike says he really feels cruddy—light-headed, ready to puke—so we move slowly. He grows quieter than usual, and when I don’t hear a witty comment out of him for over an hour, I know he is hurting. Finally, we reach the flat saddle between Liberty Cap and the summit and knock off for the day.

We briefly consider going to summit and sleeping on top—the weather is so beautiful. But Mike just doesn’t have it in him right now.

He sits on his pack while I jab the handle of my ice ax into the snow around us, feeling, making sure we aren’t over a hidden crevasse. I pound two shovel-shaped snow flukes into the glacier, tie us to them, and settle in even as the sun still lingers in the western sky.