The Ledge (18 page)

I scratch away some more, and get down to my thighs. Mike is crammed in next to me, rope and gear are tangled all around us, and I’m so oppressively confined I feel like I might completely lose it.

I try to push free again. Nothing. I try yanking my left foot free, but all I manage to do is hyperextend my knee, causing a grotesque stab of pain.

I resume digging, and as I move the snow around, I realize that Mike has slid away from me a little. I don’t want him to slip off our snow pile, so I grab the back of his jacket with one hand. His chest is squishing me against the left ice wall, and I know that digging myself out would be easier if I could sit him up for a minute. I stop and think about it. Part of me is worried about aggravating what I am sure is a serious spinal injury. Another part of me admits that any such worry is moot now.

“He’s gone, and it’s not going to hurt anymore,” I mutter to myself sadly.

So I push him upright, which takes a lot of his weight off me and gives me more room to move. I clutch a handful of his jacket in my right hand while I dig with my left, and after a couple of minutes I manage to get my left foot free. The increased freedom is intoxicating, and in a rush I try yanking my right foot out. I feel my knee strain, so I stop pulling and dig some more.

I switch hands and hold Mike up with my left hand and dig with my right. Once I excavate to my calf, the weight on my lower leg lessens, and suddenly I can pull my right foot out of the snow. Elated, I watch my boot emerge from the hole, and relief washes over me. I’m out.

I lay Mike back down. Now that I am free and poised right above him, I realize that I’m in a better position to perform CPR. Somehow, I think, it will all be magically different this time, even though it’s been five or ten minutes since I stopped.

I hunch over Mike, resting on one foot and one knee. With my fingers interlaced and both arms straight, I start giving strong compressions. I pause after every few pushes and blow air into his mouth. Nothing changes, but I continue, hoping for a miracle.

I keep going, though the work tires me. My calm, logical inner voice urges me to stop.

“Look at the medical signs,” I softly say to myself.

Finally, I persuade myself to stop. Stopping the second time is harder. I know for certain that I will not try again. Mike is gone.

I lay my head down on Mike’s chest again, bewildered, unable to comprehend what has happened.

KNEELING OVER MIKE
, I stare at his rumpled jacket, unsure of what to do. A question rings loudly in my mind:
Where are we?

I stand tentatively to look around. The crevasse walls are about two feet apart here, and they rise high above us on either side. How far, I’m not yet sure. I know on every level that I am in a desperate situation.

Leaning to the right, I stare over the drop-off behind Mike’s head. I see the crevasse disappear into nothingness dozens of feet below us, and it’s as if we’re on a snow pile maybe seven feet long that holds us aloft between the ice walls. Mike’s feet dangle off the far end.

I look laterally along the crevasse’s length, hoping there is a way to simply walk out the end of it, but it stretches for around a hundred feet in the up-mountain direction, then vanishes into darkness. I turn the other way, down the mountain: After about two hundred feet, the crevasse shows no signs of ending.

Maybe twenty to thirty minutes have passed since I took that awful step on the glacier’s surface and the snow beneath my feet collapsed. I know I have to look up and see how far in we are, but I’m scared. After stalling for a moment, I gather the courage and raise my head, determined to get a firm physical understanding of just where we are trapped. All those summers working with my father’s painting crew, estimating building heights and calculating the rigging we’d need, come back to me.

My eyes travel up the frozen walls, first dark gray, then dark blue, then bluish white near the top, reflecting splotches of light. I
figure it is almost eighty feet up to the sunlight flaring through the hole we punched in the snow bridge. The walls above me climb up at about eighty degrees until the crevasse is eight feet wide; then the ice walls go dead vertical; and then, higher up, they close back in toward each other in an overhang.

Oh my God
.

The full depth of our predicament settles on me like a great weight.

I stand awestruck, staring up at the underside of the snow bridge that spans the crevasse. In places, the frozen veil is so thin I can see light filtering right through it. Being way down in this dangerous dark hole, it is as if I am looking out from the belly of a beast, its jagged white teeth interlocking above me.

“Oh, we’re in trouble,” I hear myself say out loud. “We’re in big, big trouble.”

STUNNED BY THE
overhanging walls arching above us, I look beyond the edge of our snow pile. If we’re on the bottom of the crevasse, there should be a snowy floor just below us instead of that black drop-off I see. I’m confused. What did we land on? Why is there so much dark space beneath us?

I kneel down and scan beneath our perch, and it’s just as if I’m on a platform, bent over and peering underneath it: We’re on a ledge, and there’s nothing below us but frigid air. As I stare at the ledge’s underbelly, I realize that our perch is composed of my green Gregory backpack jammed against an ice slab the size of a coffee table. The ice slab must have fallen down here long ago and lodged, leaving a gap just about the size of my pack. When I plummeted down here, pack first, I landed right on that narrow gap. In essence, my backpack corked between the crevasse wall and the ice slab. If
the slab hadn’t been there, or had been a different size, or I had fallen a few feet to either side, the alignment of pack and ice slab could not have happened. Instead, I would have plunged down another five or ten feet, until I corked, permanently wedged between the unforgiving crevasse walls.

I sit upright, stunned as I realize how lucky my landing had been. It’s hard to believe what I have just seen, so I bend back down to look at the ledge’s underbelly again. The shelf is partially supported by snow crammed in between my pack and the ice slab. At the far end of the snowy ledge, Mike’s boots dangle down into space. It hits me that Mike and I are precariously perched on a makeshift platform of unknown strength and longevity. If anything gives way, we’ll plummet deeper into the narrow crevasse—something I’m sure I won’t survive. We need an anchor, quick.

Mike and I always carry enough climbing gear on our hips to set an emergency anchor. An ice screw, snow fluke, rescue pulley, carabiners, and slings always dangle from my waist, and from his. I stand up, unclip an ice screw from my harness, and grab Mike’s ice hammer—the only tool visible in the jumble of gear around us—and start pounding the screw into the wall. The blows echo dully in the cavern, but after a few swings it’s set deep enough for the teeth to grab. Then I stick the tip of the hammer’s pick into the eye of the screw and use the hammer as a giant lever, twisting the metal ice screw deep into the concrete-hard ice. The screw screeches with each twist, but after a few minutes it’s well set. I fish around and find my end of the rope and tie a figure eight on a bight into it, snap a locking carabiner onto the screw head, and clip into the anchor. I’m safe.

I fumble around some more, looking for Mike’s end of the rope, and once I find it I tie a similar knot and clip Mike in secure with two biners. We are both tied into the same screw.

That screw will keep us from sliding deeper into the crevasse if
the snow ledge gives way. It will give me a chance to save myself, and this way I won’t lose Mike’s body deeper in the slot. He’s gone, but I still have to watch out for him. We’re still partners.

I’ve taken a first, tentative step by anchoring us. It feels good to have grabbed some tiny bit of control in this impossible situation.

Hardly believing that this snow shelf is really as precarious as it seems, I unzip the one pocket on my pack that’s accessible, and find my red-handled jackknife and headlamp.

When I snap on the lamp, its beam cuts through the darkness, and for the first time, I can truly see what we are up against.

Below me, the lower reaches of the crevasse come into view. Thirty or forty feet down, the walls converge to within a few inches of each other. I can’t see the bottom. From the glacier’s surface eighty feet above, down past me, to as deep as I can see, the total crevasse depth is about 120 feet. Sensing that yawning chasm below us, I realize I can’t take any chances, so I reach for another ice screw on Mike’s harness. After I beat and crank it into the wall, I clip us both to it as a backup. If I am to have any prospect of getting out of here, I can’t make any mistakes.

As I look down, I realize we could lose all the gear, so I tie both packs into the screws, too. This makes me consider the loose gear on and in the snow pile that is our ledge. I dig around, recovering a few stray items, and carefully clip them all to me or the ice screw. I’m going to need every piece of gear we’ve got to survive this—dropping anything deeper into the crevasse isn’t an option.

Looking up to the sunlight—to the surface—again, I have no idea what to do. The only thing that comes to mind is to yell for help.

“Help! Help!”

My shouts echo around the slot, unsettling me. I hear the fear in my own voice, and it loudly demonstrates just how scared I really am.

Yelling isn’t doing any good. Start taking care of yourself
.

Meltwater drips constantly from the sun-baked snow bridge above me. I’m already soaked.

I struggle to organize my thoughts: Put warm clothes on. Strap on your crampons. Yell for help. Don’t yell for help. Get in the sleeping bag. Clip into the ice screw again. Put on more clothes. Eat. Check on Mike. Don’t stumble off the ledge. Look for an ax. Jam another screw into the wall. Scream for help some more. Blow your whistle. Find your helmet. Drink.

“Hypothermia,” I hear myself say aloud.

It’s a sign, I figure, that the intuitive side of my brain has identified the primary concern I must deal with now. I look down. Mike’s pile jacket sticks out of his pack.

“I’m not wearing that,” I say, instinctively recoiling at the thought of putting on my dead partner’s coat. “I’ll put on my own clothes.”

I’m standing on snow and partially on top of my pack. Reaching down, I grab the pack’s handle-like haul loop between the shoulder straps. I give it a strong upward tug. Bad move—I feel snow shift beneath my feet, and a chunk of our ledge calves off. Our tiny, suspended island of comparative safety just shrank.

Stop! Stupid!

It is a dangerous reminder that my pack is not just crammed into the snow; rather, it’s a key structural underpinning that holds our weak snow ledge together. If I had succeeded in pulling the pack up, the ledge would have collapsed and left me, Mike, and the gear hanging in space from the ice screws.

I drop the pack strap as though it’s electrified. One moment’s inattention almost made everything much worse. Now what?

I have to get to my clothes and my other gear, but I can’t pull out the pack. From the top side, I can’t reach the pack’s main compartment, so I decide to cut through the pack to get at my stuff.

I fold open the jackknife, kneel down, and poke the knife tip into the pack’s taut side. The blade easily slits through the forest green nylon. It’s almost as if I’m outside my own body, watching someone else. I realize how deadly serious this is.

Working carefully, I try not to drop anything. I pull out my heavy expedition jacket, but I can’t safely grab my fuzzy pile pullover—tugging on it, I fear, will cause my pack to collapse and our perch to fall away. I look again at Mike’s blue Patagonia pile sweater, crumpled in the snow, and I momentarily hesitate to put it on. Recognizing I need all the warmth I can get, I carefully peel off the sopping-wet Gore-Tex jacket I’ve been wearing, pull Mike’s sweater on, slither into my expedition jacket, then wrestle my soggy shell jacket back on. For more warmth, I yank my red pile Marmot hat onto my head.

I already have on two pairs of pants: a polypro pair underneath and a Gore-Tex shell on top. I want another layer, so I reach carefully into my flayed-open pack and work a pair of pile pants free. They should go on underneath the shell pants I’m already wearing, but that means first taking off my harness and disconnecting myself from our anchor. No way am I doing that. I’ll just put the bulky pile pants on over my shell and harness. I undo the side zippers so the legs will fit easily over my boots. I step into them with little trouble, but for some reason I can’t get the pile pants zipped up.

My hands shake.

Breathing slowly, I try to calm myself enough to zip up the pants. But I have to stop, unable to finish. I look down at my pack: The top where I cut it is wide open over the gaping crevasse, and I realize gear may fall out and plunge away from me.

I blow out another breath and am finally able to get my pile pants zipped.

Reaching down, I stuff the protruding gear back into my pack. Then I partially close the ragged opening by using a carabiner to clip two gear straps across the wound.

With me now dressed as warmly as possible, and the remaining gear secured away, I pause. I wonder why my brain settled on hypothermia as the most important of all the concerns rushing by me, and it quickly makes sense: If I get hypothermic, I’ll shut down and die. I realize that I must trust my inner voice.

I’ve dealt with my own warmth as best I can, so it is on to the next priority. But what?

“Climbing gear,” I say aloud.

I am thinking now. I am shocked and weakened by what has happened, numb with sorrow over Mike’s death, but my climber’s instincts are kicking in, so I ask myself a question: Can I climb this?

I stare at the walls for a minute. I’ve never been able to lead any sustained ice steeper than seventy degrees in my life. Far above me, both walls are ninety degrees and even overhanging. And there is more. As I face down the mountain, with my left hand on one crevasse wall and my right hand on the other, I realize I have only one shot. That is to go up the wall on my left. The reason is simple: It leads directly to the hole I crashed through. The wall on my right leads up underneath the snow bridge, which sticks out a good eight feet—like a gangplank protruding from the deck of a ship. That means that if I ascend the right-hand wall, I’ll have to dig through the unstable snow bridge to get out.