Читать книгу Higher Love - Kit DesLauriers - Страница 12

Rob considered Denali—aka Mount McKinley—a rite of passage. He wanted to ski it because of all the rugged North American mountaineers who’d skied it and because he thought it was an experience he should have before setting his sights on skiing an 8,000-meter peak. Ironically, it turned out that I had to be even more rugged than him. And fortunately, during my life with Alta, I’d learned how to be the alpha when I really needed to be.

Day eight of the climb is when things started to get interesting. We were making the move from the 11,200-foot camp to advanced base camp (ABC) after a week of wind and snow unlike anything the climbing rangers had seen in their ten years on patrol. The weather had grounded us for several days, and now we’d made up our minds to go for it because of concern about snow accumulating on the hill above us and because the forecast wasn’t getting any better.

At a dangerous exposed section known as Windy Corner, Rob felt confident that we could cross it with skis on, since we’d attached climbing skins to the bottom of them. Skins are a strip of material, usually synthetic, that adheres to the base of skis so that in one direction the ski can glide on snow and in the other direction it grips; when skiers use skins in conjunction with special bindings that have a releasable locked-down heel, they can hinge at the toes of the boots and ski uphill. I’d also attached my ski crampons for added security, but my downhill ski still slipped on the blue ice as I crossed Windy Corner ahead of Rob. Falling to the ground, I gasped and instinctively clenched my abdominal muscles to try to hold on to whatever piece of the mountain I could. My right leg was stretched out behind and downhill of my body, which had fallen onto the slick thirty-degree slope, so the narrow uphill edge of my left ski, which remained uncovered by the climbing skin, was the only connection my feet had to the slick mountain.

One of my ski poles was fitted with a scaled-down ice-axe pick, and I swung it into the hard snow as my second point of contact. While the shallow penetration gave me some confidence, it was quickly shattered as I watched one of my water bottles fall out of its pocket on my backpack and tumble end over end into one of the gaping crevasses hundreds of feet below. My heart raced as I unbuckled the waist strap on my pack, pulled it off my back, and lowered it to the ground in front of me. After removing my ice axe from its strap on the pack, I carefully swung it so the sharp pick landed as deeply in the snow as the firm conditions allowed. I clipped a carabiner from the pack to the axe so I wouldn’t lose the pack, too, and I took my crampons from their exterior pocket. With my ski strap still connecting my ski to my leg, I unclipped the toe of my boot from the ski binding, anchored my ski to the ice axe, and cautiously strapped a crampon onto my right boot.

As I put the other crampon on my left foot, I began to feel safe enough to get angry at myself for having listened to Rob. Though I’d chosen to go along with his idea to cross on skis, my instinct had been otherwise and now I let loose. “Goddamn it! I knew this was a stupid idea. Don’t even try it, Rob. Especially not with a sled.”

Apparently, I made my point. He put on his crampons and crossed the corner on foot.

With Windy Corner behind us, we were finally moving into the camp that was the gateway to the 20,320-foot summit, and with twelve days’ worth of supplies, we imagined we could stay for as long as it took. For climbers who aren’t in a big hurry, the norm is to spend two or three days at advanced base camp adjusting to the elevation of 14,000 feet above sea level (ASL) and resting from the push required to get there. It’s rare for altitude sickness to set in if a climber follows the rule of gaining only 1,000 feet of elevation a day, and even though almost no one follows that rule precisely, ABC was 3,000 feet above Camp II, so we knew we’d be there for a few days.

Since it was the beginning of the season, ABC, or “14-camp” as we began to call it, was still fairly empty, but it turned out that the Jenny Lake climbing rangers from Grand Teton National Park were working a three-week stint there as the rescue team for climbers on Denali, so we set our tent up near the Quonset hut that served as the rangers’ housing and incident command. This put us close to the twice-daily weather checks the rangers posted on a board outside their door, which, during our first few days at 14-camp, often read, “Eat till you’re tired. Sleep till you’re hungry.” Nestled in a snowy basin, the wind wasn’t too bad, but above our heads it sounded like a freight train roaring toward the summit, and the clouds ripped across the sky at astonishing speed. We did our best to relax and be patient, stay hydrated, and follow the rangers’ advice. Each morning we’d hope for better weather in the afternoon, and each afternoon we’d hope for better weather the next morning. On day four at 14-camp, day twelve of the expedition, I was checking the weatherboard when a ranger walking back to the hut recognized me from our common backyard of Grand Teton National Park and invited me into their hut to listen to the morning-ritual phone call with Jackson, Wyoming, meteorologist Jim Woodmencey. The news wasn’t good.

“There are eight hundred miles of clouds stacked to the west,” Woody said.

“How long does it take eight hundred miles to pass?” I asked.

“Who knows?”

Back at our tent, I shared the grim report with Rob and we decided to spend the forced down time focusing on the snow-block walls that protected our zone against wind. Since we were among the first people on the mountain for the season, we had the pleasure and pain of building each camp from blocks of snow we’d quarry from the mountain. Because the snow on Denali is firm, we used a snow saw similar to a handheld tree-pruning saw to cut into the surface of the glacier in the shape of a square—about twelve inches by twelve inches, since that’s about the size of the blade of our avalanche shovel. Once the first block has been pried out, the sizes can vary, but blocks much bigger than a shovel blade tend to fall apart during extraction and they’re heavier to work with. When it comes to stacking, like with a good stone wall, one over two and two over one is a good rule to follow. And as for the height and length of a wind barrier, they’re directly related to the time and energy available, how many days you imagine using the camp, and how much the wind is going to blow. A decent block wall is almost as tall as the top of the tent and at least two-thirds of the way around it in a horseshoe shape, ideally with the opening somewhere near the tent door.

When we weren’t working on the wall or sleeping, we’d pass the time by reading or playing cards, all while keeping an eye on the summit 6,000 feet above and watching for changes in the lenticular clouds that might indicate abating winds.

On day fourteen, we had a decent morning during the one-day break that Woody had forecast, with a high of ten degrees, and Rob and I made a run for it. It was a long shot, especially after such a prolonged period of physical inactivity, but we’d dreamed of being able to reach the summit in one day from ABC, so we headed out at 5:00 a.m. with a stove in our packs. We climbed fast to the 17,000-foot camp, acclimatizing well, and tried to melt snow for water and brew tea on the plateau there. Having full water bottles would be necessary if we were going to climb higher that day, and the civilized treat of a hot drink was sure to be energizing. Instead, the spindrift of snow from the incessant winds kept clogging the fuel port on the stove, and twenty minutes later we still had no flame.

We wandered around the high camp area with intensifying headaches and wondered if there would be a less windy place to set up our tent on our next rotation—it was obvious that climbing this mountain in one push from 14-camp was too much to ask.

After picking a location that looked good for the next attempt, Rob and I walked to the Rescue Gully leading from 17-camp to the glacier below. It looked super steep, narrow, and icy, and although I knew I could descend it on skis when the time came, I wasn’t happy about the idea of doing it more than once. Rob wanted to ski it that day so we’d be more familiar with the line after skiing from the summit, but with my headache and the wind biting through my clothes, I could feel my confidence slipping. The altitude was messing with my mind and my mojo, and I told Rob I didn’t want to do it.

“OK,” he said, “but I want to down-climb it today to check conditions.”

In a spirit-breaking moment, I looked at the intimidating face of the mountain above. “I don’t care about skiing the mountain. I’m not even sure I want to climb it.”

Rob stared at me. “Come on, Kit. Why do you say these things that you and I both know you don’t mean? And why are you doubting yourself?”

He didn’t say anything more, and I recognized his silence as an opportunity to explain myself and keep the door open for taking another shot at going down the gully, preferably with skis on. “I know myself,” I said, “and I usually break down and doubt myself once before I get stronger and resolve to do it.” It was my way of saying, “Please don’t push me anymore today.”

“I know,” Rob said. “I’ve never experienced another mountain that has driven me to say the same thing to myself six times already.”

Our words had suggested giving up, but our actions said otherwise, and with our bond renewed, we cached our skis and climbed back down the West Buttress to ABC.