by Jan Redford
As though on cue, Wendy and I leaned out from the rock and looked down at the ground. We were tied into two bolts, about two hundred feet up. My brown ’67 Dodge Dart was parked near the trailhead, not far from the highway.
“Maybe we should rap down,” I said. We were three pitches up Lion’s Layback with two more to go. A pitch in climbing parlance is the distance between two belay points.
“No way,” said Niccy. “We’re finishing the climb. The rock’s way too loose to rap.”
Rockies limestone was notoriously loose, and this climb on Cascade Mountain, just outside Banff, Alberta, was no exception—one big loose slag heap. We’d been knocking rocks off all morning, and if we did a rappel, the rope could dislodge rocks above us.
“Only two more pitches. Let’s get out of here.” Wendy handed me my rack of protection. Most of my gear was hand-me-downs from the guys I’d worked with all winter at a climbing store in Calgary. They’d been happy to make a few bucks on their obsolete cast-offs to put toward newfangled gear that was beyond my budget. Even my harness was second-hand. I’d bought it from Jeff, a.k.a. Dr. Risk, who’d assured me he hadn’t taken one of his famous hundred-foot falls on this one.
I slipped the webbing over my head and popped an arm through. The gear dangled down my side, almost to my knees. I had a bit more leading experience than Wendy and Niccy, so I got the crux pitch.
The best thing about climbing with other women was we shared the lead, but there were only a handful of us around. Most of my partners were guys who were stronger climbers than me, who liked to take me climbing, not just go climbing. But following was like being the passenger instead of the driver. Real climbers led.
The three of us were all the same age, twenty-one, and we’d all taken similar outdoor courses. Wendy was a lanky five foot ten and Niccy was somewhere in between us, sturdy as a shot putter. Our common goal was to climb and to eventually become mountain guides. So far, there was only one accredited female guide in all of Canada, Sharon Wood. Or at least she was an assistant guide, which was the first step. She worked for the Yamnuska Mountain School, similar to NOLS, which was where I hoped to work one day, but I needed more mileage in the mountains. In the meantime, I was working on the Kananaskis Country trail crew with Wendy, for $7.50 an hour minus room and board for our tent cabin, and Niccy was working at Camp Chief Hector, a YMCA camp between Calgary and Canmore.
Right after NOLS, I too had worked as a counsellor at Camp Chief Hector. Dave and I had hitch-hiked to Calgary from Wyoming as planned, a thousand miles with four dollars in my pocket and a couple of cans of tuna left over from NOLS. Dave, with a bit more experience and a lot more confidence, continued on to BC to work at Outward Bound, while I moved into a teepee with ten prepubescent girls and resigned myself to spending the summer singing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” around the fire and making useless shit with Popsicle sticks and clothes hangers. But after the first session, I was promoted to the coveted position of Pioneer counsellor. I got to take the older girls on seven-day hikes, horse packing and canoe trips, and somehow managed to emerge from the bush after each trip with the same number of girls I’d headed in with. But just barely.
My partner Laurel and I spent much of the first hike trying to figure out where we were on the map and how to start the stove. On the second trip we almost lost two girls in a raging creek after they fell off a log crossing. While one clung to a branch, the other went bobbing away with Laurel and me running along the bank after her till we finally pulled her out by her pack. Then there was the five-day canoe trip down the Saskatchewan River. Neither of us had paddled before, except on lakes. On day one, with the tiniest camper as my paddling partner, I launched off and immediately got swept under a fallen tree. We avoided decapitation by lying flat in the canoe.
But eight months of working at a climbing store had given me a whole outdoor community to play with, so my mountain mileage was building: a winter of ski touring in the Rockies, two summers leading on rock, and in the spring my first trip to Yosemite, a climber’s mecca. Three weeks of climbing granite every single day in the sunshine.
“Fuckers! Get off!” I flicked two more ticks off my brand-new rope. This was its christening. It had cost me over a hundred dollars, a third of what I’d paid for my Dart. But to climb most routes in the Rockies, especially multi-pitch routes in a team of three, we needed two ropes. Wendy had one, and now I did too.
“Okay. Time to blow this Popsicle stand,” Niccy said as she rubbed her hands up and down her arms and legs, feeling for ticks.
When Wendy reached for the rope to put me on belay, I noticed that the scarred, rice-paper-thin skin on the back of her hands had started to bleed again.
“Where’s your gloves?”
“I keep wearing through them.”
“I can belay if you want,” Niccy said.
“I’m fine. Go. Get out of here,” Wendy said.
The first time I met Wendy, two years before, she’d marched into the climbing store like a mummy with attitude, swathed in a white face and body mask and white gloves. Two blue eyes stared directly back at me through the slits in the cloth, daring me to recoil with horror, ignore her or, worse, to pity her. I found out later that an experiment at college had blown up in her face. She hadn’t lost her eyes because, by some bizarre trick of fate (late for class), she’d worn her glasses that day instead of contacts. Now the mask had been off for several months. The scars were stretched and red across her still beautiful face, her nose had been reconstructed, and her long brown hair had grown back.
I traversed across the crumbling ledge toward a deep corner. The first real “obvious feature” yet. The guidebook description kept instructing us to climb to the “obvious ledge” or the “obvious tree”—it was up to us to figure out which one was obvious. Route finding on Rockies limestone was tricky. When in doubt, traverse.
I continued for twenty feet, trying not to knock off any loose rock, moving up and across while looking for a slot in the rock for a placement. Nothing. I looked back at the girls. If I fell I’d pendulum and end up forty or fifty feet below them. With the highway so close, my rescue would provide the hordes of tourists with more entertainment than the elk wandering down Banff Avenue.
I pulled myself up another ledge system, still twenty feet from the corner I was aiming for. Right in front of my face was a piton hammered deep into a small crack by previous climbers. I almost laughed with relief as I grabbed a sling and two carabiners and clipped in the rope.
When I reached the corner, the vertical rock walls clam-shelled around me on either side. A crack formed where the two walls met. This looked like the crux.
I stepped up on small holds, sized up the crack, then stepped down and chose a small hex—an eight-sided piece of hollow metal—from my rack, stepped up again and tried to squeeze it into the crack. Too big. I stepped back down, chose a wedge-shaped piece of protection, a stopper, and it slipped perfectly into the crack. Hoping it wouldn’t pull out as I passed it, I continued climbing.
The first time I did a mock lead with NOLS, two of my pieces popped out and slid down the rope to the belayer, my instructor, Mike, who’d said, “Just so you know, if you were really leading and you fell right now, you’d be toast.” My next two pieces on that climb would have held a tank.
Mike’s instruction saved me when I took my first fall on lead in Yosemite in the spring, fifteen feet onto a big hex. It had held me, but I’d almost hit the ground. When I got down, I thought, Glad that’s over with, as though my first leader fall were a rite of passage, like losing your virginity.
With one foot on each wall, my legs were almost in the splits, my arms reaching wide above me. I wanted to go straight up, but I was too spread out, like Wile E. Coyote going splat into a cliff in pursuit of the Road Runner. I couldn’t make the moves, couldn’t find a good handhold above me. I placed another piece of protection as high in the crack as I could and clipped the rope. There were handholds way above, ones that Wendy
would be able to reach, and probably Niccy, but I had a couple more moves to make before I got there.
Lion’s Layback. There must have been a reason why it was given that name. I probably had to do a layback to get over this move, and I hated laybacks—pulling with your hands and pushing with your feet till it felt as if you were going to launch yourself backwards. The technique was exhausting and it was hard to stop in the middle of the moves to put in protection—you needed to fully commit and trust. That leader fall I’d taken in Yosemite had been on a layback.
I studied the rock one more time, hoping some other method would reveal itself, but the good holds were out of reach, so a layback it would have to be. I turned sideways, gripped the edge of the crack with my fingers and pulled, creating an opposing force so I could walk my feet up the facing wall.
As I shuffled my hands and inched my feet up, grunting with exertion, my hip scraped painfully against the rock. The trick was to keep the feet high but not too high. Too low and the feet could slip out. After a few moves I was able to face the corner again and get my feet on comfortable holds. I found a permanent piton in the crack above and clipped it.
“That was a grunt!” I yelled down.
The corner deepened as I went higher. I could no longer see the girls. I continued up, testing handholds as I went, but even though I bypassed the ones that wiggled, small rocks ricocheted down the wall below me.
“Fucking limestone!”
I missed the solid granite of Yosemite where the rock didn’t come out in your hands every few feet. Where the guidebook said, “Follow the obvious crack” and that’s what you did. A single crack that went on and on, instead of traversing sideways for thirty feet, up a sort of crack, and then traversing twenty feet in the other direction. But I didn’t have long to wait. Niccy and I were heading to Yosemite in the fall. We just had to find a way to get there.
My rusted-out Dart probably wouldn’t make it that far. Some days it barely got me to the highway from the Kananaskis. “Baby Beater” was my freedom machine, but I had to wedge a stick in the choke to get it started and the steering was on its way out.
My spring trip to Yosemite had been with Saul and Geoff, in Saul’s car. They were friends I’d met through my boss, Rory, at the climbing store, who became more than just my boss, until his girlfriend visited from back east. In Yosemite Saul and I had shared a tent, since I didn’t own one, which had gotten me in trouble with his girlfriend, though our only transgression had been a few sexually charged wrestling matches. Clearly, it was time to rid my life of men, especially men with girlfriends.
So Niccy was the perfect partner for Yosemite. She wouldn’t hog the lead, and like me she seemed incapable of hanging on to a boyfriend, so there was little chance we’d ditch each other for some guy. She just had to get her parents off her back. They wanted her to stay in school, become a forester, not a mountain guide. Thankfully, my parents didn’t have any aspirations for me. I sent postcards from Calgary or Yosemite or Wyoming, describing the ski touring and climbing, and Mom thought I was going for nice hikes in the mountains. Dad didn’t care what I did as long as I didn’t ask for money, though he had paid for my flight to Ottawa at Christmas.
I hadn’t seen my family for almost a year, but that eight-day visit cured me of my homesickness. My father was stashing bottles in his desk, the garage, and even the linen closet; my sister was binge-drinking; my brother was planning to wrap his car around a telephone pole at a hundred miles an hour if life still sucked in a year; and my mother had joined Al-Anon. Before I left, Mom had plied me with a collection of pamphlets and books on Adult Children of Alcoholics. At least here, on the other side of Canada, I could pretend I had a normal family.
It was getting harder and harder to move my body upward. It felt as if I were dragging a couple of tires on the end of the rope below me. I set my feet on good holds, one on each wall, looked down at almost three hundred feet of air, seventy feet from the start of the corner. I reached for the rope, pulled.
“Slack!” I pulled harder. “Wendy!” She couldn’t hear me with the drone of the traffic, and I knew it wasn’t Wendy’s belaying that was the problem. It was the rope drag from all the zigs and zags around corners and traverses.
I pulled the rope, held a loop in my hands so I could climb, then did it again until I reached a sloping ledge covered in loose rock. On its edge, a tree leaned like a gnarled old man looking down the whole face of the mountain. I wrapped its trunk with a big sling and tied myself off.
“Off belay!” I shouted. No response. “Wendy! Off belay!” I pulled hard at the rope. Wendy was feeding it out in short jerks. She wouldn’t know to take me off belay until the rope went tight. I hauled hand over hand till it came to a stop, then sat with my feet braced against the trunk of the tree and wrapped the rope around my waist in a hip belay. Tugged three times, hoping they’d figure out I was ready.
“On belay!”
No response. I tugged on the rope and finally there was slack. Niccy must have untied from the anchor. I pulled till I felt something solid again. Then more slack. Niccy must be climbing. I belayed, trying to keep the rope away from all the loose rock on the ledge, till Niccy stopped again. Finally, there were a couple of jerks and some rope came up. A couple more jerks. Niccy was on the crux. I kept the rope tight.
A slight tickle on my leg. I ran my free hand down my thigh, felt a bump just above the knee. Like a small, flat scab. Or a tick.
Keeping my brake hand tight around my body, I pulled up the leg of my red rugby pants, which were faded almost to pink, my most hated colour. There was a black tick, its head sunk into the flesh of my thigh.
Just as I dug it out with my nail and flung it away, the rope went tight. Niccy must have peeled off the crux. And now I was falling too, dragged off by her weight. I swung around the tree heading straight down the corner, then jerked to a stop when the rope between me and the tree tightened, like a dog reaching the end of its chain. I hung there, upside down, staring at a few-hundred-foot drop. The rope cinched my waist, digging deep into my flesh, but I clamped my fist, kept my brake hand tight across me, holding on to Niccy. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her on the rope, so that meant she hadn’t hit the ledge.
A clatter above me. I looked up. A rock the size of a microwave was rolling down the slope, right toward Niccy. With my brake hand still clamped hard, I reached out with my other arm and one leg and deflected the rock just before it rolled past. It landed heavily on the pile of rope.
“Niccy!” Nothing. “Niccy! Are you okay? Fuck!” I grunted, spun my legs, trying to turn myself upright. More weight on the rope, like Niccy was jumping on it. “Niccy! What the fuck are you doing?”
Did she want slack? I eyed the big rock, willing it not to move. If it fell, it would land on top of her.
More weight on the rope. She must want slack. I fed out some rope. As it seared the skin of my waist, I thought of Wendy. Third-degree burns to 30 percent of her body. I gave Niccy more rope. She must be lowering to the ledge. Finally, her weight came off and I could breathe. As I spun upright, rocks and dirt funnelled toward the corner.
“Rock!” I screamed. Those stones would turn to missiles by the time they got to Niccy, seventy feet down. I wedged myself into a sitting position, the rope still tight, and pushed the big rock off my rope, to the side, where there was no chance it would get dislodged again. The white of the rope’s innards hung out. I’d chopped my first brand new rope.
When Niccy finally came in sight, she looked up at me, her face wet and red with exertion. “What the fuck? I almost hit the ledge!”
“Sorry,” I muttered. “I fucked up.”
I knew what I’d done wrong. I’d sat above my anchor, the tree, instead of below it Sitting on the ledge would have been better. In my attempt to avoid all the loose rocks, I’d ended up being dragged through them. I’d chopped my rope and I’d almost killed my friend.
Niccy climbed past and tied into the tree. As she flicked ticks off h
er cotton pants, I gave her a rundown of the near-catastrophe, showed her the rope-wrecking rock.
“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I’m still here, aren’t I?” But she wouldn’t look at me, and I felt her annoyance. She’d never been mad at me before.
Niccy passed me the end of the rope she’d trailed behind her, which was attached to Wendy. I pulled in the slack and got ready to belay. This time I stood on the sloping ledge, with the tree above me, the way I should have belayed Niccy.
“Fuck!” Niccy ripped her shirt over her head, picked a tick off her white tummy and flicked it off the ledge.
“Wussie,” I said. “It’s just a bug.” She grinned at me. We were good.
“You chopped your first rope,” Niccy said. “That is not cool.”
“Yeah. And I almost killed you. Sorry about that.”
“Apology accepted,” she said. “You can buy me a cold beer. Or two.”
“Fucking limestone. We’ve got to get to Yosemite.”
The rope jerked a few times so I knew Wendy was ready. Holding the rope above the loose rocks, I pulled in the slack, focused on Wendy’s every move. One almost-dead friend was enough for the day.
3
THE RESCUE
I stood at the base of El Capitan, straining my neck to stare up three thousand feet of granite. A single line of red rope lay against the blank face and disappeared up out of sight. I was back in Yosemite Valley, twelve hundred miles away from crappy Alberta limestone.
Rik threw his backpack on the ground and started to dig out the gear. He was a member of the Yosemite Rescue Team and we’d met in the spring, on my first trip to the valley. A few days ago, he had offered to take me up some harder routes, routes I couldn’t do with Niccy, and I’d accepted, with a twinge of guilt. But Niccy had lots of partners. It seemed half of Alberta’s climbers were in Camp 4 with us.
