Bad weather forced them to spend another night in the hut. At 2:00 A.M., the footsteps returned. The door latch rattled. This time, the men were ready. They sprang up and yanked open the door, but there was no sign of anyone in the hallway. Despite being brave mountaineers, neither could face going upstairs. They left the hut early the next day. Just before heading out, Haston checked through the visitors’ book, in which climbers recorded the routes they had completed on surrounding mountains. He was shocked to find a note about the hut guardian being killed in an avalanche. It was a fate that would befall Haston himself, a few years later.
Adrian Burgess stayed in the same hut in 1972. He didn’t know about the ghost, and only learned about it a few years later. The hut was about to be demolished, and there was a lengthy discussion about whether its replacement should be built on the same site or relocated because of the resident spirit.
Burgess is skeptical about the idea of ghosts and spirits on mountains. “In some places I climb,” he told me, “if the ghosts of dead friends were coming to visit me there would be so many of them it would be pretty crowded. I mean, if it was true, the entire alpine hut system would be crawling with howlers. Anyway, thankfully none of them have ever tapped on the tent door. I’d be scared shitless.”
MANY CLIMBERS are reticent about admitting to paranormal experiences, for fear their peers will think them crazy. Not so the Mexican climber Carlos Carsolio, who in 1996, at the age of thirty-three, became the fourth and then-youngest person to climb all fourteen of the world’s highest peaks. We had a long conversation about his experiences. He never used supplementary oxygen on his climbs and he’s had many hallucinations, including the “third man” syndrome, which he says is a normal phenomenon up high. What he calls his “moments of extended reality” are quite another matter. They are, in his words, “a step more.”
One of Carsolio’s most profound experiences was in 1988, after his solo ascent of Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain. By the time he began his descent, night had fallen, and the wind was very strong. He was extremely weak, struggling with the beginning of pulmonary edema and beginning to freeze. His headlamp faded, the windblown snow covered his tracks, and he was soon lost. He had been in this kind of situation before; he knew what he must do to survive.
“I stopped fighting the cold,” he recalled. “I became one with it. Then I became part of the mountain and I didn’t get frozen. I used my energy in a positive way.”
He started to talk to the mountain and the different entities it was revealing to him. “Some of the seracs were female, some of the rocks were male. They were guiding me, telling me where to go. But some of the presences were evil and wanted me to die. The two sides were fighting over this. I was talking with them. With the friendly ones in a friendly way, with the bad ones in a fighting way.”
These conversations went on for hours as Carsolio struggled down through the storm, searching blindly for a narrow snow bridge that he knew was the only safe route through a section of dangerous crevasses. Suddenly he felt a strong presence. He recognized it as a climber he’d known who had died on Makalu—later, he would discover that the man had perished in the very area in which he sensed the presence of his spirit. Eventually, he came across the snow bridge, and from there reached his high camp. This would have been impossible, he believes, without the help of his climbing friend’s spirit and the friendly entities.
“I cannot understand how else I found the bridge, in such a huge place with the wind and the dark night and no lamp and frozen glasses and my exhaustion. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.”
He collapsed inside the tent, still wearing his crampons. Two hours later, when the sun woke him, he could barely breathe and was coughing up blood.
He had a tape recorder in the tent. He managed to record a brief message, saying goodbye to his family and friends. As he signed off, however, he decided he didn’t want to die in a tent on the side of a mountain. He would prefer to die fighting. He started crawling and sliding down the mountain. After several hours, a Polish team passed him on their way up the mountain. He called to them, but they thought he was so close to death that they simply carried on without offering help. By now, his team at base camp could see him through binoculars. They watched his torturous progress—descending a few feet then lying down for half an hour. Finally some Spanish climbers came by. They gave him oxygen, water, and food, and stayed with him until he felt strong enough to carry on alone to the safety of base camp.
Carsolio counts such harrowing experiences among the most memorable and treasured of his life.
“It’s not about the adrenaline,” he insists. “These extended moments are different. They take me to another dimension. They are why I wanted to climb alone and to do such hard routes, so that I could reach them.”
FOUR YEARS LATER, Carsolio went to Kanchenjunga with a team that included Wanda Rutkiewicz, a legendary Polish mountaineer. They arrived at base camp in mid-March, but by early May they had made little progress on the mountain, and the team was ravaged by frostbite and illness. Only he and Rutkiewicz, twenty years his senior, were fit enough to continue on and attempt the summit. Rutkiewicz set out two days ahead of him, but she was slowed by age and a nagging injury from a previous trip and he soon caught up with her. They spent a night at Camp 4, at 7,900 feet, and left at 3:00 A.M. the following morning. Determined to make the summit in a fast, light push and get back the same day, they took a minimum of food and water and no bivouac gear.
After a few hours of climbing, Rutkiewicz slowed to a crawl. She urged Carsolio to go ahead, insisting she would catch up with him after a rest. He climbed all day, regularly looking back at her figure growing ever-smaller on the slopes below him. It was 5:00 P.M. before he reached the summit. The sun was setting, and already the cold of the night was seeping through to his bones. His food and water had run out. It was essential for him to descend as quickly as possible. Carefully, he picked his way down the icy slopes, conscious that exhaustion, hunger, dehydration, and hypoxia could easily add up to a fatal mistake. After three hours, when he was less than a thousand feet below the summit, he came across a familiar rope and followed it to where Rutkiewicz was huddled in a tiny snow cave. Like him, she had nothing to eat or drink. Worse, she was inadequately dressed in a light down suit designed for lower altitudes. She asked Carsolio for his jacket, but he knew he would freeze without it. He encouraged her to descend with him to their high camp but she insisted she wanted to spend the night in the snow cave. She would wait for the sun to come up and warm her, she said, and then she would go for the summit.
Carsolio was horrified. But he was too much in awe of her to argue. She was one of the world’s best Himalayan climbers. She had years of experience behind her, and far more expeditions than he had undertaken. Rutkiewicz was a legend, and he was her acolyte. He sat with her for fifteen minutes until he realized that he was becoming dangerously cold. He stood up. He bid her farewell.
See you later, Wanda.
It was a decision he’d always regret.
“I knew she was in a state of exhaustion and cold but I had not the guts to tell her to go down.”
He waited for her all that night and for much of the next day at their high camp. Eventually he could wait no longer.
“As I was climbing down to Camp 2,” he recalls, “suddenly I knew, right at that very moment, that Wanda was dying. She said goodbye to me. I was climbing down, the terrain was hard, I was much focused, but suddenly my mind was filled with her presence, her femininity. I felt it very strongly.”
A storm forced him to stay at Camp 2 for much of the next day. When finally he set off, he left behind food and water for Wanda, even though he knew there was no hope. Wrung out by grief, physically spent after a week on the mountain, he started to descend a huge, steep wall of ice and rock. On the way up with Wanda, they had fixed this section with ropes, so it should have been straightforward. While moving from one rope to another, however, sorrow over
whelmed him; he lost his focus and forgot to tie a crucial figure-eight knot. Presuming he was secure, he stepped back into thousands of feet of air. The fall was short; his arm caught in a loop of the fixed rope. He was hanging, in shock, when he heard Wanda’s voice.
Don’t worry. I will take care of you.
“I have no doubt that it was real,” he insists. “I was not hallucinating and I’m not crazy. I’m sure it was her. I received it as a message; it was not exactly in words, it was another dimension, a feeling, a presence. I started to cry because I felt guilty about not having told her to come down. I did not take care of her and now she was taking care of me.” He tried to gather himself, to start rappelling again, but huge sobs racked his body. “I was crying and crying, and then I felt her presence again. It was very peaceful. It was like a mother hugging her child.”
Finally, he reached the glacier, where the rest of his team was waiting.
“I was back in the real world, the normal world,” he said. “But this experience—it was very deep. When a climb was not so demanding I never had such experiences. But when it was really extreme, especially when I was on the edge of dying, somehow in that moment, poof! The channel was open.”
Fitz Cahall
UNSEEN BUT FELT
THE TRAIL disappeared beneath the whiteness. Shielding my hood with an arm, I strained, squinting to pick a path up through broad valley walls. I knew the pass lay beyond in the whiteout, but vertigo swelled behind my eyes and I could see nothing. I looked down at my feet, nestled six inches deep in the previous night’s snow. Somewhere beyond us, I knew, Sawtooth Ridge’s granite flanks were gathering snowfall; beyond lay the nearest exit from the Sierra on Yosemite National Park’s northern boundary. We were nearing the first of the two 10,000-foot passes we would need to cross; I took comfort in the fact that we had already crossed a dozen much higher.
Behind me, Becca cradled her injured hand close to her heart. In the cold, we’d been forced to remove the splint and sling that we’d used to protect the healing wound. Five days earlier, as we strode across talus, a rock had shifted, sending Becca for a tumble. Her thumb had been pinched between a flat rock and sharp stone blade, severing an artery and chipping the bone. The emergency-room stitches were still fresh. We’d discussed calling it a trip, but neither of us wanted to leave. We’d keep walking even if we couldn’t climb.
California’s High Sierra should have been bathed in sunshine during the fall months, but two days earlier, a gentle rain had begun to fall and had built into a steady downpour, drenching us to the skin and sending the golden larch leaves fluttering to the ground. That night, the steady drum of rain on our open-floored tent gave way to the whisper of snow. We hastily gathered our camp, set out, and walked directly into a wall of white. We could have turned back; that would have been the conservative call. But there didn’t seem to be anything conservative about this storm. We could retreat back to the tree line, crawl into our soaking tent and damp sleeping bags, and hope for blue skies. But our lightweight gear was meant only for summer squalls, and staying put would probably earn us an embarrassing helicopter ride home.
We had history with the Sierra. That same October week six years earlier, we’d been ten miles to the north when an unforecasted storm rolled through, leaving three feet of snow, stranding dozens of hikers, and killing several climbers on Yosemite’s El Capitan. It had closed the high country for the remainder of the winter. I had the same feeling about this storm. Both had been preceded by a heat wave, then a day or two of unsettled weather. The day’s forecast had called for 60°F and sunny. It was 25 degrees and snowing an inch an hour. Becca and I both knew it was time to head for the exit.
In the flat dawn light, I looked at Becca and uttered a oneword question. “Go?”
“Go,” she echoed, without hesitation.
WHY? THAT WAS the question I fielded most often before we left. Our expedition was an ambitious, stubborn, and even borderline-inefficient approach to climbing. We’d have to walk almost the entire length of the High Sierra, 300 miles, from southern Sequoia National Park north through Yosemite. We would carry climbing gear the entire way and climb as much as our rations, our bodies, and the weather would permit. It sounded more like a never-ending approach than a climbing trip. “Why?” was a pretty valid query.
Before Becca and I left in August, I’d given out several answers. I’d been thinking about this trip for a decade after hearing about it over a campfire. I wasn’t getting any younger. Then there was the fact that men I admired had done this trip in a similar fashion. First, of course, there was John Muir. Then David Brower, the legendary activist, made a very similar trip in the 1930s. Over the course of two months, he and his cohorts ticked off over fifty summits and concluded their route with a moonlight climb of Matterhorn Peak.
Or maybe I’d say that I wanted to prove that you didn’t have to travel to Pakistan or Baffin Island to have a truly profound adventure—that it could be found in our backyard ranges. That it was possible to take a climbing road trip without a car or even a road. That modern adventure is more a reflection of creativity and individuality than it is of setting or environment.
The people closest to me knew better.
I was looking for an escape. I was drinking too much. Sleeping not enough. I’d pushed through writer’s block simply because I didn’t have time for it. The quiet spectre of depression was tapping at my shoulder. I relied on the theory that an animal in motion is less likely to be caught. Keep moving. Don’t rest. Don’t think. Just get to the trip. In the clutter, the noise, the constant motion of my life I was struggling to hear the quiet. If you never come out of the mountains you never have to answer a phone.
Secretly, I’d hoped that the trip would provide some quick, easy answers. They would snap from the sky as quick and complete as a lightning strike. I was waiting for someone or something to save me.
“I CAN’T SEE the trail,” I howled back at Becca, just three steps behind me. We had progressed no more than a mile and a half from our camp. I used my trekking pole to break the untouched snow. At least the change in texture helped ease the vertigo.
“I don’t think we should go back,” she yelled.
A trail isn’t necessary for upward progress. I repeated that thought silently three or four times and stepped forward. We would have to create our own path toward our first destination, Burro Pass. I took another step and the talus shifted. My feet skated on the six inches of snow and I fell directly into a stranded-turtle position. I struggled beneath the weight of the sixty-five-pound pack. The trip had whittled fifteen pounds off my six-foot-two-inch, 160-pound frame. With the pack on, I felt top-heavy.
Neither Becca nor I could bring ourselves to say it outright, but our margin for safety was as slim as it had ever been. A mistake, a misstep, a twisted ankle, a blown-out knee, would mean one having to leave the other behind to fetch help. The steep talus slopes offered no flat ground for our tent, but the situation was still fine, I reminded myself. Our bodies would stay warm as long as we kept moving. We would pause only to eat and drink. We’d navigated in whiteouts before. We’d done enough skiing in the densely forested Cascades that orienting with a compass wasn’t hard. We simply had to keep heading uphill, hit the ridge, and find the pass. Without the trail, travel over the jumble of rocks would be excruciatingly slow, but we’d just have to be patient.
Just beneath those rational thoughts, the other side of reality gnawed. It was October. It was the Sierra. It was snowing so hard it was difficult to open our eyes. Our gear was too light. We were seventeen miles from the nearest road, wet from head to foot. I wasn’t sure if we were making the right decision. Only hindsight would tell, but my instinct was to keep walking. Keep moving.
Right about then, the lightning started and the storm swallowed us. Our footprints led back into the swirling white. I reminded myself to appreciate the rawness of the moment. This was obviously a day we would never forget.
FOR THE FIRST week of t
he trip, phantom cellphones ringing in my pocket haunted me as I dreamed incessantly about work. I chased away thoughts that I was shirking responsibility for my business and my life. Instead, I fished. I even caught fish. I imagined my mind being like a dry fly about to be swallowed whole.
We put up new routes. Climbed old, forgotten ones. We followed in the footsteps of Muir into the “walls of the celestial city.” I read books. We remembered that approaches aren’t something to be reviled or rushed, but an integral part of the wonderful process of alpine rock climbing. There were strings of days when we saw no one else. We lounged naked on granite slabs next to deep, crystal-clear pools. Becca and I began to think as one, completing daily tasks in wordless unison. Answering questions the other was about to ask. Eventually, the phantom cellphone stopped ringing. The worries about shirked responsibilities faded.
“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” I repeated endlessly. “You just said that,” Becca would say, with an amused but loving smile.
When cramps and diarrhea racked Becca’s body, I pulled weight from her bag and nursed her as best I could. And when stress-induced shingles bled the enthusiasm and strength from me, Becca quietly took over, fluttering through camp to handle the evening’s chores and organize gear for the next day’s climb. These small acts of caring grew to fill the great empty spaces of the Sierra.
The questions of life in the flatlands remained. Should we leave the city and move back to the Sierra, even if it meant struggling with work again? Would that make my bad days better? Could we afford to start a family one day? Should I let go of my work completely, take a job writing press releases, and leave at five P.M. every night? Were my creative passions killing me, or was I plenty capable of doing that on my own? After forty-two days in the wilderness, no answers had come and I’d stopped asking. There would be no neat solutions.
Rock, Paper, Fire Page 18
