As I wait for Jake to calm down enough to figure out how to save us, the reality of the situation starts to sink in. I’m hanging, clipped by a locking carabiner and one-inch-thick nylon webbing to two bolts, 700 feet up a vertical wall of granite, with no way down. The bolts are drilled 150 feet apart, the length of a climbing rope, which means that with two ropes we could descend. With one rope, we’re screwed.
Eventually, Jake pushes a flop of wet hair off his face and looks around. “Mike must have taken the last rope down when he came up for his haul bag. Un-fucking-believable.”
The sound of laughter comes wafting up from the base.
“Robbie’s still down there with his students!” I lean out from the rock and scream, “Robbie!” I can’t see him, but I know he’s there.
Jake puts his head in his hands and groans, “This is fucking embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing? Are you serious? How else are we going to get down?”
Jake hesitates, then his voice pummels my eardrum. “Robbie!”
Eventually Robbie moves into our view and looks up. Waves both arms above his head.
After Jake is forced to broadcast our predicament to the whole valley, Robbie disappears back with his students. I wait for him to run down the hill through the trees and out to the road, but he doesn’t reappear.
“Why isn’t he going down?”
“He’ll finish up with his clients first.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” I put my forehead on the cooling rock. “So now what?”
“Just let me think.”
Refusing to look down, I stare at the wall and think of Max, how safe and protected I felt under his huge body. I wonder if he’ll notice when I don’t come back, but I’ve only done two climbs with the guy and one night in the sack. He’s as much my boyfriend as Randy or Scottie. A familiar longing jabs at me. Sometimes I crave someone who would notice whether I was dead or alive at the end of the day. Someone who could keep track of me, tether me to the ground so I’d stop floating off on any little breeze that blew my way.
I close my eyes and kiss the rock. Please keep us safe.
“The guys can’t get to us in the middle of this wall.” Jake sounds calmer. “We have to get to that crack system. It’s the only way down.” He points to a crack in a left-facing corner. It looks very far away to me.
“Maybe we should just wait for a rescue.” I have an urge to curl into a ball and hang from the bolts, like a pupa.
“No, we have to get as close to the ground as possible. I’ll have to pendulum.”
Jake sets up the rope and lowers himself fifty feet. He runs across the rock away from the crack as far and high as he can go, lets gravity swing him back, and sprints toward the crack, straining for it, but it’s too far away. He plunges in a long arc below me, runs back to the top of the pendulum, higher than before, then races again across the rock. Again he misses. This goes on and on, until finally he scrabbles at the edge of the crack and his fingertips—conditioned from vertical miles of climbing—clamp down like vise grips. They hold his 180 pounds.
By the time Jake lowers me over to him it’s getting dark. He grabs my harness and pulls me toward him to clip me in. I let him. I don’t give a shit anymore how tough he thinks I am. I just want to get down alive. Once I settle my feet on the small ledge, the blood rushes back into my legs.
We’re both clipped into a single rusted piton poking out from the crack, and a carabiner that Jake has wedged in as a backup. We have no equipment with us to use as anchors to rappel from, so we have to rely on any gear previous parties have left behind.
“How old do you think that thing is?” I ask, rubbing the goosebumps off my bare arms.
“I don’t know. Old. Probably put in on the first ascent in the seventies. It’s all I could find.”
“So now what?”
“I’ll keep going down, see if I can find some bolts. You’ll have to unclip in case the anchor doesn’t hold.”
Jake watches me closely to see if I understand. I do, but I wish I didn’t. If the anchor fails while Jake descends and we are both clipped to it, his weight will pull me down and we’ll both die. If I unclip, just Jake will die, and I’ll be clinging to a two-foot ledge in the dark, 600 feet up without an anchor.
“That’s fucked.”
“I know. Don’t move till I tell you to. If it holds my weight, it’ll probably hold yours. I’m really sorry. I don’t know how I let this happen.”
After I unclip, Jake slowly lowers himself onto the rope. Neither of us takes our eyes off the piton. Fear eats at the inside of my belly, nauseates me. I don’t want him to die.
“Maybe we should wait!”
“We’ll be okay. Just don’t move.” He forces a smile as he lowers himself below an overhang and out of sight.
On the valley floor, headlights move toward the village, like a procession of fireflies. My legs cramp. I’m thirsty and hungry and can only take tiny little breaths because I’m too scared to move.
You’re not as tough as you think you are. That’s what Max said to me when I pulled out my tin of tobacco. Maybe he’s right.
“Jake!” No answer.
I wrap my arms around myself but can’t stop shivering. The rope is still tight from his weight, so he hasn’t found an anchor yet. I pinch the piton lightly with my fingers for the false sense of security it gives me. One slip of my feet and I’m gone.
If I had just paid attention while I was jumaring, I could have said something. Before he dropped that last rope. As usual, I just bumbled along with my brain on pause. Even when I go first, I follow.
I call down again.
“Jake!”
The rope goes slack. He’s found another anchor.
“Rap down slowly!” His voice is faint.
With the rope through my rappel device, I lower my weight onto the piton. Jake weighs about seventy pounds more than me, so I should be okay, unless his weight shifted the pin and now it’s ready to pop. I start to descend into the black night, cringing as the rope runs through my rappel device in quick jerks, putting more strain on the anchor. My jumars and etriers dangle from my harness, clanging against the rock, the only sound except for my breathing—short, quick sips of air.
“Be careful. I barely made it to the anchor.” Jake appears just below me and off to the right, still several feet away. Relieved to see him, I descend faster.
“Watch your brake hand! You’re going to run out of rope! STOP! NOW!”
As the words rip from his mouth, I feel the tape that marks the ends of the rope and I instinctively squeeze before the last bit of nylon can slip through my rappel device. Three inches. That’s all that stands between me and the paper bags of shit at the base that climbers jettison during their multi-day climbs. If Jake hadn’t shouted at that moment, I would have rappelled right off the end of the rope.
I hang, over 500 feet up the wall, paralyzed. I don’t weigh enough for the rope to stretch those extra few feet to the anchor.
“Jake. What do I do?” To keep from crying, I clench my teeth.
“Just don’t move. Don’t let go. I’ll get to you.” I can hear him unclip from the anchor but don’t dare move my head. By the time he rigs up a sling and hauls me over to him, I’m shaking like an epileptic.
“It’s okay. We have a good anchor now.” He clips me into two bolts and I slide my back down the wall to sit on the ledge. My feet dangle into nothingness. Jake sits and puts his arm around me but I can’t calm my body. Can’t stop the tears.
“I’m so sorry. We’ll get down. I promise.” He passes me the water and I gulp it down. Terror has sucked up the last of my saliva. “The guys should be here soon, but I think we can get down another pitch.”
“I don’t think I can move.”
“It’s okay. We’ll take our time.”
We watch the headlights creep along far below on the road. I hear the rumble of a car in dire need of a new muffler, just like my own car, Baby Boat, and out of the blu
e, homesickness explodes in my chest. I want to go home. I want a home to go home to but I can’t even narrow “home” down to an address. Home is Canada. Home is my car. The most stable thing in my life right now is a rusted-out Dart that won’t start unless I shove a stick in the carburetor to open the choke.
Jake eventually breaks the silence. “Can I ask you something?” His voice is strained.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just want to know something.” He pauses. “Why Max?”
His dark eyes shine and his mouth twists under his beard. Shame courses through me, like I’ve been caught screwing around. But Jake’s not my boyfriend.
I clear my throat. My mouth is so dry. “I don’t know. It just happened.”
It just happened. Like everything else in my life. Like hanging off El Cap, without a rope, waiting to be rescued.
Jake removes his arm from around my shoulders. A shiver courses through me as I lose his body heat. “I thought you didn’t want a boyfriend.”
“I didn’t think I did.”
“Max is thirty-eight. He’s almost old enough to be your father.”
“I know.”
“He just separated from his wife.”
“I know, I know.”
Max doesn’t seem seventeen years older than me. He’s young for his age. Playful. Just the other day he said, “I bet I can bench-press you,” and got me to put on my harness so he’d have something to grab on to, then lay on his back and hoisted me into the air like I was a barbell. Jake would have no trouble doing the same thing—I’ve watched him do endless pull-ups—but the thought wouldn’t even occur to him.
“I don’t get it,” Jake says.
What am I supposed to tell him? You never bench-press me?
While I search for the right words, I wonder how he found out, but anyone could have told him. Max does have a nice tent, but a millimetre of ripstop nylon doesn’t offer much privacy.
“They’re here,” Jake announces in a low monotone, as though the zombies have found our hiding spot.
I lean out and look over the edge. The blackness below is punctuated by a procession of headlamps bobbing through the trees. I want to dance on the ledge and yodel, partly because I know that I’ve survived the night, and partly because I won’t have to continue our conversation.
“Thank God. I could use a beer.”
“Don’t get too excited. It’ll take them a couple of hours to climb high enough to shoot us another rope. Hopefully they brought the rope gun with them.” Jake stands up. “I’ll head down and find another anchor.”
Suddenly a blast of white light pins us to the rock, like wild animals caught in headlights. When my eyes adjust, I see two huge spotlights tilted up toward us from the ground; half a dozen bodies flutter around them like moths.
“Hey Jake! What the fuck you doing up there?” someone hollers.
“Jake, you moron! Is this whatcha gotta do to get a date with a chick?”
Jake turns his back to the taunts and sets up to rappel.
I yell down, “You assholes sure took your time! We’re freezing our nuts off up here!”
Jake leans out from the rock and starts to descend.
AT TWO in the morning, we walk through a quiet Camp 4. Neither of us speaks. Most of the tents are dark, but the occasional fire still crackles in a campsite, with climbers huddled around in pile jackets and down vests. There’s no sign of life in the sagging two-man tent I share with Niccy, nor in Max’s big yellow dome beside it. Jake and I say goodnight and he turns to leave, pauses, then comes back and gives me a hug.
“Sorry ’bout the fuck-up.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it.” I punch his arm. “At least now I can say I’ve been rescued off El Cap.”
I wait until he fades into the night, then kneel in front of Max’s tent and unzip the door.
Freddie Wilkinson
A SHORT CLIMB
WITH UELI STECK
or
How I discovered the Swiss
Machine was really human after all
THE HIMALAYAS at dawn.
A golden beam of light strikes the summit of Mount Everest. It steadily spreads to the lesser summits of the Khumbu Himal, illuminating one vertical, icy arena after another, seeping down toward the still-darkened valley below. The beam from my partner’s headlamp has faded and a glow soon lights Makalu’s shark-fin pyramid to the east. We pause to don crampons.
“It does not matter how slow we go,” Ueli Steck tells me in clipped English. “Only that we never stop moving.”
I’m about to follow perhaps the greatest living solo climber of our age up a mountain wall 800 metres high—roughly two and-a-half times the height of the Empire State Building. Naturally, we will begin by climbing as high as is possible without a rope. If either of us falls, it’s understood that he’ll die.
Above, the north face of Cholatse points like an arrowhead straight toward the heavens. A faint crease runs down the centre of the face: our line. It’s spattered white, the etchings of a thousand spindrift avalanches from a hundred storms. At twothirds height, this natural pathway is split by an overhanging rock buttress and breaks into two systems: twin ramps rising away from each other to reach the two ridges that bound the northeast face. Both of these variations have been climbed before.
Our plan—or rather, Ueli’s plan—is the direttissima: to finish straight up the rock buttress in between.
After a few minutes of hiking, the terrain gradually steepens. Instead of carrying our ice axes like walking canes, we begin to plunge the picks directly into the slope in front of us. A streak of névé, seventy degrees steep and marble-smooth, leads over the first cliff band, a 100-foot-high escarpment of shattered rock. Ueli scampers up this section, but as I begin to follow him, some hard-wired mental breaker flips within my frontal lobe. My body surges with energy, yet I move with an inconsistent glitch.
At the top of the first pitch, Ueli casually leans off the tethers connecting his harness to his ice tools to snap a photo of me climbing. I slurp in a deep breath and try to reboot. We move higher, meandering up a fifty- to sixty-degree sheet of alpine ice peppered with small rocks. I find myself following the path of least resistance; Ueli chooses a different line a few feet to my right. We share the occasional word of excitement, but mostly we climb. We keep moving.
Each swing of my tools thuds into the névé like a dart hitting a bull’s eye. I’m an experienced climber and I can objectively evaluate every placement I make: each one is “bomber”—completely solid. Even if my other hand and both my feet were to cut simultaneously, I know it will hold. Or so the climber in me says. But the other part of me—the part who is a son, brother, and husband, who loves life dearly and doesn’t want it to end—knows that my existence rests on a centimetre or two of steel.
Between my feet I can see the beautiful curve of the mountain wall, sweeping over the lower rock band and down the long, arching snowfield across our tracks to end in a crumpled pinch of talus above an emerald-blue glacial lake.
It wouldn’t be a clean fall, but I wouldn’t stop, either.
THE WORLD first heard of Ueli Steck in 2002 in the inaugural issue of the magazine Alpinist. Ueli, with Canadian Sean Easton, had pulled off an incredible ascent of the east face of Mount Dickey, in the Ruth Gorge of Alaska. In only three days, the pair merged big-wall climbing with cuttingedge mixed techniques—the equivalent of ascending a face half-again as big as El Capitan with ice tools and crampons. Because the ascent was so startling, and occurred on a relatively low-altitude peak lacking big-name stature, it garnered little mainstream attention. Only the true alpine crazies recognized “Blood from the Stone” for what it was: a groundbreaking achievement that heralded the arrival of a new talent.
In the following years, Ueli steadily racked up one of the most impressive and diverse lists of climbing accomplishments in the history of the sport. He soloed 5.13. He redpointed 5.14 on rock, M12 on mixed terrain, and competed in the Ic
e Climbing World Cup. In the greater ranges, he made several bold attempts to climb the south face of Annapurna, one of the most formidable walls in the great Himalayas, and orchestrated a series of brilliant raids on numerous 6,000-metre peaks scattered around Nepal. Simultaneously, he came within a whisker of making the first “on sight” free ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.
And all along the way, there was the Eiger. For Steck, who grew up in the country north of Interlaken, the nearby mountain has been home turf since he was a kid. He first climbed its classic North Face—perhaps the most storied alpine route in the world—at the age of eighteen. In 2001, he put up a line of his own on the wall, calling it “The Young Spider.” Five years later, in 2006, he returned and soloed the same line in winter. The next year, he turned his attention back to the original route on the Face. The first time he climbed it alone, in 2004, he carried a rope to self-belay on tricky sections and was pleased to make an uneventful ascent in ten hours. Steck kept training and kept getting better. In 2007, he broke the North Face speed record, shaving nearly an hour off the existing record of 4:40 held by Italian Christoph Hainz, bringing it down to 3:54.
Steck was fast becoming a climbing star in the Alps but he was still relatively unknown in the United States. This all changed the next year, in 2008, when he returned again to the Eiger. He was in the best shape of his life. As he later explained, “The [2007] record meant nothing to me—I knew that was not my real best. I had just been faster than the others.”
On February 13 of that year, he started the timer on his watch—and began sprinting up the opening snowfields of the North Face. Two hours, 47 minutes, and 33 seconds later, he was on the Eiger’s summit, having taken more than an hour off his own record. All within less than a calendar year, he then went on to solo both the north face of the Grandes Jorasses (via the Colton-MacIntyre Route, in 2:21) and the north face of the Matterhorn (via the Schmid Route, in 1:56)—thereby claiming the speed records on the three most iconic faces in Western Europe.
Rock, Paper, Fire Page 20
