Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  THIRTY-ONE

  ONE PART OF THE NIGHT SKY is alive with color, the planets and stars pulsating blues and reds and yellows against a black-velvet backdrop. The other part—the North Face of the Grand—looms up over me on three sides and it's as dark as a celestial black hole. It yawns farther and farther over my head with every high step on the scree. I'm ascending into another world. A harsher, purer world, where the things that seemed so important below lose their significance.

  Roberto moves ahead of me like a phantom, leading me higher into the night. I've always liked watching him move. Every step, every swing of an arm or turn of his head, is utterly unself-conscious. Each motion is nothing more than a fluid contraction of the requisite web of muscles. There's no interference from his psyche, no second-guessing or worrying if he's being observed. He's not even breathing hard. If he's breathing at all I can't hear it. He makes no sound except for the occasional scuff of a Vibram sole on stone.

  We're ascending into the tight confines of the Teton Glacier. The rock walls of the Grand and Mt. Owens loom over us, nearly three thousand feet high. Although it is just so much sucking blackness overhead, I know the North Face of the Grand is to our left. We'd climbed it once with Dad when I was fourteen and Roberto two years older. At the time it was the biggest, scariest thing we'd ever done. It was terrifying even with Dad there guiding us and with the three fat ropes we'd brought as lifelines against the forces of gravity. The ropes might catch a fall but they provide little psychological support when you're just a boy and you've got all that space beneath your heels. And then there are the things the ropes can't help—the twin dangers of rockfall and high-altitude lightning storms that can blow up out of nowhere and go off like an atomic bomb.

  I can still remember the feel of the rock on that trip—the adrenaline causes everything to be imprinted deeper in your memory. It was sixteen years ago but it still tingles in my fingertips. Low on the face it was glacier-polished and smooth as glass, while higher it had a texture like sugar and the weather had formed pits and knobs. I recall the way the gray, pink, and white granite streaked my hands with damp soot.

  We have not spoken a word since abandoning the Pig at Lupine Meadows. Roberto headed up the trail without a backward glance at me, the dark hole in the night sky pulling at him with an even stronger force than it pulls at me. A monstrous Pied Piper piping in a couple of hungry rats.

  I caught up to him at one point. I found him standing a little way off the trail and pushing down the sleeve of his windshirt. In his hand I caught a thin flash of moonlight on a needle. I passed by without a word, pretending to not see him.

  But now, as we step onto the glacier, Roberto says over his shoulder, “Check it out. On the right.”

  There is a wide crevasse running alongside us. I twist on my headlamp and point it into the chasm. It reflects back an eerie blue light as strange as that in my brother's eyes.

  The glacier is not steep but the rigid soles of my mountain boots threaten to skate on the hard summer surface. It wouldn't take much of a fall to slip down into the crevasse. And God only knows where the bottom is. I was guiding once in Alaska when a glacier on Denali spit out two climbers who had disappeared more than three decades earlier. Their bodies were perfectly preserved, like they'd been in a time warp in the center of the earth. Although it's oddly warm, walking on this glacier in the predawn darkness, the thought of an icy entombment makes me shiver. But Roberto doesn't stop to put on his crampons so I don't either. Instead of walking slowly and cautiously, my brother is picking up speed as the altitude draws him into the sky.

  A bergschrund—a wide gap between the rock wall and the ice—finally brings us to a halt at the base of the wall. I'm panting from the long approach, my polypro underclothes soaked with sweat. Like me, Roberto seems to remember everything about the long-ago climb here with our father. He moves left along the bergschrund's lip until he finds the bridge of snow leading across fifteen feet of bottomless space.

  “Think it will hold?” I ask when he pauses before the bridge. I've turned on my headlamp again to study it.

  “Only one way to find out, che.”

  I stand next to him before the bridge and study it with my light. It's about three feet wide at the narrowest point and looks from the side to be about ten feet in depth. The rock on the other side is sheer and smooth as glass, polished by thousands of years of grinding ice. I pull my long ax off my pack and gently probe the foot of the bridge. The upper crust of snow is hard, like burnt toast, but when I push a little harder the ax slides cleanly into lighter stuff. When the head presses flat against the surface I pull it back out.

  “I don't know,” I tell my brother.

  “You've already said that a couple of times tonight. You're holding on too tight.”

  In the light of my headlamp he's giving me one of his signature looks. A deep stare from his blue eyes framed by all that sweat-soaked black hair. He has the stare of a messiah, but it irritates me right now. Some messiah; a drug-addicted killer, a possibly suicidal adrenaline junkie.

  “To what, Roberto? Living?”

  His eyes remain fixed on mine. “To everything, che. Fucking everything. Can't have any fun unless you're willing to let go every now and then, see what happens. Loosen your grip, little bro.”

  He's probably talking without thinking, talking shit, but because of his soft voice and his eyes I worry over his words like Mungo gnawing on a rawhide chew stick.

  While I'm standing there thinking in the dark, Roberto brushes past me with a soft hiss from the rub of our nylon jackets. He steps right out onto the bridge without hesitation, then moves lightly across it. His boots barely crunch on its surface. At the far end he finds a few small edges in the rock for his fingers and the toes of his boots and pulls himself up onto a narrow ledge. He moves sideways toward where an alcove cuts up through the face. I take a deep breath as if to fill myself with air and make myself as light as possible then step with a quaking boot onto the bridge. The bridge holds my weight.

  The alcove is like a chimney or a three-sided elevator shaft rising hundreds of feet up the wall. I remember this as the start of the route from that August dawn sixteen years ago. Only then it hadn't been choked with snow and ice.

  “Let's haul ass,” Roberto says. “Won't be long to sunup. Don't want to be sitting on our thumbs when the rockfall starts.” He gives a short laugh when I touch my cheek, as he knew I would, at the mention of rockfall. Then he sits to snap his crampons onto his boots.

  The snow is soft at the bottom of the chimney. I swim up it after him holding my long ax in both hands and planting it sideways in the snow. It's technically easy, and mentally no big deal, but it's physically more exhausting than the harder moves I know are lurking ahead. I'm panting and sweating by the time I scramble up onto the first large ledge on the face.

  For the first time I pay attention to the wind. It had been steadily rising since we left the car and began hoofing it up Garnet Canyon. It flowed over the pass between the Middle and Grand Tetons and rushed down at us as if trying to push us back. Then, when we entered the deep cirque beneath the North Face, it had almost disappeared. Here now, high on the face, I can feel its strength. It rustles over our nylon shells and shoves us around with occasional gusts. Looking up, I can see a streak of spindrift tearing off the summit like a flag in the night.

  We follow the ledge past a small cave. It's where we had bivied that August fifteen years ago, safe from the rockfall that whistled by in the late afternoon. I shine my light in the cave and can recall exactly where I had shivered in my sleeping bag all through the night. I can even remember Dad joking that my eyes looked ready to pop right out of my head.

  At the west end of the ledge another chimney takes us higher. The back wall of this one is choked with vertical ice instead of snow. We climb it by swinging our picks directly into the ice or by torquing them into cracks and stemming with crampons on opposite walls. The crampons screech and spark until they find purchas
e on the rock.

  We're getting high now. We're probably close to a thousand feet off the deck. All that space pulls at my back.

  The Second Ledge angles steeply toward the abyss. We move across it cautiously for several hundred feet. One slip or a rolled ankle on a loose stone and I'll be sliding off the lip.

  “How's the job? Doing justice. You still locking up them nasty addicts and jaywalkers?” Roberto shouts over the wind.

  “It sucks,” I yell back.

  “Know what Richard Pryor said 'bout justice? JUSTICE is for JUST US. Dude may be a flaming crackhead, but he knows what he's talking about.”

  It's not until we're near the top of the three-thousand-foot face that I get truly gripped. And the Rat gets a high-altitude feast.

  From the Third Ledge we climbed a sixty-foot corner using rock shoes now to smear on thin edges and pockets. At the top of this there is a narrow rail of rock leading to the left. It's about as wide as a bookshelf and it tapers down to nothing at a distant corner. There it actually inverts, a turning place where the whole world gets upside down.

  Roberto crawls out onto this bookshelf in slow motion. He's on his hands and knees at first, then, as the shelf narrows, he's actually slithering along on his left shoulder and hip. Pulling on tiny edges with his hands and pushing on others with the toes of his boots, he creeps out an inch at a time. I watch with my heart in my throat. He's doing what he wants, I tell myself again and again. That's as good a way to die as any. But I can't help imagining him shifting slightly away from the rock and falling into space. I can already hear my own grieving screams.

  He turns the corner as slowly as I've ever seen him move. His head disappears, then his sideways shoulders, then his hips and finally his boots. I think I take my first breath in several minutes.

  Then it's my turn.

  I'm shaking as I follow, being very careful to focus on nothing but the cold rock at my fingertips. I try to meld into the stone, to shrink down on the shelf and burrow into it. The wind claws at my jacket. Rebecca, I think. My child. Let me live and I'll never solo up here again. I've made that promise before but this time—just as I had before—I mean it.

  When I stick my head around the corner I catch sight of my brother again. He's traversing up a seventy-five-degree slab that drops off into nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. I can't see the edges he's using. Watching, crouched sort of sideways on one hand and one knee, I start to breathe hard and fast. I'm perfectly still except for the shaking, and it's as if I'm running a sprint. My blood thunders through my veins like a high-speed train through a tunnel.

  Why didn't we bring a rope?

  It takes me a few minutes, but I manage to screw up my courage. There's nothing else to do. I sure as hell can't back off this ledge. And I sure as hell can't stay here—the stone is already transferring a debilitating numbness into my wrist and kneecap.

  I inch around, looking desperately for any good handhold. There's nothing but a few rotten edges. I grip first one and then another, praying they don't break off. Then with agonizing slowness I put my weight to them and pull myself around the corner.

  The will to live, the idiocy of being up here without a rope, almost overwhelms me. I have a child. I have a woman I should make my wife. Win her. Win back my job. Fight for all of it.

  I find tiny nubbins for the inside edge of my boot soles and stand there, feeling the dreadful weight of the void sucking at me. Staring at the rock just above my face, I try to find another hold. Someone has hammered a secure-looking piton into a tiny crack. It's not concern over whether the piton is still sound that keeps me from reaching for it, but ethics. You don't pull on gear. It's cheating.

  I hesitate for a long moment, thinking about it, then I grab the fucking thing with a relieved groan and wiggle my index finger through the steel eyelet. Nothing's ever felt so good. I don't care if my brother sees me. Later, I know, I'll confess and my brother will mock me for my weakness but he won't attach any other importance to the crime.

  He's waiting for me on another ledge—this one broad and flat and wonderfully safe—with his feet dangling out over the void. He's grinning at me but he says nothing when I pull myself up beside him and let the adrenaline crawl back into the little nodes in the small of my back. He punches my arm, but not hard enough to knock me off. Then he points out at the valley.

  “What's the matter, bro? That little traverse freak you out?”

  “Yeah. It freaked me.”

  The Snake River is very clear from this height, its water a flashing vein of mercury in the dawn light. Beside it the highway is already bustling with traffic. Just to the east, though, where the land humps up a little, smoke is billowing into the air. A great dark cloud that is tinted with orange at the bottom.

  “It's burning,” 'Berto says. “Check it out, che. The whole fucking valley's going up.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE REST OF THE CLIMB to the summit is technically easy. There's another chimney or two that embrace me within the comfort of three solid walls, a pitch up some steep, loose blocks, and then it's just a scramble to the summit.

  But my mind is burning just as brightly as the valley below. Fire. It was fire that took Cali's father. Fire that stole from Alana Reese what was most loved by her. And now the valley's ablaze once again.

  We are beginning the final easy pitch when a man steps up onto the summit block. He's leaning hard against the wind. I rest for a minute, watching him turning his head and staring out at the surrounding peaks and then out at the valley, and hoping he's not one of those assholes who likes to throw rocks into the void. He glances down at the North Face with what appears to be a quick shudder. Then he does a double take, seeing Roberto crawling up the final yards toward him without a rope. His mouth moves and I lip-read an awestruck “Holy shit!”

  Another man steps up onto the block. He's wearing a jacket with the insignia of Exum Mountain Guides, a company I'd worked for a long time ago. When I move closer I recognize him—Jason something—a guy who was just starting out as a guide when I was quitting. He smiles knowingly as he watches us crawling up to the summit, understanding what we've been through and also surely noting the lack of ropes, harnesses, and gear.

  He shades his eyes against the rising sun and squints first at my brother then at me. “Holy shit,” he too mouths. Then he calls out over the sound of the wind, “The Burns brothers?”

  Roberto doesn't answer even though he's closer. I hear him mutter a couple of curses in our mother's language. I yell, “Hey, Jason! You know what's going on down there?”

  But he's staring at my brother, who is more famous for both his climbing and extralegal exploits, no doubt wondering what he's doing back in the States and whether he's still a wanted man.

  When he finally answers my greeting it's not to greet me in return. “The park's radio guy called our hut last night, trying to figure out if anyone's seen you. Something's going on in the valley, man. We're to report if we spot you.” He looks uneasily at Roberto, assuming the message has something to do with him.

  “Have you heard what's going on in the valley?” I ask again.

  “All I know is that there's been some kind of shooting and an assistant prosecutor is missing. And that some maniac's lit a fire in the valley.”

  A brand-new fear turns the sky a tick brighter.

  I run awkwardly in my stiff mountain boots, leaping small ledges and over boulders, rushing down toward the rappel ledge below the summit spire. My vision stays fixed on the rough ground—on not falling—but I'm intensely aware of the space all around me. The impossible amounts of air above, to the sides, and below. Bright blue sky and distant ice-covered peaks and dirty white glaciers. It's perverse, but I feel a bit of pleasure along with the apprehension. A revival. I've soloed the North Face and lived. And now the waiting is over. I'm needed down there, in the real world, where there has to be something I can do.

  I temper the emotion by reminding myself that Cali might be in trouble. In very, very
bad trouble.

  Four climbers clad in Gore-Tex and with sticker-covered helmets are gathered at the rappel station, tying knots and double-checking one another's rap devices. I push through them, acknowledging the startled faces by saying, “Sorry. There's an emergency below. Mind if I borrow your ride?”

  I grab the twin ropes hanging over the edge without waiting for an answer. The ropes are looped through a Gordian knot of bright, multicolored slings looped over a spike of rock. I check to see that the ropes are bound together with a tight double fisherman's and that the slings aren't too worn or weather bleached.

  “Hey, man . . .” one of them starts to protest.

  But his complaint is cut off by the deadly earnest expression I feel on my face. Or maybe it's because I hear Roberto coming up behind me.

  “I've seen you, dude,” another says to him cautiously. Respectfully. “You're the guy who soloed the Nose in like three hours, right? That was so fucking sick. What'd you come up? The North Face or something?” His friend nervously nudges him to shut him up.

  I don't wait to hear my brother's response. I'm already leaning over the edge, feeling the cold air rising up my jacket from below. Since I don't have a harness or a rappel device I've wrapped the rope around my shoulders, hips, and groin in the old-school method Dad had taught us. After lowering myself a few feet my boot soles lose contact with the vertical stone.

  I'm hanging free, spinning as the rope squeezes me and hisses against my nylon shells like an enraged python, spiraling down toward another narrow ledge above the peak's Upper Saddle. Other than that and the cliff, there is nothing but space—thousands of feet of it—and Idaho and Montana and then Wyoming swimming before me with every rotation I make.

  My boots thump down on the ledge just as my gloves start to burn through and my jacket begins to melt under the rope's pressure. I take off at a run down a steep ramp of broken rock and snow leading to the Upper Saddle. At one point the ramp narrows to nothing, but I half-leap and half-climb past the exposed section. I barely consider the potentially fatal air below.