by Sharon Wood
Although Dwayne has told us we will want two ascenders on this section, I am determined to use only one to ensure I count on balance more than strength to make the thousands of steps to Camp Three. But after a couple of rope lengths of scraping, wobbling and yanking on my single ascender, I clamp the other one onto the rope. An hour later I pull over the headwall onto a small balcony on the spur where Dave, Albi and Chris sit with their backs to the wind.
“How’s it going, Woody?” Dave asks. He holds out the hood of his jacket to keep it from flapping over his face.
I lurch forward to counter a gust and say, “Like a kite in this wind, and without feet yet.”
“I felt like that too at first,” he says, “but that headwall got easier by the day as I became better acclimatized.”
I shuck my pack and join them to look at the new view. The glacier below tapers into a tongue of ice whose tip laps at our Basecamp. Three kilometres beyond, the Himalayas end abruptly, turning to brown hills on the Tibetan Plateau. Across from us are the two mountains that towered above us when we were in the valley carrying between Camp One and the cache. “Looks like we’re a good ways up Lingtren already,” I say. “What is it, 7,000 metres or so? Hopefully we’ll be looking down on it from Camp Four within a week’s time.”
“Yep, we should be looking almost straight across at the summit of Changtse by then,” says Chris through a surgical mask. “It’s about 7,500 metres, I think.”
Albi points up at the face above us. “So Woody, see where the spur we’re on runs into that rock band? Camp Three is at the base of it.”
I notice a bank of clouds billowing on the western horizon. “It looks like some weather is coming in,” I say.
“Nay, lass,” Albi says, “that’s far enough away to be in India. It won’t be here anytime soon. Days away, if it reaches us at all.”
We get up to continue our ascent. “Come on, Woody,” says Dave, “file in. We’re not going any faster than you.”
Albi rocks up to a stand. He slides one ascender and then the other up the rope and slips into a rhythm. When a gust of wind catches him mid-step, he regains his balance with ease. The climbing is by no means exciting or difficult for experienced alpinists—we have spent years on ground like this where we mastered the practice of minimal output for maximum gain. All we need in order to endure all the trips ahead of us is to acclimatize.
Now that I am above the headwall, I can relax my focus. And for the first time, it seems, I realize I am climbing on the spur of Everest, which inspires a new sense of the terrain. Now I witness rather than measure the results of this miracle where tectonic plates have shifted, collided, buckled, folded and thrust upward to make the Himalayas. My mind wanders from the miraculous creation of the Himalayas to the abstract geology lessons I suffered in high school, and then to how liberated I felt when that school door closed behind me for the final time. At the time, I was righteous about my decision to leave school, hell-bent on a better life beyond its doors. Yet despite no one knowing, in my own mind I lived with the stigma attached to “high school dropout” as if I was lazy, dimwitted, a loser. That branding drove me to prove myself to myself and in part, that shame has put me here on higher ground than most humans will ever reach.
In the last hour that day, the wind’s strength increases and mine flags. I wait at an anchor to let Dave pass me. If I want to make it to Camp Three, my only chance is to think smarter rather than fight harder. The crosswind blows the ropes sideways in sweeping arcs between spans. After Dave goes by, I switch to the windward side of the rope and discover that the wind presses my body into the rope and up toward the next anchor, harnessing the force like a sailboat to the midpoint of the span.
I see the boys disappear inside a crevasse a short distance above me. Soon after, I watch shovelfuls of snow spurt from that hole and disperse into spray. As I draw closer, Albi appears on a ledge cut into the slope and the downhill side of the crevasse they have been tunnelling into. He stands, legs spread wide to brace himself against the buffeting wind, and shouts, “Welcome to your future palace, Woody!”
When I climb up onto the ledge, Dave reaches out from where he and Chris are sitting in the cave and takes my pack so I can crawl in beside them. I look around in amazement at the extent of the work they have done. There is room for all four of us, as well as a tent. It is so quiet and calm compared to outside.
“The only problem with this place,” Dave says, “is that it keeps filling up with spindrift and we have to dig it out every time.”
“Seems a small price to pay for a bombproof shelter over our heads,” Albi says.
Dave and Chris have a pot on the stove. After a few sips of tea and a short rest, my pounding head urges me to descend. “We’ll see you down there,” Albi says as I am leaving. “We’re going to dig out a little more to make it fit for a princess.”
Back out in the wind on the ledge, I thread the rope through my figure-eight device, which will help brake the speed of my descent, and clip it into my harness. I lean back and out over seven hundred metres of space to fully weight my harness, and then with one hand above the brake and one hand below, I turn sideways and run down the ice. As I reach each anchor, I remain clipped in with a backup leash while I transfer my brake device from the upper rope to the lower one, and then transfer the backup leash to it as well. I reach the bottom of the lines in a fraction of the four hours it took to climb up.
* * *
I carry another load up to Camp Three the next day, and when Dave and Chris rotate into a rest the following day, Albi and I move up for our first night at Camp Three.
Halfway up, the temperature plunges and Albi’s storm from India blows in. Even though it is so cold that bare skin will freeze in seconds, I stay warm. I generate heat as long as I keep moving. Blessed with good circulation, I rarely need more than boiled-wool gloves on my hands and a few layers on my body to keep me comfortable. A balaclava covers my face, but I have forgotten my goggles and my sunglasses soon become useless. Ice cakes my eyelashes and all but freezes my eyes shut. I climb the rest of the way up the ropes more by feel than by sight.
The only way I can tell we have arrived at Camp Three is that the rope ends here. Just as Dave said, snow has drifted into the opening of the cave, and it takes us hours to reclaim it and re-pitch the tent, which we find collapsed inside. When we finish, I shuck my outer boots and crawl inside the tent to join Albi. He hands me a steaming brew, and I lean back and smile at this old friend of mine.
I met Albi for the first time nine years ago on a bitter minus-thirty-degree day. He was meant to be leading me up one of my first waterfall ice climbs, Louise Falls, though my initial impression of him didn’t inspire confidence. His craggy face was flaked with sleep and frost, and he looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. Feathers puffed out of the holes of his duct tape–patched down jacket. His dented helmet barely fit over a boiled-wool balaclava that partially covered one eye, which forced him to tilt his head back and sideways to see. And when he upturned the contents of his pack onto the ground, a frozen clump of rope, ice screws, slings and a harness dropped out, which he untangled while cursing and muttering like a madman. Yet tied around his neck, just so, as if he were a proper English gentleman, was a silk cravat—a nod to his British roots. This man was the epitome of dishevelment, but as soon as he ticked his first tool into the ice he underwent a transformation. Where I had seen others bludgeon their way up, he picked his way upward with elegance and light, precise taps.
Now, propped up on one elbow, Albi looks across the tent at me and says, “There’s the happy woman I’ve come to know and love.”
“I’m happy to be climbing—finally. ”
“The harder and the nastier it gets, the more you like it.” He sighs. “You’re a strange bird, Woody.”
“I know.” Despite the storm that is raging just a few metres away, I feel secure in the little sanct
uary we have worked hard and long for. “This way of life is so refreshingly simple, you know?”
“I do, I suppose,” he says. “But I’m not sure simplicity is an issue for me.” Albi bats his eyelashes. “You need to learn how to be shallow and vacuous like me.” He unzips the door and reaches out to scoop up some more snow to top up the pot on the stove. “You see, Woody, you think too much. You’re plagued with existential angst and your only respite is when you’re up to your eyeballs in some life-and-death tussle. That’s why you love it, and hence you’re good at it.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I bet you don’t talk this way to all your friends.”
“No,” he says, “they’d probably hit me. But this is what you like to talk about.”
“That’s why I love you.”
Albi looks at his watch, “My my, how time flies with oxygen-deprived brains and muscles engaged in little tasks. It’s time for our 7 p.m. chat.” He pulls the radio out of his jacket. “Hello to all you campers out there! This is Albi and Woody at Camp Three, checking in.”
The radio crackles to life. “This is Jim at Basecamp. Anyone on yet?”
“Hi Jim, this is Albi and Woody at Camp Three,” Albi answers.
“What are you still doing there?” Jim says. “I thought we had decided to abandon the mountain at the first sign of a storm.”
Albi replies, “It was hard to tell how hard it was snowing. Seems like this storm has more blow than snow.”
“It doesn’t matter how much it’s snowed!” Jim says. “What matters is we all decided to clear out when the first storm hit—like right now! Hello Camp Two, are you on?” All we can hear is radio static for a minute or so and then Jim saying, “Good to hear you made it up there today, Laurie. Can you tell how hard it’s snowing?”
We can only pick up the words, “Hard to—wind.”
Albi says, “Camp Two, Camp Three here. We’re reading you one by five. How much snow did you get at Camp Two? Jim, will you please relay for us?”
“Sounds like reception depends on line of sight tonight. Standby, Camp Two, while I relay your message to Camp Three,” says Jim. “Laurie said there’s a lot of drifting snow and they can’t really tell how hard it’s snowing. Nevertheless, I repeat, it’s a storm so what the fuck are you doing there?”
I take the radio from Albi. “Hi, Jim. We didn’t realize how bad it is. We pretty much just climbed into the tent to have a cup of tea after spending all this time digging it out. We didn’t know how much time it had taken until just a few minutes ago. What would you do if you were us?”
“Well,” Jim says, “at this stage, it’s probably safer to sit tight than to try getting back down.”
We agree that if it is still storming in the morning, we’ll get out of here.
“Nice one, Woody,” Albi says after the call. “You hit that one back into his court.”
The flame on the stove has been slowly turning from blue to green and now starts to flicker. “Seems we’re competing for the same oxygen,” says Albi. “Better shut down for the night after we fill our bottles.”
Albi begins to snore soon after we turn the stove off. I envy the way he can sleep anywhere and through anything. The wind keeps me awake; protected as we are in the cave, it still reaches us, drawing back and sucking in the tent walls. Sometimes the wind exhales with a deep sigh right away and other times it pauses at the top of the intake, as if holding its breath. The longer the pause, the more thunderous the return.
I toss in my sleeping bag, cycling my hot water bottle from my feet to the small of my back to my stomach, recalling a time when Albi and I were in a similar situation two years ago. We were less than fifty kilometres away, perched on a small platform we had cut out at 7,300 metres on the West Ridge of Makalu. Within a few steps to either side, the ridge plunged 1,500 metres to the valley floor. We had just set the tent up and were enjoying an intimate view of the Himalayas on that calm afternoon.
Albi had nodded his head toward Everest and said, “You should think about coming with us in ’86. Look what we just pulled off here. Three days of hard labour, climbing and fixing through mixed ground above seven thousand metres. After this, you’ll have more experience than most of the members already on the team. You were as strong as me if not stronger. You’ll pass muster. You must know that by now.”
Oh, I knew I had the ability to dig deep, work hard and endure. I’d turned twenty-one with him on the Nose Route, wide-eyed by the nine-hundred-metre-high airy sweep of vertical granite on El Capitan in Yosemite. I fell leading on the first day of that three-day climb and grabbed a fixed rope with my bare hands, which I didn’t let go of until I smelled burning flesh. Instead of giving up, I slathered my burnt hands with ointment and gloved them with tape for the duration of the climb. I turned twenty-five on the Cassin Ridge on Denali, where my partner and I were stuck cowering from a storm under a boulder at 5,800 metres for thirty-six hours before we could top out. And I would turn twenty-seven there on Makalu. Despite that experience and the years of climbing and guiding in the Rockies, I knew it wasn’t enough. Nor was I enough for the Everest Light team to invite me to join them.
As if Albi knew what I was thinking, he said, “Two years, Woody. You’ve got two years to get the experience you need for a ticket to Everest.”
At that moment, I had glanced over at Everest. Tendrils of cloud curled around the summit like sinister fingers where none had been moments before, and a breeze rustled the tent. I leapt up to drive in the tent stakes and tighten the guy lines. Minutes later, we were both in the tent, our backs pressed hard against the windward wall as the poles splintered, the stakes popped and the floor ripped under our heels. The wind died nearly as fast as it came that day, and the next morning we sped back down the ropes, rattled by the power of Himalayan storms.
Now I lie awake, rattled by the force of another storm as Albi snores beside me inside a hole on the side of Everest. But I’m here, thanks in part to him. The tempest outside diminishes in sound only as it buries our tent. Finally I take a sleeping pill—to put my thoughts to bed.
* * *
When I wake, Albi is crammed against me and I can feel the roof of the tent just centimetres from my face.
“Albi, wake up!” He snorts and bolts upright, hitting his head against the ceiling. He then starts punching at the walls of the tent to get more space, but just the frost lining of condensation from our breath sprinkles down on us.
“Bloody hell,” he says. “How hard can this snow be packed in here?” He draws his arm back and punches the wall closest to the cave opening. A crack of light appears. “Ah! And then there was light!” And he lies back down. “Your turn, Woody.”
I wriggle around to unzip the door of the tent, which opens to a solid wall of snow. My gut lurches and my throat constricts. “Oh, God. Have I ever told you how much I hate snow caves?”
Albi rests a hand on my shoulder. “This isn’t the first time this cave has filled in overnight. The only difference is we’re in it this time,” he says. He points to the crack of light on the side of the tent. “Air isn’t far away. There’s a hole. In fact, do you remember what a palace this was yesterday? It can be that way again, and soon.”
I start scraping at the wall of snow with the pot. With nowhere to put the snow but inside the tent, Albi scoops it into a pile that fills most of what little space remains. I never imagined I’d feel such relief when a blast of spindrift hits my face. We zip the door back up and pull on our insulated suits. Then I worm out of the tunnel and into the raging storm, and start digging out our tent. Every few minutes I fold myself over the shovel and gasp for breath.
“Enough,” Albi yells. “I’ve got enough room to get the stove going now.” While we wait for the snow to turn to water, we call Jim. He says it is pretty windy at Camp Two and the boys have a lot of digging out to do as well. They are pretty antsy to get out of there—as are we.
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A short time later we step out onto the ledge to begin our descent toward Laurie and Dan at Camp Two. I can see little beyond my feet in the storm. When we start down, we find the ice blown clean except for a few sections where we have to stop and wrench the ropes free from densely packed snowdrifts. The snow-loaded slopes looming six hundred metres above our heads worry us, and we quicken our pace. I breathe easier when we drop off the spur into the lee of the headwall.
At the bottom of the fixed ropes, Laurie gives me a rib-crushing hug and Dan hands Albi and me each a loop from their rope to clip into. He says, “We’ve told Jim you’re down. Let’s get outta here!”
Although Dr. Bob and Chris walked out just a few hours earlier, there is no sign of their tracks. Dan takes the lead, breaking trail through drifts of knee-deep snow. As I hurdle from step to step to keep pace, I feel a part of it now—a part of the team and the one hundred trips we’ll make.
Chapter 9
Proving Grounds
Most of us stay at Camp One and carry loads to the cache over the next three days while waiting out the storm. By now we have passed over that ground enough times to start naming the features. There is a round frozen lake amidst the jumbled penitentes, which we call the Montreal Forum after the boys skate around on their boots there one day pretending to be famous hockey players. We name the five-storey-high ice tower that leans precariously over our route the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and place bets on when it will fall over. The Bowling Alley is a hundred-metre-long icy gauntlet lined with boulders marooned atop rows of melting-out ice pinnacles. We always quicken our pace when we walk past those last two features.
