Rising

by Sharon Wood

  The storm that forced us off the mountain allows us to regroup into our original teams. Laurie, Dan and I cycle into another rest. The first courier is due any day, which inspires me to make a trip to Basecamp for the mail.

  Liberated from my heavy boots, I wear my light trekking shoes, which have me flying down the trail. Before I have time to recognize the red-and-blue fleece jacket and pants that a sponsor provided for the Makalu expedition, I run into Carlos. I slow to a walk to discourage conversation. But he waits. I’ve been dreading this encounter, the first time we will be alone together since he showed up at my house without notice and told me he was coming to Everest.

  That night I was determined to get out of my car and walk right past him and into my house. I hadn’t seen him since he’d left me four months earlier, after not coming home one night. I’d then discovered that the woman he’d been with that night wasn’t the first over the four-year span of our relationship. “Outta my way,” I said, but he barred my way to the door.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  I pushed past him to open the door. “Not happening.”

  In a reedy voice, he pleaded, “Just give me five minutes.”

  “For what?”

  “For your permission.”

  He craned his head to catch my eye, which I refused to meet. I felt his hand on my arm and twisted away. “Get on with it, Carlos.”

  “I want to go back to Everest.” He had climbed a new route on Everest, the East Face, in ’83.

  “Go ahead. I don’t care what you do now.”

  I watched his foot push and arrange the snow in ridges and mounds. “The trip is this spring, on the north side. We’ll be at the same Basecamp.”

  “No!” My head dropped to my chest. I heard myself whine, “Why? You were supposed to go to K2 next spring.”

  “Well, I’m not now. I want to climb Everest without oxygen instead. An American team is going and this is my chance.”

  I turned for the door. “Well, do it any other time but when I’m there.”

  “It would be better for both of us if I had your permission.”

  My fingers gripped the doorknob. “No, Carlos. You mean it will be better for you. Not for me.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to go anyway.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” It was all I could do not to slam the door in his face. Instead I pressed it shut behind me and listened to the snow crunching underfoot as he walked away. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I let out a gasp and slid down the wall to the floor.

  A few days later I found out that Carlos had rekindled an old romance with Annie over the winter. Annie was his introduction to that team.

  Now Carlos stands on the trail between me and Basecamp. He looks gaunt; his pack, jacket and pants hang limply from his shoulders. He shoots me a smile as I approach. “Hi, want to walk down to Basecamp together?”

  “Why would we do that?” I say.

  He coos, “Come on, I’d like to be friends.”

  “Friends?” I keep my voice steady. “You betrayed me, lied to me and then you show up here. Why now?”

  “Because I want to climb Everest without oxygen.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” I say. A few weeks back, when Laurie ran into Carlos in Lhasa and asked him why he was in China, Carlos answered, “To put the first American woman on top of Everest.” But I want to hear those words from Carlos, not Laurie. “There are plenty of expeditions every year, and with your resumé, you could join most any of them. So, I ask again, why now, when I’m here?”

  He looks older than his thirty-three years. More than anyone I know, Carlos wears his strain on the outside. Dark hammocks hang below his bloodshot eyes and a crease cleaves his brow. Anxiety gripped him at the start of every trip we shared. Sometimes he couldn’t touch or talk to me for days. Now, another woman’s problem—not mine.

  He stops, turns and reaches out to touch my arm. I recoil. He replies, “I didn’t know when I’d get another chance if I didn’t come now.”

  “No, that’s my story because, unlike you, this is my only chance and it looks to me as though you’re doing your best to spoil it.”

  “I’ve been honest with you,” he says. “And I respected you enough to ask your permission, didn’t I?”

  The skin on my arms prickles and an ache throbs at the back of my throat. No, I think, don’t lose it, not here. I say, “I hate you for doing this to me. I’d rather not hate you, but apparently you’ve got nothing to say to change that. So, fuck off.” I break into a hard run, not so much to get away from Carlos but to give rein to my fury.

  Why is he here now? My footfalls landing hard on the now. I don’t want to be the same woman I was when I was with Carlos, but still he has a hold on me.

  In late summer of 1982, all the senior Yamnuska mountain instructors except for me left to climb Everest. Without warning, our boss hired Carlos, who had never worked with us before, to co-lead a five-week mountaineering course with me. I was furious. We had opposing approaches to teaching and argued daily. Even so, and to the puzzlement of many, including me, we fell in love and went on our first climbing trip together that fall, to Yosemite Valley in California. It would be the first of many.

  In April 1985, we had set off for two months in the Peruvian Andes. Carlos and I had loved and fought in equal measures. He was my best friend, my lover, my climbing partner and my captor. By then, I was sure we would spend the rest of our lives together. It would be an adventure and it would be hell—and I couldn’t imagine life without him. Carlos had climbed here several times, and it felt like home to him. We spent our first week hiking out of Huaraz, starting on potholed streets that narrowed to cobbled roads and trailed off through open hills to the mountains. I brimmed with love for this companion-cum–tour guide at my side.

  But over breakfast one morning, at the end of that first week, and just after Carlos had been musing about us getting married, he caught himself. “Why did I have to fall in love with a climber? Why can’t you just be a normal girlfriend? Right now, I’d be looking forward to some simple time together, some nice hikes and a bit of sightseeing. But instead I’m stressing over how we’ll climb together and dreading it.” My eyes stung and my heart plummeted. It wasn’t the first time I had heard this lament from him. Yet still, I rose and fell every time.

  Over the next month we made a few multi-day trips up side valleys into the Cordillera Blanca with burros and camp guard in tow. But due to an unseasonable amount of snow that rendered the avalanche hazard high and the mountains out of condition, we didn’t get up anything, which left us lost for who we were when we weren’t climbing. This problem resolved itself for me in the second month. While Carlos was busy leading a trek, I climbed with my future Everest teammates: with Dave on Cerro Artesonraju and with Albi on Cerro Huandoy.

  Carlos asked me to come with him the second month while he guided a client in the mountains above the Ishinca Valley; more than he wanted me to come with him, he didn’t want me to climb without him. So, I found myself plodding up the trail behind Carlos and his client, three burros, a burro driver–cum-cook and two chickens. When we rounded the final bend at the head of the valley, I saw the six-thousand-metre-high Cerro Tocllaraju leaning into the sky. There and then, my plan to be a submissive girlfriend unwound as fast as an anchor rope off a ship’s deck.

  I took in the glasslike polished ice face in measures: six hundred metres high and an average angle of fifty degrees. I scoped the crux: halfway up, the route narrowed into a vertical section like the waist of an hourglass to pass through rock bands. The ice on the crux was shades darker than the ice above and below it, indicating that it might be too thin for crampons to bite. I heard myself say, “I can retreat if I can’t climb it.” The final hundred metres tapered into a steep pyramid, with its third side a lower-angled ridge and an easy wa
y off.

  The valley we had been following ended abruptly half a kilometre ahead at a terminal moraine. The glacier had receded over the centuries to where it now lay, three hundred metres above the valley floor. Traces of footpaths led up through spine-backed lateral moraines to a ramp that led onto a glacier. A fresh snowfall draped the gaping crevasses and seracs I would wend my way through to get to the West Face of Tocllaraju. Compelled by an urge to respond, I would go—now. I bolted for where our group was unloading our gear to set up Basecamp, packed up, and was on my way. I was not sure what Carlos thought of my sudden change of plans. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. More telling was the strength of the draw.

  Late that afternoon, I encountered a straggle of climbers unroping at the glacier’s edge. Behind them, their track, like an erratic graph line, jagged, spiked and paralleled the crevasses in search of snow bridges to cross them. The team was Czech and spoke little English. In a patchy exchange, they pointed at the low-angled ridge leading to the summit of Tocllaraju and told me they had climbed it. Or was that just what I wanted to hear? I could climb the face but not descend it. Their track would be mine, and the only route off the mountain.

  I followed their trough, ploughed knee-deep through heavy, wet snow, until I came to a hard stop where one of their feet had broken through a snow bridge spanning a cavern below. Crossing the glacier in the peak of the day’s heat when the snow strength was weakest was a poor decision—unnecessary. I could turn around now and camp on the edge of the moraine to wait out the night and cross the glacier in the morning once the snow had frozen and strengthened. But even a single step back could break the spell. I might lose my resolve and return to Basecamp. I asked myself, Am I motivated by Everest and the identity of an alpinist it promises? Or was it absolute passion, the irresistible pull, the delight at the sight of every new puzzle to solve?

  Yes, I wanted to be here now—pure and simple.

  I put on my harness and crampons. Then I tied a long leash to my pack and heaved it onto the middle of the snow bridge where it landed with a soft thud and stayed put. Then I got down on all fours, splaying my body across as wide a surface area as possible and wallowed across.

  An hour later, I veered off the Czechs’ track, dropped my pack and climbed a short way up the face to mark the best bridge over the bergschrund for the next morning, when it would be dark. I was back down on the glacier by sunset, where I stomped out a platform to settle in for the night. I lay in my bivouac sack, propped up against my pack, watching the mountain disintegrate into darkness, with the hiss of my stove the only sound beneath the star-studded ceiling.

  By 2 a.m. my mind was on its feet: would I cave and turn back, or rise to an all-consuming focus that I yearned for? Just begin. Believe and begin.

  I was walking by 3:30 a.m., carrying a light pack with a litre of water, some granola bars, a bag of nuts, an extra jacket, a short length of rope and a couple of ice screws and pitons. The light of my headlamp confined my world to a ten-metre radius. On each out breath, to calm my trepidation, I chanted in cadence with my step: just begin, just begin. The hard freeze overnight made the snow firm enough to walk atop. Within a few minutes my world tipped steeply upward. The beam of my headlamp now spotlighted a metre-wide circle on the face in front of me.

  I felt the transition from snow to ice underfoot. My crampon points and picks of my axes sank in as easily as darts into a corkboard. I settled into a new cadence of axe, axe, foot, foot, rest, perfect balance, axe, axe, foot, foot, rest, perfect balance, where all hesitation was consumed by will—simple.

  I felt entranced—as if I was floating. More space opened beneath my feet, demanding a precision in balance and economy of effort. My senses flared for the slightest change in feel, look and the sound of my points penetrating the ice. I had sought this place of certainty before—a state of mind that channelled adrenaline into focus. Once elevated to this state, it was harder to go back than to move forward—toward more. The only fear became failure, which threatened a backward slide to what I was, rather than to what I could be.

  First light revealed a dim view of the crux just above me. The day before I had scoped this narrow vertical passage from below and planned to turn around here if I couldn’t find enough rock to drive a piton or ice to thread an ice screw into. But turning back was not an option. I could see veins of ice thick enough for my front points and axes, and features to stand on. After a few body lengths of delicate climbing where no more than a centimetre of my picks pricked the thin ice, I found myself above the crux.

  The sky was awash in lavender and pink by the time I reached the steep and bulbous snow formations capping the top of the face. The vertical snow bulges defied gravity and me. I attempted to burrow up through the hip-deep unconsolidated snow by gouging a trench and pressing my feet and body against the sidewalls, but they collapsed and it felt too insecure. I backed down and tentatively traversed below the obstacles in search of higher-density snow and an easier route to the top. When I reached the edge of the West Face, I was relieved to find a lower-angle ramp that led to the top. When I punched my right foot into the new slope, it felt denser.

  All it took was one kick to disturb that layer of new snow, which clung to the ramp just beyond the angle of repose. A crack appeared, and in the time it took me to jerk back onto my left foot, it ripped across the slope. I heard a swishing sound as the snowfield disintegrated into fragments then vanished over the edge. It was over in an instant. Was I delirious, was I seeing things? Then as if in answer, a rumbling cloud roiled up from below.

  My heart pounded in my ears. The near miss sent me scuttling back across the West Face to my abandoned trench, where I bolted upward, gasping on fumes of adrenaline. In order to gain any traction I had to spread my weight over the largest surface area possible. I swam with my arms and legs to propel my body upward until I reached the top.

  I stepped out of the shadow of the face and into a fiery orange wash of alpenglow. Dread doused my relief when I couldn’t see any footprints anywhere. I raced across the top for a look over the other side in hope of finding the Czechs’ track back down, but saw nothing. Hope kept me plunging down the knee-deep snow slope—looking, praying—until I reached the breakover, where the slope dropped away so steeply I couldn’t see the ground below it.

  I thumbed through the pages of my memory for everything I had learned about snow stability and stopped at the winter of 1979. I was with a group of ski industry professionals, enduring a lecture on slope configuration from snow hazards expert Chris Stethem, the best in the business. I had rolled my eyes as he stood at the front of the meeting room, pointing at a giant image of a woman’s breast he was using to illustrate weaker and stronger terrain features. He slowly traced his pointer from the upper swell, drawing it down to the nipple and then horizontally across the curve, where he let it rest. “Right here at the breakover,” he explained, “where angle tips, is where the tension is greatest.” I was one of two women in the room, and he shot me a sly smile. Asshole.

  But he was effective. As I shot back up my tracks, I puzzled over something that the Czechs had tried to convey the day before. Had they said “avalancha”? Did they stop before the summit because of an avalanche hazard?

  Back on the summit, I ran across to look over one side and then the other. “Shit, shit, shit, shit! What am I going to do?” I howled. “Stop it! Calm down. Sit! Eat something. Think.” And I plopped down on my pack. I felt the faint warmth of the sunrise on my back. I watched the shadow line of this peak creep down the mountainside across the valley. A light breeze came up as if caused by the movement of the earth turning toward the sun. I was a part of the ride that morning and viewing it from the top of the planet.

  I looked down at our Basecamp and thought, I could still be asleep or just rousing, sipping a cup of tea and later seeing Carlos and his client off on an acclimatization hike. Then I’d wander off somewhere just to kill time. I could be
safe. Either way, killing time or killing myself, I’d be dead. Instead, I was here, inside this body vibrating to the thudding beat of my heart. I had never felt more alive.

  I soon packed up, said a prayer and started descending the way I had come up—the way I’d thought I couldn’t. Axe, axe, foot, foot, slide, repeat. I made good time until I reached the ice. Unlike climbing up where my focus was right in front of my face, every step down forced me to look through my feet at the glacier far below.

  Two hours later, I arrived at the crux where the next five metres dropped out of sight over the edge. My calves burned from fatigue. The equatorial sun blazed down. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my face and the sides of my ribs. It was difficult to see my feet past the bulk of my jacket, and I was soaked in sweat. I shrugged one arm out of a pack strap and sleeve, slipped it back through the pack strap, and then did the same with the other arm and eased my jacket out from between my back and the pack and let it go. I envied the ease in which it floated through the air and glided to a stop on my track far below.

  With much improved comfort and vision, I slotted my front-points back into the tiny holes I had made in the thin veneer of ice and fissures in the rock on my way up this section. I poured all of my will and all of my focus into each step downward and each axe placement.

  I was below the crux now. My calves screamed for respite and I stopped and chopped out a ledge to get my feet sideways and my weight on my heels. I looked back up at the section I had just climbed down and shook my head in wonder. A few hours ago, I hadn’t thought it possible to reverse the moves I’d made to climb up this section. Where was the line between what I could and couldn’t do? This question would bring me back to the edge again and again.