Learning to Mountaineer

He was jumpy. I was a mousetrap, about to snap on myself in total fatalistic defeat if I looked at the big picture. I wanted only to think of what was immediately necessary. Darkness took over. I was cold and the air felt moist on my stinging cheeks. I told him we should cool our pace, be methodical.

We had wanted to touch the sky, to feel alive, to hang off the side of a mountain and feel our sphincters clench in thrilling terror, and to smile in cool, blue sunshine. We did these things. We made the summit, contrary to everyone’s expectations, especially our own. Lee asked over and over, “Do you really think it’s doable?” with nervous excitement as we approached the mountain. I grinned mischievously and said, “Of course it’s doable. I just don’t know if we can do it.” I’ve always been able to convince myself I’m capable of anything, both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes I can drag a friend along. We weren’t rock climbers; not yet. We wanted to be.

We added our names and the date to the summit log, a notebook rolled into a rusty, metal pipe with screw-on caps at each end. It was jammed between two boulders on the tippy top. There wasn’t time for more. Our entry was unlike the other entries with their details about the weather and accounts of personal history. “We came all the way from Chicago to climb this brute… Three beautiful nights of Grand Teton backcountry camping in a perfect weather window in July…”

Not for us. We left no commentary on the effort in the mountain air, the quality of the rock, the tiny alpine wildflowers improbable existence on sheer, skyward granite. We left no mention of the couple of days we’d been out hollering happily at the mountains, or of the beautiful canoe trip into the wilds where we’d grinned shirtless in the fall air, dipping our paddles eagerly. Nothing of the backpack trek up to our base camp, chatting keenly about the climb, about girls, and about the food we’d eat when we got back. Nor of the morning frost, the sunrise that turned the rock pink, or even the crazy rumble of the Falling Ice Glacier that shook us periodically throughout the day as we climbed above its amphitheater. Nor did we mention that we hadn’t seen another soul and would likely be the last folks of the season to climb it.

We needed to hurry. We reached the summit late in the day, and it was late in the year.

“Hmm. I don’t like those clouds to the west,” Lee said as we gained the summit ridge and finally had a clear line of sight towards our incoming weather. Cold winds hit us. Brooding clouds were swallowing the heads and shoulders of the neighboring mountains.

On top, we high-fived with a display of confidence and excitement that was contradictory to our taught voices. We were ecstatic, but full of fear. Then we went looking for the descent route. We knew there were supposed to be semi-permanent rappel anchors, equipment left behind by previous climbers, that we could loop our rope through to lower ourselves down upon. One rappel station should lead to another. We imagined we could get down about a thousand feet an hour if things went smoothly while rappelling. We had about three thousand vertical feet to descend to reach our camp. But that was not all we had in front of us.

“It’s all fun and games now until … the Drizzlepuss!” I gave Lee a squirrely smile. The name cracked us up. But we were concerned about it.

Part of our worrying was that we didn’t only need to go down. As a part of the ascent to reach the mountain's main face and gain the summit, this route required a climb over a jagged horn called the Drizzlepuss. It was essentially another peak in and of itself. On the way up, we summited the Drizzlepuss and then made two rappels down to where the route climbed out from the notch formed between the Drizzlepuss and Mount Moran’s main face. Now we would need to make a half dozen or more rappels back down this main face before we would get back to the notch. Then we’d need to climb back up the Drizzlepuss to reach the more moderate terrain on the other side. This ascent of the horn, according to the little research I’d done, could be the hardest part of the climb. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hoped we could make it before dark, but I didn’t want to actually think about it. First, we needed to find our way off the summit.

We found the first rappel anchor without wasting too much time. It wasn't far from the face we’d climbed, and we set up our rope and started into the process of lowering ourselves down one at a time. At first this was one of the most enjoyable parts of the day. It was thrilling hanging off the side of the mountain and dropping ourselves down in moon-gravity leaps away from the rock face. “I feel like Spiderman!” I shouted up to Lee. I was feeling triumphant and optimistic once again. He wahooed back at me as he came down second.

And then, after we moved through a few rappels, I came to the end of the rope and found that there was not another rappel anchor waiting for me. Here I began to make a series of mistakes that would turn serious. I didn’t think to build my own anchor for a few unreasonable reasons: I knew one should be nearby, I didn’t feel I could spare the time if I didn’t need to, I didn’t want to have to continue to build them the whole way down if we started to get off route, and I didn’t want to leave all that expensive gear on the mountain if I didn’t have to (I had just bought everything brand new for this trip and it was the first time that I’d used any of it!)

I took a hard look around and finally spotted an anchor twenty feet diagonally below me to my left. Shoot, I thought. I couldn’t figure out how I messed it up. Perhaps I didn’t come straight enough towards this anchor? There was no way to swing towards it while on the rope now. The many jutting features of rock on the cliff face that the rope was weaving through prevented it, and I didn’t really think I would reach it by swinging anyway. Without enough consideration, I decided to free climb, climb without any protection from falling, over to the rappel anchor. I took myself off the rope and climbed stupidly and vulnerably to the anchor. I attached myself to it.

“Lee! You need to descend more LEFT!” I shouted upward as loud as I could.

“Left??!!” His voice ricocheted back to me.

“YES!! LEFT!!” I thought if he did that, then the rope might stretch the whole way.

He started coming down. He was back to woohooing and enjoying himself.

I was still puzzled though. Anxiety nibbled at my nerves like a rat in a cage. The rappel station I was on still seemed too far from the end of the rope. Then I saw my mistake. Above me, to the right a ways up, there was another rappel anchor. It was somewhat obscured from view, and I had blown right past it in my amusement.

“Lee! Go RIGHT!! I was wrong! GO RIGHT!!!” I yelled.

I hoped he could disregard my previous instructions. “OKAY - RIGHT!” I heard him shout back. His voice sounded left of me. He had already started down, moving considerably left as he did so. Even so, he was still able to change course in time and redirect to the right, and he reached the rappel anchor above me.

He asked how I got to where I was but I waved off his questions. I didn’t want to explain all my poor decisions at shouting volume. He was trying to free the rope from the previous rappel so that he could set up the next and get to me.

“Ben, it’s stuck!” Lee yelled, and I could see him pulling on the rope with all his weight. It was my fault. I had made him wander all over with my differing instructions and he’d zig-zagged the rope through all those jutting rocks. Now the friction of the rope against the rock wouldn’t allow it to be pulled free. He pulled and pulled but it was of no use.

Fortunately, we had a second rope, and fortunately it was in his pack. We’d thought we might need both ropes to get down the longer stretches of steep, bare cliff face. Some rappels require two ropes. We didn’t know enough about climbing to plan efficiently, so we threw in every piece of gear we had access to. This time it helped.

After too much discussion and burned up daylight, he rappelled down and over to me on the second rope just so that we could climb back up as a team to where he’d just been where the first rope remained stuck. From there we’d need to climb up beside the first rope to where we could unjam it from the mountain, and the whole prospect was terrifying and defeating. We tried pulling it together. We put all our weight and muscle into it. We grunted and clenched our teeth... It moved! It moved a couple inches at a time if we put all our effort into it. We labored and labored, sweating and swearing, and eventually we freed it.

“Thank god. What a mess.”

“Wow. It’s getting dark already.”

We both swore.

We’d wasted a lot of time with the whole fiasco, and it was dusk. The dark clouds we’d seen from the summit were now upon us and a cold mist was falling, wetting the rock. We continued through a couple more rappels, and then we made a scary traverse across smooth, freshly dampened rock.

Almost wordlessly, we reached the notch between the Drizzlepuss and the face where we now needed to climb up the two last rope lengths of technical terrain.

It was indisputably dark.

The easiest route traversed along the outside of the horn and up it. It stepped out in sickening exposure over the deep canyon that stretched far below. I knew this but didn’t want to think about it. I wouldn’t have felt great about doing it in the light, and now that it was dark I really didn’t want to.

The mist was turning to a light mixture of snow and rain. The rock was slick and cold. In my mind we had to climb it. If we tried to wait until morning light - more than twelve hours away - we’d be frozen stiff and end up climbing it caked in snow or ice, a thought that was too scary to me.

Without too much deliberation, we agreed to climb in the dark.

I clicked my headlamp on. I got back on lead and gulped away any thoughts of anything but what I was immediately doing. Lee and I were not speaking apart from what was necessary to be safe. Too much emotion could be revealed. Painfully, with the limited light of my headlamp, I found hand holds and placements for gear and inched my way upwards. I set an anchor and called Lee up. He seemed to be taking a long time to undo the lower anchor and start climbing. I thought he was stalling, but I didn’t push him. We had to yell to hear one another anyway.

Then I heard him: “Ben?! My headlamp is dead!! I can’t find spare batteries! I guess they’re in the tent!” He sounded like I felt: childishly overwhelmed. There was nothing to do about it. He had to climb. I put my heels against a big rock and looked at the pieces of gear that formed my anchor, a network of three pieces of protection. I hoped they were solid. I had bought only “passive” protection because it was more affordable, and I was broke. They were simple metal wedges that worked by jamming them into narrowing cracks in the rock. I hadn’t had anyone fall on gear I’d placed before. I hadn’t placed much gear before. I started taking rope in as I felt him coming up. I had attached myself to the anchor and was belaying Lee from my harness; that was the way I knew how. I wanted to keep him tight on the rope, but since the pitch traversed sideways as it moved up, I could pull him off the wall if I pulled too much. I listened as he called, “Take!” as he moved up.

Then he fell. “Take! Take! Take! TAKE!!!” he screamed and I pulled rope as taught as possible before feeling it grotesquely yank me forward as he fell and then swung. The gear caught. Everything creaked with tension. I looked back at the wire hexes straining in their cracks, very conscious of Lee’s body weight pulling me towards the dark abyss below.

“LEE!?” I screamed. I waited a few seconds. I screamed it again and waited again, then screamed it again.

After too long a wait I heard him, “Ben?!” He meekly yelled up. I screamed back at him.

“I am so screwed!” he shouted up. He tried to describe that because of the traversing nature of the route he’d swung under an overhang and couldn’t climb up. I was just glad he wasn’t unconscious and slowly slipping out of his harness upside down as I’d imagined him with terror in the brief eternity of his silence. I wanted his weight off the rope as soon as possible. I looked at my anchor again. I just knew at any second the whole thing would rip from the mountain, one piece of gear jumping out of the wall at a time like popping popcorn, and we’d plunge to our deaths, not seeing anything until we smashed on the boulders so far below.

I yelled down that I’d pull on the rope as much as I could. With another massive effort, he finally resumed climbing, and I finally felt the rope relax. Time was flying by as we moved at a snail’s pace. We were deep into the night. I was cold, cold, cold. It was slick and icy. There was still another rope-lengthed pitch to climb, and a long, downclimbing trudge from there to the tent as well. It was too much to think about. Finally, he made it up to me. We were both shaky. I gave him a shaky, one-armed hug. I tried to crack him some “on the bright side” jokes, they helped in the instants they were told and then flew from our ledge to their deaths below.

We’d been out of water and snacks for hours. We talked about making a huge dinner when we got back to the tent, cooking big pots of hot food. We laid claims to freeze dried dinners, “I’m going to eat that Chili Mac -- and probably a bowl of oatmeal too.” We said it matter of fact.

Then I went up the next pitch.

I thought about nothing.

I built the sturdiest anchor that I could. Overkill. I jammed metal hexes and wedged nuts into cracks all around me. A spider web of slings, runners, and knots connected them.

Lee came up, climbing slowly in the inky dark. Eventually I could hear him breathing, then see his hands, then he was up on the ledge with me. We were done going up. We were grateful, but we knew we still had a long way down to go to get to our tent.

We made record setting slow progress over the broken cliffs, boulders, and scree. We rappelled several more times, too unnerved to scramble the smaller cliffs unprotected in the dark. I stopped over and over to turn and shine light for Lee. My headlamp became dim. Then we saw the tent. It was not far below us, but there were several more cliff-bands in between it and us. We could see its reflective fabrics glowing like a lighthouse, announcing danger and safety. Still, it took forever to reach. It was 4:00 am when we finally arrived, and we had been climbing for twenty four hours.

“Oh. Thank. God.” We groaned repeatedly as we crawled into the tent and stiffly pulled off wet boots and clothes.

Neither of us mentioned the imagined meals we’d been pulling ourselves down the mountain with; it would be too exhausting to do anything but sleep. We slithered and whimpered our way into our sleeping bags, and inside that safe cocoon I finally felt a smidgen of icy tension melt out of me.

We laughed idiot laughs of incredulity while drifting off, only half aware of them. Lunatic joy.

We slept the hearty sleep of the dead, happy to be alive.

We were rock climbers. We were bad ones. But we were.