The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 28

  I’d never been here before, but I’d been nearby six weeks earlier looking at it from a col about 400 yards to our left at the southern edge of the snowfield. I had come to take a look because the climbing pressure on the standard routes was becoming such that I was interested in finding another easy way to the summit to recommend to those climbers who mainly wanted to get to the top of the mountain. What I had seen in June was far from being the easiest route on the mountain. The sun reflected off the snow into the couloir to reveal a mass of contorted ice, as if a section of rapids in the Grand Canyon of the Snake had been instantly frozen and set up vertically in this evil-looking crevice in the mountain. Debris, both ice and rock, cascaded out of it. It seemed the picture of unpredictability. There was no pattern other than a headlong, downward plunge. The mountain seemed to be saying, “Here I keep no pacts.” At the same time, I did note the comparative warmth and orderliness of a sunlit route up an open chimney just to the south of the icy corner. I had decided this was the route Petzoldt had gone up and though it may have been easy for him, it wasn’t easy enough for the type of climber I had in mind. I descended from the col without bothering to traverse the snowfield to take a closer look.

  Now the ice was gone and water poured down the couloir. My comrades were of the opinion that the route went up the couloir. I said that was impossible, anybody could see that that was no place to be. It was not a place for people. My memory of my first look at the couloir in June coloured my present perception of it considerably. Thus I persuaded them to follow me up the route I had seen, which is in fact not the Otter Body Route but the Smith Route.

  The discussion had planted enough doubt in my mind that I wanted to make sure the climbing went as easily as I had claimed it would. I’ve never worked harder to find the easiest possible line. I scanned the rock almost frantically and climbed with as nonchalant a motion as I could. However, the climbing, while easy, was not trivial and at the point which in the guidebook account of the Smith Route is described as “the difficult overhanging portion”, the climbing became seriously non-trivial. As we paused to deal with this shocking appearance of fifth-class climbing on what was supposed to be a third- and fourth-class route, we heard voices unmistakenly coming from the top of the couloir.

  We rappelled down and decided that only two us would go up to investigate, partly because of the rockfall danger and partly because the voices we heard seemed to be singing! Sterling Neale and I had travelled together, worked together and climbed a lot together. I wanted him to stay at the bottom with Doug because it looked like that was going to have to be the organisation point. I didn’t know what the tremendous barrier was between where we were and where they were, but there must be something keeping them from descending. Sterling could practically read my mind and I wanted him where he would be in a position to do something if things got complicated. Also, Jim Greig was bigger and stronger than either of us and there were at least seven of them up there someplace.

  Angry because of my mistake, I climbed carelessly and managed to break my hammer soon after we got underway. I remember the climbing as being more difficult than does Jim. The last two pitches, bypassing the overhang and crossing the ice, could be psychologically intimidating to a climber, or a party, not in good form.

  The route lay up the right-hand or east side of the ice at the top of the couloir. The party was on the slabs at the “tail” of the Otter Body, about thirty feet above and half a rope length in distance. There was about seven inches of snow on the ice almost heavy and wet enough to adhere to the ice while bearing our weight. We weren’t able to protect the pitch in a manner which could stop a fall short of the overhang. We had neither ice pitons nor crampons. A rope from above would be just the thing.

  For the first time, we turned our attention fully to the party we’d come to rescue. They seemed surprisingly calm. Did they have a climbing rope? They did. Would they toss us an end? They would. The young man Fenniman stiffly approached the lip of the ledge with a rope. He seemed a bit perplexed. We instructed him to give the coil a healthy swing and toss it down to us. He swung the coil back and then forward but failed to release it. He did the same thing again. And then again. And again. There was something odd about the motion. He wasn’t swinging the coil to get up momentum, but swinging indecisively almost as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to cross over to them and disturb the calm which reigned there. The swinging motion became mechanical. He’d forgotten that he was not only to swing the coil but also release it. We hadn’t told him that he had to do both. We told him. The coil, released in the middle of the swing instead of at the end of it, dropped in front of his feet. Jim and I exchanged glances. Perhaps if he climbed down the slab to the next ledge toward us?

  “I won’t! I won’t!” He spoke not directly to us but first to the air at our left and then to the rock at his feet.

  “Stay where you are!” we said in one voice we just managed to keep from rising. We were in for it, no doubt about that, we’d really gotten into something which promised to be very strange.

  Jim “went for it” and we made it across and joined them on their ledge. They undoubtedly had been badly frightened and were probably making an effort to recover their wits. Possibly they were somewhat embarrassed. The resulting impression on me was of an unnatural calm. It seemed to be an effort for most of them to acknowledge our presence. There was a polite smile, a curious, almost disinterested gaze, the sort of thing I’d experienced in New York subways. Mary Blade seemed positively cheerful. They’d been singing, she told us. She also told us that Lester had been having a difficult time. Lester wanted to know if we’d brought any strawberry jam. We hadn’t. We should have. According to Lester that’s what we were supposed to do, bring strawberry jam and tea. He was a little put out with us and seemed doubtful that we knew our business.

  I was offended. My first thought was, “Jesus Christ, Lester, if I knew what we were going to find up here I would have brought the Tenth Mountain Division!” I had just enough presence of mind to realise that I was feeling defensive and said nothing. The Grand Teton National Park Rescue Team was and still is the best rescue team in the country. Where did Lester imagine he had gotten the authority to lecture us? From a book, a book on European practice? I had a picture of the members of these large climbing organisations sitting around in their meetings imagining rescues with the old New England obsequiousness toward things British and Continental. The European teams were unquestionably better than ours. Gary Hemming used to urge me to go to Europe and learn from them and I wished I could. But what we’d been able to glean from books we found unadaptable to our circumstances. There was a more immediate reason for my defensive response to Lester’s suggestion that we didn’t know what we were doing. What were we going to do?

  I signalled to Jim. Under the pretext of moving to a better radio transmission site, we climbed up to the next ledge and walked behind a boulder to talk.

  “What in hell are we going to do?” he asked.

  Jim later told me that I calmly lit a cigarette and replied, “We’re all going to die, that’s what we’re going to do.”

  I guess I had to say it to get it out of the way. I’m glad I did. Life doesn’t provide many opportunities to deliver a line like that. Anyway, the notion was not that far-fetched. The radio wouldn’t work and we’d managed to get off without taking an extra battery. I restrained myself from throwing the radio down the mountain and satisfied myself with shouting into it, cursing and shaking it.

  Eventually, by moving about from rock to ledge to chimney and bouncing our voices off the walls on the East Ridge, we found a place where we could shout out of the couloir and have some words heard and, we hoped, understood by Sterling and Doug. All we could tell them was to stay out of the couloir. What we wished to have been able to tell them was that we would be setting things up, up here, while they organised the equipment and men coming up from below. At some convenient moment, we would freeze all motion in the upper couloir while they
set up belaying and lowering positions below us. Then we’d have a bucket brigade of various techniques, fixed ropes, maybe a litter or two, rappels, belays and so forth, depending on the terrain and condition of the members of the party. It could have been very elegant but it was not to be. Jim and I would just have to start moving the group down the mountain any way we could until we were back in communication with our team-mates, or until they could see what was needed and we could see that they could see what was needed.

  We started. There was a ledge big enough for the whole party below us but it was further than the two short pitches Jim and I could manage with the equipment available. Could Fenniman, the only one of the party who was reasonably ambulatory, help us? He’d have to. The fact that we had to use Fenniman in the shape he was in gave me a feeling like what I imagined the French Existentialists meant by the absurd. A little ironic repartee crept into the conversation between Jim and me, something of Hemingway, a bit of Camus’ Stranger. Jim would lower one to me, I’d lower that one to Fenniman, he’d belay them to the ledge.

  I had anchored Fenniman to a slab about thirty feet above the big ledge and gave him very precise instructions about what to do which I repeated several times. While doing so, my sense that things were absurd became a feeling that things were desperate. The entire operation had to funnel to and through this eighteen-year-old youngster just out of high school who was headed for Dartmouth. I’d once been a kid just out of high school headed for Dartmouth and couldn’t imagine what I’d have been able to do if I were then in the position he was now in.

  He had been there, within a stone’s throw of this place, for two nights and now nearly three days. He was in what must have appeared to him as the most precarious position he’d been in during the entire nightmare. He was, in fact, quite securely anchored, but he had only my word for that. It would not be surprising if he had come to doubt the word of people who claimed to know better than he the position he was in. He might have been bound to a rock over an abyss by a strange god or demon for all the events of the past three days might have taught him.

  It was no wonder that I wasn’t quite sure if I was talking to the whole Fenniman or to a messenger the whole Fenniman had sent to hear me out. The messenger seemed reliable, even heroic. I felt that Fenniman would get the job done, but had the odd thought that I’d like to meet him some day. It occurred to me that he might untie himself from the anchor and step off the mountain. That had happened a few years before to a guide with a head injury on this same peak, three ridges to the south. I moved the knot tying him to the mountain around behind him, where it couldn’t be reached accidentally as he tied and untied the people we sent down. I made my instructions simple, precise and routine and tried at the same time to speak to him as a peer who could of course do what we were asking of him.

  It worked. He did it exactly as I instructed; exactly the same way every time. When I had seen him swinging that coil mechanically back and forth when we’d asked for the upper belay some part of my mind had registered the potential in those precise movements and the potential in his “I won’t! I won’t!” There must be a way that he could be made to say “I will! I will!” There was, but as the sequel was to show, something very different might have happened.

  We first assumed that they could provide their own motive power and set the pace of the descent if we belayed them down a fixed rope. The least experienced of them would not have found the first pitch at all troublesome under normal circumstances. Now people were falling down on flat ledges, falling into a stream two feet wide and three inches deep and spending thirty seconds trying to figure out how to step over an eight-inch rock. Sometimes you see this in a beginners’ rock-climbing class when the client is really frightened. There are ways to deal with it. But these people did not look frightened. What we were seeing on their faces and hearing in their voices wasn’t fear but confusion, as if the problems of balance and motion were intellectual problems entirely. We had to give up trying to talk them through the moves. We were becoming exasperated at the ineffectiveness of our explanations and instructions and knew that our exasperation would only make things worse.

  Tactfully at first, and then less so, we relieved them of their autonomy. Staggering, slithering, stumbling, as long as they kept descending, they could pick their one way down. If they stopped too long, a tug, a nudge and finally steady, unrelenting pressure kept things moving as the sun got lower.

  After the first of them had gone down the snow-covered ice, it was snow-covered no longer and all pretence of down-climbing was abandoned. They got soaked; sliding down the ice and water and I shivered for them. Speed was becoming imperative. Fenniman caught on. I overheard someone explaining to him that they had lost a foothold. To which Fenniman replied insistently, “They say you have to keep moving.”

  Speed under these circumstances is a relative term. We who were trying to imagine that we were in control of things were tying, untying, handling the rope with one hand, gesticulating with the other and talking and thinking as fast as possible. Those who were being controlled were rudely precipitated off a pitch, tied to an anchor and then left to a shivering halt of a half hour or more before it was their turn again.

  Once down on the big ledge, things seemed better. Perhaps the ledge they’d spent so many uncomfortable but relatively safe hours on had been difficult to abandon. There was less of a feeling of us and them. There was some conversation. We found out all we could about what had happened as the opportunity arose. I began to learn their names and to take account of them as separate people. I noted that the Junes seemed to be holding together. That doesn’t always happen to couples under stress in the mountains. I wondered if Germer was recalling warm summer days rock climbing in the Shawangunks. Janet was the wettest, coldest, seemed most out of place, but I was impressed by her endurance. I wondered if Mary Blade was worrying about Ellis, and if so would she be more concerned about his safety or the repercussions that seemed obviously destined to come to him. Kellogg appeared to be not too badly off, something like a nice young man just recently embarked on a course of dissipation.

  There was little time for these thoughts. Above all was the fact that we could make a mistake and kill one of them, or not make a mistake and still have one of them die. Lester Germer was the obvious candidate, the one everybody was worried about, but there were others. And what of the missing three? We had to take Mary’s word that they were in pretty good climbing shape, but what did “pretty good” mean? The best we could hope for was that they would be spotted by Barry who was on the summit today. The trouble was, Barry would be down by now. Perhaps Doug and Ster already had news?

  I chafed at our slow pace. My earlier route-finding mistake had cost us about two hours and that was going to make the difference between day and night in this gully, between warm sun and 32° granite, between wet pitches and icy pitches, between snow you could heel down and snow as hard as ice. My mistake had the appearance of meaning the difference between life or death for one or more of these people. Once you parade yourself in the world as a rescuer and once you take charge of the party, everything that happens after that is on your head.

  We made another effort to communicate with Doug and Ster. We tried to impress on them the mass of equipment that would be needed and reiterated the point about them staying out of the gully. It was frustrating for them, and we could see that some of the guides had arrived too, to watch the shadow of the Grand move out over the valley at an increasing rate, while we appeared not to be moving at all. But the rock falls we were setting off were fairly convincing. The main thing we wanted to happen was to have the snowfield all set up for lowering so that as each of the party arrived at the top of the snowfield they could be lowered quickly from anchor to anchor.

  Just before dark, Jim called down to me the news that two of the missing three were coming down from above. The significance of the fact that there were two, not three took hold slowly. I couldn’t imagine how the third could be rescued
. If we stopped everything to bring a litter and eight climbers up through us, I was sure somebody would die of exposure, there would be rock fall both above and below and there’d be nobody left to help us get these seven down. I also found myself fervently hoping that I wouldn’t have to go back up the mountain.

  When Blade got to me I interrogated him fairly fiercely about the condition of the third. It was Smith and he was dead. I was in danger of feeling relieved and that made me ruder. Also, it was difficult to believe. “Are you sure he’s dead, because if you’re not, somebody has to go up. How did you check? How long did you wait before leaving him?” Blade told me that the body had started to get stiff. I didn’t believe that but whether he was dead when they left him or not, he was certainly dead by now. I sized up Joyce. He was clearly in better shape than anyone else. It was a little startling to see a normal person apparently unaffected by this place.

  I had pulled Blade aside to question him. I could imagine what the impact of the news that the strongest member of the party had died of exposure might do to their will to survive. Furthermore, if someone else was going to die it was unlikely that they’d do it quickly and allow us to go on. I had a horrible image of being immobilised there in that gully helplessly watching a slow chain reaction of dying. I ordered Blade not to talk about it.

  He moved across the ledge and gathered everybody there around and made a little speech about how we were trying to help them and they’d have to co-operate with us. I found that astonishing and a little amusing. Astonishing that he still was functioning as a leader and amusing as I tried to imagine how they could not co-operate with us. Then I had an awful insight.