"Where do you think we go?" I asked Karl. It was a common question throughout the morning. First, we bushwhacked through a Larch forest by headlamp, got totally lost, and then finally popped out of the forest above the tree line and got back on route. However, the phrase "on route" is quite subjective when it is early in the morning and everything is covered in ten centimetres of snow. Nonetheless, we trudged up the moraine toward the receded glacier high above us. Ultimately, we were trying to get to the "Centre Ice Bulge Direct!", a classic alpine ice climb on Mt. Fay. Getting there involved travelling on said glacier towering above us, and we were looking for an easy, developed rock route to get up to the glacier, known as the Perren Route. We trudged on, slipping on the snowy rocks as the sun began to tell the world it was time to wake up. The beautiful larches across Moraine Lake faded into hues of pink, somehow making the yellow trees even more beautiful as they contrasted against the high peaks that I hold so close to my heart. The wide moraine terminated into a ledgy cliff to our left, and a waterslide looking waterfall above us.
"This must be it," I announced, more so trying to convince myself than Karl. The route was incredibly cryptic with its cloak of snow, but the cliff was by no means impressive. Perhaps standing at a generous twenty metres, and full of ledges and good looking holds we figured it must've been the route and though we couldn't see bolts, it was easy enough for us to scamper up. Our spirits were high as we yelled in euphoria, donning our cold hands with gloves, and drinking an obscure South American tea that Karl had brewed. The approach had been mentally testing, trudging on and on in the cold. But I was there. I was in one of the most beautiful places in the world with one of my best friends, and we were about to embark on what we had both came for: adventure.
"Let's put our crampons on, it'll give us better purchase on the rock," Karl offered. I obliged. The conditions were tricky, the infamously broken rock had frozen together and was covered in a glaze of ice thick enough for your hands to hate you, but too thin for the use of the ice axe. We started up the easy looking rock, singing The Lonely Island and laughing. It was bliss. We felt like we were earning our stripes as climbers, and these new-to-us conditions simply offered another initiation. With our big gloves, we pulled on good holds, hoped they didn't break, found an edge for the front points of our crampons, and moved off them. Soon, a promising looking ledge was a few feet above our heads, and both of us were side by side on small ledges, trying to figure out our next moves. A shark tooth looking hold stuck out to me on the ledge, but I was not ignorant to the range in which I was climbing and tested it thoroughly. The mood was still jubilant, and Karl and I laughed when I said to the abiotic feature, "Please! Please, don't break and kill me!" I weighted it and it felt good, so I moved my feet up off the safety of the ledge onto two small holds. As I searched for my next right hand to pull myself onto the lovely looking ledge, I heard it.
With a crack, my eyes widened as I looked at my left hand holding onto the shark tooth feature now detached from the rock. My momentum took me a few inches away from the cliff, and in the longest two seconds of my life I clawed at the rock for any sort of literal lifeline. My right hand got something small and snow covered, and I pulled myself back onto my two small feet. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, I can't move Karl, I can't fucking move. Fuck." Karl heard the desperation in my voice, and tried to calm me: "Hang on. I'm going to climb to the ledge and throw you a rope, just hang on." This worked and I breathed, focusing on simply hanging on.
"Nat. Nat. I can't move. You need to get to me." They were the last words I wanted to hear and I looked to my right and found Karl, slightly above my level and on hands and feet looking more precarious than mine. My saviour needed saving, and our jaunt had turned into a death march.
Adrenalin kicked in, and after split second examination I pulled on holds without testing them, simply hoping they wouldn't break, and I fought my way to the ledge. I set my backpack down, and in an attempt at a voice of reason said, "Hang on buddy, I'm just going to build an anchor and get you up." His response, and the way he looked at me, was hauntingly real. With small pupils, both his eyes and voice said, "No time. You have to pull me up. I fucking need you, I can't hang on." In a moment like this, no one thinks, they simply do. My friend was in peril and he needed me, just as on so many past adventures I needed him. I searched for a hold for my left hand along the ledge, but could only find a slopey feature glazed in ice. "Karl, you just need to hang on, just a little longer, I have to find a better hold. I can't pull you up on this," I pleaded. I saw his gloveless left hand, white as the snow around it, clutching a hold with his entire life upon it as his right hand grabbed his axe and took desperate swings at the rubble in the ledge, hoping for a miracle. "I can't feel my hands, you have to pull me up now," my friend said, once again with eyes wider than anything I'd ever seen. I took a breath. "Okay, just try and weight yourself as much as you can, I don't know if I can hold you." I gripped the frozen sloper with my left hand, my glove off trying to summon all the strength and grip I had. "You ready?" He asked. "Yeah, yeah give me your axe," I responded, perhaps sounding rather solemn. Karl's axe swung into the vicinity of my outstretched body, and with my hand that wasn't hanging onto my slopey prayer hold, I grabbed it and began to pull. I could feel the pulleys in my left fingers flex, and then I could not. They had gone numb but thankfully wouldn't budge. I tried to balance on my crampons as my right arm strained with the weight of my friend. With a sort of disbelief, Karl shouted, "I think I found something! I think I found something!" I felt the weight on my axe hand lessen slightly as one of his feet below the ledge propelled him upward. He extended for a good hold that was previously out of reach and grabbed it with his free hand, and with that released the axe I was white knuckling. We were home free, but it was short lived. I watched with horror as his hold started to unearth itself. "Grab the axe! Grab the fucking axe!" I shouted, watching his hold flex. He grabbed it and the tension left my body as his knee pulled onto the ledge. We both collapsed on the ledge for a moment, in total disbelief of how our day had gone from zero to one hundred.
Reality snapped back in the form of the screaming barfies, where one's frozen hand begins to be filled with limb saving warmth, as well as pain that makes you want to scream, and, you guessed it, barf. My left hand felt like it was thrown into a boiling cast iron pot and though I didn't scream, with slight insanity I sung The Who's, "The Kids Are Alright", trying to take my mind off the pain. "I don't miiiiiiiiind," I wailed the song, now laughing at myself and somehow crying in pain at the same time. Karl, who typically had an Ace Ventura quote lined up for any situation, was as silent as the Rocky Mountain air around us. "You alright buddy?" I asked. "Sleep. So tired," he responded as his eyes rolled back and looked empty. The ordeal had sent Karl into shock and he was about to pass out. We weren't out of the woods yet.
I grabbed water and spoke to Karl, probably sounding incredibly annoying, in order to keep him awake. "You can't fall asleep on me Karl, you just can't." I said, always trying to sound calm, though I could hear my words leave my mouth with an accompanied tremble. I needed to make us secure, and grabbed the rope and our trad rack from Karl's pack. I rushingly tried to place a cam into a crack above the ledge, but it was too big. I cursed with frustration as I saw on Karl's harness the right sized cam that would work, but he was sitting on it and I couldn't risk moving him. I cleared snow off the rock looking for more cracks that would give us some concrete safety. With Karl in a semi-conscious state, myself running around this ledge trying to build an anchor, and the beautiful Autumn Rocky Mountains teasing us, it was the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
"Well, shall we keep going?" I was so shocked to hear these words I almost fell off the ledge. "What the hell are you talking about? Are you okay?" I asked in rapid fire, incredibly confused. "Yeah, I'm alright. That was gnarly, let's keep going," Karl responded with calm in his voice. We hugged, and laughed, happy to be alive and discussing our route. The snowy ledges continued, but at a lower grade. After some recuperation, we went onward. Soon though, we realized that the conditions made this low grade rock incredibly heinous, and we still had no idea where the actual route was. Plus, our brush with the other side had us way behind schedule. It was time to turn around.
As we bum scooted through a gully on the far left side of the ledge, and walked down the semi-frozen creek to Moraine Lake, we talked. Both of us expressed that though we had to learn from that experience, neither of us were dissuaded from alpine climbing. It happened, we dealt with it in the best way possible, and we are better because of it. Though I risk sounding ignorant to risk, I am at peace with the fact that climbing is playing with fire. I expressed to Karl that the thought of sitting at a desk for forty years still scared me more, and I was relieved to hear him respond in a sarcastic Mike Meyer's impersonation. He was back, and I found myself looking forward feeling inexplicably excited. We went for it and committed, and in an imperfect life, imperfection is inevitable. There is an incredibly large difference between living, and surviving. We did not survive that day somewhere near the Perren Route, we lived it. Though I never want to go through something like that again, I cannot wait to get on another climb.
Finally, my conscious thoughts have instilled into my mind that this is going to be my life and I am going to embrace all that comes with it. Still at the very humble beginnings of my alpine climbing career, this left me with a deep satisfaction. Both of us had read, and been inspired by Barry Blanchard's memoir, The Calling. In the book, he talks about his close calls, and how many times he and his partners had bailed each other out of situations. I thought about the time that my friend Luke and I almost accidentally cut our rope nine hundred feet off the ground, or when John threw me a rope cause the god damn Nike Freeruns were about to send me into the Norquay valley, and when Karl did the same on Tower Of Babel, when we chose to solo the first pitch and the god damn Nike Freeruns betrayed me again (why do I still wear those shoes? Learn, idiot!). As I looked around, I thought about the Rocky Mountains, and once again felt somehow even smaller. An ear to ear grin was on my face as I nodded at the wise scholars whose shadow's did not chill me, but filled me with warmth. We had danced with them, and as our feet stumbled both literally and figuratively, they bestowed us with their knowledge. But I know that I am not going to sit on the bench in the corner of the gym sulking, I refuse too. For with each new song, comes new opportunity, the opportunity for the entire reason I'm dancing: adventure.
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