Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [46]
On Mount Rainier, I learned what it meant to sit in an exposed bivouac after my partner Paul Budd and I had made a traverse over the summit, ascending via the Kautz Ice Chute route and then—because of our shortage of ice screws and a nasty lightning and snow storm—descending via the standard Disappointment Cleaver route. With our camping gear, food, and water supplies at 11,000 feet on the opposite side of the mountain, we shivered at 10,000 feet for eight hours as a ten-degree chill drained our bodies’ warmth. During that epic, we climbed over 15,000 feet vertical in twenty-four hours (we had to reclimb the peak to retrieve our gear) and went sixty-six hours without sleeping due to the storms.
Paul and I had put forth a monstrous effort that showed new depths to my strength; these came to bear the next weekend, when I returned with my friend Judson Cole from Arizona and we climbed the regular Disappointment Cleaver route in a single push, going from the Paradise base area to the summit and back in fourteen hours. On an endurance-climbing kick, I joined a group of three companions from the ACME Mountain Club for an ascent of the North Face of Mount Shuksan, one of the most beautiful mountains in the world and still one of the greatest climbs I’ve ever done. But the approach to the climb was proof of the adage “If you want to get to heaven, you have to go through hell.” Our team bushwhacked through such heavy forest undergrowth that it ripped one of my ice tools completely off my backpack without my even noticing. I lost our only map as well, as I slipped with every second step on the sloping hillside coated in two-inch-thick slide alder branches. Thankfully, we knew the route well enough from having memorized the description that we were able to keep going, despite gaining only a mile’s progress in almost eight hours of hiking through the night.
By morning we were exhausted from the heinous approach. After reorienting ourselves in the daylight, we reached 5,000 feet on the north shoulder of the mountain and collapsed for an hour-long nap. At noon, we rousted ourselves and roped up for protection against falling into a crevasse while we climbed the mountain’s upper glaciers. A thousand feet up, in the middle of the ramp connecting the two glaciers of the North Face, as my rope-mate Bruce and I were spread across an avalanche debris field, we heard a distant rumbling far above us.
Our partners ahead started screaming at us to run. Without looking at what the other was doing, Bruce and I ran three steps away from each other, and the rope drew taught, comically jerking us to a halt. It was a moment that we recounted later in bellyaching guffaws, but it brought me to the brink of a roiling panic at the time. I turned back toward Bruce. “THIS WAY!” I yelled over the increasing but still invisible thunder, and gave a rough tug on the rope.
We both sprinted forward across the snowfield in a blinding terror. With heavy mountain boots, crampons, and forty-five-pound packs, moving quickly proved to be a nightmare. Time slowed; it felt like we were running in place. Suddenly, the noise got louder and then stopped, as though I’d stepped into a soundproof room. I shot a look back over my shoulder.
From an ice cliff hanging above and halfway across the traverse, a boulder the size and shape of a motor coach hurtled into the air, spinning and wobbling violently like a punted football. The sight brought me to a horrified stop as I screamed for Bruce. “RUN! KEEP RUNNING!” I couldn’t tell if he was clear of the boulder’s landing zone yet, and we had only about two more seconds before we both found out the hard way.
In those