Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [48]
Our adventure on Mount Shuksan wasn’t over. Since we hadn’t yet topped out on the mountain—and indeed were on the opposite side of the summit pyramid from the fastest route to the top—we had a long day ahead of us when Sunday dawned bright and clear. Circumventing the black pyramid’s ramparts on the east and then the south, we were forced to skip going up the final five hundred feet to the peak’s high point so we could scout the three major gullies that dropped off the west side of the mountain’s southern glacier. Without the map, we had little certainty of our descent, and though we found our way down the steepest climbing of the trip—through an ice tunnel at a glacial bergschrund (a crevasse created where the head of a glacier pulls away from the adjacent rock), down the vertical rock of the Fisher Chimney, and up a grueling finish to reach the Mount Baker ski area—it was dark again before we were off the mountain.
A week after the Mount Shuksan climb, I moved to New Mexico with my job and immediately joined the search-and-rescue (SAR) group to which Mark had belonged for five years. The Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council, the top team in the state for technical rock rescues, provided me unparalleled training and experience and introduced me to nearly every one of my climbing partners of the next three years. Living in Albuquerque also allowed me closer access to the peaks in Colorado where I spent an average of five days climbing each month, year-round.
With my summer of big-mountain adventures in Washington, and more time for training in the Colorado mountains, I had gained a significant amount of experience that prepared me for a full slate of winter fourteener ascents during the winter of 1999–2000. However, I was still at the mercy of the mountain gods. Greater-than-100-mph winds blasted me on the summit plateau of Mount Bross on December 22, repeatedly knocking me over. The entire time I was crawling and fighting for my balance, unbeknownst to me, the metal frame of my headlamp was conducting the heat off my forehead into the bitter windchill, leaving a Gorbachevian crimson frostbite mark centered between my temples. I joined my family that evening in Denver with a ridiculous purple brow that faded to a brown splotch, like the stain of a mild sunburn, after four days.
In the three days after Christmas that year, I surmounted five fourteener summits; two days later, I rang in the millennium in the Everglades of Florida with about twenty of my friends (and eighty thousand other fans) at my fiftieth Phish show. The band played continuously from midnight until dawn, nearly eight hours, in an incomparable marathon set. Later in the spring, four of my friends and I decided to go to Japan that summer to see the band play an entire tour of small venues; while we were there, we also hiked to the top of Mount Fuji, the first time I’d ever been to the highest point of a country.
Before the winter of 2000 was over, I soloed another six winter fourteeners back in Colorado, including the moderately technical Kit Carson Mountain and Blanca Peak, both in the southern Sangre de Cristo Range. On January 16, 2000, after nabbing the first documented ascent of the millennium on Blanca and its easier sister summit, Ellingwood Point, I descended briskly on a thin snowfield that barely covered some underlying boulders. At about 12,000 feet, I broke through the snow crust up to my right knee for about the hundredth time—I was bruising and scraping the front of my shins from bashing into the leading edge of the crust each time I stumbled—but this time I couldn’t pull my