Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [60]
I was loving the ski-town life. My townie friends and I would make almost daily references to “living the dream.” We employed all sorts of tricks, favor exchanges, and bartering to ensure a high quality of life in Aspen, despite our meager wages in a place that has one of the most expensive costs of living in the world. We had free two-day-a-week ski passes from our jobs, but we figured out how to ski five days a week by earning our turns—hiking to the upper lifts where passes weren’t scanned. I quickly learned where I could go to find untracked snow when I couldn’t be the first one out on a powder day. “If you can’t ski first, you gotta ski smart,” I would say to folks I met riding the chairlifts before squirreling off into the trees to a favorite stash.
Outside the ski areas, boundless public lands yielded infinite opportunities for free outdoor recreation. While it’s hard to beat free, we scored discounts and deals wherever we could in town: pro deals on top-quality gear, cafeteria pals we could count on for a “good-guy discount,” friends who would organize lavish dinner parties, bouncers and bartenders who would give us the nod for the familiar-face freebie. It didn’t hurt that we were getting the best snow in five years.
As soon as winter officially began, my attention narrowed, and I focused on my upcoming solo fourteener climbs. The routes and mountains started at an advanced level and got more and more desperate as the winter progressed. Besides the blessings of my job, my roommates, my friends, and the social and musical scene, I was also lucky to have a guardian angel who apparently didn’t mind putting in some long hours when I traveled into the backcountry.
My climbing efforts commenced on the day after Christmas, when I scaled and skied two adjacent fourteeners—Castle and Conundrum peaks—twice taking what backcountry guru and guidebook writer Lou Dawson calls “the journey through the valley of death.”
Avalanche exposure increased significantly over the New Year, so by January 9, camped below the north face of the picturesque North Maroon Peak, I had to change my itinerary from the standard route on North Maroon. Instead, I climbed Pyramid Peak by its West Face route, despite a storm that blew dangerous amounts of fresh snow into the steep-faced west amphitheater at 13,800 feet. Avalanche hazard was at volatile levels, waiting for a human trigger named Aron to step onto the wrong part of the slope.
Descending the summit ridge, I contorted my body over my gloved hands, poised on loose mudstone slats, to make a difficult downclimbing maneuver through a fifteen-foot-high band of cliffs. When my grip came loose, I fell four feet to land flat-footed on a three-foot-wide shelf. Wobbling directly above a second cliff, I steadied myself before easing down another ten feet onto the upper perimeter of the wind-loaded amphitheater’s snowfield. From there, it was a heart-stopping descent all the way to treeline. To avoid the unstable zones that had filled in with a foot-thick layer of avalanche-prone snow as I climbed above them, I had to take inefficient deviations from my ascent path. I made a safe return, sometimes pushing snow down onto a slope below me to make it avalanche in a loose slide of spindrift before I continued down myself. I had never taken a fall on a winter climb. I’d been fortunate to land safely—a backward step from the ledge would have sent me on a fast ride into the sweet spot of the bowl, most likely injuring me as I triggered a massive slide—but I was spooked and gave every hazard an extra margin on the way down.
Starting with the experience on Pyramid Peak’s summit ridge, I went on a month-long streak of climbing fourteeners in January, with close calls on all of them. On my approach to Mount of the Holy Cross, I got caught after dark at 13,000 feet