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By Root 851 0

in bitterly cold temperatures due to an incorrect route description for traversing Notch Mountain. Bivouacking on a two-foot-wide snow ledge, I was just below the notch that separates the two 13,200-foot summits, but above a sickening drop into a fifteen-hundred-foot-long steep snow couloir. My intent in hunkering down was to replenish my body’s energy with hot Gatorade and instant mashed potatoes. Twelve miles of travel had brought me to the top of the northern summit of Notch Mountain, but without a tent, I was planning to reach a rock-walled shelter on the southern summit before dark. However, deeply drifted snow and the guidebook that had said to traverse the east side of the southern summit, when it meant the west side, had slowed me down and used up all of my energy reserves, as well as my water. By the time I was certain I was headed the wrong way, I was too tapped to regain the notch where I would be on track again.

A finicky fuel-bottle O-ring then nearly cost me everything. Unbeknownst to me, the rubber gasket had gotten pinched at the fuel-line insertion hole, and for five minutes, fuel spilled into the snow when I opened the valve. I unwittingly lost three quarters of my fuel before I figured out why the stove was burning so weakly. I had popped the troublesome O-ring in my mouth and was flattening it out with my tongue when I saw the storm coming in from the west. I knew I had to get to the shelter, but I needed energy first, and without water, I couldn’t eat anything—I had to get the stove working properly. The thought occurred to me then that there are many shapes to the thing that separates life from death. Sometimes it’s obvious: the distance that separates you from a lightning bolt, the seat belt that restrains you when you hit a deer at 80 mph, the actions of a friend whose quick reflexes save you from drowning in the Colorado River. Other times it’s subtle, even imperceptible: the microscopic string of DNA that enables your body to fight off an infection you don’t even know you’ve contracted, a decision to climb a different mountain and thereby miss being hit by a rock that assails the route you aren’t on. We go through life ignoring these subtleties because there are a million things we survive every day without recognizing we were ever at risk. Then we have a close call, and we become acutely aware of what that fraction of an inch or that split second means. I knew my stove was my salvation from the ledge and quite probably the link that would get me off the mountain. I had to fix the fuel-line seal.

Extracting the three-millimeter O-ring from my mouth, I examined the deformed section. While I was handling it, my deteriorated state caused me to fumble the critical piece into the dark. One of those subtle lifelines had just become terrifyingly obvious. I was horrified to think I had bobbled the O-ring off the ledge. With my headlamp illuminating the ground, I sifted my bare fingers through the concealing snow and found the little black rubber seal. Five minutes later, the stove roared as I melted snow, and I knew I had a fighting chance.

The longer I struggled through the storm, the more difficult the traverse got. I couldn’t remove my goggles because of the blinding wind and blowing snow, but nor could I see in the dark with the mirrored lenses eliminating more than half of the visible light from my headlamp. I left my goggles on but lifted them periodically to hunt for the most efficient route. An hour into the steep traverse, with unseen slopes dropping away to my right, I crossed at the top of a slab-laden snowfield below an ice-plastered rock cliff in fifteen-foot visibility. I tried moving up the rock but made only forty feet of progress before the technical nature of the terrain overcame my confidence. I backed off to find an easier way. Though I had grown accustomed to scrambling up complex terrain in my flexible-toed telemark ski boots, my skills weren’t up to the challenge of climbing fifth-class vertical ground in the dark with a heavy pack. Another hour of searching through the cliffs