Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [64]
A few minutes later, I walked over to the Homestretch. Lips tight and forehead wrinkled, I dropped through the first five moves facing out from the mountain into the storm clouds. I quickly encountered loose snow cloaking a treacherous layer of smooth ice that transformed the only usable footholds into slippery smears. I turned my body to face the rock slab to my right, my left boot hunting for purchase. Watching my foot and trying to ignore the chasm that menaced in the background, I brushed some snow off a small protrusion that supported my boot sole when I weighted it. Three more downclimbing moves, tapping my axe’s pick into the half-inch-thick smear of ice for a grip, and I reached an inset section protected behind a boulder. I turned outward again and, keeping my bottom in contact with the slab, scooted down onto another tiny snow patch coating the underlying rock.
I needed to descend another thirty feet to a pair of thin detached flakes of rock that stuck out an inch where they had separated from the adjoining slab. They enticed me with the prospect of encouraging handholds for a twenty-foot-long swing to my right. I had two options: Moving to my left as I faced down the slab, I could make a few easy moves that would leave me with a fifteen-foot-long slab traverse back to my right, which would be exposed, but it was clear of snow and ice; or I could go straight down a snow groove to the right of the slab, following the usual ascent/descent route, and skip the exposed slab traverse.
Go with the snow; there’s no handholds on that slab; it’s too risky.
The first four times I moved my feet down into the furrow of snow, I managed to find solid footholds and made comfortable downward progress. Still facing outward with my rear end on the snow, I extended my arms out to either side of the groove and pressed my hands against the grayish-brown granite, palms down. My ice axe dangled from its leash around my left wrist, clanging against the rock each time I rocked my upper body forward to relocate my hands farther down the rock. After easy gains for about ten feet, my left boot heel skittered on some ice hidden beneath the snow. Lowering myself until my right foot bent all the way under my buttocks, I stretched my left foot farther down the furrow, but it skidded off at every attempt. I could really use those crampons.
I took the head of my ice axe in my left hand and planted the pick side into the snow until it struck rock. Weighting the axe, I was then able to extend my left foot another six inches, though without finding an ice-free foothold. This would be child’s play with some metal spikes on my feet. Just at the point when I was berating myself for dropping my pack, I made a mistake. I pivoted too far forward on my right haunch, flattening the sole of my right boot on the snow. It peeled out of its divot, and I fell. Instinctively, I rolled over onto my stomach and grabbed the ice-axe shaft with my right hand. I was in the self-arrest position, but my torso slipped below the axe, both my feet skidded onto the rock slab, and my weight fell on the ice pick too abruptly. It jerked out of its placement, and I slid down the last of the snow onto the forty-degree rock slab. Gaining speed, I could feel the crystals of granite grab at my waterproof pants under my knees. From inside my closed eyes, I saw the maw of the chasm rear up behind me, and I gasped. “This is it,” I thought. “I don’t have a chance.”
Trying to drive the axe into the slab to make myself stop, I rotated my shoulders until the full weight of my torso pressed into the axe, grinding it in a hideous squeal of steel on rock. I spent as much energy squinting my eyes shut as I did gripping the axe; I couldn’t bear to witness the rock slip away faster and faster until gravity grabbed me by