Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [74]
At three in the morning, I awoke and put on my cold-weather clothes, gathered my water and food, kicked my feet into my boots, and strapped on my crampons. After a quick bowl of oatmeal and protein powder, I was moving up the debris field by three-thirty A.M.
Within an hour, I was in trouble. While making my observations the afternoon before, I’d spotted a steep shortcut directly up a narrow gully. The gully would eliminate a wide traverse to the right in less consolidated snow, allowing me to enter the Bell Cord Couloir proper at 11,200 feet. Climbing on my front points in the isolated bubble of my headlamp, I was halfway up the gully when a bowling ball of ice came shooting out of the inky heavens down the tightly walled corridor and whizzed past my head. It fell with such velocity that I caught only the flash of it in my headlamp. Terror chilled my blood, but I climbed on, hoping that the twenty-pound ice cube didn’t have any friends. A few minutes later, however, another block hurtled past my right shoulder, also at high speed, and smashed into the right wall of the gully. I had to get out of the shooting gallery as fast as I could. Climbing out the top was the best option, as the blocks seemed to be leaping over a ledge that would provide cover until I left the confinement of the rock walls. The gully became steeper as I neared the top, and then my ice axe hit solid ice below the Styrofoam snow. I looked up at a forty-foot-high sheer frozen waterfall that spanned the gully wall-to-wall.
What the…? Where did that come from? Why didn’t I see this before? Can I climb it? Should I go down?
I didn’t want to risk descending the gully—I had no idea if the bombardment was over or not—and I couldn’t afford to lose the time it would take to reascend the snowy ramps. I needed to be at 13,600 feet by the time sunlight hit the mountain faces in two hours, and I wouldn’t make it if I had to give up a half hour of backtracking. If I wanted a shot at doing the climb today, I would have to climb this curtain of water ice with a single ice axe and general mountaineering crampons—not my preferred ice-climbing equipment. The crampon points on my right foot bit into the frozen glaze of the waterfall, and I swung my long-handled axe in my right hand like a shorter ice-climbing tool, until it sank to the third tooth on the pick. Finger-width cracks, shallow ledges, and inset footholds populated the rock wall on my left. Forming a right angle with the ice, the rock wall on my left allowed me to make stemming maneuvers; using counterpressure, I could more confidently bear down on the crampon points of my right foot, where they were embedded in the ice. I surmounted two ten-foot steps in the rock using this basic technique. Trying to ignore the deathly void behind me, I continued another ten feet and ran out of ice on my right side. I was almost at the top, but now there was a small patch of frozen tundra exposed by the avalanches that had coursed through the gully. A two-inch-tall horizontal crack gave me a decent left foothold where the flat front points of my crampons could balance. My right foot could still puncture the icefall in a straight-legged stem, but the rock wall faded back from my left hand, leaving me without good holds for either hand. I was stuck.
Reversing my climb back down the mixed ice and rock dihedral would lead to a death fall. I couldn’t go down; I couldn’t stay. I had to go up, as improbable as it seemed. Plucking my axe from its last placement in the ice, I swung it hard into the frost-heaved earth above a grassy knob. I hardly trusted the mud to hold my weight, but my left hand couldn’t pull on the last remaining rock lip—my glove was too slick. As the crampon points of my left foot skittered off their balancing point, I