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By Root 767 0

on July 2, 2000. My best friends and closest climbing partners, Mark Van Eeckhout and Jason Halladay, and I had climbed North Maroon, traversed the ridge to South Maroon, and descended the slushy ice runnels in the East Face Couloir in a fifteen-hour round trip. Despite the gnarly descent, I remembered a moment of downclimbing blocky purple rock into the yellow-lichen-coated central notch at the head of the Bell Cord and looking out to the west over the lush velveteen green of Fravert Basin. The colors were so rich, I thought I could smell them. I felt the love of beauty to a greater extent than I ever had before. Two things became certain to me in that moment: first, that I would visit Fravert Basin and see close up the vision of nature that called to me from that rocky perch; and second, in whatever vague recess of my mind that is in charge of these life decisions, I knew that one day I would call Aspen my home. If the subject of a winter traverse of the Maroon Bells ridge had come up at that time, I would have dismissed the idea outright as an impossibility. I had done it though, not just once but twice in the same day, and five hours faster in the winter than I had done it in the summer.

Seven

Day Three: “Push on till the Day”

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.

—HORACE

WHERE HAVE ALL THESE mosquitoes come from? I wait out two of them and return their spirits to the cosmos when they alight on my right forearm. Up until a half hour ago, I hadn’t seen a single insect all day, and now a half-dozen bloodsuckers buzz around my head. Sitting in my harness, suspended from the anchor I built this morning above the chockstone, I execute them one by one until they are all gone. Bizarrely, it occurs to me that I could eat the flattened mosquitoes. It’s a ridiculous and unnecessary thought: The bugs couldn’t possibly sustain me, and besides, I still have most of two premade burritos. That’s a good five hundred calories, and much more appetizing than dead insects.

Must be the sleep deprivation. It’s making you dumb.

Yet another breeze brushes past me on its way to the Big Drop, stripping me of what little warmth I have. Later in the afternoon like this—or early in the evening, I guess—the winds come more frequently, and a crispness anticipates the arrival of night.

My gumption for chipping at the boulder is gone. I continue with the fruitless effort solely to stimulate my metabolism and push into the background the shuddering weakness brought on by the chilly winds. Even still, I work only a fraction as much as I did yesterday. I’ve already acknowledged the inutility of hacking at the chockstone, but some irrational part of my brain hasn’t yet acquiesced to the helplessness of my situation. It insists that if I work harder and take fewer breaks, I will eventually get free. I rationalize my lethargy with the impossible thought that I don’t want to get free with night approaching—I could stumble right off the Big Drop rappel in the dark, or get lost in the lower canyon.

Like you’re going to get free. You’re lazy and you know it. You’re in the fight of your life—a fight for your life, no less—and you’re too lazy to get over a little fatigue and do some work. You slothful waste. You’re killing yourself here. You’re going to die.

There it is, my prognosis in black and white, like an X ray held to the light. I have a terminal condition. Without being able to meet the needs of my body, I can expect to live another day and a half, perhaps. Or two days, but what would that matter? No expectation had prepared me for this tormenting anxiety of a slow death, thinking about whether it will come tonight in the cold, tomorrow in the cramps of dehydration, or the next day in heart failure. This hour, the next, the one after that. Anytime I’d come close to death before, it had been in the context of a flashing crisis, a dramatic vision. Whether the circumstance was experienced or envisioned, the chop came as an executioner’s blade, fast as gravity in the form