Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [122]
After a few of these discouraging miles they turned left and followed an entirely dry tributary uphill to the northwest, aiming at the Vennacher Needle—a prominent peak, extremely broad for a needle, as Vince pointed out. “One of those famous blunt-tipped needles. One of those spherical needles.”
Up and up, over broken granite, much whiter than the orange stuff east of Taboose Pass. This was the Cartridge Pluton, Troy told them as they ascended. A very pure bubble of granite. The batholith, meaning the whole mass of the range, was composed of about twenty or thirty plutons, which were the individual bubbles of granite making up the larger mass. The Cartridge was one of the most clearly differentiated plutons, separated as it was by glacial gorges from all the plutons around it. There was no easy way to get over its curving outer ridge into Lakes Basin, the high granite area atop the mass. They were hiking up to one of these entry points now, a pass called Vennacher Col.
The eastern approach to the col got steeper as they approached it, until they were grabbing the boulders facing them to help pull themselves up. And the other side was said to be steeper! But the destination was said to be fine: a basin remote, empty of trails and people, and dotted with lakes—many lakes—and lakes so big, Charlie saw with relief as he pulled into the airy pass, that they had survived the drought and were still there. They glittered in the white granite below like patches of cobalt silk.
Far, far below; for the western side of Vennacher Col was a very steep glacial headwall—in short, a cliff. The first five hundred vertical feet of their drop lay right under their toes, an airy nothing.
Troy had warned them about this. The Sierra guidebooks all rated this side of the pass class 3. In scrambling or (gulp) climbing terms, it was the crux of their week. Normally they avoided anything harder than class 2, and now they were remembering why.
“Troy?” Vince said. “Why are we here?”
“We are here to suffer,” Troy intoned.
“Bayer Aspirin, it was your idea to do this; what the fuck?”
“I came up this way with these guys once. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“You think you came up it,” Charlie reminded him. “It was twenty years ago and you don’t remember exactly what you did.”
“It had to be here.”
“Is this class 2?” Vince demanded.
“This side has a little class 3 section that you see here.”
“You’re calling this cliff little?”
“It’s mostly a class 2 cliff.”
“But don’t you rate terrain by the highest level of difficulty?”
“Yes.”
“So this is a class 3 pass.”
“Technically, yes.”
“Technically? You mean in some other sense, this cliff is not a cliff?”
“That’s right.”
The distinction between class 2 and class 3, Charlie maintained, lay precisely in what they were witnessing now: on class 2, one used one’s hands for balance, but the terrain was not very steep, so that if one fell one could not do more than crack an ankle, at most. So the scrambling was fun. Whereas class 3 indicated terrain steep enough that although one could still scramble up and down it fairly easily, a fall on it would be dangerous—perhaps fatally dangerous—making the scramble nerve-racking, even in places a little terrifying. The classic description in the Roper guidebook said of it, “like ascending a steep narrow old staircase on the outside of a tower, without banisters.” But it could be much worse than that. So the distinction between class 2 and class 3 was fuzzy in regard to rock, but very precise emotionally,