Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [123]
In this case, the actual class 3 route down the cliff, as described by the guidebooks and vaguely remembered by Troy from twenty years before, was a steep incision running transversely down the face from north to south. A kind of gully; and they could see that if they could get into this gully, they would be protected. The worst that could happen then was that they might slide down the gully a ways if they slipped.
But getting into the gully from the top was the trick. The class 3 moment, in effect. And no one liked the look of it, not even Troy.
The five old friends wandered back and forth anxiously on the giant rocks of the pass, peering down at the problem and talking it over. The top of the inner wall of the slot was a sheer cliff and out of the question. The class 3 route appeared to require downclimbing a stack of huge boulders topping the outer wall of the slot.
No one was happy at the prospect of getting down the outer wall’s boulder stack. With backpacks or without, it was very exposed. Charlie wanted to be happy with it, but he wasn’t. Troy had come up it once, or so he said, but going up was generally easier than going down. Maybe Troy could now down-climb it; and presumably Frank could, being a climber and all. But the rest of them, no.
Charlie looked around to see what Frank might say. Finally he spotted him, sitting on the flat top of one of the pass rocks, looking out to the west. It seemed clear he didn’t care one way or the other what they did. As a climber he existed in a different universe, in which class 3 was the stuff you ran down on after climbing the real thing. Real climbing started with class 5, and even then it only got to what climbers would call serious at 5.8 or 5.9, or 5.10 or 5.11. Looking at the boulder stack again, Charlie wondered what 5.11 would look like—or feel like to be on! Never had he felt less inclined to take up rock climbing than he did at that moment.
But Frank didn’t look like he was thinking about the descent at all. He sat on his block looking down at Lakes Basin, biting off pieces of an energy bar. Charlie was impressed by his tact, if that’s what it was. Because they were in a bit of a quandary, and Charlie was pretty sure that Frank could have led them into the slot, or down some other route, if he had wanted to. But it wasn’t his trip; he was a guest, and so he kept his counsel.
Or maybe he was just spacing out, even to the point of being unaware there was any problem facing the rest of them. He sat staring at the view, chewing ruminatively, body relaxed. A man at peace. Charlie wandered up the narrow spine of the pass to his side.
“Nice, eh?”
“Oh, my, yes,” Frank said. “Just gorgeous. What a beautiful basin.”
“It really is.”
“It’s strange to think how few people will ever see this,” Frank said. He had not volunteered even so much as this since they had met at Dulles, and Charlie crouched by his side to listen. “Maybe only a few hundred people in the history of the world have ever seen it. And if you don’t see it, you can’t really imagine it. So it’s almost like it doesn’t exist for most people. So really this basin is a kind of secret. A hidden valley that you have to search for. And even then you might never find it.”
“I guess so,” Charlie said. “We’re lucky.”
“Yes.”
“How’s your head feel up here?”
“Oh good. Good, sure. Interesting!”
“No post-op bleeding, or psychosis or anything?”
“No. Not as far as I can tell.”
Charlie laughed. “That’s as good as.”
He stood and walked down the spine to where the others were continuing to discuss options.
“What about straight down from the lowest point here?” Vince demanded.
Charlie objected, “That won’t work—look at the drop.” He still wanted to want to try the boulder stack.
“But around that buttress down there, maybe,” Dave pointed out. “Something’s sure to go around it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Because it always goes in the Sierra.”
“Except when it doesn’t!”
“I’m going to try it,” Jeff declared, and took off before anyone had time to point