Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [124]
“Don’t forget your comb!” Vince said, in reference to a time when Jeff had used a plastic comb to hack steps up a vertical snowbank no one else had cared to try.
Ten minutes later, however, he was a good portion of the way down the cliff, considerably off to the left as they looked down, where the steepness of the rock angled outward, and looked quite comfy compared to where they were.
He yelled back up at them, “Piece of cake! Piece of cake!”
“Yeah right!” they all yelled.
But there he was, and he had done it so fast that they had to try it. They found some very narrow ledges hidden under the buttress, trending down and left, and by holding on to the broken white granite of the wall next to their heads, and making their way carefully along the ledges and down from ledge to ledge, they had all soon followed Jeff to the less steep bulge in the cliff, and from there each took a different route to a horrible jumble of rocks in a flat trough at the bottom.
“Wow!” Charlie said as they regathered on a big white rock among the rest, next to a little bowl of caked black dust that had once been a pool of water. “That was class 2! I was wrong. It wasn’t so bad! Wasn’t that class 2?” he asked of Troy and Frank.
“It probably was,” Troy said.
“So you guys just discovered a class 2 route on a wall that all the guidebooks call class 3!”
“How could that happen?” Vince wondered. “Why would we be the ones to find it?”
“We were desperate,” Troy said, looking back up. From below the cliff looked even steeper than it had from above.
“That’s probably actually it,” Charlie said. “The class ratings up here have mostly been made by climbers, and when they came up to this pass they probably saw the big slot in the face, and ran right up it without a second thought, because it’s so obvious. The fact it was class 3 meant nothing to them, they didn’t care one way or the other, so they rated it 3, which is right if you’re only talking about the slot. They never even noticed there was a much trickier class 2 line off to the side, because they didn’t need it.”
Frank nodded. “Could be.”
“We’ll have to write to the authors of the guidebooks and see if we can get them to relist Vennacher Col as class 2! We can call the route the Jeffrey Dirretissimma.”
“Very cool. You do that.”
“Actually,” Vince pointed out, “it was my refusal to go down the slot that caused Jeff to take the new route, and I’m the one that spotted it first, so I’m thinking it should be called the Salami Dirretissima. That has a better ring to it anyway.”
That night, in a wonderful campsite next to the biggest of the Lakes Basin’s lakes (none had names), their dinner party was extra cheery. They had crossed a hard pass—an impossible pass—and were now in the lap of beauty, lying around on ground pads dressed like pashas in colorful silken clothing, drinking an extra dram or two of their carefully hoarded liquor supplies, watching the sun burnish the landscape. The water copper, the granite bronze, the sky cobalt. On the northern wall of the basin a single tongue of cloud lapped up the slope like some sinuous creature, slowly turning pink. Each of them cooked his own dinner, on various kinds of tiny backpacking stoves, and in various styles of backpacking fare: Dave and Jeff sticking with the old ramen and mac-and-cheese, Vince with the weirdest freeze-dried meals currently available at REI; Troy downing a glop of his own devising, a mixture of powders from the bins of his food co-op, intensely healthy and fortified; Charlie employing the lark’s-tongues-in-aspic theory of extreme tastiness, in a somewhat vain attempt to overcome the appetite suppression that often struck him at altitude. Frank appeared to favor a diet that most resembled Troy’s, with bars and bags of nuts and grains supplying his meals.
After dinner the Maxfield Parrish blues of the twilight gave way to the stars, and then the Milky Way. The moon would