What Am I Doing Here, Climber Asks as Crevasse Swallows Guide

MT. BAKER, Wash. — The storm was coming in below us, the clouds blowing swiftly up the mountain. We were moving fast in the dull early-morning light when I felt the yank on the rope.

I turned to see the climber behind me dropping to the ground, struggling with the cord that linked the five of us together. Behind him, the rope ran into a jagged hole punched in the glacier where Paul, our guide and mentor for the last week, had been standing a moment earlier. A snow bridge had collapsed, plunging him into a hidden crevasse.

I fought to control a rush of panic. Dropping to the ground, I kicked the spikes on my boots into the snow and dug in my ice ax. I could feel Paul’s weight pulling at me and I wondered if he was hurt.

We were 9,000 feet up in Washington’s North Cascade mountains. Help, if we needed it, was hours away. And I was climbing my first mountain.

A thought drifted through my head: What am I doing here?

‘The Mountain Can Kill You’

I wonder how many of us there are. We buy mountaineering books and hide them like a 14-year-old stashing copies of Playboy. We read furtively about the Alps, the Himalayas and the climbers who test themselves there. Secretly, we dream of reaching our own summits.

And we wonder if we can make it.

For 15 years I’d been wondering. I’m an experienced hiker and for a few years I had been a serious caver. But mountaineering seemed a closed society bound by obscure skills. So, weary of just thinking about it, I came to the Cascades and met up with three other rookies and an ex-Green Beret now guiding for the American Alpine Institute. There, during an often-overcast September week, I found out if I could make it.

For six days, our small group learned from Paul Rosser, a 31-year-old Georgia native who discovered mountaineering as a teenager and honed his astonishing strength and endurance in the Army Special Forces.

From our camp, in a rock-strewn basin near the base of one of Baker’s glaciers, we crawled out of our tents each morning to grapple with Paul’s lessons, learning the basics of mountaineering and preparing for a summit attempt on the final night.

A natural teacher, Paul taught us to walk and fall, to work with ice axes and the art of moving as a rope team. We learned crevasse rescue techniques and the basics of mountain meteorology.

And always, as we mastered those lessons in the spectacular classroom above the tree line, Paul hounded us with warnings.

He had a seemingly endless supply of mountaineering truisms, many of them ending with the phrase: “The mountain can kill you.”

“Listen y’all, everything we do up here we do for a purpose,” was his catchall maxim, “because if you do something wrong, the mountain can kill you.”

Mt. Baker, at 10,778 feet, is a good first summit. The glacier-covered volcano is difficult enough for a taste of serious mountaineering, but still within reach for a well-prepared neophyte. The route we would take, while sometimes steep and heavily cracked open, does not demand the skills of an accomplished mountaineer and does not reach high enough to include the dangers of low oxygen. At the height of the Cascade climbing season--we were on the mountain at the very end of the season and had it nearly to ourselves--Mt. Baker is awash with climbers, many of them beginners.

If an experienced climber might sniff at viewing Mt. Baker as a challenge, it seemed an enormous hurdle to me, an all too often deskbound writer.

I was, at 30, both the youngest and least-prepared of the mountaineering initiates.

I had spent three months training, with thousands of sit-ups and push-ups and hours of running in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. I had hiked for days in the meandering hills of the Appalachians.

But I could not match my compatriots, two lawyers and an engineer well-steeped in the demands of lengthy wilderness trips. One didn’t bother to bring toilet paper, another takes weekend camping trips with no food--he says it weighs him down--and another goes for 100-mile jaunts in the Idaho forests.

Much of the time I felt like a back-country beginner struggling to keep up.

Desperate Struggle for Focus and Life

The week did not begin easily.

We were making our way across a glacier, maneuvering through the maze of fissures, when my concentration slipped and my feet quickly followed.

Pitching into a crevasse, I calmly watched the rope going taut as my rope mates fought to stop my fall.

I dropped for 20 feet, until my head plunged into soft powder. Spitting out some snow, I yelled I was OK and climbed out using my crampons--the spikes clipped to my boots--and ice ax.

At the top I found John Richter, a lawyer from Atlanta, grimacing in pain. Jerked heavily when I’d fallen, he’d raked a crampon across his leg.

I was racked with guilt. I sat in the snow, worrying over what could have happened if I’d hit ice at the bottom of the crevasse, or if I’d dragged in someone else. I wondered if another careless slip would cost me my life or that of another climber.

John soon felt better, but the mountain had changed for me. A momentary lapse in concentration made me realize I might regret coming on this trip. Keeping hold of that focus would be the fight of the next few days.

‘This Is a Great Night to Summit

We crawled into our tents before the sun went down, set an alarm for midnight and awoke to a cold, starry sky.

Through the thin nylon wall of my tent, I heard Paul suck in a deep breath.

“This is a great night to summit,” he called out.

I wasn’t so sure. I had spent the evening tossing in my sleeping bag in fitful dollops of sleep. Six days of training suddenly didn’t seem enough for an all-night climb. I worried about frigid temperatures and harsh winds. I wondered how I’d react when faced with the mountain’s crevasses--some dropping more than 100 feet.

Just getting up at that hour was unsettling. We climbed in darkness because the cold of night would harden the snow and make it easier to maneuver.

But I said nothing, vowed silently to make it and forced my feet into my frozen boots.

Mountaineering’s Mysterious Appeal

Even now, months after I trudged off Mt. Baker, I cannot completely explain the appeal. Beyond a love of the outdoors--an urge to feel close to the sky, to experience the glacial isolation and drink in the views across the Cascades--the draw of mountaineering was a mystery.

I knew it was dangerous. I had a fiancee back in New York who was worrying about what could happen--despite having encouraged me to go.

No armchair mountaineer missed the lessons of last May, when 12 people died on the upper reaches of Mt. Everest, some of whom were unprepared for survival at such altitudes.

If Baker is a long way from Everest, climbing any mountain is still dangerously unpredictable. Storms come up quickly, snow bridges collapse, climbing partners fall. The Alpine Institute is one of the nation’s best mountaineering schools and Paul was a great guide, but they couldn’t guarantee my safety. Nobody could. And that was part of the appeal. I wanted to do it despite the dangers.

Was I looking for some sort of transformation? Was this an attempt to preempt a midlife crisis?

Perhaps. I won’t deny the appeal of swinging a rope over my shoulder on the way to a summit, leaving behind the gaping tourists. Mountaineers have always held a peculiar place in the public imagination, viewed paradoxically with both admiration and a lingering suspicion that they might have some peculiarly cold death wish.

I had no such wish. But after years of fascination with mountaineering, all I really had were vague notions about testing myself and finding adventure.

And I knew that if I loved it, if I had not romanticized those spits of rock into false meccas of challenge and self-awareness, I would do it again.

Climbing by the Stars, Drawn to the Summit

We fell quickly into a silent rhythm. With Paul leading the way, we hiked to the edge of the glacier, where we roped up.

Within minutes, we were on the exposed face of the mountain, linked to our five-man world by 11-millimeter nylon cord spaced 30 feet between each climber.

There was a remarkable feeling to climbing in darkness, an isolation punctured only by the stars, the light of an insomniac camper thousands of feet below and the glow of a town in the distance. Our path was lit only by five bobbing headlamps.

I climbed in the footsteps of the man in front of me, and he in the footsteps in front of him. With each step, I swept the beam of my headlamp across the glacier, stepped into the pool of light, and felt for the reassuring crunch of my crampons biting into the snow. Wherever I turned, the crystalline expanse of snow and ice reflected the light like a million tiny shards of glass.

Occasionally, Paul would stop and I would hear him probing the glacier, searching for weak patches. The sound made me look at the ground, wondering if the snow beneath me was about to collapse into the glacial gloom.

I forced myself to think of nothing outside of my tiny circle of existence. Am I using the correct step, how is the rope positioned, am I prepared for something going wrong?

Over and over I ran drills in my mind, moving my fingers along the ax so that if one of us fell, I could instinctively ram it into the snow and stop the descent.

After a few hours, exhaustion seeped through my legs. The wind also kicked up, dropping wind-chill temperatures to about minus 20 and forcing us to yell above the blustery clamor.

When it would become overwhelming and the four of us slowed, Paul’s yell would boom down the rope line. “How y’all doing?” he’d bellow. After a week together, it took no more encouragement than that, and the plodding pace would again pick up.

We rested below the final push, a steep 1,000-foot section called the Roman Wall. We clumped together near the volcano’s vent, the smell of sulfur suffusing the air. I choked down Fig Newtons and used my ax to chip ice off my canteen so I could suck down slushy water.

Then we moved off, moving quickly in the predawn cold.

Suddenly, the steepness gave way to a plateau. At 6:18, just as the pink of dawn began to light up the mountains around us, we hit the summit.

A rush of exultation quickly gave way under exhaustion. For a few minutes, we sat on a rocky outcropping and watched as one man’s canteen slipped from his hands, slid to the edge, and dropped into oblivion. The pictures show a miserable group, only one person bothering to fake a smile before we threw on our packs to head down.

Paul, who had moved to the back of the rope, pointed to dark clouds coming in beneath us. He yelled that we wanted to clear the Roman Wall before the storm hit.

We were moving fast and had nearly made it down the wall when I turned to see the climber behind me, an engineer from California named John Rinard, dropping to the ground.

Paul was gone, dropped into a hidden crevasse. And despite the fear, it was time to put our training to work.

I threw myself onto the glacier, helping hold Paul’s weight. The lead climber crept to the edge of the crevasse. I heard nothing above the wind, but saw him shouting into the chasm. After a few minutes, the yell came for us to move down the mountain, pulling the rope and raising up Paul.

His smiling face broke over the snow line.

Paul nonchalantly hoisted himself out, thrilled at having hung more than 60 feet from the bottom.

Minutes later, a whiteout enveloped us in a surreal miasma of fog. We moved into the shelter of a small moat to rest.

The climb was still hours from ending and we had thousands of feet to descend in a whiteout. But crouching in that small space, chipping more ice off my water bottle, I suddenly knew I was a climber.

Just minutes earlier, bracing the rope holding Paul, I’d wondered what I was doing on the mountain. Now I knew.

I was cold and exhausted. I had not shined on the climb. But I’d done it. I could do it. My struggle for concentration had succeeded.

From then on, I hiked confidently on the glacier, stepping easily over the rope and wondering how I’d gotten tangled earlier. I looked into the crevasses, amazed at their shapes and regretting I’d been unable to enjoy them on the way up.

The mountain, which had seemed so menacing, now seemed wondrous.

A Journey Out of Normalcy

In climbing, according to David Roberts, one of America’s foremost mountaineering writers, “one normally ignores the complicated world we call ‘out’ and instead penetrates the mysteries of self-reliance . . . all that should matter is one’s self, one’s partner, the rock and the weather.”

After it was all over, what I had done was journey out of that complicated world of everyday life. There was no wilderness epiphany, no transformation. I didn’t make a remarkable climb. But in the 10 hours I spent scaling Mt. Baker, faced with exhaustion and fear, I had to fight hardest just to stay focused.

Deep in concentration, I found myself cut off from everything unconnected to the climb.

For that brief period, I cleared my head of the chaos of daily life. Nothing existed but the next step, the next turn, the next crevasse. There was no world except the snow beneath me and the men around me.

And in that intensity of focus, in penetrating those mysteries of self, I found my reason to climb.

I fought to control a rush of panic. . . . We were 9,000 feet up in Washington’s North Cascade mountains. Help, if we needed it, was hours away. And I was climbing my first mountain.