Certain I wouldn’t survive another recirculation, I pleaded, “Help! Throw it again!”
My strokes were desperate but weak. The toss had to be perfect. Any mistake here and I was dead. Three seconds later, the line came back and draped over my right shoulder. A miracle! I grabbed at it with both hands, wrapping my left wrist in the line twice as my body wilted. With one last breath, I let my head drop into the water and felt the tension increase on the cord, biting into my wrist, but I didn’t care. My only thought was a hope that the line wouldn’t break. First my hands, and then my arms and chest brushed up onto the sand, and Jean-Marc was grabbing me under my shoulders. I felt sick, cold, blown out, and apathetic. I was safe at last but exhausted beyond concern. A voice spoke: “Oh my God, are you breathing?”
I nodded. “Thank…you…” I huffed between choked breaths, my head buried between my outstretched arms, face in the sand.
“Jesus, you almost died!” Jean-Marc was upset and stressed out, but Chad was calm.
“It’ll be okay. You’re safe. How do you feel?”
“I’m cold.” I paused and shuddered. “I think…I swallowed…a lot of water.” Rolling over to sit up, I slowly drew my legs out of the eddy and held my bloated stomach, groaning over the ache, wanting to puke, but I was too faint to summon the energy.
It took a full five minutes of rest, staring at the eddy where I nearly took my last lungful of air, before I could stand up. Chad offered me a dry sweatshirt, and I paced around in lurching stumbles, trying to restore my equilibrium. Even dry, I was still chilled and needed to get moving. However, nauseated from the river water, I could barely hold my balance. Jean-Marc spotted me when I climbed up the slate ledge to our earlier perch, and I had to sit and take a break while they packed away their camping supplies. We were relaxing, and the aftermath of the adrenaline made us all a little slaphappy.
“I can’t believe how lucky that last toss was.” I was dumbstruck at how a matter of seconds and inches had saved my life.
“I can’t believe you were like ‘No, I don’t need any help-I’m drowning, but I’ll be OK,’ ” Chad teased me.
I looked up and smiled, and we giggled. “Are you ready to go? I need to get my metabolism fired up.”
“Yeah, we’re ready,” Jean-Marc said. “Get your shoes on.”
“Oh. They’re gone. I had to kick them off when I was in the river. I’m gonna hike back in my socks.” My shoes were halfway to Mexico by now, and my sandals were back at Havasupai Campground.
“It’s eight miles, man. Here, take my sandals off my pack.” Chad leaned over, and I undid the Velcro loops. The rubber sandals were too big, but they were better than nothing.
The more we walked, the better I felt. I warmed up, and my stomach absorbed the river water. We rehashed the rescue, I asked if Chad had gotten the picture of me, and he confirmed, “It was you in the middle of ‘Yeee-haw’ jumping off the rock.”
“Well, then, it was worth it. As long as you got the picture,” I said sarcastically and grinned. Secretly, I was pleased to know that I’d have a souvenir of one of my stupidest moments ever.
As we headed back to our camp, Jean-Marc mentioned he had a bottle of Stolichnaya up at their gear stash above Mooney Falls, and all of a sudden, it was the only thing the three of us could think about. We sped the remaining three miles upstream, hopping over logs, splashing and slipping in the creek, in an hour-long dash for the Havasupai happy hour. We eagerly guzzled most of Jean-Marc’s vodka, then found Sonja as it was getting dark, to join up for a swim in the large pool below Havasupai Falls. Telling and retelling the story of my near-drowning, we waded up under the falls to reemerge in the moonlight like creatures from the Blue Lagoon. After polishing off the vodka, our group of four stumbled out of the water well past dark. We crafted a faux distress note to stick in the bottle before sending it over Mooney Falls toward its destiny. We imagined it making a journey all the way to Lake Mead, where a Jet Skier would find our message: “Help! We’re at Havasupai Campground. Send more vodka immediately! Emergency! [signed] Jean-Marc, Chad, and Aron, November 29, 1998.”
An hour later, when we’d called it a night, Sonja and I got into our sleeping bags. Lying there next to my sister, I told her what it had been like at the Colorado. All comedy aside, I said, “I was scared, Sonja. I saw headlines reporting my death. I thought I was a goner.” We cried together, then drifted off to sleep. The next morning, we packed up our gear for the ten-mile hike back to my car, then posed together for a final picture next to Havasupai Falls, happy to have each other. It became one of my favorite photos of the two of us.
By December 1998, I hadn’t yet climbed any winter fourteeners. Indeed, I’d climbed only seven total, and all of those in summer conditions. I planned to start with the easier, nontechnical peaks at the beginning of the winter 1998-99 season. Even these least demanding mountains would require safe snow-travel knowledge and winter- weather experience. On the last training trip Mark and I did before I left for my winter vacation, we attempted Engineer Mountain in southwestern Colorado, near Durango. Conditions were rough, due to a ground blizzard whipping snow into fifty-foot visibility conditions. About a third of the way in, we bailed on the climb and spent the late morning and early afternoon digging snow-study pits to practice evaluating the snowpack. Mark showed me how to check the snow layers for hardness, cohesion, and avalanche potential, something that would become routine for me as part of my fourteener project.
Two days later, after one of my best days skiing ever-in three feet of powder at Wolf Creek-Mark and I drove down into Alamosa in my fully laden sports coupe to get a motel room and recuperate from our binge of snow recreation. We had skied together regularly in the big snow year of 1997, usually camping out in zero-degree weather in the back of his Tacoma in ski-area parking lots, sitting on his tailgate eating hot oatmeal straight from his camping-stove pot, and watching the other skiers arriving. This time was even more special because Mark was moving to work in Alamosa for the winter.
In the morning, we parted ways, and I drove north toward Fair-play, in central Colorado. My plan was to attempt a winter solo of Quandary Peak before I visited my parents for Christmas. Quandary’s easy winter access and short ridgeline route makes it the easiest winter fourteener, and one with a low exposure to avalanches, an ideal proving ground to test my winter skills and solo methods. December 22 dawned clear and cold, but with a jet-stream wind blowing hard across the high peaks. I had bought Mark’s old snowshoes from him, and as I strapped them to my waterproof leather hiking boots, I jittered with childlike excitement, feeling that it wasn’t just another hike. This ascent of the 14,265-foot Quandary represented the first stage of a substantial commitment, an engagement to my project. I stood at the threshold of the forest, arms wide, balancing on that moment when preparation changes into performance.
The wind in my face occupied my attention for most of the gentle ascent. I tried to keep my head bent and my goggles from frosting over on the inside as I trudged in the snow up to the elevation where the trees grow more horizontally than vertically. I quickly left behind even these stumpy juniper shrubs. Higher up, the wind scoured the snowpack down to the rock-strewn tundra. I left my snowshoes on the broad ridge at a knoll somewhere above 12,000 feet. I looked to the southwest, where the nearby Lincoln group of fourteeners was clearly visible. The wind cut through my goggles’ ventilation ports, making my eyes tear up; snow-frosted summits swam in my vision under the azure sky.
As I put more and more of the atmosphere and its contaminants below me, the sky sank along the color wheel from Mediterranean blue to solid cobalt to indigo dye. I imagined I could hike until the sky went black, and to me, for a few hours, the sky in my world was a different color than just about everyone else’s. I thought about the chance that I was the highest person in Colorado, and it seemed extremely likely-virtually no one climbs fourteeners in the winter. Given that it’s the off-season for the other high mountains of North America, I figured there were fairly good odds that I was the highest person on the continent, too.
Windchill temperatures were in the negative twenties, and I’d completely spaced on my plan to keep a few food items in my pants pocket. At the summit, I found that my storebought water bottles had frozen through completely, and my chocolate bars were frost-nipped inside their packages. They weren’t edible, though I sucked on one like a Popsicle until I had licked the chocolate coating off the peanut core.
Descending with the wind at my back, I nearly took flight from the mountaintop, as I ran in bounding leaps to my snowshoes. Relief from the physical stresses of the climb gave me a chance to celebrate my accomplishment. I put on the snowshoes and thought back over the day, especially about what I could do better to keep my food and water thawed during the climb-it wouldn’t always be such a short trip that I could get away without eating and drinking. In fact, hunger was gnawing in my stomach, and my tongue felt sticky in my mouth. I needed refreshment and was discouraged that I’d carried around the deadweight of my frozen food and water without gaining from it.
I returned to my car and drove two hours down to Denver and my parents’ house, bursting with the exhilaration
