five hours, I had rounded the halo to arrive at the top of Mount Holy Cross, where I could easily discern the ski areas and major summits of the Elk Range surrounding Aspen to the southwest. On the climb, I had to rely on fitness, acclimatization, and pacing to keep from spiking my energy demands. I found if I could avoid unnecessary power moves and maintain a consistent output, my endurance would get me through. An hour after topping out, I was retracing my telemark boot prints along the gentle ridge that would take me back to the boulder field of Holy Cross’s southern satellite summit. At a horseshoe-shaped set of rocks about twenty feet to the windward side of a steeply dropping cornice, I stepped into a shallow post-hole I’d made on my ascent.
Suddenly, a splintering noise erupted from the snow ahead of me. I leaped instinctively to my right and the protection of solid ground. Splitting the snow along the inside boundary of the horseshoe of rocks, a fast-moving crack traced a semicircle from the far side of the snowfield toward the spot where I had stepped a second before. As I hopped over the rocks to the safety of the nearby tundra, the entire snowfield tore away and disappeared. Aside from the initial rupture, the cornice collapse didn’t make another noise. I walked over boulders to the southern edge of the hole I had created and cautiously peered down the underlying cliffs. Five hundred feet below the ridge, the wreckage of the fallen cornice lay strewn on the snow slopes above the frozen shore of the Bowl of Tears Lake. I eased back from the drop-off and considered the fate I’d escaped. The image of my pulverized body smashing against the cliffs amid a jumble of snow blocks flashed briefly in my mind. “There’s no way I could have survived that fall,” I thought. “I’d be down there with my head bashed in, under a ton of cornice debris.” The most frightening aspect of the collapse was that I hadn’t recognized the cornice on my ascent. Overhanging cornices are highly prone to collapse-it’s their nature. With a hundred yards’ progress up the ridge, I looked back and saw my footprints marching straight into the abyss.
Back over the intermediate peaks and the two summits of Notch Mountain with my reloaded backpack, I got to my stashed skis at dusk and skied the remaining nine miles and four thousand vertical feet under the silvery light of the moon. At about nine P.M., speeding down the wide track of the summertime approach road, I spooked an elk in a sloping treeless area. It dashed off into the forest, plowing through four to five feet of powder with little strain. Remembering my clumsily slow pace pushing skis up through the forest in the same snow, I gave a moment’s appreciation to the elk’s prowess, though I knew how lumbering it would seem to a pack of hungry wolves.
On Tuesday of the week following my thirty-mile trip on Mount Holy Cross, my roommate Brian Payne ended up in the ICU after a serious skiing accident left him in critical condition. Minutes after I arrived at Aspen Valley Hospital to visit Brian, I found out my friend Rob Cooper was also there, to undergo surgery for a snowboarding accident that had crushed his right arm, wrist, and hand. Brian spent five days in the ICU and another five days in recovery, with a collapsed lung, a crushed kidney, and six ribs broken in twenty-two places. Rob stayed for two weeks. I visited Brian and Rob twice more before I left on Thursday night to drive to Boulder for a pair of climbs on Longs Peak, shorter but more technical than Halo Ridge. Although my primary concern was for their well-being, their accidents also reminded me how lucky I had been on my recent trips.
Just as Holy Cross had been the last fourteener of the Sawatch Range for my completion list, Longs Peak would be my last summit of the Front Range. I met my friend Scott MacLennan for a team attempt on the north-face cables route (named for the cableway built in the 1930s to assist hikers up the most direct ascent of the upper mountain). Horrendous storm winds hindered our approach, but we arrived in the Boulderfield and our advance camp location by nightfall. Unfortunately, Scott suffered ill effects of the 12,600-foot altitude, compounded by yet another malfunctioning stove. I warmed a foil packet of lentil stew on my stomach, but it was insufficient to properly restore our bodies’ reserves for the climb. As rest had not alleviated Scott’s altitude woes by morning, we prudently abandoned our trip and returned for hot food and recuperation in Boulder.
The next morning, a Saturday, Scott dropped me off at the same trailhead, with a plan for him to return in ten hours. I hiked up the trail alone, prepared for my solo attempt. Longs Peak is unusual in that it is so windswept that it is best climbed without skis. Up at 13,000 feet, as I rounded the Keyhole for the first time in eight years, I saw that the windward slabs and towers of the west face and north ridge were coated in thick layers of rime. Wind accelerates over the peak, chilling the air below the dew point, and then frost condenses on every exposed surface as the supercooled water vapor slams into the upper mountain. Ice mushrooms pillow from the ridgeline features most exposed to the westerly storm winds, especially along the rock rib extending to the west of the top of the Trough Couloir and the Narrows. My ascent took me over the same route by which I’d climbed the peak as my first fourteener.
Since I still hadn’t put on my crampons or removed my second ice tool from my pack, I chose a route that avoided the too-thin verglass on the Homestretch in exchange for two hundred feet of steep snow, connecting a series of ledges that ended in a vertical-walled chimney with a short overhanging finish. Pressing my legs against the right wall with my back against the left wall of the chimney, I removed my pack to make the final squeezing moves out the top around the overhang. My climbing skills were up to it, but my basketball skills failed me.
I tried to hurl my pack over the blockage onto the summit. It was a bad idea. My throw was weak, and instead of landing on the football-field plateau beyond, my pack hit the overhang and careened out to my left. Still off balance from the throw, I twisted around in time to watch my pack bounce over my head, clear of the wall. Free- falling for a hundred feet, the pack cratered into the snow to the left of my ascent tracks, then slid downhill, gathering speed toward a two-thousand-foot chasm. I watched in disbelief as the pack miraculously jerked to a stop, caught in a two-foot-wide crack in the middle of a rock slab.
My amazement at this stroke of luck dissolved as I realized my crampons and ice tool were now unavailable for my planned descent of the Homestretch. I topped out around the overhang, walked over to the highest discernible point on the plateau, and took a few photos. Dangling my legs from a huge boulder above the Diamond-the well- known east face of Longs-I set aside my dejection and enjoyed the tremendous drop-off below my feet. But in the back of my mind, all I could think about was how I would retrieve my pack.
A few minutes later, I walked over to the Homestretch. Lips tight and forehead wrinkled, I dropped through the first five moves facing out from the mountain into the storm clouds. I quickly encountered loose snow cloaking a treacherous layer of smooth ice that transformed the only usable footholds into slippery smears. I turned my body to face the rock slab to my right, my left boot hunting for purchase. Watching my foot and trying to ignore the chasm that menaced in the background, I brushed some snow off a small protrusion that supported my boot sole when I weighted it. Three more downclimbing moves, tapping my axe’s pick into the half-inch-thick smear of ice for a grip, and I reached an inset section protected behind a boulder. I turned outward again and, keeping my bottom in contact with the slab, scooted down onto another tiny snow patch coating the underlying rock.
I needed to descend another thirty feet to a pair of thin detached flakes of rock that stuck out an inch where they had separated from the adjoining slab. They enticed me with the prospect of encouraging handholds for a twenty-foot-long swing to my right. I had two options: Moving to my left as I faced down the slab, I could make a few easy moves that would leave me with a fifteen-foot-long slab traverse back to my right, which would be exposed, but it was clear of snow and ice; or I could go straight down a snow groove to the right of the slab, following the usual ascent/descent route, and skip the exposed slab traverse.
The first four times I moved my feet down into the furrow of snow, I managed to find solid footholds and made comfortable downward progress. Still facing outward with my rear end on the snow, I extended my arms out to either side of the groove and pressed my hands against the grayish-brown granite, palms down. My ice axe dangled from its leash around my left wrist, clanging against the rock each time I rocked my upper body forward to relocate my hands farther down the rock. After easy gains for about ten feet, my left boot heel skittered on some ice hidden beneath the snow. Lowering myself until my right foot bent all the way under my buttocks, I stretched my left foot farther down the furrow, but it skidded off at every attempt. I could really use those crampons.
I took the head of my ice axe in my left hand and planted the pick side into the snow until it struck rock. Weighting the axe, I was then able to extend my left foot another six inches, though without finding an ice-free foothold. This would be child’s play with some metal spikes on my feet. Just at the point when I was berating myself for dropping my pack, I made a mistake. I pivoted too far forward on my right haunch, flattening the sole of my right boot on the snow. It peeled out of its divot, and I fell. Instinctively, I rolled over onto my stomach and grabbed the ice-axe shaft with my right hand. I was in the self-arrest position, but my torso slipped below the axe, both my feet skidded onto the rock slab, and my weight fell on the ice pick too abruptly. It jerked out of its placement, and I slid down the last of the snow onto the forty-degree rock slab. Gaining speed, I could feel the crystals of granite grab at my waterproof pants under my knees. From inside my closed eyes, I saw the maw of the chasm rear up behind me, and I gasped. “This is it,” I thought. “I don’t have a chance.”
