Trying to drive the axe into the slab to make myself stop, I rotated my shoulders until the full weight of my torso pressed into the axe, grinding it in a hideous squeal of steel on rock. I spent as much energy squinting my eyes shut as I did gripping the axe; I couldn’t bear to witness the rock slip away faster and faster until gravity grabbed me by my collar and I tumbled backward down the ever more precipitous face, bouncing like a rag doll into the two-thousand-foot void.
The axe screeched for another moment, and then it caught on something, and I jolted to a stop. The fact that I was no longer falling stunned me into momentary paralysis. Still holding my breath, I opened my eyes cautiously, certain that even the twitching of my eyelids would end this intermission and cause me to break free, plummeting me to my death. I saw first that I was still on the featureless slab, having slid only about two body lengths down the rock. What was holding me in this improbable position? Tilting my head to the left, I peeked under the shaft of my axe. My gaze zeroed in on the tip of my pick…and saw nothing. To all appearances, I had ground the pick into the granite with such pressure that I welded it straight onto the bare rock. There was no other obvious explanation. No shelf, no knob, no lip, no ledge, no crack; just the microscopically featured granite, rough as unfinished concrete, that had cropped up directly in the path of my pick and snagged me from the clutches of imminent doom. In disbelief, I gave in to my body’s need for oxygen and took a series of panting breaths. It was a full minute before I moved, and then only my head, to peer over my left shoulder toward my escape route.
I don’t know how I got out of the self-arrest position and to a secure shelf behind a boulder to my left, but soon I was standing on my feet, looking over the rest of my descent. What I do know is that I never once looked at the chasm, centering my attention instead on the remaining traverse below the two flakes. Soon after reaching the first flake, I discovered more ice under the twenty-five-foot-long snowfield. Desperately overgripping the in-cut upper lip of the flake with my right hand, I swung my axe in my left hand, using the adze to chop footholds for the front tips of my boots in a descending traverse across the ice. In ten minutes, I had crossed this last obstacle of the Homestretch and rejoined my ascent tracks, eventually reaching the fissure where my bag was lodged. Immediately, I retrieved my crampons from my pack and strapped them onto my boots, then re-crossed the slab. I was at last equipped for my descent, and down I went to Scott, waiting for me at the trailhead.
With two technical routes and three long-distance routes in four weeks-including skiing the northeast bowl of Snowmass Mountain, another Elk fourteener-I felt ready for the biggest challenge of my project: solo climbing Capitol Peak. In my experience, Capitol has the longest stretch of difficult climbing of all the fourteeners, as technical as Longs and Pyramid put together, and is as dangerous as the Maroon Bells (aka the Deadly Bells). But I knew the approach, I knew the snow conditions, and I was at the top of my fitness and acclimatization. The peak is known for the Knife Ridge; a hundred-yard-long ridge at 13,500 feet that drops fifteen hundred feet away to the east, down steeply corniced flutings that end high above the Pierre Lakes Basin, and twenty-five hundred feet down the west side to Capitol Lake. While the exposure gives the Knife Ridge its infamous reputation, the most arduous sections of climbing come after the ridge, on the upper pyramid of the peak.
On February 7, 2003, I woke to sub-zero temperatures at my advance camp on the frozen rocky perimeter of Moon Lake. Ascending in the hyperborean conditions, I skinned on alpine-touring gear until the grade became too steep for my ski skins to hold on to the slope. Still below 13,000 feet, I removed my skis, mounting them on my backpack, and wallowed through bottomless powder, trenching six- and even eight-foot-deep troughs up the forty- degree snow slopes to the 13,600-foot-high subsidiary peak, locally known as K2. Stashing my skis at K2 in anticipation of the long powder-field descent, I continued across the Knife Ridge with crampons strapped to my randonee boots. Halfway across, I came to a disturbing section of the precipitous ridgeline, which was broadly corniced on the left-hand side. Due to prevailing westerly winds, snow had solidified in a cantilevered lip extending from the east side of the ridge.
I had been straddling the apex of the ridge to move across it, but at the overhanging snow cornices, I had to add to my technique, moving forward now with my ice axe poised to latch on to the rock rib if I should tumble off my saddle position. While I was safely perched with my weight balanced on either side of the knife-blade ridge, the cornices continually broke away from under my left leg, vacating space in a startling silence. Each collapse jolted me onto the Knife Ridge’s edge under my crotch. An accompanying sense of airiness frightened me, as I knew without looking that coffee-table-sized sections of compacted snow were dropping from under my left buttock in muted free fall. I focused on the rhythm of placing my right crampon in a convenient crack on the west side of the ridge, then humping my body forward another six inches or a foot. Soon enough, I was across the Knife Ridge. Euphoric with the rush of having completed the daunting traverse, I pulled my digital camera out of my jacket for a self-portrait. The huge smile on my face said it all.
I dug my way up the final five hundred feet. At twelve-forty-five P.M., I summited Capitol Peak and fulfilled a dream of five years. My entire project had been building to the day that brought me safely to the top of the mountain, my forty-third winter solo fourteener. It was the test piece of the project. With a second traverse of the Knife Ridge still to follow on the descent, I hustled off the high point after recording an exultant video and snapshot footage from the summit, and returned to my skis at the top of K2. As the day grew longer, I dropped into the freezer-box shadows of the upper mountain and had to periodically remove my gloves to knock ice from their linings. All the trenching and wallowing in the snow on the ascent had soaked the gloves and packed them with snow that quickly solidified into ice with the dropping afternoon temperatures.
Skiing off K2, I worried less about my hands than the stability of the snow. The powder turns I laced down the face of K2 joined those first S’s of Mount Harvard on a short list of my favorite backcountry ski descents. By the time I arrived back at my Moon Lake campsite, however, I knew something wasn’t right with my hands-they wouldn’t warm up again, no matter what I tried. Holding them over my lit stove, I melted my liner gloves in the flame without feeling any warmth in my fingertips. Tearing the molten fabric off my hands, I saw for the first time the eggshell-white pallor of my fingers and thumbs. Not good.
I hastened my departure from camp without preparing any food. I wasn’t so much afraid of frostbite; I accepted what had happened and wanted to minimize any further tissue damage. I had climbed a peak in a style that, over the course of the last thirty hours, had completely satisfied my yearnings for mountain experiences. That I had attained partial- and full-thickness frostbite on eight of my fingers, including both thumbs, was part of that adventure. While I didn’t understand the depth of the damage at the time, I put on a dry set of liner gloves and kept my barely functional hands protected from the cold for the seven-mile ski descent.
When I arrived home in Aspen, instead of going to the hospital (which is what I should have done), I treated myself for the frostbite. To start with, I took four tablets of extra-strength pain-reducing medication to prepare me for the next part of the procedure. I waited a half hour for the pills to take effect, filled the kitchen sink with hot water, and experimented with how fast the steaming faucet had to run to maintain a consistent hot-tub temperature in the plugged washbasin. Standing alone, I held both my hands in the basin for an hour, watching my fingertips change from white to black, red, orange, and green, obscenely screaming out at the throbbing pain. At times I had to seize my right wrist with my left hand to keep from yanking it out of the water-it was more damaged and caused me more agony. My roommates were all out of the house, and our neighbors must have been gone, too, or they may well have notified the police of a murder in progress. Over the hour, I hoped again and again to see blisters form under the skin of my fingers. Blisters meant the underlying tissue would probably recover, though never fully regain its original circulation; whereas no blisters meant the cold damage was severe and I could lose portions of those fingers. One after another, excruciating blisters bubbled up at the end of each finger, back to the first knuckle on most of them. I was thankful for the fiery swelling.
I subsequently decided I would take five weeks off from solo mountaineering, allowing my hands to heal from the frostbite, even though I had two peaks left in the Elk Range-the Maroon Bells. There was plenty to occupy me until my fingers grew new layers of protective skin: Phish was touring the West for the first time in three years; I had a hut trip planned with some friends from New Mexico; and there was lots of in-area telemark skiing to be done with my Aspen pals. But even this “downtime” wouldn’t be free of risk.
Two weeks after my ascent of Capitol, I headed over to a mountain range just east of Mount of the Holy Cross to join six friends from the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and five of their relatives on an annual backcountry ski trip. This year’s destination was the Fowler-Hilliard Hut on Resolution Mountain above Camp Hale. We met in Leadville and divvied up food and drink loads to be carried in our packs to the hut. The 10th Mountain Division huts are named for the World War II ski infantry who fought the infamous Battle of Riva Ridge in Italy. Their main training camp for two years was Camp Hale, halfway between Leadville and Vail. Many of the war veterans returned to Colorado, where they helped propagate the postwar ski-area development boom with their passion for skiing and familiarity with the region. The ski areas of Breckenridge, Vail, and Aspen were some of the
