a flashing crisis, a dramatic vision. Whether the circumstance was experienced or envisioned, the chop came as an executioner’s blade, fast as gravity in the form of a falling ice block, a smothering avalanche, a failed self-arrest, a peeling backflip from high on a rock face. I knew my last sounds wouldn’t be any profound passing of wisdom but a muttered “Oh shit,” maybe the thought “This is it,” and a crushing exhale, a spattering of blood, crunching bones. I’d never imagined fading in a protracted departure. I figured I could handle just about anything that would provoke a drawn-out struggle: fighting through a storm; finding my way when I was lost; dragging my body back from injury or illness. No, I wouldn’t sit down to dinner with death, talk introspectively over a lengthy visit, and end on “Well, that’s it, then, guess it’s time to go.”
I had been lucky so many times that even the glimpses of my final destiny had become a toy I played with to bring on a certain intense feeling, the ultimate contrast between the fear of immediate doom and the desire to live fully. I think some people would consider these the thoughts of an adrenaline junkie, but I relished more the
Water. I pick up my charcoal-gray Nalgene bottle and swirl the precious contents. For the last day, I’ve been sipping about two ounces every three hours. Hmmm. That means the ten ounces I have left will get me through tonight. I need it to last longer than that. It’s after six P.M., but I haven’t had any water since I put away my video camera at three-fifteen. I should skip it this time, save it for later. I feel all right, I guess. My tongue isn’t unusually swollen or squishy or hard. My lips feel normal, too. I’m thinking about water fairly frequently, but maybe this stage of dehydration is like that part of fasting when I’ve thought I would die if I didn’t eat soon, but after another half a day, the disrupting fantasies of food ceased and my hunger dissipated. Somehow I doubt thirst is like that. I bet this is just the beginning.
Yes, it’s better to focus on my plan. I put my Nalgene below the chockstone in the sand and consider the coming evening. It will be pitch-black at nine P.M., and then there will be nine hours of darkness. I know it’s only nine hours, but especially when I’m not producing internal heat, it will last like a polar winter. I’ll sip at nine, midnight, three, and six A.M. I’ll take smaller sips than last night; that will conserve more for tomorrow. I’ll need it to eat the rest of my burritos. That first bite three hours ago was so dry it turned to pasty glue in my mouth; the rest will only be worse. OK, then, that’s what I’ll do.
That leaves me with the question of how I’ll stay warm. The air seems colder than it was this time yesterday. There were a few more layers of clouds passing by today, keeping the temperature lower. But now the clouds are gone, and there’s nothing to insulate me once the sun goes down. One of the few laws of heat transfer I recall from engineering classes is that radiation, or emissive heat loss, between a ground source and the night sky is proportional to the temperature difference raised
Taking off my pack, I fish out the small black cloth sack in which I stowed my digital camera. Holding the sack’s open end in my teeth, I take my knife in my left hand and punch out the stitched end of the bag, trying to keep from stabbing myself in the face. The lightweight material tears easily, and I thrust my left forearm into the fabric tube. Tugging with my teeth, I pull the closer end of the sack up over my elbow, creating a makeshift long sleeve for my left arm. I dismantle the runners from their spot in my pulley station and retie two more lengths of purple webbing around my right arm, pulling the strands between my forearm and the wall where I can’t situate the insulated CamelBak. Also from my anchor system, I take in my teeth the extra length of yellow webbing and, applying tension against the tied-off loop, slice off a five-foot strand with my knife. I put the remaining two thirds of my first burrito in my left pocket, drop the unopened whole one into the bottom of my backpack, and wrap my right biceps in the plastic grocery sack that I was using to store my food. I tie off the plastic bag with the yellow webbing and have a long sleeve for my right arm, too.
Now to do the same for my lower half and somehow make pant legs out of the remaining 170 feet of my climbing rope. The dirty green and yellow line lies in a heap on the rock shelf in front of my knees. It takes me twenty minutes for each leg, but I manage to wrap them both from my thighs to my socks with about thirty neat loops of rope. I laugh at myself. The ropes stack like coils of potting clay; it looks like I’ve been attacked by two identical half-inch-thick green pythons. The coils gather and pinch at my knees when I sit in my harness, so I loosen them and make an adjustment on the daisy chain fixing me to the anchor, lifting me two inches higher in my seat. This is the most comfortable I’ve been since I was trapped.
With the ropes wrapped around my calves, I can lean in to the rock shelf in front of my shins-the one I was afraid I would trip over backward if I’d tried to move out of the way of the falling chockstone. Even if I had fallen, I would’ve been better off with a tib-fib fracture. Did I think about that, or was I worried about my head? It happened so fast, but it happened so slowly, too. How much time had I really had to react? There had been a lot to consider in that fraction of a second when I made my decision to push against the falling rock. Why did I do that? Maybe I thought I could steer the chockstone away from my head, like I had done with a similar-sized boulder on the Crestone Needle.
That time I certainly had no choice. If I hadn’t redirected the boulder, it would have crushed my chest, and I would have plummeted from 14,000 feet in free fall. I had been making a traverse on the ridge between Crestone Peak and the Needle in the spring of 2000, after soloing the Northwest Couloir on Crestone Peak with hiking poles and sans crampons. I was in a ballsy mood, and instead of taking the documented and cairned route of least resistance on the traverse, I made up my own variation of adventure along which I found myself covering a considerable stretch of ground on the north side of the summit-to-summit ridge. The normal route never crosses onto the north side, and for good reason: Twice I was on-sight soloing broken and loose fifth-class rock in my mountaineering boots. I felt every inch of the three thousand feet from my position down to the Upper South Colony Lake. Cliffed out by the Black Gendarme in front of me, I knew I had to find my way over the ridge crest to the south side and easier ground. Fifty feet above me, a short and steep gully of loose rockfall debris ended in a ten-foot-high roof. It over-hung a little, but the gully was only three feet wide at its head, so I figured I could stem up to the roof, chimneying myself higher until I could pull over it, probably putting myself right onto the knobby conglomerate staircase where I would finish the traverse to the Needle’s summit.
Except it hadn’t happened like that. I had been four feet off the rubble in the fifty-degree gully when I yarded on the overhang and the whole roof dislodged. A thick piece of slab came unwedged from between the two towers that formed the narrow chimney. Shit! I hugged the boulder to my chest, and we fell backward as a single object until my torso twisted to the left in midair. My back hit the right-hand wall, and the boulder momentarily compressed my chest, forcing out a puff of breath. As I slid down to land in the steep scree, I shoved at the falling boulder, deflecting it away from my upper body and down into the gully just past my feet. With the wind knocked out of me, I collapsed forward, and my hands caught on the opposite wall, with my head slumped downhill. I saw the boulder bounce twice in the scree, then catapult over the lower lip of the ravine in a half-mile-long shower of crushed stone and pebbles. If my back hadn’t hit the wall and kept me upright, allowing me to redirect the boulder, I would have taken a tandem ride with it. I recovered my breath but not my confidence and found myself reversing the gully to an easier crossover to the south side of the Needle.
A half hour later, within thirty vertical feet of the summit, I backed off an easy move. My head couldn’t let go of the near-miss accident. I didn’t even bother to switch into my rock-climbing shoes and try the final move a second time. I’d had it. I bailed off the traverse, making a heinous descent across the south face of the Needle, maneuvering down a series of four jagged rock ribs and intermediary ravines laced with rappel slings, evidence that I wasn’t the first to flee from the finish to the traverse. Until my feet hit level ground at 13,100 feet, I was consumed with desperation and a wish that I had the luxury of rappelling. Back at my vehicle, I plugged my favorite
