The Abominable: A Novel

off—so let me help get one of you and the fixed ropes that high, to that snowy point right at the base of the vertical last pitch, and then I’ll free-climb it without tying on, just carrying the rope loose around me so someone else can give it a try if I peel off.”

“I’ll follow you up to that point when you find some belay points on the boulders,” said the Deacon.

Jean-Claude was leaning over the edge of the North Face, studying our footprints and route with his field glasses. “The Germans are climbing toward Mushroom Rock,” he said over the wind. “We shall have to climb quickly if we are to reach our Alamo in time.”

20.

I didn’t know a damned thing about Zen meditation, if that’s what the Deacon really had been doing when he sat cross-legged and apparently lost in thought every morning before breakfast as Reggie recently suggested, and I certainly hadn’t had the time or interest on this insane climb to ask him about it.

But I suspected then and I know now that mountain climbing—especially rock climbing under extreme, no-forgiveness-for-errors conditions—is a strange and beautiful equivalent to Zen. Everything empties out of the climber’s mind except the moves he’s planning to make, the holds he sees or senses or hopes for, the speed he’ll need to move at in order to stay attached to a steep or vertical face. One imagines— envisions, rehearses, feels—the motions he’s about to make, the stretches and reaches he’s ready to go for, the fingerholds or footholds he needs to find, the life-saving friction he’ll have to create where no friction should exist.

So, with the Deacon’s belay rope tied on for only the first half of this impossible climb, I began the scramble—first to the left toward the off-width crack corner where the faces met at a sharp angle, the all- important joint starting just below that meeting of sheer faces, a mere fracture there but widening to become the 15- or 16-foot-high off-width crack 45 feet higher up. That crack was filled with rocks and pebbles—a joint—down low and appeared from below to be no factor whatsoever in this first half of the climb.

That wasn’t quite true, actually, for as I quickly traversed left toward the south-facing wall near that joint, I moved into full shadow, and suddenly the air was painfully colder. Working near the useless joint would make me much colder—a negative factor. I had to move fast through these shaded parts, or later I’d be losing fingers, toes, feet, hands, and God knows what to the surgeon’s scalpel.

I scrambled up the narrow groove near that meeting of cliff faces, then shifted right, my fingers finding holds that my eyes couldn’t see, my crampon points balancing on cracks that were less than half an inch wide. Then a short vertical climb, my left hand jammed deeply and painfully in a vertical crack just below the cone of snow halfway up, feet scrambling to the left and then to the right before finding the faintest traction, then up again until I could balance and cough and pant on the four-inch-wide top of a tall, skinny boulder. Four inches was a boulevard up here…a Kansas prairie.

This was the “high step” up onto the snowfield I’d seen from below and had decided to worry about only when I got there.

Well, I was there. There was really nothing to wedge my crampons or hands against to get any lift for that four-foot or broader step up onto the steep, snow-covered, downward-tilting slab. (It was never level enough at any point to be called a ledge.)

Death in such rock climbing can come quickly when you pause to think things out. Sometimes you must trust to instinct, experience, and the brief advantage of adrenaline over rational thought.

Knowing now that the Deacon couldn’t hold me if I fell during this giant step—leap was more like it—and seeing 8,000 feet of empty air under my boots and between my legs as I made the upward lunge—I was, for a fraction of an instant, sorry that I’d tied onto the belay rope even for this lower, “easier” part of the climb. I really, really didn’t want to pull the Deacon with me when I slid over the edge to my death.

I landed on my belly on the slippery snow. The steep shelf had been exposed to sunlight for hours now, and parts of the snowfield were wet, slippery…my fingers clawed into loose snow and found no grip whatsoever. I began sliding on my belly backwards and to the right, toward the sheer drop-off.

Then the front-point crampons on my flailing boots found some traction in the six- to eight-inch-deep snow on this slab. My sliding slowed, then stopped. Moving in slow motion, the crampons on the front of my stiff boots the only real contact with the snow—much less the unreachable rock beneath the snow—I managed to use the four steel points at the front of my crampons to push my body inch by inch up and to my left. Eventually, despite the steep slant and the absurd exposure, I stood, reaching for a higher rock to balance myself.

Then I walked to the far left—north—side of this cone-shaped snow shelf, found a corner there where I could kick together a tiny snow platform on which to stand, ran the rope once around the only rock belay I could find—a three-inch upward-slanting spur about the height of my nose but smaller than my nose—shook the rope loose, took up its slack, set it over my shoulder in the way I’d done a thousand times, and shouted “On belay!”

“Climbing!” shouted the Deacon and—sometimes using my taut rope to keep himself from catapulting off the face backward—he clambered up toward me in his George-Mallory-cum-electrified-spider mode.

Within minutes he was up with me. I knew I had to start moving—we were in the shadow here, and I was freezing without my goose down outer layers or serious mittens and gloves, my body was already shaking (perhaps partially from the adrenaline as well as from the cold)—so I wedged myself up two or three feet along the off-width crack in the corner and let Richard Davis Deacon take my place on the marvelously level square foot of snow I’d piled up in the corner. (An off-width crack, in climber parlance, is one that’s too wide for your hand or fist to find traction in, far too wide for a piton to be driven into—if you happen to be one of those iron-mongering Germans who even use pitons—but too goddamned narrow to wedge your entire body into. To most intents and purposes, other than tossing bottles or something into as a garbage pail, off-width cracks are useless.) Now my foot was in that crack, the pressure of the crampons on limestone and my two extended arms merely holding me a few feet higher than the top of the Deacon’s head there in the angle where the two cliff faces met. It was an exhausting position to hold at any altitude, and up here I knew I couldn’t hold it for more than a minute.

“Keep the belay rope tied on,” gasped the Deacon. His face was ashen from his climb, even with the help of my taut belay rope at times. I can’t imagine what my face looked like, but at the moment I felt like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with two horns of light emanating from his temples. Only I was going up—with luck—not down.

“No,” I said. I held myself in place with my boot, my back, and one extended hand while I untied from my waist-rope harness, looped the belay rope twice over the cloth belt of my Norfolk jacket so it would stay with me as long as I was climbing but would pull loose the instant I peeled off the face, and started scrambling upward while I still had a trace of warmth and energy and will left anywhere in my shaking body.

21.

I knew the instant I started free-climbing the impossible Second Step that whether I lived another three minutes—including the time I’d still be conscious while falling a mile and a half—or lived another seventy years, this would be the climbing effort I would be most proud of.

I couldn’t breathe well because of the ragged constriction in my throat, but to hell with that. I’d taken in one deep but unsatisfying gulp of the frigid open air here above 28,140 feet, and now I would complete this climb on that single gulp of oxygen. Or not.

Conventional wisdom and climbing experience suggested that I should try to stay to the far left of the 25- foot face, using the off-width crack for something.

To hell with that. Staying close to that off-width crack, I felt in my aching gut, meant death. I took a narrow branch of one of the smaller rising cracks to the right instead.

The largest of the vertical cracks on the right was all but filled with small, loose stones. Again—death to get one’s boot or hand in there. Forget that as well.