I’d also brought a hunting rifle and a handful of bullets. Not for food, but to ward off wolves. They weren’t common in that area of Denali, especially not up above the timber line, but there had been some worrisome reports recently.
The rifle was too heavy to take with me – every extra pound you carry up the mountain feels like five by the time you’re halfway up – so I would leave it at the base when I started my ascent.
I also had a flare gun with two flares. I figured I could bring that with me. I didn’t mind dying out here, but I didn’t want to go slow. No starving to death, compound fractures, or 127 Hours-type shit, thank you very much. Somebody seeing a flare go up off of Moose’s Tooth would know to send a chopper looking for me.
Or I guess I could just jump off the cliff face. Couldn’t go out much faster than that, short of a gun.
The first climb was going to be up the east face of the Moose’s Tooth, a route called “Birds of Prey.” David Lama and Dani Arnold had done it back in 2013. It was a rough climb – steep and nasty, with some immovable objects to get around.
Just my kind of jam.
Lama and Arnold had done it in only 48 hours, so I figured it would take a little longer for me. I packed slightly more than two days’ worth of food and water.
After I’d eaten and settled in, I did something I knew I absolutely should not do… but I did it anyway, just like I did every night.
I read the letter Katie wrote to me two weeks before she died.
Who wrote letters by hand anymore?
Nobody. It was a relic of a bygone era.
Katie liked things like that. She used to collect old Victorian chokers, the kinds with little cameos at the neck… handmade glass beads… old photographs she found at flea markets with dour-faced women and men in stovepipe hats. People who had been gone for at least a hundred years.
Normally she was like everybody else and did emails and texts. But two weeks before our wedding, she wrote me a letter, in her beautiful, elegant handwriting. It was the only thing I had that she’d written by hand.
Which is what made it the most treasured thing I owned.
I read the first two pages. They were pretty much straight-forward, just a list of the things we needed to do for the honeymoon.
It was the last page I dwelled on.
I am SO looking forward to doing this with you, Jack!
And I’m looking forward even more to being your wife.
And having your babies.
Just you, me, and a dozen little rugrats against all comers. We’ll have the mountain-climbing version of the von Trapp family.
You tell me all the time that you’re the luckiest man in the world to have met me…
Well, I’m the luckiest woman in the universe.
I love you. I always will.
Katie
“Goddamn it,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes. “Goddamn it…”
I cried and I howled out there in the cold and dark.
Only the wolves heard me, if there were any to hear. And they knew enough to stay away.
3
Spoiler alert: the climb didn’t go as planned.
I got up early, before dawn, awakened by bad dreams.
I dressed, which was a ritual all its own. Long woolen underwear… soft-shell pants… medium fleece… waterproof pants… insulated jacket… waterproof jacket over that…
I ate my breakfast – my last hot meal for the next three days – cooked over a Coleman propane stove. Tiny little thing, but I fixed some eggs and bacon in a pan and washed it all down with some instant coffee.
Then I started out.
Just like I’d planned, I left my hunting rifle at the base of the mountain slope. Carrying an extra ten pounds I didn’t plan to use, 4200 feet straight up, was not my idea of a good time. But it might come in handy if I had a bunch of four-legged admirers waiting for me when I made my way back down.
I started the climb and got up a good ways with my ropes still in my backpack. The mountainside was steep and covered with a good layer of ice, plenty for the spikes on my crampons and my ice axes to bite into.
There was a fair amount of spindrift coming off the slopes above me. ‘Spindrift’ normally means the spray of water blown off the crest of an ocean wave, but it also applied to snow that’s already fallen that’s blown around by the wind. Like sand in a desert.
Excess spindrift made sense – the big storm that had come through a couple days ago had deposited a lot of powder.
Then I got up past the initial ice to sheer rock. That was where the fun began.
That was semi-sarcastic, by the way… although only semi. Anybody who would fly thousands of miles to climb 4200 feet of ice and snow in freezing cold has to be a bit of a masochist. So ‘fun’ is entirely relative.
I had to pendulum my way across some otherwise impassable obstacles – meaning I had to use ropes to swing from one area of the cliff face to another, like a clock pendulum.
When you’re scaling a cliff face, you mostly use cracks that run up the mountain. The cracks are what you hook your picks and crampons into.
But you occasionally run into a sheer wall of rock that you can’t scale.
No cracks, no climbing.
So pendulum-ing helps you find more cracks.
Katie used to call me a crack addict.
I would tell her that was the worst dad joke ever.
She’d grin and her eyes would sparkle and she’d say, Better file it away for our kids, then.
The good thing was, other than occasional little memories like that, I had no thoughts other than the ten feet of stone and ice in front of me. That’s all you could concentrate on, if you wanted
