Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who didn’t think enough of themselves to make something of themselves-people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.
– MARK TWIGHT, “I Hurt, Therefore I Am”
I WAS NEVER LUCKIER than in the twelve months following my retirement from corporate life.
For our 2002 Denali expedition, I was privileged to join the elite adventure racers of Team Stray Dogs-Marshall Ulrich, Charlie Engle, and Tony DiZinno. I assisted our team leader, Gary Scott, with everything from early trip preparations, food orders, and flight reservations, to cooking and cleaning after meals, building shelters, carrying loads, and making decisions during the climb. Besides being an ultra-fit team of people who were flexible and learned quickly about high-altitude glacier climbing, the Stray Dogs taught me valuable lessons about group dynamics. From my experiences on that trip, I easily figured out that I enjoyed leading groups and teaching people about the outdoors.
When I was back in Colorado after the Alaska trip, my interest in mountain guiding solidified. I especially enjoyed showing off the wild places of the West. I led a camping and peak-bagging trip near Aspen with two of my less experienced friends from Chicago. Friends from Florida saw wilderness for the first time when they came with me to the Utah desert of the Escalante. I carried equipment on an expedition with the renowned Colorado landscape photographer John Fielder, an ambassador of the wilderness who takes people places through the medium of his pictures. He instilled a desire in me to take people there in person.
I decided I would go back to Denali in 2003 to climb the West Buttress with some of my friends from New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Gary Scott, our team leader in 2002, holds a record for the fastest ascent of the mountain; in 1985 he climbed from Kahiltna Base Camp at 7,200 feet to the 20,320-foot summit in eighteen and a half hours. I knew I could move fast on the mountain, and after I had climbed with Gary, the siren lure of his record called to me to go even faster. I put together a plan to follow our 2003 team’s climb with an attempt at a solo speed ascent, hoping to complete the first sub-twenty-four-hour round trip on the mountain. I spent the next year getting into the best shape of my life.
In November 2002, I moved to Aspen and immediately found a sales job at the Ute Mountaineer. When I wasn’t telemark and cross-country skiing, mountaineering, or snowshoeing, I was talking about telemark and cross-country skiing, mountaineering, and snowshoeing at the Ute with customers (but always saving the best stories for my colleagues and managers). Besides having a home base from which I would train for and climb nine of the most challenging fourteeners in the state that winter, I was surrounded by an entire town of like-minded friends.
One of the enjoyable challenges of my winter was maintaining a balance between going out on the town, going out to dinner parties, going out to see music, and keeping up my training. Fairly often, I would squeeze in a three-hour cross-country ski session between my split shift, skin up one of the four ski mountains of Aspen/Snowmass on my telemark skis before work, or head out on an evening snowshoe run after work, then catch up with some friends at a club until late. When the music wasn’t happening in Aspen, my friends and I might head to Vail or pull a big drive down to Denver or Boulder and back in the same night. There was never a routine, nor a dull moment.
I was loving the ski-town life. My townie friends and I would make almost daily references to “living the dream.” We employed all sorts of tricks, favor exchanges, and bartering to ensure a high quality of life in Aspen, despite our meager wages in a place that has one of the most expensive costs of living in the world. We had free two-day-a-week ski passes from our jobs, but we figured out how to ski five days a week by earning our turns-hiking to the upper lifts where passes weren’t scanned. I quickly learned where I could go to find untracked snow when I couldn’t be the first one out on a powder day. “If you can’t ski first, you gotta ski smart,” I would say to folks I met riding the chairlifts before squirreling off into the trees to a favorite stash.
Outside the ski areas, boundless public lands yielded infinite opportunities for free outdoor recreation. While it’s hard to beat free, we scored discounts and deals wherever we could in town: pro deals on top-quality gear, cafeteria pals we could count on for a “good-guy discount,” friends who would organize lavish dinner parties, bouncers and bartenders who would give us the nod for the familiar-face freebie. It didn’t hurt that we were getting the best snow in five years.
As soon as winter officially began, my attention narrowed, and I focused on my upcoming solo fourteener climbs. The routes and mountains started at an advanced level and got more and more desperate as the winter progressed. Besides the blessings of my job, my roommates, my friends, and the social and musical scene, I was also lucky to have a guardian angel who apparently didn’t mind putting in some long hours when I traveled into the backcountry.
My climbing efforts commenced on the day after Christmas, when I scaled and skied two adjacent fourteeners-Castle and Conundrum peaks-twice taking what backcountry guru and guidebook writer Lou Dawson calls “the journey through the valley of death.”
Avalanche exposure increased significantly over the New Year, so by January 9, camped below the north face of the picturesque North Maroon Peak, I had to change my itinerary from the standard route on North Maroon. Instead, I climbed Pyramid Peak by its West Face route, despite a storm that blew dangerous amounts of fresh snow into the steep-faced west amphitheater at 13,800 feet. Avalanche hazard was at volatile levels, waiting for a human trigger named Aron to step onto the wrong part of the slope.
Descending the summit ridge, I contorted my body over my gloved hands, poised on loose mudstone slats, to make a difficult downclimbing maneuver through a fifteen-foot-high band of cliffs. When my grip came loose, I fell four feet to land flat-footed on a three-foot-wide shelf. Wobbling directly above a second cliff, I steadied myself before easing down another ten feet onto the upper perimeter of the wind-loaded amphitheater’s snowfield. From there, it was a heart-stopping descent all the way to treeline. To avoid the unstable zones that had filled in with a foot-thick layer of avalanche-prone snow as I climbed above them, I had to take inefficient deviations from my ascent path. I made a safe return, sometimes pushing snow down onto a slope below me to make it avalanche in a loose slide of spindrift before I continued down myself. I had never taken a fall on a winter climb. I’d been fortunate to land safely-a backward step from the ledge would have sent me on a fast ride into the sweet spot of the bowl, most likely injuring me as I triggered a massive slide-but I was spooked and gave every hazard an extra margin on the way down.
Starting with the experience on Pyramid Peak’s summit ridge, I went on a month-long streak of climbing fourteeners in January, with close calls on all of them. On my approach to Mount of the Holy Cross, I got caught after dark at 13,000 feet in bitterly cold temperatures due to an incorrect route description for traversing Notch Mountain. Bivouacking on a two-foot-wide snow ledge, I was just below the notch that separates the two 13,200-foot summits, but above a sickening drop into a fifteen-hundred-foot-long steep snow couloir. My intent in hunkering down was to replenish my body’s energy with hot Gatorade and instant mashed potatoes. Twelve miles of travel had brought me to the top of the northern summit of Notch Mountain, but without a tent, I was planning to reach a rock-walled shelter on the southern summit before dark. However, deeply drifted snow and the guidebook that had said to traverse the east side of the southern summit, when it meant the west side, had slowed me down and used up all of my energy reserves, as well as my water. By the time I was certain I was headed the wrong way, I was too tapped to regain the notch where I would be on track again.
A finicky fuel-bottle O-ring then nearly cost me everything. Unbeknownst to me, the rubber gasket had gotten pinched at the fuel-line insertion hole, and for five minutes, fuel spilled into the snow when I opened the valve. I unwittingly lost three quarters of my fuel before I figured out why the stove was burning so weakly. I had popped the troublesome O-ring in my mouth and was flattening it out with my tongue when I saw the storm coming in from the west. I knew I had to get to the shelter, but I needed energy first, and without water, I couldn’t eat anything-I had to get the stove working properly. The thought occurred to me then that there are many shapes to the thing that separates life from death. Sometimes it’s obvious: the distance that separates you from a lightning bolt, the seat belt that restrains you when you hit a deer at 80 mph, the actions of a friend whose quick reflexes save you from drowning in the Colorado River. Other times it’s subtle, even imperceptible: the microscopic string of DNA that enables your body to fight off an infection you don’t even know you’ve contracted, a decision to climb a different mountain and thereby miss being hit by a rock that assails the route you aren’t on. We go through life ignoring these subtleties because there are a million things we survive every day without recognizing we were ever at risk. Then we have a close call, and we become acutely aware of what that fraction of an inch or that split second means. I knew my stove was my salvation from the ledge and quite probably the link that would get me off the mountain. I had to fix the fuel-line seal.
Extracting the three-millimeter O-ring from my mouth, I examined the deformed section. While I was handling it, my deteriorated state caused me to fumble the critical piece into the dark. One of those subtle lifelines had just become terrifyingly obvious. I was horrified to think I had bobbled the O-ring off the ledge. With my headlamp illuminating the ground, I sifted my bare fingers through the concealing snow and found the little black rubber seal. Five minutes later, the stove roared as I melted snow, and I knew I had a fighting chance.
The longer I struggled through the storm, the more difficult the traverse got. I couldn’t remove my goggles because of the blinding wind and blowing snow, but nor could I see in the dark with the mirrored lenses eliminating more than half of the visible light from my headlamp. I left my goggles on but lifted them periodically to hunt for the most efficient route. An hour into the steep traverse, with unseen slopes dropping away to my right, I crossed at the top of a slab-laden snowfield below an ice-plastered rock cliff in fifteen-foot visibility. I tried moving up the rock but made only forty feet of progress before the technical nature of the terrain overcame my confidence. I backed off to find an easier way. Though I had grown accustomed to scrambling up complex terrain in my flexible-toed telemark ski boots, my skills weren’t up to the challenge of climbing fifth-class vertical ground in the dark with a heavy pack. Another hour of searching through the cliffs for a reasonable exit onto the southern summit wore me down, and by the time I reached the rock shelter and found it filled with snow, I was too exhausted to do any shoveling. I laid out my sleeping bag, crawled in, and passed out.
The next morning, the storm had passed, but I doubted my chances at twice traversing the Halo Ridge of Mount Holy Cross. Because of the route’s layout, I would have to climb over the three intermediary high points-each above 13,200 feet-to reach the main summit, then return over those same subpeaks. Back at the shelter, I would have to reverse the entire approach over both summits of Notch Mountain to get back to my vehicle. In sum, there were nine peaks above 13,000 feet that I would have to climb before returning to my skis and the nine-mile descent. Due to my stove fiasco the previous night, I had only enough fuel to melt two liters’ worth of water, less than half of what I would need. Without enough water, I wouldn’t be able to prepare my oatmeal and protein shake for breakfast, and would therefore have to ration my five candy bars-my only remaining ready-to-eat food, and again, only half of what I needed-until I returned to my truck.
Outside, the calm sunny weather and dramatic surroundings infused me with confidence. Before I knew it, in 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.
Go with the snow; there’s no handholds on that slab; it’s too risky.
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.”
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 randonée 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 largest of the 10th Mountain veteran enterprises. While the backcountry huts weren’t established until the 1980s, they are dedicated to the memory of individuals whose love for country took them overseas to protect the freedom that I find most glorified in the mountains.
After five hours plowing through two feet of fresh snow along the six-mile approach to the hut, we settled into our weekend home and ate gourmet appetizers of oysters, spicy hummus, clams, and kippered fish on crackers, and drank three rounds of hot cocoa and schnapps. Spying out the hut’s picture windows, I lusted to take some turns in the east bowl of Resolution Peak directly in front of the hut. When talk turned to action, two of my Mountain Rescue colleagues, Mark Beverly and Chadwick Spencer, joined me in buckling up our boots and preparing our avalanche safety equipment for the short ascent.
Our threesome skinned up to Resolution Peak on the wind-scoured northeast ridge, starting at 4:50 P.M. and summiting the 11,950-foot peak just after 5:15. Darkness was coming quickly, but while Mark and I waited for Chadwick to arrive, we took a five-minute break to survey the ridgeline of the Continental Divide to the east and the Eagle River watershed and Mount of the Holy Cross to the west. Beyond the White River National Forest, only thirty miles away (but a three-hour drive from the trailhead), was my home in Aspen. I recounted my solo winter ascent of Holy Cross for Mark, and the night ski off the 12,000-foot saddle when I’d seen the elk in the meadow. I also spoke of the hairball adventure I’d had with my emergency bivouac en route to the rock shelter and the contrasting triumph I’d felt at surmounting the Halo Ridge.
Even though this was our first trip together, I knew Mark was one of the best climbers on our rescue team. I admired his technical climbing and rescue rigging skills, advanced medical training, and guiding experience. In sharing the details of one of my recent climbs, I think I was trying to impress him, as he had impressed me with his Canadian ice-climbing trips. He surprised me when he responded with an accepting but seemingly unmoved reply: “I can’t be excited for you, Aron. I don’t do climbs like that. But I think it’s great for you-as long as you’re happy.”
“Yeah, I am. I’m living my dream.”
Mark was saying that he didn’t aspire to do winter solos, and it seemed like he was making sure I was doing them for the right reasons-climbing not for bragging rights, or the perceived admiration of others, but because it made me happy. It was a subtle check that I had cleared in myself a long time back, but I was grateful for his reminder.
Once Chadwick joined us, we posed for a group portrait with Elk Ridge behind us. Skiing off the rock-strewn summit, Mark led us back down the wind-packed ridge, a safe but unappealing ski descent because of the thin, icy snow. After I slipped and fell to avoid an exposed tree root, I called out to Mark: “Hey, this sucks! I’m gonna head over to the powder.” I had borrowed a set of new powder skis from the Ute in Aspen and was itching to try them out in the untracked bowl. It had been a year since I had first freed my heel and started telemark skiing. Chadwick had given me some of my first pointers on technique, and I was excited to show him how much I’d improved. Leaving the ridge, I skied out to my right onto the softer snow, which got deeper and deeper the farther I traversed across the top of the forty-degree bowl.
Mark stopped slightly downhill from me on the ridge. Chadwick was behind me, traversing to the right, parallel and uphill from my tracks. None of us called out to dig a snow-study pit to check the snow stability and the likelihood of an avalanche, but I felt confident in the snowpack from having been out climbing and skiing the backcountry all winter. Success on the fourteener climbs and providential salvation from the string of close calls had bred in me a cavalier attitude toward the real avalanche danger. We spread out in the standard routine to expose one skier at a time to potential slide terrain. I arrived at the top of the lowest-angle fall line that started at thirty-eight degrees and eased off to about thirty-two degrees above a cluster of twenty fully grown pine trees.
“I’m gonna ski here. Are you coming down?” I said to Chadwick, who was close enough that we could talk in normal tones. Mark was still a hundred yards away over on the ridge.
“I don’t know. How are you going to get back to the hut? It looks like you’ll have to skin back out.”
“I’m not going to go past those trees. I’ll stop there, then traverse back left to the hut.”
Mark shouted over that he wasn’t going to ski the bowl. He’d go down the ridge. I yelled out, “Okay! Watch me!” to let my partners know I was dropping into the bowl. I felt a little nervous but didn’t pause to pinpoint whether it was about the avalanche danger or wanting to ski well in the deep powder. Moments later, as I took my first three sweeping turns, the sweet sensations of plowing through billowing snow replaced my timidity. I sped up and quickened my rhythm, popping shorter-radius turns on the lower-angled slope, and hooting as I passed the uppermost trees on my right. With another 1,500 vertical feet of the bowl below the trees luring me to keep skiing, only the fatigue in my legs made me stop. I turned and yelled back to Chadwick, three hundred vertical feet above me, “Yaaa-hooo! That was great! The snow is awesome! Come on down!”
Lurching in the powder, Chadwick followed my tracks, falling twice on the steeper part near the top as Mark watched from the ridge. I had my camera out, taking pictures as Chadwick settled into the easier slope, matching his turns to my tracks. Breathing hard, Chadwick forced out his last turns and stopped next to me. “Wow, that was a lot of work. I could barely turn, the snow was so deep.”
“Yeah, but it was great, huh? You looked good on that last part. I got a couple pictures of you. Check it out, how our tracks slink down like that. It’s like we’re heli-skiing.” I yelled up to Mark, “Come on-it’s great!”
Chadwick and I stood at the edge of the trees, looking up to Mark traversing into the bowl just below our entry tracks, bouncing on his skis. He was ski-cutting the snow, trying to preemptively trigger a slide by simulating the impact of his weight as he compressed in a turn. Seemingly satisfied at the snow stability, Mark made three turns in the upper slope, fell, tumbled over, and stood up, still skiing but sitting back on his skis. He recovered and finished his run smiling. Exhausted, Mark plopped down into the snow about thirty feet from the trees instead of turning to a stop. A hollow whoomph escaped from the snow under Mark, and we each jumped through our skin-hearing the whoomph of collapsing snow often means you’ve triggered an avalanche. But the snow around us remained in place without fracturing. Relieved, Chadwick joked, “Did you hear that? Mark’s butt just whoomphed.”
“Ha! Hey, Chadwick, drop forward on your knees-I want to get a picture of you in the snow.”
A diesel engine-or maybe it was the whispered roar of a jet plane-sounded above us.
As I lined up Chadwick in my viewfinder and depressed the shutter release, I noticed a swirling cloud of thick airborne spindrift over his head. Then the diesel rumble registered in my ears, and in the same fraction of a second that I realized the growling and the spin-drift were related, I was shoved hard from behind my right shoulder, lifted from my feet, and slammed downhill onto the slope on my left side. My world went black.
Accelerating from zero to thirty as if a truck had hit me, I opened my eyes to a dense soup of white. I knew immediately that I was sliding downhill headfirst, buried in a teeming mass of snow, but several seconds passed before I understood that I was being carried away by an avalanche. I opened my mouth and sucked in a mist of snow that lined my throat, choking me. Spitting out the snow, I waited until I saw a patch of sky through the avalanche, then inhaled deeply and held my breath. I fought the pull of the current, trying to rotate my body to get my head uphill so I could swim against the roiling white flood, but my skis dragged through the accelerating debris, anchors shackling my feet above me. Relaxing to save my oxygen until another window opened in the suffocating tide, I silently wondered when my life would start flashing through my mind; fortunately, it never did. My next thought was “So this is what it’s like to be in an avalanche.” I was expecting to be rolled over in a terminal somersault, but I simply continued to slide on my left side. Several more seconds dragged on. I needed to breathe again. I waited for a chance, but there was no blue window this time. I gasped and filled my mouth with snow.
Then I sensed the deceleration as the avalanche slowed, and I yanked my arms to get them above the snow. Because of the ski poles tethered to my wrists, only my right hand came up. It ripped free from my glove, with my forearm and elbow interred in the stiffening snow, like the rest of my inundated body. As I stopped sliding, I jerked my head up and thrust my hips forward, arching my back like a scorpion. I was peering down the hillside, eye level with the rubble. The thought struck me: “I’m alive!”
My torso heaved relentlessly for air. The asphyxiating conditions of the avalanche and a mouthful of compacted snow had starved my body of oxygen. Spitting out the snow, I continued to hyperventilate but managed to yell out, “I’m okay! I’m okay!” between overwrought gasps. The avalanched snow had promptly consolidated, encasing me in an unyielding cast that constricted my chest and held my body motionless except for my right hand and my head. Brushing away what little debris I could from in front of my face, I looked to my left and saw the hut; to my right, the hillside. Avalanche debris was everywhere, but I saw no sign of either of my partners. “Chadwick! Mark!”
Above me, Chadwick screamed in response. “Aron! Mark!”
I craned my head as far to the left as I could and caught a glimpse of Chadwick about a hundred feet upslope. “I’m okay! Are you okay? Where’s Mark?”
“I don’t know!” Chadwick sounded scared, and the shouting wasn’t helping.
“Are you free?”
“Yes, not yet, I’m digging my feet out!” Chadwick had somersaulted in the avalanche several times, but landed on his feet and stood up as he came to a stop. He had already unclipped his shovel from his backpack and was excavating his boots and ski bindings as I continued to yell for Mark.
“Chadwick, can you see anything of Mark?”
“No!”
My goggles, shovel, and camera were gone, torn off me during the tumult. My probe poles and right glove were gone, too, buried in the debris. I was hoping Mark might have lost some equipment and that a visible trail of gear would suggest his location, but neither of us could see any personal effects amid the debris field.
“Switch your beacon to search and come dig me out. We’ll need both of us to find Mark,” I shouted. Protocol might suggest that Chadwick should try to find Mark by himself, but I couldn’t unbury myself enough to get to my beacon and switch it to search mode. Until I could do that, Chadwick’s beacon would be receiving my transmission on top of Mark’s, making it difficult to pinpoint him.
Within two more minutes, Chadwick was at my side, digging out my left hand. “Stay with me, Aron!” Chadwick was very emotionally shaken. I reassured him that I was okay and directed him to dig at my legs and then to free my boots from the ski bindings.
Rolling out of my hole, I stood up and saw the extent of the vast slide. It hushed my voice. “Oh my God, Chadwick. Look at it.” Five hundred vertical feet above us, a gargantuan fracture cut across the top of the bowl, as high as a two-story house on the right. Blocks the size of refrigerators littered the mountainside; a few monstrous chunks were as big as railroad cars. At first glance, the slide looked to be several hundred feet from side to side. Then I saw how it continued to the left, behind the island of trees where we’d been blindsided, arcing almost a half mile to the far southeastern ridge. Untold thousands of tons of snow had crashed down the hillside. My knees weakened at the scale of the avalanche. That two of us were coherently mobilizing a rescue, after a slide of this magnitude had swept us two city blocks down the mountain, was almost unimaginable. But where was Mark?
Chadwick was still surveying the bowl when I ran down to a terrace in the hill thirty feet below us. The rollover blocked our view of the lower snowfields. At the edge, I scanned the debris for any visual clues, but there were none-the avalanche had swept down the bowl another thousand feet below our position, all the way to the creek. With my beacon set to search mode, I frantically wished for a signal, but there was no feedback on the display. I shouted back to Chadwick, who had started moving to the right and was over a hundred feet away from me. “What’s your range?”
“I don’t know.”
“Switch your beacon to transmit.” I wanted to identify how far apart we could be and positively pick up a transmission. With Chadwick transmitting and my beacon receiving, we could establish our working range.
“Do you get me?” he yelled. I could hear the desperation in both our voices.
“Not yet-come back toward me now.”
“Okay! I’m coming! I’m coming!”
“There; thirty-eight!” My beacon had picked up Chadwick’s frequency at thirty-eight meters. “Switch back to search!” We had a range of just over a hundred feet and a slide path over two-thousand-feet wide. If we could trust our beacons to consistently perform at the working range with a minimum overlap in our search pattern, it would take us five trips up and down the length of the slide zone to cover the whole debris field. But there was no time for that.
Think, Aron. Think.
“Chadwick! We were together at the top. Look where you and I ended up. We’re in line. Mark should be in that same line. Is he above us or below us?”
Chadwick didn’t respond. I ran back over to the edge of the rollover and double-checked the lower mountain. The vast majority of people who survive being buried in an avalanche are found within the first fifteen minutes; after a half hour, the chances of a successful resuscitation are negligible. We didn’t have time to go down and up. It was one or the other. I shouted, “I’ve got nothing-no clues down here. He’s above us! Let’s go!” I wasn’t certain by any means, but we had to make a choice. If he was still alive, any indecision on our part would kill Mark in another few minutes.
With a hundred feet between us, Chadwick and I marched quickly up the slope toward another terrain roll fifty feet above. Chadwick had come to a stop. To my right, he blurted out, “Forty-eight! I’ve got a hit!”
Mark! We pushed harder, thighs burning, lungs stinging, legs sinking, stumbling in the debris. Mark! No time to catch a breath. I crested the rollover, and my beacon lit up-38, 37, 34…28…24. I was closing in. Then I saw a small object, a ski tip. I could discern the K2 insignia.
“I’ve got him! I see a ski tip!” With more ground to cover than me, Chadwick had slowed in the debris, falling farther and farther behind. I shouted out, “Mark! We’re coming!”
Chadwick shouted, “Aron, take the shovel!”
I was close. 18…15…I couldn’t turn back to get the shovel. “No! Get your ass up here!” As I charged toward the ski tip, my beacon beeped faster and at a higher tone, like a detonator about to explode. 11…8…4…Over the insistent shrill, I heard a weak moan, then another.
“Mark, I’m here!” I traced back five feet from the ski tip and lifted a briefcase-sized block of snow from the source of the moaning. A tangle of yellow hair and a red piece of cloth protruded from a pile of cementlike snow.
“Mark! Can you hear me?” Mark couldn’t spare the time it would take me to be delicate with my next task. I roughly knocked his head several times while brushing the snow away from his face, quickly clearing a breathing space. When I moved the red glove bunched up in front of his mouth; Mark’s leaden skin tone arrested my action. I was staring into the ashen face of an entombed ghost. Of the four dead people I’ve seen in my life, all had more color than Mark did at that moment.
I cocked Mark’s head up and fished the icy blockage out of his mouth. It had been twelve minutes since the avalanche stopped, and Mark had been without adequate oxygen for most of that time. He was still alive but at the lowest level of alertness. I was relieved when he responded to my questions, but all he could tell me was that he was cold and tired.
I jumped up from my crouch and ran halfway to Chadwick, who threw the shovel to me. Catching it in the air, I turned and raced back to Mark. With his airway clear and him still breathing on his own, my next concern for Mark was his body temperature. Hypothermia could pull Mark from consciousness at any moment and shut down his breathing. I dug first at Mark’s partially exposed left arm, then at his back and left leg, calling out my finds as I made slow progress. Mark was buried more deeply than I had been. Chadwick arrived and talked to Mark as I dug feverishly, scooping snow downhill. I needed help to move all the heavy snow. After exposing Mark’s backpack, I unfastened his shovel and tossed it in front of Chadwick. “Help me dig!”
“I can’t. My hands are frozen. I can’t hold on to anything.” Chadwick had lost both his gloves in the avalanche, and the combination of excavating me and then clawing up through the debris field had rendered his hands unusable. I had only my left glove and liner. Tearing off the outer shell, I gave it to Chadwick against his protests: “My hands are gone-save yours!”
“Take it! Turn it inside out and put it on your right hand. I need your help digging.” Next I yanked off Mark’s gloves, gave Chadwick the left one, and took the right one myself.
For the first time, I saw movement over at the hut, nearly a third of a mile across the mountainside to our right as we looked uphill. I cupped my hands and shouted at the top of my lungs to the people I could see milling around outside: “HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP!”
Faintly, I heard a voice reply, “We’re coming!” Rescue was on its way, but Mark couldn’t stave off hypothermia unless we could get him out of the snow and wrapped in more insulating layers. We swung the shovels, throwing snow, clanging the blades against each other. Chadwick missed the snow entirely on two consecutive attempts.
“Chadwick, slow down. You’re not even hitting the snow.” He was panicking; we were falling behind. “Here, start high and scoop the snow down-it’s easier than shoveling uphill.” Even with both of us toiling, Mark was slipping away. He had been repeating that he was very cold and very tired, and then about a minute of quiet passed.
Chadwick checked Mark’s head again. “He’s not breathing.” With two rescue breaths from Chadwick, Mark resuscitated. I extracted Mark’s left boot from the telemark binding and leash. Five minutes and forty cubic feet of snow later, we disinterred Mark’s right leg from its encasement.
“HELP! HELP! HELP!” We shouted together to our friends at the edge of the debris field. We had done as much as we could, and we needed supplies to get Mark warmed up. Exhausted from the half-hour rescue effort and not realizing the precautions our friends were taking to ensure that they were not swept up by a secondary avalanche, I muttered in exasperation, “What’s taking them so long?”
We rolled Mark onto his left side and sat him up. He lurched back and belched out the air Chadwick had blown into his belly-the rescue breaths had been partially diverted from Mark’s lungs because of his head’s forward position. Smothering his back and sides with our bodies, we removed Mark’s pack and rooted through it for gloves and clothes. Shuddering with the aftermath of adrenaline, Chadwick and I hugged Mark and each other in a seated embrace. We smelled the raw halitosis of fear, mixed with the odors of oysters, clams, fish, and spicy hummus appetizers. Confident of Mark’s survival, we broke into a gale of nervous laughter laced with relief that we were all out and stable with help arriving in minutes.
One after another, the other four members of the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue team who were with us on the trip-Steve Patchett, Tom Wright, Dan Hadlich, and Julia Stephens-skied over to the pit where we were huddled as darkness consumed the mountainside, carrying with them a down sleeping bag, a foam pad, gloves, and headlamps. We wrapped Mark in the down bag, and by the time Chadwick and I had retrieved our skis and what little of our other equipment we could find in the debris, Mark was up and mobile. It was a tribute to his strength and drive that in thirty minutes, he had gone from losing consciousness to skiing back to the hut under his own power.
We had a solemn dinner back at the hut, retelling details of the evening. Several of our friends had seen the avalanche and knew right away we were in trouble. They had gone from cooking dinner in their long underwear and socks to being fully prepared for a prolonged rescue effort and arriving safely on-scene in a half hour-a phenomenal performance. Chadwick had held himself together even through the terrifying stress of rescuing both his partners. I was proud of his fast action, and of Mark’s resilience. While we had each decided to ski that slope, I felt guilty about my own decisions: decisions based on ego, attitude, overconfidence, and ambition, which overrode the combined training and experience of our group. We had survived a Grade 5 avalanche-as big as they get in Colorado. We had survived something we shouldn’t have survived. We had survived, but Mark and Chadwick blamed me for pressuring them to ski the bowl. I lost two friends that Sunday because of the choices we made; Mark and Chadwick left the next morning, and they haven’t spoken to me since.
Rather than regret those choices, I swore to myself that I would learn from their consequences. Most simply, I came to understand that my attitudes were not intrinsically safe. Without fully evaluating a decision for potential danger-i.e., when I had made a decision in which attitude overruled a complete understanding and mitigation of risk-I was playing the odds. I recalled an avalanche instructor’s advice: “When you play the odds, you have to be able to survive not beating them.” After the Resolution Bowl avalanche, I found it easier to let go of the ego and attitude that otherwise pushed me to risk more than I was comfortable with, or rushed my decision-making, causing me to skip critical steps of gathering and evaluating information. Discomfort with elevated risks was not a weakness to overcome, but a signal for me to process a decision until I could either move forward safely or choose to come back another day.
Warm weather and more storms over the next three weeks caused a rash of natural avalanche activity that diminished the likelihood of my final project for the winter-climbing the Maroon Bells, the postcard-perfect candy-striped twin pyramids that decorate calendars as the most photographed of Colorado’s mountains. Every face and gully of both peaks is subject to extreme avalanche hazard. There is no low-risk route; the only way I would be able to attempt the peaks would be under stable snowpack conditions. By early March, time was running out on my winter season.
Due to my climbs through the winter, the March 15 Aspen Times Weekly newspaper was running a substantial article on my ascent of Capitol Peak and the Resolution Bowl avalanche. For pictures to accompany the article, I hiked out onto Highland Ridge with Dan Bayer, a photographer friend of mine. We had a bluebird day with unobstructed views of the Maroon Bells. I had said in an interview that I didn’t think conditions would permit an attempt on the Bells before winter was up. But what I saw during the photo shoot led me to reconsider my chances. From 12,000 feet on Highland Ridge, I could see that the major snow chute splitting the east face of the two peaks-the Bell Cord Couloir-had avalanched repeatedly. Sometimes the safest routes to climb are the ones that have already released. Speculating that with continued warm weather, calm winds, and no more snow, the couloir would remain consolidated from the previously run-out slides, I planned an overnight trip for two days later.
On the day the Aspen Times Weekly cover article ran-entitled “For Whom the Bells Toll”-I skied in my randonée boots the nine miles up from the Maroon Creek road closure to 10,200 feet at Crater Lake. Directly below the Bell Cord Couloir, I crossed a half-mile-wide zone of hardened avalanche debris, the evidence of a weeklong cycle of intense avalanche activity. By one-thirty P.M., I had reached the area where I would camp and was scanning the trees past the edge of the debris for a protected campsite when a thousand-foot-long plume of snow came cascading over the lower cliffs of the East Buttress of South Maroon Peak, less than a quarter mile in front of me. On the quick draw with my camera, I took a series of pictures as the avalanche overwhelmed the forest in a cloud that rose five hundred feet off the valley floor. The sound waves hit me on a time delay. Splintering crashes punctuated the bellowing growl of the snow as it pounced from the upper cliffs onto eighty-foot-tall trees that snapped under the devastating momentum. Avalanches can travel at speeds around 100 mph, with a density four times that of air because of the suspended snow, which hits with the energy of a 400-mph wind. The pines and firs didn’t have a chance. Nor would I.
As puffs of crystalline snow drifted through the valley, I chose a campsite in the trees at the farthest edge of the older debris and formulated a plan for my ascent. Avalanche threat for the couloir itself was minimal due to prior releases, but both faces empty out into the common trough. Sun exposure on the nearly vertical rock and snow faces on either side of the fifty-degree Bell Cord would put me at the greatest risk. The left face would get sun from first light until about noon, while the right face would get sun until late afternoon. Due to its longer sun exposure and more southerly aspect, the right face had already lost most of its snow and was less of a concern than the left one. I read the mountain and understood that the risk would be lowest before sunrise and just after the left face went into shadow around noon. Later in the afternoon, the right face would begin sliding, just as it did three times while I sat in my tent and prepared soup for an early dinner.
At three in the morning, I awoke and put on my cold-weather clothes, gathered my water and food, kicked my feet into my boots, and strapped on my crampons. After a quick bowl of oatmeal and protein powder, I was moving up the debris field by three-thirty A.M.
Within an hour, I was in trouble. While making my observations the afternoon before, I’d spotted a steep shortcut directly up a narrow gully. The gully would eliminate a wide traverse to the right in less consolidated snow, allowing me to enter the Bell Cord Couloir proper at 11,200 feet. Climbing on my front points in the isolated bubble of my headlamp, I was halfway up the gully when a bowling ball of ice came shooting out of the inky heavens down the tightly walled corridor and whizzed past my head. It fell with such velocity that I caught only the flash of it in my headlamp. Terror chilled my blood, but I climbed on, hoping that the twenty-pound ice cube didn’t have any friends. A few minutes later, however, another block hurtled past my right shoulder, also at high speed, and smashed into the right wall of the gully. I had to get out of the shooting gallery as fast as I could. Climbing out the top was the best option, as the blocks seemed to be leaping over a ledge that would provide cover until I left the confinement of the rock walls. The gully became steeper as I neared the top, and then my ice axe hit solid ice below the Styrofoam snow. I looked up at a forty-foot-high sheer frozen waterfall that spanned the gully wall-to-wall.
What the…? Where did that come from? Why didn’t I see this before? Can I climb it? Should I go down?
I didn’t want to risk descending the gully-I had no idea if the bombardment was over or not-and I couldn’t afford to lose the time it would take to reascend the snowy ramps. I needed to be at 13,600 feet by the time sunlight hit the mountain faces in two hours, and I wouldn’t make it if I had to give up a half hour of backtracking. If I wanted a shot at doing the climb today, I would have to climb this curtain of water ice with a single ice axe and general mountaineering crampons-not my preferred ice-climbing equipment. The crampon points on my right foot bit into the frozen glaze of the waterfall, and I swung my long-handled axe in my right hand like a shorter ice-climbing tool, until it sank to the third tooth on the pick. Finger-width cracks, shallow ledges, and inset footholds populated the rock wall on my left. Forming a right angle with the ice, the rock wall on my left allowed me to make stemming maneuvers; using counterpressure, I could more confidently bear down on the crampon points of my right foot, where they were embedded in the ice. I surmounted two ten-foot steps in the rock using this basic technique. Trying to ignore the deathly void behind me, I continued another ten feet and ran out of ice on my right side. I was almost at the top, but now there was a small patch of frozen tundra exposed by the avalanches that had coursed through the gully. A two-inch-tall horizontal crack gave me a decent left foothold where the flat front points of my crampons could balance. My right foot could still puncture the icefall in a straight-legged stem, but the rock wall faded back from my left hand, leaving me without good holds for either hand. I was stuck.
Reversing my climb back down the mixed ice and rock dihedral would lead to a death fall. I couldn’t go down; I couldn’t stay. I had to go up, as improbable as it seemed. Plucking my axe from its last placement in the ice, I swung it hard into the frost-heaved earth above a grassy knob. I hardly trusted the mud to hold my weight, but my left hand couldn’t pull on the last remaining rock lip-my glove was too slick. As the crampon points of my left foot skittered off their balancing point, I lunged my right hand onto the head of the ice axe. The point held fast in the frosted tundra, but I was desperate; if my axe had popped when my foot slipped, I would already be dead at the bottom of the gully.
Fraught with stress, I leaned my head to the left with my neck outstretched, and bit the cuff of my left glove in my teeth, ripping my hand free. Letting the glove dangle from its wrist loop, I crimped my fingers around the rock lip and pulled simultaneously with both arms, staring at the axe pick stabbed into the mud. It was as hard as any 5.8 rock-climbing move I’ve ever done, making it the most difficult free solo maneuver I’d ever attempted. Add in the altitude, remoteness, and the fact I was doing it at high exposure in the dark, and it was easy to understand why my body collapsed onto the first flat surface I could find. I was sweating so hard I needed to be wrung out, but all I could manage was to open an energy gel packet with my teeth while I reached to don my left glove. It wasn’t there: My glove wasn’t dangling from my wrist.
Then it hit me that I hadn’t put my wrist loop around my hand that morning. When I’d torn off my left glove to make that last move, it had dropped all the way down the gully. Damn, damn, damn! Again I debated whether or not to go down, but I knew it would mean bailing on the climb to retrieve my glove. Could I afford to risk more frostbite damage? Well, no; but I did have an extra set of liners to prevent ice-up like what had happened on Capitol. I took off my right outer shell, turned it inside out, and put it on over my spare left liner, adding my spare right liner over the one I was already wearing.
Okay, Aron, the rest of this should be easy compared to what you just did.
My heart hammered at its maximum output for the next two hours as I gained the remaining 2,300 feet to the top of the couloir just in time to watch the sun rise over the summit of Pyramid Peak three miles to the east. The shadows of the Maroon Bells swept halfway to the horizon, where Snowmass Mountain and Capitol Peak gathered their first rays of dawn under a dramatic black sky. It was an early reward for the demanding climbing I’d done in the dark, and my first winter sunrise from near the top of a fourteener. I took a long break, reenergizing with some food bars and water, then set off up the fourth-class slabs and snowfields to the summit of South Maroon, which I reached with hoots and smiles at eight-fifteen A.M. An hour later, I was back at the saddle above the Bell Cord, ready to ascend North Maroon Peak. The ridge of the Bells is one of four technical high connecting traverses on Colorado’s fourteeners, the others being Blanca-Little Bear, Wilson-El Diente, and Crestone Peak-Crestone Needle. I’d climbed them all in the summer, but the Bells would be my first of the foursome in the winter. Encountering deep and fluted snowdrifts on the west side of North Maroon’s south ridge, I climbed up to the snow mushrooms on the ridgetop and tunneled a hole through one of the seven-foot-high pillows clinging to the rock to make my way to the summit. I have had few mountaintop experiences when I felt the excitement and jubilation that I did on top of North Maroon. Waving my ice axe in the air, I shouted with joy at my forty-fifth winter fourteener solo, my completion of the Elk Range in a single winter and the last of the technically hard routes, and the singular experience of a double traverse of the Maroon Bells ridge. Turning to the south and a view of my tracks winding over and through the surreal snow formations of the ridge, I let loose a “Yaaahooooo!” and imagined my exuberance bouncing off alpine summits all the way to Crested Butte.
Back at the notch above the Bell Cord at noon, I felt giddy that my scheme had worked exactly as planned. I raced down the 3,400 vertical feet to my camp, picking up my left glove from the debris at the base of the “shortcut” gully, all within forty-five minutes of departing the head of the Bell Cord.
On my descent, I recalled the first time I’d rung both the Bells in a day on July 2, 2000. My best friends and closest climbing partners, Mark Van Eeckhout and Jason Halladay, and I had climbed North Maroon, traversed the ridge to South Maroon, and descended the slushy ice runnels in the East Face Couloir in a fifteen-hour round trip. Despite the gnarly descent, I remembered a moment of downclimbing blocky purple rock into the yellow-lichen-coated central notch at the head of the Bell Cord and looking out to the west over the lush velveteen green of Fravert Basin. The colors were so rich, I thought I could smell them. I felt the love of beauty to a greater extent than I ever had before. Two things became certain to me in that moment: first, that I would visit Fravert Basin and see close up the vision of nature that called to me from that rocky perch; and second, in whatever vague recess of my mind that is in charge of these life decisions, I knew that one day I would call Aspen my home. If the subject of a winter traverse of the Maroon Bells ridge had come up at that time, I would have dismissed the idea outright as an impossibility. I had done it though, not just once but twice in the same day, and five hours faster in the winter than I had done it in the summer.