To the Last Breath by Francis Slakey

Author:Francis Slakey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve thought about that moment many times, particularly in light of what would unfold over the next decade.

For so much of my life I had thrived on dramatic moments of consequential decision making. Years earlier, Pax and I went to the Ruth Glacier in Alaska to climb one of the signature mountains in North America. We were two thirds of the way to the summit when we had to rappel down into a notch.

Pax was seventy feet directly above me, preparing to descend the sheer ice wall. In another minute he would touch down beside me and we’d face an irreversible decision. Should we pull the rope, eliminate all possibility of reversing our steps, and commit ourselves to going to the summit?

Two days earlier, in a grocery store in Talkeetna, Alaska, my biggest decision was whether to get a muffin with my coffee. I opted for blueberry and then Pax and I walked into an airplane hangar full of Twin Otters and asked a pilot if he could take us to the glacier.

The Ruth Glacier sits in the heart of the Alaska Range and is scarred by deep crevasses. Fortunately, there are a few patches of smooth, hard, stable ice just long enough and wide enough to land a plane. With a steady hand, the pilot skied his air taxi onto the ice, dropped us off, and flew away. There wasn’t a soul for miles. No birds, no trees, just two climbers and a mountain of rock and ice.

The mountain is nameless. Climbers simply refer to it by its altitude: 11,300. It probably would have remained completely unknown to the rest of the world if it weren’t for Steve House, one of America’s premier mountaineers, who identified 11,300 as his favorite climb on the continent. That doubled the traffic on the mountain to about six climbers a year.

The only sensible way to climb a mountain like 11,300 is to move fast and light to beat the ever-approaching blizzards that are notorious in this part of Alaska. To stay light, we ditched all spares. No extra food. No extra clothes. One rope.

We started the climb by ascending a gully, a steep scar in the rock filled with waist-deep snow. We topped out of the gully and climbed along a ridge to ten thousand feet where we reached a notch. The only way across the notch was to rappel down seventy feet to a snowbank and then climb up the other side.

So here we are on the snowbank with the rope threaded through a metal ring above us. To continue up the mountain, we’ll need the rope. If we pull the rope down, then there’s no going back. The sheer seventy-foot wall we just rappelled down is unclimbable. The only way off the mountain will be to go up to the summit and then down the back side of the mountain.

The three most challenging sections of the mountain still lie above us: the narrow rock chimney nicknamed Thin Man’s Squeeze, a razor-sharp ridgeline with a two-thousand-foot drop, and a final fifty-foot wall of ice to the summit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.