Halfway to Heaven by Mark Obmascik

Author:Mark Obmascik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2009-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Gravity

LITTLE BEAR PEAK 14,037'

BLANCA PEAK 14,345'

ELLINGWOOD POINT 14,042'

When my boot slipped, and my hip hit the snow, and my legs began plunging down the avalanche runout, I didn’t think to scream. My first instinct was to stop my fall by ramming my ice axe into the snow.

Then I lost my axe.

Shitttttt!

The slope is steep and the snow is slushy. Sliding feet first on my belly and accelerating, I jam my left fist into the snow. No brake. Right fist—same. Slush cements my nose and ears. Down five feet, then ten, then twenty, I gain even more speed. I push out my butt and thrust the toes of both boots into the slope.

I stop. And I scream again.

Shittt!

I’m thirty feet below my axe and two hundred above the unpleasant place where the snow ends in shark-tooth rock. I dig both hands into the snow to give myself two more solid points of contact and then kick each boot deeper. Whew. I’m stopped. I blow the slush from my nose. I’m still thirty feet from the side of the gully I was traversing. How do I get out of here?

“Are you OK?”

It’s my climbing partner, Skip Perkins, a sixty-year-old Wisconsin schoolteacher, who has safely exited the snow gully and is watching all this from the rocks above me. His eyes are wide, his voice uncertain. I assure him I’m fine, but shout that I’m downhill from my axe. Probably not the safest thing for me to Spider-Man my way up to retrieve it.

Wait there, he tells me.

I’m trying my hardest, I tell him.

Splayed against the soft spring snow, I realize my skid made both perfect sense and no sense at all. It made perfect sense because we were at the end of a long and taxing day, and in my haste to get down the mountain, I had let down my guard. But my slip also made no sense because we had taken the worst this Fourteener could throw at us—and on this peak, that’s saying a lot—and survived until this point in amazingly good cheer.

Little Bear Peak is a dark, hulking mess of a mountain, a fearsome mix of rotten rock and sinister slope that gives it the well-deserved reputation of having the nastiest, most dangerous standard climbing route of any Rocky Mountain Fourteener. When my wife asked last winter whether I really intended to climb them all, Little Bear was the one that made the little voice in the back of my brain scream, Hell, no! Its most infamous challenge is a stark, three-hundred-foot rock gash usually called the Hourglass, which describes its broad shape at top and bottom, with a ten-foot pinch in the middle.

When Skip and I climbed the gully early this morning, we learned why it also carried two other nicknames: the Bowling Alley and the Shooting Gallery. Five hundred vertical feet of jumbled boulders all balance precariously at the top of the gully, and the slightest nudge—a snowball’s slip, a pebble’s roll, a marmot’s sneeze—can send an oven-size hunk of black rock tumbling directly down the climbing route.

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