The Ledge: An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier by Jim Davidson; Kevin Vaughan

Author:Jim Davidson; Kevin Vaughan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 0345523199
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-01-01T01:42:10+00:00

KNEELING OVER MIKE, I stare at his rumpled jacket, unsure of what to do. A question rings loudly in my mind: Where are we?

I stand tentatively to look around. The crevasse walls are about two feet apart here, and they rise high above us on either side. How far, I’m not yet sure. I know on every level that I am in a desperate situation.

Leaning to the right, I stare over the drop-off behind Mike’s head. I see the crevasse disappear into nothingness dozens of feet below us, and it’s as if we’re on a snow pile maybe seven feet long that holds us aloft between the ice walls. Mike’s feet dangle off the far end.

I look laterally along the crevasse’s length, hoping there is a way to simply walk out the end of it, but it stretches for around a hundred feet in the up-mountain direction, then vanishes into darkness. I turn the other way, down the mountain: After about two hundred feet, the crevasse shows no signs of ending.

Maybe twenty to thirty minutes have passed since I took that awful step on the glacier’s surface and the snow beneath my feet collapsed. I know I have to look up and see how far in we are, but I’m scared. After stalling for a moment, I gather the courage and raise my head, determined to get a firm physical understanding of just where we are trapped. All those summers working with my father’s painting crew, estimating building heights and calculating the rigging we’d need, come back to me.

My eyes travel up the frozen walls, first dark gray, then dark blue, then bluish white near the top, reflecting splotches of light. I figure it is almost eighty feet up to the sunlight flaring through the hole we punched in the snow bridge. The walls above me climb up at about eighty degrees until the crevasse is eight feet wide; then the ice walls go dead vertical; and then, higher up, they close back in toward each other in an overhang.

Oh my God.

The full depth of our predicament settles on me like a great weight.

I stand awestruck, staring up at the underside of the snow bridge that spans the crevasse. In places, the frozen veil is so thin I can see light filtering right through it. Being way down in this dangerous dark hole, it is as if I am looking out from the belly of a beast, its jagged white teeth interlocking above me.

“Oh, we’re in trouble,” I hear myself say out loud. “We’re in big, big trouble.”

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