Story Time

“Hold fast. All storms pass.” 

Conrad Anker is known for this saying. He’s a climber who should know- he’s seen storms, and not just the kind that bring snow and wind. He watched his best friend Alex Lowe swept away in an avalanche on Shishapangma in the Himalaya that he survived. I guess when they heard the “crack” of the slab releasing, Alex ran one way and Conrad ran another and just like that, one was dead and the other wasn’t. Conrad married Alex’s widow and raised his boys. That’s a storm.

He suffered a heart attack on the side of Lunag Ri with David Lama. That’s a bad place to piss off your heart- it’s about as remote as you can get. I think he was even camped in a port-a-ledge (the tent thing that hangs on the side of a cliff) at the time, somewhere around 20,000’ of elevation. That storm passed, but then another one rolled in last year when that same David Lama was killed climbing in Canada.

He found the body of George Mallory on Everest, who may have been the first person to summit that mountain, 75 years after his disappearance and was witness to the suffering that happened there. That’s a storm.

And those are just a few tiny blurbs from a really long list of climbs, many of which involved actual storms- lying wrapped in down with nothing but flapping nylon between you and the wind and snow, all immersed in uncertainty, not knowing if you’ve finally pushed your luck too far and 75 years from now somebody will find you still lying there after the ravens have had their way with you. Like I said, Conrad Anker should know about storms.

I’ve really only ever been to that place once in all the mountains I’ve been on. It was on Rainier a few years ago. We were climbing the Kautz glacier route. It’s more technical than the standard Disappointment Cleaver route because it involves some rappels down rock faces and a few pitches of ice climbing. The first day we established a high camp at about 10,000’ on a ridgeline and bedded down after a beautiful sunset, feeling like kings looking down over our kingdom. Then the wind kicked up and blew so hard that we spent the night with our mouths filled with blown grit holding onto the upwind tent poles, hoping that we wouldn’t be literally blown off the mountain. Then the tent poles snapped, forming sharp ends that shredded the tent as it flapped like a flag in the gale and we just waited for the night to end. That storm passed.

Despite the sleepless night, the next morning we began our summit bid by traversing a few glaciers until we arrived at the Rock Step, a rock face probably 70’ tall that you rappel down onto the Kautz glacier proper. It’s an impressive place, what with the glacier spreading out below you and the Kautz ice headwall above. You hear rockfall as ice melts and the rocks it’s been holding in place cascade down the gullies around you, and then there are the occasional BOOMs as apartment-building sized chunks of ice calve off the headwall and tumble down the other side of the ridge from you, kicking off more rock and ice as they go.

Anyways, for various reasons (not the least of which was stage 4 cancer and a collapsed lung, although I didn’t know it at the time) I decided to stay at the Rock Step while the rest of the team headed to the summit. The plan was for me to wait there while they tackled the remaining ice pitches and then returned to me in a few hours. I’d already summited Rainier and didn’t want to slow down the team, so I watched as they rappelled and then began making their way out of sight up the ice, weaving their way through the penitentes. Then the storm arrived and I was trapped inside a ping pong ball, all alone.

I found a small cave and sheltered from the storm there for 9 or 10 hours and my team never returned. I didn’t know if they were alive or dead up there, but eventually I realized I had to move or die, as I had no gear for a night up there. The problem, though, was navigating the glaciers between me and high camp. Usually you rope up with your partners on glaciers so that, if one person punches through a snow bridge into a crevasse, the others can get them out. Since I was all alone, though, I wouldn’t have that luxury. Some of the glaciers on Rainier are almost 1,000 feet deep, so falling into one would most likely prove fatal. It was a slow trip back to high camp probing the snow out in front of me with my ice axe the whole way, trying to feel for weak layers in the snow.

I got lucky and that storm passed, but when I arrived at high camp I realized my epic wasn’t over yet. The heavy, wet snow had saturated my sleeping bag and then frozen into a block of ice. I pulled it apart like an accordion, put on every stitch of clothing I had (including my rain gear), and crawled in with the shredded rainfly of my tent wrapped around me like a burrito and tacked down with rocks. Then the waiting began, punctuated every so often by knocking the ice my breath formed off of the material resting on my face. Thank God the wind died down as the crystal clear milky way slid over me in the moonless sky. I've never felt so refreshingly alienated from the rest of humanity as I did that night. I couldn't have been more remote on the moon- not a soul in the world knew where I was and there was no way to change that. I don’t know how cold it got that night, but some nearby waterfalls froze into solid columns of ice. That night passed and the next day I descended another 4000’. Finally, the storm had passed.

And now I find myself in the middle of another storm. The uncertainty, the animal fear in the back of my mind, the exhaustion- it’s all so familiar. I’ve spent a lot of time in this place, and right now I’m tired of it, even though I'm pretty sure it'll ultimately be for my good. But thank God that all storms pass. And in the meantime, I hold fast, thankful this Thanksgiving for Conrad’s wise words.