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Outside Magazine June 2001

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Down Time -- cont.


	Saari and Nat Patridge's trial run on Huandoy

THE NEXT DAY BROUGHT the first of the debates that would rattle and eventually fracture our team. Castaneda left for a guiding job in Huaraz, and everyone except me wanted to ski Huandoy. (After the warm-up run, I quickly decided to stay in base camp and monitor the group's progress via walkie-talkie.) Koch and Patridge lobbied for the north face proper, a route that would take the group left, or east, of a giant rock spur that runs down from the summit. Erickson argued forcefully for going right on the marginally gentler northwest slopes. The face proper was the most direct and "elegant" line, but there was a problem: a vertical rock band right at the top, a spot where the four Americans who first climbed the face, back in 1971, had been forced to bivouac.

"We could climb it and then rappel back over it on the way down, but are we gonna have the time to do all that in one push?" Saari wondered. On the other hand, he pointed out, going via the northwest slopes would mean an easier, rock-free approach and an uninterrupted ski descent. "In which case you've skied from the summit," Trimble said, "but maybe not in the ultimate style."

For two days we talked it over, sitting elbow-to-elbow in the shade of a large, leaning rock and staring up at the face in the afternoons, then tossing it over some more at night in the "conversation pit," a circle of stones stacked between the tents. For a while the argument was a great, all-absorbing game—not unlike the fierce chess matches that Saari and Trimble engaged in every evening.

Finally it was time to vote. Northwest slopes prevailed, three to two. Relieved to have a decision, Erickson went to nap in his tent. By the time he woke up and returned to the pit, Koch had made a fiery speech and rallied everyone back to the face proper. Better to knock off the toughest line on the mountain, he argued, than leave some plum for a future O'Neill to pluck.

"That's fine," Erickson said. "You all go ahead. I'll stay here."

In some ways, he was acting the petulant schoolboy. Yet Erickson knew firsthand the consequences of overreaching in these mountains. In June 1997, having just graduated from Montana State, he had arrived here with his best friend, Rob Williams. When Erickson was sidelined with dysentery, Williams, 23, decided to attempt a hard route on Chopicolqui, immediately east of Huascarán, with Koky Casteneda, then an apprentice guide. Just below the summit of Chopicolqui, Williams succumbed to pulmonary edema. Over the next week, Erickson, Casteneda, and two others grimly fixed ropes to the summit so that Williams's body could be lowered off the mountain.

Now, as Erickson restated his argument—the northwestern slopes provided more bailout options if something went wrong—everybody but Koch began to waver. In the end it was Nat Patridge who led the troops back across the divide between Koch and Erickson. "We're much stronger and safer if we stay together as a team," Patridge said. "I don't care if the left is more aesthetic. I'm going right." Koch walked away in disgust.

At midnight I watched the five of them leave camp and disappear over the toe of the glacier, penitentes marching to oblivion. Later, after daybreak, they were five specks on the open face, frying under the Andean sun. By noon, three of them had reached the ridge, and a fourth, Koch, was clawing his way up to join them. Patridge had turned back, stopping to rest—or so it appeared—at a rocky alcove halfway down the face.

Up on Huandoy, the clouds don't roll in, they coalesce out of blue air, and a few minutes later I couldn't see the peak at all. Erickson got on the radio. The four on the ridge wanted to go on and tag the summit, he said, but how was Nat doing?

"I don't know," I said. "I can't see him anymore."

The next three hours were tense. The four abandoned their summit bid to make sure Patridge was OK, but how best to reach him? A ski descent was out of the question—baked by the sun, the snow was unskiable. The four tried to skirt right and rappel down to the glacier by another route, but eventually they had to tiptoe all the way back across the bottom of the slide-prone slope they'd just climbed. At dusk they got to the alcove where I'd last seen Patridge, but he wasn't there. Then, just before dark, the clouds lifted and I spotted him a thousand feet below the rest of the group. He was skiing.

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