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Outside Magazine June 2001

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Down Time -- cont.

AFTER THE QUIET of Huandoy, base camp on Huascarán was the definition of culture shock. Some 40 people were there, most of them on commercially guided climbs headed up the ruta normale. Long into the night, peals of laughter spilled from the big canvas tent where guides and porters gathered. Huascarán, it appears, has gotten a reputation as a big but not-too-difficult peak, a good place to burnish the résumé.

For three days, we moved up the mountain in 1,500- to 2,000-foot "baby steps," which brought us to the foot of the icefall. From there, I planned to climb via the ruta normale and meet the others on the summit. On the fourth night, Erickson, Saari, Trimble, and Patridge puppy-piled into a tent in a crevasse just beneath the Shield, intending to make for the summit later that same evening.

Their alarm went off at 11, but it took three hours of high-altitude Twister to brew up, suit up, and get on their way. Fifteen minutes after leaving camp, Patridge ate a candy bar and immediately puked it back up. "But after that I felt great," he said.

The first few hundred feet of climbing were nasty, but then the slope eased. Sure enough, there was snow on the left-hand edge of the Shield—some of it good, some of it death crust. Continuing up the West Rib, they climbed by headlamp until the moon came up. At dawn I looked south and saw two figures with skis on their backs heading up the summit plateau.

Saari and Trimble arrived at the summit at 9:15 A. M., with Erickson close behind. About the same time, some 500 feet below, on the ruta normale, I turned around, too exhausted to continue.

Above me, the final, crucial call of the expedition was at hand: descend by the Shield, or retreat by the ruta normale? "In a strangely lucid, intense discussion at 22,000 feet," Trimble would e-mail later, "Erickson convinced me that I was going to accompany them down the Shield for the turns of a lifetime, and that the snowpack, which seemed sketchy on the way up—while breaking trail I triggered a terrifying 'settling' incident at around 3 A. M.—was actually 'bomber' and beautiful. He was utterly correct, and I slithered along into the abyss."

After a beautiful ski down the West Rib, the foursome arrived at the top of the Shield about ten o'clock. Behind them, the sun was just coming up over the mountaintop. Edging right, they skirted the near-vertical peak of the Shield's chevron. Then Patridge cut out onto the face, probing delicately with his pole and hopping an exploratory first turn. He nodded back to the group—and off they went.

"I've skied steeper slopes," Saari said. "But the pitch was so consistent that there was a distinct feeling of, I don't know, just being out there on a separate plane."

Switching the lead every few turns, they descended partway and stopped to reassess. "The snow was firm, but it had a biteability to it, like chalk," Erickson said. "Up high, you left hardly any tracks, just these little creases in the snow." Lower down the snow softened, however, and they began, if not to relax, at least to open up, linking turns and reveling in, as Trimble put it, "the whole you-fall-you-die thing, the altitude, and the exposure, and the incredibly sustained pitch."

They'd achieved what they came for, but it was all over in an hour. Trimble coasted to a stop at the top of the ice pitch, planted both ice axes in the snow, and felt a strange sensation at his back foot. Looking down, he was horrified to find that his boot had come completely out of his binding. Another turn and he might well have found himself doing the fall-and-die thing. Instead, he could at last claim a shared piece of history.

Or so we thought. A few weeks after we got home, Saari sent out a group e-mail. He'd been in the library further researching mountaineering firsts in Peru, and he had some bad news. "I learned that Benoit Chamoux, Eric Favret, and André Genand skied the ŒWest Rib' of Huascarán on June 18, 1983," he wrote. "This, to me, sounds like exactly the line that we skied which we are calling 'The Shield.' Oh well."

A week later, there was another message from Saari. "I personally think [the Frenchmen] skied the same line we did, but we did ski down the actual Shield, and the West Rib route could have stayed skier's right the whole time, a much less exposed route. I would not claim our descent as a first though, and I hate shit like 'first American descent,' or 'first snowboard descent.' I guess in the end it really does not matter. The line was steep, aesthetic, and high. A classic hard route for sure."

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