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Outside Magazine November 2002

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The Hard Way
Unbroken Chain (Cont.)

WE PACKED AT the trailhead after spending eight hours driving, the last two on an absurdly bone-jarring four-wheel-drive track.

Rain jacket and bivy sack, nuts and fruit, ropes and climbing hardware, all jammed into a daypack—and away we went, walking fast and talking big.

Our plan was a hypertrophic extension of Bechtel and Lilygren's achievement. We wanted to start farther north and west of the central Bighorn spires they had traversed, at the very tip of the spine, and do every summit, round or sharp, in a southward arc—eight peaks in all.

We set out at 5 p.m. and in four hours had covered more than 12 miles. Bryan had a stomach ailment. It could have been nerves; it could have been something he ate; either way, he discounted it.

"Don't worry," he said, coming out of the trees for the fifth time.

Enchainments are an expression of mountain exuberance, the bacchanalian, masochistic joy found in moving with speed along perilous terrain.

At twilight we scrambled up smooth slabs to a tiny cirque beside a black tarn. There was heavy cloud cover. A seam of purple light slipped momentarily between the full-bellied clouds and the earth; then it was black. It was going to rain.

Rain is the scourge of rock climbing, corroding self-confidence in a sport in which you already push the boundaries of your own insecurity. Wet rock is treacherously slippery, adding degrees of difficulty and peril. And then there's lightning. Hanging on a wall in the sky gives you no place to hide. If God is so inclined, you're an easy target. The only shield between you and a bolt of lightning is prayer. Which, as we all know, sometimes gets answered with "No!" in thunder.

I had gotten the ominous forecast off the Web that morning: thunderstorms. It would have been best to wait for blue skies, but our summer schedules, like everybody else's, were packed. This was the only slot where our free time overlapped.

When it started to rain, we wormed into our bivy sacks, said good night, and pulled the drawstrings so tight that only our noses stuck out. We'd try for a little sleep and see if the storm passed.

A bivy sack is roughly as comfortable to sleep in as a garbage bag. Alpine meadows appear soft as a featherbed until you lie down and discover pointy rocks inside those lovely green tufts. Bryan and I got maybe four hours of shut-eye before the cold woke us. For two hours we tossed and turned, then got up, packed up, and started moving, somewhere around 4 a.m. The rocks were still wet, even coated with verglas in a few places, but it wasn't raining.

Bryan, who was no longer in intestinal distress, fell behind right from the start. On past trips I'd hardly been able to keep up with him. The summer before, we'd done the Cruise route in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in half the guidebook time. The year before we'd humped onto the east face of Longs Peak and then swung up Pervertical Sanctuary as fast as baboons.

I waited for him on the first summit, following the bright speck of his headlamp. It was almost dawn by the time he arrived.

"What's up?" I was trying to sound cheerful.

"Nothing," said Bryan, feigning good spirits himself.

We cut down into a rocky col and started up the second peak. On top I drank water and ate a handful of nuts. Bryan arrived looking hammered.

"I think it's altitude," I said.

"Could be," said Bryan.

Neither of us believed this.

An hour later we reached the section of ridge that unexpectedly metamorphosed from good granite to rotten, dissolving volcanic junk. In Bryan's ashen face I saw the end of our trip—and I responded with more denial. Something was clearly wrong with my partner, but I was hell-bent on doing the enchainment, one way or another. I suggested we descend an intermediate ridge, cut across the western cirque, climb the northwest buttress of Cloud Peak, circle around, and complete the entire enchainment in the reverse direction. This would turn our curving one-way traverse into a giant figure eight. It's almost always a bad sign when Plan B is more complicated than Plan A—it reveals desperateness.

"How 'bout it?" I asked.

"OK," Bryan replied woodenly.

We descended the intermediate ridge. At the base I waited for Bryan for more than an hour before he dropped his pack beside me and slumped into the grass.

"How you feeling?"

"All right," he replied. He said he'd taken a fall in the talus. "Really scared me, Mark."

Bryan was having one of those days we all dread, when for some inexplicable reason the fire is out. You feel murky and vulnerable and unfocused inside. A mysterious anxiety has worn a hole into your ordinarily strong heart, and your will is bleeding out. You become anxious, and this in turn causes you to become diffident, which consequently kills your body's alacrity. Suddenly you are numb-footed and clumsy. Neither your mind nor your muscles are working properly, your spirit is spent, and there's almost nothing you can do about it.

The mysterious neurological flow that on other trips had given Bryan the ability to climb almost effortlessly had vanished. He was a shell of himself. I knew how he felt. It had happened to me. Unfortunately, I was feeling fit as a fiddle.

We ate dried peaches, swigged iodized alpine water, and stared up at the pyramid-shaped northwest buttress of Cloud Peak. It wasn't even 10 a.m., but already the clouds were boiling back in.

"You want to do it, Bryan?"

"Of course." He answered with such profound abstraction that it was as if he wasn't even there.

"We don't have to."

"No, I want to."

"You're sure?"

"Yup."

I tried to convince myself that he was being sincere, but I knew he was only saying that he wanted to continue because he didn't want to disappoint me. We were partners. Linked together. All I had to do was have the courage to call it quits. All I had to do was let go of my selfish expectations.

"Let's do it," I said.

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