The House of Rock: Exum Mountain Guides

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Outside Magazine April 2004

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The House of Rock
Help Wanted: Exum Mountain Guides, the country's premier climbing service, is looking for supremely talented alpinists with world-class résumés for seasonal work in the Tetons. Must be willing to follow in the footsteps of legends. If qualified, don't bother calling. We'll find you.

By Kevin Fedarko


	Raising the roof: from left, Exum guides Brian Prax, Kent McBride, Rodrigo Mujica, Doug Coombs, Miles Smart, Mark Newcomb, Kevin Mahoney, Amy Bullard, Brendan O'Neill, and Christian Santelices near their stomping grounds in the Tetons. (Kurt Markus)

IT'S A CRISP PREDAWN MORNING AT 12,000 feet in northern Wyoming, and a crescent moon is bleeding off just enough light to illuminate a narrow ledge snaking across the southeastern face of the Grand Teton. The ledge is called Wall Street, and it extends like a stone catwalk along the mountain's near-vertical flanks to a point where it appears to intersect with a massive ridge that ladders up toward the summit. Just five feet short of that ridge, however, Wall Street fractures, with pulse-spiking abruptness, into a thousand-foot drop to the glacier below—a void of inky air that swallows the beam of Chris Morris's headlamp.

A seasoned mountaineer with alert hazel eyes and a brushy beard, Morris, 38, is more than a month into his rookie year with Exum Mountain Guides, and today it's his job to shepherd me and two other clients to the top of the 13,770-foot Grand. Making it up and back down safely is not a problem for Morris, who exudes a catlike combination of power and agility that enables him to flash across a steep slope of precarious talus hauling a 65-pound pack without dislodging a single stone. For his city-dwelling clients, the climb isn't such a cakewalk.

Tied into the rope behind me is Chuck Procknow, 47, a Denver investment banker with short gray hair and a quick laugh. Right now, Chuck looks as if he'd rather be basking in the soothing blue glow of his computer screen. Instead he's trying to tie a length of rope onto his daughter Hillary's climbing harness. The climb is Hillary's 17th birthday present from Dad, and thus far it's required her to, among other things that will impress her friends back home, spend a night in a mountain hut clogged with 12 flatulent male strangers before waking at 3 a.m. to confront the yawning gap at the end of Wall Street.

I've come along to watch Morris in action and to find out what it takes to make the cut as an Exum guide. Morris, who arrived from Boulder a little more than a month ago with his new wife, Kim, a documentary filmmaker, is one of only two first-year guides who've been tapped to try out for Exum this summer. His apprenticeship has placed him under relentless scrutiny by the veteran guides who teach and lead clients on a wide range of climbs in the northern Rockies. If his performance passes muster, he may earn an invitation back for a second season, the next step on the eight- to ten-year apprenticeship path in the most elite mountain-guiding service in North America.

At the moment, though, the normally benign Morris has fallen into a stern mood. The weather is looking suspect, his team is moving slowly, and we've reached a crucial point in our climb. Back in 1931, when a young climber named Glenn Exum arrived at the end of this ledge, ropeless and wearing a borrowed pair of leather football cleats two sizes too big, he simply leaped across the chasm—a bold, unprecedented move that opened the route to others. These days, teams negotiate the obstacle in a slightly less desperate fashion, performing a hand traverse on a narrow crack while their boots feverishly claw the granite wall. It's the Grand Teton's equivalent of turning onto a one-way street: Prior to crossing the gap and starting the 12 pitches that lead up the Exum Ridge, it's possible to bail out and descend via an easier route. But once across the gap, the only way to get off the mountain is by firing up and over the top, which leaves you vulnerable to Wyoming's infamous, and sometimes lethal, summer storms.

Three weeks ago, on July 26, 13 self-guided climbers from Idaho were halfway up the ridge on a notoriously sketchy stretch of rock known as the Friction Pitch when one member, a young mother named Erica Summers, was struck by lightning and instantly killed. The others were left stranded, five of them seriously injured, more than a thousand feet above the Middle Teton Glacier. It took a 50-person squadron of park rangers and search-and-rescue teams, plus a pair of Bell 206-L4 high-altitude helicopters, nearly three hours to pull the survivors off in fading light and foul weather. Neither the incident nor the rescue involved any Exum clients or guides, but it dramatically demonstrated the consequences of poor judgment on the way up the route.

"OK, let's go," Morris announces abruptly. "We're maintaining a good pace, but if the weather goes bad, I'll pick up the speed considerably—and I'll expect you guys to keep up."

With that, Morris flits expertly across the gap, disappearing up the ridge and into the darkness.

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Correspondent KEVIN FEDARKO wrote about K2 in November 2003.

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