Addicted to Danger: Affirming Life in the Face of Death

one

CREVASSE

We moved down the Peters Glacier slowly, a sled between us loaded heavy with supplies. Twenty feet of rope linked us—too close, we knew, but required by the rough, undulating surface beneath our feet. A glacier is not a fixed, solid thing. It flows like a river, with currents, some parts smooth, others rough. Where it changes direction, or where the angle of its slope steepens, the surface will split, creating cracks as deep as a hundred feet. A thin layer of snow can make them invisible.

Chris walked in front. I walked behind, righting the sled each time it flipped. The afternoon sun beat down on us, softening the snow, casting long shadows. Moments after we had decided to head toward smoother ground, Chris broke through the crust and plunged headfirst into a crevasse. I was concentrating on the sled and did not see him fall. Just as I sensed trouble, the rope yanked me into the air, then down into an icy void. This is it, I thought, I’m about to die.

In an instant, the sled and I slammed on top of Chris. Stunned but still conscious after the impact, I checked myself for injuries. My left shoulder felt numb and I could not raise my arm. (I later learned my shoulder had broken.) Suppressing an urge to panic, I glanced around and considered what I should do. Balanced awkwardly with one foot on the sled, the other against a slight bulge in the ice, I tried my best to reassure Chris as I took off my pack and squeezed it into an eighteen-inch space between the walls. Then, using my pack for support, I shoved the sled off Chris into an area just below us, where it lodged.

All I could see of my companion were his legs, still in snowshoes, dangling behind his large black pack, which had compressed to half its normal width between the crevasse walls. Suspended facedown, parallel to the crevasse bottom far below, he yelled, I can’t move, Wick, you’ve got to get me out! Trapped under the pack, Chris’s entire upper body was immobilized. When I noticed his left hand, twisted back, caught between his pack and the wall, I grabbed it and asked if he could feel the pressure. No, he barked, I can’t feel anything! You’ve got to get me out, Wick! I assured him, I will, Chris, I promise. I tried lifting him by his pack, but hard as I pulled, he would not budge. Within a few minutes I realized I could do nothing more for him until I got myself out of the crevasse.

The tapered walls were as slick as a skating rink. The distant slit of daylight looked a hundred feet away. To make it to the surface, I needed to put on my crampons—steel spikes attached to each boot to prevent slipping. Luckily, they were on the back of my pack. In a space so tight I could maneuver only by facing the wall, I awkwardly pulled off my snowshoes and strapped the crampons on. Then I retied our rope to the back of Chris’s pack, clipped a three-foot aluminum picket and a pair of jumars—mechanical devices to move up and down a rope—to my waist sling, and prepared to climb out. When I tried kicking the front two points of a crampon into the wall, they bounced off. I tried using my ice hammer, but without room to swing my arm, I barely made a scratch. How could I get out if I couldn’t penetrate the ice? I began to panic. Calm down, I told myself, think of something that will work.

I tried chipping out a little indentation, narrower than a finger width, and placed the front points of my crampon on the tiny ledge. I edged myself up, placing my back against the opposite wall as a counterforce. The front points held my weight. Using my good arm to wield the hammer, I slowly worked my way up the cold, glassy walls, chiseling a ladder of little ledges as I went. Three chips and a step up, again and again. I concentrated harder than I ever had before. The whole time Chris kept yelling from beneath his pack, You’ve got to get me out, Wick! You’ve got to get me out! Between puffs and grunts I continued to reassure him, It’ll be okay, I’ll get you out. And I felt sure I could.

Despite my impatience to reach the surface, I never let the distance between indentations exceed six inches. I knew that if I fell back down, I would probably get wedged, like Chris, between the walls or be hurt worse than I already was. This was my only chance. Near the top, where the shaft widened to about three feet, I twisted my upper torso, drove the ice hammer into the lip of the crevasse at my back, and pressed my feet against the opposite wall. With one rapid movement, I levered my body over the lip and onto the surface of the glacier. It had taken an hour to ascend what turned out to be a twenty-five-foot shaft.

Nearly exhausted, relieved to be alive, I lay on the snow and gasped for breath. Raising my head to look around, I was startled by the quiet and the brightness of the sun on the broad, tilted glacier. Though tempted to rest a little longer, a sense of urgency made me struggle to my feet. I knew I must work fast. If I didn’t get Chris out before nightfall, he would die from the cold.

From the crevasse edge, I took up the slack in the rope and pulled with all my might. He did not budge. I tried again—nothing. And again—still no movement. I would need to go back down. I tied the rope to the picket, which I pounded into the hard snow. Then I attached the rope to the jumars (with nylon slings for my feet), which allowed me to descend swiftly but safely into the crevasse.

It took me about five minutes to return to Chris. Hanging a few inches above him, I tried to hoist his pack with my hands and one good arm, but nothing budged. In the hope that changing the rope’s position would make a difference, I tied it to each of the pack’s accessible cross straps and pulled. But still the pack did not move. I tried to reassure Chris, but when I drove my ice hammer into the pack, all I did was move the top a few inches; then it settled back into place. I attempted to use the power of my legs to lift the pack by stepping upward in the slings. Nothing was working.

Peters Glacier from accident site with low mountains to north; flank of McKinley’s Wickersham Wall at right.

I thought that if I could open Chris’s pack and empty its contents, enough pressure would be released to let him move, but when I tried tearing its tough fabric open with my ice hammer I could only make ineffectual punctures. The pack, like a block of wood in a vise, was simply too compressed. Lacking equipment with which to construct a pulley system, I could not dislodge Chris. So, after two hours of continuous effort, I stopped. Sorry, this isn’t working, I conceded. "I’m going back up to try to get someone, anyone on the radio."

After hauling up my pack, I retraced our tracks to a nearby knoll, where I desperately radioed for help: This is an emergency. Can anyone hear me? If you can, I need your help. I repeated the message again and again, but no one answered; I never really expected a reply. In this valley, so far away from anyone who might have come, our line-of-sight radio was useless. We had set out to climb Mt. McKinley by a remote, untraveled route, and this was the price we paid. No one would come to help. We were alone.

I went back down with little hope of freeing my friend and repeated the rescue maneuvers I feared would fail. Chris’s incessant pleas subsided as he gradually realized I could not get him out. Having planned to climb Mt. Everest with me the following year, he said, Climb it for me, Wick. Remember me when you’re on the summit. A classical trumpeter, Chris asked me to take his mouthpiece there. I don’t know about me, I replied, but someone will. I promise. We spoke of his imminent death, but I could not believe that so young and vibrant a man was actually about to die right in front of me.

After asking me to relay messages to his family and closest friends, Chris entreated me to help him die with dignity. However, I could think of no way to ease his suffering or speed his death. I asked him whether he wanted his body left in the crevasse or brought out. He said his father could decide. At about nine-thirty, six hours after we fell into the crevasse, Chris conceded, There’s nothing more you can do, Wick. You should go up. I told him I loved him and said a tearful good-bye. As I began my ascent, Chris said simply, Take care of yourself, Jim.

Back on the surface, physically spent, emotionally exhausted, and racked with guilt, I pulled on a parka and collapsed into my half-sleeping-bag and bivouac sack—an uninsulated nylon bag used in emergencies for protection against the wind. Lying at the edge of the crevasse, I listened to my friend grow delirious from the searing cold. He talked to himself, moaned, and, at around eleven, sang what sounded like a school song. At 2 A.M. I heard him for the last time. Chris Kerrebrock was twenty-five. I was forty.

Chris Kerrebrock the night before the accident.

The next morning I wrote in my diary,

I feel indescribable guilt and failure for not getting him out and for leaving him to die alone. I don’t know how I got myself out with my injured arm. I had to if I would see my precious wife and children again. I can’t write more because of sobbing.

Chris and I had arrived on Mt. McKinley the week before, eager to undertake a challenging route up the mountain’s Wickersham Wall. No one had climbed it since 1963, eighteen years before, when first a group of Canadians and then the Harvard Mountaineering Club established the only routes up its treacherous face. Its reputation as an avalanche trap kept climbers away. We planned to take a new line up the massive wall between the two existing routes. Although I felt confident about our prospects, I left my wife, Mary Lou, with more than the usual trepidation. Why, I was not sure.

After a spectacular flight over Kahiltna Pass to check out our route, Doug Geeting, the bush pilot I’d used on several expeditions to Mt. McKinley, dropped us at the mountain’s main landing site. He said he would pick us up in about three weeks. In the interim he promised to fly over and check on us at least once. From the air, Wickersham Wall looked huge, but not particularly steep. While concerned about its ice cliffs and the prospect of avalanches, we saw nothing to deter us. Dangerous in places, yes, but climbable. Barring bad weather, we believed we could reach the summit.

Storms confined us to a camp close to the landing site. For the next three days, we ate bacon, eggs, steak, and fresh fruit as we planned our climb and became friends. Reading the Harvard Mountaineering Club’s expedition summary reinforced our decision to climb by an entirely new route. Since we had elected to climb the mountain in a single push, with just four ice screws and two pickets between us, we could not take their more technical route.

Chris’s easy company and good humor made me look forward to the next three weeks. A year earlier Chris had entered graduate school in philosophy at Columbia University, after earning a degree in classical music at Oberlin, and a reputation for exceptional strength and speed at Mt. Rainier, where he had worked as a summer guide for Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (RMI). Through his father’s contacts with Chinese government officials, he had managed to obtain a coveted permit to climb Mt. Everest from Tibet, then asked Lou Whittaker, one of RMI’s owners, to organize and lead an expedition the following spring. During the months spent planning that climb, Chris and I came to know and like each other. Although we had never climbed together, we suspected we would be a compatible team.

We each approached Lou and asked him what he thought. He encouraged me to climb with Chris, describing him as one of the strongest members of the Everest expedition. While characterizing me as an expert climber, Lou cautioned Chris to go to McKinley prepared to look out for himself since I was not a trained guide.

Just as Chris and I finished the last of our fresh food, the weather cleared and other climbing parties began passing our camp on their way to more popular routes. On Tuesday, May 5, 1981, we set out, taking turns in the lead. To make it up Wickersham Wall, we would need to be a fast, strong, and well-coordinated team.

On Wednesday, I wrote,

Chris and I are getting along marvelously. Our personalities seem to mesh and thus far there isn’t the slightest semblance of getting on each other’s nerves. We make a good team and if this expedition is the trial run for Everest, we should do well there together.

The next day we left a route crowded with climbers and proceeded alone. We crossed over the pass separating the usual West Buttress climbing route on McKinley from the remote north side of the mountain where few, if any, climbers go each year. Descending 2,000 feet to the Peters Glacier, our route to the base of Wickersham Wall, we negotiated a tricky series of crevasses, ice cliffs, and a bergschrund—a large crevasse at the head of the glacier. There we discovered the most beautiful campsite either of us had ever seen. Surrounded on three sides by a ridge curved like an amphitheater, we were protected from the wind and restored by the silence. As the soft afternoon light swept gently over the cirque, we felt safe and at peace.

Aerial view of Wickersham Wall.

I could see that Chris, having come through the rigors of the day in excellent spirits, possessed not only the requisite energy and strength for this climb, but the good temper and patience to wait out the storms that would inevitably slow our progress. Refreshed, euphoric, and eager to set off the next morning for the base of Wickersham Wall, we talked late into the evening. Though we had not known each other long, we related remarkably well. In addition to shared interests in classical music, philosophy, and mountaineering, we laughed a lot, thanks mostly to Chris’s warm, infectious wit. The force of Chris’s personality and the gleam in his eyes moved me to photograph his face, made rosy by the fading northern light. As night fell, Chris commented philosophically, When your number’s up, it’s up, to which I remarked, I plan to do all I can to stay alive since I want to grow old with Mary Lou. I told myself that as a climber I might risk my life, but I would never consciously court death. Just where that line falls is a matter of opinion.

On Friday, May 8, we spent a leisurely morning enjoying the glacier’s quiet beauty and reveling in our solitude. We talked about the National Park Service’s policy against landings and airdrops in the area. Chris pointed out, If the prohibition were lifted, masses of climbers and their attendant garbage would desecrate this wonderful place. How satisfying to know it can only be reached on foot.

Saturday, May 9

Chris is dead. I am injured. My only hope is Doug Geeting. I pray he does a flyby before the next big storm.

I spent the day in my bivouac sack consumed with grief and guilt, impatient for Geeting to come. My mini-weather radio predicted cold air from the northwest. Did that mean a storm, I wondered, or just colder weather? I kept imagining the sound of an airplane, but all I really heard was an occasional rock or chunk of ice falling in the distance. A setting that once seemed benign became ominous. As I gazed up at the huge ice cliffs that towered above me, I hoped I could escape an avalanche. In the distance, low hills completed the valley, blocking my radio signal.

Although Doug had said he would fly by to check on us, I realized he might not come for several days. With just a few pieces of beef jerky, a bottle of water, and a half-empty thermos of lukewarm soup, I knew I must conserve. Intense pain in my shoulders, upper arms, and chest made shifting position in my bivouac sack difficult. The adrenaline I had produced after the fall and in my frantic attempts to rescue Chris must have blocked the pain, but now I began to feel the full force of my injuries. I would need sleeping pills to get through the night.

All day long I tried to think of how I could have freed Chris. From where I lay I could see the hole we had made when we broke through the snow roof and plunged into the crevasse. On each side of the hole I saw a telltale dip we should have noticed. I kept asking myself, He noticed all the others, why not this one? Why didn’t I tell him to slow down? I despaired that Chris, a young man with such a promising, adventurous future before him, had lost his life because of a single misstep. I hated being the only one who knew he was dead.

As I reeled from Chris’s death and my own close call, thoughts of my wife overwhelmed me. From now on I planned to stay closer to home; I committed to quitting serious climbing. I promised myself that, if I survived, I would withdraw from the Everest expedition.

It snowed all night, but by Sunday morning the sky had cleared. Then a cloud descended, blotting out the surrounding valley, and I knew that if Geeting waited much longer, storms would keep him away for several days. I prayed he would remember to check on us, not wait for us to call him from the summit.

When I had left Chris as he was dying, it did not occur to me to dig through our sled for supplies. Now I needed them, but I could not face the prospect of going back down. In the two days since the accident I had eaten just two sticks of beef jerky, a cup of soup, and a few sips of water. I felt light-headed from dehydration. Without my stove (tucked deep inside the sled) I knew melting snow would be difficult. To keep my bottle as full as possible, I started adding snow to the water and slowly melted it with the heat of my body. Though I grew desperately thirsty, I could never afford to drink enough.

I thought back to the hour before the accident when I told Chris I had lost a buckle from the waist belt of my pack. We dropped our gear and retraced our steps a quarter mile before I realized I hadn’t lost my buckle after all. Returning to retrieve the sled, we discussed whether to change positions. We didn’t. Chris remained in the lead, pulling while I braked. If we had switched positions, I would be the one dead in the crevasse. What wedged Chris between the walls was the weight of his body and pack plunging into the crevasse, compounded by the weight of the eighty-five-pound sled, me, and my fifty-pound pack.

Although I knew second-guessing would not bring Chris back or lessen my anguish, thoughts of the accident continued to haunt me. I kept thinking, Why couldn’t I free him? I didn’t, I simply didn’t. I tried everything I could but it wasn’t enough. The way Chris died seemed so much worse than if he had died instantly, as in a fall. It was not a particularly difficult part of the climb that got us but a crevasse on easy terrain, just like so many others we had encountered and crossed without mishap. Some people would say we were careless. Perhaps we were.

Why had I survived the accident? Doubting divine intervention, I wondered, Could it be my amulets? Since first attempting K2 in 1975, I had always carried a Zuni owl for protection. Some sixth sense had led me to bring a second amulet on this climb. A year after I left a plastic, pink match case on the summit of K2, Reinhold Messner—the first person to climb all fourteen of the world’s highest mountains—found it, protruding from where I’d buried it on the windswept, snowcapped peak. Ever since he returned it to me, I had kept it as a good-luck charm.

I had survived bivouacs on K2 and Mt. Rainier, and now this. Why? Convinced there must be some reason, some higher purpose for me, I resolved to hold out until someone found me. I told myself, "I will not die here." Our tent, stove, pots, and most of our food remained in the crevasse. I wondered how far I would be able to stretch twelve sticks of beef jerky. Rationing one a day, my supply would last twelve days. I couldn’t imagine Doug Geeting waiting any longer than that, but I steeled myself for the worst. As much as I wanted to get up and walk out of there, I knew my best hope was to sit tight and wait.

Thoughts of my wife both upset and sustained me. I longed to be with her, to hold her and cry. But it sickened me to realize that had I died in the crevasse, she and our five children would never have known what happened to me. I resolved never again to take so great a risk. For twenty-one years I had pursued mountain climbing with an intensity greater than I had devoted to either my family or my career. This was my tenth expedition in nine years. There was still time for me to become a better husband, a better father, a better son to my aging parents. I wrote:

Something good must come from this tragic expedition. I think of a photograph of an old Patagonian couple whose faces radiate serenity; after lives lived together in love. I don’t want to drift apart from Mary Lou in our middle and later years, as so many couples do. I want us to grow closer, to become like the couple in the picture.

I told myself to heed the words of Maurice Herzog from his mountaineering classic, Annapurna: There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men; a new life begins. It was time for me to stop serious mountain climbing and begin a new kind of life. From now on I would live differently, my priorities would change—I owed it to those I loved.

Sleeping pills let me get through the freezing night so I was only vaguely aware of the snow and wind bombarding my bivouac sack. I awoke to a brilliantly clear morning—a perfect time for Geeting to fly by. As I dried my soaked parka and half-bag, I heard the sound of aircraft engines. But they were only my imagination. Please remember to check on us, Doug. You must remember. In my gut, I knew he would not come.

When I stood up for the first time since the accident three days before, I felt light-headed and my legs felt weak. I looked at the ice cliffs towering above me and wondered if they would crash down in the next storm. Should I move up the hill? Concerned about traveling alone over such dangerous terrain, I resolved to wait, at least until I felt stronger.

All day I tried to figure out how I could have rescued Chris and thought about the people who would suggest they could have freed him. Uphill where we encountered so many crevasses, Chris had led cautiously, detecting the slightest depressions where the snow sagged over them. Once we had passed through what seemed the most dangerous terrain, we mistakenly relaxed and picked up our pace. Had we approached the crevasse from more of an angle—instead of nearly parallel—Chris’s momentum would have carried him across, but he hit the opening in such a way that he was propelled down the shaft.

Desperate for a temporary respite from my predicament, I read The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen and was struck by his comment that in high mountains, there is small room for mistake. After The Snow Leopard, I began Pnin, a short novel by my favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s recurrent theme of deep marital love consoled me, but it also made my heart ache for home. Lying in my bivouac sack for hours, looking out over the lonely white landscape, I began to search my soul. When I returned to Seattle, I intended to visit one of the few priests I felt I could talk to. Perhaps he could help make sense of this tragedy.

Tuesday morning I dozed, waking briefly when two planes (the first I’d seen since before the accident)