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Desire & Ice: Challenge on Denali
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We pause for one of our hourly rest breaks 500 feet above camp, pull on wind-breaking layers, sit on overturned packs, and take in food and fluids. As we start climbing again, the grade steepens. Ahead of me on the rope, Clay Howard, 53, a former college athlete and one of the fittest members of our team, begins to falter. He stops abruptly and leans on his ice axe. I can see his chest heaving, as he struggles to breathe the thin air. He calls out to Wagner, who's leading the rope, in a frail voice. "I'm not feeling so good," he says. "I need to rest for a while."
"Clay, take a few minutes," Wagner says.
We wait five.
"You ready, Clay?" Wagner asks.
"Yeah, I think so."
The rope pulls tight, and we're moving again. Within a few minutes, Howard, who is now staggering, stops again.
Wagner jettisons his pack and rushes downslope to take the load off Howard's shoulders. Most of us know what's coming. There's only one sure cure for altitude sickness: For Howard, the trip is over.
Talcott feels for Howard's pulse and does his best to lead him to the right—and only—decision. "You will only feel worse the higher you go," he says. Then Wagner, not known for his light touch, weighs in. "Clay, if you're hurting here, there's no way you're going to make it to camp at 17,200," he says. "You have to go down."
An hour later, we arrive back in purgatory.
I feel particularly bad for Howard, having already had my own bout with altitude sickness. Throughout our first night at 11,000 feet, I'd drift off to sleep only to awaken a few minutes later in a panic, gasping for breath. The condition is known medically as Cheyne-Stokes Breathing, and I realized that had it worsened, it could have bought me an early ticket home.
While all of us could expect to suffer some effects of acute mountain sickness—nausea, lethargy, headache, or insomnia—Talcott checked often to make sure none of us was lapsing into the more serious afflictions known as high altitude pulmonary edema or high altitude cerebral edema, in which the lungs or cranium, respectively, fill with fluid. Either can kill a climber in less than 48 hours.
THE NEXT MORNING WE DECIDE that Howard will descend with a guide from another RMI team led by Everest veteran Brent Okita. The day before, our own guide Horiskey led down one of Okita's climbers, on the heels of two other clients who'd left earlier with another guide.
Okita's remaining climbers are young and strong. They set out for high camp at 8:30 a.m. We follow at 10, and by noon we're at 15,400 feet, peering up at an 800-foot section of snow and hard ice pitched at 45 to 50 degrees. It's the most technical stretch of the West Buttress Route leading to the high camp. To proceed, each of us grips an ice axe in one hand and, in the other, holds an ascender clipped onto fixed lines anchored into the snow. The ascenders, attached to our harnesses, will slide freely as we move up but grab hold should we fall.
Ahead of me, Wagner moves agilely up a protruding belt of near-vertical ice along the bergschrund. Now it's my turn. The hard ice deflects my axe several times before I can sink it into a tiny crack. Standing on the front points of my crampons, I take one tentative step. Then I feel a sharp tug from below. Coffey, who hasn't yet clipped onto the fixed rope, has thrown a crampon, and he's sliding backward. Brace scrambles to his aid, as I call out to Wagner to slow down.
"We really can't stop here," Wagner yells over the wind. Within two minutes, Brace and Coffey have refastened the crampon, and we're moving up. Then it happens again.
"You will keep up!" Wagner shouts, as we start to move, and I know that Coffey, the engineer, is mentally devising a more lasting repair to make when we stop for the day.
Within two hours, we collapse onto our packs at the pass, the fixed lines behind us, and glance ahead to the rocky, exposed West Buttress. In 15 minutes we're picking our way along a rocky crest. At one point, maneuvering around a boulder, I look down to see that I'm standing on an ice ledge narrower than my boot. As I glimpse the Upper Peters Glacier a thousand feet below, I recall that in 1998, an RMI guide died on this ridge after clipping off the rope to aid a struggling client.
Then the Jerry Lewis skit begins. Two French climbers, a man and woman, unroped and holding ski poles instead of ice axes, decide to pass us. As I cling to the rock, they edge around me, expressing their gratitude in broken English, seemingly unfazed by the hazard lurking below. Ahead, Wagner wears a look of disgust.
As we leave the rocks and follow a gentle rise into high camp, I struggle to breathe the thin air and glance ahead to the open basin and the bottom of Denali Pass, our campsite and the gateway to the summit.
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