by
Cameron McPherson Smith
1992
I SUPPOSE things had got out of hand long before I found myself thinking "This seems like a reasonable belay," while hanging big-wall style from two tied-off pickets driven into a crumbling, vertical wall of rime ice -- God knew how far above the White River Glacier - but my mind wouldn't admit it. Dumb to everything but the rope and the belay 'anchors', and the faltering circle of light beaming from my headlamp to fend off the night and the bone-chilling cold, I thought, "Sure, sure. This is OK. We're still in control..".
We were not in control. Did I mention that there was a gale blowing? A gale was blowing. A thundering wind hammered at my trembling body, shaking me against the ice face. The rope trembled in my hands. The pickets crunched and wiggled in the rime and I gave them the same mute stare I always give to hanging belay anchors, my face freeizing into some expression that no one would ever see. Somewhere up above Chiu was descending towards me, somehow.
Did I mention it was 5am ? It was 5am and Chiu's home-made headlamp had, as usual, been killed by the cold, so he was down-climbing the rime wall in the dark.
Did I mention this was the fourteenth hour on the go ? It was the fourteenth hour on the go since leaving the car at Timberline. Chiu and I had fled Portland in a desperate quest for something resembling alpine climbing. Anything but another OWell-at-least-we-got-some-exerciseO snow slog so common to the South Cascades. We picked Steel Cliff on Mt. Hood, noticing from the Timberline parking lot that it was very nicely iced up. This was March 1992. We had to be in class at 11 the next morning.
My battered copy of Jeff ThomasO Oregon High described a meandering route on the easier section of Steel Cliff, but Chiu and I tackled the steepest part we could find. Approaching the face from the upper White River Glacier we found rock and icefall and quickly daggered up the initial 500 feet. At the base of the vertical section we roped up with Chiu's 8.5mm 'rope' and I led off, racked for cold mixed climbing (or madness, though I suspect they are the same beast). Two Friends, two pickets, two screws, two knifeblades, a lost arrow, ten carabieners, a few slings and the essential prussiks (after reading Touching the Void I vowed to never climb with less than five prussiks attatched to various places on my harness, pack, bibs and jacket). Opting for speed, we had left even bivvy-bags and pile jackets behind, and my nice new pack was no heavier than when I first spied it on display at the store, stuffed with a pillow. Now it contained a half-litre of ice water, some scraps of chocolate, a Power Bar and a space blanket. Chiu was also lightly equipped.
Did I hear the cliff chuckle "Well, well, well, what have we here ?", or was it an echo of my folks telling me, so long ago, that they didnOt mind me rock-climbing but that they would really be worried if I ever started that ICE CLIMBING foolishness...Whatever it was, I heard something as I led off, but I ignored it. Of course.
A few hours later we were quite a way up and things were very strange. The climbing could be termed exceptionally challenging or desperately hair-raising; it's up to you. I pick desperately hair-raising, as I was there, but you, Gentle Reader, may simply consider me a Chicken of the First Order and call it exceptionally challenging. Whatever. As I said, the climbing was hair-raising, ascending vertical crumbling rubbish - er - rime that is, with axes planted in something (usually) and front-points either delicately tapped into brittle bubbly ice (Layer I) or rammed into the gritty snow beneath (Layer II). Layer III was the treacherous 'Mt. Hood Special' - crumbly tuffaceous GRAHDOO which some might call rock and for which we had brought the token rock protection.
'Protection' might have had some meaning at some time in the past but up there it was an obsolete word. Normally we managed a single tied off screw per pitch. The rime was too shallow and brittle for pickets or deadmen. Basically it was as if someone had sprayed down the face with churned, gravelly wet cement and then let the whole mess freeze. At least placing screws was easy - it didn't take much time or effort. My confidence turned to jelly as I looked down once to watch Chiu remove one of my OplacementsO with a single violent yank.
We went on, anyway, somehow staying on the face.
The climbing? Oh yes, the climbing...We found a few narrow gullies which we could ascend with a combination of stemming, groping by headlamp and British-style 'just-get-up-the-damned-thing' heaving, and sometimes we found ourselves bridging vertical steps with small low-angle snow slopes, and all in all it was a good ascent with some interesting (and hair-raising) climbing. When the steeper sections gave way to the summit ridge we hunkered down behind an outcrop of Layer III and chewed down a nasty Power-Bar each. Note: Power bars are so awful that they should not be counted on to reward even a tired, hungy climber. They will ruin the pleasure of your ascent. Do not purchase them, do not accept them if offered and do not eat them under any circumstance.
We completed our laborious chewing and considered our next task. The boring descent of the South Side would be an anti-climax to the excitement of the roped soloing we had been up to, but it was the best way down.
I went a few metres up the ridge to look over the route. Gee, those clouds rushing in from the West like an unstoppable freight train weren't there a few minutes ago. Say, the wind sure has dropped; there seems to be an unearthly calm right at this moment. Boy, I must be scared, I can even feel my hair trying to stand on end under my balaclava and helmet. OH GOD! I hoofed it back down the ridge to Chiu.
"Jesus! Let's get out of here !" I yelled, charging past him and heading for the cliff. In my mind I saw us happily rappeling off bollards down the walk-up route and returning to the car in a few hours.
Great plan ! Too bad we never found the walk-up route.
Seconds later visibility plunged from 30 light-years to 30 inches as the stars were veiled by thick blowing cloud. We stopped in our tracks. The dense wet clouds were escorted by a rising wind which was soon to become a gale. Chiu and I groaned in unison and prepared ourselves for the misery to follow.
Without vision things were decidedly awkward. The whiteout was also a blackout and our headlamps and glasses became encrusted with a quarter inch of ice. Soon it was hard to tell whether my eyes were open or closed and I began to wonder for some reason whether it was possible to fall asleep under such conditions.
I did not fall asleep and somehow we got along by roped fumbling. Literally we were climbing blind; we could see nothing past three feet or so but a bizarre white blackness which is impossible for me to describe. But we had no choice, you see. Our light packs told us that stopping would be more foolish than going on. We were totally unprepared for any sort of a bivouac. Our clothes and packs were soon encrusted with ice via the distressing Cascades phenomenon of dense fog instantly followed by a freezing wind. The humor of things cracked and fell away.
Like a crab on unfamiliar ground I hacked and hooked and scabbered my way around with my axes and crampons. Somehow I found a relatively low-angled slope which led downwards and I took it, front-pointing or something with my crampons while my axes smashed up to the hilt into the rime and tuff. After a while I found that the rope went tight and I set up a 'belay' (axes rammed into the crud as far as they would go). I resorted to the Munter hitch as the rope accumulated ice. Chiu came down and as we switched leads his headlamp flickered and died. When it rains, it pours. 'It was just Mt. Hood,' I could hear people saying in the comfort of heated rooms. Thanks for the news. Not even a pile jacket - just my shell and a pair of Capilene long-johns ! Man, what a drag ! To top it all off my fingers were quickly going; my well-worn Capilene glove liners were not quite enough and I jealously eyed Chiu's woolens. Our glasses accumulated a lens of ice; I could just make out a blur of Chiu's form as he headed down. Uncontrollable full-body shivering kicked in and my guts ached with stomach spasms...
We didn't speak and we didn't make eye contact for the next few hours, so I suppose things really were pretty desperate. It's hard to recall how things were - suffice it to say that it was decidedly unpleasant and we worked like zombies.
We spent ten hours descending the 600' or so of Steel Cliff. That neatly works out to 60' per hour which is, of course, one foot per minute. Yes, one foot per minute, for about ten hours, and don't think I'm not embarrased. But then again I don't give a damn becaus this was a survival epic and I'm just glad we escaped.
Had we just descended the South Side we wound have been down at the car in a couple of hours, no worries. Rather, I had taken us into a horrific descent with my panic.
Well, at least I knew something about horrific descents.
There was the Cooper Spur (again, 'Just Mt. Hood !'), which Chiu and I had descended as the rock and ice butresses above came to pieces (knocking Chiu temporarily senseless with a well-aimed fist-sized ice chunk). After hiding under a rock for a while and watching television-sized rocks tumble down the Spur we had headed down in a lull; Chiu's headlamp had died (naurally) and at the last belay switch we dropped my Petzl, watching with horror as it slid a hundred meters down to bounce to a stop three inches from the lip of the one crevasse on the route. Then there was the three-hour whiteout descent of the Ingraham icefall on Rainier, which we finished just an hour before a three day storm dropped in and trapped everyone at Camp Muir for a day and night...And, say, wasn't that was me, rapping off of bushes on the Royal Arches in Yosemite in 1990, at 11pm with a single pen-light in my teeth and two partners I picked up while waiting for my mates to arrive (nice guys but they climbed with all the speed of a glacial retreat and refused to spend an open bivvy on top, so down we went).....And little did I know, groping there on Steel Cliff, that just a few months later I would find myself going green with horror as I rapped off a sling dropped over a slick granite hump, 600 vertical feet off the deck at Tahquitz, down in California. This, I must add, in a freak downpour which mysteriously arrived just as Alex and I drove into Idyllwild, following three months of drought and temperatures in the 90's. And then I recall rapping off of a single knifeblade on an idiotic solo aid-climb back in England in 1987 (temporary insanity and no partner are all I can invoke to explain that one), and then there was the time my saftey-prussik locked on the half-way tapes as I made an airy free-hanging rappel up in Washington...and then there was the time...
No, 'Retreats arenot something to fear', I rationalized with my heart in my mouth as I clawed down another rotting pitch with ice breaking away in huge flakes which were instantly whipped away by the howling storm. And much, much later I found myself hanging from two pickets after 14 hours on the go, frozen to the bone, sheathed in a quarter inch of ice and my mind in tatters.
Chiu descended to me from the white/black/gray fuzz above and we did the switch, and soon he was at the bottom; very soon, actually, and we found that to add to the craziness of it all I had set up the bizarre hanging belay just about ten feet above easy terrain which sloped gently down to the White River Glacier. Zero visibility, you know.
Down we went, and after a while we were on safe terrain, but it was still impossible to see anything so we guessed at the right direction and headed off for Timberline. After scores of trips to Mt. Hood you get a sort of familiarity with the terrain and our guess-work was dead on target (our planned 'lightning-style ascent' had even precluded bringing a compass). We stumbled into the parking lot and stamped onto heavenly, solid asphalt. I checked my watch. Sixteen hours, 27 minutes, car-to-car.
A few minutes later I gazed lovingly at the steady white stream of sugar pouring into my hot, milky coffee and licked my lips in greedy anticipation. The poor young girl at the counter shrank back and looked at us as if we were a pair of escaped convicts. Chiu and I sat in the lodge and marveled at the skiers' flourescent costumes and let out stream-of-consciousness descriptions of what we'd been thinking on the descent, interrupted with the normal hysterical nervous laughter which is a mark of the poorly adjusted individual. We still had no food and I carefully considered devouring my paper cup.
After a few minutes we fired up my old VW and chugged back to Portland. Somehow Chiu managed to change into a pair of sweats and get to class, where he fell asleep in his seat. I skipped the formalities and fell into bed back at my safe, warm apartment.
Well, the sensation has returned to all my fingers and toes now (three months after the 'climb') and my mind keeps telling me that if I can't recall the sensations of cold and pain too vividly, then, hey, I may as well carry on climbing as it couldn't have been THAT bad. 'But it was !' I shriek, and of course my mind ignores my other mind, and, totally beyond control, I find that Chiu and I are planning for the Yokum Ridge this coming December. The thought of it makes me queasy; but we MUST do it ! Explain that, please ! And the list of nasty descents grows. Just the other night I had a lapse of reality and was shocked to find myself rapelling off of a scandalous bollard on the bottom of the North Face of Hood as the most grim clouds I've ever seen descended and the whole scene took on a quite sinister air. I legged it, you can be sure, and decided that soloing was for decidedly better climbers than myself, or better weather, anyway.
The smoke has cleared. Chiu and I keep telling ourselves that as long as we're trapped in Portland we may as well take advantage of terrible rime, that someday the experience will pay off. Har, har. This winter (1993) we're planning to go to Patagonia for more bad weather, waiting and, without doubt, epic descents. I wonder if we'll actually climb anything...
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