A Poor Belay

It is early evening, December 18, 1994. Chiu and I are loading the old VW with a few items we need to make an attempt on the Yocum Ridge, the infamous and most intriguing feature of our old acquaintance, Mount Hood. Visible from my apartment in Portland, the Ridge is a daily reminder that just 90 miles from my classrooms lies an excellent challenge....

We finish loading the gear; we're going light this time, with just bivvy bags, no sleeping bags and no stove, just a bit of food, a few pickets, lots of slings and the big 100-meter rope; and a vow to keep moving...We motor out of Portland and make the familiar trip to the mountain, freezing in my unheated VW wagon.

Several hours later I am no longer sitting in my car but in a rather more precarious situation...I am perched, dark in the moonless night, on steep ice on a western flank of Mount Hood. I'm clipped to my ice tools and a picket, watching as Chiu traverses away from me on frontpoints and with axes, disappearing from the influence of my headlamp, vanishing into the darkness. It is warm; too warm, I can feel it already...The ice towers and gargoyles composing the Yocum Rigde will be cracking away before sunrise...I keep feeding out the rope and start to consider our position...Shall we go on, or would it be bewt to head home? I have been here before, I know when the Ridge is in condition, and when it is nothing more than a suicide mission...

As the time clicks by I hear the beginnings of the Big Melt; far off on the ridge I can make out the sound of ice towers crashing down our approach slopes...The ridge is already alive with icefall...Suddenly a white flash blurs directly in front of me - I'm momentarily blinded by the immediate flash of light...I realise a large chunk of ice has whizzed right past me, through my headlamp beam, and now I can hear it shattering and sliding down the ice slopes below me.

I can only think "Shit, let's get out of here!" as Chiu tugs on the rope and I have to yell out "NO--MORE--ROPE!". At 100 meters it is hard to hear, and I feel stupid for having not noticed before that Chiu was out of rope. Immediately I hear him shout back "CLIMB"; I can't tell if he wants me to climb so he can reach a belay stance or because he is already prepared to belay, but something in that simple one-word response, combined with the sounds of the ice crashing down all around, set me to take apart my belay very quickly and head off...I follow the traverse, finding Chiu has made his way across a formidably crumbly and nasty rime ice slope. Most of it is at 60 degrees or so, with a few bulges of steeper terrain where he managed to get in an ice screw...I move quickly but carefully, waiting for the sudden yank at my harness that would mean either Chiu had fallen or that the rope joining us had been hit by a chunk of ice.

I'm quite scared now, but concentrating on the climbing, as usual, takes precedence. Now, looking back (and to the future...) it seems crazy to allow myself to be distracted from the danger - but I won't quit....The light from my headlamp goes a sickly yellow and falters...I bang it lightly with an ice axe and it flares back to life, illuminating the grotesque, thick, ropy ice features I am traversing across. They glisten with melt and soak my hands as my knuckles occasionally contact the ice. My knees are cold and sore from bumping the ice -- but all of this is minor; what I really think of is just getting across to whatever Chiu has found.

After a few minutes I am startled to see the rope curling around a corner of sorts. If Chiu is around a corner, it means he is in a gully, a couloir; that wouldn't make sense, as it would be an obvious icefall trough....I'm puzzled but I move carefully towards the ice pillar that forms the acute angle of the corner. I set my tools, stop for a moment and peer around the corner; Chiu is ten feet away, ,a red-and black colored lump crouched under a desk-sized outcropping of rock projecting from the narrow ice funnel. Before he can look up and see me, I retreat back around the corner and concentrate on the delicate move, straddling the ice in the moonlight, quite aware now of the thousand feet of steep ice below us, and the crevasses below the ice...

I finish the odd move, somewhat like working ones' way around a greased telephone pole, and as I stop to rest for a moment, I hear the horrible sound of rattling ice once again....ClackakakakaCKCKCKCK....rushing by, spinning in the air...I huddle and grind my teeth and wait for the piece which I know will leap out of the darkness to find me....but nothing, it passes. I begin making my last few feet towards Chiu, he looks up at me and speaks:

"Cameron. Caution. The belay is poor." I crab across once more and I am finally able to creep under the rock. I set my axes and get into a sort of rest stance. Chiu and I are now huddled in a bizarre situation, sheltered under the rock from the intermittent icefall, our puny headlamps making it just possible to see the occasional drip of meltwater dripping off our rock. The mountain of rippled ice and granular snow, I feel, seems to radiate out from us; two points of living, sparking life hunkered down under the little pip of rock...Somehow, we are surving where we were never evolved to be....

I watch with horror as Chiu directs my attention to the belay. Two knifeblade pitons are completely driven vertically into a 7mm crack; it looks perfect, but Chiu now grabs the equalizing sling he has put on them and yanks, and both pop out, with quite a large chunk of rock coming off and thudding down the ice slope beneath us. God! That's a belay? Of course, Chiu was also clipped to his two tools, but that was it, and the ice here for screws was a joke; as usual on Mt. Hood rime ice, the opportunities for a good screw were approximately zero. Mount Hood rock was even worse.

We stuck it out for a while, under the rock, but eventually we realized that the longer we waited, the warmer it would become: it was time to get out of the icefall zone: another shot at the Yocum Ridge was foiled. Ah well...it isn't going anywhere...

We packed our few items and headed off again, climbing away into the darkness, getting wetter and wetter as the melt increased; by the time we reached Illumination saddle, at about 9,000 feet, and unroped, we looked back to a dim dawn and a positively active series of ice faces which were now rattling with icefall. Impressive.

We turned tail and headed home...