“Wait here,” Jake said. “I’ll set a line at the next tower.”
He climbed the next two hundred yards, using the crampons on his boots for traction and occasionally breaking out his ice ax for a little more help. When he reached the tower, he tied a line, then led it back to the rest of the group.
“You can’t do this all the way up,” Kate said when they reached the tower. “You’ll wear yourself out. Let me take the next one.”
“I have the most experience with this,” Jake said.
“I wasn’t asking,” Kate said. “I’m up.”
Jake shrugged, knowing he wouldn’t win the argument. He untied the line and gave it to Kate. She set off for the next tower. The sun was coming up now, even as the air was getting colder. The slope of the terrain had not begun to punish them. Kate started to wonder if the whole climb would be this easy, took a step into some deep snow and painfully “post-holed” herself, her leg going all the way through. She climbed out, shook that off, kept going, and hit an ice patch a few yards farther, losing her footing and nearly hitting her face on the ice. Okay, she thought, not so easy.
She reached the next tower and tied the line, led it back, and almost wrecked herself a couple more times on the way.
“My turn,” Nick said when she rejoined the group. “You guys are hogging all the fun.”
“Fine with me,” Kate said, handing him the rope.
Nick headed off for the next section, digging into the ice with his spikes, swinging his ice ax and then using the leverage to lift himself up a sheer wall at least eight feet high, then scrambling up another incline until he reached the next tower. An old cable car had fallen and buried itself into the ice and frozen mud here. Nick was reasonably sure there were no skeletons trapped inside, yet he still didn’t want to look through the hazy windows.
He led the line back and told the rest of the group about the eight-foot wall and the fallen car just beyond it. The climb was already getting interesting and they’d only been on the mountain for a little over an hour.
Jake wouldn’t let Quentin take the next section. He was already looking ahead to the next tower and how high it had been set into the rocks above them. The real climbing was about to begin.
Jake worked his way up the steep incline, finding footholds and handholds in the rocks and ice, pounding in pitons every few yards, running the line through his harness so that if he fell, it would only be a miserable body slam and not an outright fatality. When he found the next tower, he saw that it had been damaged by an avalanche sometime over the years and was now tilting a good thirty degrees downslope. It was a good reminder that an avalanche could still happen at any moment.
Jake fed down the line. He didn’t even have to walk it back, the terrain was so steep. The group made their way up, and then Kate took the next section. They all took a break after that, looking back down the mountain at the hotel far below them.
“Everybody still up for this?” Jake asked. “It’s only going to get harder.”
“Let’s go,” Kate said.
* * *
Two hours later, the mountain had spiraled them away to the east, away from their sight line down to the hotel. The empty towers were their only guideposts now. There were no more bare spots on the ground. Everything was either snow, ice, or some combination of the two, with the temperature just barely warm enough to occasionally thaw patches in the direct sunlight, which would freeze at night, thaw again, then refreeze. Jake knew that this could be even more dangerous than in the dead of winter, when everything was ice and you never had to assume anything different.
He was working his way up an almost sheer wall, at least twenty feet high, chopping into the ice and setting pitons every few feet. There was an overhang of snow above him. Jake kept his eye on it, wondering how he’d work his way over it, at the same time hoping today wasn’t the day it would all come down at once.
He glanced back at the others, all huddled together a hundred yards behind him at the last tower. Then he looked back up and suddenly the whole world was rushing at him. He heard somebody shout from below before everything turned into pure, white impact.
Jake grabbed the ice ax, already planted into the wall, held on to it with both hands, and tucked his head in as much as possible as the snow and debris pounded his helmet and his shoulders and the back of his neck. It thundered in his ears, filling his jacket with snow and dirt and ice as he held on. He wondered if these would be his last moments on earth, and wondered at the same time if his daughter and Nick and Quentin would be able to use the few extra seconds they had to climb up the tower. Or if that would even matter at all.
Maybe this was it, right now, for all of them, and someone would find their bodies a month from now. Or a year from now. Or maybe never if they were buried deep enough.
The weight kept pounding down on him, feeling like the entire mountain was pouring itself onto his head. He felt his fingers start to slip from the ax. He couldn’t hold on much longer. The debris was in his mouth now, his ears, his eyes, his nose. It would suffocate him before it crushed him.
The roar somehow stopped. He was hanging by one hand, his face pressed against the ice. He spit everything out, shook his head, and turned to look down at the path of the debris. Most of it had settled down by the tower. More important, Kate, Nick, and Quentin were above it, holding on to the tower’s legs.
“Are you okay?” his daughter called up to him.
He spit out more dirt and called back, “Never better!”
When he caught his breath, he continued his climb up the wall. The top was cleared of snow now and easier to crest than before it had tried to kill him. He saw the next tower ahead, another fifty yards away, with one more wall of ice to climb until he could reach his goal. For the first time on this whole trip, after everything they had been through, Jake asked himself if he was simply too old for this.
He answered his own question, hell no, and kept climbing.
* * *
Kate’s hands were getting sore and blistered, even with the climbing gloves. She leaned her weight all the way back as she held on tight to the rope, using her feet to grip the ice and her legs to do most of the work. It was counterintuitive to keep herself so far from the wall instead of hugging it, but this was what her father had taught her. This is how you climb.
She took another step, feeling the ice break through, feeling the weight of her body thrown sideways. She grabbed behind her for the rope in the harness to make sure she didn’t fall, and held her breath as her body slammed against the ice. It was the tenth time this had happened, or maybe the hundredth. Time had stopped. There was nothing but ice and rope and a slow but endless upward movement.
“We’re almost there,” Nick said, just behind her. “We’ve got this.”
She looked down at him. Blood was running down the side of his face, from a cut on his eyebrow. He must have caught the ice the wrong way on one of his own body slams. Now he looked like a boxer who needed to be sent to a neutral corner to be checked by the doctor.
Kate regained her footing against the ice, leaned her body back again, took a step, and then another. She saw her father looking down at her from the top of this wall. That meant the tower was close. It would be another chance to rest.