But at least they were climbing.
Not stuck on a glacier in a blizzard.
They’d started the climb up a wide wall to the right of the debris field toward a coulee—a riverfall of ice and snow between pillars of snow. Ten pitches up and they’d cleared the wall, approaching the massive bergschrund at the top edge of the hanging glacier.
Orion had stopped at the edge of the schrund, a wall of ice that had separated from the granite. The fall inside could extend three thousand feet down.
The snow had begun to spindrift off the buttress overhead, and he’d climbed in the lead, diagonally, passing a coulee before finally climbing up to the rocky ledge that he wished were bigger.
Then Orion had screwed in his ice anchor and set himself to belay.
A few more pitches and they could stop for lunch. Or elevenses. Or whatever to call a meal during this endless day.
He hadn’t gotten a real straight answer from Ham as to why this trip, now. “Sometimes you just gotta climb a mountain to figure out what is important.”
He knew what was important—staying alive. The truth was, he’d never really been able to say no to Hamilton Jones. Maybe that’s why Jake was stuck on the side of the mountain turning to ice too.
The wind lifted the collar on Orion’s jacket and he shivered, the sweat on his back cooling.
Snow slides dribbled down the coulee. He wanted to look down, to see if he could spot Ham, but he couldn’t sacrifice his position. Instead, Orion slipped his shoulder under the overhang for protection. Overhead, the sky was turning hazy and gray.
“Ham, hurry up!”
He spotted him now, his black hat and red jacket fifteen feet below the ledge.
“Took you long enough.”
Ham looked up at him, his glasses reflecting the mountain, snow covering his nose flap, his reddish-blond beard. “What, you have somewhere else to be?”
A crack sounded above, and Ham’s grin vanished.
“Watch out!” Orion stiffened and braced himself.
Ham slammed the picks of his ice axes in hard with two mighty wallops, pinioned his crampons, and ducked his head.
The mountain thundered down over him.
“Hang on!”
The world turned white. Orion hunkered down to hold his belay.
The rope yanked hard, nearly unseating him. “Ham!”
But his shout was drowned by a deluge of snow. The snow pummeled Ham, unseen, below—Orion felt it through the rope.
Then, suddenly, the snow dropped away, leaving tiny wisps hanging in the air. Orion spotted Ham, blanketed in snow, unmoving and hanging by his wrist loops, his feet dangling free of the wall.
“Ham!”
A heartbeat. Another. Orion started to track through his options.
Finally, Ham raised his head, blowing out hard.
“You okay?”
He came back to himself fast, slamming his crampons into the snow, re-grabbing his ice axes. His weight eased off Orion as he reset himself onto the side of the mountain.
Then Ham turned, looking down to Jake’s position. “Jake!”
Orion tried to lean forward, but Jake was fifty feet down perched on a ledge—
“He’s gone,” Ham said. “I’m going down.”
Acid pooled in Orion’s chest as he belayed Ham down. Ham attacked the wall with terrifying ferocity, and when he shouted up for Orion to join him, Orion rappelled, leaving his anchor screwed in.
Because Jake wasn’t on the ledge. His anchor had been ripped out. Orion imagined him hurtling down the icy wall two thousand feet into the debris field.
“Jake!”
Oh, please—
“In here, mate!”
The voice echoed up from the darkness of the crevasse of the bergschrund.
“Belay me,” Ham said.
Orion set his anchor, then hunkered down as Ham worked his way down the wall to the gap the ice formed between the granite and the snowfield. He worked his way in and vanished.
“Ry! Get down here!”
Orion dropped him the rope, then worked his way on belay down to the crevasse.
Leaned inside.
His heart nearly slipped from his body. Jake sat on a wide ledge, maybe eight feet deep, six feet down from the lip of the crevasse. “You okay?” He climbed down next to him.
“I thought I was going to die, and then, whoop, I fell in here, like the hand of God opening up to grab me.”
Ham sat down, breathing hard.
Orion met his eyes. “I think the mountain wins.”
Ham’s mouth tightened. But he nodded. “Let’s set up to rap down.”
Orion glanced up into the swirl of snow, the storm-clouded sky. “We’d better hurry, or we’ll be socked in.”
As he climbed out of the crevasse, setting up his anchors to rappel down, he couldn’t help but stop and watch the clouds as they churned toward Denali.
And of course, Jacie walked back into his head, just for a second.
Be safe, Jacie.
Jenny climbed mountains because being at the top of the world—with the wind whipping against her face, the cold seeping into her pores, and the gut-clenching drop-offs—kept her laser-focused on her next step.
On either side of her, the world slid away as she picked her way along the summit ridge, a final two-foot-wide quarter-mile-long trek to the highest point in North America.
To the right rose the eight-thousand-foot south face, with a view of Cassin Ridge and South Buttress Ridge. And, at her feet, the six-hundred-foot drop fell to the plateau below. On the left, the world fell two miles, down Harper Glacier, across the Muldrow Icefall and glacier right to the foot of Ruth Glacier, from which rose the craggy granite spire of Mount Huntington.
The rest of the Denali massif poked up their ragged heads between wispy, low-hanging clouds, the sky to the east a brilliant blue.
It could take her breath from her chest. But climbing was the opposite of adrenaline. Exhilarating, but it required her not to run, not to panic, but to think. To take her fear and shove it into a hard ball and keep moving forward.
Her breath razored in her chest as she moved her feet, the crunch of snow the only sound besides her gasps.
Wind scraped snow in a wave off the top. Up here, everything was simple.
One careful foot in front of the next, all the way to the top. A person couldn’t turn around. Not without falling.
Ahead. Up. Focus.
Get to the top.
Then get back down.
“You can do it, Sasha.” Jenny didn’t want to turn around to face Sasha, roped up between her and Aria, but she threw the words over her shoulder.
Sasha had stopped talking shortly after their early morning ascent through a relatively flat section called the Autobahn. They’d stopped for water and a power bar at Denali Pass.
Sasha had met her eyes with enough fear in them that Jenny had to hunker down with her, grab her hood, meet her eyes. “We are stronger than we think we are, right?”
Sasha nodded, breathing hard. But they all were breathing hard.
“I can do this,” Sasha had said.
“Yes.” Jenny stood up, pulling Sasha with her.
Sasha picked up her ice axe and waited as Jenny trekked out ahead of her.
Aria turned to face the mountain, her expression like flint. “This is for Kia,” she said. Tears streaked down her face.
Jenny too felt a little like crying after seventeen days climbing through driving snow, not thick enough to trap them in their tents, but brutal enough to make hauling gear up the mountain between camps, up and back, miserable. Fourteen days of adjusting to the diminishing oxygen, fighting insomnia, nausea, and cold, and two rather brutal nights in High Camp enduring a storm that came off the mountains to the south. She’d spent her time watching the wind pummel her tent, worrying that they’d run out of food before they made the summit.