The Ascent(51)

A bit of a party, I thought, while Donald Shotsky keeled over dead of a heart attack just one hour from base camp. A party while we looted his backpack and left him to freeze to the ground.

But it wasn’t Chad’s fault. I couldn’t be angry, and I didn’t want the disgust on my face to be too apparent. I finished the tea and handed him back the empty cup, thanking him under my breath. Ten minutes later, I curled up and went to sleep, while the bonfire popped and Chad blew sad notes on his harmonica.





Chapter 12


1



STRADDLING A MONOLITHIC PLATFORM Of ICE-

covered rock, I paused to survey the world below. The vastness of the drop was enough to cause my heart to slam against the walls of my chest, the proximity of the edge—mere inches from my steel-toed boots—both exhilarating and vertiginous. I leaned over the edge, and the mountainside vanished into indistinguishable levels of snow-covered peaks.

My stomach, which in the past twenty-four hours had processed nothing more substantial than a 3 Musketeers bar, ramen noodles, steamed rice, and countless cups of black coffee, seemed to grow heavy and felt as though it wanted to descend deeper into my naval. I hadn’t slept in two days.

We were a full two weeks into the climb, having just crossed the southern pinnacle of the Godesh Ridge, and it was just over a week since I had carved Donald Shotsky’s name in the mountainside where his body had given out. The beginning of the second week had been punctuated by tedious treks through deepening snow and the careful negotiation of serrated, ice-encrusted peaks. The second half of the week had presented a dramatic notch in the south face of themountain, which we climbed vertically while harnessed together in two groups of threes—Petras, Chad, and myself the first of the two groups to ascend. We’d climbed to the summit and continued up the accompanying face as if we were climbing straight to heaven.

Petras passed behind me, peering over my shoulder. His hand on my shoulder was like an anchor.

“Some view,” I said.

“Let’s keep moving.”

Around the other side of the platform, the mountain abruptly ended. Something like three hundred feet below us ran a narrow, snow-packed pass across the shelf of a glacier. Andrew was poised at the lip of the ridge, overlooking the valley. Beside him, Curtis canvassed the surface of the glacier with a pair of binoculars.

I could see the sun streaking colors along the surrounding mountains and the reflection of sunlight mirroring on the ice. Farther down the pass was the hint of a crevasse—a barely noticeable depression in the otherwise undisturbed snow—which I estimated to be at least twenty yards across, though it was impossible to tell for sure from our vantage.

“You guys see it?” Curtis pointed to what appeared to be the beginning of the snow-hidden chasm that ran beneath a buttress of blue stone. “Can’t tell how wide it is, but you can bet your ass it’s deep.”

“Teams,” Andrew said.

I zipped my coat to my chin and rubbed my gloved hands together. Petras bumped his shoulder against mine, and I thought my teeth would shatter in my skull. I attached myself to a fixed rope, while Petras and Chad fed a communal safety line down the face of the cliff. Flexing my fingers, I turned around at the edge of the cliff and gripped the line in both hands.

Petras nodded. “Go.”

I pitched over the side and rappelled down, my feet pushing off the cliff face as I descended. Glancing over my shoulder, I could seebeyond the crevasse and down the far slope of the glacier where, like a grid of blocks, crumbling seracs the size of automobiles rose from the glacier’s surface and cast bluish shadows along the snow.

When I touched down on the glacier, the snow was hard like ice. I tugged at the rope and waved to Petras, who looked down at me.

Once they’d all managed to descend, we trekked across the glacier, heedful of traps or snow bridges bent on deceiving us, until we paused approximately fifteen feet from the edge of the crevasse. This close, it looked wider than I’d originally thought. Forty, maybe fifty feet across. Chad stepped too close to the edge, and Curtis, who was standing beside me rubbing his neck, sucked in air through his clenched teeth.

“Careful,” Petras called to him.

Chad raised a gloved hand in response but didn’t turn. He kept walking until he reached the edge.

“Fucking idiot don’t even have a line tied to him.” Curtis flipped up the collar of his parka. “Think he would have learned his lesson back at base camp.”

“She’s deep, all right.” Chad peered down into the crevasse. “Can’t even see the bottom.” He looked across the surface of the glacier, following the fault-line negotiation of the crevasse through the snow. It disappeared beneath an icefall at the base of the next peak. “She’s narrower closer toward the base of the mountain. If we’re going to cross her, we’ve got to do it over there.”

“I say we climb the wall,” suggested Hollinger. He scrutinized a slab of ice that rose maybe five hundred feet to a spire-shaped pinnacle.

“That’ll take all day,” Chad said.

“So? You in a rush?”

Chad shook his blond hair over his eyes and rubbed the snow from it. “Cut it out, will you, Holly? We can toss a rope and scale—”

Hollinger took a step toward the wall of ice, then disappeared.

It took my lagging brain several seconds to realize what had happened: a trap had opened up in the glacier directly beneath Hollinger’sfeet, and gravity had sucked him down. I broke into a sprint as Petras nabbed me by the hood of my anorak, jerking me to a halt.