The Adventurer's Son(5)
Working toward degrees in biology and math left me “a mathematician who wanted to be a biologist” in the view of the biology department. In contrast, faculty in math gave me access to paper-grading jobs that honed useful quantitative skills. With each succeeding math class, the technical papers published in The American Naturalist and Theoretical Population Biology grew ever more accessible to me. And with each succeeding mountain adventure, Alaska’s wilderness did, too.
IN FEBRUARY 1980, I was flummoxed to find Carl Tobin grinning at my cabin door. He came in, kicked off his boots, pulled a couple of beers from his pack, and showed me a photo of a slender white peak atop a sweeping blue-ice wall. It looked like Mount Huntington’s cute little sister.
“What a peak,” I gushed. “What is it?”
“The east face of Ten Nine Ten,” Carl said. A 10,910-foot-high tetrahedron, the mountain is known to Fairbanks climbers simply by its digits. “What do you think? Want to climb it?”
Although I’d made a few glacier ski trips, rock-climbed in the Arrigetch, and ice-climbed in Valdez, I was still just a pimply-faced teen, bruised from what felt like a failed expedition the year before. “Well . . . um.” I gulped. “How?”
“Right here.” His finger traced directly up the center of the icy blue face, through a rock band, to the airy summit—a true alpinist’s line.
The best climber in Fairbanks was asking me to climb the kind of route I’d dreamed of climbing since I was fifteen. But like a shy high school nerd invited to the Sadie Hawkins dance by the captain of the cheerleading squad, I couldn’t say yes.
“Pretty sweet, huh?” he coaxed.
“Oh, man. I’d love to,” I said, “but,” remembering Dieter, “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“You climbed Shot Tower. And the ice won’t be any harder than Bridal Veil.”
Grateful for his confidence, but aware of my job and school, I asked, “How long would it take?”
“The climb? If conditions are good, a day up and a day down. The whole trip? Two weeks. Fly in and ski out.” He grinned. “Think about it.”
Within a week I had tracked Carl down to tell him yes. Less easy was approaching my boss, who had been an Alaskan climber, too. He once told me, “All my partners either died or quit climbing.” Asked if I could go to the Hayes Range for two weeks, he responded, “Yeah, you can go, but you won’t have a job when you get back.”
I made my choice and sharpened my tools, shopped for food, and trained at the gym over the weeks that followed. From the gymnasium balcony, a pretty, blond girl watched Carl, me, and other gym rats climb hand-over-hand up twenty-five-foot ropes dangling from the ceiling. She looked young and petite, with a broad smile and high cheekbones below almond-shaped eyes. She must be here to see Tobin with his shirt off, I thought.
A week later, Carl and I flew into the Hayes Range. My share of the charter cost my last paycheck. The pilot dropped us off directly below Ten Nine Ten. Its 3,000-foot face looked short, easy, almost disappointing in the trick of perspective known as foreshortening. Years later Carl would tell me, “If it wasn’t for foreshortening, nothing would ever get climbed.”
In the morning, surrounded by steep, glacier-draped mountains, we headed up. Midway on the route, Carl led through near-vertical granite mixed with ice. He pounded in a warthog—an ice piton that looks like Macbeth’s dagger—for protection. Following him, my crampons screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard. I stopped to wrench the warthog out of the crack for use higher up. “Leave it in!” Carl called down, “We gotta keep moving!” With cold toes and only halfway up the climb, I happily left the ’hog skewered in an ice-choked crack, unclipped the carabiner and sling, and hurried on. Pitch after pitch of ice led to the final headwall as the weather slipped into storm.
The increasing snowfall stopped us on a small arête where we would dig in for the night. Carl shoveled a shallow snow cave that sheltered us above the waist only. We crawled into our bivy sacks, sleeping fitfully and cramped, our feet dangling over the edge. Spindrift powdered our faces till dawn. Although I was miserable, it was precisely the experience I’d hoped for—Alaskan alpinism.
The storm passed, leaving the morning clear and cold. On the windless summit, we took in the view while Carl melted snow on our stove for hot cocoa. After my fear of failure, success tasted especially sweet, but we still needed to get down. We descended a sharp ridge back to camp, then packed up and skied out a series of glaciers to the road, elated with our ascent of the virgin face. Carl had won a local prize in Ten Nine Ten, picking a plum with an inexperienced, teenage kid.
I felt special to climb the route with Carl. But one night, years later at a Sandvik party, he admitted, “I would have climbed Ten Nine Ten with anyone.” Seeing my face fall, he added quickly, “But I’m glad I did it with you.” Carl valued his partners’ feelings as much as he valued their belays and we would make many adventures together. Intense outdoor experiences either strengthen or extinguish bonds between partners.
Back in Fairbanks after our climb of Ten Nine Ten, we quickly sobered up from the alpine high. Two friends, a popular couple, had been involved in a tragic fall down a local mountain. Peter McKeith, a UAF graduate student, was the president of the Alaska Alpine Club. His girlfriend was the strongest female climber in Fairbanks. With three broken limbs and trapped between crevasses, she overnighted in her backpack’s built-in bivy sack and survived. Peter didn’t.