The Adventurer's Son(8)
Peggy often balked when I pushed her toward her limits on those adventures. Her overprotective father, worried about the safety of ten kids on a middle-class income, had never bought Peggy a bike, never taught her to swim, never set up camp away from the road, nor allowed her to take a chance that might result in injury. His strategy had worked. “Out of ten of us, nobody was ever seriously hurt,” Peggy pointed out. Her rearing left her risk-averse, a complement to my risk-taking behavior.
Our experiences crisscrossing the continent taught us to communicate, share, and compromise, skills necessary to make a family work. We could also see the outlines of children more sharply in our shared lives. When we returned to Fairbanks in May 1983, my former adviser in the math department stopped me on the street to describe a new graduate offering at UAF. “Roman,” he said, “this program is tailor-made for you.”
Working toward an M.S. in mathematics at UAF would allow me to continue analyzing an ecological model I’d developed as an undergraduate. It would also give me financial support working as a graduate assistant and a skill in teaching math. While unscheduled on my science career timeline, the decision seemed a good one along a path that included Peggy, kids, and our future adventures together.
I had no idea that a steep mountain in the Hayes Range would hurry me on my way.
Chapter 4
The Cornice
Hayes Range cornices, January 1984.
Courtesy of the author
Not long after we got back to Alaska, I walked into the Hayes Range to climb McGinnis Peak. At its base my partner revealed a dream he’d had the night before: I fell while leading, and to save himself, my partner unclipped to let me fall past. While only a dream, this confession against the inviolate bond of the rope unnerved me as we headed up our climb. Dangerous conditions chased us off, but I named the route anyway: “Cutthroat Couloir.”
Two years later I went back with a mercurial mountaineer named Chuck Comstock. Stocky, blond, and belligerent, Chuck was the toughest guy I would ever know. He climbed with a brutal style that many, including me, misunderstood as incompetence. On rock and ice, he thrashed like he was only marginally in control. He made hard things look desperate, scary, unnerving. He’d fall on rock, on ice, in the mountains, but somehow, he would survive to terrify—or inspire—those around him.
Like two partners at the start of a buddy movie, we didn’t hit it off right away. On our first major expedition together, Chuck warned me during an argument not to turn my back, or—as he drawled in his Iowa country-boy accent—“I might sink an ice ax in the back of your head, Romin Dahl.” Later, as roommates at Sandvik House, we came to blows over something petty. Cornered, Comstock landed a punch to my jaw. I replied by pummeling his belly, then throwing him on a table, breaking it and ending the fight.
Nevertheless, we partnered up for Cutthroat Couloir. We flew there in March when it was well frozen and safe from rockfall. The climb to the top took three difficult days, including my hardest lead ever on ice, a pitch we had named “Difference of Opinion.” Chuck’s lead on “Mixed Feelings” was even harder. After those pitches of steep rock veneered with thin, hollow ice, we finished the couloir and climbed a snowy ridge to the top.
We tented on the summit our third night. Below us the Hayes Range went dark as the sky turned indigo and Alaska’s winter chill set in. The temperature reached thirty below zero and I shivered, tossing and turning in my expedition down parka and synthetic sleeping bag. Long before dawn, we woke and brewed hot drinks on our stove in the tent to warm up.
We felt good about McGinnis’s Cutthroat. Maybe too good. We had just put up one of the hardest climbs in the Hayes Range. We knew that McGinnis’s southeast ridge was another. Hubris sent us down that knife-edged ridgeline like happy cowboys on barebacked ponies. Then we arrived at a long stretch of cornices. Two of the most experienced alpinists of our generation had disappeared without a trace on Canada’s highest mountain when one of these snowy hazards collapsed beneath them, sending the pair roped impotently to their deaths.
On Ten Nine Ten five years before, Carl had instructed me in negotiating corniced ridges: “Roman, if I break a cornice, jump off the other side, okay?” The idea that a rope stretched over the ridge between us would keep us both from falling to the glaciers below seemed iffy at best, but it would be the only way to safeguard our descent of McGinnis’s southeast ridge.
AT THE END of a stressful two-hour lead, I slithered like an alpine chimney sweep down a big iced-up crack that split a craggy spire. Tied together with twin parallel ropes, we had reached the col between McGinnis and the next mountain. It was a good place to pull Chuck in on belay. Crisp blue shadows rimmed in tangerine stretched across the ridge. The sun would drop soon, sending temperatures to minus thirty again. The wind picked up.
Waiting for Chuck to join me, I looked ahead. Beyond the col, cornices clung to bare rocks like a white gyrfalcon’s talons to a black fox’s carcass. There was no place to camp here and no time before dark to maneuver through the tortured ridgeline coming up.
Tense and angry by the time Chuck arrived, I dumped my stress on him.
“Chuck! There’s no place to camp! Why didn’t you say something earlier, when you were leading?” We argued about whose fault it was that we hadn’t made camp somewhere safe. He ended our spat with a whisper.