TR: Down the long slides like free bloody birds
It starts out Frostean
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With co-opted bourgeois musings about roads less travelled
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And other similarly trite profundities
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But then we turn a corner, and a Gothics horror rises before us
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Or so it was named for it's prominent panes of frozen glass and feldspar buttresses that reminded Frederick Perkins and Old Mountain Phelps of a cathedral
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But it reminds me more of the mouth of a beast with alternating incisors of cracked crags and shattered glass
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(picture stolen from the internet)
And I wonder if Jonah stood on the lip of his great fish, and stepped calmly onto its tongue to be swallowed. Or was he, like me, apprehensive of a long, rough slide into the beast's gut?
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Of course, even the ancients doubted the veracity of Jonah's tale, while I have no doubt that I'm in a rather serious spot. This is beyond comfort for me.
The snow begins.
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And the traverse, traverse, traversing above paint-thin sheets of verglas vexes away any will to document. We devolve into a three man exercise in not slipping. We rope up twice. Once to cross a wind loaded gully. Again when a slip would have been long, hard and final.
After the second and final belay we plow up a sugar-filled gully, hooking our tools on roots and rocks, pulling ourselves again and again out of snow that's more likely to swallow our legs than support a step. We crawl the last few meters to the ridge over krumholtz covered with snow that seems to lack any substance whatsoever.
The summit ridge, by comparison, is an escalator,
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To views of tomorrow's goal
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And mother Marcy
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All that's left now is to find the top of the slide, which is somewhere North of the Nordwand
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We down-hike through chest deep, breaking branches with faces, ripping roots with front points, pitched forward by the skis on our backs, cursing each step and the sagging sun behind us, until we think back to the sheet of snow on a sheet of ice on a sheet of rock we climbed and feel comforted by the trench our bodies are digging.
You can't fall off a trench.
After a few dozen miserable meters, the slide really is there. And the snow is soft:
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After 12 hours and 16 miles D-Roc, Moops and I arrive at the hut just as the others were arranging a search party to rescue us (sort of). I need a cup of coffee to give me enough strength to eat my stew and drink my beer. We share stories of the day (our group was but 3 of 12). I share good times with good men, but I remember nothing. My mind and body are wasted. I won’t be waking up at 4:30 tomorrow. But I will surely follow someone more motivated up a mountain.
The next day was blurry at the summit.
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But that didn’t stop us from from stopping to dance.
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We picked our way down 40 feet at a time so as to not lose sight of each other, stumbling hopefully through thick brush in the general direction of our slide. Occasionally we link a turn or two together through an open patch.
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But mostly it’s falling leaf while grasping a gnarled tree trunk until we reach the top of the slide. And we smile.
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We make cloud turns
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Ice turns
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Rock turns
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Stick turns
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Stream bed turns
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And one, errr...rather.... ummm…. late turn that involved a face
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Back at the hut the groups re-merge and devour cheese, chili, beer and bourbon over well won stories of exaggerated greatness. ML, Moops and I stay up late finishing the liquor, plotting next year's campaign, when we’ll be older, grayer and greater.
More to come from other parties in the posse...
