A Bolt from the Blue Page 14

  Meanwhile, down in the Meadows campsite, 2.2 miles and 1,800 feet below, the other members of the climbing party had begun to stir. Jake, Rod, and Reagan all rolled out of the same tent and, along with the other two climbers in their party, hiked up to the Lower Saddle to meet the others. They weren’t sure what time they hit the trail, but the early-morning air was frigid, and the mountain peaks were still shrouded in darkness. To Jake in particular, who admitted that he didn’t understand mountaineering, the whole ordeal seemed to be getting off to an awfully early start.

  By 8:00 A.M., the Meadows group had joined the Moraine group at the fixed rope below the Lower Saddle. Once assembled, they all scrambled up together to the Lower Saddle, the 11,600-foot ridge between the Grand and Middle Tetons, a site that hours later would be swarming with rescue personnel and helitack teams. High above them, sunlight glinted off the granite peaks as they began their ascent up the craggy south side of the peak.

  The 13 climbers broke up into four rope teams, distributing the most and least experienced climbers among them. Each team was led by a climber who had previously summited the Grand: Rob, Justin, Dave, and Clint. It was Rob’s fourth time climbing the Grand, and “Safety Dave,” who had become serious about climbing at Idaho State University and had been hooked ever since, was looking to summit for the 10th time.

  Dave led the first rope team of three, followed by Rob leading four climbers. While living in Pocatello, Idaho, Rob had gone climbing in the Tetons four or five times every spring. His familiarity with the Grand as well as his experience on much more technically difficult climbs—for example, Elephant’s Perch in the Sawtooth Wilderness, a 5.9 trad climb with a sheer 1,000-foot vertical face—made him the obvious choice as the overall group leader.

  In Rob’s three previous summits of the Grand, he had begun the ascent as early as 1:00 A.M. and as late as 11:00 A.M. With a group of 13 people, he was shooting to leave the Lower Saddle by 9:00 A.M., and even after waiting for the other members of the climbing party to come up from the lower campsite, they still beat that by an hour.

  The team leaders each carried family-frequency Motorola radios to talk to one another, and the group did a last-minute check to make sure that they were operable. Throughout the day, the climbers used them mostly for climbing commands—“On belay,” “Climb on,” etc.—and occasionally for a more conversational “Hey, Dad, where are you?”

  Some members of the group were not just new to climbing but also new to one another. Rod had only met Kip and Reese the evening before, and he was introduced to Erica for the first time that morning. Although everyone was obviously not matched in terms of climbing skill or experience, each member of the party was in great physical shape. As the morning progressed, Rob was especially impressed with the performance of Sherika and Erica, both, according to him, “tough, spirited Idaho girls” (despite the fact that Erica, getting off to a sleepy early-morning start, seemed more shy than sociable at the beginning of the climb). Although neither woman trained year-round for climbing, the consensus among the 11 men was that they were both incredibly athletic. While the climb was strenuous, it was not beyond anyone’s ability level, and throughout the day, no one in their group held anyone else back.

  The group planned to snack on the way up rather than stop for a whole lunch, because, depending on pace, they expected that it would only take a couple of hours to get to Wall Street. They packed gel packs, string cheese, granola, and beef sticks to devour quickly as they climbed.

  As it turned out, they had plenty of time to eat.

  The Exum Ridge route is one of America’s most famous alpine rock climbs and therefore one of the most crowded. The climbing traffic on the mountain was intensely busy, with the Idaho climbers constantly having to wait as other parties ascended ahead of them. The skies were bright blue, and the weather was sunny and brisk, but people were meandering all over the mountain, and the large group simply couldn’t get around them.

  By 11:00 A.M., they had made reasonably steady progress to reach the base of the wide, flat ridge of Wall Street that marks the start of the Exum Ridge, but there they came to a complete stop. People were strung out all along the rocky ledge. In front of them, almost a dozen climbers were working their way up the ridge and waiting their turn to rope up and execute the technical move across the open-air chasm at the end of Wall Street. All of the climbers from the morning were backed up at that one funnel point. The whole length of the narrowing ledge was crowded—not only was there a line of people in front of the Idaho group, but there were also climbers coming up behind them.

  To pass the time, they ate their snacks. They took pictures of the view and of one another. They talked about how awesome the morning had been, how far they could see, how much rock they had climbed. To this point, some of the footwork on the climb had been tricky, and the holds were not always obvious or generous, but nervous anticipation grew as the group realized that the real technical climbing, the scary part, was about to begin. The sky was clear, and spirits were high. They were restless about the delay but more exhilarated than tired.

  As time went by, they began to feel uneasy. After an hour of waiting, they began to get outright anxious. After two hours, the mood had turned somber. And then the clouds moved in.

  Erica in particular was having a hard time—without moving around for a couple of hours on the mountainside, she was cold and tired and thinking about turning back. Justin gave her his gloves, and Clint and Sherika cheered her on, encouraging her to eat, telling her how great she was doing, reminding her that they were just 1,500 feet from the summit.

  Nerves were likely playing a part as well. Earlier, when they arrived at Wall Street and Erica took her first look at the gaping chasm she would have to cross, she had turned to Clint, saying, “Holy crap, what are we doing?” That was the place, and the time, where the sport climber separates from the mountain climber—the exposure kicks in, the 2,000-foot drop. None of her experience would make that particular maneuver any less intimidating.

  In addition, it was getting chillier in the shadows, and the climbers had another lengthy process in front of them. After being delayed more than two hours for their chance to start on Wall Street, the climbers would still have to wait for one another as the 13 of them each roped up and crossed the gap. They realized that after five hours on the mountain, they should have been at or near the summit, and they had yet to move past the first technical section of the route.

  Wall Street is considered a point of no return on the ascent of the Grand. After crossing it, it is a complex operation to retreat. Once the climbers cleared the Wall Street gap, they would be committed to climbing to within several hundred feet of the summit before finding the next exit.

  Clint asked Erica what she wanted to do. She told him that her legs were hurting her but that after sitting there watching the group above them advance through Wall Street, she had gotten used to the exposure and felt less panicked.

  Once Erica said she wanted to keep climbing, Clint decided it might help her to change up their team for the rest of the climb. Clint and Erica had been teamed up with Jake, the greenest climber in the group. Clint asked Rod, who was a stronger climber than Jake, if he would trade with Jake and shift to Clint and Erica’s team.

  Rod agreed to join the third rope team, leaving Jake, Justin, and Reagan to make up the final team. By the time the climbers all successfully traversed the breach—blood vibrating with adrenaline, hearts hammering wildly—more wispy clouds began to drift across the sky to the east of Exum Ridge.

  When the climbers reached the sheer rock face of Friction Pitch, dark thunderclouds were actively building in the northwest. As frequently happens on summer afternoons in the Tetons, the warm, moist air rising over the valley collided with cooler currents flowing in from the southwest, creating a storm cell with a massive electrical charge.

  Around 3:00, it started raining lightly. Shortly after that, an icy drizzle drenched the group. The buoyancy of the brilliant sunny
day had been swapped for a grim and bleak atmosphere as the climbers waited, once again, for people ahead of them to advance.

  At this stage, Justin, who had been studying the overcast sky, was overcome with a sense of foreboding, panic-stricken with the feeling that they shouldn’t be waiting so long. The premonition that he was going to die was so acute that he stifled back tears as he pulled his phone out of his pack to call his wife and tell her he loved her.

  By this point, the first rope team had ascended the slick, wet granite of Friction Pitch. From his position on the top of the pitch, Dave called Rob on the radio to discuss next steps.

  Rob had essentially put the trip together—secured the permits, put the logistics in place—and in that moment, as group leader, he felt the full weight of accountability. He knew that if he ditched the summit bid, certain members of the group would be severely disappointed to have come so far, gotten so close, and not reached the top.

  Rob also knew that there was a valid argument to keep going at that point, because in order to go down, they first had to go up. The rainstorm had saturated the rock on Friction Pitch and made it exceptionally slippery, but they had to climb it anyway. Backtracking was not an option. To try to reverse what they had done back down to Wall Street would have taken them hours; it would have meant setting anchors on the mountain and doing some extremely dangerous downclimbing.

  Either choice, pressing on or turning back, required the climbers to be at the top of Friction Pitch. It was at the crest of the pitch where climbers could either continue ascending roughly 600 feet to the summit or veer off to the escape route. Even if they abandoned their summit quest, from their location, the only way off the mountain was to climb the most difficult section of the route. And once they had scaled Friction Pitch, the technical section of the climb was essentially over.

  Still, neither Rob nor Dave, the most experienced climbers in the group, had a summit-or-die attitude. In the end, Rob, in consultation with Dave, called off the summit attempt. The afternoon had somehow taken on an ominous tone, and both men knew the mountains well enough to trust a sensation that just felt wrong. The group needed to concentrate its energy on getting back to safe territory, and Rob rightly believed that spending extra minutes getting to the peak was contrary to the goal of getting the hell out of there. They had simply been on the mountain much too long, and it was time to get off.

  Rob wasn’t concerned with his own emotions regarding not reaching the top; he felt as if the issue wasn’t about him and the summit but rather his responsibility to get everyone down. Clint was fine with the call, rationalizing that it just gave him an excuse to come back and climb it again. Justin, who had prophesied his own death, and Erica, whose legs were burning, were outwardly relieved at the decision.

  Jake, who was, and would remain, blissfully ignorant of the extent of the potential danger the group faced, was mildly disappointed but having a great time either way. Steve, Rob’s father-in-law, was nearly furious, cursing at Rob and saying, “Are you kidding me? We are this close.” The most frustrated climbers didn’t necessarily comprehend the full volatility of Teton weather at that altitude, didn’t realize that massive storms could come in above them at any moment.

  Even as Rob announced the decision to scrap the idea of the summit, more clouds emerged, and the sky began to darken. There was no thunder or lightning to that point. The group’s attitude toward lightning strikes was that they were something that happened on a golf course, not at 13,000 feet. None of the climbers considered lightning as a threat, although Jake and Reagan did joke that the trekking poles Justin and Rob had used during the earlier hiking portions of the trip—folded up and sticking up out of the packs on their backs as they climbed—would make excellent lightning rods.

  Once the decision had been made to get off the mountain, the tension level in the group ramped up considerably. Rob and Dave knew how to find the descent rappel by cutting left at the top of Friction Pitch. From that location, they needed to traverse the east ridge, rappel 140 feet down a cliff, then do a quick scramble down a scree slope to land at the Upper Saddle. Dave’s team was already at the top of Friction Pitch, and he immediately began to lead them down. After climbing the V Pitch, they headed over to the main rappel. Since they only had one rope, they fixed it there and rappelled down to the Upper Saddle.

  At that point, two other climbing parties committed a blatant violation of both climbing etiquette and common courtesy by cutting in front of the Idaho climbers. A team of four and a team of two, unrelated to each other, came between Dave’s rope team and Rob’s team. Randomly, both teams had meteorologists on them, which was comical in a twisted sort of way, given that they were exposed on the top of a mountain in what was soon to be a lightning storm.

  The men on the two-person team, both from New York, were trying to move too quickly on wet rock. One of them would later give Dave, who by that time had reached the Upper Saddle, a rope to use to climb back up the mountain in an attempt to help his friends. The men had climbed maybe 15 feet up when one of them turned around and called down to Rob, “Hey, is it all right if we climb ahead?” The answer was that they were already doing it, and Rob, frustrated and exhausted, merely waved them on.

  One of the men alternated between meandering up the mountain and moving too rapidly, as if for an audience. Rob thought the guy might tumble off the face, but as it turned out, both men (and also the party of four) that climbed in between the Idaho climbing party ended up summiting the Grand moments after the lightning struck. Their ice axes hummed like crazy with ground-current voltage steps before they reached the peak.

  Immediately after those nonrelated teams moved through their ranks, like a butterfly flapping its wings, forever altering the timing of who would be on which exact rock at 3:35 that afternoon, Rob ascended Friction Pitch first in his group of four. When he reached the top, he set three camming devices (spring-loaded metal anchors) into the rock at the top of the pitch to secure the rope. He first belayed the climbers in his group from above, speeding up their progress on the mountain, then belayed Clint, who clipped into an anchor at the top of the pitch. Once Clint was up, Rob headed toward the traverse to the big rappel down to the Owen-Spalding route to get off the mountain.

  Rob’s team was spread out above the top of Friction Pitch, climbing unroped in third-class terrain, meaning that three points of contact were potentially required (e.g., a climber might need a handhold on a rocky outcropping). Class 3 is easy climbing—a mountaineer wouldn’t do it with his hands in his pockets, but he also probably wouldn’t need a rope. Rob’s father, Bob, who was on his team, was near the base of the V Pitch. Rob had rounded the corner at the top of Friction Pitch and scrambled upward approximately 15 feet. Sherika was on a ledge a few feet below her husband.

  With the switching of the groups, Rod was on the third team with Clint and Erica, the one behind Rob’s team. With Clint belaying her from above, Erica began her ascent of Friction Pitch while Rod waited below for his turn to climb. In addition to Rod, the only members of the Idaho group left to climb Friction Pitch were those on the fourth rope team, now made up of Jake, Justin, and Reagan, all tied into a single-point anchor at the base of the pitch.

  On any given day, the members of the group could have been at those places at that time in the afternoon and everything would have flowed together the right way. They all were physically capable, and without a storm, they all likely would have summited. Still, in the mountains, in the Tetons, in the summer, there are late-afternoon thunderstorms on many days, and if you were a betting man, you would have been off the Grand hours earlier.

  NINE

  “This is so beautiful, so breathtaking. It’s like a dream.”

  —

  Clint Summers to Erica Summers, 3:34 P.M., July 26, 2003

  Erica climbed up smoothly, solidly, heaving herself onto the Friction Pitch ledge with a final huge effort. She had a tough time getting traction on the wet rock, but once she was up and over, she
was visibly elated. Still drenched from the rain and shivering in the chill wind, she settled into a sitting position on the ridge and cuddled up against Clint.

  At the bottlenecks at various points on the ascent, there had been other climbing parties both in front of them and behind them, and they had been climbing all day right next to the other 11 members of their group, but for those few moments on the top of Friction Pitch, there wasn’t anybody else on earth except Clint and Erica. All of the other teams had gone ahead or long turned back, and the members of their own group were spread out above and below them.

  The first three climbers in their party were already at the rappel and on their way to the Lower Saddle. Rob and Sherika and the rest of their group had headed for the V Pitch. Two other unconnected climbing groups had passed the Idaho climbers in their insistence on reaching the summit. Clint had just begun belaying Rod up Friction Pitch, and the last three climbers in their group were waiting their turn on a ledge at the bottom of the pitch.

  At that place, at that time, in the mist, it was only the two of them, husband and wife alone on the nearly flat, ten-foot-wide ridge above the pitch, stretching their gazes out over the expansive view of the peaks and glaciers of Teton Valley. As tendrils of fog curled around them, they sat together on the edge, Erica on Clint’s left side, hips and thighs pressed close, legs dangling over the top of the world.

  Camping in the rocky Moraine in the shadow of the Grand the previous night had been their first night away together since Erica had given birth to their daughter, Adison, just over four years earlier. The week before the climbing trip, the couple had invited Erica’s family over for Adison’s fourth birthday party, barbecuing in the backyard and celebrating with cake and ice cream. Then, for the first time, they left Adison and her brother, Daxton, overnight with family so they could climb the mountain together. The trip wasn’t the way Erica had originally envisioned commemorating their fifth wedding anniversary, but even so, in a tent in the cool mountain air, she got the best night’s sleep she had had in years.