L ooking through the notch, all I could see were blank granite walls dropping abruptly to the broken Alaskan glacier a thousand feet below. “Crap! The plan to climb that way won’t work,” I realized. Burgundy droplets of blood splattered the ledge as I belayed my partner up. I wasn’t hurt, but my hands were in rough shape after the hard physical climbing we’d done to get up to the tiny perch. It wasn’t just my hands either; we were starting to wear ourselves ragged. This was our second attempt on the remote granite spire that had never felt a climber’s hands before. Later, we’d have to drag, carry, and paddle almost 100 miles to get back to our truck, though right now all our effort was focused on moving upward. But we were tired. We were moving slowly. We were behind schedule. And we knew it. My expedition partner, Max Fisher, and I had come to these remote mountains, across the border from the NOLS Yukon mountaineering course area, to push ourselves as alpine climbers and mountaineering instructors. We wanted to climb hard, at our grade, in mountains where nobody had climbed before. As I watched Max struggle to rappel diagonally toward a ledge system, suspended from a tiny iron knife-blade piton we’d battered into a small seam, I reflected: we were doing it. On the NOLS Alaska Mountain Instructor Course I had taken exactly five years earlier, I learned about the Leadership Pyramid, the concept that advanced skills can only be performed reliably when basic skills are mastered. Since that time, I had slowly built my critical outdoor skills, like learning to deep-fry pancakes in horizontal sleet. I had performed rep after rep until I could sleep well on lumpy tundra tussocks and catawampus rock slabs—after shimming, padding, and snuggling in, of course. These were skills I’d started to learn on my NOLS course and had now mastered. Coming off rappel, I awkwardly balanced on small crystals beside Max, who’d had to look hard to find safe gear to build an anchor. I led again up the ledge system past the drooping, now Salvador Dalian snow ledge we’d constructed at the high point of our previous attempt. It was those basic skills I’d learned as a NOLS student that we had tapped to sleep pretty darn well on that icy ledge, even stuffed as we were like nesting silverware inside our single sleeping bag, tied into our harnesses so we wouldn’t slide off. Though when we awoke early in the morning on that shelf, we had decided to descend as foggy clouds began to wring out their moisture into the down of our sleeping bag and puffy jackets. Now, to continue ascending the moss campion-encrusted ledge system beyond the location of our previous snowy bivouac from which we had retreated on our previous attempt, I quickly switched out of my rock shoes into mountain boots and unsheathed my ice tool. That’s the part of the pyramid we’d come to these grey walls and buttresses to learn. Alpine climbing is like another distinct skills pyramid balanced atop a mountaineering skill set, which itself is a set of skills instructors often place high on the NOLS Leadership Pyramid. Climbing light and fast in the mountains takes a finely honed set of climbing skills for ice, snow, rock, and every gradation in between (e.g., we found a lot of “snice” and snow-covered rock).
Erik Bonnett exits vertical terrain, with ill-fated hopes to find moderate terrain through the notch above. Erik Bonnett
Alpine climbing rests on a solid base of mastered skills like managing nutrition, route finding through giant crevasse fields, and navigating in whiteouts. We had smoothly performed these base skills on another outing earlier in the expedition and had managed to summit the pinnacle via an easier “mountaineering” route. The moderate climbing had been well within our abilities and we had moved up the route’s snowy slots and broken ridges quickly and efficiently. Though we had been excited to stand on the summit, we weren’t satisfied. We had not yet achieved our goal of alpine climbing in hard, unknown terrain. That’s why we had returned to the spire’s face and were now halfway up, making for the upper ledge systems that would lead to the summit in an effort to put all of our skills together in a kind of peak performance. As I continued climbing up to the end of the lower ledge system, I finally found a quasi-solid boulder protruding from the snow and slung it for a belay. I realized I needed a mental break. I felt OK physically, even after nearly 12 hours of climbing, but it was time for Max to take over again. We’d both trained hard for the physical aspects of the climb. I’d been in the gym and to Yosemite, throwing myself at the proud lines of yesteryear. Max had been leading NOLS Patagonia expeditions and putting up new ice lines on sea cliffs near his New Brunswick home. As I passed the ice screws and brass stoppers to Max, I realized I hadn’t trained at all for the mental stress. That’s what
Left: Max Fisher works his way up a narrowing crack on the party's second attempt of the Kooshdakhaa Spire's face. Erik Bonnett
Fall 2014
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