Our People

    by Max Lyon     

           I heard the next gust coming before it hit us.  It was coming over the saddle, giving me a chance to want to run, to know I couldn’t, and to hold my breath thinking that this time- maybe it would be this time- the tent would rip and the poles would break and we would be grabbing the ground with our fingers.  I put my shoulder against the tent pole and waited.  The hard air crashed the tent like a closing out beach break and then rolled over us and out into the quiet of empty space above the cirque.  Frost shook down into Eli’s bag.  I looked at my watch.  It was my turn, and soon I would have to suit up and crawl out into the whipping blizzard to dig out the snow that was packing in hard between tent and fly and burying us on the lee side.  I pulled my bag over my head.

Inside my little cave, I switched on my headlamp to consult the altimeter.  “ Mr. A” told us the same story he had an hour ago: that our ten was floating 300 feet above the true elevation of the saddle, as if sucked off the earth by this low that wouldn’t leave.  I paged back through my record of the days, the columns of frustratingly similar altimeter readings, and my mind crept back to what had happened, as your fingers might creep to the edge of a wound.

The climbing ranger at Moose had been steady, patient, professional, and- hard as I searched his face- hadn’t offered an opinion.  “Moderate” avalanche hazard and a forecast of “scattered showers” weren’t exactly a red light.  But, as one who had been up Garnet Canyon seven times, past winters, to stand on a summit only three times, I didn’t find these signals a welcoming green.  Eli and I wandered around in the visitor center long enough to recognize that we were stalling.  I went outside to call a friend.  I got her answering machine, and I made the decision.

We’re going to try the Black Ice Couloir”, I said.  “We’ll be down Sunday.  I’ll give you a call. Wish us luck!”

I hung up and stood staring at the perfect little rimed snowflake that had lighted on my sleeve.

Once we got skiing across the moraine, of course, we warmed up and loosened up.  Big chunks of blue floated over us.  We sweated; we stopped to blow.  It was just a day in the mountains.

I have always felt, at the point where Garnet Canyon levels out at the Meadows, and heads straight toward the Middle Teton, that I am approaching a giant mountain castle.  Snow ivied the lower walls, thin curtains of spindrift poured off the turrets so high above my head.  I kept sliding one ski up and through the snow, then stepping down on it, then sliding the other one up and past it, breathing hard and steady.  I looked up and all around me though, and inside me fear tumbled with desire.  There was the thinking part of it, of course:  Watching the sky and guessing the weather, digging a pit and testing the snow below the steep slopes leading up to the moraines.  But I felt, standing small in the snow beneath those rock walls, that it would not be these things that would decide, or even fate or chance.  I would be something more like grace that would let us pass through to the Queen’s high camber- or its lack that would turn us from the castle.

The blue shadows were deepening toward black, the wind was cutting sharper.  I sucked in the cold air and rolled my head to ease the crush of the shoulder straps.  I was getting impatient, worrying we were going to be too slow for the long climbing day we’d planned.  I started to decide, just in my own mind, on an easier route.

It was a hard push past the moraines.  We cached our skis below the final rock band and climbed the fat fixed rope left in the summer by the guides, burning our lungs with the effort.  In the deep dusk we made the saddle.  Lights started coming on down in Idaho, twinkling sharply at us through the frozen air.  We were tired, moving slow, taking long rests between simple tasks.  But we were laughing as we put up the tent.

For some reason I walked over and built a cairn to mark the route back down off the saddle.

We both woke in the night to the popping of the tent and the racing wind of the storm.  We lay awake without talking.  The climb was over.  I now was anxious to get down while we could, and as it started to get a little light, I made this clear with few words and great haste.  Kneeling in the snow, I bundled up the tent as it snapped and streamed out from my hands.  We groped through the river of blowing snow to find the cairn.

We couldn’t see more than 250 feet below us, and our tracks were gone.  My mind refused to accept how fast the wind had loaded the slope.  I was suffering, the rangers would later tell us, from “get-home-itis”, a leading cause of body-recoveries.

I put my goggled face close to Eli’s and screamed at him over the wind.  I wanted him to belay me from the big boulder at the top of the slope, let the rope run out- I would trail it to the top of the fixed rope- then follow when I got off the snow and onto the rocks.

I went straight down in a wallowing plunge step.  All seemed well at first. 100 feet, 200 feet.  I stopped to look up.  Eli had dropped the end of the rope and was standing on the boulder.  I looked down, and my mind reeled.  A blue crack shot out from my feet and across the slope to the right.  Another one ran out of sight to the left.  It led toward a jumble of fresh avalanche debris.  Had I missed seeing this slide from above or had it just now cut loose?  A black curtain of fear fell behind my eyes.  My skin prickled with regret over this ultimate, irretrievable mistake.  Hip deep in snow, I wanted desperately to run.  The driven snow hissed against my hood and goggles.  The world was white and gray and small.

As steadily and quickly as I could, I began retracing my steps, head down.

At the top I found that Eli had come down the slope to the end of the rope and was belaying me from a pitiful picketed axe.  We looked at each other, wordlessly comprehending.

We walked down to the lowest point on the saddle and found a van-sized boulder.  In its lee we set up the tent and crawled inside and resolved to make no more dumb mistakes- or unilateral decisions.

So we became tent-dwellers.  The days became indistinguishable from one another.  After the first day we rationed our food.  Then we finished it.  Eli taught me a board game which we played with peanuts and raisins and he beat me so many times in a row that I ate the pieces.  We talked of Eli’s girlfriend who was staying with my friends in the valley and who was probably going crazy with worry.                                                           

I lay awake the second or third night, thinking about my dad.  I remembered the sinking feeling that had swept through me one time when I was in high school and coming down late from a mountain hike, had met my father, silhouetted in the moonlight, coming up to search for me.  I lay inside the snapping tent and tried to will the Park Service to prevent my father from somehow getting in his head to come up this canyon.

I woke Eli when I came back in from shoveling.  We began to talk, lying on our backs in the close tent.  We could do without food, sure, but we only had fuel enough to melt snow for maybe two more days.  Could we outlast the storm, or was it better to try to get down now, while we were still able?  We knew that for real mountaineers in the big ranges of the world, being stuck like this was no big deal.  But for us it was beginning to feel a little epic.

Maybe we could find a way to climb along the rocks back to our skis, maybe ski cut the steep slope above the moraines and make it slide, and then maybe find the last long slope down to the meadows already released.  It sounded crazy, but it seemed better than just sitting in the tent and waiting.  Waiting for what, to be rescued?

The next morning we huddled in the gale and uncoiled the rope.  I led down through scattered boulders, and then Eli ran the rope out toward a downward-sloping slab.  I watched him fiddling with a Tri-cam, trying to get an anchor in a snowy crack between two boulders.  I hated to see him there, standing in the snow nearly at the limit of visibility, at the end of his plowed track, below a huge snow pillow.  This was madness, we agreed when I got down to him, and we got back to the tent to wait as long as we had to wait.

That night I sat up, listening again to the wind crash against the saddle.  Life was always uncertain- I knew this intellectually.  But now, for once, I could feel, as real as the emptiness in my belly, that I had no future to hold and pat and turn over in my fond mind.  There was only this place, this wind, this night.  I listened to each shriek of wind, each snap, each silent space.  I listened to the wind coming through the bright black night, and my heart lifted it in welcome.  This was it.  I don’t mean the end or anything certain, just it.

I looked over at Eli.  One thing I did know now:  whatever happened to one of us would happen to us both.

Next morning, Eli was outside shoveling; I was melting another pot of snow.

“Hey Max, it’s breaking up!”

“No way”, I thought.  But truly there was a new light coming through the tent.  I scrambled out and we stood on our little ledge in the new quiet and the sun poured over us.  Our vision, so long constrained to a close gray world, flew hungrily out across the previously unimagined gulf of space in front of us to light on the golden granite and the extravagant oceans of blue, blue sky.  An avalanche shot off the summit of the Middle Teton, turned to powder in the air, and floated down like a dropped lace veil into the cirque below us.

I recognized then, with the warmth of home-coming, that we had been let inside the castle.  It was to catch these glimpses, to remember this understanding so easily lost, that we would keep on risking what we had to lose.  It was for this that we would keep on coming back to the mountains.

So now what?  We roamed around in our new freedom.  I found the wooden slats of the summer outhouse on the windward side of the saddle and thought that we could burn these maybe, to keep on melting snow.  Looking out to the west, I saw the laser-cut geometrical crown of a fresh slab avalanche on an east-facing slope quiet like the one separating us from the valley.

We came back together to talk.  The weather was good, yes, but we still had to wait at least a day.  The storm had come in cold and gotten warm:  All the signs said wait.  But there was another big cloud bank out west and Mr. A, if he could be believed, still showed us under a low.  Could we last another storm?

It began to dawn on us that we were waiting to be rescued.  This was all happening in the days before the Gulf War, and we were thinking that the world would have bigger things to concern itself with that a couple of guys stuck on a mountain.  What if no one came?  And what a dumb thing it was to wait to be rescued, anyway!  We started discussing again the idea of heading down, getting ourselves out, then once again came up against the realities of avalanche hazard, then started second-guessing our judgment on that.

Waiting again.  I was outside the tent, drinking a mug of water and adjusting Eli’s sleeping bag on the roof of the tent when I heard the helicopter.  There, below us, were the rotors chopping air.  Then the ship rose to our level and I looked across at the helmeted men and saluted them with my mug.  The machine sailed over our heads and we were back in wind and blowing snow, and when it cleared we saw in amazement that the helicopter had landed.

We ran across the snow and met, also running across the snow, a ranger in a big white flight helmet.  His cleanly shaven mustached face looked incongruous to us; it reminded us of a civilized world we had at some level forgotten.

We introduced ourselves, as if there was a need.  He introduced himself and I recognized his name from guide books.

He came quickly to the point:  “So what do you want to do?”

“What’s the forecast?”

“Shitty”.

“What would it cost to be flown out?”

“They don’t usually charge,” he said.

Eli and I looked at teach other.  There were people worried about us.  And the helicopter had to go down anyway…

We accepted the rescue.

“O.K. You’ve got five minutes to pack.  The pilot’s real worried he won’t get out before the clouds come back in.”

So we ran back and started tearing down the tent, the ranger helping.  But the tent floor was frozen in place and we were tugging on it when the other ranger ran up, out of breath and in a big hurry.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here!  Now!” he yelled.

It didn’t occur to us to let them go.  The unit had jumped from two to five.  We were all together.

We threw some rocks on the tent and what was still inside, grabbed the smallest expensive things we could see, and ran on our underused legs and jumped inside the helicopter.  In an instant we were rocketing around the west side of the Grand, straining to catch a view of the climbs there, then blasting down Cascade Canyon and then, suddenly, we were standing in our booties in melting snow at the Jackson airport, blinking against the bright sun and trying to say our unnecessary thanks.

The rangers took us to lunch at Dornan’s.

At the big Park service debrief which came after lunch there was a reporter from town and I recognized Rod Newcomb, who had taught me about avalanches.  Before we could tell our story and the rangers could tell theirs, I was pulled away; they had gotten my parents on the phone.  I crowded into a small room with the smiling dispatcher and heard my mom’s voice coming from so far away.  She had been made live by the news, I was glad to hear that in her voice, but it clouded my happy mind to hear, or thing I could hear, that I had aged her a bit, too.

Back in the debrief, we learned many things.  The head ranger had waited up by our car in the storm until ten the night we were due back.  They had flown at the first break in the weather, and were turned back by the low ceiling, but not before seeing our tracks disappear beneath the debris of a big avalanche. The rangers had called our employers and climbing partners to find out about us and what kind of decisions we might be apt to make, so they could best plan their rescue.  My brother, on getting the news that we were overdue, had immediately said, “Well let’s go in and find them!” but the Park had put a stop to this plan, not letting anyone in on foot.

When it was over, one ranger, the man we’d first spoken with when we signed out so long ago, drove us to the trailhead. The plow driver had kept open a little driveway back into the big white mushroom that contained our car.  We began to dig. When we got down to the windshield we found, clipped under the wiper, a grocery bag of cookies.

That was the night they bombed Bagdad.  We were in the Cowboy Bar in the Jackson, sitting with Eli’s parent, who had driven up from Southern California when they heard we were overdue.  Everyone in the bar was sitting in a big half-circle in front of the T.V.  Up on the screen the President’s eyes were doing a good job of looking like they believed the words his mouth was saying.

I heard someone say, from behind me in our half-circle, “Well at least we won’t lose too many of our people.”

I bent forward and twisted my glass, tearing the soggy napkin coaster.  I closed my eyes and pictured what was happening, right then, as we sat in a bar in Wyoming:  bombs were falling through people’s roofs.  Once again I was flooded by the bleak regret of irretrievable loss.