Back to Camp

Day 7 - August 22nd, 1997

The next morning we awoke to the gray sky, stretched our broken exhausted bodies, and prepared for the final set of raps.  We decided to launch the haul bag off the ledge.  It was quite the sight. We just pushed it over the edge of our ledge and watched it bounced twice before it disappeared.  A couple of seconds went by, and then we heard the bag hit the ground.  The sound echoed against the walls surrounding us.  I hoped that my sleeping bag was okay, and that the haul bag had in fact hit the ground.  It would be awful to have to climb up three pitches to retrieve our bag.

We ran into another problem.  On the third rap below the ledge we pulled our rap rope through the anchor and it got caught on a flake above us... about 15 m above us.  "Do you want to climb up to get it?", "no, do you?", "no".  So we cut it, and used our third rope for the remaining raps.

Oh Shit! Its stuck.

We had packed our gear and committed the haul bag to gravity before we started down the remaining rappels on the lower tower. We kept the climbing hardware on us in case things didn’t go as planned and set off down the face... 
Things didn’t go as planned! A few pitches down the face the rope failed to come down all the way when we pulled it free from the station above us. It was stuck behind a flake and no amount of pulling would free it. We didn’t spend long on the problem this time. Neither of us cared to lead up on the “maybe feasible” face and we were way to tired to be bothered with the $100 rope (it was the haul rope) We just cut the blighter, stashed the bits we had salvaged, unpacked the third rope again and kept going down. We got to the ground and sort of wandered around packing up our gear quietly. Both very happy to have done the climb and relieved to be back on relatively level ground.

The Ground

I didn't feel that I had finished the climb until my feet actually touched the ground.  After 50 hours on the wall, my feet returned to the earth.  It was a relief; to know that the climb was over, that there would be no more rapping, and that we had accomplished what we had set out to do.  The solid, beautiful, safe, flat ground! it never felt so good.

We stumbled back towards our camp.  At the first opportunity, we filled our water bottles with clear, cool, clean water that ran directly off the glacier.  We drank and drank to our hearts content and water never tasted so good.  Further down the trail, a stream runs over a sandy bed,  the banks green with tufts of grass, it just begs to be swam in.  I stripped naked and... well it was a bit too cold to swim in but I did take a quick dip and it felt good.

We arrived at our camp, and the first thing on our minds was FOOD! and we ate and it was good, and we spoke to the groundhog, and we told him of our adventures and it was good.  And the mountain marmot listened to our story, and it was good.  And the mosquitoes and mice and goats and caribou and fish, they all listened to our story as it unfurled from our lips.  The whole experience was too incredible for words, it seemed that we had accomplished something of biblical proportions, and it was good.  Religion had been on my mind because during our drive up to the Yukon, there were long stretches where the only radio stations that we could find were hard right Christian. 

We actually didn't talk to the animals, we were too busy eating.  Including the weight I lost due to dehydration, I was probably at least 10 lbs lighter, well whatever it was, my ribs were mighty visible. 

 The climb may have affected our personalities somewhat...at least in the short term!

We spent the rest of the day relaxing.

We sort of meandered back to camp over the next couple of hours with our heavy packs. We had lots of eating and drinking to do. We were each more or less in our own little worlds and we would have little bouts of conversation reliving bits of the climb and sharing our success and relief. We lay all the wet gear out to dry and did a lot of resting. We interrupted the resting with repeated feeding sessions. There were two new climbers in the other camp site and the Americans had headed down to Glacier Lake, having run out of food and I guess incentive to complete their “new project” somewhere up in the second cirque. We introduced our selves and the telling of tales began again, only this time we were the givers of knowledge and they were sucking up all the info’ we could give them as we had done less than a week before.