Grand Teton National Park
“How can we use the unavoidable truth of our mortality to empower us, rather than cripple us?”
A crack split the air and then a clatter, and my guts dropped. It was loud — which meant big — and my right hand clenched tight on the brake strand of the rope that tethered me to Bryan and both of us to the rotten rock lining the sides of the Black Ice Couloir.
“Going out of condition,” the Climbing Rangers report said of the Black Ice Couloir on Tuesday. The route is long, accessed by the dangerous and arduous Valhalla Traverse, and rarely in condition — in one of the top alpine climbing arenas in the States, the Black Ice sees only a handful of ascents a year. And sometimes none.
I distinctly remember opening the Teton Climbing Bible for the first time and landing on the route description for the Black Ice. It felt mythical and unobtainable, a route for my alpine heroes. This was at the beginning for me; I was still busy surviving my first fumbles in the mountains.
Bryan read the report aloud, and I tumbled the phrase around in my mouth. “Going out of condition,” meant that it was in condition, and that someone had climbed it. Bryan and I climbed the NW Ice Couloir on the Middle Teton the day before, easily and quickly. At the summit we had looked at each other and agreed on a subtle, mutual feeling: it was too easy. Not strong enough of a dose. I hadn’t thought much about the Black Ice for years, and I flushed with the sensation I felt standing in the climbing shop in Jackson with the Ortenburger book in my hand: wonder, mystery, one of those “one day maybe” experiences.
Suddenly, the “one day maybe,” was right now. We made a show of objective deliberation but both knew the decision was made as soon as we read the conditions report. Within hours we reneged on our vow to not tromp up the Garnet Canyon trail another time this trip and were in the parking lot wrecking a gallon of huckleberry ice cream and frying two pounds of bacon on the tailgate of my truck. The hordes of weekend summer tourists poured in and out of the trailhead, oblivious to our ambition and amused by our antics.
People gave us strange looks as we strapped recurved ice tools and mono-point crampons to the outside of our backpacks, most without the slightest idea of what we were heading in to do or any clue at all what was possible beyond the scree and boulders where the Garnet Canyon trail ends. And I think this is beautiful and right — it’s the process of discovering for oneself the physical and mental freedom of moving in mountain terrain that has so much intrinsic value. What did I know about them, even?
Still, I had to fight the desire to scream at them — there was so much vertical freedom waiting above that so many are unwilling or unable to discover. How it would change their lives! Instead I bowed my head and walked fast, saying, “howdy,” politely and stepping off the trail to let them pass.
We stacked the odds in our favor with an afternoon hike in and a bivouac on the Valhalla Traverse. Knowing we would have to climb the route with bivy gear in our packs, we went light: no stove, 1/8″ bivy pads and down quilts. After smoking up the trail to the Lower Saddle, we got ourselves committed on the traverse before scoping out some shelter behind a boulder. We flaked our one rope on the dirt in two vaguely human shaped piles to sleep on for extra insulation. The wind howled and the stars rose and we shivered through the night: embracing discomfort as part of the greater experience is a strong theme in alpine climbing. It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.
Before the red rays of sunrise bounced off the snow we were slamming steel picks into hard ice on the last section of the Valhalla Traverse. Conditions forced us to rope up where we would have preferred to solo and we lost time, but we were in Go Mode and couldn’t be bothered to stop and discuss the implications of continuing. We snuck beneath the entrance to the Enclosure Couloir and soon reached the base of the 5.7 rock climbing that guards the entrance to the Black Ice. Without speaking I put Bryan on belay and he led off in mountain boots.
1200′ of ice stretched up and out of sight above us when Bryan handed over the rack: three pitons, three ice screws, nuts and a few cams. I visualized the terrain above: where to pound the pin, where to save the screw. The climbing on the Black Ice is never hard, but there’s lots of it. Time is a critical factor — as the sun pans onto the slopes above, more and more debris is funneled down the route. That, and the rock quality is terrible. Often it’s better to just skip the dodgy protection in favor of climbing fast.
“Going out of condition,” tumbled around in my head again as I looked down at the water running on the surface of the ice and around the steel-pointed toes I stood on. The ice screw thirty feet below me was my last and the rock to my side was too shattered to take any kind of protection, but the climbing was easy. I said it to myself: the climbing is easy. The climbing is easy. You will not fall. The Fear is the danger.
I looped a horn of solid rock and eased my weight onto the rope, shifting from the simul-climbing we were doing to belaying Bryan. The pouring water and skittering rocks in the distance were more than enough to inspire urgency in every movement: I looped a runner with the rest of the gear over Bryan’s head as he organised carabiners on his harness. I had him on a lead belay before he had looked up to see what lay ahead.
This was it, the feeling I aspire to in the mountains. Life is distilled into a single necessity: climb. Climb fast and efficiently, climb well and your total being is consumed by the single moment of physical movement you’re in. There is nothing else in the world to you in this moment besides the swing and flick of your ice tool, by the sensation of your whole body balancing on the 2mm of steel of your left crampon, by the scream of your calf muscles. And the sensation, the all-consuming feeling, isn’t fear or anxiety or pain or exhilaration or anything at all, really. It’s just focus. There isn’t space in your brain for anything else.
At the belay, everything changes. The saturating heat from redlining muscles starts to ooze into the ice and snow around you. Cramps set in from leaning in your harness, from not being able to shift your feet or take your hands off the belay device. Anxiety creeps in — about the rockfall in the distance, about the creeping time of day and the slow speed of your partner above. What if it’s too hard to continue? What if my partner falls? What if a rock falls?
And then I hear Bryan’s voice in the distance, “Belay! Off!” and it all disappears, replaced once again by the urgency and the single necessity to climb fast. I tear the anchor down to a single piece and wait until the rope comes tight on me before swinging back out onto the ice. Hot blood rushes into the shrunken capilaries in my hands and a familiar feeling of pain and naseau rolls through me. It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.
Narrow, rotten ice threads through a section of particularly shattered rock above. It’s my lead and I poke and prod for protection before ultimately just climbing through, building an anchor, and handing the lead back over to Bryan. The steepest section of the couloir lies ahead and neither of us say anything about it, we just operate: clipping carabiners to each others’ harnesses, pulling out food and water for each other.
The long, steep walls of the Black Ice couloir lead directly to the chimneys of the most popular summit route on the Grand Teton. Directly as in, everything that falls off of the Owen-Spaulding falls directly into the Black Ice, and often picks up a few hitchhiking rocks with it.
I heard the rock well before I saw it: clink, clink, clatter. The last noise was loud, the kind of elemental, building-blocks-of-nature noises that triggers a special kind of animal brain reaction. I’ve only heard it a few times in my life, the last when an automobile-sized chunk of ice calved off of a serac near me.
I looked up instinctively, even though that’s the opposite of what you should do, and I saw the ricocheting rock, breaking into smaller pieces with each contact of the couloir wall heading straight towards Bryan’s body. I yelled, “ROCK!” with the kind of urgency that grips intestines, and Bryan slammed his body sideways into a semi-sheltered position climber’s right.
For whatever reason, the climbing world describes rock sizes as kitchen appliances: refrigerators, microwaves, toasters. I watched a microwave hit Bryan and the wall beside him and break into two toasters, which tumbled straight towards me. I slammed myself into the wall, ducked my head, and felt only small pieces of debris rattle off the plastic shell of my helmet.
I looked up and Bryan was already shaking it off. Apparently the rock only clipped his backpack — his shoulder hurt more from the urgent duck-and-dodge than his back from the rock. Without a tiny hint of fear in his voice he said, “All good, man. Heading up.” And he headed up.
When I reach his belay we are beginning our emergence from the darkness of the Black Ice. Voices of climbers rappelling the Owen-Spaulding above rattle down to us. People rapping means rocks falling, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid by starting early. I checked my watch. The voices above were the first of what could be hours of people descending. It was a camera, Bryan said, that fell and knocked the rocks loose that sprayed us. Urgency twisted again in my gut.
By this point we’ve climbed almost a thousand feet of the couloir, and we had found our groove. During long, consistent climbs you get a unique kind of self-trust. Duration and repetition melt away anxiety and doubt and you just move, knowing exactly what you’re capable of and how to stay within those bounds. The angle eased off in the last few pitches and we simul-soloed to the Upper Saddle.
As I set the last belay anchor right beneath the lip of the Upper Saddle a face appeared in front of me. “Hey!” It said. “What route is this? Did you see a camera fall by any chance?”
—
Hours later we sat next to a snowmelt stream surrounded by our wet and disheveled gear. We were tired. And while the climbing had felt good, in a way it felt more like getting away with something than an accomplishment. As much as I wanted to blame the gumby climber for dropping his camera and knocking loose the rocks that almost hit us, rockfall is a well-known element of the route. It was our responsibility to be out of the couloir before the sun and people above hit it.
An older Exum guide wandered up to us lying prone next to the creek and asked what were doing with all of that ice gear this time of year. He was suprised, but believed us. It was his friends that had climbed it and written the report that sent us out in the first place. “Didn’t think it’d still be climbable, now. Good on ya.” He nodded and continued on.