On the Ridge Between Life and Death A Climbing Life Reexamined

Chapter One: Gabe The trouble began on the fifth pitch. I handed Gabe our hardware -- half a dozen soft-iron pitons and eight or nine carabiners dangling from a nylon sling -- and said, "On belay." Once again, I had been unable to drive a single piton for my anchor: instead, I had found a bucket-shaped hollow in the ruddy sandstone and sat in it with my back against the right wall, my feet braced against an opposing bulge.Gabe started up the inside corner, angling left as the arching dihedral dictated his path. The going looked easy, for he was moving with that jerky efficiency that had become his forte during the last three months. My breath escaped in a sigh of well-being. Once again, we were launched on the flight that turned the neurotic thrum of ordinary life into a staccato pulse of purpose.But there were no cracks for our pitons. That was the trouble with the First Flatiron -- with all the Flatirons, those massive tilting slabs that stared east from Green Mountain over the mesas above Boulder. Eighty feet up, Gabe sidled left around a protruding arate and passed out of sight. Still he had placed no protection, so as I fed the rope out, I knew my belay was worthless.The rope stopped. Gabe's distant voice: "Should I go straight up? Or traverse left?"We had been shouting too much on this climb -- conferring from a hundred feet apart, as we had forced our way through the route's odd intricacies. The elders in the Colorado Mountain Club who had taught us to climb early that spring had stressed the importance of economy in our shouted signals: "On belay!," "Climbing!," "Slack!," "Up rope!" -- the syllables apportioned so that even over a droning wind one call should never be mistaken for its opposite."Try to go straight up!" I yelled back. So the route had seemed to unfold, as I had studied it in binoculars from my home on Bluebell Avenue. Atop this pitch, I thought, we would have it made, with less than 200 feet of easy scrambling to the notch just below the summit.The rope inched out again. Ten minutes later came Gabe's call: "Off belay!"With a sense of relief, I started up. It was a perfect summer day, pine sap wafting on the fickle breeze, warm sun slanting across the cliff, the whole of the First Flatiron to ourselves. Each wrinkle in the sandstone offered a toehold, each knob a handle to seize with my fingers. The rhythm of movement absorbed me.The burden of my previous winter lifted: in the blue sky at the brow of our universe, an answer hovered. I need only struggle up to find it, turning fear into power, ambivalence into act. After this pitch, we could waltz to the top. Gabe would get back in plenty of time for his cousin's birthday party.As I climbed, the rope drooped unnaturally to my left. Despite my advice, Gabe must have continued his traverse, rather than heading straight up. Oh, well: I trusted his route-finding.When I was fifty feet up, the rope began to drag at my waist. I pulled in about ten feet of slack, then moved farther up. Once again, the drag restrained me. This time when I pulled, no slack came. Somewhere the rope must be stuck. I peered left, and noticed, across forty feet of blank purple slab, a downward-pointing prong, beneath which the rope disappeared.I stepped carefully left, hanging on to a horn with my right hand, to regain a few feet of slack. Taking the rope in my left hand, I swung it vigorously in a counterclockwise turn. A loop spun down the GoldLine cord, ebbing as it went. At the prong, it died. I tried several more times, but the rope was jammed fast.On my tongue, I tasted the first trickle of dread.It was July 9, 1961. I had turned eighteen a little more than a month before, Gabe Lee two months before that. We had taken minimum-wage jobs that summer between high school and college: I planted seedlings in the tundra at 12,000 feet for an alpine research lab, while Gabe peeled potatoesRoberts, David is the author of 'On the Ridge Between Life and Death A Climbing Life Reexamined', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743255189 and ISBN 0743255186.