GUNDELBERG'S LAST STAND

North Twin, West Ridge

The Gundelberg saga concludes with one last adventure in the Twin Sisters range.

Harken back to our last “climb” of the North Twin

(http://frivilousessays.blogspot.com/2017/05/gundelberg-returns-to-twin-sisters.html.

Needless to say, after this fiasco interest in the Fairhaven College mountaineering class (JG/BK professoring) diminished sharply.  In fact, the next year there were only two “students” – both men in their 40s – game to make the North Twin climb.  Naturally, I went along, ostensibly to “help”. 

Well, it was crappy weather, a crappy experience, no fun at all.  It did have one virtue, however.  It scared some sense into me.

Do you know what “gendarme” means to a mountaineer?  Well, in the French Alps it may denote a policeman who kicks your butt into jail for getting a little too exuberant in some nice, cozy wine shop.  However, more generally it means some species of rocky impediment blocking a climbing route.  You have to go around it, over it – or go home in defeat.

A Gendarme.  Not ours, but you get the idea

Well, there is one such on the upper portion of the west ridge of the North Twin.  In a decent weather year we could easily passed by it on either side, but the weather that day was bad, as it had been for months – and we were faced with a dilemma.   Our choices were two:  we either could pass by the thing on its north side, by traversing a few tens of meters of steep snow, or we could climb over the damned thing.

I was leading.  I had my ice ax, and I liked to fool around on steep snow.  There was a modest “bergschrund” – maybe 18 inches wide but God knows how deep – which I confidentially stepped across.  We had a rope but I wasn’t attached – hell, this was going to be a piece of cake.  On crossing I planted my ax, took a single step, slipped, lost my grip – and found myself sliding down a very steep slope, on my back, head first!  The bottom of the slope was perhaps 1000 ft. below, and it was lined with big rocks! 

A Bergschrund, considerably larger than mine

Well, I just had time to formulate the thought “What a stupid way to die!”, when I whacked into a few rocks that Providence had placed just below the gendarme.  They stopped me, without significant damage.  Cats have nine lives.  Clumsy climbers have, at most, three.  I had just used up one.

Very carefully, I crept up the snow slope to the “schrund”, retrieved my ax, tied on to the proffered rope, and regained terra firma.  I was alive – but the damned French policeman still barred our way.  Now it was the turn of JG/BK.

Keller liked to climb rock.  The obvious way over the gendarme began with ascent of a rubble filled shoot – I guess you could call it a couloir, to continue the barrage of French names.  So Bob started scrambling upwards, while the rest of us stayed out of the way of falling debris.  He was un-roped, of course – we learned hard in those days.

Well, after what seemed like too long I decided to take a peak.  I stuck my head around our sheltering rock, looked upwards – and a chunk of Twin Sisters dunite the size of a softball whizzed by my right ear, going very, very rapidly.  I jerked my head back just as it was followed by a shower of other rubble and the thought popped into my head:  “That’s life #2.  Is God trying to tell me something?”    I decided that the answer was “yes”.

So, I yelled at Bob that I was through, that I was going down, and taking the two “kids” with me.  He was pissed, but had no choice.  I think he pouted for the next two days.  We spent the night in a dilapidated cabin at the edge of a meadow called Daley’s prairie, near the foot of the mountain.  We shared it with two young men from Lynden, WA, a nearby town known for its religious fervor.  They found out I was a geologist, and spent half the night trying to convince me that the “recent flurry of earthquakes” (there was none) presaged the End of Times.

So, all in all, it was a shitty trip.  It did teach me an important lesson, however.  I never again went courting death in the mountains.  Sure, you can be killed by a dead squirrel falling on your head while at dinner in a campground; malign fate is always sniffing at our heels.  But after that it was trail hiking or mountain scrambling for me.  I still have that third life in reserve.