North Twin, West Ridge
The Gundelberg saga concludes with one last adventure in the
Twin Sisters range.
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.
