I have always liked being in the mountains, but the thought of climbing a mountain never occurred to me until I met my husband Dan. He is a member of The Mazamas, a Portland climbing club. His spare room was full of all sorts of weird gear and he would spend his weekends climbing mountains in the dark.
When Dan was finishing his master’s degree in 1999, he knew he wouldn’t have much time for a girlfriend and he suggested that I take the Mazamas Basic Climbing Education Program. It’s a great class that consists of textbook readings, lectures and field sessions. I was fascinated by that textbook. I learned what all that weird gear was for and why you climb mountains in the middle of the night. And I learned nuggets of wisdom. Like, if you are roped to your climbing partner, and you are walking along a ridge, if your partner starts to fall down one side of the ridge, what you should do is jump off the other side of the ridge so the rope catches you and holds you both. — Yeah, right! I finished the field sessions where I chased my more athletic classmates up steep hikes, and I learned to self arrest, where you jam your ice axe into the snow and thumbtack yourself to the mountain.
Thus, I became an mountaineer.
In 2003, we joined a Mazamas outing to the Swiss Alps. The Eiger, is the classic alpine peak, with a north face so steep that the snow doesn’t stick to it, and it looms darkly above the valley. Well, right next to the Eiger is the Mönch, and at 13,474 feet, it is 500 feet taller than the Eiger, and that’s the mountain we climbed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the industrious Swiss built a tunnel through the Eiger so you can take a train up to 11,000 feet and start climbing from there. For this reason, the Mönch is actually one of the easiest of the classic Alpine peaks.
But, easy is a relative term, and it soon became apparent that I was the least experienced and the least fit of the eight of us on that climb. After they took everything out of my pack, and put it in theirs I was able to at least keep up with my rope team.
The Mönch consists of a series of boulder fields to climb interspersed with ice ridges. Picture a balance beam — no, make it an ironing board; tip it up at an angle, raise it 1000 feet into the air and cover it with ice, and you get a picture of these ridges. So, I had a lot to think about on this climb. I had to keep the rope taut, not get cut with my crampons, and keep the ice ax in the proper hand, not to mention climb uphill at altitude. But during it all, I kept thinking about how this was the Alps and it was all going to be so worth it at the end.
Toward the top of the climb, I put my ice axe down in the snow next to me, and when I took it out there was a hole in the snow. Through that hole, I could see all the way down to Grindelwald, two miles below me. It occurred to me, that if I had put my foot there, it could have been me going all the way down to Grindelwald. But, I didn’t, and I made it safely to the top.
There were high fives all around and photos taken and I felt — nothing! Where was my climber’s high? Where was the exhilaration that made it all worth it? The view wasn’t even that good because of the cornice, and we were all crowded together at the top and you couldn’t spend any time up there because you still had to get down and you didn’t want to wait too long because the snow would get slushy and be unsafe. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t a mountaineer. I was never going to be one of those people who say, “because it is there.” As we started the descent I started composing my speech to Dan in my head, where I would say that I was glad to have had the experience once, but I didn’t see that I would be continuing to climb with him at this level.
It was early afternoon and we were worried about the sun melting the ice and making it too slushy for crampons to get a good hold. We had just put our crampons back on in preparation to cross an ice ridge. Monty, at the front of my rope had just stepped out on the ice and he turned back to me and said, “I was going to say that the ice feels pretty good, but they just fell.” and he pointed to the ridge ahead of us. About 100 yards away there was a group in front of us and one of them had fallen and was in the process of getting up. It didn’t look that bad at first, but she didn’t get up and she started to slide, and she pulled the next person on the rope with her, starting a chain reaction. As we watched in helpless horror, Sandy, standing next to me, said, “He needs to go right.” and it occurred to me that this was that absurd situation from my climbing textbook. We started to yell, “Jump right! Jump right!”
We didn’t know if they could hear us, but eventually the last man on their rope jumped off the right side of ridge. He jammed his ice axe into the snow and we watched as he fell — up. He was being pulled up the ridge by the weight of the climbers on his rope down the other side. Finally, just before he reached the lip of the ridge, they came to a stop. There, hanging down the left side of the ridge, like beads on a string were four climbers and on the right side was one man holding them all with his ice axe jammed in the snow.
I knew I could be of no help, but both Monty and Dan had training in high angle rescue. I quickly unclipped from the rope and stayed behind while they made their way out on the ridge. As soon as they got close enough, Dan made an anchor with equipment he had with him and attached their rope to the mountain. Then Monty attached the ropes together so that now all of them were connected to the mountain by more than just the one ice axe, and they could begin the slow process of bringing the climbers back up to the top of the ridge, up that slope too steep to just walk up.
Another climbing group came along and helped the stricken climbers down the mountain leaving us to pull the anchor and make our own way down. It was late in the afternoon now, and the weather had changed. It was thundering and raining lightly and we had already heard one avalanche from the neighboring slopes. But, probably the worst time pressure was the fact that the last train down of the day was at 5 and Swiss trains don’t wait for anything. We had some intense climbing to get the rest of the way down and Dan and I were the last two people on that train, getting on just as it left the station.
We met up with the group we rescued in train station. They were a Czech family on their first climb, being led by a family friend. They didn’t speak much English and we communicated by hugs and tears and a Czech beer. Their leader spoke a little better English and he told us that he had heard someone yelling “Jump right” and that had been enough to trigger in his mind his mountaineering training so he knew what he had to do.
The Monch is the most technical mountain I have ever climbed, and it will remain so. I don’t think Dan believes me when I tell him that the rescue is not my reason for not wanting to climb at that level. But I did get a good story out of it. I’m able to say that I once ordered a complete stranger to jump off a cliff. And he did, and he thanked me for it.