Off Belay
First published in the Winter Edition of The First Line 2006
The avalanche had come down on her so fast that she had barely had time to throw herself behind the giant pine tree that she had been about to scale in order to try to get her bearings. As far as she could tell, the ancient pine seemed to have survived the impact of hundreds of tons of snow falling from a nearby ridgeline, or at least it hadn’t collapsed on top of her. The tree had been so massive that the ridges in the bark would have provided decent handholds leading up to the first branches 30 feet off the ground. Thus, it had provided at least some protection from the onslaught of snow that had come down on her so unexpectedly.
She had landed on her back as far as she could tell. Once she had loosened up the snow around her a bit, it seemed pretty clear that gravity was pulling her down from behind. The snow immediately around her was somewhat packed, but she was able to move a bit and begin scratching away at it so she couldn’t be too far underneath the snow. Or so she hoped. Luckily, and somewhat by design, she had been protecting her nose and mouth with her arms as the avalanche had come down on her, so she had landed with a small air pocket surrounding her head. The problem now was not to drop snow into her mouth and nose as she slowly scratched away at the snow that confined her. She had no sense of time. She wasn’t sure if she had been digging for hours or just minutes. She was fairly sure that she didn’t have enough air to last hours, but it seemed as if she had been trapped here forever. She pushed on. Constantly thinking to herself “Just a few more swipes, and I’ll be free. Just a little farther, and I’ll see sky. Just keep moving, don’t stop.”
She had taken her gloves off in order to scale the tree, and her movement was too limited to do anything with her pack to get them back out. So, she had scratched with bare fingers and then dug at the snow in front of her with bare hands that had started to bleed. Her hands had grown so numb that if it hadn’t been for the snow that was falling at the sides of her face, she wouldn’t have known that she was still digging. But she pushed on. Suddenly, the snow pack in front of her face bowed outwards with her hands. Then it fell in, covering her head. She coughed and sputtered and worried that she would drown in snow; but suddenly her arms had room to move and to reach out, and she could feel wind on the parts of her forearms that weren’t numb. She fumbled the snow off of her face and took deep breaths of slightly warmer air. She clawed more snow away from her body. Apparently she wasn’t totally flat on her back but rather slightly inclined towards a standing position. She uncovered her legs and slowly pulled and rolled herself free of the snowy pit she left behind her. She just lay there, sorely tempted to lose consciousness and just give in to the exhaustion that consumed her. But she had to keep moving. The sun was out, the air was warmer than the snow, and she had to regain the feeling in her extremities.
She sat up. This was a struggle with her pack still on, but just the effort which that movement required, while exhausting, acted to warm her; and it was energizing to feel warmth again. She could see a field of snow stretched out around her. Judging by the fact that she was still alive, she had to assume that she hadn’t suffered the brunt of the avalanche. So she scanned the horizon for a break in the snow. Spring was budding in the valley, and there had been minimal amounts of snow on the forest floor prior to the avalanche. The largest accumulation she had seen on the flight in had been the cornice piled up on the ridgeline connecting the two summits nearby. She had asked if she should be wary of avalanches with the warmer weather starting, but the pilot had told her that the rangers blasted any dangerous build ups on a regular basis and she had nothing to worry about. She made a mental note to file a complaint at the ranger station if she ever made it out of here alive.
Of course the pilot and the ranger would just be two more on the list of people she intended to have words with when, and if, she made it back to civilization. The person at the top of that list was her climbing partner. Her climbing partner for this trip was a friend of a friend of hers whom she had come out with in order to get on some multi-pitch trad routes that weren’t very popular because they were hard to get to. As a high school Spanish teacher, she had spring break off, and, while she usually climbed with her husband, he had agreed to do an outward bound trip in South Africa and he wouldn’t be back in time for her planned departure date. So, she was left to climb with a guy she didn’t know very well, but whom she had climbed with a few times and knew to be a solid and safe climbing partner. Unfortunately, he was also apparently a horny bastard. Through the first few days of the trip, he had flirted with her mildly as they made their way deeper into the wilderness and got on a few trad routes, but it was nothing she wasn’t used to; and she just playfully shrugged it off. Then, last night, he had seriously come on to her.
They had been making dinner, and she had mentioned something about the wind picking up and the temperature dropping. He had started making erotic recommendations about how they could stay warm. At first she had laughed and said that she didn’t think her husband would think much of that. She started to worry when he said that he didn’t give a damn what her husband thought about it and he would never have to know. Then she got serious. She made it very clear that she didn’t have any intention of sleeping with him, ever. He made it very clear that he was only mildly concerned with her intentions. So, she made him more concerned with them by supplying him with a swift knee to the testicles followed by a head butt. It ended there. Needless to say, they didn’t talk much through dinner. She had barely slept that night, worried that he would try something again by breaking into her tent. Thankfully, he wasn’t that despicable. Or at least, that’s not how he chose to demonstrate how despicable he really was.
When she had woken up the next morning, her tent was alone in the woods. Her partner was gone, along with all the topo-maps and guidebooks for the area, as well as the compass. She had had her own compass at the start of the trip, she never traveled without one; but her partner had dropped his off a 300 foot cliff earlier on, and they had been sharing since then. All she had left was her climbing gear, her rope, her personal supplies and the food and water she had been carrying in her pack. Plenty to survive on in the woods for a week or so, but with no way to know where she was or where she was going.
As she mentally recapped the last week’s events, she unclasped her snow shoes from the outside of her pack and attached them to her boots. Slowly she began making her way to what looked from here to be the edge of the avalanche field. She could still see the giant pine that she had planned to climb, and some of the trees around it still stood as well. She must have been very close to the edge of the avalanche for everything here to have fared so well. After a 15 minute trek she reached the edge of the avalanche field and was on solid ground once more. After removing her snow shoes and reattaching them to her pack, she started downhill, once more determined to find another tree to use to check her bearings.
After a while, she found an appropriate pine. She once more stripped off her gloves (her fingers were slowly and painfully regaining some feeling), put on her harness and left her pack at the base of the tree. This pine wasn’t as large as its giant cousin had been, but it was large enough, and its base wasn’t covered in six feet of snow, so she could actually get some purchase on it from the ground. She started the laborious climb up, trailing a rope behind her in order to rappel back down, and she gradually made it to the first branches. Once in the branches the climbing became easier, and she was able to secure herself to the branches while resting. When she was about 70 feet up and clear of most of the trees surrounding her, she took a good look at the surrounding valley.
She could see a giant white swathe where the avalanche had fallen, and she could see the ancient pine she had intended to climb earlier. Down in the valley she could see a small reflective line snaking through the trees and meadows, which she took to be the river. Along it, she could see a thin black line. So, there was a road down there. She tried to keep down her excitement as she assessed the obstacles between her and her goal. From the features that she could see, it looked like the way down with the lowest gradient started about half a mile to her left. From there she should be able to descend to the valley without running in to any giant cliff faces. She checked again to be sure, but everything to the right seemed steeper, and she could even see what looked like a sharp drop-off not too far away from her in that direction. Left it was then. From what she could see, it was about 8 miles overland to the valley floor.
She hiked all day and stopped at sunset. From what she could tell she had made it about half way from the tree to the valley floor. Normally, hiking with trails, she would have made it at least twice that far in a day’s hike, but the uneven terrain and the occasional obstacles that had to be circumvented made the going slower than usual. As the sun dropped behind the mountains, she prepared to make camp. The day’s hike had returned the life to all of her extremities, and she smiled as she flexed her toes and fingers and felt the warmth running through them. She ate some energy gel as an appetizer just to keep her warm while the water was boiling. Luckily the bastard hadn’t taken the mac and cheese. Easily-digested carbohydrates were exactly what she needed right now. She had just enough energy left after dinner to struggle with her tent and unroll her sleeping bag; once her head hit the down, she was on the far side of consciousness.
She woke up to darkness, and the sound of metal on metal and nylon rubbing against fleece. Or, was that… FUR? Crap. In her hurry to go to sleep last night she hadn’t put away the dishes or hung up her pack. She slowly unzipped the window flap on her tent and held her breath as she waited to confirm her suspicions.
A large and curious black bear was rummaging through what was left of her food stores. “How could I have been so stupid?” was her only thought. Well, extreme exhaustion and frustration were pretty good excuses in this case. But, that didn’t change the facts. A black bear was eating her provisions. “This can’t be happening to me. Seriously, this only happens in movies. This much crap doesn’t happen to just one person in less than 24 hours.”
There is nothing to do in this situation but to sit very quietly in your tent while the bear eats all of your food, anything else is just tempting fate. However, if the bear takes an interest in you and your tent, then you have other problems.
She had never felt safe sleeping in trees. She was sure she would just roll out of them. But, she was still exhausted and she was still hiding from the bear. Not that black bears couldn’t climb trees, but she hoped that it would be too lazy to come after her there and be more content with her food and her tent. At least she had salvaged her sleeping bag.
So it was, she met the dawn half asleep, 15 feet up a pine tree, cursing almost everything in nature and particularly bears. Once the sun had shed enough warmth to warm up her limbs, she shed her sleeping bag and followed it down to the ground.
After an hour of reassembling what little was left of her belongings into a makeshift sack made out of her sleeping bag, she headed off again, eager to finish the last 4 miles of her trek to the road and civilization.
It was late afternoon when she reached the winding river that split the valley. She was dismayed to note that, at least at the point where she had come to it, the river was between her and the road. However, after all that she had gone through so far, fording the river didn’t seem like much of a problem. It was relatively wide, but not terribly deep, and she was fairly confident that she could cross it without too much trouble.
She had forgotten just how cold snow melt was. She hadn’t even fully appreciated it when she had gotten her wool- and boot-clad feet into it and started crossing. But she had enjoyed the full effect when she tripped over a submerged log and tumbled headlong into the swift moving water. She managed to lodge herself against a rock a little way down stream and succeeded in righting herself, but she had lost her makeshift pack and was now soaked from head to toe. She hurried to get herself to the other side so she could keep moving quickly and start to warm up; she didn’t need to add hypothermia to her list of woes.
Fortunately, getting to the opposite bank went smoothly after that, and she had little trouble warming up once she got to dry land. However, to stay warm she had to keep moving. All of her clothing was either wool or synthetic so it would continue to insulate even though it was wet, but she had to keep producing body heat in order to enjoy the benefits of that insulation. She soon found easy motivation to keep moving.
Black pavement glistened up at her in the sun. Her smile glistened back at it. A two lane highway was sure to have traffic on it sometime in the near future. All she had to do was wait. In order to keep from freezing to death, she would keep walking while she waited. She couldn’t remember which direction the nearest town was, but she decided to head south along the highway just because it made her think of warmer climates.
After being passed by a few cars whose drivers seemed to think she was crazy, she had her first bit of true luck in this debacle since surviving the avalanche itself. It came in the form of a ranger truck headed to a ranger station.
Her description had been submitted that morning as a missing climber. She and her partner had filed their itinerary with the local ranger station prior starting their trek, including brief physical descriptions of themselves, and when the avalanche was reported by a local woodsman they had immediately sent out a search party, but had expected her and her partner to be beyond salvage. As she learnt on the drive to the ranger station, they had been half right. Her climbing partner’s body had been found on the opposite side of the avalanche field from where she had climbed her way out.
She spent the next 24 hours pampered with warm blankets, hot cocoa, warm food and copies of National Geographic from all the rangers at the station. She also enjoyed a hot shower and some clean, dry clothes. Plus, a few kind souls had donated some climbing gear to her once they heard that she had lost all of hers in her numerous misfortunes. Finally, her husband showed up to take her home.
On the flight back, her husband asked her what exactly had happened. She had been dying to tell someone, dying to rant and scream, dying to have someone agree with her about what a son of a bitch her climbing partner was, right up until the ride to the ranger station. Now, she fumbled for a response but only came up with “we had a disagreement and got separated. Then, the avalanche killed him.”
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