West Wall

　

　

Schoeck’s wife, Tiara, met him at the airport in Denver. At first, she didn’t recognize him. Schoeck was in a wheelchair and the tip of his nose was black. Bristly whiskers covered his face and throat and he looked like an old man, shivering a little and draped in clothing that was far too large for him. When he rose from the wheelchair, Schoeck winced with pain and staggered. His left foot was wrapped in surgical gauze and there were bulbous dressings on the tips of three middle fingers on his right hand. Tiara glared at him. Schoeck’s face was vacant and exhausted, his yellowish skin wind-burned around his eyes, and he seemed disoriented, not yet ready to recognize Tiara where she stood among the ticketed passengers at the jetway, her gate pass clutched in her fingers.

The flight was thirty hours by air from Kathmandu to Denver via Dubai and Chicago – more than forty hours traveling all told and Schoeck’s joints felt fused, wrapped in tight ligatures of scar tissue. He sat back down in his wheelchair, clutching the pack containing his medication in his lap.

Tiara took several deep breaths. Her eyes were burning and she brushed at them. Then, she smiled blandly in Schoeck’s direction, waiting for him to notice her, but not advancing to where he had been set in his wheelchair to the side of the jet-way by the steward. Schoeck tilted his head to acknowledge that he saw her, twisted his withered blackish lips into a smile, and, then, visibly gathering all his strength, tried to stand once more. His body was top-heavy, uneven, asymmetrical. Tiara embraced him forcing him back into the wheelchair.

They went to the baggage claim. She pushed the wheelchair. In the baggage claim, the gear from the expedition was set next to the moving carrousel. Schoeck insisted on standing and, as he hobbled back and forth from the carrousel, helping her collect the big, brightly colored bags, his strength seemed to improve and he was steadier on his feet. He had shrunken and some of the big packs spinning by on the conveyor seemed to be larger than he was. Tiara had parked the car in short-term lot, close to where the moving walkways disgorged people from the terminals into mazes of underground passageways leading to the various lots. The weather was cool and clear and Schoeck waited in the car for Tiara to hike back to the baggage claim for the rest of the expedition gear. It took her several trips, although she used a cart to transport the equipment, and, of course, when she was apart from him, she cursed Schoeck and the Himalayas and the corpses lying in the snow at 8000 meters and Mount Everest itself. But she was careful to show no sign of her anger to the revenant, the wounded man resting in the Landrover like a frail wraith.

Schoeck slept most of the way to Telluride. The mountains were draped in clouds and the deep stony valleys were wet. Schoeck growled sometimes in his sleep and cried-out.

Things had not gone well on Everest. A windstorm trapped Schoeck’s party just below the Second Step on the southeast ridge above 8400 meters. The climbers bivouacked in a unprepossessing and gusty couloir. The snow-filled ravine was decorated by two corpses, one of them bedded face-down next to three discarded oxygen bottles, the other leaning against a boulder with his mummified chin pointing upward to the step and the summit. The corpses were clad in bright yellow and orange jackets and their boots were both neon blue. No one in Schoeck’s party knew the names of the dead men. No matter how intense the gale, the vortices of snow in the couloir did not cover the corpses or disguise them in any way – probably, the men had died of exhaustion in places where the intensity of the wind was less and this accounted for the bodies persisting unconcealed notwithstanding the snow whirling in the air.

Schoeck and his comrades remained in the ravine for three days, huddled in their orange tents, fabric ballooning with sudden gusts of wind. In the Death Zone, 8000 calories of food intake are required daily simply to support metabolisms stressed by the high altitude – the most that Schoeck and his fellow climbers could consume per day was 1500 calories. As a result, their bodies were devouring themselves, eating muscle mass to keep heart and lungs operating. One of the men had a retinal hemorrhage in his left eye and frost bite was worrying their toes and fingers.

Unable to go up or down, Schoeck’s party waited out the storm. When they crept out of their tents, the brightly colored corpses seemed to beckon and wave to them. On the morning of the third day, the wind shifted a little and snow sifted down from the limestone ledges, dry as powder, and, then, there was a third corpse exposed, a climber in striped gear colored like a tropical fish squatting at the head of the coulee. The climbers said that it was strange that they had not seen the third dead body before this moment. But altitude sickness clouded their minds and the progression of light and darkness was confused – some nights seeming to last for several days and others passing in the wink of an eye.

On the fourth day, a respite in the gale allowed them to stumble up the ravine, past the brightly dressed corpse. The position of the climber seemed to have changed, as if the body had rolled down the snowy bank to sprawl across the center of the ravine.

"We ought to move him," someone suggested.

"He’s Chinese," one of the other climbers said.

They shrugged and walked past the dead man, ascending from the couloir along a ragged, yellowish ledge that led up to the small terrace below the Second Step. A decade before a Chinese expedition had installed a fifty-foot aluminum ladder bolted to rock and pitched against the top of the Step. The sliver of ladder was vibrating like a tuning fork in the wind, the whole jagged cliff exposed to the hurricane.

"It can’t be climbed," Schoeck said. They prayed for a half-hour to the god of the mountain. The wind howled, shrieking over the rock faces tottering overhead.

"We have to get down," one of the Sherpas said.

They slid back down the coulee. The third dead man now lay on his belly as if he were doing a breast-stroke in the deep snow.

At a lower elevation, below 6000 meters, Schoeck’s party met some climbers ascending the Rongbuk glacier. These climbers said that a Chinese mountaineer was lost near the summit and presumed dead.

Schoeck said: "We maybe saw him."

"He was dead?"

Schoeck didn’t answer. He looked up at the peak with the jet stream blowing a plume of snow like an acetylene torch at the summit.

"I think so," Schoeck said.

He slept for half a week in his bed in Telluride. Then, he sat on his deck looking up at the wall of mountains and the silvery cascades falling from them. His wife brought him noxious-tasting protein malts, the sort of thing best consumed through a gastric feeding tube. He tried a little walking, first in town, and, then, above Telluride in the alpine meadows fresh with columbine. His wife said that he was depressed and that he should seek professional assistance. She asked him whether he wanted to sample her Zoloft but Schoeck said no, that he was simply exhausted, and, that, soon enough, he would recover.

As the mountains darkened in the evening, he thought about their deadly heights. He drank Captain Morgan rum before going to bed, hoping that nightmares would not afflict him.

Walking in the meadows wasn’t sufficiently strenuous. When the amputations on his feet healed, he began to jog a little. He ran cautiously, as if afraid that he would slip and fall. After a month, Schoeck’s partner at the rock-climbing school came to visit him and said that he should come back to work.

"I don’t know if I can climb any more," Schoeck said.

On the weekend, Schoeck went with his partner to the Ilium boulders and they worked-out on the big rocks. There were other climbers among the trees, groups of them surrounding the rocks and spotting for the people ascending the boulders. The brightly colored crash pads spread below the big fists of the rocks reminded Schoeck of the lost climbers on Everest and he looked away from them. Schoeck placed himself inside a hollow at the base of one of the boulders, a place that required that he navigate an overhang to reach the top of the rock. He sat for awhile with his buttocks in the pine needles, the big rock as serene as a grazing cow – a cave-like coolness came from within the hollow in the stone. Schoeck reached out and seized the jagged edge of the overhang, pulling himself upward off the ground. "Spot me," Schoeck said to his partner who was chalking his own fingers and palms. To his surprise, the muscle-memory returned and his upper body strength was sufficient for him to raise his weight up around the bend in the stone. Some the pine needles adhered to the back of his trousers. He hauled himself over the out-thrust edge of rock, then, climbed quickly to the pinnacle about twenty feet above.

"I still can’t feel anything in the tips of my fingers," Schoeck said.

He slid down the back of the rock.

Schoeck worked a few other problems in the boulder-field. He told his partner that it felt good to be climbing again and that, perhaps, he would try something more challenging before the end of the month.

"I need to get you back to work," his partner said.

Schoeck’s father was a ski-instructor and for years had worked at the resorts near Taos. There had been a divorce when Schoeck was in High School and he was estranged from his father. The old man had cancer and Schoeck had planned his climb on Mount Everest so that he could be out of the country when his father died. But the old man rallied and was still alive when Schoeck returned from the Himalayas. The old man’s girlfriend sent him a message on Facebook that the old man was doing poorly, had entered hospice care in Alamosa, and that it would be a good thing for Schoeck to visit him before the end came.

To the east of Alamosa, rising over the San Miguel valley, there is a big mountain. After his parents divorced, Schoeck had lived for a year with his grandmother in Alamosa. During that time, he had climbed the west wall of the mountain looming over the valley. The mountain was privately owned and, apparently, the center of controversy between local ranchers and the man who held title to the peak. Schoeck recalled that he had climbed the big escarpment on the west face of the mountain with a couple of high school buddies. On the summit, they had sat for an hour drinking schnaps and, then, descended the mountain more than half-drunk. Schoeck recalled the feeling of power and strength that he had felt as they climbed down off the summit, watching for cowboys or men on jeeps or ATVs who might detain them for trespassing. They slid and dived and jogged downhill, effortlessly slipping over the cliffs, and, it seemed, that nothing was beyond their abilities. A figure on horseback approached them as they hiked out of an arroyo, but they were fast and elusive and the cowboy wasn’t able to catch them. At the base of the peak, among the forests and the narrow, stony defiles, they reached a logging road that seemed unfamiliar to them – their route down from the mountain was different from the way upward and they were lost in the foothills. It took them much longer to locate their jeep, parked in a little box canyon and hidden among the aspens, then, it required for them to ascend the great stone wall and reach the mountain’s top and they didn’t reach the main highway until late at night. But the day had been a success, not the least, their escape from the cowboy, and they vowed to return to the mountain. But, of course, they did not come back.

Schoeck told his partner that he was going to do some solo climbing, nothing complicated or tricky, a small wall that you could summit in a half-day. He said that he was planning to visit his father in the hospice in Alamosa and, then, the next day would climb the western escarpment of Mount Blanca.

"Be careful, dude," his partner told him.

"It’s an easy climb," Schoeck said.

Schoeck didn’t recognize his father in the old man crumpled-up in the wheelchair at the nursing home. There was no trace of the brash, hard man that Schoeck had known when he was younger. Schoeck’s father had faded – his eyes were no longer blue but some indeterminate slate color and his voice had lost its edge, fogged with phlegm into a whisper. Schoeck sat beside him for an hour and talked about mountains that they both had loved. Leaving, he shook his father’s hand and tried to hug him, but the old man pulled away.

There was a Country Inn on the edge of town. Schoeck checked into a room with a mural of the Maroon Bells on the wall. The room smelled of disinfectant and sun tan lotion. He laid out his gear on the second double-bed in the room, testing the knots and checking his carabiners. It was a new rope and Schoeck let it glide smooth as silk between his fingers, inspecting for defects.

He watched TV but wasn’t tired. When he tried to sleep, he kept visualizing the bivouac beneath the Second Step on Everest and was unable to rest. After two-o’clock in the morning, Schoeck gathered up his gear, coiled the rope in its vinyl bag and counted out the hardware – pitons, ‘biners, ascenders and descenders. He went to his jeep and drove to the municipal park, a grove of cottonwood trees caught in a loop of the river. The water smelled icy in the darkness, like the high mountains, and it skidded down hill through a shallow stony trough. The white water was phosphorescent in the darkness and the sound of the cascade was soothing to Schoeck – the last police patrol for kids making out in the park had passed-by an hour earlier, and the little lane between the picnic tables and the fire-pits was deserted. Schoeck always slept better in his jeep. It reminded him of the old days, before he was married, when he lived out of his pick-up truck.

A couple hours before dawn, Schoeck drove out to the mountains. He found a jeep trail on the back side of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, a ragged, dismal track that led over some high desert to a shallow canyon. The canyon was a watercourse dry most of the year and it could be navigated uphill, zigzagging around rock falls to a small, muddy lagoon where the stream trickling off the big mountain ended. There was another trail leading upward from the lagoon and it was steep, but passable to about 10,800 feet. At that point, Schoeck encountered a fence with no-trespassing signs at intervals. He wiggled between a couple strands in the barb wire and climbed a game trail switchbacking up to a dark, tilted boulder field. Although the sun had risen, it was dark on the west side of the mountain and cold, an immense ominous shadow spreading out behind Schoeck so that the darkness almost touched the skirts of the pale white sands in the National Monument.

Schoeck walked between boulders, following instructions from an internet site that he had printed. The landmarks described on the map correlated to real places – he found the cairn and, then, the dead tree protruding like a lance from a boulder and, at last, he reached the talus field beneath the big wall. The fallen rocks were small, ankle-twisters, and he scrambled upward carefully. The path became steeper and, then, he was climbing up chilly, moist slabs of tilted rock. Imperceptibly, the incline increased and, after an hour, Schoeck found that he was mostly vertical, moving from hold to hold on a rock pitch that was accommodating – hand and toe-holds where he expected them, and, sometimes, ladder like ripples in the stone.

After ninety minutes, Schoeck startled a cliff-dwelling bird and recoiled as its wings clipped across his face. He lost his grip momentarily and slid a little on the pitch. He looked down and saw that he was almost a thousand feet above the talus slope and too high to continue free soloing. He slipped into a crevasse a few feet away, anchored himself, and, then, removed his rope and gear from his pack. Then, he climbed upward, self-belaying with two-point anchors. The ascent was now much slower, and more technical, Schoeck climbing up to lead from the high-point, and, then, descending to remove the pitons below. The rock remained generous, pocked with hand-holds and foot grips, and he thought that he could have free-soloed without much difficulty or fear, but, of course, he was alone and there was no point in demonstrating his courage, and his up and down motion over the cliff face afforded a kind of familiarity to the big rock wall.

The sunlight skimmed over the cathedral-like height overhead and it was warm on the rock, the mountain seeming to breathe slightly with convection currents rising from the stone. Sometimes, he encountered dark vents in the mountain and could smell its wet innards, a muddy, almost fecal odor from inside the rock. It was all fine and effortless and he seemed to be swimming in the air.

Then, a shadow fell over him. He looked over his shoulder and saw that a fat, greasy-looking thunderhead was rolling over the sand dunes. Schoeck was about six-hundred feet below the escarpment’s rim and he thought that, perhaps, he should abandon his roped climbing and hurry up to the mountain’s summit. But that would be dangerous, potentially lethal, if the storm smashed onto the cliff while he was exposed. So he chalked his fingers again, and continued his way up and down the cliff.

A splash of water landed on his face. Then, another cold raindrop lit up the back of his neck. He looked for a place to anchor himself and saw vee-shaped gouge in the cliff face, a narrow trough that ended on a terrace. The terrace was corniced over the pitch and there seemed to be some trash on its edge.

A spray of water blinded him for a moment and, so, Schoeck swiftly made the traverse over the ledge extruding from the cliff like half-shattered limestone balcony.

The trash on the edge of the terrace was a corpse. The body was cocooned in a striped climbing suit. One of corpse’s Cordura boots was knocked off and the man’s foot wrapped in a woolen sock was exposed. Somehow, the man’s aviator-style glasses had remained on his head, but birds had dislodged them so that the dark lenses were perpendicular to his face. The climber’s couloir harness was tangled on a stalagmite-shaped bulge of stone and the corpse’s right arm, disarticulated at the shoulder hung down, pointing into the abyss.

Schoeck rubbed at his eyes and watched as water showered down, bathing the corpse so that it’s dangling arm wavered in the air, made animate by the impact of the cascade sliding down the groove in the cliff. Hurriedly, Schoeck anchored himself, tapping a couple of pitons into the wet rock. Somewhere the wind moaned, but on the cliff-face it was still, water striking down from the heights in vertical blasts.

"Dude," Schoeck said, "I thought we left you on Everest."

The corpse made a hole in the landscape. Water dowsed the dead body and wet its withered lips.

"You’re not supposed to be here," Schoeck told the dead man.

He felt foolish talking to a corpse and the words echoed back to him: "You’re not supposed to be here."

Schoeck huddled against the cliff-face. Soon enough, he was soaked. He thought that he should cut the corpse loose and send it in free-fall down the pitch. The body was a couple yards from him and the intervening ledge looked questionable, intricate with fissures and facets of stone tilting sharply down into empty air and, so, there was nothing that he could do. He rotated his body away from the dead man in the striped suit and looked across the face the great wall, glacier-gouged with embedded columns of rock at intervals at stately intervals, the air buzzing with falling rain.

The storm passed in 45 minutes and, after the rain, the air felt dryer and less charged with energy.

Schoeck looked up and saw the rock reaching upward like an open hand to the precipice two-hundred yards above. The channels in the rock were still alive with snake-like motion, swift surges of water twisting and corkscrewing downward. Thunder sounded in a remote precinct of the mountain.

"See you later," Schoeck said to the dead body.

He began to descend the wet and slippery cliff face. The sun appeared overhead and dried the stone and, as he climbed downward, he seemed to be held in the mountain’s embrace.

When he reached his jeep, it was warm but his hands were shaking. He sat for a few minutes until the trembling subsided. The inside of his jeep smelled of crushed juniper berries and a heavy, sweat odor like wet dog.

In Telluride, Schoeck’s partner asked him about the climb.

"I didn’t make the top," Schoeck said. "I got caught in a thunderstorm."

"Bummer," Schoeck’s partner said.

Schoeck didn’t see any reason to mention the dead man hanging in his girdle of couloir harness on the cliff.

"No," Schoeck said. "It was a good climb."