Mourning Sun

We knew what was coming

Freed from behind the paywall

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We weren't yet up against it. But I think we knew it was coming. Scott and I had been climbing all night. It didn't make sense to stop and chop a shitty ledge from the hard, black ice. Or to wiggle our way into too-thin sleeping bags when we could warm ourselves with movement, and heat our hearts with risk. So when the sun disappeared there was no discussion. We were connected and each understood what needed to be done.

The route-finding was easy: upward. I brought a file to sharpen our tools and crampons but we didn't stop to use it. Our safety was in motion, and we ran up the ice as fast as we could. The cold first seeped and then carved into us. Thickening the oil, slowing the blood, weighing us down. Cores froze in the ice screws, leaving us with three usable ones — a long one for the anchor, one medium screw placed halfway up each pitch, and the other long one for the next belay. We smashed blunt steel into bullet-hard ice and the effort smashed our souls, bearing down, wearing us down, slowing the leader's progress until a call from the belayer below demanded he hurry as frostbite nipped at toes and nose and fingers.

The timing was right though. We spent the darkness climbing and just when the sky lightened past dusk the slope laid back and the surface softened. We were warmed by simple light, well before the sun's arrival. The water was gone or frozen in our bottles. We missed dinner and only the gels hadn't solidified. We squeezed enough of those down through the night to keep going, thankful for the caffeine to help us focus.

We crested the top of the north buttress, with the summit of Mount Hunter still 2000 higher. We hadn't been on ground this flat since two mornings ago and the relentless steep had worn us out. Here though we could relax, and rest, doze off while the stove hummed and we maybe heard voices or music coming from it. Fatigue-induced hallucinations. And that brought back an old inside joke ... "Do you hear that? The music, that band, do you hear it? There's somebody here." It was from 'Dig It', a Skinny Puppy track we both knew by heart, sampled from the Twilight Zone episode 'Elegy'. Whenever we heard voices coming from the stove — and it happened more than once — one of us would quote that.

We recovered a bit on the comparatively flat terrain, ate the dinner from the night before, briefly closed our eyes, then ate again. I mean, why carry it in the pack when we could carry it in out stomachs where it might do some good? That left us with two liters of water each and an inch of gas left in the fuel bottle, enough to suffer through another night if it came to that but it wouldn't. Because on the heels of that lovely sunrise was a storm, the sky already hazing over, wind kicking up, and we had spent enough luck in the night, and the day before so we laced up our boots, shouldered nearly empty packs and kept going.

Because the only way down was up.