Brad Thor - Blowback

As he walked, large sheets of crisp, ice-laden snow cracked and broke away beneath his crampons. The pop, as every footfall punched its way through the crusty snow, sounded like gunfire and could be heard well above the roar of the wind. Harvath looked back more than once, just to make sure Jillian was keeping a tight grip on his safety line.

Using the avalanche probe to test the stability of the shelf in front of him, he took his steps one painfully slow foot at a time. It was like climbing up the side of a slick, steeply pitched, snow-covered roof. With the sharp teeth of his crampons aiding his climb, Harvath was more concerned about the entire shelf dropping away beneath him than he was about losing his footing. As he continued to move forward, he tried not to think about it.

He developed a steady rhythm as he planted his avalanche pole, then took a step, then planted his avalanche pole and took a step. It was almost hypnotic, and Harvath literally had to shake his head to keep his mind focused on what he was doing. When he finally reached the shelf’s peak, he stopped and looked around as best he could through the increasing snow. Mount Viso towered high above while the other side of the shelf appeared to run steeply downhill into a large ice field far below.

Harvath had explained to Jillian that when and if he signaled, it was okay for her to follow him out onto the shelf; she should untie the loops of rope from around her waist and follow exactly in his footsteps. Giving her the signal, he watched as she removed the rope and coiled the extra loops on the ground where they wouldn’t get tangled with her own. Then, like a tightrope walker, she carefully began placing one foot in front of the other and made her way toward him.

She was doing great and was about halfway across the shelf when Harvath heard a series of rumbling noises that sounded like three mortars being loosed. Jillian heard it too and immediately stopped, frozen in Harvath’s tracks. For a moment, he thought it might have been thunder, but he knew it wasn’t. Thunder came from over your head, not below your feet. For the moment, there was nothing but silence. Even the wind and snow seemed to have died away.

Harvath stood completely still for several seconds, as his ears strained to pick up any further sound, but there was nothing other than his own shallow breathing. After several seconds more, he signaled for Jillian to start moving forward again, slowly.

One step. Two steps. So far so good. But three steps later, the shelf began to tremble and made a terrible groaning noise. Pieces of it splintered as if a giant hand was pushing down on it from above. Harvath yelled for her to lie spread-eagle and distribute her weight evenly across the snow, but Jillian couldn’t hear him above the noise. Suddenly, the shelf cracked apart and collapsed inward, completely disappearing from sight and taking Jillian Alcott along with it.

As the ice shelf caved in, there was nothing Harvath could do to save her. Jillian was too far away. It was like watching someone fall through a frozen lake. As her screams echoed off the side of the mountain, Harvath was tempted to look back, but his instincts had taken over and he was totally focused on saving himself.

Flattening his body against the upper peak of the shelf, Harvath slid his ice axes out from their holsters and swung them, along with his crampons, into the ice as hard as he could. Behind him, he could hear the sickening sound of the shelf as it wrenched the rest of the way away and collapsed into the chasm below. At least twenty feet out from the face of the mountain, Harvath said a silent prayer that the receding hunks of ice and snow wouldn’t drag his safety line, and him, down into the frozen void.

He lay there waiting to be yanked off at any moment, but the moment never came. As the thunderous roar of the collapsing shelf subsided, Harvath began to entertain the guilty thought that for the umpteenth time in his life, he had cheated death.

With his hands beginning to ache from the death grip he had on his axes, he knew he needed to come up with some sort of a plan, the crux of which had to be getting to Jillian to see if she was still alive.

Looking down, Harvath saw that only about two and a half feet of shelf still remained below him. From the edge of it to the face of Mount Viso, where they had rappelled down with their first set of ropes, was about eighteen feet. The shelf which Harvath had crossed, and which had swallowed up Jillian, had been nothing more than a fragile bridge of ice and snow that covered over the entrance to a deep cavern of blue-green ice. Even though his anchor was firmly established on the far mountain wall, using his rope to swing out over the open expanse, Tarzan-style, was not the best of ideas. Eighteen feet might not seem like much, but it was plenty of distance in which to pick up a full head of steam and slam into the other side. He immediately struck it from his list of possible options.

Ice chasms in general were like a big V, wide at the top and progressively narrower as you got toward the bottom. If one were to imagine a huge triangle with its point downward, it would form a pretty good picture of what things had looked like before the shelf had collapsed. Harvath now stood at the top of the chasm looking across to where his rope was anchored on the other side. Since swinging across was out of the question, the only way he could go was down. The problem, though, was that if he established another set of anchor points on this side, when he wanted to climb back up he’d still be on the wrong side of the cavern with no way to get across. There was no telling what condition Jillian was in. He needed to figure something out quickly. Finally, Harvath had an idea.

After pulling up the balance of his rope from where it had fallen into the cavern, Harvath set new anchor points in the ice above him. Confident that they were secure, he tied a small loop in a portion of the rope that led back across the chasm toward Mount Viso and lay between his two sets of anchor points. Then, after attaching an extra carabiner to the loop of rope, he unslung his pack and removed only the most essential items. The key was to leave as much weight in the pack as possible. It was essential for his eventual ascent that it weigh more than the remainder of the line. The few items he needed to have with him he stuffed inside his parka and then attached the pack itself to the carabiner.

Having tested the anchor points to make sure they would hold his weight, Harvath holstered his ice axes and began his descent. With every crack and pop of ice, he immediately froze. There was no telling how stable the remaining portion of the shelf above him was. If it collapsed, he’d be crushed beneath it, and if the ice around his pitons gave way, he’d be set loose on an unstoppable trajectory straight at the wall of ice on the other side.

Inch by inch, Harvath played out the rope, trying to judge how much further he had to go. Crystals of snow hung in the air, obscuring everything from view. Twenty feet, forty feet, fifty-soon Harvath began to lose all concept of how far he had rappelled. His muscles ached more from the careful, measured descent than if he had been tackling it at regular speed, but he knew all too well that regular speed was only advisable under perfect conditions. What he now found himself in were definitely less than perfect conditions.

Harvath needed to take a breather, just for a moment, and as he sat back in his harness, he contemplated calling out for Jillian. The upside of the idea was that if she was alive and could call back to him, he’d be able to get a fix on her location. The downside was that the vibrations from his shout could very well bring the remainder of the shelf crashing down on top of him. Harvath decided it was best to err on the side of caution and held back any yelling for the time being.