SUMMITING

In the fall of his thirty third year he realized that he had unequivocally bottomed out his life.

The fibrous torn flesh of the pine bough felt pulpy in his hands and he pulled hard on it to strip it from the front forks of the motorcycle. It was mid-day and he had just then risen and his head hurt and for the life of him he could not remember how the pine bough got there. He could only assume that he had driven through a tree returning from the bar the night before. You've been drinking too much, he told himself.

He decided on Assinaboine because it was a climb that he had thought through the logistics of sometime in the past. One of numerous ideas he ran through in fine detail, lying recumbent, the back of his right hand set on his forehead, sleep unattainable. All the pieces of equipment considered, and reconsidered. His itinerary analyzed 'til he knew the best hour to start, and at which time in the day the threatened passages would be the safest. He'd often rise and write down his conclusions for fear of losing them in sleep.  Later, years after the climb, when he was married again, he realized that he had gone to Assinaboine because of its shape. That the perfection of its pyramid and absolute definition of the summit presented something that he needed. With decision came a pleasant and uncluttered calm and in this calm he set about preparing for the climb.

Opposite his cabin, the autumnal sun reached weakly through steel gray clouds and over the quadripartite shadowed summits of Mt Loughheed. Holding the ice axe tight between the underside of his thigh and the brown plastic lawn chair he dragged the mill bastard file across its chiseled pick and watched the fillings fall heavily to accumulate like dust on the dying grass between his feet. The newborn face of the metal glowed like quicksilver. Through his jeans he felt the metal heat up with each rasping pass of the file. He mused on the birthing of this heat in metal and friction and chemistry; and of its conduction, and absorption, inside his flesh.

One half hour before dawn, the following day, he drove up and out of the Bow Valley and onto the Spray Trail. The blacktop turned to gravel road and he rumbled along its serpentine curves, the truck in second gear, the road itself bulldozed across ridges and gulleys to maintain a steep and constant grade. He rested a go-cup atop his right thigh occasionally drawing liberal swallows or the hot and leathery tasting coffee. A number of the gulleys were avalanche tracks, sporadically active in this low snow fall area, occasionally running airborne from atop thousand foot cliffs, their base fully three hundred meters of slope above the road. He remembered an avalanche that had come down in the night several years earlier. It had crossed the road and broad sided a Ford Bronco moronically parked in the path, its passengers and driver allegedly out taking a piss, actually smoking a joint, miraculously out of the track and safe. The Bronco had been flung through the guardrail and tumbled down slope, its high side buried to the roof. He had seen it there on one of his runs up the road, runs of fifteen hundred feet elevation gain over five miles. A run he'd made often when he used to live in town, before his separation.

Passing now he felt no different than the drunks who had lost their truck to the snow. He laughed aloud at himself and swallowed more of the coffee. To the east the dawn had lifted a line of scarlet across the horizon. A horizon drawn and contained between the dark cliffs of Grotto and Pigeon Mountains.  One half an hour later he turned from the main road and drove on towards the Bryant Creek trail head. The blocky mass of Commonwealth Peak passed the driver's side window, its gray strata now well lit in the chromey hue of the cloudless October dawn.

He strode along the maintained trail carrying thirty five pounds on his back, his ice axes and crampons secured to the back panel of the pack. Every thirty meters, and before each blind corner or rise, he shouted out, "HOKE-AH HEY!" to alert any bears of his presence.  Mid-day he was traversing his sixteenth kilometer and he was unaware of the fact that he had stopped calling out in the kilometer before. He had stepped into the vault of his mind to handle, once again, his worn thoughts on the failure of his marriage. His body ground on up the trail under the guidance of his mammalian instincts. A grizzly rearing up on the trail grabbed his attention.  "Oh fuck" escaped his lips and for one instant he froze through in shock and in awe at the overpowering majesty of her stature. Her height one head taller than his, her chest belled out and fully as wide as the door to his cabin, the bulk of her accentuated by the blackening of her dun coat atop her shoulders and hips, the clustering of her hair into spikes there.  Her skull so broad and roundly carpeted in the lush deep and dense symmetry of her coat, the round ears too much like a teddy bear's to be real. Her head faced him squarely and he could see the glassy black sheen on her nostrils as they reached to take his scent. Her paws hung flipper like from limp wrists;  forelegs extended and revealing a thickness and power somehow excessive for this world. Curling from her paws where claws the length of his fingers and jaundiced in colour like teeth too long clouded in the smoke of tobacco. Comically, twin cubs had reared from the low growth on each side of the trail, themselves perfect miniatures of the sow and as cute in their presence as she was horrifying in hers.
Then she dropped into her charge. He crumpled and sucked his knees to his chest and wrapped an arm around them and grabbed the back of his neck with the other. He tried to be smaller than his pack -the one thing shielding him from her.  The pounding of her run vibrated the ground under him as she closed and his body contracted harder of its own accord. She hit him and his lungs collapsed like a bladder punctured massively and instantaneously wilted. He saw black then flashes of spark blue and silver, like lightning striking inside his eyes. He heard the sickening tearing of nylon and her guttural growls and the muted thumps of his skull scraping across the earth. It felt to him that he'd been hit by a truck and was now being churned as the
undercarriage planed over him, rolling him easily, his mass inconsequential. Then all was still and she was off of him and her musky smell retreated and he smelt mud. Then he smelt his fear and his fear smelt musky like the smell of nocturnal mammals: martins and wolverines and fishers, and he knew that his fear was bleeding from his pours and especially it was bleeding from his armpits. He shook there on the ground as if he were hypothermic and in his shaking he became aware of how terrified his body had been.

He lay there for four and a half minutes, the raging of his breath quieted, he slowly opened his eyes. Initially he feared being hit again but eventually he knew that he was out of threat, that she and her little ones had gone. He also believed that he was OK. He knew that his hands and feet worked and he sensed no broken bones. But his left leg tightened when he rose and he was surprised to find a large and blood tacky rent in his pants and an avulsed flap of skin the size of a tea saucer on the outer thigh of that leg. The flap was gathered into several folds that looked, to him, like drapery and he found that similitude unnatural, like his failed flesh should look anything but orderly. Beneath the flap he saw blood pebbled with the small butter coloured mounds of the underlying tissue. Twin drag lines from her claws led into the wound and oozed a sluggish blood the colour of rich wine. He was balanced on his right leg and felt the spike of one of the ice axes tapping the back of that thigh as it swayed in its attachment loop. He knew that the shaft of the axe had torn free during the mauling and that the axe had dropped and inverted when he rose. He unshouldered his pack and it was indeed a sorry thing to see. Four long flayings opened one side and fluffy down feathers wafted from the lowest slash like dandelion seeds rising on the breeze. Symmetrical puncture holes the width of his hand pierced the top flap and upper shoulder of the pack. He inserted  the trigger and ring fingers of his left hand into two of the holes and realized that they were from her incisors. Then he saw a clump of her hair backed up onto
a crampon point  and looking for all the world like dead grass wrapped around a branch in the current of a mountain stream. He lifted the hair reverently and held it to the low October sun and saw the gold and blonde and hazel in it and he set it onto the bite mark atop the pack and opened the medicine pouch that hung from his neck and eased the hair into it. Then he sat facing the sun and he thanked his god for his life.

His left leg had cramped up and he hobbled to the creek with the aid of the ski poles he'd pulled from his pack and extended. At the creek he assembled his stove and bought the one litre pot to boil and dropped four betadine scrubs into it. Then he watched the tea coloured water simmer for another two minutes. Using sterile swabs and rubber gloves he cleaned the avulsion and boiled a second pot of betadine water and cleaned it again. He pulled the flap straight and fitted it back into place and secured its edges with steri-strips adhered to sun dried betadine that he'd swabbed across the edges of the wound. A 4x4 dressing covered the flap and set there as he shaved the hair from around its perimeter with a Wilkinson razor blade. He used the last of his betadine pads to wipe the shaved area then he carefully overlay the crosshatched dressing with a one centimeter square grid of narrow duct-tape strips then he framed the dressing with full-width strips of duct-tape that he'd perforated with a safety pin. He pressed the tape hard onto his thigh. The proximal edge of the dressing he wrapped with a tensor bandage that he passed clean round his thigh and he did the same at the distal edge. Lastly he swallowed the first pill of a seven day course of a broad spectrum antibiotic that he carried as part of his first aid kit and he sat on his pack and asked out to the whole world, and himself, and none present save for himself, well Pelletier, what in the hell are you going to do now?

Three kilometers further on he bed down beneath an englemann spruce at the base of Assinaboine Pass. The tears in his sleeping bag had been repaired with duct-tape that he'd carefully warmed up above the stove to make it stick better. Likewise the rips in his pack. He'd cooked his meal downwind and awkwardly wrestled his way fifteen feet up a tree to rig a pass over a branch with the only rope he was carrying -a fifty meter, 7.9mm, twin rope. Then he'd pulleyed his stove and food and utensils and pot into the tree.

The wounded leg burned incessantly and he knew the exact beat of his heart because each wave of blood throbbed through the wound like fresh fire and his breath came in shallow rapid draws and he clenched his teeth and groaned. Lying on his left side was impossible and he eventually settled on his right with his legs bent and his right supporting his left.

The first sun of the new day saw him limping over Assinaboine Pass, leaving tracks in the shallow and crusty snow that was the first snow that would stay the winter there. One half hour later he passed silent and unpeopled lodges above the northeast shore of Lake Magog. And despite his wound, and the burning pain and rigidity of it, he felt a genuine excitement on seeing the peak like, in some small way, hope had ignited inside his chest. Hope had not been in his chest for over a year.

Feeling the need to reduce the number of benighted climbers on the mountain the executive of the Alpine Club of Canada, in 1970, commissioned an architect to design a hut to sit at 8,900 feet, one and a half kilometers north-northwest of Mt Assinaboine. The bulging A-frame was prefabricated in Calgary in the early months of the next year. In July of that year the hut was disassembled and loaded onto a lowboy truck and driven, via a special opening, up the Spray Lake fire road to a staging area. A Bell 206 helicopter flew twelve volunteers
from the Alpine Club to the site then slung in all the pieces of the hut. By 1pm the next day the hut was erect and the work party began the long walk out Bryant Creek.

The hut bears the name of Robin C. Hind, born 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, an active mountain climbing pioneer from before the second world war who had a lifelong association with the Alpine Club and served as its president from 1964-65. He was a man who saw mountaineering evolve from a bowline tied around the waist with hemp rope as round as a shotgun shell to laser-cut, foam molded harnesses secured to twin perlon ropes the diameter of a ballpoint pen.

Johnny Pelletier arrived at the hut at midday and collected snow from firm drifts upwind from the hut and melted the snow on his stove and made minestrone soup and pasta and black tea with milk powder and sugar, then he slept. He slept through the afternoon and was shocked to see that it was 1:18am when he checked his watch. He lay awake for a long time and he tried to remember everything he could about the bear. He did not have to look far for his fear, it came to him immediately and he was taken aback by its intensity and he found that he had to maneuver by it to concentrate on her image, and her smell. At 5:47am he slept again.
All that day he rested and he maintained his wound and he prepared to climb. By midnight the air temperature had dropped to -21c and he knew this even from inside the hut because he'd awoke cold at 1am and had to pull his down jacket onto his legs like pants and close the hood of the mummy bag down over his head and cinch the face hole until only his mouth and nose were exposed.  He slept with his watch on top of his head and inside his touque so that the watch stayed warm and that he heard its alarm go off at 6am.

He'd set his stove up beside him and he now went about liberating his right hand to light it. The water that he'd left in the pot overnight had frozen to a centimeter and a half and he stabbed at the ice with the heel of the pot grabber to liberate some of the encased water. With the stove alight, and humming, and the pot atop it, he pulled his arm back into the bag and dozed until he heard the water boil.  An hour later he limped away from the hut towards the North Face and the cold was shocking and it forced him to move faster to stay warm. The beam of his head lamp bounced along like a buoy on a rough sea and there was no moon and the mass of the mountain was discernible because it created a black horizon in the stars and as he advanced on it he felt like he was being swallowed. Like the mountain was a black wave that was rearing and slowly breaking over him.

The dawn of that new day saw him perforating a perfect line of steps up the new snow that had been brazed hard into the corner of rock and ice that bordered and defined the North Face couloir. To an airborne witness -and there where none- he'd of looked microscopic, hard to find, a meager six feet of flesh and blood and heat clinging to two thousand three hundred seventy feet of frost-bound rock and brittle ice and polar cold snow. The cold felt liquid seeping from the crampon's steel into the toe cap of his boots. He'd stopped twice to swing his feet to force blood back to his toes and to windmill his arms to drive blood back to his fingers. He'd reached a stasis now by moving faster than he would if it were warmer; his feet and hands were warm but his torso was slick with sweat and it felt like a sauna was contained inside his capilene and pile and goretex. Just inside his shell cloth the heated humidity from his body met the arctic temperature of the air and frosted his outerwear to plates and hinges that were best described as armor. His left leg had bent reluctantly when he'd left the hut, now it had warmed up and he had to bring it to full contraction to feel any pain in it and he thought on what chemicals his body had released to dull the pain and allow the leg to work. Then he smelled the musk of her again, and the mud, he smelled the mud.

Sixty seven minutes after entering the gulley he crested out onto its broad left hand shoulder and he was amazed by the area of it, an island of relatively flat ground shelved onto the otherwise constant incline of the face. The light of the new day was well established then and he studied the ground above and discerned a slender and discontinuous gulley leading to a break in the Red Band five hundred feet above him. In a rising ascent to the left he made for that gulley line. Messner had once written of rhythm and Johnny Pelletier found
his in that gulley climbing in the pied triosieme position and stacking his ice tools one atop the other when there was enough of the firm neve to do so, and scratching them through to rest on rock edges underlying when the snow thinned to a fragile crust that often collapsed, like wafer, when he loaded it.

The Red Band is vertical and he climbed it via a chimney already choked with mushrooms of firm winter snow. He climbed slower there and cut back the mushrooms gradually for he feared one shearing free with enough mass to knock him off. Yet he felt solid in his bridging and immovable when braced foot to back in the feature. The climbing demanded more dexterity and contact force than he could manage in his thick gloves so he removed them and climbed in thinner gloves of wool and nylon that were cross hatched with a grid of rubber. His hands froze twice and twice he had to maintain his bridge and brace a shoulder and bring his frozen hands to his face and cup them over his mouth and blow life back into them. The band finished abruptly on an incut bench and to his delight a gulley presented itself above him and he saw that it contained ice and led to what he thought was the summit ridge line. You did that fine Pelletier, he said to the world you did that just fine. And then he howled and his howl was one of joy and his howl was the howl that alpinists have howled from the beginning and all men before alpinists who had linked pieces of terrain and found passage in that linkage ... a route.

The ice was brittle because of the cold and he shattered handfuls of it swinging his tools until they were secure, until the teeth of the picks bit into the ice. The gulley steepened the higher he climbed in it and towards the ridge line it cul-de-sacked against steep rock. He made two moves up the rock and knew that he was doing the wrong thing. C'mon Pelletier, no mistakes here. Don't you make any mistakes here. Down-climbing to the ice he placed two of the four ice screws that he carried and slung them together with a double length spectra sling, and carabiners, and he then clipped his leash into the focal point. Then he shucked off his pack and clipped it in too and dug out the twin rope and flaked it out to find its middle. He clipped the middle in with a locked carabiner and tied the two ends together and piled them into the pack in the throw-bag style. When about thirty feet of the doubled rope remained outside the pack he tied a two stranded overhand knot and clipped it into the locking carabiner on his harness. Then he dug the thin gloves out from inside his pile jacket and stuffed the thick gloves in there and started to climb. At the first opportunity he banged in one of his half dozen pitons and clipped it to the ropes with a sling and carabiners. Higher he placed one of his four nuts and pulled the rest of the rope from the pack and retied into the ends of the ropes.  Forty five feet higher the ropes came tight and he hammered in two more or his pitons and slotted in a #4 stopper in addition and anchored, then he untied from one of the rope ends and let it slither away down the face and he pulled on his end and after one hundred and fifty feet of gathering the other end of rope was in his gloved hands.  One more repetition of this system put him onto the permanent ice of the summit slopes and he placed a screw and clipped the rope ends to it and stood and cramponed off to the south and to the summit. It was 10:08 am and the air temperature was -28c but the radiant heat was incredible and he pushed back his hood and put his face to the sun and closed his eyes and enjoyed the heat on his face. Then he studied the view in all directions and noted peaks that he recognized on all horizons (later he calculated that he had one hundred seventy five miles of visibility). Standing there he felt like he could see a lifetime, or at least the remainder of a lifetime. Holding that thought he knelt to the aerated neve under his feet and went about trenching into it with the adze of his ice axe. When he'd dug down a foot he unzipped five layers of clothing and unslung his medicine pouch from his neck and placed it into the trench. It contained all the talismans that he had kept to his thirty third year including a golden wedding band and the guard hairs of the sow grizzly. He buried it and rose and cramponed away.

Twenty hours later, having bivouacked under the selfsame englemann spruce, and walking out Bryant Creek, he no longer shouted out his presence because he believed in his heart that she knew him now and that she felt no threat from him and that she would allow him to pass and continue on with his life.