CANADIAN ALPINIST EXPIRES FROM EXHAUSTION ON THE SEVENTH DAY OF ALPINE BINGE

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Canmore. Noted Canadian alpinist Barry Blanchard was having "too much fun" Wednesday when in the company of several of his "alpine" buddies Blanchard hooked an icicle with his ice axe and slowly rotated to face the buddies and said, to quote Toni Kurz, "I'm finished." Blanchard then slumped over limp and dead. One witness, and buddy, Steve House of Mazama Washington is quoted as saying, "The damn fool (Blanchard) just wouldn't take a rest. He'd been at it for a week, huge days, different partners -all of them beasts. We told him he was doing too much. Tried to reason with him, but he'd just say, "Hey man, you only turn 40 once."  It became like a mantra for him, "Hey man, you only turn 40 once."  Now he won't be turning 40.  Such a senseless waste of human life."

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Any climber who drives the Banff/Jasper Highway notices Howse Peak. The summit block breaking the skyline of the vast limestone walls that encompasses it. The NE Ridge falling plum from the bulwark summit and slicing forward like the cutting edge of a scythe. From 1981 to 1988 I watched Howse Peak in winter and I convinced myself that the ice systems on the East Face were too thin.

"I thought that the waterfalls would be too thin and if I tried to climb them I'd fail. I hate failing."
              The Beast Within
              Climbing #117

Given the fact that I've now climbed one of those ice lines, and knowing the limitations of the screws and tools we climbed with in '88, I think that I was right.

As of Sunday night, Mar 21, Scott, Steve and I had yet to decided if we were going to Howse Peak. Scott and Steve took off for some fun the next morning on the Stanley Headwall. They ended up climbing Nemesis after chunking some of the unfrozen and loose blocks from the dry-tool start to Suffer Machine (Teddy Bear's Picnic, M8). The weekend had been too hot, 18-20c, anything south facing had slid and the waterfall and mixed routes were suffering. On Sunday Catherine , Steve and I had rock climbed the 800í Kahl Wall on Mt. Yamnuska in t-shirts and we'd been perfectly comfortable.  The winter had been uncommonly mild and there was 50% more snow than usual. On the summit block of Howse the wind and snow and temperature had grown an incredible number of huge snow features. Cornices and mushrooms and flutings clung to the peak above 9,400' and it looked like Alpamayo or Kussum Kanguru or Fluted Peak up there.

Monday, while Steve and Scott climbed Nemesis, I printed out the weather forecasts, satellite images and avalanche info. It all looked reasonable, including a drop in temperatures and a slight chance of precip on Thursday and Friday. "Man, I'm more worried about the snow mushrooms this year than the approach slopes," I said, "but we won't know 'til we go stick our noses in it." We decided to leave at 3am the next morning.

"Good god man, isn't this place wild!"
"Ya, it is," Steve replied.
"It's just so incredible to have it be so alpine one hour from the car" I said. "So much bang for your buck."

We had skied to the end of Chephren Lake and now stood in the shadow of Howse Peak. The summit, five thousand feet above, a deep couloir cut into its left ridgeline offering passage on the guarantee of ancient, grey, alpine ice; the final 1000ft of the face. Below a traverse on incredible and exaggerated snow features under an overhanging triangular wall of black limestone, that connecting to an ephemera of silver strips of ice bleeding from, and frozen to, the snow slopes overlying. To us the possibility of a line through the thousands of feet of black compact and sweeping rock.

"Man, Bubba, I see what you mean about the snow features," Scott said, looking to the upper wall. "There's easily twice the amount of snow clinging to things this year."
"Ya, I look up there and I think about Mascioli."

Scott and Steve fell quiet hearing the name. In my head I saw Steve Mascioli's lifeblood scraped hard onto the concrete snow of Mt Hunter and I knew that Scott and Steve were seeing similar. In a somber silence we continued towards the face.

Behind and far below me the white plane of Chephren Lake bore a jagged line segregating sun from shade ... the dawn, it transected the rolling chalk colored mounds to our right. We were still in shade and it was good because we were all working hard and the hard work went better for us in the cold. Ascending in short traverses we kicked our skis around often to remain close to the spine of the lateral moraine. Eventually the moraine melded into a transitional roll and laid back into the upper basin. There was a wind slab to our right and we had to cross it and so it began. "You and Scott better hang back here 'til I get across this," good communication, but needless, like telling Scott and Steve to check and see if their boots are on the right feet. 

Mid-slope, the angle was about 35 degrees and I had to step high with my left ski to advance it across the surface then rock onto it to cut it 30cm into the snow. I gripped my left ski pole mid shaft and lay it across the slope to support my hand which I punched onto the snow in a fist. Intellectually and intuitively I felt that the slope had little chance of sliding, but the down-slope ride threatened a deep burial. It was our first act of engagement and fear drove my heart rate beyond what the physical task required. 40 meters further on the slope laid back and the slab shallowed to nothing and I yodeled back to Scott and Steve to come, one at a time.

Sun lay bright on the lower slopes. We kicked steps in our boot soles the slope soft enough to go without crampons. Linear stains of water wept from the underborders of  the snow and darkened -by one shade- the grey limestone below.  Five hundred feet up we entered shade cast east to west by rock overhead. We stomped out platforms in snow that leaned to the rock and I commented that I liked warm winter alpine climbing, that there was nothing wrong with warm winter alpine climbing. Small shrubs grew from the corners and creases in the shale coloured rock in front of us giving voice to the warmth and accent the anomaly of it. We stepped into harnesses and snapped  on crampons. I flaked the 8.1 mm twin rope onto my platform to drag it, to have its weight off of my back. Ahead Steve sunk a pick into grade  2 ice, the first ice of the route. "'I'll lead this," Scott said, arriving at my anchor three hundred feet above the grade 2 ice. The first fifth class pitch of the route. We decided to grade it WI 6 for lack of a better description and for want of an appropriate rating system. We could have invented another grading system: Alpine Ice (AI) 6, because although the physical act felt like WI 6, the medium that we climbed on was not waterfall ice.  Perhaps in October, when whatever water present had frozen, then it could have been called waterfall ice. Since then it had been swept by thousands of waves of spindrift and snow had been tamped into any hole, and every bulge and overhang and icicle had been draped with beautiful sweeping and sculpted lines of snow. Time and pressure and the continual pounding from more spindrift metamorphized the snow towards ice and the ice towards snow. Evolving from either end compromise was reached at a material we called "alpine snow/ice." It felt like Styrofoam and offered enough structure to climb, but not enough to protect dependably. The surface of the alpine snow/ice looked like exotically blown and swirling glass and like blown glass, there were melding colours and the colours gave some hint to the structure and, more importantly, to where there might be some strength. Tinnish grey was more ice while stucco white meant more snow.

Finding placements took numerous swings as much of the snow/ice had melted away from the underlying rock. Medium length ice screws often bottomed out and had to be tied off. When they went in full depth they went in easily with little resistance. We figured that one out of four might of held a fall.

Steve and I seconded the pitch classically, which means that we climbed the way all alpine pitches were climbed earlier in the century, before the jumar and the big wall: we climbed with our packs on our backs after Scott had hauled his pack on one of our ropes then thrown the rope back down to Steve to retie. The packs made the seconding incredibly strenuous and nearing the top I wouldn't have been at all surprised if I'd popped off.  Scott had anchored ten meters above the ice in the only crack around. As always I checked the anchor as Scott described it, "We've got a good 1/2" angle up here and I had to stack a long shallow angle behind this knifeblade to feel good about it."  Compact black limestone. It is always complicated, some of the hardest rock to get gear in. Steve took a picture of the anchor. We continued onto the last of the huge horizontal snowbands that span the face from ridgeline to ridgeline. Above us was the magic line, the one that we hoped might be climbable. We punched up the slope in a rising line to the left until we could anchor and lean out and look at the proud silver trail. It was too thin. We knew. We'd all broken pieces of ice like this before and this was not the place to be doing that. I led a six hundred foot fourth class traverse to the right, to the ephemeral strips that we'd connected in our minds' eyes five hours earlier. Finding gear was like spotting $20 bills on the sidewalk outside the bank: a lot of time and ground passes between spottings. I bottomed out screws in the melt-water edges aproning the snow and tied them off with spectra webbing, or carabiners when the threads were exposed. Once in awhile there was a crack and I dicked something in. My hand went numb whaling on a reluctant pin, yet at the end I found a good anchor.

Steve's pitch, grade 7 alpine snow/ice. Scott and I got to watch and look back a decade and a half because Steve is climbing in a place that Scott and I have been and Steve is climbing in that place better than Scott or I had. And a small part of it is the gear and the tools but the far larger part is the fact that Steve is a further evolved alpine climber and Scott and I and all of the Lowes and Lauchlin and Messner and Bonatti all contributed to that evolution. Steve got to start on a higher rung on the ladder. And it was breathtakingly beautiful to watch Steve climb up there because the part that is all his, the part that he brings and displays up there, is heart. At forty meters out the vertical pitch backed up against an overhang and Steve's heart  pounded out blood at over two hundred beats per minute as he excavated a crack to place a cam with trembling hand. He didn't flinch. Steve's heart is huge and as absolutely ardent as Mohammed Ali's.  From solid screws I climbed into a large triangular snow slope and the snow felt like bonded sand under foot. The air gained a cold chromey hue, and the taste of cold water, as I picketed my tools and kicked in my feet and recited my internal prayers for stability. At 60 meters I reach the only rock protruding from the slope and I banged in pins and slotted cams and brought Steve and Scott up to dig our first snow cave.  We coupled two shovel blades to ice axes and we hacked and burrowed for an hour.

"Holy shit there's people below us" I exclaimed.

Two thousand feet below twin figures skied to the end of the lake and we saw the flutter of their headlamps dance about like fireflies as they went about bivouacking. Our cave was cramped, a two bedroom unit. Scott and Steve got the master bedroom and we all laughed at Scott faking surprise on finding an in flight pillow in the foot of his rather prodigious sleeping bag.  I wriggled into the kid's room, which afforded about the same room as a hot dog has in a bun, and for several hours we ate and drank whatever the stove could produce, and we joked and laughed and we enjoyed ourselves.

"What's for breakfast?" I asked over our first brew of coffee, 4:30am.
"You don't have your pop-tart?", Steve asked.
"What pop-tart, I didn't get no pop-tart."
"Ya you did. We gave it to you last night."
"That was breakfast. I thought it was desert, I ate it last night."
"Bummer dude."

We emerged with the dawn and I traversed left over bulging ice the colour of ash to gain a groove of alpine snow/ice that rose in an arc following a huge corner in the rock and giving us passage for the next five hundred feet. Far below we saw twin figures approach the face and we thought that they may be following us up the route, but they soon veered from our tracks (later we learned that they were Dave Marra and Dave Edgar and that over the next two days they climbed the huge blue waterfall to our left and descended from its top leaving it as an ice route -a route that did not go to the top of the wall or to the summit). My pitch was superb, grand, grade IV. Striking the surface of the ice reminded me of slapping a six foot fence plank in its middle to hear its percussiveness and to feel it flex and vibrate. I anchored to large cams in rock and shouted to Scott and Steve. They were in the sun ... lucky bastards. They jumared and manhandled my pack. I was not in the sun, but I was surrounded  by the alpine and it was magic and I felt fine.  Scott climbed into the sun and it stayed with him for half of his pitch before turning behind the mountain and leaving the face for the day.  Scott's pitch was beautiful, even with the tied off screws, and he and I hung from his rock anchor bundled in our parkas for three and a half hours while Steve led "The Pitch:"

"...It was, 80 feet long and exactly one foot wide. This narrow strip of silver  was the physical rendering of all my alpine ideals: high, hard, serious; one line up a flat, blank, vertical wall. It could have come from the mountains of my mind....Between Scott and me there is over 40 years of alpine climbing experience, and it was the hardest lead that either of us had ever witnessed in the mountains. Steve described it as "being in a different place," a place he knew he may only be in once in his lifetime. I'd bet that there are, perhaps, 10 men in the world that could have put those 80 feet together without breaking it, without falling. I doubt that one would survive a fall.  Climb into a place where lethal consequences exist, and climb until those consequences fade to the background because you've been dealing with them for hours and they no longer evoke fear -they're just there. Hang on until gravity becomes a song."
      Barry Blanchard
      Patagonia Catalouge, Early  Spr.2000

"How come Steve draws all the hard pitches?" Scott asked.
"Because God knows man, because God knows."

Jumaring the 8.1mm and 7.9mm ropes scared me and I shouted back to Scott to unweight his rope at one point so that I could lift it from behind a flake that had a sharp edge.

"Thanks for doing that Scott, it made it safer."
"OH NO brother, when someone with as much experience as you asks, I don't question."

 Steve had run out of rope at a bulge of ice no deeper than five inches. There was no other ice. He'd placed five screws in the bulge and tied off three and bought it all to a focal point, then he'd tied both his prussiks together and climbed to the rock and placed four pieces and focused them tight to the screws.  Above, our gulley was draped wall to wall with a cresting and stationary wave of snow. I tried climbing free on the right but felt that I'd fall pulling the bulge so I retreated and aided on rock that I excavated from the wave.  I anchored to rock while the light of the world faded. I felt so very alive ... and so very worked. For Scott and Steve and I alpinism is the source of our greater lives. The place that we go to test our command of all the numerous esoteric skills and intuitions that we've nurtured and trained during thousands of days in the mountains. Our moments of grace out of synch with the world into which we've been born, yet we know this grace to be timeless and quite simply put, the truth: the actualization of our higher -heroic- selves.  We began digging in at my insistence, but compromised when we ran against rock and fatigue. We shoveled out half a cave . One that I couldn't get all the way into ... our first important mistake. The storm swept over Howse Peak in the night and by dawn the face was awash in continual spindrift avalanche. A perfect cone of snow, the height of a veteran's cross, had settled onto the exposed foot of my bag and the down inside was damp and I knew that the bag was dead.  We had the food and fuel to sit out a day and we decided to do that and as we enlarged our cave to rectify our mistake Scott said to me, "Bubba, I'll never again doubt your judgment in this range."  With the door to our cave blocked shut, we brewed and hydrated until we were pissing clear again and then we went about yakking and napping and over the course of the day we solved all of the problems in our world, which is the world of climbing and especially it is the world of alpinism, and with that done we continued on to solve all the problems that existed anywhere between male alpinists and their spouses.

Fourteen times Steve lifted the same block from the door and fourteen times he saw the world alive in cascading snow.  Environment Canada updates a forecast twice daily. We listened to that repeating broadcast from inside our cave on my VHF radio. The 4pm update sited a twelve hour break in the storm for the next day, Friday, 26th of March, 1999. With that we ate again and slept and thought on the day to come.

At 4am I started the stove. Soon after, Steve removed the block and said that it didn't look good but that it was too dark to tell still. With the dawn Steve said, "It looks like a Niagara Falls made out of snow out there," and the sinking of our hearts was near audible inside the cave. We decided to eat the rest of our food as we packed up to descend (perhaps eating would lift our spirits). I worked the stove in agony knowing that retreating would relegate the greatest pitch that I'd seen in twenty years of alpine climbing to the catacombs of history. "Hey guys, why don't we just cinch down the velcro and strap on goggles and go take a look? If it's too mean we can always run back to here." Scott said it and I think that it put Steve into shock because he knew that we should be going down, that down was the right thing to do, yet he wanted it and I believe that he saw himself alone in that wanting, thinking that Scott and I -because of our age- would not want as bad as him. "Man, you've been reading my mail" I said.

The hope of succeeding was like a golden sun was rising inside our small cave, that cave wholly contained inside a big mountain storm.  We immediately regretted having eaten pretty much all of our food in the last hour. Carrying two Gu and three Werthers butterscotch candies apiece, we left all our bivy gear in the cave and launched.  Scott led from the cave and into a world of white and off white grey. Snow, in motion, fell over us, and snow  that was not in motion was set into motion with our passing. The clouds that produced the snow, and the snow they held, and precipitated, were all that was for us and inside the flow we saw only white and white weighted with grey from black limestone underlying; and in the ebb, occasionally, we saw through vents in the clouds two miles across valley then the vents would close and I'd be able to make out only the rope to where it blurred into snow, and into cloud. Scott led 4th class for eight hundred feet traversing snow flutings and mushrooms that I have never before seen in the Rockies. I'll describe the terrain as Peruvian because I have seen flutings like the ones we traversed there, and in the Himalaya, but only on the front ranges in the Himalaya -those being the peaks that bear the full smack of the monsoon. It was like climbing through the veil of dreams and it felt threatening only when it whited out completely and I believe most of the threat that I felt then was from my disorientation. There were moments that were nothing less than enchanting.

Scott's traverse ended on a snow platform and anchor in rock. Seventy feet below us and to our right lay the exit couloir that we'd spotted approaching the face three days before.  We decided to fix one of our twin ropes there to make it easier to regain the ledge on our retreat (at that point we were thinking that we might even abandon everything on the face, and in the cave, to descend via the White and Black Pyramids as Ward and I had done eleven years earlier). A ten meter rappel saw us to an anchor and I traversed right towards an ice bulge and into the gulley proper. Snowflakes the size of postage stamps filled the air like exploding down and monstrous spindrift avalanches roared from the gulley every several minutes as if something malevolent within the mountain was loosing the gates of a white hell. I was terrified. I knew that several of the slides had been big enough to take me off. Climbing up into it was like climbing into a waterfall and the weight of the slides stacked kilograms onto my bowed head and shoulders and arms. During the slides all I could do was bow my head and create a channel within the torrent to breathe. And the snow was cold and it conducted heat from me and I began to shiver from that conduction, and from my fear. I knew that if I got to the top of the bulge and started to pull over and took one of the slides in the chest it would take me off.  What I was doing bordered on madness, yet in my heart, where real decisions are made, it remained, to me, a fine kind of madness. Also I saw that if I could pull over the bulge I'd be able to climb away from the gulley's containment (later Scott and Steve told me that it was all in the balance there and that every time I disappeared from them in an onslaught of white, they thought that I'd retreat, and that we'd be going down).

Before the bulge I started a screw, than lost the starter hole to a slide, then the started screw was buried by the rush and thunder of a slide. I was mortally afraid then and I could feel all of my mammalian flight instincts screaming at me to RUN! yet I fought on with the screw and hung in past the trembling and the dilated eyes and pounding pulse that gripped and released at my larynx like an external hand torquing a screw driver. "I thought that we were going down then," Steve admitted to me later on.

Above the bulge the gulley widened and for five more pitches one of us would lead and the other two would follow tied in ten feet apart on the end of the 8.1mil. Leaving my anchor above the bulge Scott was blasted off by an exceptionally large slide and he tumbled down twenty feet in the white until the rope above, to Steve, and the rope to me, caught him. We shook that off and continued.

It is amazing to me what human beings come to endure and accept.  Were we put into certain situations instantaneously, they would overwhelm us, take our lives from us. Six men crossing the Drake Passage in a 22 foot open boat called the James Caird. Two men sitting to the ice in a bivy sac at 7700 meters on the West Face of Gasherbrum IV and surviving fifty hours of storm and avalanche. Scott and Steve and I striving up through tons of spindrifting snow gaining a touch of the indomitable spirit of the salmon.

I led the final pitch on the wall. Twenty feet above and right of my anchor, and hidden from view until then, a cornice that defied all that we had seen before yawned out an honest forty feet over the top of the couloir. The westerlies turbined new snow over it and it grew perceptibly while I stood there. We had no discussion of continuing and dove head-long into our retreat.

Every 30 meters (the length of our single rope rappels) we left a brand new express screw and hot wire biner. "Hell man, Bill Belcourt (Scott's gear sponsor) will give us more swag just for the stories!" Scott bellowed into the storm and against the rumble off the slides.

At 5pm we jumared the rope that we'd left fixed and regained Scott's anchor at the end of the "Peruvian Traverse."  Far below I heard the distinctive thumping of a helicopter. I thought that it was in rescue of the two climbers that we'd seen approach the face three days before, then I realized that it could be searching for us. I dug out the radio.

"Blanchard party on Howse Peak for Parks Canada."
"Ya, hi Barry, it's Mark here in the helicopter, where are you? over."
"We're at about 9,800 feet on the East Face, over."
"Well we're way below that. How are you guys doing? over."
"We're OK. We're on our way down. It's not real nice here right now. Are you guys looking for us? over."
"Catherine called. She's a bit concerned, we said that we'd check on you and we had a flight to do up this way anyways. What's your plan, over."
"We're hoping to make our snow cave a thousand feet lower tonight and rap the rest of the face tomorrow, over."
"Do you need us to do anything for you? Any assistance? over."
"No, I think that we'll be ok, thanks."
"Ask about a weather forecast," Steve said.
"Have you guys seen a weather forecast? over."
"Ya, the storm should start to break up tomorrow, over."
"Well, thanks Mark. I guess we're out."
"Happy birthday Barry, over and out."

Somewhere far below us, beneath the grey, the helicopter thumped off to the south. It felt strange standing there after that brush with the greater world of mankind, my body cooling, my hand already cold from working the radio. Scott and Steve and I still in a big mountain storm, still descending through it.

Scott led back across the peruvian traverse, then set anchors for our rappels back to the cave.  At 9pm I stood alone anchored to our last station. Falling snow cluttered the beam of my headlamp and beyond that was the black dark of the moonless brumal night. Scott was already in the cave and Steve had just then hollered that he was off rappel. I threaded the ropes through my descender and onto my locker and reached to unclip my leash from the anchor which was an ice screw and shallow angle piton -the piton bent from Scotty bottoming it out and going for more-both pieces tied to a focal loop with 5.5mm spectra cord. I felt good, one more rappel and I would be inside the security of the cave.  The crack was loud, like the trunk of a Douglas Fir breaking, I heard it a meager few moments before I was hit. Somewhere above a snow feature had loaded beyond what its contact bond with the mountain could bear. It had fractured into free fall and accelerated and exploded against the gulley above me. The hit was inhuman, tons of solidly bonded snow, momentum so in excess of what the human body could take. I know that I survived solely because of my position on the side of the gulley. The material crumpled me into the wall and under a small roof. The hit continued and I was overwhelmed and I thought that I'd been scrapped off and that I was tumbling down the gulley and that I would next feel the weightlessness of free falling from the gulley then the muffled crunches of my impacts and my skeleton shattering and finally the blacking out of death.

    I'LL NEVER SEE CATHERINE AGAIN!

That thought screamed its love, and its loss, inside my head. "No, not now," I said, and it was a plead that contained my defiance -"No"- and the affirmation that my life was good and that I was not ready to have it taken from me then -"not now." Blocks continued to batter me, then I was shocked to realize that I was still at the anchor and that my sense of being in motion was an illusion. In reality I was snap-tight to my leash ragdooling in the surge and hanging from Scotty's beautiful bent and over driven piton. I reached for the leash and for my biner and the pummeling continued and then it tapered off and then it ended ... seven seconds after it had begun.

I was monumentally shattered. My jaw quivered uncontrollably and spit and fear streamed from my mouth and my shoulders quaked and I groaned from the pain of the hit and from the immensity of it. "BARRY! BARRREEEE!!"  Steve's voice screamed from below. I tried to respond, but choked on a knot in my throat that pulsated like a lightning strike inside my thyroid. Finally I shouted out that I was "OK!" and that was bull shit. I knew that I was in shock and that my right knee was fucked. My pack had been shorn from my back and my headlamp dangled, its beam swayed erratically and by it I saw that my gloves had been half taken from my hands and that my wrists were exposed and packed with snow. The ice screw had pulled and hung from the spectra cord, a deracinated thing. The piton flexed as I pulled into balance over my left foot and my hands quaked as if I had Parkinson's. I feared the piton pulling and with trembling hands I replaced the screw and threaded the ropes and hobbled down the rappel because my right leg could not bear weight. Steve pulled me onto the ledge outside the cave like a father pulling a toddler from the pool. I saw horror in his eyes when he looked into mine. "Oh Bubba, fuck man, Bubba..." he said. It was all I could do to stand then and Steve bear hugged me and we cried.

Scott and Steve took over and I became a patient. They got me into the cave and into Scott's huge synthetic bag then they sealed the cave and boiled a litre of water, and bottled it, for me to put between my thighs. I removed my helmet, incredibly the inside of it was tamped with an inch of snow that was solid enough to take a pick. My right knee was the size of a honeydew melon and marbled with patches of yellow and green and dead blood black. My partners use the last of our fuel making me a cup of tea ... they had nothing. One half hour later my eyes had un-dilated and I had stopped quaking and I was warm. Scott and I spooned together in his bag and we listened to an encouraging forecast on the radio and then we sleep.  At 2am I was awake and I was afraid of dying, of losing control because of the leg and the weather. I knew that I wouldn't be able to ski and I anguished over calling for a rescue. I could rappel, I thought; didn't know if I could climb sideways, down climb.

The new day was lighter. We rappelled to below the ceiling, which was lifting, and the snow had stopped. There were no more slides. I'd tried to contact the wardens from inside the snow cave but the radio was shorted out, it must have been smacked in the avalanche. My right leg was useless and I hopped down the raps on my left. Whenever I snagged my right leg I got an invigorating jolt of pain and swore mightily. Without the radio we were all wondering what would happen when we got off the wall and to our skis. We knew that I couldn't ski.

Midmorning I tried the radio again and it worked!  "Climbers on Howse Peak for Parks Canada."
"Hi Barry this is Gord, how are you guys doing? over."
I held the radio and looked at it . Was this the one chance that I'd get to ask for help? "Gord," I said, "we could really use some help getting off of Howse Peak, over."
"OK, we're on our way ... "
And that was that.

Steve continued to rig fall-line rappels and we reversed the fourth class traverse that I'd led four days earlier. I worried about how much damage I was doing to the leg and I feared being crippled.  The helicopter found us above Scott's grade 6 lead of the first day. The radio would not transmit and I couldn't ask the helicopter to land down on the flats and wait for us to descend to it thereby saving Lance, the pilot, some risky flying. We'd run out of pitons and were anchored to an alien and my spare pick driven into the crack. Mark slung in and hooked up to me, then called the ship back in, and he and I drifted out from the face and I saw Scott and Steve shrink and meld into the East Face of Howse Peak. The eternal opportunist, Scott, had, at the last minute, clipped his pack onto my harness.  Two minutes later I was at the highway drinking hot chocolate while Gord examined my knee. Two hours later, in Banff, an ER doc told me that my tibia was cracked and that my knee capsule was inflated with blood. I limped out on crutches, but with Catherine. At 8pm I was at my fortieth birthday party and Scott and Steve were there just back and clean and showered.  

And in Steve's words:

"People everywhere are congratulating us, slapping us on  the back.  Reinforcing the high. Barry sits on a table with his leg elevated and people all around him. The room is packed to the point that you can't move to refill your glass. No need, as more beer comes though, brought on by the back slappers and congratulators. The praise feels good, and then empty as I look at Barry.  He was my hero once upon a time; but now I know him as I know few people.  Yesterday I thought I was watching him die. There is no pride in that; only shame. Shame and the deepest sense of failure. I am the youth and I wanted. I wanted enough to climb the hardest pitch of my life. I wanted enough that I couldn't face descending from that wall. I couldn't make the toughest decision, the right decision without pity for myself, without hollow, meaningless hate for the storm."

And in Scott's words:

"I always look for answers where there can be none. I want to know if we were right in continuing or if we were just fools. The company at the party raises my mood. Friends I haven't seen in years are there.  And yet as I walk back out into the night towards sleep and forgetfulness I hear myself answering the riddle.  You did the wrong thing for the right reason and you got away with it. Barry's going to be fine in a few weeks and the only answer is that all decisions are made based on incomplete information and in the mountains you end up being  completely responsible for the outcome."

I left the party with my wife and drove to our home, there to convalesce, and to recover, and to doubt that I'd ever return to Howse Peak, and further to wonder if I would ever climb a hard alpine route again.