But the belay above held, and the belayers too. As soon as she stopped bouncing, however, she twisted and kicked into the ice wall with both front point crampons, then grabbed her ice axe and smacked the ice above her with the sharp end to place another tool.
A moment’s stillness. Nothing hurt too badly. She was well down in the crevasse, the blue wall right in front of her nose. Ice axe in to the second notch, but she wanted more. Below her Jack was hanging freely from the same rope she was, holding onto it above his head with one hand. No sign of the sledge.
Voices from above. “We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Hold the belay! Don’t move it!” Don’t do a thing! she wanted to add.
“Jack!” she called down. “Are you okay?”
“Mostly.”
“Can you swing into the wall and get your tools in?”
“Trying.”
He appeared to be below a slight overhang, and she above it. A very pure crevasse hang, in fact, with the rest of the group on the surface several meters above them, belaying them, hopefully listening to her shouts and tying off, rather than trying to haul them up by main strength; it couldn’t be done, and might very well end in disaster. Val didn’t even want to shout up to tell them to tie off; who knew what they would do. Not wanting to trust them, she took another ice screw from her gear sling, chipped out a hole in the wall in front of her, set the screw in it, then gave it little twists to screw it into the ice. Its ice coring shaved out of the aluminum cylinder. A long time passed while she did this, and it became obvious that they were underdressed for the situation; it was probably twenty below down here, and no sun or exertion now to warm them; and sweaty from adrenaline. They were chilling fast, and it added urgency to her moves. She had to perform a variant of the operation called Escaping the Situation—a standard crevasse technique, in fact, but one of those ingenious mountaineering maneuvers that worked better in theory than in practice, and better in practice than in a true emergency.
The screw was in, and she clipped onto it with a carabiner and sling attached to her harness, then eased back down a bit. Now both she and Jack had the insurance belay of the screw.
From the surface came more shouts.
“We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Are the anchor screws holding well?”
Jim shouted down that they were. “What should we do?”
“Just hold the belay!” she shouted up anxiously. “Tie it off as tight as you can!” More times than she cared to remember she had found herself in the hole with the clients up top, and they had often proved more dangerous than the crevasse.
She tied another prussik loop to the belay rope, then reached up and put her right boot into it. Then she stood in that loop, jack-knifing to the side, and unclipped her harness from the ice screw, then straightened out slowly as she slid the prussik attached to her harness as high on the rope as it would go. When she was standing straight in the lower loop, she tightened the upper prussik, then hung by the waist from it, and reached down and pulled the lower one up the rope, keeping her boot in the loop all the while. There was the temptation to pull the lower loop almost all the way up to the higher one, but that resulted in a really awkward jackknife, and made it hard to put weight on her foot so she could move the higher one up. So it was a little bit up on each loop, over and over; tedious hard work, but not so hard if you had had a lot of practice, as Val had, and didn’t get greedy for height.
“Jack, can you prussik up?”
“Just waiting for you to get off rope,” he said tightly.
“Go ahead and start!” she said sharply. “A little flopping around isn’t going to hurt me now.”
Soon enough she reached the edge of the crevasse, and the others on top helped haul her over the edge, where she was blinded by the harsh sunlight. She unclipped from the belay rope and went over to check the belay. It was holding as if nothing had ever even tugged on it. Bombproof indeed.
Then it was Jack’s turn to huff and puff. Prussiking was both hard and meticulous, accomplished in awkward acrobatic positions while swinging in space all the while, unless you managed to balance against the ice wall of the crevasse. Jack appeared to be making the classic mistake of trying for too much height with each move of the loops, and he wasn’t propping himself against the wall either. It took him a long, long time to get up the belay rope, and when he finally pulled up to the point where the others could haul him over, he was steaming and looked grim.
“Good,” she said when he was sitting safely on the ramp. “Are you all right?”
“I will be when I catch my breath. I’ve cut my hand somehow.” He showed them the bloody back of his right glove, a shocking red. The blood was flowing pretty heavily.
“Shit,” she said, and hacked some firn off the ramp to give to him. “Pack this onto it for a while until the bleeding slows.”
“A sledge runner caught me on its way down.”
“Wow. That was close!”
“Very close.”
“Where is the sledge?” Jorge said.
“Down there!” said Jack, pointing into the crevasse. “But it got knocked in and past us, rather than crushed outright by the block. I gave it a last big tug when I jumped in.”
“Good work.” Val looked around. “I’ll go back down and have a look for it.”
“I’ll come along,” said Jack, and Jim, and Jorge.
“You can all help, but I’ll go down and check it out first.”
So she took from her gear sling a metal descending device known as an Air Traffic Controller, and attached it to the rope, then to her harness using a big locking carabiner. She leaned back to take the slack out of the rope between her and the anchor, then started feeding rope through the Air Traffic Controller as she walked backward toward the crevasse, putting her weight hard on the rope. Getting over the edge was the tricky part; she had to lean back right at the edge and hop over it and get her crampon bottoms flat against the wall, legs straight out from it and body at a forty-five-degree angle. But it was a move she had done many times before, and in the heat of the moment she did it almost without thinking. After that she paid the rope slowly up through the descender, one hand above it and one running the rope behind her back for some extra friction. Down down down in recliner position, past the ice screw she had placed, down and down into the blue cold. She was keeping her focus on the immediate situation, of course, but her pulse was hammering harder than her exertion justified, and she found herself distracted by an inventory that part of her mind was taking of the emergency contents of everyone’s clothing. This was no help at the moment, and as she got deeper in the crevasse she banished all distracting thoughts.
Just past the tilt in the crevasse that blocked the view from above, there was a kind of floor. Her rope was almost entirely paid out, and she had not tied a figure-eight stopper knot in the end of the line, which was stupid, a sign that she wasn’t thinking. But it got her down to a floor, and it was possible to walk on this floor, she saw, still going down fairly steeply; and as she saw no sight of the sledge, but a lot of chunks of the broken ice block leading still onward, she called up that she was going off rope, then unclipped, and moved cautiously over the drifted snow and ice filling the intersection of the walls underfoot—a floor by no means flat, but rather a matter of Vs and Us and Ws, the tilts all partly covered by drift. There was also no assurance at all that it was not a false floor, a kind of snowbridge in a narrow section, with more open crevasse below it; she would have stayed on rope if there had been enough of it. As it was she crabbed along smack against the crevasse wall, hooking the pick of her axe into it as she went, testing each step as thoroughly as she could and hoping the bottom didn’t drop out from under her.