The Ledge by Jim Davidson

recounting his latest wilderness escapade, me with nothing similar to share. I hike and climb and ski with passion, but my work as a self-employed environmental geologist keeps me otherwise all too busy. And while Mike is single, I am married to Gloria. All that means that I struggle to rack up one-fifth the mountain time Mike does. But I’d recently logged some trail miles, and this time I have a story to share.
    A few weeks earlier, Gloria and I set out to hike Longs Peak. Five hours after leaving the trailhead, at about 9,400 feet, we’d ascended 4,000 feet along rocky trails and rugged boulder fields. We were close to the summit when a horrifying scene unfolded in a place called the Narrows, a hundred-foot-long ledge only a few feet wide. Just ahead of us, another hiker stumbled off that ledge, cartwheeling 70 feet down the mountain and landing, seriously injured, among a pile of rocks. We were among a dozen volunteers who kept the patient alive in the first critical hours. In the end, I spent eighteen hours with him, staying to help some National Park Service rangers and a few other die-hard volunteer rescuers carry him on a metal stretcher through the night, buffeted by subfreezing temperatures and eighty-mile-per-hour winds. When loose rocks clattered toward us in the dark, the rangers shouted for us to lean over the patient to protect him. At dawn the next day, we handed him off to a second rescue team, and six hours later they got the young man onto a helicopter and to the hospital. I was thrilled that he survived, but the rescue strained my body to its limits—I lost ten pounds in twenty-four hours—and tested my technical-climbing and rope skills during ournight-long effort to lower the man over 1,000 feet of craggy mountainside.
    “Nice job, Jim,” Mike says. “You guys put yourselves on the line, and got him down. You earned some stripes on that one.”
    Mike raises his beer in toast, and we tap mugs, but soon our focus shifts. We’d talked for years about climbing something “big.” All serious climbers think, at least fleetingly, about Nepal, but at this point the Himalayas seem out of our league and beyond our budget. We’ve talked about the Grand Tetons, and other places too, but one mountain—Rainier, in Washington State—keeps creeping into our conversations. This night, in the cacophony of a college-town bar, we decide what I think we both have known deep inside for a while: that we will go there. The postcard-perfect mountain, its volcanic slopes covered with glaciers, attracts thousands of climbers a year, the bulk of them headed for the top via the Disappointment Cleaver route or the Emmons-Winthrop route. It is as unforgiving as it is beautiful—an average of two or three people lose their lives on the mountain each year, and in 1981 it was the scene of the country’s worst climbing disaster, when an avalanche swept eleven people into a crevasse.
    We recognize that there are dangers, but we accept them. For us, earning rewards in adventure and personal growth means challenging ourselves with bigger mountains and, sometimes, bigger risks. As we talk, our determination solidifies. Rainier it will be. And we aren’t going to climb a standard route; we are going to push ourselves on an elegant but challenging ascent up the north side of the mountain. Up the Liberty Ridge.
    SIX MONTHS LATER , during our final preparations, I call the National Park Service ranger stations on Rainier three or four times, checking snow conditions, ice coverage, and avalanche danger. I learn that ithas been a low-snow year, that the crevasses on the Emmons and Carbon Glaciers are not too bad, and that it has been unseasonably warm. In one call, I speak with Mike Gauthier, one of Rainier’s climbing rangers, who tells me the avalanche danger is nil and that upper parts of the Liberty Ridge are covered in hard water ice. If you’re ready, he says, for technical ice—and we are—it may not be too bad. But he