The darkness presses in on all sides as we stand in our tiny group. Our tents and gear are packed up for us to pick up on the way down; looking back there’s no sign we were ever here.
“Ready!” I say, and I make my voice sound energized. “Sorry for being a ferret, Rosie.”
Rose gives me the thumbs-up. “Apology accepted. I know the feeling. Two a.m. is a great time to be home, sound asleep in my awesome bed.”
Maya sighs. “Enough with the martyrdom, Rosie.”
“The journey is the reward. Yah, I know. Got it.” Rose’s voice is clipped and pissy, and I roll my eyes. Obviously I’m Team Rose, but sometimes she still acts like a sullen eleven-year-old around Maya, and it’s getting old. “Let’s get this party started, okay, boss?” I say and start walking.
Rose follows, and we head up, headlamps bobbing in the darkness. Four thousand two hundred feet above us is the summit. Crampons crunching into the hard snow, we begin to climb. It’s quiet except for the stomp of our boots and the heavy sound of my breath in my ears. I slept with my iPod in my sleeping bag to keep the battery alive, and now I turn it on, letting the music amp me up for this climb. Loud guitar chords blast into my ears, drowning out all other sounds. I try to forget Rose’s crankiness, Maya’s frustration, and Dad’s nagging and let my body take over.
In the darkness I can barely tell white snow from dark rock, but even so, the movements are automatic. The tread of Rose’s footsteps in front of me marks our time. I pull out my earbuds and tuck them into my collar, and there’s only the scream of the headwinds and the blackness of a mountain sky above us.
We stomp along the glacier until we get to the ledges that give our route, Gibraltar Ledges, its name. The giant Gibraltar Rock looms over our shoulders on the right, and the darkness of the rocky ledge drops down on the left. Dawn’s barely beginning. This is the technical part, requiring ropes and real climbing, and the adrenaline starts to thrum as I contemplate the route. Rose and I stop to add extra layers to protect us from the winds that will try to rip us off the mountain as soon as we round the edge. We tie ourselves together, leaving plenty of slack rope, then double-check our ice axes, extra line, and helmets before starting up. Dad and Maya are still behind us. Maya must be feeling like crap because they’re moving slower than ever.
“You ready?” Rose asks, her voice muffled beneath her mask. “We’ll head up until Camp Comfort, which, if I remember, is the most poorly named spot on the mountain, then take a break. Okay?”
I nod, glad I can’t see her face beneath her goggles, helmet, and mask. I know from her voice she’s still in a shitty mood, and I can feel myself tense up in response, can feel my jaw working and my neck tightening against my shoulders. I try to roll my neck, make myself smile to see if, as Dr. Jimmy always says, smiling actually changes your mood. Shaking my arms and legs to warm them, I start up after Rose.
After a few minutes I stop, my body held tight against the rock. “Rosie. Check out the view.” I can’t pull my eyes away.
The sunrise, crazy beautiful, is blazing hot orange and pink and red, striping the sky and glinting off the far-distant ocean.
“It’s gorgeous.” She smiles and shakes her head. “Ridiculously gorgeous.”
I bat her with my mitten. “Right? Worth the trip?”
She rolls her eyes but nods. “Yes, Mom, it’s always worth the trip! That’s why I’m here instead of in my delicious bed. Anyway, we should keep moving. Lots of cautionary tales about rockfall and seracs crashing down on this chute.” She starts to climb again.
I follow, and soon we’re alternating between steep, hard-packed snow pitches and small level stretches that give us a chance to catch our breath. Dad and Maya eventually catch up to us as we rest at Camp Comfort, which is comfortably out of the wind but still icy and miserable. Displaying my usual expertise and skill, I drop my mitten trying to get a cough drop.
“Tate, for God’s sake,” Dad says, his voice tired, like it’s too much work even to yell at me.
“It’s fine! It caught on the lip of that serac, so you’re in luck,” Maya says, trying to be cheerful, as always.
I resist the urge to tell her how lucky I feel and start down the snow to reclaim my mitten. While I’m walking, a gust of wind knocks my helmet off the spot where I parked it and sends it hurtling down toward me.
“Oops! Better grab that while you’re there,” Rose calls. “Anything else you want me to drop, so you don’t have to make a separate trip?”
I give her the finger with my mitten-less hand and retrieve all my gear. “Sure, sure,” I say, huffing my way back up to them. “Make fun of the loser. Typical.”
Rose shoves me, and I shove her back, while Maya looks at the view and Dad looks disgusted. Time to go.
“Okay, Captain. Let’s tag this bad boy and get down. I’m hungry,” I say, and Rose agrees.
Waving to the others, who are still fixing crampons and dicking around with their ice axes, we start to climb.
Shoving the earbuds back into my ears, I start up behind Rose. She’s a splash of yellow high above me already, but I’ll catch up quickly. I’ve got almost six inches of reach on her, so she never stays far ahead for long. I adjust my ice axe and dig my right crampon into the crusty snow, pushing off. Crunch, shove, crunch, shove, crunch…The snow shifts between crunchy and soft, making it hard to know how much pressure to use. Twice my foot slides loose, but I catch it before I shift my weight. Soon all that’s in my brain is the smash and thrash of the music in my ears and the pause, step, pause, step of my feet. Up ahead the spot of yellow stops as Rosie waits for me on the edge of the glacier. The wind’s unbelievable, howling and screaming around us. I give up on the music again and rip the earbuds out. The iPod will be dead before I get back anywhere that I can hear it.
“How’s it looking?” I ask when I’m close enough to shout in her ear.
She shrugs. “Not great. We’re going to need to tap dance through this crud. That warm week really screwed with the glacier.”
She’s right, as usual. Even from here I can see the crevasses, some two or three feet across, some only a few jagged inches, all standing between us and the finish line. I nod, resigned. I hate this part, when there’s no vertical, just these little old-lady steps and stopping to check the integrity of the ice every few seconds. It’s barely climbing. Give me a chute any day. Still, it’s my job to look on the bright side. “Sure, but a little more of this and we’ll be at the summit crater. And from there…the summit!” I throw my arms up like a champion, and she laughs.
We push forward slowly, and the impatience moves through me like an itch. Jimmy always tries to get me to notice how my body’s turning on me, siding with my ADHD brain, by making me take short breaths or hunch my shoulders or clench my fists. He’s all into yoga breathing and stuff, which does kind of help, although I laughed my ass off the first time he lay down on the floor and told me to try belly-breathing. Anyway, I try it now, or at least as much as I can at 13,000 feet.