Some Notes on Descent

 

The descent beckons, as the ascent beckoned~ William Carlos Williams

 

There are only three people I trust to set up rappel anchors, pauses, AND I’M ALL THREE OF THEM.~ Charlie Sassara

 

Descent seems to be very steep and dangerous.  The ascent is always laborious, yet it is on a well-trodden path.  But the downward path is new.  Many have gone down, but they have usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface. One finds wrecked cars, trousers, shoes, and skeletons, perhaps of people gone to smash on that path.  This is the path of danger.~C.G. Jung

 

Outside the hut, clouds roll by at speeds that appear induced by time-lapsed photography with plenty of blue sky between them.  Typically, the day you tag a summit in the Alps is a long one, mostly because it starts so early.  We had spent our first night sleeping (not) under a dining room table in the Tête Rousse hut.  And that was with reservations.  Now, without reservations on the return, we have no choice but to descend all the way to Chamonix.

            We plod downward past the spot where we had met the lightning-struck Brits–“So I says, ‘Wot’s that smell?’ And then I realize it’s me hair!”  Soon we are at the bottom of the ridge where the death couloir must be crossed. On the ascent it had been frozen in the dark; now it is late and sloppy. Here a number of people are bottle-necked, gathering up the necessary courage to sprint across the shooting gallery.  They are clumped in sketchy silence like boys deciding who will be the first to jump off the bridge in the water.  The couloir itself appears like a runway down which large rocks tumble sporadically in huge slow-motioned leaps of space.  So far as we could see there were never two rocks falling at once and though they tumbled mostly in silence, a thrumming in the air usually announced their approach.

            The actual danger zone may be only forty feet across, though better measured probably by the number of seconds it will take to cross. But if it’s not really dangerous then why do so many people die here? They are slow, thrashed, inexperienced, we rationalize, creatures so very much unlike ourselves.  Unlucky.

            I watch a large flat rock arc downspinning, a stone thrown to skip on water, frozen and tilted. It builds speed as it descends, but it’s hard to believe you couldn’t dodge it, even in crampons on the slope. That’s what we tell ourselves.

            We sprint across and begin the long hike out to the train station, the caveat being that if we don’t catch the 5 o’clock we will have to spend another night out, this time without the arguable benefit of the hut’s dining table to lay under, as we had on the ascent. Without the train and the telecabine–newly-acquired decadent Eurohabits–the walk to Les Houches is unthinkable after the length of our day, now approaching fifteen hours.

            We make our train and not too long after that we’re seated at a sidewalk table at the Café de’ L’M where the placemats match the view of the Aiguilles–the needles–and as our exhaustion sets in, the alpenglow brightens, and fades, leaving the ridge to the Goûter hut, the Dome de Goûter and the distant summit silhouetted against the night sky.  Lucky indeed.

Photo: Charlie Sassara casts off for the glacier below Peak 11,300