It'll Burn Off

The rain continued to drizzle through the cold, damp air, and visibility was closing into near white-out conditions. So far, we’d been traversing and climbing a combination of rock and sun-cupped snowfields and hadn’t needed either crampons or the rope. That was the good news. And then things changed.

We were in the process of descending another immense snowfield, this time looking for White Rocks Lakes, our designated camp 3. As we continued to descend the slope, it became painfully clear that we were off route. We had lost too much elevation and not found the lakes. We were now in a steep section. The surface was icy, it was starting to get dark, and we were lost. Serious doubt crept into my psyche.

We finally stopped, knowing that to descend further would only compound our mistake. It was too late in the day to turn around and climb back up. We had run out of time in our search for the lakes. We determined that this stopping point was going to be our camp 3. We started chopping out a platform for our tent on the icy slope. We worked furiously, hacking away with the adzes of our ice axes.

It took a while. The adze on an ice axe isn’t very big. Memo to self: When we get back, create an ice axe with a bigger adze. When we had cleared just enough space, we hastily pitched the tent on the barely adequate platform and crawled inside. We would sleep on ice that night. The first on the agenda was to get warm. We fired up our trusty gas-fueled MSR Model 9 stove, our little friend, who would keep us company that night.

The MSR stove was a godsend for mountaineers and backpackers alike. The ingenious design used the fuel bottle as an outrigger to stabilize the burner assembly and support your cooking pot. The best feature was the fuel pump, which allowed you to pressurize the white gas in the tank and keep the fuel flowing even in freezing conditions.

Stoves that relied on canisters of butane fuel were almost useless in a deep cold environment, where you needed them most. They lost their fuel pressure, and the flames were pitiful. They were only a fair-weather device. By contrast, the MSR stove was a true mountaineer’s tool. Its other outstanding feature was its burner head. It was a freaking blow torch that made a lot of noise and cranked out a lot of heat, which you needed if you were melting snow to get water.

We huddled around the little stove as it roared away. We weren’t melting snow. We were trying to get warm, leaning over towards the stove, hands cupped and yearning like two small children.

“Please sir, may we have another bowl of warmth?”

This activity would become our ongoing routine that night. We called it taking a warmth break. That night at camp 3, our down bags were each a sodden mess of wet down clumps sandwiched between two sheets of nylon. Beginning loft: 9” Current loft: 1” But at this point, you really couldn’t call it loft because that implied a fluffy mix of down and air.

Our bags were completely useless, and we slept on top of them that night, fully clothed in our wet wool. Sleep is a euphemism because we didn’t sleep much at all. We passed the night in brief snatches of that nether world that exists in the fuzzy border between sleep and consciousness. We punctuated our stupors that night with frequent warmth breaks, crouched over our little gas-fueled friend as it roared away.

Try as it might, the little stove provided only enough warmth to keep us engaged with getting through the night. I was shivering, freezing, certain that I’d get through this night, but I was feeling really ragged and seriously questioned how much more of this I could take. I wondered if Nicolai was concerned as well. I asked him,

“So, if the conditions don’t change, how many more days can we do this until we die?”

Nicolai was among the smartest people that I had ever met, and nothing if not self-assured. If you wanted the perfect model for a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “I might be wrong. But I doubt it.” Nicolai would be your first choice. Hunched over the stove, he paused as if making a few mental calculations and then turned his head towards me.

“Three days.”

This is a brief excerpt from ‘It’ll Burn Off,’ a mountaineering adventure story from my recently released memoir. Banquet of the Infinite is now available as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.