To the Last Breath: A Memoir of Going to Extremes

Slakey, Francis

ISBN 10 : 1455887293 ISBN 13 : 9781455887293

Editeur : Brilliance Audio, 2012

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter 1

BEYOND THE SKY

I am out of balance. I hang dangerously off center but I’m oblivious, until some dim awareness of the world shakes me awake.

I lift my head up slightly and look toward my feet. Sure enough, I’m not flat. My body is sloping downward and I can barely see the tips of my toes in the faint moonlight. This wouldn’t be anything to worry about if it weren’t for the fact that I’m on a cot pinned to a sheer granite wall two thousand feet above the valley floor.

My shifting around was enough to wake my climbing partner, Tom Paxton. Pax is lean, but with a muscled frame that looks like he could haul a bull if the circumstances called for it. I don’t know much about his past, and he knows nothing about mine, and that makes for an ideal pairing. We both live without rearview mirrors, driving ahead through our days, and only when absolutely necessary tapping the brake. Pax never boasts, another admirable quality. There are plenty of climbers who talk and never summit; Pax summits, without complaint or glory.

At the moment, like me, he’s trying to make sense of what’s happened to the cot. Since it is just barely long enough and wide enough for the two of us he was bound to sense my slightest motion. We’re sleeping head to toe so when he lifts up, he sees that he’s sloping dangerously upward—his head is a good ten inches lower than his feet.

We had spent a half hour pinning the cot into the wall to make sure it was secure. We jammed thick aluminum blocks into a crack in the granite face, pulling them tight, wedging them deep into the rock. The blocks are solid, they could hold the weight of an elephant; there’s no way that they’re coming loose. Something else must be going wrong.

As my eyes adjust to the dark, the strips of webbing that hold the cot together come into focus. The strip attached to one of the corners looks like it is lengthening, stretching out like a rubber band.

After a few moments, I shake off my sleep haze and my brain starts processing things more carefully. I realize that the webbing isn’t stretching; our situation is much worse than that. The webbing is unraveling. In a few more seconds the webbing will come completely undone and our cot will drop out from under us. There is nothing we can do to stop that from happening.

“Slake.”

“Yeah, Pax.”

“We’re going to fall.”

I look over the edge of the cot, down into the void, and wait for the inevitable.

There was a time when people thought that El Capitan could not be climbed. It is easy to understand why. The hammerhead of granite bursts out of the ground and rises straight up, three thousand sheer vertical feet, looming over Yosemite Valley in central California.

Nothing man has ever built has stood this high. Even after a century of hoisting scaffolding, welding steel, and pouring concrete, no building on the planet reaches even two thirds the height of El Cap. When you stand at its base, arch back, and look up, it seems to rise without end, farther than the limits of vision, past the bounds of Earth, pushing up and beyond the sky.

Magnificent, imposing, the rock taunts you, daring you to climb it. There was no question that one day someone would try.

Early attempts were unsuccessful for a simple reason: humans aren’t built to scale a smooth vertical wall. We don’t have sticky pads on our feet, like a gecko. We don’t have the clinging legs of a centipede or the hooves of a mountain goat. Flat and long, our feet are best designed to propel us off flat ground, away from an oncoming mastodon.

To scale a crack in a vertical wall, your legs and feet have to be used in ways that aren’t part of our evolutionary development: you pivot a knee out wide to one side, slide your toes into the crack in the rock face, and then twist and press down on the foot with all your body weight, mashing your toes hard into the crack and locking your foot into place. The bones of the foot are compressed and twisted, crushed to conform to the profile of the crack.

The hands follow the same pattern: fingers, knuckles, a fist all getting mashed and pivoted into the crack. The granite is unforgiving and the hand placements need to be precise. If a hand slides against the rough granite, the rock flays off a layer of skin like a potato peeler.

Twist, crush, repeat—that is the methodical technique that propels a climber up the crack in a vertical rock face.

If at some point the crack thins out, too narrow to mash in a foot, then the climber searches for options, balancing on features and contours often no thicker than a nickel, or smearing the rubber of the climbing shoe on the rock, hoping that friction alone is sufficient to stay pinned in place.

If all else fails, climbers come back down and look for a new route. But now they face another evolutionary disadvantage. Our eyes are well placed when we’re climbing up since we can have good visibility of our foot and hand placements. In down climbing, the view is obscured, the balance less assured, the toe sweeps the air searching for the placement.

So the granite monolith of El Cap was unyielding and the requirements for scaling it were inhuman. The climber who would be the first to conquer it would have steady nerves, astounding patience, and a body fully adapted to scaling the vertical world.

Warren Harding, the climber who first scaled El Cap, was an inspiration to me. I was fourteen years old when I first heard about his climb. From that moment on, I wanted his adventure to be my adventure.

His adventure began in the summer of 1957 when he and his two teammates dropped their gear at the base of El Cap like so many other climbers had before them. They carefully pieced together their route, zigzagging up yard by yard. They established camps in the sheer rock wall. They linked their camps with ropes fixed into the rock with pitons—hammering the four-inch-long metal spikes into the cracks—then returned back down to the valley floor.

Progress was slow; too slow. After four laborious months, with the cold settling in and snowstorms approaching, the team was forced to halt the climb for the winter. El Cap was crushing them.

The next summer there was more disappointment. One of Harding’s teammates fractured a leg; the other was discouraged and dropped out. It seemed that El Cap would defy another attempt. Harding, determined and fixed on the prize, found two new climbing partners and faced the stone once again.

Months ticked by as the team continued to push upward, establishing a few dozen more feet of the route each day and then descending back down to the valley floor to rest. As fall approached, the fixed ropes began fraying. Weakened and unraveling after a year of use, the ropes would never last through another winter. If the team couldn’t scale El Cap before the snows came, nearly eighteen months of work would be lost. It was now or never for Harding.

They loaded up their gear and took to the wall for one final try. With the weather turning and ropes weakening, they knew the odds were completely against them.

The team moved quickly at the start of the climb. It was familiar; they had scaled it dozens of times in going up and down the wall establishing the route. Then hope faded; an early winter storm settled into the valley and they were forced to take shelter on a ledge and wait it out. Days went by; cold rain pounded at the rock, the wind whipped at their backs.

When the storm finally broke, their rhythm was shattered, their morale draining away. Their pace slowed to just five feet an hour—a caterpillar could move faster. They faced a choice: push past the fatigue and go higher; or descend, pack up, forget about El Cap, and get on with their lives.

They decided to push on.

On November 12, 1958, nearly five hundred days after Harding started the climb, he and his team hauled themselves over the lip of El Cap. They had done what no one had ever done before, what some people had considered utterly impossible: they had scaled three thousand feet of sheer vertical granite. They had started on a flat valley floor and propelled themselves directly up, straighter than a rocket, directly into the sky.

They challenged nature and suffered a beating for it. Their hands were bloodied and calloused, bodies scarred, feet crushed and bruised. But the day was theirs. They waged war against gravity and, against all odds, had won. They, and they alone, had conquered that colossal piece of granite. As a boy, when I first heard this story, I couldn’t imagine a more spectacular ending.

When their feet finally touched the stable ground of the valley floor, there was no press corps to greet them, no microphones or cameras. The public didn’t care. Harding’s achievement was in the shadow of another, more famous, climb. There was euphoria when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest a few years earlier—their achievement made world headlines. But the conquering of El Cap was a climbing footnote. Harding didn’t grumble; instead, he developed a following.

With Harding demonstrating that gravity could be defied, climbers began migrating to Yosemite Valley. They brought with them a new attitude: they swore off the use of pitons. Pounding the metal spikes into the wall severely damaged the rock, disfiguring it, leaving streaks of rust and widening the cracks. And since many of the pitons were left behind in the rock, climbers began viewing it as a garbage trail.

Climbers developed alternative hardware that would allow an ascent without leaving a trace. The piton was replaced with machined bits of metal and camming devices that a climber could slip into fissures of the rock, and the second climber, following behind, could pull out on ascent.

Over the decades, gear became lighter, sturdier, allowing for cleaner ascents that didn’t scar the rock. With the new gear came speed; Harding’s five-hundred-day ascent was cut down to seven days, then three, then two. Pitons were replaced by equipment with names like bat hooks, Camelots, Ball Nutz, and Big Bros. The new equipment made Harding’s gear look like museum pieces: quaint and unreliable.

On our climb of El Cap, Pax and I have all that modern gear with us and we’re confident that every piece is 100 percent reliable, manufacturer-tested and -approved. I have been climbing for years and I have never known the gear to fail—mine or anyone else’s. Never. The likelihood of a critical piece of equipment actually breaking is vanishingly small, say, one in a million.

I look back now and realize that suffering the astronomically unlikely one-in-a-million event should have given me a sense of foreboding. Instead, that improbability would govern my next ten years, challenging a sense of imperviousness that I had proudly cultivated. At the moment, those unlikely odds are governing the next tenth of a second of my life.

Thwwwwip. The last few stitches of webbing unravel and the cot drops out from under us.

Before we had gone to sleep we were careful to tighten our harnesses around our waists and clip them onto ropes secured onto the rock face. But the ropes have some slack, so as the cot drops out beneath us, we begin to fall until the rope goes taut, takes our weight, pivots our feet under us, and then pulls us toward the wall, slamming us into the rock.

We hang there in the darkness, our only protection a strand of nine-millimeter-thick rope that keeps us from plunging two thousand feet to the valley floor.

If either of us had tied a meager knot or were loosely clipped into the anchor, we would be in free fall right now, moments away from having the life crushed out of us. In the history of El Cap climbing, dozens of climbers have met that fate. But having avoided that ourselves, there is comfort now, ease. It is a remarkably peaceful moment.

I walk my feet up the rock face a few steps and lean back on the rope, staring up at the night sky.

Breathe in, breathe out. Calm.

With the immediate danger past us, we now have to focus on the next dilemma. We are dangling like puppets in the pitch black of night. We need to find a way out of this.

I have no idea how much of our gear plunged to the valley floor below. That will become all too clear the next day. For now, what we need most is some light.

A fifteen-foot circle of light cuts through the darkness, spotlighting the granite. The beam of Pax’s headlamp starts to move across the rock wall, slowly rastering back and forth.

I unclip my headlamp from a belt loop on my harness and join the search, sweeping my light across the sheer granite face, scanning for a place—a ledge, a cave, a protrusion—anywhere to take the weight off our harnesses and rest.

Pax finds it first. “There’s a ledge,” he calls out. Those are the first words spoken since the cot collapsed and if he’d yelled that out at midnight at one of the populated camps in the valley below, he would have awakened someone who would yell at us to shut up. But here, thousands of feet above them all, we’re out of earshot and his words are welcome news.

Pax’s headlamp is illuminating a feature in the rock that is roughly twenty feet below us and ten feet off to the side. It’s a small ledge, smaller than our collapsed cot, only about the size of a couple two-by-four planks. It is meager, just a fraction of scaffolding, but it is the only option we have.

“Looks comfortable, Pax. Let’s get down there.” With that, I shift my headlamp’s beam back to my harness. We have to untie from the safety rope we’ve been dangling on and clip onto another rope—one long enough to reach the ledge below.

From my harness I unclip a rappel device, a thick, sturdy figure 8–shaped piece of metal that fills the palm of my left hand. With my right hand I thread a rope through the top loop of the 8 and then clip the bottom loop onto the harness. I take in the slack and lean back on the rope. It takes my weight.

The only thing in my vision now is the rope tied onto my harness; the rest of the world once again falls back into darkness. It’s time to untie the safety knot.

This is a moment that might give some people pause. The safety line is secure: it rescued us from a two-thousand-foot plunge; it has proven its reliability. The rappel line, on the other hand, hangs loosely below my feet, untethered and swaying in a modest breeze. One could imagine a cascade of problems that might result in shifting to that untested line.

That is certainly one way to size up the options: untested versus proven. But that would be the wrong way to look at it. If I assessed things that way, I would never have gotten off the ground to do this climb in the first place.

Here’s the way I see it: either I untie the safety line and rappel through the open air down toward the ledge; or I continue to dangle on the safet...

Revue de presse

“Intrepid Francis Slakey scales each continent's highest peak, surfs every ocean, and lives to tell the tale in To The Last Breath, an exhilarating thrill show for armchair adventurers who prefer air conditioning to thin air.” —Vanity Fair

“When a Georgetown physics professor saw his existence becoming mundane, he actually did something about it. This exciting, moving memoir documents his quest to climb the highest mountains and surf every ocean on earth.” —Entertainment Weekly “Must List”

“A dramatic account of summiting Everest, getting ambushed in Indonesia and enduring isolation and spiritual deprivation in Antarctica. . . . To the Last Breath is a moving tale of self-discovery, right to the last word.” —People

“Francis Slakey’s exciting, perilous adventures from El Cap to the Indian Ocean are at first just a stunt—the cool, calculated goal of a hardcore scientist. But when the acts of grace and heroism of others open his heart, To the Last Breath becomes a tribute to the remarkable connectedness that binds the world and its people together.” —Norman Ollestad, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy For The Storm

“To The Last Breath is, in a word, breathtaking. Dr. Slakey takes you with him as he blasts through blizzards and dangles by frayed lines to get to the top of the highest mountains. He also adds the science of surfing to your body of knowledge. I felt his transformation as if it were my own: from restrained physics professor who gives his students equations instead of himself, to humane, caring soul, willing to love and to lose and to truly enter the world. Slakey’s story has the adrenaline of high adventure, but more importantly, it delivers the thrill of self-discovery.” —Lucinda Franks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of My Father’s Secret War

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Brilliance Audio
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1455887293
• ISBN 13: 9781455887293
• Reliure: Lecteur digital à contenu audio pré-chargé
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible