Deadman Anchor Page 3

  Jeremy handed them each a set of crampons and showed them the footwork needed to ascend and descend the steep slope. Instead of watching Jeremy, Kendal was distracted by a snowboarder coming down one of the steepest runs on the mountain. She was sure it was the same guy she saw yesterday He wore the same blue jacket, the same black helmet. He moved the same way, hypnotically, back and forth down the hill.

  “Are you paying attention?” Kendal’s father asked.

  “Yeah,” Kendal said.

  “Ten points of doom,” Jeremy said, lifting up his left foot. “They like to catch on your pants, legs, and shoes. Walk a little bowlegged. Don’t walk on edge, but on all of the points.”

  When she looked back at the mountain, the snowboarder was gone.

  Chapter 13

  They practiced climbing a few feet up an icy, steep slope. Then Jeremy showed them how to arrest a fall using the ice ax.

  “Hold it on the top. Not on the shaft,” he said. “This point is sharp enough to go right through your skull.”

  Kendal looked at the sharp, silver point and could clearly imagine it going through her skull, her chest, her leg, her face.

  “Hold it out in front, and use it like a cane when you climb.”

  Jeremy climbed the steep slope in front of them, the ax in his right hand. Kendal watched as the crampons on his shoes dug into the ice and snow. She laughed because he was walking like a duck.

  “Pay attention,” her father hissed at her for the third time. “You need to take this seriously.”

  “I am,” Kendal said.

  “Now,” Jeremy said, “if you start to slip, you arrest the fall by grabbing the ice ax right beneath the spike, covering the point with one hand and putting the other hand on the handle, and slamming the point of the ax into the ice.”

  Jeremy then went into a fall, slid down the icy slope, turned on his belly, and dug the ax into the ice.

  “One more thing,” he said, standing up. “Make sure you put your feet up because if your crampons catch, you’ll break an ankle, or worse, do a cartwheel down the mountainside.”

  Kendal’s father went next and, of course, made a perfect arrest.

  “You’re a natural,” Jeremy said.

  Kendal went next. As she climbed the steep hill, her left crampon caught on her right pants leg, and she tripped and fell. Before she could even think what to do, she had slid all the way to the bottom of the hill without any attempt to stop her fall.

  “Do it again,” Jeremy said.

  She climbed the steep slope again, trying to keep the sharp points of her toes firmly planted into the snow.

  “Now fall,” she heard Jeremy yell.

  But she didn’t want to fall.

  “You need to do this,” her father said. “Just slide on your belly and stop yourself with the ax.”

  She looked over her shoulder but didn’t want to go into a slide. She was afraid of the ax, afraid of the sharp crampons, afraid of dying on a twenty-foot training slope.

  “I don’t know if I should be doing this,” Kendal called down to them. “Maybe you two should do the climb on your own.”

  “You can do this,” her father said. “You just need to have some confidence in yourself. And I’m not leaving you behind.”

  She bent her knees, slowly got down on her belly and lifted her feet, and began to slide. Before she could even lift her ax, she was already down at the bottom of the hill.

  “Again,” Jeremy said.

  She climbed the slope again. This time when she went into a slide, she dug the ax into the ice, but at some point lost her grip. The ax remained near the top of slope, but she was at the bottom.

  “Again,” Jeremy said.

  Kendal climbed up the slope again and again, going into a slide ten times before she finally got it right.

  “This is a life and death skill,” Jeremy said each time he told her to do it again. “It is as important as the deadman anchor.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Kendal said.

  “Follow me,” Jeremy said, and Kendal and her father followed him to a place where there was an even steeper drop-off.

  Chapter 14

  The three of them stood at the top of the cliff.

  “You’ve been training with ropes?” Jeremy said, handing them harnesses.

  “Yes, for three months,” her father said. He’d made Kendal go rock climbing at a gym every Sunday. It took her a dozen times to finally make it to the top, but she had slowly gotten stronger and faster and her arms stopped shaking halfway up.

  “Good,” Jeremy said. “We won’t be scaling any cliffs, but like I said, we need to be prepared. So I am going to teach you what to do if you need to descend in an emergency and there is nothing to secure your rope. This is the deadman anchor I mentioned before.”

  Jeremy got down on his knees and began to dig in the snow as if he was digging a small grave.

  “You have to dig deep, at least two feet,” he continued. “If it’s an emergency, you’ll likely want to rush this part, but fight the urge. The cleaner the walls, the deeper the trench, the stronger the anchor.”

  He signaled Kendal and her father to start digging their own trenches.

  “Not deep enough,” Jeremy said, looking down at Kendal’s trench. “You can’t take shortcuts on this. You have to be sure it is deep enough.”

  She dug deeper and made sure that it was at least two feet wide.

  Jeremy continued, “Place your ax into the trench and create a sling with the rope. If you don’t have an ax, you can stuff a sack with snow.”

  He placed his ice ax in the hole and signaled Kendal and her father to do the same.

  They all stood over their trenches and then Jeremy showed them how to fill them in.

  “Starting from the back of the trench, firmly stomp the snow down. Pack the snow good and hard until you have a large block of flat, well-compacted snow all around the anchor. Then give it a couple more stomps just for good measure. You have to be sure that it will stay in place, that it will hold your weight as you descend over the edge.”

  Then Jeremy clipped himself to the rope and went over the edge of the small cliff, proving that it would hold.

  “Do you trust your deadman?” he yelled up at Kendal and her father.

  This time, even her dad looked uncertain.

  Chapter 15

  After training all morning, they went back into the lodge for an early lunch. Jeremy showed them a map with their highlighted route.

  Kendal finished a stack of blueberry pancakes and four slices of bacon. She was still hungry, so she ordered a side of eggs.

  “We’ll start here,” Jeremy said, pointing to a picture of the lodge on the map. “We’ll climb to the top of Powell Point and then onto Palmer’s Glacier where we will rest. Then we’ll head past Devil’s Kitchen and through the Pearly Gates.”

  “Devil’s what?” Kendal interrupted.

  “Devil’s Kitchen. There’s a fumarole there. Gasses sometimes rise up from vents that have formed in the volcano.”

  For the first time all day, Kendal remembered The Atlas of Cursed Places. She had been too busy training to even think about it, but just then she remembered Nellie Bly throwing gold down into a crevice while steam spewed up around her.

  “Hey,” she said, turning to Jeremy. “Is there a legend about gold being discovered on this mountain?”

  Jeremy took a sip of his coffee.

  “There’s always stories about gold being found all over Oregon,” he said.

  “But up here? On Mount Hood? Isn’t there a story about gold being found and lost up here? A story about a woman named Nellie Bly?”

  Jeremy traced his finger along the edge of the map.

  “Not one that I can recall,” he said. “Why?”

  Kendal didn’t tell him about the book. She told her father that she needed to head upstairs and pack, but instead she went straight to the library again.

  On the shelf she saw the empty pla
ce where The Atlas of Cursed Places had once sat. She looked through the other books on the shelf, and read for a few minutes about the glaciers and snowfields that made up the peak of Mount Hood. Apparently, experts believed that Mount Hood would likely erupt in the next fifty years.

  She closed that book. That wasn’t something she needed to have in her head as she climbed the mountain the next day. No matter how prepared a person may be, Kendal thought, there’s no way to prepare for a mountain that suddenly erupts. She thought once more about the book she’d read last night.

  There is no way to prepare for a curse, either.

  Chapter 16

  Kendal tried to go to sleep after dinner, but she tossed and turned and couldn’t get her brain to shut off. She reached for one of the books beside her bed and when she turned on the light next to her bed, she saw that what she held was The Atlas of Cursed Places.

  She wished her phone worked, because then she would’ve taken a picture of the book just in case she was dreaming again. If this was a dream, though, it was a really vivid one. She could feel the paper beneath her fingers and smell the faint cigar smoke.

  She opened the book and found the place where she had left off.

  Nellie Bly got rid of most of the gold—but not all of it. To her surprise, she started thinking like her husband. Years later she would claim that his greed transferred to her when he died. Still standing next to the crevice, she suddenly found herself thinking about how the remaining gold could help her start a new life with her children. How else would she feed and clothe them? She slipped the gold into her skirt pocket and made her way down the mountain.

  When she got back to the camp, her youngest child died in her arms. She knew then that she had been foolish to take the gold. She carried her child and the gold back to the cave, and buried both, side by side.

  Chapter 17

  Jeremy signed their names in a ranger book along with the time of their departure. Kendal’s father called her mother to give her one last update. They were about to begin their ascent.

  “Call me when you are back down,” Kendal heard her mother say. Then her father passed her the phone and her mother told her to be careful, to be strong, and to stay tethered to her father in case she fell.

  The moon was bright and high in the sky. The light reflected off the snow.

  The mountain was so silent that the sound of their crampons digging into the snow echoed around them. Out of the corner of her eye, Kendal thought she saw something move behind a boulder and then behind some pine trees.

  “Jeremy,” she said, nodding toward the woods.

  He stopped and pointed a flashlight into the trees. The light reflected off a pair of eyes.

  “What is it?” Kendal said.

  Jeremy clapped his hands.

  “Hey,” he said in a loud, deep voice. “Scat, cat! Scat!” He looked back at Kendal and her father. “It could be a mountain lion, or maybe just a fox. I don’t think we have to be worried, whatever it is. Look at what you’re carrying in your hands.”

  Kendal looked down at the ice ax.

  “Besides, mountain lions don’t like to go where they can’t hide.”

  “Walk in the middle,” Kendal’s dad said. He moved out of the way so she could go in front of him.

  Chapter 18

  When they reached Powell Point, they had been climbing for nearly three hours. The stars shone brightly in the sky. It was the closest Kendal had ever been to the stars. She imagined that if she was standing on the mountain peak, she’d be able to touch one of them.

  Her father put his arm around her and kissed the top of her knit hat.

  “We’re halfway there,” he said.

  “I’m glad I’m doing this,” she said. “It’s really beautiful up here.”

  Jeremy adjusted his backpack and looked at his watch.

  “The rest of the climb is a bit more treacherous, so I say we take a break and wait for more light.”

  Jeremy had a camp stove in his backpack, and he boiled some snow and made them hot tea and oatmeal. They ate and watched the sky turn from indigo to a periwinkle blue.

  Chapter 19

  The climb became steeper near Palmer’s Glacier and the mountain more exposed. Sharp boulders and glacier ice jutted out in places. Jeremy got out the ropes and tied Kendal and her father together.

  “What about you?” Kendal asked him.

  “You don’t want to be tied to the guy in front. I’ll be testing the way, making sure everything is stable. There is an ice bridge we need to cross.”

  “Where?” Kendal said.

  “Up ahead. Just past Devil’s Kitchen.”

  Kendal and her father followed. They went more slowly, more cautiously. It was now a very steep climb, with a drop-off to the left of them.

  As they made their way around a giant boulder, there was the smell of rotten eggs. Kendal crinkled her nose.

  “Devil’s Kitchen,” Jeremy said. “Some volcanic gas is being released today. We don’t want to get too close to the vent. The fumes can knock you out.”

  He veered to the left and up another steep slope. When it leveled off, Jeremy said, “Stay back.”

  Kendal watched him move across what looked like a small field, but when he came back for them and led them across, she saw that there was a deep ice crevice to the right.

  Near the peak, they had to climb up and over some boulders, reaching and stretching. At one point, Kendal’s father had to hold onto his end of the rope and help pull Kendal up.

  The higher they climbed, the stronger and colder the wind blew. When they finally reached the Pearly Gates, they took a moment to get out of the wind and drink some water and rest their legs for the final push to the top of the mountain. Jeremy said that it would take them twenty minutes to reach the peak, and Kendal couldn’t believe she had made it that far.

  Chapter 20

  The Pearly Gates were a pair of tall, slender pillars of stone. They seemed to frame the sky above them. As they crossed between the two rocks, Kendal looked up and saw that the blue sky had started to cloud over. She wondered if she could touch one of the clouds when she reached the top.

  Jeremy suddenly stopped and looked up at the sky too. He took out his radio and tried to call down to the ranger station to check on the weather, but the radio sputtered out static and then went silent. He turned it off and on again, but it didn’t work.

  “I put new batteries in it yesterday,” he said, shaking the radio. “I tested it out before we started to climb. I don’t understand.”

  Her father took out his phone, but it didn’t have a signal, so he took a picture of Kendal instead.

  “I can’t tell what these clouds will bring,” Jeremy said, looking off in the distance. “I checked the weather this morning and no storms were expected until late tomorrow night.”

  “We’re so close,” Kendal said, eyes focused on the top of the mountain. She wanted to finish the climb. The summit was just up ahead.

  Jeremy studied the clouds and then looked at his watch.

  “We’re almost there,” Kendal’s father agreed.

  “Let’s go,” Kendal said.

  Jeremy paused, looked back at the clouds, but led the way. There was a clear path to the top, but it was narrow, and on both sides of the path were steep slopes covered in ice and snow. Kendal gripped the top of her ice ax, prepared in case she slipped.

  Chapter 21

  At 10:37 a.m., they made it the top of Mount Hood. To the east the sky was clear, and Kendal could see farther than she had ever seen in her entire life. Off in the distance were three other mountains and, in between, deep valleys and lakes.

  “You did it,” Jeremy said, pulling out his camera and taking a picture of Kendal and her father at the top—the sky above them, the world below.

  Kendal wanted to stay there a bit longer and take it all in, but after just five minutes, Jeremy said they had to start their descent. His face looked concerned as he looked at the clouds racing in fro
m the west.

  When they reached the Pearly Gates, snow began to fall. At first it was light, just a few flakes, but then it started coming down heavy and fast.

  “We need to stick together. We don’t want to be separated in this,” Jeremy said. He told them to turn on their headlamps so they could see each other. He then loosely tied a rope around his waist and handed the other end to Kendal’s father. The three of them were now linked together.

  The wind picked up and blew the snow so hard that it felt like tiny pieces of sand hitting Kendal’s face. They had to stop and put on face masks and goggles. The goggles made the white snow turn gold.

  Kendal couldn’t help thinking of Nellie Bly. Trapped in a storm. Surrounded by gold.

  Chapter 22

  The snow swirled and fell upwards and downwards. They could hardly see more than a few feet in front of their faces as the storm raged.

  “Let’s take a break here,” Jeremy said, gesturing to a place behind the rocks. “We need to get out of this wind, and I have to get my bearings.”

  “Do you think we should stop and wait the storm out?” Kendal’s father had to yell in order to be heard.

  Jeremy just shook his head.

  “We have to keep going. We have to make it down. If we wait, we could freeze to death.” They continued to descend. Jeremy, then Kendal’s father, then Kendal.

  Her legs were both cold and tired. It was harder going down. The snow made it impossible to see, and with each step, she could feel gravity and the pull of the earth.

  “You’re doing great,” Jeremy said. “We’ll be at Devil’s Kitchen in no time and then it’s a straight shot down to Powell’s Point. Once there, we can follow the ski lift down to the lodge.”

  They each took a sip of water and continued on.

  The wind was gale force; there was nothing to block it. Jeremy signaled them to stay close. He was just a few feet ahead when Kendal heard a loud crack, then a crash. Her feet began to slide.