Night 6 - Crevasse on Emmons, Hooman's Bad Night

June 16-17, 2007

Emmons Glacier Crevasse Bivy (approx 10,000 - 11,000 feet)

At this point, it is 8:00 pm, it's getting dark, and Hooman suggests that we should start looking for a snow cave where we can bivy for the night. I heartily agree, and start scouting the immediate area near the base of our rappel for an appropriate crevasse or cave. I find what looks like a suitable option conveniently located near the base of our rappel rope, and when Dan arrives, I rappel 10 feet down into the crevasse, and find a near-perfect, flat bottomed crevasse with protection from the still-blasting winds and blowing snow. I ungracefully ascend back up, and inform Dan of the discovery. He rappels down, checks it out, and with some trepidation, agrees that it’ll work for the night. I join him in the crevasse, and we set up our sleeping gear, enjoying the peace, surprising warmth and shelter from the wind and snow that had been beating us senseless us all day.

After 20 minutes to collect our thoughts, it occurs to us that we are missing a member of our team. Neither of us has any idea where Hooman has gone, and we realize that he must have continued down the glacier, unroped. By this time, it’s completely dark out, so we start to get worried. After some discussion, I ascend out of the crevasse with my headlamp and a whistle that Dan thoughtfully remembered to bring, and blast on the whistle, screaming Hooman’s name into the howling gale. Finally, after 5 minutes of hiking downhill, I see the light of his headlamp very far away in the distance, and hear him shouting. At this point, I have a very difficult decision to make – do I continue down the glacier to Hooman, or do I return to the crevasse with Dan and all of my gear? I decide that I should return to the crevasse, for the following reasons 1 - It’s completely pitch black out and the blowing snow reduces visibility to about 10 feet in any direction. 2 - I don’t have a rope or any other gear. 3 - I would be traveling over crevassed terrain, in the dark. 4 - Hooman is a much more experienced mountaineer than either Dan or I, and he has all the gear that he would require to survive a night in a crevasse or on the mountainside. 5. I am already uncomfortably far away from the crevasse with my gear, and if I get lost out here without my sleeping bag or shelter from the elements, I’m screwed. After a nerve-wracking moment of indecision, I head back up to the crevasse, and take shelter again, hoping Dan won’t be angry with me for not continuing down the glacier after Hooman.

While I’m back in the crevasse, we notice the rope being tugged out of the crevasse, and think that Hooman has somehow managed to find his way back up to our tiny hole in the ice. After shouting his name and getting no reply, we figure out that the rope is actually being tugged by the wind, since there’s about 100 feet of it hanging free between the top of our original rappel, and the lip on top of the small cliff that rise 10 feet above our cozy home for the night. As a precaution that seems logical and adequate to our exhausted brains, I tie a coil in the bottom of the rope, hoping that the extra bit of weight will help anchor the rope in the bottom of the crevasse and keep it from being blown up and out of the crevasse during the night, leaving us semi-stranded in the bottom in the morning.

As we settle down to sleep, I realize that I have screwed up my one chance on the entire trip to make my sleeping pad EXACTLY how I want it, and end up tossing and turning on a ridiculously uncomfortable patch of snow that has the bumps and high places in all the wrong places. Midway thru the night, I realize that we are actually more susceptible to snow blowing down into the crevasse that we originally thought, and when I stick my head out of my sleeping back, I realize that Dan and I are basically both coated with half an inch of fine spindrift that quickly melts on our warm sleeping bags. To add injury to insult, at about 1:00 am, out of the corner of my eye I catch a small black shape zipping up and out of the crevasse. I get out my headlamp, and find to my horror and fury that the coil that I tied in the bottom of the rope didn’t help, and the rope has been blown up and out of the hole.

Not wanting to wake Dan with this bad news, I lay back down in my increasingly wet sleeping bag, get really mad, and proceed to plan out, in great detail, the exact course of action that we’ll be taking over the next day, or in the case of continuing bad weather, the next few days. Basically, the plan is to climb out of the crevasse first thing in the morning, and retrieve the rope by whatever means necessary. If the weather is still crappy and visibility sucks, return to the bottom of the crevasse, call the rangers on my unbelievably still-functional cell phone, let them know where we are and that we’re missing a member of our party. Then we’ll rig the tent rainfly to protect our sleeping spots from continuing loose snow, and hunker down for another day or more, melting loose snow in our Nalgenes with body heat in our sleeping bags, eating our remaining food to try and stay warm and healthy. If the weather is good in the morning, we’ll haul ass down the rest of the glacier to Camp Shurman as quickly as possible, looking for Hooman on the way. Upon arriving, if we don’t find Hooman and he hasn’t made it to Camp Shurman under his own power, we raise the alarm with the rangers, and if we’re physically capable, head back up the glacier and start searching for him ourselves. At some point during this strangely lucid fury-driven planning session, I relax and warm up enough to stop the painfully strong shivering that I’ve been experiencing since we got into the crevasse several hours ago, and finally get to sleep.