A week later, Carl and I flew into the Hayes Range. My share of the charter cost my last paycheck. The pilot dropped us off directly below Ten Nine Ten. Its 3,000-foot face looked short, easy, almost disappointing in the trick of perspective known as foreshortening. Years later Carl would tell me, “If it wasn’t for foreshortening, nothing would ever get climbed.”

In the morning, surrounded by steep, glacier-draped mountains, we headed up. Midway on the route, Carl led through near-vertical granite mixed with ice. He pounded in a warthog—an ice piton that looks like Macbeth’s dagger—for protection. Following him, my crampons screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard. I stopped to wrench the warthog out of the crack for use higher up. “Leave it in!” Carl called down, “We gotta keep moving!” With cold toes and only halfway up the climb, I happily left the ’hog skewered in an ice-choked crack, unclipped the carabiner and sling, and hurried on. Pitch after pitch of ice led to the final headwall as the weather slipped into storm.

The increasing snowfall stopped us on a small arête where we would dig in for the night. Carl shoveled a shallow snow cave that sheltered us above the waist only. We crawled into our bivy sacks, sleeping fitfully and cramped, our feet dangling over the edge. Spindrift powdered our faces till dawn. Although I was miserable, it was precisely the experience I’d hoped for—Alaskan alpinism.

The storm passed, leaving the morning clear and cold. On the windless summit, we took in the view while Carl melted snow on our stove for hot cocoa. After my fear of failure, success tasted especially sweet, but we still needed to get down. We descended a sharp ridge back to camp, then packed up and skied out a series of glaciers to the road, elated with our ascent of the virgin face. Carl had won a local prize in Ten Nine Ten, picking a plum with an inexperienced, teenage kid.

I felt special to climb the route with Carl. But one night, years later at a Sandvik party, he admitted, “I would have climbed Ten Nine Ten with anyone.” Seeing my face fall, he added quickly, “But I’m glad I did it with you.” Carl valued his partners’ feelings as much as he valued their belays and we would make many adventures together. Intense outdoor experiences either strengthen or extinguish bonds between partners.

Back in Fairbanks after our climb of Ten Nine Ten, we quickly sobered up from the alpine high. Two friends, a popular couple, had been involved in a tragic fall down a local mountain. Peter McKeith, a UAF graduate student, was the president of the Alaska Alpine Club. His girlfriend was the strongest female climber in Fairbanks. With three broken limbs and trapped between crevasses, she overnighted in her backpack’s built-in bivy sack and survived. Peter didn’t.

Every adventure community feels elation and sorrow. But for me, springtime’s sunshine amplified my elation, burned off much of the sorrow, and prompted me to approach for the first time the pretty eighteen-year old freshman who’d watched us climb ropes in the gym: Peggy Mayne.

Chapter 3

Peggy Mayne

Peggy, Brooks Range, July 1986.

Courtesy of the author

Bathed in sunlight the day after classes ended, Peggy Mayne stood at the top of the UAF library stairs. It was warm—a beautiful spring day. We had never met, but we both had anticipated this moment. Peggy, a friend named Eleanor had recently informed me, had been eyeing me all winter. “But,” Eleanor went on, “she’s not your type, Roman.”

Seeing Peggy standing there, I thought, Let me be the judge of that.

Success on Ten Nine Ten had emboldened me to speak to her, although forty years later we still disagree about who said hi first. Slim in white painter overalls, she wore her long blond hair straight and loose down her back. Her smile sparkled bright as the May sunshine. When her blue eyes spotted in green met mine, we felt a mutual attraction that was immediate, physical, and uninhibited.

I asked her out on a date to a campus play that night. While I was sitting next to her, any little touch of our elbows or knees so electrified me that I could hardly follow the plot. Afterward, we walked and talked well past midnight, when the sun dips briefly only to rise shortly after. While Peggy Mayne wasn’t interested in climbing, she certainly seemed interested in me.

The week following semester’s end, we spent every day together. We walked through the woods behind the university. We cycled Fairbanks’s dusty bike paths. And we hung out at her sister and brother-in-law’s place three blocks from campus. In Maureen and Steve’s small house Peggy cut my hair. The intimacy thrilled me as she pushed her taut little body against mine to trim my shoulder-length mane to the collar.

Like me, Peggy liked to talk. We talked while we walked. We talked while we bicycled side by side (neither of us had a car). And as weeks turned to months and we found ourselves in bed, we talked there, too.

Peggy’s nature rubbed off on my dirt-bag climber cheapness. She taught me to share, to consider others, to be responsible for myself. Then, as now, she lives her every breath by the Golden Rule. She also shows no mercy when she’s unhappy with my behavior.

As the youngest of ten children—five boys and five girls—who grew up under an abusive father, she has always shown remarkable insight and empathy. It’s as if her whole nervous system focuses outward, collecting data on others, observing and responding to them. She sees things I don’t even know exist in people, judging them on character, not accomplishments.

That summer, I left for Colorado to climb, then for Virginia to work. Peggy left for a salmon cannery on the Alaska Peninsula. We kept in touch with handwritten letters. Her words told cannery stories about characters, comedy, and conflicts. She also asked about me.

“I miss you. I miss your eyes, your voice, the feel of your skin,” I wrote back, looking forward to picking up where we had left off.

The following winter, I moved into a dry, one-room log cabin without electricity and heated by a small wood stove. It was a few miles from campus, off the cross-country ski trails near the top of Miller Hill. Without a car, we spent many winter nights on campus, crowded together in Peggy’s dorm room bed when subzero temperatures kept me from my commute. Our heads on her pillow, we would sometimes whisper about children and family.

“I want to have seven kids with no TV in the house,” Peggy told me, our bodies touching, “and have them when we’re young, so we can be young with them, too.”

“I don’t know about seven!” I replied. “I want to travel the world with my kids, sharing its wild places, its cultures, its tropical mountains and subtropical beaches.”

With her small frame and smile that can light up a room, Peggy has always been every child’s favorite adult. She seemed ideally suited for her chosen college major of elementary education. She was playful and sensitive with her niece and I could see that she’d make an attentive and loving mother.

In May and September of 1981, before and after her summer cannery employment, we made overnight trips to the distant Delta Mountains in the eastern Alaska Range and the nearby Granite Tors, a low tundra plateau studded with craggy towers. Peggy had never camped off the road, climbed a rock, hiked a mountain. I enjoyed sharing these easy experiences with her. For gnarly adventure there was always ice climbing with Carl.

School took up my time with biology labs and math homework. Like most college students, I had little clue how a career might look after graduation, although my adviser encouraged academia as a goal: a professor, perhaps. Earning a Ph.D. fell somewhere along a vague timeline to “be a scientist.” Until then, climbing would take precedence over everything—except Peggy Mayne.

THROUGH THE EARLY eighties, a climbing-related accident took the life of a good Fairbanks climber every year. But that didn’t slow me down. By 1982, the Alaskan alpine style of climbing—like skiing a hundred miles to climb a steep new route—had emerged as my forte. Although summits still seduced me with the promise of alpine intensity, combining them with the wilderness below the peaks increasingly appealed to me. The landscapes in the foreground were so much richer in colorful experiences: animals and plants, rivers and forests, sounds and smells. The rock, snow, and ice of alpine routes were monochromatic. Climbing from river bottom to mountain top integrated all of wild Alaska in a satisfying tapestry of nature.