Nevertheless, we partnered up for Cutthroat Couloir. We flew there in March when it was well frozen and safe from rockfall. The climb to the top took three difficult days, including my hardest lead ever on ice, a pitch we had named “Difference of Opinion.” Chuck’s lead on “Mixed Feelings” was even harder. After those pitches of steep rock veneered with thin, hollow ice, we finished the couloir and climbed a snowy ridge to the top.

We tented on the summit our third night. Below us the Hayes Range went dark as the sky turned indigo and Alaska’s winter chill set in. The temperature reached thirty below zero and I shivered, tossing and turning in my expedition down parka and synthetic sleeping bag. Long before dawn, we woke and brewed hot drinks on our stove in the tent to warm up.

We felt good about McGinnis’s Cutthroat. Maybe too good. We had just put up one of the hardest climbs in the Hayes Range. We knew that McGinnis’s southeast ridge was another. Hubris sent us down that knife-edged ridgeline like happy cowboys on barebacked ponies. Then we arrived at a long stretch of cornices. Two of the most experienced alpinists of our generation had disappeared without a trace on Canada’s highest mountain when one of these snowy hazards collapsed beneath them, sending the pair roped impotently to their deaths.

On Ten Nine Ten five years before, Carl had instructed me in negotiating corniced ridges: “Roman, if I break a cornice, jump off the other side, okay?” The idea that a rope stretched over the ridge between us would keep us both from falling to the glaciers below seemed iffy at best, but it would be the only way to safeguard our descent of McGinnis’s southeast ridge.

AT THE END of a stressful two-hour lead, I slithered like an alpine chimney sweep down a big iced-up crack that split a craggy spire. Tied together with twin parallel ropes, we had reached the col between McGinnis and the next mountain. It was a good place to pull Chuck in on belay. Crisp blue shadows rimmed in tangerine stretched across the ridge. The sun would drop soon, sending temperatures to minus thirty again. The wind picked up.

Waiting for Chuck to join me, I looked ahead. Beyond the col, cornices clung to bare rocks like a white gyrfalcon’s talons to a black fox’s carcass. There was no place to camp here and no time before dark to maneuver through the tortured ridgeline coming up.

Tense and angry by the time Chuck arrived, I dumped my stress on him.

“Chuck! There’s no place to camp! Why didn’t you say something earlier, when you were leading?” We argued about whose fault it was that we hadn’t made camp somewhere safe. He ended our spat with a whisper.

“Okay, fine, Romin Dahl,” he said quietly, his jaw stiff from the cold. “Let’s just split right here. I got a stove and a cookpot, you got a stove and a cookpot. We both got shovels. Just take your rope and give me mine and we’ll go our separate ways.” Chuck untied. He dropped the end at my feet.

Eyes as big as the yawning space around us, I stared at the naked tail of rope.

“Chuck . . . look, I was wrong. . . . You were right. It’s my fault. I should have said something back there. Maybe we can camp on this col . . . Chuck, please. Tie back into the rope.”

He looked away and spat a rat turd of Copenhagen snuff into the clean white snow.

“Really. Chuck, I mean it. . . . I’m sorry. It’s going to be fucking cold soon. Chuck, man, please. Tie back in.”

His blue eyes squinted through blond lashes crusted in frost, his look like a runaway dog who’s unsure if he should return to his owner. Reluctantly he retied. The moment passed and Chuck led off. The twin lines paid out as Comstock plowed a trough along the ridge crest, the broadest it had been since the summit. Half a rope length away, he pushed a four-foot aluminum stake—a picket—into the snow as protection, then probed the ridge with his ice ax. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe looking for a camp, maybe testing the footing, when—in one fluid motion—he dropped from sight.

The rope yanked at my comprehension, reminding of me what Carl had said on Ten Nine Ten: I leaped free of the ridge. I tumbled into space, cartwheeling and bouncing off the snowy slopes below, everything passing in a slow-motion blur. Relaxed, without pain or even fear during a fall that felt very far, I wondered if I might die, like Peter McKeith. Or if not killed, about how I might be hurt, like others who’d fallen and survived, only to suffer with broken arms and legs, days away from help. I found myself praying: Dear God, don’t break any bones. If you must, take my life instead.

Eventually I came to a bouncing, yo-yo-like stop, hanging from the end of the rope and alive. Dangling in the soft rime and sunshine I took stock—tools, crampons, pack, all intact and me uninjured—my helmet? Where’s my helmet? I looked down. Accelerating toward the glacier at the base of McGinnis was an orange dot. If the rope had broken, that would be me, careening like a rag doll.

The rope—stretched tight over the ridge—had saved me. What about Chuck? With mechanical ascenders on the rope I pulled my way to the ridge crest. Is the sturdy anchor on the other side Chuck’s dead body? On top, the rope sliced deeply into snow the cornice had left behind. A thirty-foot chunk of the ridgeline—five feet thick and fifteen feet wide—had broken free, the collapsing snow stuffing Chuck into a steep, dark couloir. Hoping to see Chuck alive, I peered down the nasty gash and spied a figure inching upward with tangled coils of rope hanging below.

“Chuck!” I called down. “You all right?”

“Yeah!” he yelled back. “I hurt my hand! But I’m okay!”

“Hold on, Chuck! I’ll come down to you! Put in a screw!”

I pounded a picket into the hard-packed snow left behind by the cornice, then rappelled down to him. He looked all right: no blood, no deformities.

“Good God, Chuck. What happened?”

“Well, Romin Dahl,” he drawled, more shaken than I’d ever seen him, “there was a strange hole in the snow and I bent over to look inside. I thought maybe we could camp in it, dig a cozy little snow cave. And then I was falling and all this snow was pushing down so hard on me I thought the rope would break! And when it stopped—well, there I was.”

We rappelled a thousand feet into the night, until we found snow deep and soft enough to scrape a shallow bivy cave. It was crowded inside but we felt safe and lucky to be alive. In the morning we rappelled another thousand feet to the glacier, staggered back to camp, stepped into our skis, then cruised off the glacier and down an iced-up creek.

At the time, I had planned to return and make another climb on the east side of McGinnis. But once back in Fairbanks, the retelling of events on the southeast ridge revealed the truth, stark as the shadow Chuck fell into: the mountains don’t give a goddamn about how good you are.

I loved alpinism like a junkie loves a fix, but I needed to quit cold turkey. It seemed far better to be an alpine has-been at twenty-five than a dead legend at thirty.

McGinnis marked the last time I would tie in for an alpinist’s route.

Chapter 5

Cody Roman Dial

Father and son, November 1987.

Courtesy of the author

After McGinnis Peak nearly killed me, I asked Peggy to marry me. We wed in June 1985 surrounded by family and friends in a wide-open field behind the Miller Hill cabin. Our honeymoon in Maui followed and then we moved into a one-bedroom house a block from Maureen and Steve. It felt good to be married and done with alpinism, although the Alaskan wilderness still tugged at my bootlaces.

In May of the following year, after finishing my master’s degree, Peggy and I headed west from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline on cross-country skis to attempt the middle leg of a thousand-mile traverse of the Brooks Range. We pulled sleds filled with a tent, a packraft and paddle, plus food and equipment for four weeks, hoping to enjoy spring give way to summer. From May to August, it never gets dark in the Brooks Range.

Only five miles from the road, though, the snowpack turned rotten in the afternoon sun, leaving conditions too soft to ski, much less walk. We climbed up to the canyon rim and camped, waiting for it to cool and the snow to harden back up. “Let’s just stay here,” Peggy suggested when the first night hovered above freezing.

On the canyon rim, we set the tent facing east and overlooking Kuyuktuvuk Creek’s valley below. We waited there, stuck in our camp, the tent hot as a greenhouse during sunny day after sunny day. We stripped off our clothes to keep cool and—technically still newlyweds—enjoyed a second honeymoon. Tent-bound, Peggy complained, “I have never eaten so much candy on one trip. We eat chocolate three times a day—just laying around in the tent!”