Meditations on Suffering
Not long ago, I was in the upper reaches of Bells Canyon in the Wasatch Range and came across an older man grimacing as he sat awkwardly next to his pack. I've broken my fibula, I believe, he said. I'm a retired orthopedic surgeon. I don't want a helicopter, I can make it out.
We're five miles in and 3500' above the valley floor.
Later, when people asked me how he made it out, I say haltingly, He suffered.
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Let's go to Alaska. It's July 2002. My son is just over 3 months old but he's sweating away the summer in Salt Lake City.
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Andrea and I had just returned from digging the snow cave when I ordered our six clients to grab their belongings and abandon the tent. We were at our high camp at 17,300' on the upper Harper glacier on the north side of Denali. In our lone remaining tent just below us were our sister guides Marco and Erica with their six clients, crammed into a 4 person Trango 4 expedition tent.
We had lost two tents only 18 hours before, but in a way I never expected. I'll try to explain...
The first flakes of snow began to fall as our four teams put the finishing touches on a double wall around each tent. What began as an intermittent shoveling exercise with the blowing and drifting snow became a near continual effort to keep our tents from being completely buried. Several hours pass with heavy snowfall and strong wind.
(williwaw on Anvers Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, Margaret Brown)
I'm in our guides tent vestibule melting snow and making hot drinks when I hear first the thunderclap and then the sound of terror and alarm. I'll never forget stepping out of the vestibule with channel locks in my hands to see two fully guyed down tents with clients in them picked up vertically and then smashed into bits. One of the tents was engulfed in flames, the nylon rapidly disintegrating around clients clawing to escape. They too had been melting snow in their vestibule and the chaos had thrown their stoves into the air.
Gear is lost as we scramble to bring our homeless clients in to our two remaining tents. It's still snowing 3" an hour and the wind is such that talking without yelling is difficult. Marco and Erica take charge of one of the tents with six clients, Andrea and I remain in the guides tent and welcome in six refugees from the storm. But it doesn't last long for us. The drifting reminds me of the shifting sands in Lawrence of Arabia. Our tent is being buried by the drifting snow and despite the continuous shoveling, we can't keep up. Andrea and I tell the clients to keep shoveling, keep melting snow, keep drinking tea, keep nibbling, keep your wits about you. And so we leave to dig our snow cave which would be our last remaining hope.
(haboob in Arabia, C.Cain)
It was not to be. The drifting is such that the eight of us are entombed in a frozen mausoleum. And so we must abandon the snow cave and head down to the last remaining tent. Our old tent is long gone, completely buried. I don't remember how it was that I was grinning as I post-holed over and said, Marco, how are you for room in there? Within minutes we had 16 people in a single Mountain Hardwear Trango 4 tent - two thin layers of nylon separating us from End of Times. And the storm continued.
What was it that destroyed the double walls, picked up two fully loaded tents and and destroyed them? There was no avalanche debris. The bedouin describe something of a sandstorm called a haboob, or dust spout that can upend entire mounted armies and scatter camps into oblivion. Others conjecture a williwaw. Williwaws are known to be violent katabatic wind storms not uncommon in the higher latitudes. But I think they may be more maritime in nature. So I may never know. But I shudder to think of the event destroying all of our tents instead of two.
