“There’s nothing here! Don’t you feel it? Can’t you feel how deserted this place is? How empty?”
Yes, I felt it back when we were on the col and observing the rolling plains of scree and the surrounding cliffs. Dead is the word that springs to mind. The valley seemed dead. You could tell even by the way Augustin’s yodel had gone flat and died down in the expanse.
“Yes, and I don’t like it either. I don’t know how come we haven’t reached the glacier yet. We must have gotten disoriented. I don’t know what to say. The strain, the whiteout, the altitude, whatever. But hey, we simply made a miscalculation down there and the glacier is probably right in front of us, in the mist.”
That sounds plausible. I think I can even feel its cold, massive breath. The valley may be dead, but glaciers are alive—dormant, watchful, ancient, and cold.
“Let’s just bivouac. I’m cold and I don’t want to find our way back down in the dark and in the mist. It will clear up tonight and tomorrow morning we’ll be able to see where we are. Then we can decide whether to go up or back.”
“Yeah, and what about this snow?” Augustin looks at his watch. “It’s twenty-eight degrees. Was that the forecast?”
I shrug. We both know how incredibly local these things can be in the Alps. High mountains create their own laws and weather systems, and if you allow them to take you by surprise, they will render all your accumulated experience and technical skills useless. You can learn to read the weather, but you can never truly understand it. Even so, the sudden drop in temperature is strange. The past few days, the frost line had risen to 13,500 feet, and it was supposed to stay warm for the next couple of days.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s look for a sheltered spot.”
It startles me to realize that, for a moment, I don’t know from which direction we have come, because the terrain is practically flat and the increasing snow is making visibility even worse than it was. More by luck than judgment, Augustin spies the bed of the brook and we hurry to it, relieved to have retrieved our landmark. The brook is our last resort. When even the birds have left and the water has fled, downstream is the only guide to the valley. We may have gotten disoriented, but at least we weren’t lost.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
??*
About an hour later we settle down pretty comfortably—insofar as that’s possible in the damp cocoon of a bivi sack in the middle of freezing nowhere.
The light is diffuse, as you can see in photos 6 and 7.
I call this pair “A peek into camp.” The mountains have entered that strange, subdued phase between late afternoon and twilight. Although the daylight has not yet receded from the sky, the snowdrifts make it look like the evening has already frozen solid all around us.
The first of the two is a timer shot, but you can see I’m not in the space or the mood to pose properly. A bit further upstream, we had found a large, slightly overhanging boulder. The lee it offers is pathetic, but it’s the best we can do, and with some mental gymnastics, you could call the ground somewhat smooth. We quickly set up camp by piling up boulders as a storm barrier, spreading out the bivi sack and cramming the Therm-a-Rests and sleeping bags in through the opening. The exertion keeps us warm, but the wind is getting stronger and lashes our faces with cold waves of snow. You can see Augustin behind me in the photo, sitting on the bivi sack. The Gore-Tex is billowing with trapped air and he’s gazing intently, concentrated, preoccupied with taking off his light blue Scarpas.
The atmosphere in the second camp picture, photo 7, is cheerier. Augustin’s smiling broadly at the camera over a steaming mug of lemon tea. He’s propped up on his elbow, tucked under the bivi sack’s hood and emerging like a caterpillar from the goose down sleeping bag. Like me, Augustin has put on his cap to keep warm. Our breath is rising in puffs and blends with the steam from the MSR stove under the sheltering boulder. We’ve just had Chinese tomato Cup-a-Soup and the tea and are now digging into Thai noodles with curry. And duck, the package says. It’s amazing what culinary pleasures you can concoct with powder and melted snow.
[Yes, photo 7 has an aura of positivity, Sam, but it is the last picture I would take of Augustin. If only we knew these kinds of things when they mattered.]
We’re lying down, pressed against each other, staring at the bivi sack’s silver interior, as the day’s rigors finally creep into our bodies. I try to adjust myself to the hard discomfort of the rocks under my pad and the shoes and backpacks piled up at our feet. When I gaze circumspectly through the bivi sack’s opening, cold air and snow rush in. The weather outside has only deteriorated. It’s a strange sight; you would think it was the middle of winter.
There are occasional gaps between the hurriedly passing clouds, which only reveal layers of more clouds hanging above them, gyrating in the powerful machinery of the drifting snow. It spreads a fan of powder on the bivi sack’s surface and starts to pile up against the stone barrier. The Black Diamonds, which we planted between the rocks, stand out like guards, and I shiver involuntarily.
When are you going to ask yourself the questions that need to be asked? This goes through my mind as I pull down the hood and shut out the storm. When are you going to ask yourself why it took you hours and hours to cover a distance that shouldn’t have taken more than a quarter of the time? How could the valley seem to be growing with every step you took? And how come you couldn’t find a single bit of information on this place online?
Drops of condensation on the bivi sack glisten when Augustin looks at his cell. I ask whether he has a signal. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head.
“Weird, huh, how dependent you start feeling once you’re off the grid? Makes you realize how on your own you really are.”
Augustin shrugs. “I don’t like them anyway. I have a prepaid so I can call 1414 in case of an emergency, but besides that, I only use the camera.”
“Yeah, only, just when you need it, you get a mountain blocking the cell tower and there’s no signal.”