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Jim Wickwire

We moved down the Peters Glacier on Denali's West Buttress slowly, a sled between us loaded heavy with supplies.  Twenty feet of rope linked us - too close, we knew, but required by the rough, undulating surface of the glacier with its hidden crevasses beneath our feet.   Chris walked in front.  I walked behind, righting the sled each time it flipped.  Chris broke through the crust and plunged headfirst into a crevasse.  I was concentrating on the sled.  The rope yanked me into the air, then down into an icy void, "This is it," I thought, "I'm about to die."   The sled and I slammed on top of Chris.  My shoulder was broken.  Beating back panic I awkwardly took off my pack and squeezed it into an eighteen-inch space between the ice walls.  I shoved the sled off Chris.   All I could see were his legs behind his large pack compressed to half its normal width between the walls.  Suspended face down, he yells, "I can't move, Wick, you've got to get me out!" I grabbed his pack. "I will Chris, I promise." Hard as I pulled, he would not budge.  I could do nothing more until I got out of the crevasse.   Back against one wall and crampons against the other, I inched my way up.  Chris kept yelling, "You've got to get me out, Wick! You've got to get me out!"  Between puffs and grunts I reassured him.  Slow going.  Falling back meant getting wedged also or injured worse.  I had one chance to get out.   At the top of the 25-foot shaft, I was able to flip onto the surface.  Relief was cut short by the lowering sun.  Night meant death.  I pulled hard on the rope I had attached to Chris' pack and pulled again, and then again with one good arm.  No movement.  I anchored the rope and wen't back down.   I tried opening the pack to empty some contents.  Compressed like wood, nothing would budge.  I hacked at the pack with my axe.  The fabric flexed to the blow without tearing.  After two hours, I told Chris, "Sorry.  This isn't working." I'm going back up to try to get somebody, anybody on radio."   I climbed the rope using ascenders.  On a nearby knoll I called out for help.  "Emergency! Can anyone hear me!  We need your help!  Repeated again and again.  On this remote, untraveled route, our line-of-sight radio was useless.  No one was coming.  We were alone.   I went back down with little hope of freeing my friend with the same maneuvers.  Chris' incessant pleas subsided as he realized I could not get him out.  We were to climb everest next year.  "Climb it for me Wick.  Remember me when you're on the summit." I'm stunned.  My friend was about to die right in front of me.   Chris gave me messages to relay to his family and closest friends.  I asked him if he wanted his body left in the crevasse or brought out.  He said his father would decide.  At 9:30, six hours after falling, he concedes, "There's nothing more you can do, Wick.  You should go up."  I told him I loved him and sobbed.  As I left, Chris said simply, "Take care of yourself Jim."   Lying at the edge of the crevasse, I listened to my friend delirious from the searing cold.  talking, sometimes singing to himself.  At 2 a.m. he went silent.  Chris Kerrebrock was twenty-five.  I was forty.

 

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