PERSPECTIVE
Now I had nothing to hide behind. Her last scream echoed in my head. My heart rate increased. The sense of dread that had been building behind a wall of practicality began to break through. I knew now that my skills were redundant. It didn’t matter that we’d skied this route dozens of times before. It wouldn’t matter how fast I could get her out. The only thing that mattered was whether she had survived the fall. Everything was out of my hands. I had no control. The dice had been rolled. All that was left was to lift the cup and see how they had fallen.
I reached the edge and stared down. No more than a meter wide, the bullet-hard, watery-smooth blue sides disappeared downwards into ever-fading tones of blackness. “Emily…?” I choked out as loud as I could, knowing that the next thing I heard would dictate the rest of my life. “Yeh,” came a muffled reply. A wave of relief, anger, nausea, gratitude and adrenaline lifted, washed, surged, cursed through me. I wanted to punch, kiss, vomit, and praise all
Words: Tom King
Tom works for Icelandic Mountain Guides, dividing his time between the remote South East of the country and the glamour of Chamonix. He is also a freelance writer and guide with The Splitboard Collective.
at the same time. I swallowed. “Are you hurt?” “No.”
“Are you clipped in?” “Yes.” By now a guide was being lowered down to her. Another guide helped me sort out the ropes. We packed our kit and knelt on it as the helicopter came and dropped off the PGHM (the French mountain police/rescue team). They worked quickly, but it took an agonising amount of time with few distractions before a stretcher appeared at the lip of the hole. I looked down at the bloodied face of my soaking wet, shivering and yet still smiling girlfriend with a tear in my eye.
She was flown to hospital as we packed up our
gear. That morning, I’d packed my shortest rope with the same reasoning I’ve used every time I ski on a glacier. If I can’t reach someone with 30 meters of rope, I don’t need to: they are dead. It took every centimeter of that rope to reach Emily, but my reasoning hasn’t changed. We were just very, very lucky.
22 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
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