All that l could think about around 1 AM on June 21st was my thirst. Inside a steep, cascading gully filled with boulders and fallen trees, I rappelled through a cold waterfall. It was pitch black except for the stark beam of my headlamp, and the faintest gleam of moonlight behind silver clouds. I opened my mouth wide to the fall, gasping in water. At that point, losing what was left of my mental clarity to dehydration was more dangerous than possibly contracting giardia.
Once my feet found the base of the gully again, I shouted to Kane and Kelsey above. “Off rappel!” I looked around at the new ledge I had descended to. Was that rap six or seven? I’d lost count, and didn’t care.
Alone on the ledge inside the gully, soaked to my base layers, my mindset shifted from thirst and rappel counts. I spoke out loud to the mountain in the darkness. “I just want us to get home safe. Please let us all get out of here OK.”
~
Kelsey and I were both itching for another moderate, beautiful adventure climb right when the new Snoqualmie Rock Guidebook was released at the end of May. We both got copies and pored through it right away. We found Epiphany - a 5.8, 10-pitch route ascending 1,300 feet to the top of Revelation Peak. Photos in the book depicted a cirque of granite slab. Beautiful, moderate, with a simple but steep approach. It looked like the adventure we were seeking.
Kane called me on June 19th, the day before Kelsey and I had agreed to climb. He said he was coming down from Bellingham specifically to climb, so I told him to jump on board our trip. “Ten pitches of 5.8? Hell yeah, I’m in,” he replied.
On the morning of June 20th, we hiked through the woods to the base of the climbing route. The one-hour approach described in the guidebook turned into two hours of heinous bushwhacking. As we ascended the 50º slope, Kelsey slipped. She instinctively grabbed a thorny stalk of Devil’s Club, and scoured her hand. No more lead climbing for her.
Our mindset at that point was centered upon being owed a good time after such a shitty hike. “I’m fine to go on if you guys are OK with leading the whole route,” Kelsey said.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
What I wish I had said was something more attuned to the mindset of “time to turn around. The mountain isn’t going anywhere.”
Like accelerating dominos, the rest of the day went by with decisions of increasing severity in consequence. The mountain was falling apart, and near-misses with rockfall the size of grapefruit plagued us. Placing protective gear on the decaying mountain face was impossible for nearly a hundred feet at times, rendering our rope as dead weight when there was nothing to clip it into. Thunder clapped as a storm rolled in on pitch eight, then quickly abated - but left the loose rock slick with rain.
We were ready to be off the mountain, but the fastest way out now appeared to be up-and-over. Impatience turned to frustration, and frustration to distress as our haste interfered with our ability to accurately route-find. By way of a previously-unclimbed chute of unprotectable choss, we reached a false summit in fading daylight around 9 PM. Finally, we could begin our descent down the opposite face.
Then we discovered that I was the only one with a working headlamp. Our pace slowed to a crawl as I alternatingly rappelled down the darkening gully, then turned to light the way for my friends.
Our exhaustion and hunger had amplified our negative mindset in the twilight. By 2 AM, the accompanying lightheadedness was playing into a dim humor of resignation. “It’s kind of funny now that we were all worried about getting home in time for dinner,” I said.
Kelsey laughed. “Yeah, now it’s like, where should we take a nap in the dirt?”
Thirty minutes later, Kane’s feet punched through a loamy rim of soil as we traversed the side of another gully. A large conifer root under each of his armpits was all that suspended his dangling body 30 feet off the ground. That’s when we emphatically decided to stop moving and wait for daylight. We huddled together on a patch of dry pine needles, and joked about our miserable circumstance. Somehow our spirits rose, and the stars came out gleaming through black limbs above.
Around 5 AM, the first daylight pierced the blue fog surrounding us. We kept rappelling down and traversing the gully rim for another 45 minutes, and soon found ourselves back on the exit route described in the guidebook. Two hours later, we were back at the car, 24 hours after we had left it. We drove to the nearest diner and got a massive pancake breakfast, the best I’ve ever had. When I got home and took a shower, I returned to the simplest of all mindsets, which can only be found in the sleep of pure exhaustion.
~
I did not climb for a month as I recounted and analyzed the pivotal points of June 20th. I was disappointed in myself for not having made safer decisions. Epiphany is not a memory that brings me comfort or satisfaction. But it does give me a mindset of caution, and emboldens me to speak up in the face of disappointing friends with boring, safer alternatives to future misadventures.
Kelsey belaying Kane up the first pitch of Epiphany.