Richard, Jay, and I made good time, despite the angry weather, and climbed most of the way up Washington Column before bivouacking on Overnight Ledge, three rope lengths from the top. Night came tenderly but our hunger felt murderous once the adrenaline wore off. 

Jay had brought a zip-locked block of cheese, swimming in yellow varnish after cooking in the haul bag all day. We wolfed it down in no time. Same with the summer sausage and family-size can of Dinty Moore stew. This was our first go at scaling a big wall, and knowing the hunger of the castaway.

We’d planned to start three days before but got washed out by a late summer thunderstorm that flash-flooded camp and the Visitor Center, close by Yosemite Falls. Now we had no water at all, swilling the last of it to gag down that funky cheese. No worries, said Richard. We could sleep the night away and climb off the wall in a few hours next morning. Then tank up on water once we got down. 

We slouched back, wasted, three wannabe rock stars, shoulder to shoulder on our little granite bench. 

Between roping up at the base and clawing over the summit lay a vertical gulf we could gaze past but never fully plot beforehand. The sorcery came from crossing that gulf with an unproven strategy made up on the spot, which felt risky as hell. Without a reckless curiosity about the unknown, where all things seem possible, we wouldn’t have gotten far. A dozen years later, we’d have fifty walls bagged between us, and half of those were crapshoots.

Richard kept fiddling with gear, pitching a few broken bits out into space and us chuckling anxiously as they plummeted through the night before clinking off the wall a thousand feet below. We all feared falling through the air, but tumbling through my mind was my greater fret. Dissolving into the crypt of self. Big walls as body snatchers. I’d quested up there, offering myself to fear, as the void reached up, grasping at my feet, dangling off Overnight Ledge. Slowly, the white noise died off, leaving signal, which is soundless and always right now. 

To whom did this silence answer? Not to me. The world of sounds and shades and ten-thousand forms was no longer arrayed around me as the focal point. The order of things had flopped, somehow. Now everywhere was the center. Perhaps this was how the world perceived itself. 

I had no idea, starting out that morning, as we idled up the trail, shouldering vicious loads. Inaccessibility was part of the magic. If anyone could stroll up here, most of gravities power would be lost. We were experienced climbers—not on this scale, it is true—but we were hungry for trouble and knew about ropes and pitons and going up. We all felt confident we were where we belonged.

Around noon, a fiery breeze blew the clouds away and heat waves welled off the rock, blistering to the touch. We’d climbed too high to safely retreat, otherwise we would have. Heat is heinous for its unrelenting strength, which no one can understand until it is endured. We panted, foreheads banging, seeking the patch of shade beneath the haul bag. 

Then clouds rolled in like foaming breakers, darkened and snarled, as rain teemed from the sky for what felt like hours, us still stranded in slings. Finally the sky broke apart and the rock, scarfed in mist, dried out. For another hour, we dangled there, staring into the blue distances, wondering if Nature had lost Her mind (toggling the dial on the thermostat like that), shivering ourselves back to action. Rangers said the swing in temperatures was the largest in a day since they began keeping records in the 1890s. We sat stupefied on the ledge, wondering how this mercurial rock monolith could apprehend such extremes. 

I never know a mountain till I’ve slept on it. But beat down like that, sleep refused me. The lights and campfires gleamed in the valley. My mind went blank. A quiescence without beginning, crawling with ancestral fears. It must have spooked the others as well because we all started talking furiously about nothing, blue stars winking back at us. It felt like being in church, almost, till a hankering for a sip morphed into brain-frying, soul-murdering thirst. It happened—like everything else in this circus-mirror world—one-two-three. 

We’d climbed through the heat wave and had downed maybe a quart of water per man, many quarts shy of the required dosage. That triggered, on a time delay, a thirst like a freight train that ran us right over. 

We sat in stupors, crying out for a drop. Anything. Staring at the moon, trying to will it across the sky. Time became the enemy. The mountain, monstrous. At first light, like three bursts of fire licking the wall, up we climbed, summiting in a daze, our mouths and eyes glued shut.  

We staggered into forest and traversed right over a saddle to the start of North Dome Gully, a mostly treeless series of slabs and sandy ledges marking the start of the descent route. The storms of centuries had rolled a riot of teetering boulders into this ditch, bristling with snaggle bushes. The sky was blue blue and, already, the gully heaved with heat mirages. Jay warned to stay far left because out right loomed the Death Slabs, steep and naked granite covered with pine needles, where a traveler, dying of thirst and loaded with ropes and ironmongery, only went to die.   

We trundled down, breathless and seeing double, through a maze of boxcar boulders and manzanita. Gaping at the Merced River, half a mile below, meandering from Tenaya Canyon and wending through the valley. A silvered strand of life, us shrieking inside at the sight of it. There, but tragically out of reach. We would gladly have sold the other guy into slavery just to have one cool inch of that river.

I couldn’t make out Richard’s words, just followed his hand, pointing to seep, drizzling from a fracture in the wall of the ditch. Clear water. Living water. 

We’d all three stripped down to short shorts and sneakers, our thirst just as roaring and naked as our bodies. I reached a hand into the thread of drizzling brightness so intense that my mind stopped. It was the most unguarded moment of my eighteen years on earth.

Jay clawed at the drizzle, trying to catch it. Then rooted through the haul bag, retrieved our tin Sierra cup, and held it below the trickle. We watched, agonizing second after second, as the cup began to fill. Jay couldn’t wait and tossed down a spoonful. I wrenched the cup from his hands and held it under the drip, and we kept doing this in turn till round about noon, our bodies filled back out and we could see straight and make words again.

We pushed on, as if floating in slow motion through a Hieronymus Bosch painting, found by tilting life on edge for 1,200 feet and emptying its pockets. We’d never suspected a world so stark, so vivid as heat and cold and hunger and thirst. The absoluteness of water dripping from a rock. The teetering minarets and flying buttresses. Even the white rags of clouds, shredding as we strove for the silver river.

***

This has been excerpted with permission from John Long’s newest book, Granite Mariner under the title “Mood Indigo.” John Long is a regular contributor for Climbing, having penned the classics “Pumping Sandstone” and “Pumping Granite” in the late 1970s. He’s written over 40 books, with nearly three million copies in print.

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