Elephant Buttress
By the time I was a sophomore at the University of Colorado in Boulder, my youthful awareness of God had faded into the background. In his place, I adored rocks and mountains. I had gazed down at the Navajo desert from the summit of Shiprock and scampered up the perfect basalt columns of the Devil’s Tower. I wrote poetry and wandered barefoot around campus, always dreaming of my next vertical encounter.
One warm fall morning in 1966, my roommate, Frank Prescott, and I decided to ditch classes and go climbing. We hopped on his red Kawasaki and roared out of town. We belted out rock songs as we leaned into the curves, heading for Boulder Canyon in the foothills.
Ten minutes later we stopped in the shadow of four cliffs known as the Elephant Buttresses. We jumped off the bike and stared up. The name fit. I could easily imagine the rock formations as a row of gargantuan gray elephants. "How about the Fourth Buttress?" Frank asked, pointing to the cliff farthest to the south. "The northwest face looks perfect." That morning I was full of bravado, ready to take on any challenge. "You’ve got it," I agreed.
Strapping on my rucksack, I followed Frank as he headed for the creek at the foot of the cliffs. We took off our lug-soled kletterschuhes and waded across. On the other side we relaced them and scrambled through the brush to the base of the Fourth Buttress.
Frank tossed me one end of a 120-foot Goldline nylon rope. We knotted the rope around our waists. I took the lead on the first pitch. Frank paid out the rope from below, ready to cinch it off if I slipped. Once I got to a ledge about a hundred feet up he’d join me. Then we would switch positions for the next pitch.
I started climbing the perpendicular wall of rock, reveling in the hard, ripply feel of the cold stone. Groping for a good hold, I jammed my fingertips into a fissure above my head. Then I wedged the tip of one shoe into the same crevice, drew my other foot up, slotted it, and pushed up to an even higher hold. Like a spider, I slowly worked my way up the face of the cliff. Feeling cocky, I stopped only once to hammer in a piton and clip my line through it. If I slipped, it would shorten the distance of my fall.
At last I reached the ledge and hoisted myself onto it. I rested a moment and breathed in the crisp, clean air. This sure beats being stuck in some stuffy classroom, I thought. "On belay!" I shouted down. Frank’s voice drifted up, "Climbing!" I began taking in rope as he climbed toward me.
My friend clambered onto the ledge and gave me a high five. We started singing Stevie Wonder’s "Baby, Everything is Alright." (Uptight, out of sight.) We were on top of the world.
Frank looked up at the steep cliff above us. "Okay," he said, "my turn." He disappeared around the corner of the ledge, the rope trailing after him. The scrape of his shoes against the granite faded as he climbed higher. I sat on the ledge, legs dangling over the precipice, in position to secure Frank if necessary. But the end of the rope lay in a pile beside me. I hadn’t bothered to anchor in. As I waited for my friend to reach the top, about fifty feet up, I watched swallows wheel and swoop, and caught a refreshing whiff of pine in the canyon breeze. The creek we’d crossed was now just a slate-green ribbon below.
Frank’s got to be thirty feet up by now, I thought, when suddenly I felt an overpowering presence beside me. I turned to see a man of blinding radiance standing on the ledge. He was tall, over seven feet, and robed in lightning white. His voice penetrated me with authoritative clarity: "Anchor in now, or you’re a dead man!"
I looked around frantically. My eyes fell on a jutting block of granite to my right. I had just wrapped my end of the rope around it twice when a dark shape plummeted past me. Frank had lost his hold. He’d fallen off the cliff.
Before I could brace myself and take in the rope to secure him, I was yanked off the ledge by his weight. In the next second, I jerked roughly to a halt. The rope dug painfully into my side.
"Frank, you okay?" I called, afraid I wouldn’t hear an answer. I’d only slid off the ledge. Frank had plunged sixty feet. After what seemed a long while, I made out a faint "Yeah." Slowly he climbed up to me with none of his usual boisterous enthusiasm. His ruddy face had gone ghostly. Neither of us felt like talking.
When we got back on the ledge, the angel was gone. Frank and I took the easiest route to the top, deeply shaken. In silence we walked down the other side of the Elephant Buttress, picking our way through the boulders. "Man," Frank said finally, as we packed our gear on his bike, "good thing you anchored in."