Unbelievably lucky — When misfortune turns miraculous
Good luck often hides in the shadows of misfortune. Something bad will happen that bums us out or feels unfair. “Why did this happen to me?” we lament. Why today, of all days? Yet we often never know how much worse things could have been. It’s one of life’s ironies that precisely when we’re most fortunate do we tend to feel out of luck.
Of course, back when I was 19 years old, I only vaguely believed in luck, preferring to believe that God was watching over me, protecting me. Christianity and a climbing obsession are what drew me and Dallas Kloke, then 54, together as climbing partners a year and a half earlier.
Thirty years ago this month, I piled into Dallas’s yellow VW bus (four cylinders, no heat) and headed toward the Cascades where we’d planned to climb a peak. As we gained elevation, the clouds grew thicker, heavier, and they soon burst wide open. The mountains were socked in, so we decided to continue to sunny eastern Washington. Dallas, a summit fanatic, pointed us toward the Peshastin Pinnacles — a collection of small sandstone towers as impressive as they are infamous for soft rock and runouts.
After one exhilarating “warmup,” Dallas suggested a two-pitch 5.8 called Windcave. He led the easier first pitch to the namesake belay cave, placed an anchor, then belayed me up. The second pitch appeared long, smooth and low-angled with few cracks for protection.
About 15 feet up, I found the first gear: a small cam behind a flake. A solid-looking piton beckoned a few moves higher, so I high-stepped a tiny edge, rocked onto it and began to stand tall to clip the piton when … SNAP! The foothold broke off, and I was suddenly airborne.
“FALLING!” I yelled instinctively, as I slid down the slab.
The rope began to slow me down as the cam took my weight, then … POP! … the cam ripped the flake right off the wall. The jerk flipped me around so I was facing out, feet first and falling faster. As I sailed past Dallas a thought — neutral, emotionless — passed through my mind: “I’m going to hit the ground, break my legs and probably die.”
Just then, the rope caught me, halting my ground-ward plummet with 30 feet to spare.
A moment passed as I hung there, dazed, my shirt torn and bloodied. I moved my neck, each arm, each leg, my fingers and toes. “Chris?” Dallas yelled tentatively, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” My body shook with fright as I pondered my bad luck: a hold broke and my gear ripped.
Painfully, I clawed back up to the belay cave where Dallas stared at his hand. “You okay?,” I asked. The rope had passed over his fingers, and the full weight of my 40-footer crushed them against the rock. “Yeah,” he mumbled.
That’s when I noticed his anchor, the only thing that kept us both from a catastrophic ground-fall: a single nut — a small metal wedge the size of a thimble. Even worse, it was protruding precariously from the crack, as if I could flick it out with a finger. I was at once horrified and in utter disbelief-slash-gratitude that the nut held.
Apparently, the tremendous force of my fall yanked the nut from its original position; it slid a few inches down the crack and miraculously caught again — all in a split-second. My head began to spin as I imagined the consequence of that single chunk of metal pulling out. Dallas would have hit the ground from 50 feet; I’d have decked from 70 feet.
My back was seizing up while Dallas’s fingers were so fat he couldn’t move them. We rappelled down and headed to the nearby E.R. In transit, I probed him about his atrocious “anchor” that should have had three bombproof placements. Turns out Dallas, being an old-school mountain man (raised on the maxim: ‘the leader must not fall’), didn’t know how to place the cams I’d brought with us. He only placed one nut, assuming I wouldn’t fall.
Despite my lacerations and bruised vertebrae, and Dallas’s two broken fingers, that day long ago remains one of the luckiest of my life.