It certainly looked like a palisade. Above the rolling, wild Sierra high country stood the final line of defense barring passage into western California – a wall of impenetrable granite the color of bleached bones. The sheer face of the Palisades was rippled, with ridges that looked like the upright logs of a wooden stockade. Breaching those battlements would take more than just a grappling hook, I warranted. A prolonged streak of fearlessness would be required as well.
I had hoped a summer of conditioning myself to 14,000-foot elevations in Colorado would serve me well against the Sierra Nevada’s finest. But compared to the highest peaks of Colorado, California’s Fourteeners had a greater proportion of vicious edges, and several were impossible to summit without ropes and technical gear. The 14,012-foot Middle Palisade had one or two points of weakness where a climber could scramble past its formidable cliffs, which was why I’d chosen the mountain for my final solo adventure.
Every good castle has a moat surrounding it, however, and the Middle Palisade had a frozen one. The southernmost group of active glaciers in the United States fringed the Palisades, protecting their upper reaches from reckless explorers like myself. Because the glaciers were active, their slow creep down the mountainside created stress fractures that widened into deep crevasses. The easiest route to the summit, I had read, could be reached by climbing to the highest point on the Middle Palisade Glacier. There, a secret path left the ice and transected a band of cliffs, arriving at Secor’s Chute, which provided a steep but manageable means of accessing the top of the mountain. All I had to do was keep from falling into a crevasse.
Unfortunately, because of the 5,000-foot climb in elevation to reach this point, I had made the irresponsible decision to leave my heavy metal crampons behind, so my shoes had nothing with which to grip the icy surface. I skirted the bulk of the glacier by walking on the rubble of a small moraine, but I could not avoid crossing thirty feet of slanted ice if I wanted to reach the apex and the hidden pathway. Gingerly, I tested several routes, using the melted, uneven surface to my advantage as I hopped from one depression in the ice to another. If I lost my balance and stepped onto a patch that was too steep, I would probably tumble down the slope and disappear into one of the fissures. My hiking poles would be a poor substitute for an ice axe in that scenario.
After many cautious attempts, I almost reached the top of the glacier, but the incline grew too great to continue. Time to try another tactic. Along the upper edge of the glacier was a bergschrund – a gap where the glacial mass had pulled away from the side of the mountain. Snowfall would fill and replenish this space every winter, and in the summer months, gravity would tug on the glacier and open the wound anew.
I entered this dangerous territory out of necessity, for there were small amounts of snow I could sink my poles into, and at times I could straddle the side of the glacier and the cliff wall, or leap between one and the other. The downside was that I had to cross a few untrustworthy snow bridges that hung in the air above the entrances to ice caves, and while these grottos were beautiful, with their blue, icy interiors and icicle stalactites, I wasn’t keen on unexpectedly falling into any of them.
Once I gained the top of the glacier, I scanned the cliffs above for the hidden pathway to Secor’s Chute. There, on a thin shelf rested a stack of stones that beckoned me upwards. To reach it, I would have to make a series of precarious jumps that were probably impossible for a videogame character, let alone an actual human. The merits of the path were dubious, but I dreaded having to return to the ice, so I tied my hiking poles to my pack and hoisted myself up to the first ledge.
