Melt Down

RUNNING THE GLACIER HAUTE ROUTE, FROM CHAMONIX TO ZERMATT

- Kim Strom

“If he starts to slide, jump into that crevasse,” says Dan. The counterweight would be the best way to keep us all from skidding into the next slit below.

I look down into a bottomless hole, blue and terrifying. For a second, or maybe even two, I imagine drinking coffee, a cat on my lap, running shoes waiting on the doormat. I would give anything to be there. To be any place other than tied between two guys on a melting glacier.

I want off this nerve-racking glacier, the last before our final destination of Zermatt, but the only way off is to keep moving, not to have a melt down. We are weaving our way through the seemingly endless maze ahead of us, navigating the least risk, backtracking. I stamp my crampons harder into the ice, ready to dive onto my ice axe or even jump into that abyss as Pascal inches his way forward, probing the snow bridge ahead of him.

“This is not good,” I hear him mutter to himself as he scans the crevasses to piece together our path.

Just a few weeks earlier, on a run with Dan, we had looked up at the Arolla glacier, as he pointed to a line across the ice, recalling memories of multiple trips skiing and hiking the famous Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. Dan excitedly interrupted his own story with this question: “What if we run it?”

I knew before he finished the sentence that we would. So many adventures begin this way: a “what if ” grows excitedly into a plan, and pretty soon you’re roped up to two friends on a glacier in the Alps.