LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 36 end of the rope that was played out to him. He was somewhere between 50 to 80 feet below his part- ner, maybe half of the rope's length. He couldn't go any farther. "I've got my flashlight in my mouth so I can see what I'm doing. And I holler up to him I need a little more rope. And nothing happened," Hardy said. "I had the flashlight in my mouth and it must have sounded like I was in big trouble. He pulled on the rope and I swung off the rock." "There are places along the ridge, Wayne can tell you, it probably drops off 1,200 to 1,500 feet down. And I had no idea what was going on," he added. "I still have the flashlight with the teeth marks in it. I almost bit it in half I was so scared. "So I steadied myself and grabbed hold of the rock. And I took the flashlight out of my mouth and I pointed it down. I was afraid of what I was going to see and found out I was about a foot above where I had to be on a wide ledge." He likened it to the cartoon where a man in the wa- ter thinks he's drowning until he stands up and discov- ers he's in shallow water. "And after that," Hardy said, "it was relatively easy going back down." They reached Hornli Hut about 10 or 11 p.m. Mont Blanc days later was truly hard, Hardy recalled, with maybe 50 to 100 other people trying to get to the top at the same time. "That was a slog." The three-day climb went up snow fields and gla- ciers with overnights in huts along the way, not a very technical climb, but requiring crampons, an ice axe and the ability to stop yourself with the axe should you slip. "Roland, he and I were on a rope. And there's slopes and crevasses and everything else," Hardy said. "And he decided this whole line of people was going too slow and here we are I don't know, 13,500 feet, and he decides he's going to pass. "And there's like a two-foot wide trail that's about two feet deep in the snow that's been packed by ev- eryone going up. He decides that we're going to pass and I am not in condition to run uphill in two feet of soft snow and follow him. We went by a few people and I went, 'Roland I can't do it.' I just couldn't do it. Not that." Failing got stuck in a bottleneck of less experienced climbers below a steep headwall near the summit, ahead of his three partners. "While waiting below for my turn, a climber above me fell, unroped, and landed on top of me with his crampons piercing into my leg," he wrote. 'He was very apologetic in French but it hurt a lot. I could see the summit in the far distance so I pushed on. It was a clear day with an awesome view of the other moun- tains, valleys and the village below. It was cold and extremely windy with a plume of snow flying off the summit like a cloud." He had another climber take his picture with his camera and descended and passed the other three partners, still heading to the summit. They all stayed that night in a mountain hut, and the next day de- scended the rest of the way and drove to Austria. There Roland Frank wanted to climb the east face of Predigtstuhl, a mountain in the Wilder Kaiser range, in the last days of their two-week outing. It was a big wall, a rock face. As they got part of the way up, rain began falling hard. It made handholds and footholds slippery. The three Americans voted to stop and descend. The German voted to keep climbing. The 24-year-old Failing had one more adventure on his way home. He reached Grand Central Station in Manhattan too late to catch the day's last train to Uti- ca. Too cheap to get a room for the night, he decided to sleep on a bench in the cavernous station and catch the first train in the morning. In retrospect, he consid- ered it a bad decision. "Turns out it was the seediest spot in town for bums, muggers and gangs," he said. "It was like a parade all night long of thugs eyeing up this young hick sitting on a backpack full of valuables. I was a target but not an easy target. I took my ice axe off my backpack, sat on my pack with my back to the wall, just slapping the handle into my other hand. All night long." He stared back at anyone who stared at him, and they kept moving. He caught the 8 a.m. train and slept onboard all the way.

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