Over breakfast Florian loan Wells, a 33-year-old aerospace engineer, and Craig Parsley, a 25-year-old environmental technician, discussed their plan for that day, May 14, 1983. They were going to climb one of Mt. Garfield' s western peaks, a minor if perilous crag in the Cascade Range east of Seattle. For them it was a routine climb, and neither had bothered to pinpoint for his wife where he would be.
When they reached the mountain, the sky was cloudy and the temperature was 34 degree Fahrenheit. Conditions weren't ideal, but the men decided to continue on, hoping the weather would hold.
It was 8 a.m. when they started for the 4896-foot-high summit.
66. ______
All morning, they took turns leading. The pitch of the granite face averaged 70 degrees, about the steepness of a ladder placed against a house.
It began to rain — a few drops at first, then a steady downpour. Florian was troubled: if the rain continued, they would have to turn back. It was 11 a.m., and they were about halfway up the face.
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Thrown off balance, Florian screamed, "Watch out!" Then he fell backward, head down, scraping and bumping against the rock. Instinctively he rotated, feet down, fumbling for something to grab.
Craig saw his friend slip back and heard his yell. As Florian dropped twice the length of the rope between the two of them, about 120 feet, Craig braced himself. "I'm going to have to absorb one whale of a pull when I stop him," he thought. Then the rope tightened with a born-jarring wrench and yanked Craig off the rock face. Hurtling forward on his belly, Craig tried to stop himself with his hands, tearing skin from his palms.
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Like Florian, Craig turned his body to a feet-down position. He slammed into a small ledge, which spun him around like a rag doll. Crashing forward headfirst again, he clutched frantically at anything that interrupted the smooth rock face, pulling several fingers out of their sockets.
Florian, too, was desperately trying to find a way to stop his fall. He caught a narrow ledge with his right foot, but the leg bent uselessly beneath him. Looking beyond his dangling feet, he saw a 500-foot vertical drop ending in a small pool. Florian closed his eyes and. waited for the inevitable yank, when Craig's plunging body would pull him from his position to go screaming into the abyss.
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Craig has grabbed a finger-size twig sticking out of the rock face. Hanging by his right arm, he felt a wave of pain sweep over him and realized that his shoulder was broken. Craig grabbed a piton with his left hand, set it in a moss-filled crack and drove it to the jilt with his hammer.
Meanwhile, Florian had hauled himself onto his ledge. Wedging himself in place with one arm and leg, he fumbled some jam huts from his harness and secured them in small cracks. The two climbers were safe, temporarily. Yet they clung to the lip of a sheer drop, a 50-story fall to certain death.
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Craig slid down the ripe to Florian, and it was then Florian found out that his partner's injuries were worse than his own. Craig's shoulder was broken and his right wrist and both ankles were fractured.
The situation looked bleak. It was raining and temperatures would fall below freezing that night. Their wives did not expect them back until much later and did not know their location. If tile climbers stayed on the rock face, they would die from exposure or' blood loss.
"I'm going down," Florian told Craig. "When I get to the truck, 1' 11 use the CB radio to call for help."
A. But the lethal tug never came. Instead there was silence followed by an anguished yell. Looking up, he saw Craig dangling by one arm from a small ledge.
B. Craig took the lead. Seeking out tiny cracks and crevices in which to wedge his fingers and the toes of his climbing shoes, he worked his way 165 feet up the length of his rope. Then he planted some pitons -- large, flat nails with eyelets — in a crack, secured his rope through them and told Florian to start climbing.
C. Florian fastened his rope around his waist, and Craig lowered him the length of the rope. But to reach the bottom of the cliff, Florian had to make six long rappels. With one end of his rope belayed through a piton and the other wrapped around his body, he pushed off.
D. Florian was leading, clinging to the wall 60 feet above Craig. In a crack at about shoulder height he planted a NO. 2 jam nut. Properly anchored, the nut holds 500 pounds, but Florian didn' t like the look of the crack it was in. He bent down to plant a larger NO. 3 in, a better crack near his feet. As he did, he heard a "pop." The NO. 2 nut had torn loose.
E. Florian now felt a pain in his right leg. A jagged bone poked through his shoe. "My leg is broken," he cried to Craig.
F. Now Florian was again sliding down the rock, barely touching it, at a terrifying speed. "I wonder if it's going to hurt to die," he thought.