Chapter 8
Sawyer
The satisfaction of the successful avalanche blast lasted less than two minutes.
The sky above Galena Ridge darkened from bruised slate to pitch black as the
main category-four low-pressure front slammed into the peaks. The wind spiked
instantly to seventy-five miles per hour, turning the air into a blinding white
vortex of pulverized ice that wiped out all ground reference within three feet.
Sawyer stood beside his snowmobile, fighting to stay upright as the gale
hammered against his chest.
A deep, continuous rumble began high on the summit pyramid above them. It was
not a single explosive crack; it was the low, grinding roar of an unmitigated
natural slide releasing from the ten-thousand-foot summit headwall.
"Natural release from the upper peak!" Declan roared through his radio headset.
"Move! Get to the leeward rocks!"
Declan grabbed Sawyer by the chest harness and hauled him into the narrow,
sheltered trench between two massive granite boulders. They threw themselves
flat against the frozen scree just as the blast wave of the secondary slide tore
across the ridge saddle.
A cloud of high-velocity powder blasted over their heads at eighty miles per
hour. The pressure wave hit the two parked Polaris snowmobiles out on the open
crest. Sawyer watched through his iced goggles as both five-hundred-pound
machines were lifted off their tracks, rolled across the hard sastrugi, and
hurled over the eastern cliff into the bottomless abyss of the canyon below.
The roar subsided after sixty seconds, leaving only the deafening scream of the
sub-zero blizzard.
Sawyer pushed himself up from the snow, looking at the empty saddle where their
machines had stood. "Our sleds are gone. Radios are dead from atmospheric
static."
Declan pulled a heavy nine-millimeter static rope from his pack, tying a
figure-eight knot around Sawyer’s harness ring and clipping the other end
directly to his own waist. "The valley route is buried under six feet of fresh
debris and the wind will drop our core temperature to fatal levels in thirty
minutes. We cannot hike down."
"Then where do we go?" Sawyer asked, his voice steady despite the howling gale
tearing at his clothes.
"My high-altitude telemetry station," Declan said, his dark eyes fierce and
determined behind his storm visor. "Four hundred yards down the leeward spur.
The dome is steel-reinforced and anchored directly into the granite with
two-inch foundation bolts. We move on foot, locked together on this rope. Step
in my footprints and do not stop for anything."
Declan turned into the teeth of the whiteout, leaning his massive body sixty
degrees forward into the wind. Sawyer dug his boot soles into the hard crust,
locked his fingers into the short tether between them, and followed Declan into
the freezing storm.