Evans... on the summit of Denali... with a smile. Photo: Dave Hahn

That big load made things worse. I was breaking my legs into one crevasse after another, struggling back quickly from the edges, and having a devil of a time detouring with that big sled anchoring me. If you ever get your Monster Truck stuck while mud-bogging and you have to tie a line to the bumper and pull for all you are worth to do a few more donuts... you'll know how I felt on the Kahiltna Glacier that day. Hours and hours went by in the wet, heavy snow. I stepped into more cracks that day than I had in whole years of my guiding life. I was scared and reacting fast whenever my legs sank. I was scared because that big pack would be absolute hell to bounce on a rope with while a ton of snow and ice broke, tumbling and thundering into the depths below.

And when my snowshoes would push a black hole through some bridge, I'd realize that I was on some thin overhang of gooey snow and that the void beneath was big enough to swallow a double-wide trailer home... on end. I'd see hard, sheer walls of blue ice, some with water forming a floor, sometimes with absolutely nothing forming a floor, and I'd see a bleak future as part of a 40-mile-long river of ice. It got so that my eyelid was twitching with stress… a thing that had only happened to me previously only during such horrors as college and close personal relationships.

I kept finding a way, though. And, putting my hand on my twitching eye, I would look back at our three ropes snaking back and forth through this bizarre maze. Sometimes I was only about 20 feet from Laura, who was 450 feet back on the ropes from me. And we trudged along. I no longer yelled back to admonish people to stay right in my exact tracks. They all knew that. And we no longer took hourly rest breaks. There just weren't any places left that didn't have one rope spanning about four heinously hanging snow bridges at any given time. My snowshoes kept diving under the heavy white ooblek and constantly freeing them got to be a major chore.

Finally I neared where the route up the Southeast Fork joined the main glacier. I couldn't believe it, just a hundred feet to salvation. The Fork was obviously well put together, which only slightly took my mind off the fact that the final 100 feet getting to it contained about a million crevasses. I was testing out the remaining bridges when I heard Laura's far-away voice getting kind of urgent. Through my twitching eye, I looked to see that Fred was gone from the glacier surface. Laura and her one other topside partner, Stan, were holding the rope which disappeared down into the ice.