Thinking that people have way too many reasons to climb as it is, I've never really been all that big on climbing for a cause. Mountains don't care about causes. Why raise the stakes and the danger by upping the emotional ante for tagging the top? What will dying do for your cause? How will the mere failure that climbers deal with so regularly be handled by those also seeking hope, inspiration, cures and answers from mountains. Climb it because your Grandpa did? Climb for the poor? For the sick? What's wrong with climbing just for the hell of it?!?

But I come at it all from a guiding angle, which, I have to remember, involves more paranoia and cynicism than is generally socially acceptable. Most people, and even a fair number of guides, leave a little room in their lives for inspiration. I should. But you would need to remember that over the years I've seen about a gazillion scams and schemes in high and weird places designed to gain publicity, money, a partner's lunch, a piggyback ride...you name it.

So when, back in 1996, I met Laura Evans with the rest of the team I hoped to guide up Denali, I was a little suspicious. Hadn't Laura just done that massively publicized Expedition Inspiration down on Aconcagua? Well, yes, she said, that had been the point...raise money and awareness for the fight against breast cancer. Which I know is a good thing, but back in my twisted little brain stem, I was thinking "Cancer killed my mom when I was a kid...I don't want to think about that...why do we have to be any more aware of something so bad?"

Harboring my little concerns and suspicions, I looked around for cameras and reporters intruding on our little band of McKinley-bound climbers...not one to be seen. Laura seemed to be just climbing for the hell of it, which I liked — so much that during that climb I forgot all about her being a cancer survivor. She was strong, she had a good sense of humor, she got along well with everybody. All I really needed to know about her was right there.

And we had a great climb. In my memory it was the quintessential late-season McKinley experience. We had difficulty, uncertainty, delay, solitude, splendor, camaraderie, deprivation, and a little luck...and, after three weeks, a heck of a time getting down the mountain, which was partly why we had the place all to ourselves. The winter had been thrifty when it came to leaving snow on the Alaska Range and as a result, the lower reaches of the Kahiltna Glacier were expected to be rough going. In theory, less snow would mean quicker melting of the seasonal "blanket" covering and bridging crevasses. And that was just what we found in real life. Getting down the mountain was tough. One day, in particular, still stands out as about the hardest I've ever worked.

About three hours into the final push toward Base Camp and the airstrip, I remember having to stop when fog rolled in and prevented me from navigating the crevasses and bridges ahead. Even though we were only about two hours from Base Camp under "normal" conditions and the gang wanted badly to be eating Sparky Burgers in Talkeetna, I just stopped. These weren't normal conditions and everybody pretty well knew that I needed to see where I was going to get through the break-ups. Without a word to anybody, I dropped my pack and sat on it.

I was grateful when Dave Mahre, my hero and assistant guide, brought his rope even with mine, and didn't say a word either. People who work with Dave get to call him "Spike." He was nearly 70 years old on that trip and had seen plenty enough in his years to know just what I was doing and why. By the time Fred Alldredge guided in the final rope team with Laura anchoring it, he was laying down on his pack snoozing.

As Fred got out from under his 80-pound pack and settled it on the snow, I looked at his sled and saw that he'd taken the toilet bag from our last camp. "Good old Fred," I thought, since it was a heavy and unpopular burden. I was only vaguely curious as to why he hadn't already hucked it into one of the hundred open crevasses we'd already encountered since leaving that camp. It wasn't worth cluttering the silence to ask though. The fog and its delay of our progress were of much greater importance, anyway.

Neither Fred nor Spike needed to tell me that this turn of events was pretty well ruining my escape plan. I guess they could have figured that although my eyes were closed, my brain was running like a chainsaw...we'd taken down camp in what was hoped to be the cold part of the day so that the surface would be a little bit more firm for walking. That 2am start was not really making much of a good difference since the greater sky had remained cloudy, trapping heat and moisture over the lower Kahiltna. The surface wasn't frozen, which made for more than just a little more work at trail-breaking. It was dangerous...too good a chance for breaking crevasse bridges.

And now, if we were delayed further by fog, it would be full-on daytime, which can be hot in late July. More danger. Not so many choices though, really. No decent or safe place to camp where we sat, and food and fuel reserves were dwindling. Two hours slid by.

Finally Spike, Fred and I stood up, looked around and decided the fog was on the run. The next hour or so went pretty well, I made good time snowshoeing along and began to think that my work would be safely finished soon. In fact, Jay Hudson flew over in his Cessna and talked to me on the radio. That can be pretty encouraging, knowing that your pilot is waiting for you to get done so that he can fly you home.

But Jay wasn't all that encouraging. He circled and said, "Man, Dave, I don't know how you are going to get through the next part...be careful." On hearing that, I thought a couple of things. For one, I wished I could see the glacier layout from his bird's-eye view...Secondly, I thought, "What the heck does Jay know about it, he's a pilot, he just looks for places he can land an airplane...I'll get through." But Jay was right. Things got tougher and tougher.

To make it all worse, by the time I was banging into all of these soft crevasse bridges, I could already see up the Southeast Fork to the landing strip and where I wanted to finish. But I was worlds away from where I wanted to be. My pack was too damn big and my sled was too damn heavy. When I say that, I'm not boasting. More like admitting to a screw-up. In my zeal for getting the last day done, I'd taken the heaviest loads I could to make it easier on the gang..but that was dumb for the guy out front on a mushy day. And I wasn't into admitting my mistake and asking for someone else to take the weight.

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.

The ensuing project of getting to Fred and getting him out of the Kahiltna was not going to go like anything ever seen in a climbing textbook. There was precious little room to maneuver. Although everybody had a first impulse to throw off packs, unrope and run pell-mell to Fred's aid, there were far too many crevasses, both obvious and not, within inches of where we need to be. I carefully belayed myself back along the ropes toward Laura and Stan, who were still in arrest position. I crawled toward the jagged-edged void that Fred had discovered and I began to yell for him. I got no response as I inched closer, my mind raced ahead to a vision of my assistant guide down there unconscious, broken, bloody and buried in the collapsed snow.

Stretched out on my belly to distribute my weight, I got to where I could begin to see down. I yelled again and got an answer. Rubbing my twitching facial muscles, I looked down to see Fred hard at work. His sled had come into the crevasse with him but was hanging from the rope above him by its prusik cord as planned. Fred had climbed the rope back up to his sled and was wrestling with it trying to get his crampons out and his snowshoes off. When he'd tumbled in with the former snowbridge, he and it had all gone into the water that made a dark turquoise bottom to the crevasse. He mentioned that he'd gotten an anchor placed in the hard blue ice of the wall, gotten himself out of the water and now, by God, he was going to get his crampons on so as to be ready to get the heck out of his wet and cold prison.

There on my belly at the lip, trying desperately to figure some strategy for hauling Fred...no direction seemed promising or safe...I watched him grapple with his vertically-hanging sled. Suddenly a plastic bag strapped to it came away in his hand. It was the crap bag from the last camp, the one he'd volunteered to carry about 80 years earlier...Fred looked up at me and said, "Guess I can get rid of this now," and tossed his passenger away into the depths. Lying on my face in the slush, I nearly died laughing then and there.

Catching my breath, I looked around to share the joke. Stan and Laura weren't laughing; they were holding the rope for all they were worth. Kei and Murph and Spike weren't laughing, they were furiously trying to get useful anchors placed in the soggy oatmeal-like snow surface. Everybody looked at me with horror wondering what about this, 14 hours into a five-hour day, with a man possibly near death in a crevasse, could be even a little bit funny. I wanted to tell them then that Fred had just won, for all time, the competition for stylish poop-bag tossing...but instead I shut up and got to work.

It wasn't easy, but we got Fred out. It took a while and I had to have him stay in the hole so that he could help us rescue his bulky pack and sled first. When he finally emerged, he was cold and shaking. I think we were all near tears of some sort, joy...relief...anger...pain...frustration...I forget which. He'd banged around pretty good going in and we all knew we'd darn near lost him.

A few hours later, we'd climbed to where Base Camp had been back when we started the trip. The clouds were in again and so flying was out of the question...no Sparky Burgers, just another camp to build in the snow. I got the stoves going and mixed up some beige and khaki food. I tried to inflict it on the gang but they were already passed out in their tents. If it was the hardest day I had ever worked, I think I'd win money betting that it was the hardest day any of them ever worked (I'd lose money with such a bet on Spike if he weren't so modest. But he'd never think to burst my bubble by mentioning the really tough ones he's survived over the years).

Just about everybody was unconscious, except Laura. I knelt in the snow, in the quiet shadows that pass for an Alaska Range summer night, outside her tent. Ever the eager student, she was trying to learn from our ordeal so that given similar problems without guides, she'd know how to handle them. She'd seen me pulled from a crevasse a few days before, farther up the mountain. And she'd seen how we got Fred out. Laura wanted to know if there were ever situations where we'd get the person out first and then the gear they carried. I laughed, reached up to my sunburned yet blissfully twitch-free face and pointed out to her that if it were herself, we would waste no time in getting her out and back on her feet, gear be damned.

As I write this, word reached me that Laura died this past week. Cancer — relentless and unbeatable when it visited her again. The day I learned that, I happened to be going through my dusty boxes of climbing gear and papers and keepsakes and I found a summit picture from that McKinley trip. A nice blow-up that somebody was thoughtful enough to send me. And although my defining memory of that trip has always been about surviving the last day, I was happy to see from the photo that we had also made it to the top of North America.

Laura is in the center of it, smiling, and in good strength on a spectacular day at 20,000 feet. And I'm afraid I now understand a little better what it meant to her to have survived cancer once...and why it was important to her that other people should be smart enough to be inspired once in a while. But I'm also very happy that she climbed that particular mountain for herself...for the sheer joy of attempting and accomplishing something difficult in the narrow space life granted her for such pursuits. It was a good cause. My brain may be wired oddly in that the death of a friend causes me to focus on a glacier, a twitch, Fred's crevasse, and laughing through our struggle… but it was the last great day I climbed with Laura Evans. I know that her illnesses were profound and in the eyes of some they must have defined her life, but certainly not for her team on Denali in 1996. We were lucky. We saw her beyond survival...we saw her living large. I intend to remember that. I guess it's called inspiration.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Correspondent