The Seeker

The Mountains Breathed Life into Kyle Dempster.

- Andy Anderson

July 20, 2015. Through the rushing hiss of spindrift pouring down the face, they heard only a soft pop when the V-thread failed, then the two climbers were falling—anchor, ropes, crampons, tools and bodies tumbling down.

LESS THAN 12 HOURS earlier, Kyle Dempster and Scott Adamson had been just a few hundred meters below the summit of the unclimbed north face of the Ogre II (6,980 meters) in the Karakoram of Pakistan. But near the end of the hard climbing, in the dark, Adamson had fallen 100 feet, his head lamp beam and sparking crampons flashing past Dempster at the belay. He broke his leg, and the two were forced to descend straight down the enormous 1,400-meter north face. Their already slim rack dwindled, and their ropes had to be chopped after a stuck rappel.

Now wracked with fatigue but only 300 feet from the safety of the basin below, Dempster rigged a V-thread rappel anchor, and he and Adamson both clipped in. His mind wandering, he dreamed of being safely on the glacier, of eating and melting snow for a hot drink.

“Coasting on 10 years of placing V-threads and 20 years of experience rappelling mountains and technical big walls, I let my mind lapse, thinking that that anchor somehow wasn’t important,” Dempster later wrote in “Student of the Game, Hard Lessons from the Pakistani Karakoram” submitted to Rock and Ice when he considered attending this magazine’s annual writing symposium.

When Dempster weighted the V-thread, it ripped.

“I wish I had seen images of family and friends flash through my mind. Instead there was only horrific terror,” wrote Dempster. “I accelerated, bounced, tumbled, and for a moment soared in weightlessness.”