Selfishly, I saw Alex's predicament as a good thing. I had duct-taped my skins on that morning to deal with the cold. Since he would have to stop and somehow get that glue to work if he was to get any purchase on the snow, and if mine kept sticking, I at least had a ghost of a chance at keeping with him during the dash to the base of our climb. But no! He'd merely reached down, scooped up the departing strip of material and kept on firing up the slope, splaying that right ski out in half a herringbone formation.

I had pressed on, my heart pounding and my lungs heaving; great clouds of frost billowing from my frozen beard. I'd known then that I was having a good day —, all systems were working just fine as I'd hissed and crunched across the sugary surface. When Alex's other skin came away, I'd seen that as fair game, too. I don't remember being troubled by the thought that I meant to get to the base of the wall fresher than my partner who'd now have to struggle a good deal for the final 40 minutes of travel. But Alex didn't hesitate to grab that offending skin up and just go into full herringbone mode on the left ski as well.

My sympathy for his plight had been lessened by the way he'd then extended his lead, despite the handicap. Sure enough, Alex had beat the stuffing out of me during that little race. Conrad had, too, in the end. My only consolation had been that nobody had actually labeled it a race (as then they'd have truly whupped me) and that adrenaline for the task at hand was surging into my amped body and mind.

Now, as we got close to that rock in the sun, we were coming to grips with the task. Alex suggested we ought to leave the rope he'd lugged up the first 1,500 feet of mountain. After all, we were going to do this thing light and fast, we were pretty darn good climbers, and the route was turning out to be easier than expected. I was nodding my head, even as I looked down the smooth, steep, white slope to the dot that our cached skis had become at the foot of the wall.

I was nodding some more as I gazed across the valley to the imposing ridge we'd climbed a few days earlier. My mind sorted through that all-night, vertical mile of rock and ice to somewhere at its outset when Alex had also said "We ought to leave the rope here... this is easy." Easy. Not in my memory, but "easy" is a relative term...for Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker, these were just hikes; I was playing with the big boys.

As I pulled awkwardly onto the Tyree sunshine boulder, I said, "Sure, let's leave the rope." And I didn't regret it for a few hours, at least. I didn't regret it when we reached our targeted couloir and found a light slab of snow ready to avalanche down over a humongous ice cliff and down onto the Patton Glacier. A rope wouldn't have helped that situation. Only Conrad and Alex's painstaking work kicking free the slab as we traversed a tad awkwardly within reach of the rocks made that situation workable. I say awkwardly, but of course, neither of them was very awkward on a 60° ice slope with massive exposure using one ice tool and an arrest grip ski pole. It was me again, kicking my front points in for all they were worth and swinging two tools hard into the ice for every move I made.

I was aware that Alex and Conrad were gaining ground ahead of me as I kept looking down the chute to the ice cliff lurking a thousand feet beneath my heels. Had we just been able to get out in the couloir, rather than having to traverse the upper edge of its dogleg, I reasoned, I'd have been fine. But this was a little much, and I was slowing down to enjoy it thoroughly. I figured I'd be in tall clover when we hit the upper, straight-on couloir that Alex had been moving toward. Just no more of this traversing without a net.

Finally, I finished up a little draw onto a small saddle between the rocks of the dogleg and the main gully. Small is truly what that flat spot was — just about three or four square feet of flat at about 13,000 feet. But my relief in reaching such a spot was huge. I turned away from Tyree for the first time in hours and looked out at the frozen planet of Antarctica. Ice stretched dependably to the eastern horizon. Mountains stretched outrageously up and down the length of the Ellsworth chain. I scanned the Patton, eventually catching sight of the ski tracks our airplane had left when it dropped us off five days back. These I followed to the little dot that was our camp. I was on the radio to Gordon Wiltsie then, assuring him that I was okay and having a hell of a day. Then I turned back to the mountain and started off again in the tracks of my partners.