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I did that too!
Posted by Michael Strahan on Dec 06 2005
Solly,
I had a similar experience sheep hunting in the Talkeetna Mountains once. My partner and I arrived on the top of the ridge where we planned to camp for the evening and he drank the last of my water! He'd forgotten his water bottles in the truck, now about six or seven miles away. We had no option but to descend to a spring in the valley below. The quickest descent involved plunge-stepping down a loose rockslide. We got to the spring in about ten minutes, drank our fill, and filled up the bottles we had. Looking for a place to climb back to our camp, we realized the slide was too loose to work, so we traversed the mountain until we came to an outcrop that looked doable. My partner climbed the chute next to it and I climbed the outcrop (so we wouldn't kick rocks down on each other. My partner managed to make the ridge without too much trouble, but things were getting progressively more difficult for me. I eventually arrived in a place where I couldn't go left or right, couldn't climb and couldn't decend. Worse yet, the outcropping I was on was crumbling away (some years later a good friend of mine was killed in a 1200 foot fall not far from this place). I thought if I fell, I'd just land on my pack backwards (head down) and hopefully spin around to get my feet under me. As I was working out how to do this without killing myself, a string landed on my shoulder. Actually, it was a shoelace, tied to another, and some odd scraps of parachute cord. My partner had tossed me a "line". I was mere feet from the summit, but that little cord was all I needed to make it to the top. The place was so steep that the only flat spot was a narrow sheep trail right on the spine. We sat there a minute to catch our breath and I remember commenting that there weren't very many places I'd been where you could have one leg in each valley.
Thank God for friends who can think! I forgave him for drinking all my water... but I still haven't let him forget it!
Lesson Learned: Don't climb up where you cannot climb down! I've since realized that it's a lot easier to go up than down in really steep terrain.
-Mike
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