West Pillar of Eichorn Pinnacle

************ Eichorn Pinnacle -- West Pillar III 5.10 4:30 pm 20 June 1992 The after-image of the most recent, deadly million-volt electrical discharge rips across my vision leaving a jagged path of green-black blindness as I peer through the wind-driven sleets of hell. The sheer volume of the crackling explosion of thunder, shaking my bowels simultaneously with the flash, tells me the lightning scored a direct hit on the summit, where Jane was anchored by steel and aluminum to the wet granite lightning rod we have climbed. The air hums, buzzes and crackles against the hissing and howling of the tempest, rising in volume and pitch, then sudden eerie silence, a vivid warning of the next strike. KABLAMMMMMM! Rope, no longer taken as I move up, wind-stretched horizontally into the sky to my right in a desolate, enlarging loop of Saint Elmo's Fire, entangling my feet, hobbles me, gasping me in panicked nightmare-slow-motion, the sky a witch's cauldron of cloud, ice, and sleet plastering the rock in rime-like mushrooms, my medusa wet hair dancing like things alive. Keep moving. Demons and chittering dark risks slash at my neck, raking my flesh with their icy sleet-claws. My mind's eye behind eyelids clenched against the fury of ice-blasted blinding maelstrom beholds Jane, still anchored to the summit, a smoking, charred husk, black ash cheeks sunken against bone, her skull teeth flashing a final, shockingly sickening grin in the context of cooked flesh of the carbonized corpse, ironically still wearing a green helmet half-melted to singed hair, stench of burning flesh palpable in spite of the vortex of wind, me looking into Jane's dead eyes framed by ash-skin forever in one final look of surprise at this conclusion to our climb. Up through the drenching violence of the storm to where Jane was last alive. Summit: The scene is like that of some electrical horror film gone awry: in the contrast of dark, sleet-curtained gloom and and stark brilliant strobe of lightning, snow pellets freezing to the granite in a frictionless verglas, As I summit I see a surge of crackling energy plasma leap from the highest rock, through Jane's helmet and over to a secondary high point as another deafening direct hit assaults the top of the spire.I find my climbing partner hypothermic, shocked and dazed but alive. She's survived her roll of the dice, and its my turn. With panicked mumbling hands not working I anchor and lower her from the summit, cowering, suffering searing shocks as more strikes burningly electrify the wet rock against my skin, I twitching like a newly-pinned insect in a sadist-entomologist's bug collection, like a gibbet-strung corpse whose body does not yet know it is dead. The rope knots on the summit blocks. Between strikes I fumble the tangles of rope-slush, listening, *feeling* the growing energy imbalance, cowering down between the summit blocks as the hornet-buzz like a thousand angry hives suddenly stops.... KABLAMMMM!!! Upright again into the lull immediately following the explosion, hoping the monster will take time to reload, knowing that in two more strikes like that last one my body will cease to respond to commands, my will like trying to shout with a mouth stuffed with rags at my limbs' mute ears... rope finally free, Jane is down, the electrical corona crawls over my flesh and dances demon-like across the sky, buzzing stops, cower... KABLAMMMM!!! Summit carabiners touched with a welder's arc. rope finally set for the retreat through the sleet, Jane below hunkering in her shorts and T-shirt frozen dazed Come on we've got to get out of here. Above, The needle-like spire is suspended in a net of blinding, burning threads of death as we stumble, drenched, frosted, and nearly destroyed, down the slabs and through the brush to the shelter of an overhanging outcrop. END