The Thing About the Cold

Ashleigh Scully

       For several weeks, the Chugach Range became the entire shape of my world, a place so immense and so magnificently indifferent to ordinary human concerns that everything I left behind seemed to evaporate almost immediately. We helicoptered onto the glacier carrying everything required to live, climb, sleep, eat and endure, including two hundred and seventy pounds of food, which sounds like an impressive quantity until you hit week three and all that remains are hashbrowns and the dust of chai tea powder. When the helicopter finally lifted away, its blades tearing at the air before the machine shrank into the distance, there was a finality to it—as though the last thread connecting us to civilization had been severed. There were no roads, no schedules in the ordinary sense, no opportunity to change your mind and prefer to be somewhere with central heating. There was only ice, rock, snow, sky, wind and a small collection of people who had voluntarily come to live on a glacier and had apparently considered this was an excellent idea. 

       The peaks rose around us in every direction, enormous walls of white, blue and gray whose faces changed constantly with the light. Sometimes they glowed beneath the sun, sometimes they vanished entirely into cloud and howling snow, and sometimes they projected dark shadows onto the ice that forced us to retreat into our tents. 

       Each morning we stepped outside, clipped into our rope teams, and began again. The rhythm was wonderfully primitive. Put one foot in front of the other. Watch the person ahead. Feel the rope. Test the snow. Keep moving. The usual machinery of life—the unfinished conversations, minor anxieties, emails, obligations and other invented emergencies—had nowhere to go. There was no room for them when the snow beneath your feet might conceal a crevasse and the weather could change its mind faster than you could. The future became a distant abstraction, the past an equally necessary luxury, and the entire universe contracted to the few feet of snow directly in front of my boots. 

       We dug out kitchens out of the snow, carved places to cook and eat into the glacier, and constructed the small infrastructure of civilization one shovel stroke at a time. Snow became walls, floors, insulation, shelter, furniture, and, eventually, an almost unreasonable amount of work. We built enormous wind walls around the tents because the wind in the Chugach was not weather so much as an opinion, and it expressed that opinion loudly. I developed a particular enthusiasm for building these walls, partly because they were useful and partly because they gave me a legitimate reason to avoid other responsibilities. Ice blocks had to be cut, carried, stacked, adjusted, rebuilt, and occasionally stared at with grave concentration. I became unexpectedly skilled at digging them out of the glacier, which was convenient because the glacier had provided an infinite supply and because almost any task involving a shovel could be made to look important. 

       Cooking, meanwhile, presented a more complicated problem. I seemed to possess an inadvertent inability to cook, although in retrospect the word “inadvertent” may be granting me more innocence than the situation deserves—the reality was, I developed an intense desire not to. There were always other things that urgently needed doing. The wind wall could be taller. The kitchen could be deeper. Gear could be reorganized. Snow could be moved from one location to another for reasons that, if questioned, became increasingly difficult to articulate. If all else failed, I could simply walk away carrying a shovel with the solemn expression of a person engaged in essential alpine infrastructure. Somehow, the prospect of preparing dinner never acquired the same heroic appeal. 

       The wind itself could dominate an entire night. I remember lying inside the tent while it roared overhead—a deep, continuous sound that seemed less like weather than an enormous animal moving across the glacier, screaming. The fabric shuddered and snapped beneath it, every gust reminding us how thin the distinction was between our little shelter and the forces outside. Sleep became a negotiation some days. The cold pressed through every layer, the tent strained against its anchors, and above my head hung a collection of foul-smelling socks, drying—or perhaps merely existing—in the warmest air available. They were suspended there with the quiet confidence of objects that had long since ceased to care whether they were pleasant to be around. I would lie beneath them, listening to the wind batter the tent and wondering whether the walls would hold, while also contemplating the rather more immediate question of whether my tentmate’s socks might eventually fall directly onto my face. 

       Occasionally, the wind stopped. 

       The silence that followed could be almost more overwhelming. Snow absorbs the sound until the world seems suspended, as though the air itself has softened. Walking through that landscape, our rope teams stretched quietly across the glacier, each person separated by distance but connected by the line between us. The mountains were never truly silent. Somewhere across the range an avalanche might begin with a distant crack or rumble before gathering itself into a tremendous roar, snow and ice breaking loose from slopes we could barely see. The sound traveled across the valley and then disappeared again into the vastness. They looked still, but they were constantly moving. They did not require our presence to make them dramatic. 

       The sun brought its own form of violence. When it emerged, it could feel almost aggressive in its brightness, reflecting upward from the snow until there was nowhere left to hide. The light came from above and below, sunglasses became essential, and even through them the landscape seemed determined to burn itself into your eyes. Skin burned, lips cracked, and exposed cheeks and noses could feel as though they were being baked while the rest of the body remained wrapped in layers against the cold. Alaska seemed to operate according to extremes, as I always knew it had, and every summit came with the understanding that it was only halfway. 

       That lesson became one of the clearest truths of the entire experience. Reaching the top of the peak was not the conclusion—it was the midpoint of the responsibility. The summit could be beautiful, and sometimes breathtakingly so, with the entire range unfolding around us in every direction, but standing there did not mean the mountain was finished with us. We still had to descend. We still had to cross the terrain we had climbed, navigate the glacier, manage the ropes, assess the snow and return safely to camp. The summit was a moment. The mountain doesn’t recognize accomplishment. It simply continues to exist, and you have to find your way back through it. 

       Over the course of those few weeks, we climbed different peaks surrounding our camp, each one revealing a different version of the landscape and a different challenge. Some days began with long approaches across the glacier while others demanded steeper climbing and more deliberate movement. The mountains seemed impossibly large when we first arrived, but slowly they became familiar. We learned the shapes of the surrounding peaks, the ridges, crevasses, the slopes that caught the wind, the places where snow accumulated. The range began to feel like less of an unknown landscape and more like a living map we were gradually learning to read. 

       I also made it my personal mission to document this education for posterity, which meant becoming, without consulting the group, the official photographer. I carried my camera everywhere and developed an admirable determination to produce it at the least appropriate moment. While everyone else was concentrating on route-finding, managing ropes, dealing with weather, or trying not to fall into a hole, my glove slowly let go of my ice axe and reached for my camera dangling from my backpack. There was always something that was worth documenting: a dramatic ridge, a sunset, someone halfway through a crevasse rescue, a person emerging from a tent looking as though they had just been exhumed. The camera became another piece of equipment I was apparently incapable of leaving alone. 

       The group made the experience, more than anything else.  We were all around the same age, which gave the expedition a particular energy, and despite the seriousness of the environment, there was so much laughter. We shared stories while cooking, poked fun after long days, sat together in the snow and huddled in the cold. It was remarkable how quickly we connected when stripped of the distractions of ordinary life. We had no restaurants to go to, no bars, no phones demanding our attention, no easy entertainment waiting at the end of the day. We couldn’t even play cards. The glacier soaked them up and the wind attempted to steal an ace every time we broke out the deck. We only had stories. 

       Those evenings were some of my favorite moments. After the climbing and training and constant concentration of the day, we sat together in camp, tired and hungry, taking shifts cooking and cleaning bowls, laughing while the sun made its way behind the peaks. Each night, the shadow of the disappearing sun would cast a sudden, eternal cold over the glacier, as though someone had switched off a furnace. Morale alone would determine the few who decided to spend a few extra minutes outside watching the sky turn pink. Oftentimes, it involved running laps around the perimeter or digging ice blocks to build up the wind wall until our bodies were warm—and then diving headfirst into our tents and sleeping tentmates. 

       Boredom, however, eventually became its own mountain to climb. On one particular occasion, I began digging a hole straight down into the glacier. At first it was merely something to do. Then it became a project. Then, it became an increasingly ambitious subterranean enterprise. I kept digging until it was deep enough that I was no longer visible from the surface. Somewhere above me were the peaks, the tents, the wind walls, the entire grand spectacle of Alaska. Below, there was me, enthusiastically excavating a personal glacier bunker. Mountaineering, I discovered, contains a surprisingly thin line between exploration and becoming a mildly determined subterranean rodent. 

       Despite being completely off the grid, I felt more connected than I often do in ordinary life. There was no need to manufacture an experience because the experience was already there. The simple things became enough: a warm meal, dry socks, a conversation, a joke, the relief of getting back to camp, and the slight sting of a boiling hot water bottle at the end of your sleeping bag. The absence of convenience made everything feel more meaningful. 

       The nights were their own kind of education. Sometimes I would lie awake listening to the wind batter the tent, aware of how little separated me from the immense forces outside. The walls we had built from snow were temporary, our camp was temporary, and even our presence was temporary. The glacier had existed long before us and would continue changing long after we left. The peaks did not need us. They did not become more beautiful because we were there or less beautiful when we were gone. We were simply passing through. So much of ordinary life revolves around the illusion that our concerns are enormous and permanent. On the glacier, permanence belonged to the landscape, not to us. 

       That realization has stayed with me because ordinary life is so often organized around the opposite assumption. We behave as though our concerns are permanent, as though every inconvenience deserves immediate attention, as though every small problem is an emergency and every achievement ought to announce itself loudly. The glacier had no interest in any of this. It did not care who reached the summit first, who took the best photo, who built the biggest wind wall, or who forgot their sleeping pad. The mountain did not award points for any of it. 

       During the days, that perspective translated into movement. When I was tired, when my legs were heavy, when the altitude or cold or wind made everything feel harder, there was nothing to do except keep moving. The mind became quiet because the body demanded everything. I began to understand that endurance is not always some dramatic act of courage. Sometimes it is simply continuing. Sometimes it is accepting that the only way through something immense is to make yourself small enough to deal with it one step at a time. 

       And then there was the completely unglamorous reality of actually living there, which had a way of puncturing whatever grand mountaineering narrative we might have been tempted to construct about ourselves. Yet our daily concerns could still be wonderfully ridiculous. We could spend hours navigating glaciers and climbing peaks, then return to camp and have a serious dispute about whose socks were responsible for the smell in the tent. We could build elaborate defenses against hurricane-force wind and then argue who had moved the stove. I could photograph a breathtaking mountain sunrise and then spend the afternoon digging myself underground because I was bored. 

       We had four tents spread across the glacier, three of them holding three people and ours holding four, which meant that our particular corner of the expedition was less an alpine shelter than a long-term social experiment in proximity. Every piece of gear had to occupy the exact amount of space available to it, and every person had to learn the choreography of getting dressed, getting out, retrieving something, or turning over without inadvertently taking out three other people in the process. Privacy became theoretical, personal space became a historical concept, and the phrase “I just need to grab something” could trigger a sequence of movements that involved half the tent. Yet there was a comfort to it at night when the wind was roaring and the tent fabric was snapping under its force, because the same cramped little space that made everything inconvenient also became the place where we laughed the hardest, traded stories, invented jokes, and eventually developed the kind of inside language that requires almost no explanation because everyone already knows exactly what happened. 

       The humor became its own form of camp infrastructure. We had recurring jokes that became progressively less funny to anyone who had not been there and progressively funnier to us. A phrase overheard during a long day could become a punchline for the next week—someone’s particular way of doing something could be quietly imitated until everyone was trying not to laugh in the kitchen. A minor inconvenience could acquire an elaborate mythology entirely disproportionate to the event itself. We would be sitting around our snow kitchen, exhausted from a day out on the ropes, discussing the weather, the route, or whether conditions were good enough for the next objective, and one person would make a single reference to something that had happened three days earlier and suddenly the whole group would be losing it. 

       I also managed to contribute a memorable piece of material by forgetting my sleeping pad, which is the sort of mistake that becomes much funnier once you realize you are going to be living with the people who witnessed it for the next three weeks. The sleeping pad had one fairly straightforward job: create a small layer of insulation between my body and the glacier. Mine was not there. There was no heroic explanation, no intentional sacrifice, just the deeply unimpressive realization that I had somehow managed to leave behind one of the things specifically designed to prevent me from sleeping directly on the snow in Alaska. That first night, I discovered that a sleeping bag, while excellent at many things, is not actually a substitute for several inches of insulation beneath your body. The cold came straight through the tiny fabric of the tent, and sometime during the night, in what I can only assume was an entirely subconscious act of resource acquisition, I migrated across the tent and woke up with half my body resting on one of my tentmate’s sleeping pads. 

       This was not an arrangement we had discussed. 

       There was no formal agreement regarding the redistribution of sleeping surfaces, and yet sometime in the night I had apparently decided that the glacier belonged to me only in principle and that the warmer section of the tent was where I would be spending the remainder of my unconscious hours. Morning brought the discovery, followed by the inevitable laughter, and from that point forward my sleeping pad situation became part of the group’s unofficial folklore. In ordinary life, forgetting a sleeping pad would only be an annoying packing error. On a glacier, it felt like the end of my life. I could have spent the next three weeks accomplishing something genuinely impressive and I suspect I still would be remembered, at least in part, as the person who responded to inadequate insulation by slowly invading someone else’s sleeping bag territory. 

       The four person tent also created a peculiar kind of intimacy that I doubt could be replicated anywhere else. There was no such thing as disappearing for a while, because there was nowhere to disappear to. If you wanted solitude, your options were essentially to walk several feet into the snow and stand there by yourself, which was less relaxing than it sounds, or to stare silently at the tent wall while three other people continued existing inches away from you. Another method, one my fellow tentmate adopted, was simply to pretend to be asleep—to cover your entire face with the exception of your mustache, and open your eyes only when the conversation took a particular direction of interest. 

       We learned each other’s rhythms, the sounds people made when they were waking up, the particular rituals of getting ready, who took forever to pack and who seemed capable of being ready in seconds, who could make a joke at the exact moment everyone was exhausted enough to need one. The tent became its own little universe, and the absurdity of four people occupying a space meant for three somehow made it feel more like a home than any of us expected. 

       Looking back, I remember the peaks, of course. I remember the blue shadows on the snow, the avalanches rolling across distant valleys, the extraordinary light, the silence after the wind, and the feeling of standing on a summit surrounded by a landscape that seemed to have no edge. But I also remember the things that should, by comparison, have been insignificant—laughing until we could barely breathe, sharing stories inside a freezing tent, digging ice blocks, building walls, stealing warmth, and pulling out my camera at exactly the moment everyone wished I wouldn’t. 

       The mountains reminded me that achievement is temporary, discomfort is survivable, and the summit is never the end of the story. You still have to come down. You still have to keep moving. You still have to depend on the people around you. Somewhere in between the summits and the storms, the silence and the laughter, the endless shoveling and ridiculous business of simply staying warm, the mountains stripped life down to its barest truths: keep moving when the way ahead is hard, trust the people on the rope beside you, be grateful for warmth, for food, for laughter, for the small comforts that become enormous when they are scarce. The peaks never cared whether we succeeded, and the glacier never asked us to prove anything. It simply endured, as it had always done, immense and indifferent beneath the sky. We were temporary—the footsteps fading in the snow, the wind walls slowly collapsing, the laughter disappearing into the cold. Perhaps that was the lesson. That life is not made meaningful by conquering the landscape, but by being aware enough to notice it while we are passing through.