Yosemite Fall. Scott Graham
his shoulder to Chuck and Bernard.
“Not me,” Chuck said. “No way.”
“I’m ground-based these days,” said Bernard.
“You’re scared you can’t do it anymore,” Jimmy chided.
“You got that right,” the two of them said in unison.
Jimmy tightened his grip on the holds at the base of the climbing tower and lifted himself off the ground. He ascended the large, easy-to-grasp holds on the lower portion of the tower smoothly, the belay mechanism automatically taking up the slack in the rope as he climbed. Each of his moves was precise, his fingers set, his feet poised on holds beneath him. He angled left and right, scaling the wall with no apparent strain, his decades of climbing experience evident.
He passed the halfway point on the tower and reached above his head for a small hold thirty feet off the ground. Only two of his fingertips fit atop the tiny protrusion, which sloped outward, providing little purchase.
He grunted as he transferred his weight to the hold, revealing his first sign of effort. His knuckles turned white as he clung to the tower. Then his fingertips slipped from the hold and he fell.
The ratchet in the auto-belay mechanism should have kicked in, catching him when he dropped no more than a few inches. Instead, he cartwheeled away from the wall and plummeted toward the ground, his arms and legs flailing.
He screamed as he fell, the climbing rope zipping unimpeded through the mechanical belay device bolted to the base of the tower.
Jimmy’s scream echoed across the parking lot as he plunged headfirst toward the ground. Chuck charged forward with Janelle at his side, but they were too far back to reach Jimmy in time to break his fall.
At the last possible second, Jimmy spun himself upright and struck the gravel parking lot feet-first. The sharp crack of breaking bone echoed off the tower wall, followed by a howl of pain from Jimmy. He crumpled on the gravel at the base of the tower, the rope still attached to his waist. He gripped his left leg with both hands, his face contorted.
Janelle knelt at Jimmy’s side while Chuck slid to a stop in the loose rocks and stood over them. Clarence and Bernard and the other onlookers formed a circle around Janelle and the fallen climber. Carmelita and Rosie peered around Chuck from where they pressed at his back.
Jimmy took quick, gasping breaths. He moaned, the sound coming from deep in his throat. Janelle slid his jeans up his leg. Chuck bit his knuckles to keep from gagging at the sight of Jimmy’s foot turned sideways from his ankle at a ninety-degree angle.
“Ouch,” Rosie said.
“Rosie!” Janelle scolded without looking up. Then, to the group, “Someone call 911.”
Clarence plucked his phone from his pocket. “I’m on it.”
“Goddammit,” Jimmy muttered. He grimaced, his eyes squeezed shut.
“Appears to be a fracture and dislocation of the ankle,” Janelle said. “No way to reset it here.”
She shifted to put her knees on either side of Jimmy’s head, bracing his neck. “Do you hurt anywhere else?” she asked him.
“I think my leg took all my weight,” he said through clenched teeth. He exhaled, his breath morphing into a groan.
“Good.”
“Good?” His pupils glinted between his slitted lids as he squinted up at her. He breathed hard and fast, chuffing like a steam engine.
Clarence jabbed at the face of his phone. “I can’t believe it. No service.”
“That’s not a surprise,” the climbing tower attendant said as he arrived from the tiny A-frame building set between the parking lot and campground that served as the Camp 4 office. “It’s okay, though. I called in on the campground radio.”
The shriek of a siren sounded from up the valley in the direction of Yosemite Village. The number of gawkers around Jimmy grew as campers arrived from their sites beneath the firs and black oaks towering over the campground.
Members of the Yosemite Search and Rescue team, stationed in a ring of canvas tents west of Camp 4 in the heart of the valley during the park’s busy summer climbing season, arrived at a jog. They wore T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops, and ball caps bearing the YOSAR logo. The rescuers were in their twenties and early thirties, tanned and buff, mostly males with a smattering of females. They elbowed their way to the front of the circle as an ambulance turned from Northside Drive into the Camp 4 parking lot. The vehicle braked to a stop next to the climbing tower, raising a cloud of dust.
From where she knelt at Jimmy’s head, Janelle reached to rest a hand on the storied climber’s tattooed forearm. “They’re here.”
“Thank God,” Jimmy said through compressed lips. Sweat beaded his brow.
The onlookers fell back as a pair of attendants approached from the ambulance.
“I’ll go with him,” Bernard told Chuck.
“Where will they take him?”
When Bernard shrugged three times in a row, raising and lowering his shoulders in quick succession, a YOSAR team member said, “He won’t go to the valley clinic, that’s for sure. I bet they’ll take him straight to Merced. Believe me, they know the way.”
“His foot sure was twisted,” Rosie said thoughtfully, a finger pressed to her chin.
She walked with Chuck, Janelle, Carmelita, and Clarence on the gravel path through the middle of Camp 4, returning with them to their campsite from the climbing tower. West of the campground, the wail of the ambulance siren died away, marking the vehicle’s departure as it bore Jimmy and Bernard down the valley.
“That is so gross,” Carmelita told her sister.
“But true,” Janelle said. “One of the things I’ve learned in my classes is that the human body can get really pretzeled in an accident.”
Picturing Jimmy’s injured ankle, Chuck clamped his jaw, his muscles growing tense. Thank God he’d belayed Carmelita himself; the thought of her leg mangled like Jimmy’s, or worse, made his stomach queasy.
Their campsite came into view through the trees ahead. Camp 4 offered only walk-in tent sites, with vehicles restricted to the large parking lot at the campground’s front entrance. Campsites were arranged side by side in long rows, accessed by pathways linking the sites to the parking lot and central bathroom. Beneath the tall pines and oaks looming overhead, the campground was open and dusty, the only ground cover a few hardy bunches of buffalo grass, with campsites in full view of one another among the tree trunks.
Chuck had erected their two-room family tent in the dark last night at the edge of their reserved research-team site, while Janelle wrestled the half-asleep girls into their pajamas, and Clarence set up his own small, solo tent. Early this morning, Chuck had hauled the last of their supplies from the pickup truck via the graveled footpath past the other campsites to their assigned site, using one of the oversized wheelbarrows provided by the campground. As his family slept, Chuck had propped open his multi-pocketed gear duffle, the words “Bender Archaeological, Inc.” stenciled on both sides, and double-checked its contents for the week’s work to come. He also had opened the cookstove on the picnic table and connected it to its propane tank, and had assured the latch was fastened on the metal cabinet next to the table that contained their food, as required to keep the park’s notoriously nosy black bears at bay.
Carmelita had spied the climbing tower at the edge of the parking lot when she’d stepped out of the zippered family tent that morning.
“Can I climb it?” she begged Chuck, eyeing the tower through the trees. “Pleeeeeease.”
He