JOURNAL ENTRY: MAY 19, 1998
The wind and snow are relentless, biting, hissing. We’ve stagnated here three days. Avalanches explode in the distance. Then, from high above — KABOOM! A massive shift in air pressure sucks the portaledge walls out, then in, like King Kong hyperventilating into our rainfly. Everything is shaking and swinging in the ledge. Then a freight train of snow: WHAM! The portaledge doors fly open, blasts of snow fill the ledge. We’re lifted, and then dropped. With at least 700 pounds of humans and gear in the portaledge, and another 500 in the haulbags, the anchor shockloads violently. We are in a washing machine on arctic-mayhem cycle: WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! We prepare to be thrown to our doom on the rock-hard sea ice, 600 feet below.

It was 10 years ago that I endured that night on the Walker Citadel, a granite tower stabbing 4,200 feet from Sam Ford Fjord, Baffin Island. Now as I type on my laptop, I sit next to a campfire in the Wasatch with my 5-year-old daughter, Lilliana. We’re on an adventure just as intriguing, but tonight we don’t suffer. At least, not in the way Russ Mitrovich, Josh Helling, and I did those 32 continuous days on the wall.
My journey to the Walker Citadel started in Yosemite long before I was born. My grandfather, at age 13 in 1935, tired of the family farm in North Dakota; packing dried fruit and meat, he fled for Yosemite. He ended up staying five years and later settled in Fresno. I grew up camping with him in the Valley, mystified by its grand walls and waterfalls. My first trad lead was there. In the 1990s, I moved there; by my fifth season — 1996 — I craved more.
Late that summer, while I worked in The Mountain Shop (Curry Village), a quiet Japanese woman, Misako, walked in. She opened her tattered Meyers/Reid guidebook to El Cap’s Lunar Eclipse and said she needed a partner. I quit my job to join her, and a week later, we topped out. Back at Camp 4, I asked her if she was interested in going to Baffin Island, where so much of the day’s big-wall energy — Baffin Fever — then focussed. The next year, we FA’ed a grade VI on the Weeping Wall, on Baffin’s west coast. Although my first dose of Baffin Fever was incredible, I really dreamed of the east coast’s Sam Ford Fjord — an 80-plus-mile gallery of God’s vertical-granite masterpieces. I started planning: I called one of my best friends and partners, Josh Helling, a guide for Yosemite Mountaineering School.
Josh had been talking to Russ Mitrovich, who’d been to Sam Ford Fjord in 1997, climbing the Great Cross Pillar. There, Russ had been struck by the Walker Citadel’s north face, one of Baffin’s most ominous walls. Russ, too, lived in the Valley — somewhere around Camp 4, I learned, though I’d never met him. We slated a trip for 1998.
Russ and I finally met in my mom’s garage in Fresno, where we racked mounds of tattered, well-used gear. It was all we had — scrappy and underfunded, we were nonetheless the only three guys then willing to sacrifice jobs, relationships, credit cards, and savings accounts for Baffin. We packed 10 haulbags with boxes of chocolate bars and buckets of peanut butter, huge salamis, a three-man portaledge, and -30 F sleeping bags, among hundreds of other items. Each haggard, duct-taped haulbag weighed 69 pounds, exactly one pound under the airline’s baggage-weight limit. “I hope you guys are ready to suffer,” Russ said, adding 200 copperheads to the kitty. He sported what I would learn was his trademark smile, the same maniacal grin you might see on a little kid holding a magnifying glass over an ant.
We flew into Clyde River, on Baffin’s east coast, and then sped onto the frozen ocean with our Inuit guides in komatics — the ancient, 12-foot cargo sleds, now made of wood instead of whalebone and pulled by snowmobiles, not dogs. Arctic reality hit fast: our toes went numb and bitter cold doused our burning psyches as we sped onto the frozen ocean. Eight hours later, halfway in, we stopped at a hunter’s hut near the mouth of Eglington Fjord.
The following day, as we entered Sam Ford Fjord, the sun rolled low below the 360-degree panorama of giant walls. I gazed upon the highest rank of stone mountains on Earth — 3,000-to-4,000-foot granite shields and towers rising out of a throne of sea ice. To my right, Kiguti, the Fin, and their families of steep walls; to the left, the gigantic (and to this day overlooked) Ottawa Peak; in front of me, the Beak, the Turret, Broad Peak, and magnificent Polar Sun Spire; across the way, the Great Cross Pillar.
In the middle stood one of the proudest: the Walker Citadel. Take the tallest part of El Cap, add 1,200 feet of golden granite, and plaster it in snow and ice. That’s what stood before us.
We set up our tent on the ice and dove straight into our sleeping bags. Our breath crystallized, lining the tent ceiling with frost that sprinkled our noses. The cold made it hard to fathom climbing. We’d arrived in early May, roughly when the sun begins to stay continuously above the horizon. Regardless, it was still -20 F in the shade, and below 32 F in the sun. But with each passing day, it would warm — we hung onto this dearly.
On May 9, we awoke to a cobalt sky, perfectly calm and quiet. Zillions of tiny ice diamonds sparkled on the frozen ocean. The only sounds were our breath and our hearts beating. We took turns at the spotting scope. There was no debate — we would attempt the steepest, most direct line, dead center. By 1998, some of the area’s more prominent summits had been climbed once, via their back sides and easiest routes, but the vertical, seaside walls were mostly untouched. Climbers like Paul Gagner, Warren Hollinger, Rick Lovelace, and Mark Synnott, among other ace sufferers, had recently taken on the direttissimas. We had to do the same.
Russ won the rock-paper-scissors for the first pitch. He kicked steps in snow and worked his plastic boots into aiders connected to pitons. In two very frosty, sub-zero days, we fixed three groveling pitches. Full down attire, double boots, goggles — the battle was on. The third pitch ended under a 12-foot roof, and we hauled to it for our first portaledge camp. We fixed two more pitches above, and then the reaper knocked.