The Ledge - Snap Classic

Strapped in a harness, on the edge of a mountain, the snow bridge lets out a hollow crack as it gives way. The story of two climbers whose fates are intertwined by a length of rope. Big thanks to Jim Davidson for sharing his story! Jim wrote a book with Kevin Vaughan about surviving the fall on Mt. Rainier, called The Ledge. https://www.amazon.com/Ledge-Inspirational-Story-Friendship-Survival/dp/0345523202/ref=asc_df_0345523202/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312034012759&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5860551383633895181&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031107&hvtargid=pla-569606112944&psc=1He also wrote a book about his experiences during and after the Nepal earthquake called The Next Everest. https://www.amazon.com/Next-Everest-Surviving-Mountains-Resilience/dp/1250272297/ref=asc_df_1250272297/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=475810642005&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11216118860422015186&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031107&hvtargid=pla-1038062125175&psc=1 Check them out! Produced by Justin Kramon, original score by Renzo Gorrio, artwork by Teo Ducot. Snap Classic - Season 17 - Episode 16 Join Snap+ https://snap.supercast.com/if you aren't already a member! Get bonus eps, an ad-free stream and more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 2:10Glynn Washington?

  I've been lucky. Not Elon Musk lucky, but lucky, lucky. A lot of things I've had nothing to do with kinda sort of fell into place for me. Recently, I got to visit Birmingham, Alabama. Some dear friends, beautiful wedding, arrives in town a few hours before the ceremony. So I get in line for a ticket to walk through the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It's an amazing place. Chronicles the history of racial struggle. Some are trying so hard to stop our kids from learning.

• 2:47Glynn Washington?

  The bombings, the lynchings, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Notes from a Birmingham Jail. And you feel the bravery, the power of even small children standing up to fire hoses, attack dogs with the full authority of the state arrayed against them. Regular people.

• 3:10Glynn Washington?

  And watching the news footage, hearing the interviews.

• 3:16Glynn Washington?

  I weep. Just witnessing a glimpse of their courage, their conviction, of which I am a direct beneficiary.

• 3:28Glynn Washington?

  And of course, seeing this, feeling this, it occurs to me that it's not really luck at all that's lighted my way. It's sacrifice.

• 3:40Glynn Washington?

  So many heroes, so much suffering, they sacrifice not just for me, but for us. And sacrifice. The placing something ahead of yourself, it's a theme. It's woven into our most important stories. What is the whole of Christianity if not the story of a sacrifice?

• 4:05Glynn Washington?

  You see it in Islam, you see it in Buddhism. And one question is, if someone makes a sacrifice for you,

• 4:16Glynn Washington?

  what do you owe them?

• 4:26Glynn Washington?

  Today on Snap Judgment, we proudly present The Ledge, an adventure like no other. My name is Con Washington. Please, please, please remember to visit your local museum before they come for that too. Right after you've listened to Snap Judgment.

• 5:00Glynn Washington?

  Now, Jim Davidson, he grew up in New England. His dad ran a painting business and the family, they didn't travel much. But Jim, Jim is born without wanderlust. And when Jim relocated to Colorado, he fell in love with the mountains, the adventure, the beauty. And sensitive listeners should be advised that our store today does contain graphic content, including an accident, because it wasn't long before Jim discovered another side to this landscape that he loved. Snap Judgment.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Jim Davidson started climbing mountains with his best friend, Mike Price, when they were in college in Colorado. They got serious about it, trying bigger and bigger peaks across the western US. After graduating, Jim stayed in town, where he got a job and married his wife Gloria, while Mike started leading outward bound expeditions.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  But anytime Mike came back to Fort Collins after teaching one of his outward bound classes, he would call up and leave a short message.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Hello, Jim and Gloria, this is Mike Price. I'm in town and over my brothers, just wanted to say howdy, see if you wanted to drink a beer.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  After this particular call, in the summer of 1992, they met at a bar, had a few drinks, and talked about their next climb, Mount Rainier in Washington State.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Deciding to go to Rainier together was definitely a step up for me and Mike. It was going to be a multi-day climb on ice and snow to a pretty high altitude of 14,410 feet. Big packs, climbing bad rock and ice of unknown conditions.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  During their first couple of days of climbing, they didn't get much sleep.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  We would roll out our sleeping bags on small ledges that we chopped into the ice. We would wear our climbing harnesses inside our sleeping bag and attach ourselves to the mountain.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  This is so they wouldn't roll down the mountain while they were sleeping.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  It's not very restful. Our second day of climbing was the longest. We had to climb for about 14 hours. By the time we got in our sleeping bags that night, it was about 10, 10:30 at night.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  It was totally dark. They had no idea what the terrain looked like around them.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  So the next morning, finally the sun starts creeping over the horizon, and I heard Mike go, "Wow." So I scooched over my sleeping bag a little closer and looked past his feet, and on Mike's left side was a 2,700-foot steep wall. We were on a little tiny perch, and that just really brought home what a steep and beautiful alpine climb this was.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  They reached the summit on the fourth morning. Jim and Mike embraced each other, took a photo. Both men are smiling into the camera, exhausted but happy. Then they started back down the mountain. It felt like they were coasting into port. They'd eaten the food they'd brought, so their packs were light and gravity helped them along. The weather was gorgeous, gemstone skies, rippled snow, and they were feeling good enough to rag on each other a little.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Mike said, "Hey, Jim, whatever you do, don't think about a hamburger right now." It's been three and a half days of eating granola and dried cheese and gorp, and I waited about an hour or so until we were really thirsty and we both needed a water break. And I turned back to him and I said, "Mike, whatever you do, don't think about a big frosty beer, don't think about the foam running down the outside of the ice-covered glass."

• 9:00Speaker 02

  All the while, the two men were roped together by their harnesses in case one fell in a crack. Then the other could dig in with his ice axe and catch him before it was too late. Mount Rainier is covered with glaciers, these blankets of ice, hundreds of feet thick. When it gets hot, the ice shifts around and cracks called crevasses open up that could go down farther than you want to think about.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  And we're making pretty good time. It's about 11:30 or so. The snow was kind of soft.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It was getting warm. They were alternating the lead. And now Jim was out front, farther down the slope. And that's when Jim took what turned out to be a critical step.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  My foot sank in up to my ankle, and then my shin, and I sunk in past my knee. And that's when I realized, I'm standing on a weak snow bridge spanning across a big crevasse. So I yelled to Mike. Falling!

• 9:57Speaker 02

  He expected Mike to dig in and anchor him.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  And by the time I got that word out, I'd already sunk in up to my waist. And I swung my ice axe hard on the surface to try and set the pick of my own ice axe and catch my fall. I watched the pick just cut through the wet snow like a knife through butter. Everything went dark, and right about then, my head went below the surface of the snow and into that big crevasse.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  It happened so quickly, he almost couldn't believe he was falling through the surface into a giant crack.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  I couldn't see anything, but I could hear the ice scraping against my helmet, my face, and then the noise and the squeezing stopped. And I waved my arms and legs around, and I realized I'm in free space.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  He's dropping faster and faster.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  I'm thinking, come on, Mike, catch me, catch me. And I began to feel the rope at my waist tugging a little bit, and I realized that was Mike slowing me down. I knew my partner was on the surface digging with his ice axe into the snow, and I thought, oh, good, I'm slowing down. But I wasn't stopping.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  There was only 50 feet of rope between them, so he knew that if he fell any farther, it meant Mike wasn't holding him anymore. Jim waited for the decisive tug that would halt his fall, but he never got it. Instead, the rope loosened. He started falling faster. Jim knew that Mike had gotten pulled down into the hole with him.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  And it seemed like the wall was coming closer. And I put my hand out. I still couldn't see anything. And I could hear this high zzzzz. That was the sound of my nylon glove dragging on the ice wall. And then boom! It was like somebody hitting me between the shoulder blades with a baseball bat. And I had landed on my back in the snow. I was stunned, and I kind of waved my arms around. And both of my arms bumped into the wall. I started to look up, and I saw a little spot of light far above me that was a light pouring in through the hole in the snow bridge. And all of a sudden, that light started to flicker on and off, like somebody flipping a light switch. A clump of wet snow fell onto my lap. I looked up again, and I saw the light flicker. And then more wet snow fell onto my legs.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And I realized that the snow above me was starting to collapse in right on top of me. At that point, I was so scared out of my mind that I was about to get buried. I assumed that Mike was in the crevasse with me somewhere, but I didn't know where yet. Out of the darkness, I saw something even bigger and darker coming at me. And then the light far above went out. And this time, it didn't flip back on. And my brain warned me, "Something big's coming. Cover up." And when that big thing hit, boom! It kind of pushed me down into the soft snow. And then everything went dark, and I couldn't move at all. And I thought, "I've got about 10 minutes to live."

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Jim figured Mike had to be in a better position than he was, since Mike had fallen later and wouldn't be buried by as much debris.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  And I pushed and pushed the snow. And first, I couldn't get out. And eventually, I managed to push really hard with my right hand. And it burst free of the snow. And I kind of waved my hand around in the air. I was hoping that Mike would be on the surface and see my hand and grab it and pull on it. But all I felt was air. So I started digging with my one free hand towards my face. Finally, I got down to my own face. It was like wet, cold, moisture-laden air just kind of rushed into my lungs. Finally, I was able to talk, so I yelled, "Mike, Mike!" When I heard him yell back, it was a muffled moan, and it wasn't words. When I realized that somehow he was in worse trouble than me, I changed my tone. I was trying to project a little confidence and let Mike know that I know he's there

• 13:37Speaker 03

  and I'm trying to get to him. In the middle of all this, all of a sudden, I realized I'm peeing my pants. So I just decided to ignore it, decided it didn't matter, and just kept digging.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  They were near enough to each other at the bottom of the crevasse that Jim listened for more sounds from his partner.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  I could hear Mike's breathing, and it went slower and raspier, and slower and raspier. And I was still talking to Mike, and I could hear the panic in my voice.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  "Hang in there, Mike," Jim was saying. "Hang in there."

• 14:06Speaker 03

  I was just about at the point where I was ready to free my left arm out of the snow, and I heard Mike exhale, and I didn't hear him inhale. So I just froze there, just holding my arm in space and listening. And I didn't hear anything, and I waited and waited, and just this rush of panic just surged up from my stomach to my brain. And I started thrashing my arm wildly at the snow in front of me, trying to reach him.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Finally, Jim got himself free.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  And that's when I found Mike. He had been trapped underneath the snow. I hadn't heard him breathing in 15 minutes, maybe, maybe more. And I cleared the snow off his face, and I checked for vital signs, and I didn't find any. I was still hoping that just a few puffs from me, and he'd wake up, and he'd be fine, and everything would be fine. So I just gave a couple of puffs, and I stopped and looked at him again, and he still wasn't breathing. You're supposed to do CPR nonstop until somebody more skilled relieves you, or until a doctor declares them dead. So I just had to keep going.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  He went on and on, pumping Mike's chest far longer than made rational sense. In all, he did close to 40 minutes of CPR on a man who wasn't breathing.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  I had knocked Mike's glasses off, and I could look into his eyes. He was staring above my head, further up the crevasse, towards the surface. And I realized he was gone. And I stopped. I was feeling this terrible sadness and overwhelming grief that Mike was gone, and this little voice in the back of my head's telling me to get out of the snow before the wet snow freezes into a block of ice and traps us both in this block of ice. And then, very slowly, I started to lift my head up, and I began to look around. And I started asking myself, "Where are we?"

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Rising on both sides of him were two enormous walls of ice.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  And I looked up and the ice walls flared up at about a 70-degree steepness and angle, maybe getting steeper to 80 degrees. And as they went up and up and up, then they were dead vertical at 90 degrees. And I looked further up, then they started closing together at the top. And when those two sides of the overhang came together, there was a little spot of light there. And I realized that hole was 80 feet above my head.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  I'd fallen in 80 feet. And the reason I had survived was because of my friend Mike. The first 50 feet as I fell in, Mike was digging with his ice axe and slowing my fall. Mike fell the full 80 feet without anybody behind him. And that's how it'd always been with climbing partners. You're roped together because you trust each other so much.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And in this case, the rope had allowed my partner Mike to save my life, but it cost him his life.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  And so now the duty was on me. We were on this small snow pile about the size of a small meeting room table. And I got down to my knee and looked down.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  As Jim understood it, they were on the floor of this huge crevasse. But now, looking around, he saw there was more space and darkness below them, that they were on this little bridge only partway down a crevasse that went even deeper. If that bridge collapsed, who knows how far they'd fall? Jim had an ice screw in his pocket, and he hurried to drill it into the wall. He tied their rope to the screw to catch them if the bridge collapsed.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  At some point, I felt something on my lip, and I thought it was just snot, and I blew it out, and all this blood went on to the ice wall.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  It was alarming, obviously, but Jim kept going.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  I thought maybe someone saw us fall in, so I yelled a bit, but my voice was echoing around the chamber. And I realized nobody saw us fall in. The only way I was going to get Mike out was if I got out first. If I don't get out before the day is done, I'm going to be done too.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  So now, Mike's body is tied to the screw in the wall, so he won't fall further. They have about 150 feet of rope total with them. And Jim gathers everything, except what's holding Mike in place. Jim understands now, he's going to have to climb out on his own, while Mike stays in the hole.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  I needed to do one last thing. I didn't have my helmet on.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  He looked down at Mike, who was still wearing his.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  I said, "Sorry, Mike, but I need your helmet." And I put it on my head. I cinched it down really tight. It was time to jump on the wall.

• 18:53Glynn Washington?

  When Snap returns, Jim faces the hardest climb of his life, and an even harder choice. Stay tuned.

• 19:13Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the ledge episode. When last we left, two climbers had fallen down an 80-foot hole in the ice. Only one survived. Now Jim has to find a way out. Snap Judgment.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  About 90 minutes after the fall, Jim started climbing. He had an ice axe in each hand, and these spiked boots called crampons on his feet. So he was attached to the wall with all four limbs, like a bug.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  So for the first 20 feet, I made really fast progress.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  But then, as the wall got steeper, Jim realized he wasn't strong enough to keep climbing like this. Instead, every time he got up another step, he drilled an ice screw into the wall to keep him from falling.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  I'm now only moving up two feet for every five or 10 minutes of effort. My body's winding down. I'm still spitting up a little blood now and then. And I thought, you know, why don't I just stop? I'll just go back down to the ledge and crawl in one of the sleeping bags next to Mike and just go to sleep tonight when it gets dark. But I realized I couldn't do that. And also, I owed it to Mike to explain to his parents what had happened to him. And that actually brought a calmness to me.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  It was the most intense physical effort Jim had ever made, pulling his whole weight up again and again by his arms. But at last, shaking, he cleared the steepest part of the overhang. And he was amazed to discover that the angle of the snow and ice eased back. He had a straight shot, right to the hole he had fallen through that morning.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  I started climbing that steep snow. I began to feel the surge of excitement. And finally, my head bumped underneath the underside of the snow bridge. And I put my ice axe into the sun. And I reached over the top and I slammed my ice axe into the top surface of the glacier. And I pulled and I got myself through the hole. And I felt the sunlight hit my face. And I flopped my belly onto the surface of the snow. And I crawled forward about two feet. I'd made it out of the hole. I could feel it behind me. It was like, it was like a tiger was sitting just two feet behind me. And I looked around again and I just said once softly, I said, "I'm alive." I was stunned. I said it a second time and then I just collapsed and started crying in the snow.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  So this is where the story might end. Jim had gotten out of the hole. Up a wall, it seemed impossible he could climb. And it was an amazing moment. He can still hardly believe it. But there was another story that was just beginning in those moments. He lay there crying in the snow.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  And I began to think, what happens from here? I felt crushed by the loss of my friend and truly scared about what it means to survive after surviving.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Jim got up, started yelling, and eventually a mountain ranger saw him. Turns out, there was a ranger station about 1,200 feet down the slope from where they fell. The rangers put a coat on Jim. One gave him a hug. They took him back to the station. By the following day, they'd recovered Mike's body. Jim got checked out by the local doctor, who determined he didn't have any life-threatening injuries. They put Jim up one more night at the lodge at the base of Mount Rainier. It was late when he got there, and nowhere was open to eat.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  By 9:00 PM or so, I staggered into the bar room, and the bartender said, "What do you want?" And I thought about it for a minute, and I said, "I'll take two beers, one for me and one for Mike." I took alternate sips back and forth.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Some lady was sitting next to me, two bar stools over, and she looked at me, still in my wet, smelly climbing clothes, and looked over at me. She said, "While you were on the mountain..." And I turned to look at her.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Jim was unmoored, unaware how he must have looked in dirty clothes, with blood all over him, sipping back and forth between two different beers without explaining.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Her eyes got wide, and she just stopped asking questions.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  He got through the next day, gave the rangers a statement, and boarded his plane home to Denver.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  I knew that my wife Gloria would be meeting me at the gate. And when I came down the ramp, kind of like that lady in the bar, I saw the look in Gloria's eyes, and I knew I must be quite a mess and must look pretty bad, because I could see the fear in her eyes.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Jim started going to therapy. He got together with climbing friends, told the story of the ledge over and over, partly to memorialize Mike, but also to lift some of his guilt, wanting his friends to say he'd done everything he could, that it wasn't his fault.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  And then, one night, I was telling the story, and I was getting very upset, and Gloria put her hand on my arm and said, "Jim, you're talking in the present tense. It's in the past."

• 24:28Speaker 02

  But it didn't feel past tense to Jim, not when he made a commitment to telling it all again, to the audience he dreaded most: Mike's parents.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  I think I was more scared going to their house than I'd been climbing the wall. I'd never met these folks, and I'm coming over to tell them how their son died.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Jim and his wife arrived at Mike's brother Daryl's house, where Daryl and Mike's parents had agreed to meet.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  I didn't know if they would be upset with me, if they would hate me. I had no idea. And when the door opened up, Mr. and Mrs. Price stepped out on the concrete steps, and so did Daryl, and it took all the courage I had just to walk up to them and say, "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Price and Daryl. I'm Jim Davidson." And it was really weird to be that afraid to tell somebody who I was. We spent a little time just drinking tea and trying to get a little comfortable because we had to have a difficult conversation. But there came a time, naturally, where it was time to turn to what happened on Mount Rainier. Some people looked at the floor, and some people looked away. But as I started to tell the story, Mrs. Price moved down

• 25:37Speaker 03

  the couch and held my hand. I said, "I'll tell you as much or as little as you want to know." I told them the story for over an hour of what happened on Rainier, and the whole time, Mrs. Price held my hand in both of hers. At the very end, when I kind of wrapped things up, Mrs. Price gave me a hug, and Mr. Price shook my hand in a very honorable way, and so did Daryl.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Jim's fear, always, was that people would blame him. His meeting with the prices lifted that fear briefly, but it kept coming back.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  How do I enjoy life but not feel bad that I'm enjoying life? After a couple of months, my kind of injuries of crushed disc in my neck and twisted knees and everything went away, and so I started doing some very light exercise again and started asking myself, will I go back to the mountains? And it came back in very small doses. I was up backcountry skiing with a friend. We got up high and all of a sudden I got to the ridge and got ready to do the descent back down. And I looked out and I saw all these snow-covered high peaks. There was a slight breeze coming out of the west and the sky was blue, as often is in Colorado. And I just said out loud, "Beautiful day, huh, Mike?" And I could just sort of hear his echo in my mind. So when I went tearing down the slope, I let out a "wahoo" and I was skiing and the

• 26:54Speaker 03

  snow was awesome and it didn't feel sad at all. Instead of Mike's presence pulling me down and making me feel doubt-filled or sad, it instead amplified the joy. That's when I realized that I had a choice. He had given me a gift of continued life. To just give into blackness and sadness and doubt, that would be wasting the gift that Mike gave me on Mount Rainier.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  During those old conversations with Mike, the late-night ones, over beers and dark bars, the two friends used to toss out names of mountains they'd one day climb. Mike, of course, never got the chance to try most of them. But as Jim's life moved forward, he kept the names of those mountains etched in his brain, especially the big one, Mount Everest. And when Jim reached his 50s, with his two kids out of the house, he realized that if there was a good time to try it, now was it.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  That last one big dream I had of maybe someday climbing Everest, there wasn't going to be too much longer for me to do that. But I also felt like I was kind of closing up a package, bringing something home for me and Mike.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  He bought the tickets.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  As I got ready to leave for Everest, I knew there were going to be all kinds of challenges: avalanche risk and sickness and high altitude and homesickness. And I got all those challenges, and also something I didn't expect.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Jim's Everest expedition began at base camp, 17,598 feet in the air. He brought his camera to document the trip.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  You're hearing the Nepali climbers at base camp, performing a puja, asking the gods to bless their climb. Everest, for almost everyone, is not a straight shot up. You go up and down these sections of the mountain, over a series of days and weeks, as your body acclimates to the altitude. This allows you to survive the highest part of the mountain, at an altitude known as the death zone, where there's 70% less oxygen than at sea level.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  I was climbing in close proximity to my guide, PK Sherpa, from the town of Portse. He spoke a little English, I speak a little Nepali, so we got along great.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Jim set off into the first stage of the climb, from base camp to Camp One.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  So after six hours of nerve-wracking work, PK and I finally cleared the last ladder and walked into the edges of Camp One.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Mid-morning, I sent my wife Gloria a text. "Safe at Camp One, feel real good." By moving steady, I got here fast, in five hours. I sent that text to Gloria on April 25th of 2015, at 10:51 in the morning.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Shortly after he sent that text, Jim and his tent mate lay down in their tent to recuperate.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  About an hour after Bart and I laid down for a nap, we started hearing a rumbling noise from our right.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Now, we figured it was probably an avalanche. This one was different. This one was loud and close. And it started rumbling, and it started growing and growing in noise. And Bart goes, "That's a big one." Bart sat up, and I sat up, and we're listening more carefully now, because it seems to be fairly close. As this avalanche noise is starting to make me nervous, a second avalanche started, off to the left-hand side. Two avalanches at the same time, on opposite slopes? So I said out loud to Bart, "Get out, get out of the tent, something's wrong." And I reached towards the tent and tried to grab the zipper. Just as I reached out, the tent shot up into the air about eight or 10 inches, hovered for about two seconds, and then dropped back down. Bart and I looked at each other, and then the tent went back up again, hovered for a few seconds, and dropped back down.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  And that's when I knew it was a giant earthquake.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Jim and Bart were doing their best to get out of the tent.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  If we're inside, the avalanche could use the tent surface like a sail and drag us underneath the advancing debris. Eventually Bart gets outside, and I ran out of the tent. It was totally cloudy, and we could hear the avalanches coming from both sides, but we couldn't see them. You don't know where to stand to be safe, and where standing might get you killed. And then all of a sudden, the winds started showing up, from one side, and then the other. And it wasn't wind because the weather changed, it was wind because the avalanches were so big, they were bulldozing away the air in front of them. And I knew that meant we were right, directly in their slide path. And then all this pulverized ice dust started falling out of the sky. I hit my camera and started recording.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  And then so much ice dust started coming out of the sky, that I was choking and gagging on it. I dove back into our tent, and I wiped all the ice dust off my eyes, and I looked around, and Bart wasn't there. By now, both avalanches were just roaring across camp. And the tent would lean one way and shake like crazy, and the winds would shift, and the tent would go lean back the other way and rattle like crazy.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  And eventually, after about three minutes, the wind died, and the ground stopped shaking, and the ice dust stopped falling, we made it through. And I started yelling for Bart, and eventually I started hearing voices from other tents. I turned the camera myself and talked to the GoPro camera a minute. There was a huge avalanche and a huge powder blast. We got all out of the tent to see the avalanche.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Then we got powder blasted from both sides.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Shit!

• 32:55Speaker 03

  And the lens was covered with ice dust, so it's kind of a blurry image. But you can see in the picture, my eyes are about as big as saucers.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Bart came at me from the other side of camp. We gave each other a little hug, and we realized that nobody in our camp was missing, nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. It was amazing. Up at Camp Two above us, nobody was hurt or killed. And we called down to Base Camp. And Base Camp is normally the safest part of the mountain, but in this case, there was a lot of screaming going on on the radio.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  The reason for the screams was that the avalanches at Base Camp had rocks in them. They tore through the camp, wounding 70 people and killing 18, making it the deadliest day ever on Mount Everest.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  That afternoon, the atmosphere in Jim's camp was chaotic. The route down the mountain had been entirely wiped out. Snippets of information on the earthquake's destruction came in over the radio. The climbers and Sherpas wandered the camp, trying to figure out what to do.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  We were certainly in a tough situation. We were basically marooned at Camp One. But we had food, we had warm clothes, and we had fuel to last a couple of days. And so what we tried to do, at least what I tried to do, is to be patient. As information kept trickling in over the hours and days ahead, we actually found out that thousands of people had been killed across Nepal.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  It turns out, there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. In fact, it was the biggest earthquake in Nepal in 81 years.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  There were villages that had been buried elsewhere. Buildings collapsed in Kathmandu. In the end, it turns out that over 8,900 people lost their lives in the earthquake and all the avalanches and landslides all over the country. And those are the people that suffered the most in this earthquake because they lost their friends and family members and their villages. And we realized that we were only a small part of a huge, huge tragedy. And so about 40 hours after the quake, our turn came to get on the helicopters early in the morning.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  The choppers would only take them to base camp, not all the way down, since high-altitude flying uses so much fuel.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  After a minute and a half flight, I stepped out of the helicopter and I heard my boots crunch against the gravel. And I was so glad to be off the glacier. And as we got into the edge of the debris zone, I began to realize how massive the destruction was. First, it was just little bits of trash scattered on the ground that the wind had distributed. Then I noticed the tents were flattened. And as we got closer into the core of the damaged area, I noticed bent tent poles, laptops bent into U shapes. There was money in several denominations just blowing around camp.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Jim and his group were still stuck. And worse, the climbers weren't unified on a plan. Some dug out medical supplies and tried to recover belongings. Others thought they could actually continue to climb the mountain.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  I thought that was a silly thought. There's no way it can happen. All our Sherpas and high-altitude porters need to go back home and check on their families and start cleaning up their villages.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  And in the middle of all this, Jim hears a frantic shuffling of feet behind him.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  I looked back, and there were six men coming down the trail very quickly. I saw they were carrying a tarp, and clearly inside that tarp was a body. So the carriers were walking over rough rocks and bent tent poles and debris. And it looked like they were going to drop the body. So I rushed in and I grabbed the feet of the body. And as we're scurrying down the trail, I had a moment to look at the body and recognize the shape of arms and legs and hands underneath the tarp.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Jim had a flash of an image of this person's family, wondering where their loved one was. He helped lift the body onto a platform to be carried off by a helicopter. But then the other men left.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  And it was just me and the body at the helicopter pad. So I decided just to sit with this person. And I was just kind of keeping him company. And I was kind of conversing with him in my mind a little bit. And I said, I'm sorry this happened to you.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Soon, the group of men returned, carrying a second body. Jim backed up and gave them room. After a helicopter retrieved the bodies, Jim realized there wasn't much more he could do to help here, or at base camp in general. And that was when the inevitable question arose. How was he going to get out of here? The airport was closed. According to reports, there wasn't any long-distance transportation in the country.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Well, we had a little meeting about it. Our team leader, Greg, said, we might have to walk all the way to Jiri.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Jiri is the largest village between Kathmandu and Everest, and the best chance they had of eventually getting transportation.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  And one of my teammates said, where's Jiri? It's about 115 miles from Mount Everest all the way down to Jiri. Walking 115 miles through mountains after avalanches and landslides and more earthquake aftershocks still coming seemed like a pretty scary thing to do. But if that's the only way out, that's the only way out. It became obvious that climbing Mount Everest was absolutely unimportant. We were in the middle of a disaster in Nepal, and that was much more important than climbing any mountain. I would do whatever it took to get back to my wife and kids. If that means walking to Jiri, fine. If that means walking another 100 miles from Jiri to Kathmandu, fine.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  I loaded up my pack, I put it on, and I stepped outside the tent. I took one last look at the summit, and I turned my back on Everest and started walking home.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  I'm a little nervous to listen to it. Alright, well, fingers crossed. So I'm just gonna hit play and see where we are.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Hello, Jim and Glow, this is Mike Price. I'm in town and over my brothers. Just wanted to say howdy, see if you wanna drink beer.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Phew. It's, uh... It's tough to hear Mike's voice after all these years.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Wow. Haven't heard his voice in a long time. But it's good to hear his voice.

• 40:18Glynn Washington?

  Big thanks to Jim Davidson for sharing his story with The Snap. Jim wrote a book with Kevin Vaughn about surviving the fall of Mount Rainier. It's called The Ledge. You can find links to his work at our website, snapjudgment.org. The original score was by Renzo Gorrio. It's produced by Justin Kramon.

• 40:52Glynn Washington?

  When Snap Judgment returns, a real, honest, god magician cusses me out for a very good reason. Stay tuned.

• 41:10Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. I'm listen in Washington. And next up, I get to rock a story of my own, back from high school days.

• 41:22Glynn Washington?

  I was at a high school library, getting my little Mac on. I pulled a book off the shelf to draw attention away from my good-looking buddy, Chris. It worked. The book was called Hypnotism. "Let me hypnotize you," I said to the pretty girl next to me, Carrie. Beautiful Carrie. "You can't hypnotize anybody, we'll see." I began to read. "First of all, I want you to relax. Relax." "Shh, everybody, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up."

• 41:57Glynn Washington?

  "Like I said, first of all, I want you to relax. Inhale.

• 42:05Glynn Washington?

  Exhale.

• 42:08Glynn Washington?

  Every sound you hear, every breath you take, you will find yourself becoming more deeply and deeply relaxed. Inhale.

• 42:18Glynn Washington?

  Exhale.

• 42:22Glynn Washington?

  And deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

• 42:31Glynn Washington?

  You are now hypnotized."

• 42:36Glynn Washington?

  I looked up and there, pretty Carrie sat, rocking just a little bit, back and forth, back and forth. Her eyes almost closed, looking at nothing, nothing at all.

• 42:53Glynn Washington?

  "Hypnotized, baby." People started shouting, "Carrie, Carrie, stop playing, Carrie." I'm like, "Quiet, shh, quiet fools." I'm in the middle of something. I turned the next page. "Now, Carrie, close your eyes, close them. Imagine that your eyelids are so heavy, so very, very heavy, that you could never open them.

• 43:19Glynn Washington?

  Now, Carrie, I want you to try to open your eyes."

• 43:25Glynn Washington?

  She tried, but as much as she struggled, she couldn't do it. Awesome.

• 43:32Glynn Washington?

  Carrie, wake up darling, cuz you was hypnotized. The crowd went wild. I was going to be a hero. Witnesses in everything. I couldn't wait to go to school the next day. Turned out, though, my buddy Chris figured to put a monkey wrench in my plans. The library had two copies of the book.

• 43:56Glynn Washington?

  So at school the next day, Chris successfully put one of the jocks under and had him barking like a dog all over the gymnasium. I see you encountered by hypnotizing three people at the same time and having them cuddle together for warmth, convinced it was thirty degrees below zero.

• 44:21Glynn Washington?

  Chris came back later the same day. Reports were that several people were begging for water as they were so very, very, very thirsty. I came back and I came back hot. Holy grail. Age regression.

• 44:38Glynn Washington?

  Okay, I want you to imagine yourself growing younger. Do you understand? Younger.

• 44:44Glynn Washington?

  Twelve. Ten. Eight years old. Five. Four years old. Three. Now, James, come up here, come up here and write your name on the blackboard.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  I can't.

• 44:59Glynn Washington?

  Why not?

• 45:01Speaker 05

  I don't know how to write my name.

• 45:04Glynn Washington?

  Screams, the shock, the respect was palpable. Then news from the drama class. Chris. Chris had done the unthinkable, the unbelievable, the unholy.

• 45:23Glynn Washington?

  Past life regression. I ran to see for myself. Ten. Eight years old. Five. Three years old. Two. One. Zero. You are surrounded by a sea of warm water. Darkness, darkness, darkness.

• 45:45Glynn Washington?

  Now, if you see a light swim, swim towards that light, swim. Some claim they can re-enter the bodies of former selves through the aid of concentrated focus. Concentrate with me now. On the count of three. One. Two. Three. And wouldn't you know it, the girl stood up, blinked her eyes wide, and started speaking in gobbledygook, bladdy, blabla, as if it were a real language. I was so pissed, but it was so cool, so very cool.

• 46:29Glynn Washington?

  Chris, I had to hand it to a man, that was hot, that was hot. He tells me that I'm coming with him to see Mr. Tom. Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom was only the baddest, coolest, stage hypnotist we had ever just heard of. Dude! The show was amazing. Mr. Tom was amazing. He hypnotized forty audience members at a toss, and then the fun started. People stormed the stage with secret messages, others screamed in alien languages, still others left up to translate.

• 47:11Glynn Washington?

  Make no mistake, for us, this was the highest form of high art. After the show, Mr. Tom was mobbed, but we bet our time, because we're not groupies. Thanks for coming out, fellas. How can I help you? I told him everything about all the tricks we had done, and about how badass we were, and I was about to say something else cool about us, and Mr. Tom exploded.

• 47:41Glynn Washington?

  You idiot! You idiot! This is not a toy! This is not something that two jackasses can play at! You, you listen to me, listen! This tool, short circuits, all the protective covering people have built up over lifetimes. You clowns want a fool with age regression? Did you see? How I asked everybody if they had a happy childhood? A happy childhood, if they hesitated for even a second, I made them sleep. Only the happy got to play the good time games, but what if I brought someone to age three and their house when they were three? Maybe things weren't going so well with the new stepdad.

• 48:25Glynn Washington?

  Maybe they're locked in a closet, maybe whatever. People are carrying around stuff! Just barely hold it together and they don't need you bastards screwing with them. I want you idiots to promise me, right here and right now, you're gonna knock this crap off!

• 48:45Glynn Washington?

  Yes, Mr. Thompson. Right now! Yes, Mr. Thompson.

• 48:52Glynn Washington?

  The next day,

• 48:54Glynn Washington?

  I was there, at the library, to do something I have never done before or since.

• 49:03Glynn Washington?

  I actually returned a library book. Early.

• 49:16Glynn Washington?

  The original music for that piece is by Dirk Swartzoff.

• 49:23Glynn Washington?

  See? See? Life is a story, and stories are life. If you need the magic of storytelling to change your world, get the Snap Judgment Podcast, the Snap Podcast, wherever you get podcasts, and did I mention? Snap's evil twin, Spooked, is now available everywhere. Snap is on the Twitter, the Instagram, the Facebook. Snap is brought to you by the team that far prefers their adventures to involve room service, except for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, because if he doesn't get to rassle something, Lars starts to get nervous. There's Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorrio, John Facio, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot,

• 50:07Glynn Washington?

  Marissa Dodge, Bo Walsh, Flo Wiley, David Exame, and Regina Barriaco. And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could join your mountain climbing friends at base camp for an epic Everest adventure. And when they wake you up the next morning to begin the ascent, you could decide right then with absolute conviction and unbreakable certainty that, no, nooo, I'm good right here in the bed. Thank you. And you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.