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Working my Way Closer to the Cliff

Meanwhile Frank drifts higher and higher up the right embankment, and comes to maybe ten to twenty feet below the cliff face in this photo. Had he stayed lower, he would have been faced with scaling a very steep pile of rock straight ahead in order to get over the lip below the glacier.


To clear the lip, however, he had to climb high up the embankment. At one point, he found himself in what was probably the only really dangerous situation of the entire trip - though even here the danger wasn't great. He became aware that he was on a slope of loose rock at the angle of repose, and though he moved slowly and carefully, each move dislodged rocks that tumbled some way down the slope. The danger was of triggering an avalanche of the boulders he was traversing. He stopped, hanging on to some handholds in a huge, firmly imbedded boulder above him, and thought through what he was doing. He pulled himself up by the boulder, and traversed using the boulder - probably it was actually a piece of the cliff face - until he had cleared the lip below, and the gradient eased. He was very pleased to descend and cross the slide's valley at this point.