Life On The Ledge Climbers Overcome Financial Obstacles To Scale Cliffs At End Of The Earth

They begged. They climbed. They conquered.

“Being a nobody has its drawbacks when you want to climb a wall at the end of the earth,” said Lou Bartell.

“We’re so new to the scene, getting sponsorship was almost impossible,” said Russel Mitrovich.

But the two 24-year-olds patched together enough favors, promises and trust for a trip to scale a 3,000-foot rock wall that’s even more obscure than their climbing resumes.

Bartell is originally from Ohio. Mitrovich is a 1992 graduate of University High School in Spokane.

“Where do we live now?” said Mitrovich, repeating the question. “Kind of anywhere.”

The two young men met in Yosemite National Park. Mitrovich had learned climbing basics as a teenager with the Spokane Mountaineers, becoming one of the few club members to venture into big-time big-wall rock.

Mitrovich said he buddied up with Bartell, “because he was always smiling and joking, so I knew he’d be a good partner.”

Soon after they met, they climbed the 2,900-foot rock face of El Capitan. Decent climbers spend four days on the route. Mitrovich and Bartell whipped it in 15 hours. Then they looked at loftier goals.

“We’d never have thought of Baffin Island if it hadn’t been for the pictures in Climbing magazine,” Bartell said.

Baffin Island is among Canada’s northernmost major landforms, an arctic jumble of rock and tundra where the ice cap over the sea thaws for only a couple of months a year.

The jobless climbers had to feel at ease there. The total income of the 12,000 people who inhabit the island is under $200,000 a year.

“We didn’t know whether we were going to pull it off until the last minute,” Mitrovich said. “We finally got help with gear and food in the last two days before we were supposed to leave.”

Beggars on the street have a lower rejection rate than the climbers. But at least finding maps was easy, even for a venue this remote. Steven Linda Mitrovich, Russel’s parents, own Northwest Map and Travel Book Center in downtown Spokane.

North Face provided their portable ledge, a specialized shelter designed to hang on a vertical wall. Cascades Designs chipped in arctic-weight sleeping bags.

They picked up one-piece Gore-Tex suits and other high-tech gear they’d previously done without.

“You don’t need that stuff to climb in Yosemite,” Mitrovich said. “When you don’t have much money, you put off buying $500 items you don’t need.”

The climbers traveled extremely light for an expedition that would run from May 19-June 27. Together they had only 600 pounds, including climbing hardware and ropes.

Still, they had to become champion packers before they could afford a shot at a world-class climb. After sizing up the cost of excess baggage on the series of flights to Baffin Island, they got creative.

“We each had 80-pound rucksacks and 90-pound carry-on duffles,” Bartell said. “You should have seen us trying to be nonchalant about stuffing those bags under the seats.”

The adventure began from the island’s tiny village of Clyde River.

The climbers rode in a wooden sled on top of their gear while an Inuit hunter pulled them on a snowmobile across the frozen bays.

“Sea ice looks smooth from a distance,” Bartell said. “But it’s full of big compression fractures and humps. You couldn’t just sit on the sled. You had to ride it.”

“We were dying,” Mitrovich said. “The wind chill factor must have put the temperature down to minus 50 degrees.”

The hunter they hired to take them 70 miles by snowmobile to their climbing destination seized the opportunity to kill several seals.

Eating seal was a thrill for Bartell and a mistake for Mitrovich. “I’d been a vegetarian for two years before that, and the seal made me really sick,” he said.

Awe overcame nausea when Mitrovich saw the paradise of rock walls in Sam Ford Fjord. “The hardest part was picking one wall to climb,” Bartell said.

“We put a scope on a dozen 4,000 footers,” Mitrovich said. They had to factor climbing time, hiking time, down time from weather. All of this was complicated with the imprecise deadline of the breakup.

“If the ice breaks up and the hunters can’t get in on snowmobile, you’re stuck there for six weeks until they can come in by boat,” Bartell said.

“We were kind of stressed out, fighting and yelling at each other,” Mitrovich said. “The guide had to go and he needed to know where we’d be when he came back a month later. So we said all right, we’ll do that one.”

Great Cross Pillars was a beauty.

Before they had a chance to climb even a foot up the mammoth hunk of granite, rockfall pelted their tent, nailed Mitrovich in the leg and brushed Bartell in the head.

“Storms were hammering us and the weather was really cold, but we were anxious to get on the wall,” Bartell said.

Hanging from a covered cot tied into cracks in a vertical rock wall might not seem relaxing to the average person. To the climbers, the heights were a relief.

“It was a little easier sleeping at night knowing the polar bears couldn’t get you,” Mitrovich said.

They had picked a natural line so they wouldn’t have to drill and put bolts in the rock. But the route was so precipitous, there was virtually no snow or ice to melt for water.

They started with the 20-hour job of fixing rope 800 vertical feet up the wall. Then they spent four days hauling 400 pounds of gear, including three five-gallon water containers.

“We figured they wouldn’t be as likely to freeze solid as two-liter bottles,” Mitrovich said.

From 800 feet on up, they lived on the wall, sleeping for 13 nights on ‘The Ledge’ with an unfailing 180-degree view of the world’s wildest landscape.

Climb. Haul. Climb. Haul.

“The ledge was our security,” Mitrovich said. “You felt vulnerable if it wasn’t set up because the wind could come in suddenly and its hard to make camp in a storm when you’re hanging from ropes.”

One day the sun baked the rock and they wore t-shirts. A few days later, they were cold and tent-bound with 2,000 feet of air under their butts.

“Storms were our only chance to rest,” Mitrovich said. “We just sat and ate.”

The weather had kept them on the wall several days longer than they expected and they were running out of everything including toilet paper when they decided to make an all-out stab for the summit.

“Rockfall had smashed two of our water buckets,” Mitrovich said.

On the last day, they muscled through 500 feet of technical climbing and 1,500 feet of scrambling to the top.

There, they spent only a few hours before beginning the 21-hour series of rappels to return to the base of the wall.

The adventure didn’t end with the climb.

While exploring other walls and routes, the pair found themselves sloshing ankle deep in slush on the sea ice.

“We were getting pretty nervous about whether the guide was going to make it back,” Mitrovich said.

He did, of course, but they decided to beat it back 26 hours non-stop to Clyde River.

“We had to roar through big puddles and small ponds of seawater,” Bartell said. “Sometimes we’d come to the edge of the ice. The guide would stop and throw a spear with a hook to grab big chunks of ice and pull them together to make a path through the breakup.”

The Inuit hunter, they said, was the toughest guy they’d ever met.”

“He’s probably out hunting for whales now,” Mitrovich said. “I’m thinking about heading south, maybe to Patagonia. But first, I have to get a job.”

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