Glissading Gone Wrong: Into the Abyss

On the morning of June 30, 2022, two men sat on a pristine snowfield on the lower slopes of the Grand Teton in Wyoming, grinning at each other. They were 62-year-old Dan Wenker and his friend Jim Zingerman, and they had decided to descend the mountain not by walking, but by glissading—sliding down on their backsides using hiking poles as rudimentary brakes. It was a beautiful, clear day. The snow was soft. They were laughing and high-fiving. Dan watched Jim slide down to a rocky outcrop about 150 feet away, stop, and signal back. Dan took that as the all-clear. He pushed off. He picked up speed fast, his poles digging into the ice did nothing to slow him, and instead of slamming into the boulders, he shot through a narrow gap between them and disappeared over the edge of a cliff. Jim watched his friend vanish into thin air.

Dan fell 60 feet into an ice moat—a hole carved into the side of a glacier by a rushing waterfall. He hit the ice wall on the way down, was knocked unconscious, and came to on a three-foot-wide ledge in pitch darkness, with a glacial waterfall thundering beside him and a sheer rock wall in front. The water temperature was just above freezing. He was already soaked and shivering. Looking up at a small dot of sunlight far above, he thought, "There is no way I'm making it out of here."

The rope that almost wasn't carried