You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability…
—Agent Smith, The Matrix

It begins with a jarring crack that shakes the mountain and immediately builds to a deep bass rumble.

My mind starts its painfully lazy swim up from the dark blue depths of unconsciousness. I’m aware on some level that the rumble—now a roar—is coming to kill us. My eyes pop open. The cave is pitch black, but I can feel the air pressure change. I don’t know it yet, but hundreds of tons of snow are rushing towards the entrance. The race is on. The inexorable slowly unfolds as I sluggishly shrug off my sleeping bag. Even as my body begins the race for survival, my brain, shaken from a hypoxic torpor, begins to sift the possibilities.

My movements seem slow—languid, like those of a passenger stuck in a lowspeed car crash—each moment stretched into a small version of eternity. The brain fumbles through questions in what seems like a criminally slow process. Did our cave collapse? Are we to be crushed, screaming under tons of ice? Is the whole mountain sliding down? Are we to end up in a broken tangle three thousand feet below?

In real time, everything is happening in fractional moments, and it’s no more than a few seconds from the first blast, that a deafening hiss engulfs our shelter. Our team—split into two pairs ensconced in two separate tents—is perched on the icy floor of a narrow, downward arching crevasse with a ceiling of ice about twenty feet above. Picture two tiny nylon bubbles nested in a jagged stab wound piercing the sheet of ice that flanks our 22,000-foot mountain. Then picture a colossal dump truck emptying a mammoth load of quickset cement into the hole.

As the snow makes its crushing onslaught, I’m halfway out of my sleeping bag, torso through the tent door. I’m almost out as the first swell washes over me. Instantly, I’m pawing through a crushing tide that’s the consistency of fine sand. It’s like swimming through glue. The weight is incredible—a remorseless, crushing tide. Behind my shoulder, over the deadly roar I can hear Chuck yell. The only clear word is a drawn out “Fuuuck!”

The rest is a nonverbal grind of consonants drowned as soon as they become audible. He’s behind me by no more than one second, an interval that in this race, might prove fatal. As it is, Chuck isn’t fast enough. It’s impossible to see what’s happening in the pitch-black rush of action, but as I make my dash to safety the rushing white waves bury him as he struggles to kick his legs free of his sleeping bag. The pressure of snow smashes the tent and wraps his body, pinning his struggling limbs in an irresistible embrace. Then, like cement, the snow closes around Chuck’s head. His mouth and throat fills with suffocating white death—even as he releases that last desperate cry of someone who’’s losing a life-and-death struggle.

For a brief moment the deadly flow diminishes—like the trough between two big ocean waves. I make an instinctive grab for the ice screw. I vaguely remember fixing the screw into the blue ice above my side of the tent during the prior afternoon—an eternity ago. It’s a good thing. As my hand latches the frigid metal, a second, stronger wave swells, and I pull myself up with one arm, right hand locked in a death grip on the carabiner clipped to the ice screw.