Due to the fast progress I made and the exceptional experience along the route, my spirit and mood were in excellent shape close to euphoria. I made about 15 of the estimated 27km already and ahead I expected an easy home run as easy as the first part uphill the glacier but now just downhill with gravity assisting constantly.
Still every now then, there were some crevasses not as big as before but anyway and then it happened. Ahead of me was a long crevasse in some places quite deep extending perhaps a few dozen meters to the left and about the same to the right. Close to me was a snow/ice bridge over the crevasse perhaps one meter broad. The crevasses itself was about 1.5 meters wide at that place and about 2,5-3 meters deep.
Euphoria took its toll and allowed carelessness to step into. Feeling like nothing can be beat me now, I checked the snow bridge with my walking stick and had the feeling it is safe to cross. Luckily, my risk tolerance was not yet totally at grass root level and I considered the worst case of the snow bridge breaking as tolerable with the worst outcome of me going down just two meters. I crossed the bridge, well I tried to, and suddenly found myself 3 meters down in the crevasse.
I did not hurt myself and a short check on myself revealed that everything was just fine apart from being teleported two meters down the crevasses. There was no kind of panic with me. In the contrary, there was some kind of excitement like “really cool, some great new experience”.
I landed on the remainders of the bridge forming now a pile of old snow at the bottom of the crevasse. As I got up and turned around, my backpack broke off icicles that were hanging down all over the walls of the crevasse each of which breaking off and falling down resulted in an orchestral sound. Down in the crevasse, I saw the magic colors of partly opaque, partly transparent deep blue glacier ice. I felt like being in the entrance hall to a different world.
Actually, I was not afraid of not getting out there anymore and in fact it was piece of cake of doing so. With my crampons on I could quite easily cut stairs into the ice to step into and climb up using my hiking stick to get support from the crevasse’s opposite wall. Leaning over the crevasse’s opening was no problem either and with the help of the walking stick I got a grip on the icy surface and could pull myself out of the crevasse.
So, it happened and I was lucky. I decided to stay more firm with my principles again and realized this is now a good time for a rest. I ate some salami, some bread, and drank some water.
Having had some time to calm down, unpleasant thoughts and imaginations of “what if”, with lots of sentences with even more conditional clauses came to my mind. Luckily, I got over this quite well and was able to concentrate again on the hike ahead with the renewed firm will to stay to my principles.