The Edge of Sleep

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A long the border between Virginia and West Virginia the mountains of the Alleghenies erupt like the edges of a worn molar through a jawbone: notched, eroding cusps rising irregularly beyond the tree line and running roughly parallel through the dentition of the American southeastern massif.

Thirty miles outside of Wytheville, where the eruption is at its sharpest, stands a jagged outcropping of rock called Hatchetface. With movements as whimsical and random as bugs in water, a small team of picked its way slowly up a face of stone, a facet of the mountainside that had sheered off as if from a hammer blow, shedding its burden of ages in a cataclysmic rending and leaving itself splinter straight and smooth. It was the most difficult ascent on the mountain and the climbers had chosen it for that reason. They were not after elevation-there is no oxygen-thin height in the East-but hardship.

The leader of the group reached a two-foot-wide ledge that jutted from the face like the serrated tooth of a saw. Carefully hauling himself up, the leader wedged a nut into a seam in the rock and secured a spring-loaded carabiner gate to it. The climbing rope went through the carabiner and anchored the safety line for those who followed him.

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