I grab on to the line and follow it down, punching my toes into the snow for support. This crevasse plunges much deeper than the other one does, perhaps 40 or 50 feet down to the floor. A jagged hole allows me to peek even farther into the glacier's bowels. It looks supremely uninviting, dirty and lined with sharp-edged rock formations.

WE CLAMBER BACK out and come upon a snow cliff that's essentially a 45-degree drop of a few hundred feet; it ends on a snowy ledge that's maybe three stories below us. Bates suggests that we do some rappelling. He digs a T-shaped hole in the ice and constructs a support anchor.

Now, in the movies, rappelling down a vertical surface always looks cool. I mean, whether it's done by waves of ninja assassins or by Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction, it just seems like a fun adrenaline rush, right? Carrying a knife in your teeth, you're on a mission to bust out some political hostages.

Uh-huh. Right. What the movies never show is that unless you want to leave a $200 rope behind, you have to climb back up. And unless you have the upper body strength of an ape, this is extremely difficult.

Thus, I find myself struggling back up the slope, using only an ice ax in each hand and my crampons. The snow keeps disintegrating under my boots, leaving me dangling by the axes. While I know this is standard climbing procedure for professional mountaineers, my muscles are finely tuned for typing, not hoisting deadweight up a cliff.

After much flailing, I finally crawl up and over the ledge, panting like a dehydrated marathoner right before he is stuffed into an ambulance.

We take a break for water, and I ask Bates if there's any wildlife this high up on the mountain. Not much at all, he answers, except for ravens. "They're excellent food robbers. They'll spy an open backpack and fly away with your sandwich."