"WHAT'S THAT ABOUT?" Brittany asked, pointing to an ambulance.
The ambulance was parked at the end of the seven-kilometer-long private road from Krasnoyarsk to Stolby. Across the narrow, battered strip of blacktop, a green metal trailer served as a kiosk, selling beer, soda and chips through a small window with metal bars. The trail leading up to the Stolbys from the road was wide, steep and direct through dense trees. We couldn't see any of the climbing. The forest around us seemed strangely dead. No birds chirped in the branches; in fact, there was no sound at all — and nothing to see, except horrendously old trees with long root systems, hard as concrete.
Valeri Khvostenko dismissed Brittany's question with a "bah-it's-not-a-big-deal" wave of his thick hands.
Valeri had a bristling white beard, sparkling blue eyes and a round, strong frame. He was sixty-five; he'd been climbing at Stolby for fifty-plus years. He started the extensive Stolby climbing website stolby.ru and had agreed to share the place with us for the next eight days. Although his English was marginal at best (he greeted us at the Krasnoyarsk airport holding his "Welcome, Jonathan" sign upside down), his bemused goodwill made me feel as if I were meeting my own grandfather, albeit in a mismatched nylon jogging suit and Orlando Magic ballcap.
Oleg, Valeri's son, who spoke solid English and who'd taken a week off work to translate, looked somewhat more like my usual image of a climber: Gore-Tex jacket with an expedition patch, rucksack and black cotton-Lycra knickers. One of the most talented current Stolbists, he'd also been on expeditions to Alaska, Antarctica and Pakistan.
I looked to Oleg to explain.
"It's not a problem," Oleg said. "The ambulance, it waits here on the weekends."
"Exactly how often do climbers die here?" Brittany's eyes narrowed in the same way they did when she thought I was evading a relationship issue. I could tell she was unsatisfied by Valeri's cavalier hand wave.
Valeri gave us another wave.
"No, no, not very often," Oleg said. "Maybe once a month... sometimes two."
"Wait," Brittany said. "What? Oh, Jesus!"
"One or two a month?" Burcham mumbled to me. Even his West Virginia drawl couldn't soften the calculations we were all making. "One or two a month for 150 years? Man, that's... that's off the charts."
"Not many deaths," Oleg said for his father, "but yes, on the weekends there are many bones broken."
Valeri nodded and snapped an imaginary twig between his fingers.
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