The western approach to the Devil’s Squeeze was a terrifying chute of smooth blue ice, twenty feet wide, pitching downward at an angle of twenty-six degrees between upright walls of gray limestone.
Here, the winter sun never pierced. The ice was dry, hard, and zero-drag as polished marble, formed by hundreds of years of slow leak freezing into a seamless stone glacier that offered zero purchase for standard wagon driver’s crampons.
Tomas Reed stood at the head of the chute. His hands were locked onto the rear brake lever of the lead freight sledge.
On the deck sat sixty crates of flour and the master document chests. Twelve hundred pounds of dead, unbending cargo that threatened to turn into a lethal projectile if the runners broke traction on the twenty-six-degree ramp.
Below them, five hundred feet down the chute, the gorge narrowed into a sharp, right-angle dogleg known as the Squeeze Throat. If a sledge entered that bend at more than five miles an hour, it would strike the outer limestone wall with the force of an artillery shell, shattering the timber frame and hurling the freight into the canyon.
“We can’t use the mules on this pitch!” Kael shouted from the upper shelf. “The ice is too slick! If a mule loses its shoes, the whole team will slide down the chute like logs!”
