September 14
More load-carrying. When we got back up to our cache we found all our food had been eaten and we don’t know by what. Perhaps it’s blue bears or leopards. It’s spooky up there. Johnny had to make his own rucksack for load-hauling today as he’d left his sack up at the cache the first time up. When he tried to use one of the others’ sacks it resulted in a real barny. I hate all this conflict and I don’t know what the hell’s going on in everyone’s heads. Things would be a lot easier if everybody calmed down. Guess we’ll have to carry more food up.
September 16
Snow. Tent. Killed a fly. Perhaps I’ll die.
September 18
Cleared up. All going up for an attempt. Bleak atmosphere.
September 22
Back at BC. Didn’t do very well. My arm is knackered. When we got to our cache more of our food had gone, this time from zipped up bags. But we saw the critters – choughs. Choughs that can unzip bags! We slept out on a rock and got snowed on. It was freezing. Had a dreadful breakfast of porridge and set off too late for the wall. As we waded up the snow slope the rocks already started falling from above. We did a few pitches on granite and were close to the tower on the Spanish Pillar when we heard a loud whirring. A rock came from nowhere to hit me in the arm and knock me down the slope. My ice axe shot off like a boomerang. At the time I thought it might be broken but I got some movement out of it. Must be just badly bruised. So that was our big Himalayan adventure over. We kicked our bags off and struggled down after them. Then we spent the whole night scrambling over moraines and traversing scree slopes which were like sanddunes, no mean feat with one arm. Johnny was a real help. Got to camp at dawn. Bob and Joe had come down also. They had got higher than us but were stopped when Bob developed a suspected hernia whilst dragging their inordinately large haulbag. He seems to be OK now though, just a little groin strain. Guess we didn’t ‘show ’em’.
September 30
Joe left straight away, keen to escape from a bunch of young incompetents I suppose. Got a lot to learn about mountains. Bob left soon after, to meet his girlfriend and tour the south, and Johnny headed back to university at Norwich. Uttar Singh returned to Uttarkashi also. I came over to the others’ camp below Shivling. Andy’s been painting lots of pictures of Bhagirathi, it looks wild from over here. My arm’s no better yet. Looking forward to our tour of the south and good food and tropical heat.
October 6
Helped carry stuff up to Shivling for Andy and Sean and saw an awesome unclimbed tower of rock on Meru’s East Face. One day I’d like to come back to that. Freezing cold now that winter is coming.
October 10
The boys did Shivling. Said it was very cold and they’ve got frost nip as souvenirs. It was way below zero here at base camp, so God knows what it was like up there. This is the coolest place I’ve ever been and I reckon I’m keen to keep trying these mountains. But for now, get me out of here.
OUTSIDE THE ASYLUM
CHAPTER SEVEN
CENTRAL TOWER OF PAINE:
EL REGALO DE MWONO
Imagination could scarcely paint a scene where humans have less authority. The elemental forces prevail. In this desolation the wider powers of nature despise control; as if to say “We are sovereign”. Here mankind does not look like the lord at all.
— Charles Darwin, Patagonia, 1834
A vertical sheet without horizons. Two dimensions. Up. Down.
Slide jumar up as far as it will go. Inhale. Weight foot loop. Pull with right arm. Stand up straight. Exhale. Clink. Sit down in harness. Gasp. Look up. No nearer. Slide jumar. Inhale. Weight foot. Pull. Stand. Exhale. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Clunk … Fraction point. A peg. Weight. Exhale. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Darkness. Moving points of light. Remove top jumar. Place above peg. Slide. Weight. Remove chest-jumar. Pull. Stand. Replace above peg. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Headtorch? No. Moon. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Fear. Perpetuating other thoughts. Family? Why didn’t I? Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Why did he shout at me? Said he thought I was hypothermic. Hate. Sweat. Prickles. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Why doesn’t she want me? What more can I do to convince her? Wild swings of conviction. Should I have gone to be a gold miner in Sierra Madre? The west coast of Ireland? No. Look up. No nearer. Breathe. Above laughter. Chatting. Not alone. Warmth. Food. Space. Still. A cavernous room. Spinning. Spiralling inside. Thud thud thud. Giggling. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Space. Nil comprehension. Emotion. Ever-changing. Sadness. Love. Anger.
A hundred questions. Why? Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Pain. In hand. In shoulders. In arse. Sack pulling backwards. Gasp. Again. Sleep. Ambivalence. Snap. Foos. Guts rising. Screaming. Intensifying. Gasp … Awake. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Again. Lamp light. A rock crystal reflecting. A mirror. Repeat. Repeat.
My jumar hits a fraction point. A peg in the corner that I am in and I am shocked back into the night. It’s 2 a.m. and we have been sliding up this line of ropes since the previous afternoon. The headlamp beam forms a mirror upon the wall. In this mirror I see the past, the present and appalling visions of the very near future. Below the rope fades limp into the darkness. Above it disappears, taut as a hawser, into the constellations of the southern night sky. Way below Sean follows. I know he’s thinking about the state of the fixed line. In this dark it’s impossible to see how much more damage our violent and unshakable companion, the wind, has made to our frail cords in the past five days of storm.
Five weeks earlier we had arrived in Chile joyful and unsuspecting, and with some glaring omissions in our badly packed equipment. Rattling down the country allowed time for our excitement to grow. Noel Craine and I were like the kids let loose, whilst Simon Yates and Sean Smith were the old hands at this world travel game. Hanneke seemed the most relaxed of us all. A Dutch woman, living in London, she had seen a fundraising slide-show of mine in the Heights, the Llanberis meeting place. Having always wanted to trek about Patagonia, Hanneke asked if she could come with us in the capacity of Sherpa, at which she was one of the stronger members of the team and very quickly became one of the gang. We went third-class on a train full of farmers lugging their crops from Santiago to Puerto Montt. Lucky as always, I found a canvas tent, which would be my home for a few months, left by the Boy Scouts under a seat.
We laughed and joked as the lush countryside floated by our window, until the train ground to a halt and we were faced with an ugly scene. Although we were only moving at twenty-five miles per hour, a campesino had stumbled onto the track right ahead of us and got under the wheels, somewhere in the Central Valley. Everyone got off the train to look as the drivers dragged out the badly mangled corpse. We were shocked by the reactions of our fellow travellers, “Un boracho,” they said, a drunk. Youths began breakdancing with ghettoblasters, a real party scene ensued and oldsters started passing around the maté, a potent stimulant drink made from herbs. It was only one year since Pinochet had been ousted and we wondered whether the people had been desensitised to death or just plain learned to live with it, and were now beginning to celebrate life again.
On the sixty-hour bus journey south across the Pampa, staring out of a dust-smeared window at the flat brown scrubland, it was easy to see how Southern Patagonia had become known as the uttermost part of the earth. Somewhere south of this monotony, over the horizon of this lens of barren soil, so level that in all directions you can make out the curvature of the world, so that it becomes simple to picture yourself on a great big ball, somewhere down there lay white and gold towers that even the most cloud-headed imagination could never dream up.
In Punta Arenas we tried to avoid sailors who wanted to drink with us. We were flattered to pose for photos and sign autographs for young women who didn’t see many blond-haired guys on the Magellan Strait. “One
kiss!” they shouted to us and we were happy to oblige. We drove past millions of burnt tree stumps, the legacy of the beef industry, en route to Puerto Natales where we did our supermarket dash and bought $700-worth of food and pots and pans. Noel bought a football, keen that we should keep fit playing soccer at camp. During our first game, and much to the gauchos’ mirth, the ball punctured on a yucca plant.
When we arrived below the mountains we relaxed and partied with an American team who had been successful on the South Face of the Torre Centrale, and they gave us advice on big walling there. Eric, a huge, leglessly drunk wall veteran, told us to get up there and kick butt. We also partied with a local horseman who was to help us carry our kit to a camp high up in the beech forests. Pepe, a second-generation Croatian, and his family lived in tents in this grey and blue wilderness and, as they said themselves, had no use for the law. A man of great wisdom and few teeth, Pepe was to become our teacher in the customs and politics of Chile. He had seen many teams of climbers come and go. “Not many guys leave this place having made a summit,” he had said as the carafe of wine diminished. Later in the evening he spoke of the other days, of how Patagonia, or Magellanes, had held out longest. But of how eventually the regime took hold. “The soldiers stood on my head and cut my hair with a knife. You were not allowed to grow your hair.”
Walking behind Pepe’s horses, Noel and I raced to turn each spur to see what would confront us next in the mysterious beech forest of the Vallee Ascensio. Black woodpeckers flocked on a bush and a pair of condors arced lines about the summit of Paine Chico. “It’s like a zoo,” pointed Noel when he saw a family of guanacos trotting by. The team thought it highly amusing to nickname me Nandu after the rhea-type birds which ran about the place. “Yeah, very funny, Simon.”
At Campamento Torres we found two deserted cabins. Inside were fireplaces, black with years of use, well made botched furniture and plaques commemorating the great climbs, carved in their image with all the names scorched in below with red hot wire. In a side room off one of the cabins I found an oven made from a large square tin encased in stones and by its side a skillfully carved pizza shovel. There was even a wooden telephone which some homesick climber had lovingly whittled out, during some eternal infernal storm, to make a dream call home. I stocked the shelves of our new home, whilst Noel sorted out the wall gear with the impatience of a child – the weather was sunny and calm and we knew, from all we had heard, that it couldn’t last. We each put up our tents about the tranquil microcosm under the forest canopy. The wind could blow all it wanted outside but in here it would be calm. Our retreat. We came to know it very well.
Three days after getting off the bus we loitered below the gigantic pepper pot of the Central Tower of Paine. I hadn’t seen anything like this in my life, so overhanging for so far. It was like some kind of optical illusion, like it shouldn’t be standing, like it should be falling on us. I stumbled backwards, off balance. The other three had all done big routes before. I was the only one who hadn’t done this kind of thing. What if I let them them down? I was glad they trusted me. Noel and I were the best of friends and I knew he would always support me and help me through if I made a mess of things. I soaked up information and techniques from Simon and Sean. To me they were old hands, they seemed to know it all. They showed us how to make a snow cave and how to read the clouds, though the clouds didn’t behave as they should. All four of us were indecisive and nervous and argued about where to climb. The other face, on the west of the mountain, was only half the height of the face we were looking at but it took the full brunt of the wind. I wanted to go for the biggest face. I have always thought big and gone for the most daring option and many times I have failed, but that’s just the way it goes. The failures I have experienced far outshine the mediocre events of my life. After many hours of deliberation we stumbled upon a decision. The West Face was too far to walk and the East Face had the line.
We were the only climbers in the park. As we ferried our gear through wind and snow storms up the long talus slopes, we dined and slept in our own private forest. We now knew where we wanted to go. The steepest, smoothest and highest part of the East Face was split by a crack, but thin, too thin for fingers, for more than a kilometre. We were in awe but all agreed, over the sickly feeling this view caused, that we had to attempt this most aesthetic of lines.
Just as they had all told us, the weather was diabolical. At home that Patagonian veteran Rab Carrington shook his head and raised his eyebrows when I excitedly told him where we were off to. “What the hell d’ye want to go there for, lad?” he enquired. “It’ll just piss down for two months!” We spent our first week burrowing up the initial 300-metre apron which was buried deep beneath unstable powder snow. Under the snow we sometimes found bolts and much later, when the snow cleared, we counted sixty on rock slabs of a VS standard. We were dismayed. Who would want to do such a thing? The snow made easy pitches difficult and insecure, and spindrift and wind-blown ice ensured that all time on the wall was very uncomfortable. It was slowly becoming obvious; we had come on holiday by mistake.
We clambered onto a sloping snowy ledge just below where the face got really steep and set up a multi-storey portaledge camp. We had been warned against using ledges in Patagonia due to the fierce winds. Indeed, a past expedition to the South Tower was aborted when a large chunk of ice fell right onto a portaledge camp, breaking an occupant’s leg. But we were much too lazy to walk continually up and down the valley and, besides, the over-hangingness of the wall seemed to offer some protection. In fact, we hardly ever saw rockfall on this face and the huge pieces of ice seemed to fall horizontally with the south-westerly jetstream.
Simon pulled onto the ledge and scowled at me. “Don’t just sit there, do something.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Who did he think he was. I had been leading all day and had set up this whole portaledge camp with Noel. Now I was taking a breather for a minute or two and he just arrives and tells me to get a move on! I felt like hitting him or telling him at least I could do hard rock climbs, but I just kept quiet and held a grudge for most of that climb on the Central Tower of Paine. I couldn’t work it out. Back home in the pub he was always so relaxed and on our India tour he was easy-going when he asked me if I was into doing a big trip.
Andy Cave introduced me to him at the bar in a Harrogate hotel. I’d never been real mountaineering and I became transfixed that evening by his stories of faraway places; of Mark Miller getting beaten up by the taxi drivers in Rawalpindi because he’d spent his fare on a carpet, or the stories of tropical illness which Simon has had his share of (hepatitis, twice, or the mystery illness which, even after taking colon core samples, the doctors could never diagnose), or the many dealings on the streets of Delhi with Indian con artists. I could smell the sweet hot air, though I’d never been there. This man interested me. Now on our first big wall together I started thinking I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t want to climb with him. What if he turned on me again? For the next few days I stayed partnered with Noel.
I never confronted him about that incident by the portaledges until recently when he asked me if I could give him a few impressions of the climb for the book he was writing. I told him how I felt at the time and he replied saying he thought I was hypothermic and he was worried about me. What I mistook for a needless attack was in fact Simon showing his care for me!
I remember, a couple of years ago, climbing on a big loose and vegetated sea cliff on the Lleyn peninsula, I asked Simon why he wandered around the world so and his answer made me reconsider my own plans to keep on travelling the globe. “Hey, I’m trying to move a lot less now,” he said, looking searchingly out over the Irish Sea. “I’m only doing three or four trips a year now. I used to be on the move much more but that was because I was lost. It was something to do, there was nothing else for me. It became consumerism, like anything else, a list of places to be ticked off, and the experiences became flatter and flatter. I was searching for myself I guess.” Then he tu
rned and looked at me knowingly: “You’ll do the same. You’ll want to step out of the fast lane and find out where you are. You’ll want a base and some stability.” That was the first time I found myself resenting him and his arrogance. How could he possibly know what I want? At the time I felt like I was being lectured, told to settle down. But later, for me, layed up with injury and illness, some of what he said, not all, rang true.
The sloping ledge was the high point for a Spanish team from Murcia who had made two expeditions to get there. Three years earlier they had abandoned nine haulbags full of gear which we had seen from below and which did play some part in our choice of route. As we rummaged in the bags we felt some twinges of guilt but these were easily cast aside as we did have the backing of the powers that be: the park rangers had enquired if we would be able to get that rubbish down off the mountain. They had been eyeing it up for years and were wondering what kind of flash clothing they might get out of it. But bootymania soon turned to disappointment as we unpacked our vertical salvage. Inside the bags were mostly very bizarre items, including a barrel with hundreds of rotting batteries, huge flags with company logos on, a transistor radio and fluorescent strip lights. What was going on? We thought with this much gear it’s no wonder they got no higher.
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