After a fitful night’s sleep in our portavillage, comprised of a double and two single ledges, Noel and I set to work on the hundred-metre spire above the camp. Although too overhanging to hold snow, there was much in the cracks. Noel took the first of numerous falls when he unzipped a string of bashies on an aid pitch and dived ten metres. He accused me of dropping him, which I did, but I denied it vehemently. Well, I was cold and daydreaming to relieve the boredom … And I did stop him, eventually. I ended that bout of activity by climbing an icefall in my flimsy rock slippers which froze my feet, so I packed them away not to be seen again.
The following day, while Simon and Sean worked hauling, the two ‘crag rats’ set about the Great Scoop, the formidable central feature of the line. Once again Noel tried to make swifter progress in slippers, but the intense cold forced him to lower off halfway up a pitch and don double boots. I then led on up a rotten choked up chimney. Halfway now and I was equalised on two tied off Lost Arrows, trying to arrange a blade. I heard the snapping of a hawser under tension, then more, and more. I knew what was happening, I’d been there before about thirty minutes ago, falling from the same spot. I bounced off the same ledge and landed on Noel again. He was disgruntled but still managing to smile, even though his belay was of the same wobbly pins as my placements. He seemed more upset that I had landed on him as he was rolling up his last tobacco. In time I reached another hanging stance on this great shield without the slightest foothold, a full rope-length above the last. I gobbed and it floated upwards like a spider’s web on the breeze. If I followed that strange urge, the one that everybody gets when they look over the side of the Eiffel Tower, and untied, I wouldn’t touch rock all the way to the glacier.
Christmas passed in an up and down succession of accelerating storms and retreats on ice-encrusted ropes. Weathering one forty-hour tempest in our constricted nylon tomb was to prove a particularly good insight into human relations when confronted by fear and poor personal hygiene. Through the maelstrom Noel shouted quotes from his book of quantum physics whilst I made long cigarettes from its pages. As we pondered Schrödinger’s cat, the ledge began to fly like a kite and the seams of the tent began to split. Cooking in there was a dangerous procedure and used up valuable oxygen. Condensation poured down the walls and created a kind of soup under our sleeping mats. It was infinitely preferable to be the cook than the one who went outside to collect the snow. Noel passed two pots of snow in and perched on the end of the ledge desperately trying to relieve his inertia-induced constipation. I shouted at him to hurry as the spindrift was blowing in, and in his haste he fell off into the whiteout, stopped only after two metres by his slack tether. “Lord, I’m not cut out to be a big wall climber,” he grumbled, and I giggled and shook my head as he hauled himself back into the ledge.
Then a day dawned calm and wondrous and two carbon-monoxide-poisoned figures jumared laboriously back to their high point. Noel began a huge overhanging corner with a stack of loose filing cabinets neatly slotted into the top of it. I was belaying directly below, in the path of any keyed in blocks he chose to unlock. To pass the blocks Noel first had to expand them with a pin, a delicate manoeuvre, and then aid up on micro nuts – I had nowhere to run. He would say to himself “I’m weightless. I have no mass.” Using that meditation even the most dreadful RURP placement could be forced into offering some support. Two days of worry, daydreams, fear and mind games were consumed by that pitch. I ran out another pitch up a smooth overhanging shield and arrived at the base of the Coffin, one of the few features we had seen from the ground. Again it was getting late and we could see Sean and Simon starting the long jumar 600 metres or so below. It was time to switch shifts.
For three more days the corner went on through snow storms and past false horizons. Everyone was growing weary and the twenty-four-hour attention to knots, karabiners and each other’s safety was becoming hard to sustain. Everyone had his close calls checked by his partner. But the view over the ridges into the surrounding valleys got better by the day; a little like climbing the oak in the back yard until you can see into the next-door garden.
Sean added to the collected air-miles when he stripped his gear out of an iced up chimney leading up to what was to become our top bivvy. The ground was so steep that it was an air-fall without danger. As the two ‘mountaineers’ prepared to spend the night up high, Noel and I rested at the portaledge camp, waiting nervously for a midnight start on the ropes. As we dossed and discussed relativity, we were startled by a twanging on the fixed ropes a few feet below our bed. This was weird because, aside from our friendly condors, we hadn’t seen a soul in this valley for over a month. We heard heavy breathing and then saw a pair of gloves. Then we laughed when the face of our American friend, Steve Hayward, popped up with a cheesy grin. He’d jumared 350 metres to come and have a big wall party. We salivated as he unloaded wine, beer, chocolate, bean burritos, real cigarettes and mail from our base camp manager and coach, Hanneke.
The middle of the next morning we rejoined the other half of the team, careful not to boast too openly of our gluttony. We huddled together on a piss-stained snowy ledge a thousand metres above the glacier, with Simon leapfrogging bashies up a thin seam way above. We were pitifully low on ’biners and he had nowhere near enough to clip every piece. At last, forty metres out, Simon found a good Friend placement and weighted it confidently. A scream … With our heads flung back we saw his soaring buzzard form silhouetted against the grey frothing atmosphere. He bounced and somersaulted down the corner and hit a ledge just above our heads. He made a long whine with an occasional splutter. We attempted to lower him but the ropes had become fast in the crack. We glanced at each other, terrible thoughts flashing through our minds. A serious injury here, so far from help, could turn into a right epic. He came round and answered our worried pleas with, “The rope’s stuck, I might have a broken arm. Give me a minute to sort this mess out.” As he had fallen the rope had become sandwiched in a thin crack which made it impossible for us to lower him to us right away. He acted hard, Simon has survived some terrible ordeals in his past, and soon he had got himself down to the ledge. He rolled the arm at the shoulder and it seemed OK but he was shaking. He apologised for cocking up and, in that bad situation, I found respect for him and my grudge disappeared.
Noel re-led the pitch, throwing caution through the window (in Paine the wind is too strong), and I swung through into a vice of an overhanging chimney. Massive hands of water ice grew out of the granite at bizarre angles and I wriggled in the fingers like Fay Wray in the grasp of King Kong. I pulled myself free and it was like coming up for air – there was the summit block and lesser angled ground. We were euphoric. Screaming and yelping I sent Noel up the next pitch, a hidden crack which took a big swing to find. In darkness we fixed our haul line and lead rope and slid down to the bivvy with tidings of great joy. Dinner was cold porridge and rehydration salts.
The day dawned strangely; it was too warm and very windy. Water was dripping onto us. I stood up and my sleeping mat blew away and circumnavigated the summit block like some unpiloted flying carpet. We didn’t pay too much attention to the ominous signs but within an hour a full thaw was upon us. We began by jumaring through a waterfall in the icy hands chimney. The nylon gardening jackets we had found in Noel’s parents’ garden shed had worked surprisingly well up until this point but were no match for this torrent of melting ice. Simon bravely led half a pitch but retreated, bitterly cold and in pain from the previous day’s plummet. Sean, who had decided to go for the top in his canvas hiking shoes, now had frozen feet. Added to the fact that we had no food or gas, this fuelled our decision to bail out. We slid down a kilometre of wet, deteriorating rope, but our hearts slid further. Once on the ground there is an odd mixture of emotions. We didn’t really want to go back up there, but we mouthed the words that we would. Did we try as hard as we could have done? Should we have moved faster on earlier days? All questions with no answers. We decided to escape.
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sp; We abandoned our base camp in the beech forest and ran the three hours to the roadhead, just making the last bus. Three more hours and we reached the fishing village of Puerto Natales. It was a depraved team of hill-billies that hit town. Starvation stares from behind scruffy beards and inane gruntings passing as language worried restaurant staff, who timidly placed endless plates of salmon in front of the savages, fearful of losing their hands. After a night in the bar, Sean and I visited the Mylodon Disco, a sound mountaineering decision. Reality became an obscure concept. A short while earlier we had been three pitches below the top of Torre Centrale, with all its sickly heights and violent winds. Now we were jumping to throbbing music below spinning lights of all colours. Velvet mylodons on the walls, senoritas, fluorescent liquids. Again I found myself screaming. We staggered out into the dawn and some local women helped us gain entry into another bar, though this one was obviously quite exclusive as it had no sign up and the door was locked. After a coded knock the door was answered by a blurred figure. Our friends ran away, I assume because they didn’t want to be associated with us, but we gained entry. I remember a very spartan living room with crates of alcohol. I remember ordering beer and Sean collapsing. After rifling through Sean’s pockets I had to admit to the blurred man that we couldn’t pay, so I was forced to drag Sean back into the street. I wasted some time trying to pull him down the pavement but Sean Smith is a big man. There was only one course of action – I had to abandon him.
When I eventually located the hotel I found the others having breakfast. I was in a drunken panic and quite emotional. “You’ve got to come quickly. I’ve abandoned Sean.” They ushered me out of the dining room because, they said, I was creating a scene and accompanied me to where I’d left him. When we reached the spot there was no sign of Sean, only a pile of vomit. Oh well! Sean’s a big boy now. He could look after himself. When Sean did show up in the middle of the day he described how he had woken in a strange room and how he must have been carried in by the house-owner with whom he could not converse at all. That was just one in many instances of great Chilean hospitality that I have witnessed. And so, sated, we headed back to our mountain.
Noel was becoming increasingly agitated and we were not quite sure why. It soon came out that he had told his Oxford University bosses that he was going on a short holiday to Chile. He wanted to get back to his laboratory as quickly as possible. I stole his passport in an attempt to get him to stay but he played his trump card and pulled out a second passport. Damn! We were sad to see him go. He had done more than his share of the graft and he deserved another crack. True though, the near future looked bleak.
It had been a stressful time for all of us. The seemingly endless problems which the tower and the weather had put in our way made the relations between the team progressively more tense as time had gone on. For Simon it seemed an especially stressful period. Later he revealed that he had agreed to come on the trip almost out of habit, though truthfully he felt as though he had been on the move for too many years. What else could he have done, though? This was all he had ever done – gone from one trip to the next, around the world on some frantic whirligig of tropical cities, walk-ins and mountains. He had always ploughed forwards, blinkered, not wanting to look to either side for fear of seeing … a home … a woman … some stability … a bit of cash for a change, all the things he had previously seen as a trap, a part of the rat race. Maybe there was something in it; to live like other people and not like some perpetual wandering freak. After his fall and our frightening retreat in a furious storm he also chose not to go back up there. The state of the fixed ropes worried him and there was too much to live for now his decision had been made. Fair enough, I thought. There’s no honour in dying, only image enhancement.
When my ascender hit the fraction point in the corner, I wearily removed the top clamp and replaced it on the rope above the peg. I raised my left leg in its foot loop and slid the clamp upward. With an effort I took my weight on one leg, unclipped the chest-clamp, stood up and replaced it above the peg. And so on and so forth.
At 9 a.m. Sean and I were together at the top of the ropes. The wind blew hard making shattering cracks, the likes of which we had never heard before, as the gusts exploded through the gendarmes above. At this moment the sky was blue. We had left our cabin in the forest a day earlier at 3.30 p.m. We had been moving continuously ever since. Over a few hours I led another long pitch with free bits, edging in plastic boots. I was tired of all this now and felt strangely detatched as I took risks above my gear. I was thinking about my father and his night club singing routines and how he liked to play the showman. But now I was the showman, as I took a large air-fall from a roof when I stripped a nut from a rock-ice sandwich. I had to wrestle with myself for control of my mind. There was no place for emotion here, only room for non-judgmental corrections and an awareness that an accident could have catastrophic consequences. Since the thaw the mountain had refrozen and the cracks had become choked in hard water ice. This made getting protection in time-consuming as every placement had to be chipped out. At the end of the pitch I arrived at a snowfield and above I could see old fixed ropes leading up toward the summit, not far away. This time, with the euphoria was a weary relief. But now it was certain. Just below, condors contoured the wall, shadows flitting from corner to face. Sean led through and after some mixed gullies and frozen frayed lines we wallowed onto the top. A different view! After twenty-one days on the wall we could at last look west. Lago Paine, La Fortaleza, El Escudo. The Fortress and the Shield. They appeared as hurriedly as they disappeared while the clouds shunted past with a fast-forward velocity. We were unable to stand and our eyes watered, from the wind rather than with tears of joy.
On the first abseil the ropes got stuck in some jumble of boulders so Sean had to reclimb the top pitch to release them. That wasted a lot of time and we didn’t land on our top bivvy ledge until midnight. I immediately fell into slumber, whilst Sean kept waking me up with brews to rehydrate us. With the daylight came our early morning alarmstorm. The wind blew vertically, which made the already desperate task of cleaning a kilometre of rope, and dismantling a camp with only two people, even more desperate. Our ropes spiralled and twisted above us in the updraft, searching for crevices and flakes to hook onto and forcing us several times to cut them. In my haste I raced ahead a couple of pitches to a ledge and waited for Sean, but he didn’t show up. After an age I leaned out and spotted him fighting with the ropes up in the foaming cloud. I shouted but my voice was ripped away from me. I could only wait. After an hour Sean slid to my side and went crazy. “I needed you up there and you just buggered off,” he bawled in my face. “You were supposed to take the loose ends of the rope down to stop them blowing away. They fucked off round the corner and got stuck in a crack. It took me ages to free them.” I apologised and felt ashamed. I had rushed things and put Sean at risk. Down to the base I tried extra hard to please, doing more than my fair share of the work. But we were focussed now on getting back to warmth and safety as we rappeled over the ice-coated rocks of the lower slabs. We descended the glacier in the night, front-pointing on twenty degree ice to avoid being swept away by the wind. And when we crept back into the forest in the early hours we didn’t wake the others. In the morning Hanneke and Simon came into my tent and told me they were happy for us. I got tearful and went back to sleep. Celebrations didn’t commence until a few days later.
Down in the meadow we were relaxing with Pepe and his family when we heard news of the imminent arrival of a Murcian expedition. There could only be one and they had probably already seen their clothes being modelled by the park rangers. We prepared for the confrontation by hiding when they arrived. Sean and I hid in a bush and watched the Murcians unpacking their two jeep-loads of gear and setting up camp. We began to get worried when they started to practise Kung Fu. What had they got in mind for us? The inevitable happened round at Pepe’s shack one night and the four unhappy Spaniards came out of the darkness. It started wit
h hand-shakes but soon degenerated into a shouting match. After informing us that their leader was so upset that he had had to go to hospital because his stomach ulcer was flaring up, they then demanded to look in our tents. Sean wasn’t having any of this and, seemingly growing in the firelight, barred their way. What he wanted to know was why they used sixty bolts on the first 300 metres of easy slabs. A small scuffle broke out but no one was really willing to attack Tres Platos, the name by which the local gauchos knew Sean in respect of the inordinate amounts of food he could put away. We had nothing to give the Murcians. The few bits and bobs of clothing had been distributed among the gauchos and the rangers. The Spaniards left, hating us. Sean and I felt terribly guilty and left our ropes for the climbers, although they did seem to have arrived very well equipped. That was the last we saw of them, though we did hear that they went straight back home without attempting anything.
We named our climb El Regalo de Mwono, which means The Gift of Mwono, after the Tehuelche god who lives amongst those frozen steeples. The Tehuelche are gone now, wiped out by the settlers, many of them hunted down like animals. They chose never to set foot in the mountains for fear of inflaming the wrath of Mwono3 but I knew that one of them, perhaps a young agile, dirty lad, dressed in a guanaco skin, would not have been able to suppress his curiosity and will have ventured forth and explored and hunted below the great cliffs. Though I doubt whether he will have considered climbing them. The gift was the climb, not the booty which caused so much bad feeling, and we felt honoured to be granted such a gift.
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