Paul Sykes from Yorkshire had underwritten the Everest project, so I put the Eiger idea to him. This time he was not happy. It all sounded a lot more dangerous and if anything happened to me he, as sponsor, would feel partially responsible. But he did agree to meet up with and quiz Kenton, who talked him round, even if Paul was still dubious about my chances of success.
I looked at various UK charities and ended up deciding on Marie Curie Cancer Care. This was an easy choice for when I had been with Ginny in Exeter Hospital’s cancer care ward, we had noticed other terminally ill patients who were never visited by friends or family and, when we went to their bedsides, they confided that they pined for the familiar surroundings of their own home, the friendly face of some pet or other and the memories they associated with their own pictures, ornaments and furniture. But they couldn’t afford to pay carers, so they must die, lonely, in an NHS cancer ward. Macmillan and Marie Curie nurses are the best answer to this very real problem and, because I had done some work ten years before for Marie Curie, I called them first. They were enthusiastic and their committee decided that, using my Eiger attempt, they could and would raise at least £1.5 million, and maybe double that figure.
My literary agent Ed Victor signed up The Sunday Times to cover the climb exclusively, and I approached old friends at ITV News (the new name for ITN). Sadly, their veteran reporter, Terry Lloyd, who had been on so many of our expeditions in the past, had been killed whilst on ITN duty near Basra in 2003. An investigation was still going on as to the exact circumstances of Terry’s death, but the official version was ‘caught up in a fire fight between US and Iraqi forces near the Shatt Al Basra Bridge’. However, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats, three and a half years after Terry’s death, was still pushing Parliament for justice. ‘When,’ he asked, ‘may we expect the Attorney-General to make an application for the extradition and trial in Britain of those American soldiers against whom there is a prima facie case for the unlawful killing in Iraq of the ITN journalist Terry Lloyd?’
ITV News agreed to send a two-man team to record the Eiger attempt and to make clear how viewers could donate to Marie Curie. The new Terry Lloyd was reporter Philip Reay-Smith and his cameraman was Rob Turner. ITV subsequently agreed, with Paul Sykes’ help, to produce a sixty-minute documentary film in addition to their sequences for the national news.
Once ITV and The Sunday Times were on board, I approached Mountain Equipment, the mountain and polar clothing company I had worked with since 1972, and they agreed to full equipment sponsorship, and the UK Met Office in Exeter and the Swiss equivalent in Berne also agreed to sponsor us. Met forecasts are key to any successful attempt on the North Face of the Eiger, which Kenton assured me would best be made in March when winter temperatures should freeze loose rubble in place and minimise the likelihood of rockfalls.
‘Which March?’ I asked Kenton.
He smiled. ‘That depends on when, if ever, you become sufficiently proficient for me not to consider you the lethal liability that you are right now.’
So month after month through 2006 I flew out to Geneva for five-day training sessions in the Alps, trying to imbibe a basic understanding of the principles of rope-work and how to use an ice-axe (or two) in conjunction with crampon spikes, in order to head in an upwards direction on vertical ice sheets. Not just to help plod up slopes, as on Everest.
The nursery slopes that Kenton initially used were mostly close to Argentière, near Chamonix, but, when the weather was bad, he drove us through the Mont Blanc tunnel to the Italian valley of Cogne, a place of many frozen waterfalls. The basics of ice-climbing, as far as I could see, involved hacking one or both of your axes into the ice-wall above your head, kicking the front-facing spikes on your boots into the ice at about knee-level, then hauling your weight up. You then keep repeating this process until you reach the top of the waterfall.
As we progressed slowly to more difficult waterfalls, variations on this basic theme were introduced, some fairly dicey. When the ice was a mere transparent coating, as though painted on to the rock, bludgeoning your axe into it was useless. In such places it was better to try to be incredibly patient and place your axes’ tips with surgical precision into the tiniest indents. That sounds easy, but it’s not when your arms are burning or cramping with muscle pain.
Joe Simpson wrote, ‘Climbing frozen waterfalls appears to the uninformed observer to be a complicated if somewhat novel form of suicide, and quite often this very same thought worms itself uneasily into the mind of the hapless climber.’
An American climbing journal sent a freelance journalist, Greg Child, out to Chamonix to record a typical Kenton training day. Greg had himself been a world-renowned mountaineer for many years. He wrote:
We’re all clammy with sweat when we reach the frozen waterfall. Ropes uncoiled, ice axes leashed to wrists and crampons clamped to boots. ‘Baron von Cool’, Ran’s pet name for his guide, leads us up a swathe of vertical ice. Ran hacks with his ice axes and Cool pulls the rope in on his waist. Despite his mangled hand and awkward grip, Ran swings his ice tool true and confidently, and judging by our relaxed banter, he’s well on his way to conquering his lifelong fear of heights. Cool then belays me up. I find that the cold air has rendered the ice so brittle that grapefruit-size chunks of it are exploding all around me as I hack my ice axes into the cascade. Halfway up to the ledge where Cool and Ran are seated I notice a trail of blood. The droplets lead straight to Ran’s nose, which an ice shard has neatly slit. He’s unperturbed, and he sits on his perch with a bloody grin.
With Cool in the lead, we start up a rambling ice floe near Italy’s Cogne Valley, a grade 4+ named Patri. Mini tornadoes of powder snow sting us whenever the wind feels angry. On a low-angled stretch of the route, Ran steps on the rope in his spiked boots – a climbing no-no.
‘Get off that bloody thing, Ran,’ Cool barks like a rabid drill sergeant.
Ran smiles at me, and steps aside. For an alpha male accustomed to unconditional authority over his expeditions, his deference to Cool is quaint. It’s also pragmatic: he knows he’s on a learning curve as a climber, and he’s soaking up everything Cool can teach.
That day we completed my first Grade Five waterfall, aptly named the Cascade Difficile.
I got to know the mountains above Chamonix quite well through my training with Kenton. The town is possibly the greatest mecca in the world for mountaineers and is dominated by the great rounded summit of Mont Blanc. On average, one climber dies each and every day in and around Chamonix during the summer climbing season. Helicopters fly overhead on rescue missions, and sometimes come back with a bodybag dangling beneath them.
In November 2006 Kenton finally agreed that I could, if I continued my improvement, set a date of 1 March 2007 for the Eiger climb. Meanwhile there were times when he was busy with other clients in the Alps or Himalaya, so he appointed alternative guides for my tuition. One such was Jon Bracey, another Chamonix-based Brit, who led me to my most difficult ascent at that time, the great tooth-shaped block called La Dent du Géant (the Giant’s Tooth), a true Alpine aiguille or needle. We only reached the base of the final 600-foot cliff at dusk, so we dug a bivouac into the snow slope at the very base of the rock and carried on the climb after dawn the next day. I didn’t relish the unbroken nature of that stark wall and was extremely thankful for the thick rope which some thoughtful soul had fixed all the way up the cliff face to the vertiginous summit.
Climbing guides like Jon, who live in Chamonix and depend upon the Alpine snows for their livelihood, are worried, as is everyone in the winter sports industry, that the Alps are running out of snow. It is true that during Roman times the Alps were warmer even than they are today, but the current speed of warming is what worries French and Swiss scientists. They estimate that the Alps have lost half their glacier ice in the past century, and 20 per cent of that since the 1980s. Swiss glaciers have lost one-fifth of their surface area in just fifteen years. One side effect is an increased incidence
of huge rockfalls and avalanches.
Kenton introduced me to various other individuals who are cult figures in the large expatriate British community in the Chamonix area who pay French taxes. One was the Alpine guide and artist Andy Parkin who had suffered appalling fall injuries on some Swiss rockface. He received surgery to his heart, spleen, liver, hip and elbows but, within months of leaving hospital, he was climbing again on highly demanding routes.
By the end of 2006 Kenton professed himself satisfied that there had been ‘improvement’. He was a hard taskmaster, which I liked, especially since I am forgetful and inclined to be vague. I need to be shouted at in circumstances where a single absent-minded action (or lack of action) can kill someone. On two occasions over the months I received a major Kenton bollocking for putting my helmet down during rests between climbs with its rounded top on the ground. That way it could slide the more easily down a mountainside.
One day at the base of the Tournier Spur of the Aiguille du Midi, we stopped to take our crampons off, when Kenton yelled, ‘Get down’, and flung himself sideways. A rock, slightly bigger than a rugby ball, screamed through the air directly towards us from some distant cliff. I copied Kenton’s evasive action with less than a second to spare, and the missile thrummed past the point where our heads would have been.
Five minutes later we had to stop to put our crampons on again, and whilst doing so Kenton took his helmet off. To my amazement and great delight he put it down on the snow the wrong way up. I screamed at him, ‘KENTON!!’ Quick as a flash and thinking another flying rock was about to arrive, he crashed to the ground.
‘Kenton,’ I said, when he had picked himself up warily, ‘you put your helmet down the wrong way up. You should never, ever do that. You might lose it on a slope.’
I cannot remember now whether he said ‘You bastard’ or not, but he was considerably less bossy than usual for an hour or so afterwards.
Most of my climbing back at home had to be squeezed in between lectures and family activities so, since Bristol was a lot closer than Cardiff, Haydn gave me some pointers to instructors there, and by good fortune I ended up in the capable hands of Paul Twomey, the supremo instructor-cum-manager of Undercover Rock, a former parish church taken over as a climbing school for the young and old of Bristol (including, I noticed, the very young and the very old). The atmosphere was happy, excited and frenetic. It was fun to watch as well as to participate. Each and every wall and nook of the entire church, including the belfry, was crammed with artificial climbing routes, colour-coded for degrees of severity. Paul taught me many excellent rock-climbing tips in the church, and then drove us out to the Avon or Cheddar Gorge for real climbs whenever the rock there was dry.
One hot summer’s day, Ian Parnell took me to Cheddar. I watched every move Ian made in order to copy it when he was ready to belay me. One difficult section was only negotiable by holding a rock bulge from below whilst traversing round it. When I reached this rock, aping Ian’s every handhold, the entire rock, all 200 pounds of it, came away, knocking me into space. Ian held my fall and the rock landed several metres away from our car in which Louise, Alexander and Elizabeth were sitting. The same face higher up proved too much for me. A key grip, tiny and all but smoothed away by weather, defeated my stumps. Since I could not use my good right hand anywhere useful and my arms ran out of strength, I fell off again.
‘Pull me up, please,’ I yelled at Ian, unseen but somewhere high above. Either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t. I tried again and again to find a way up the tricky bit and kept shouting at Ian. He continued to ignore my pleas. I swore (silently) at him. He was Kenton’s climbing partner of many years. Between them they had achieved great new climbs on many sheer remote faces. They were the best in Britain, and Ian had agreed to join Kenton and me on our Eiger attempt. Now, I assumed, he was testing me out in cahoots with Kenton. They had plotted this between them. Damn them. With all my strength virtually gone, I was forced to think about the bit of rock that was defying my every effort. I spotted a side hold and two finger-holes that I had previously missed but which made all the difference. On my seventh attempt, I made it. I said nothing to a grinning Ian when I reached him, but made up my mind to learn how to ascend the rope itself in case I again came across rock I couldn’t manage.
I knew that Ian’s opinions of my ability, or lack of it, would be reported to Kenton, who, despite our tentative March 2007 date, had yet to make up his mind finally about the wisdom of taking me up the Eiger Nordwand. I did later see Ian’s summary of the climbing.
His hand, damaged by frostbite, of course proved a real hindrance, and at times his ‘stumps’ would prove completely ineffective at gripping the rock. I’m sure for Ran this was a real frustration, but he didn’t let it show. The real big issue, however, was Ran’s vertigo. Again, he would say very little and at times you could forget that he was battling a constant fear of heights, but when things got tricky and he became flustered, his vertigo would begin to spiral out of control. During these moments he’d seemingly lose sight of any alternative foot- or handholds other than those right under his nose. Scrabbling for purchase, his feet would start pedalling as though riding a bike over slippery cobbles and his knuckles would be white as he gripped harder and harder. But he wouldn’t give up until his arms were so drained of energy that the holds would just melt through his fingers. I did wonder if Ran’s proposed ascent of the Eiger would ever happen.
In order to work on overcoming this Kenton introduced me to a Scottish climbing instructor, Sandy Ogilvie, who took me to Swanage one day on the Dorset coast. Halfway across a sea cliff route called the Traverse of the Gods, I lost a key hold and fell in a long pendulum swing, just missing the tide-free rocks below by a metre. I was left dangling free some twelve feet below the nearest point of the rockface. Fortunately, Sandy had explained how to use prussik loops, small cord slings which form rope grips, and clumsily but successfully, I managed to scale the taut rope itself in order to get back up to the rock and continued the climb.
Soon afterwards Sandy took me and the family to the Orkneys to climb the famous Old Man of Hoy. This sea stack was my first truly exposed climb, with a near 400-foot drop to the sea. What helped me considerably was the presence, as third man on the rope, of the freelance reporter sent by The Sunday Times, himself a famous climber and author. Stephen Venables had a great sense of humour and was completely unfazed by the exposure. There were two especially nasty places, both of which Sandy from above and Stephen from below talked me over with clear and patient shouted instructions.
But I did it. Stephen later wrote,
Ran shoved and grunted, trouser seat scraping one wall, knees the other. It was all brute strength with little finesse, but the cussed determination was impressive. I also had a struggle getting out of the chimney and round the roof, conscious that there was nothing but fresh air between my feet and the sea-washed boulders over a hundred feet below . . . The accident happened on our way back down from the top, during an abseil. ‘Keep to the right,’ I shouted, as Ran walked backwards down the cliff, over the big ledge. But he didn’t move in time. I heard the throaty rattle of a defiant bird standing its ground, then a violent splatter as the aspiring mountaineer was showered with fulmar bile.
The smell was horrible but at least I had a helmet on, though as Sandy reminded me, it was a helmet with ventilation holes. People steered clear of me for a while that day.
Louise had watched the climb from the mainland clifftop. She confessed to Stephen Venables. ‘He’s away almost continuously. So either I’m left holding the baby or I have to go everywhere with him.’ She hadn’t developed a very high opinion of my ability to look after myself either. ‘On Everest,’ she said, ‘I had to stick Ran’s heart pills up all over the Base Camp mess tent to make sure he took them.’
Louise, Alexander and Elizabeth flew out to Geneva with me a month after the Hoy climb and Stephen came too. This time our goal was to reconnoitre the Nordwand so that I could actually lo
ok at the great wall close up for the first time and, if I realised that it would be folly to have a go at such a climb, I could still cancel things without embarrassing our charity. I knew that on his first attempt Joe Simpson had turned back after climbing part way up. If somebody like Simpson could make such a decision, I realised that I must face up to the unpalatable fact that I might be way out of my league. A lot of the problem, I know, would be entirely caused by my over-active imagination. Jon Krakauer, the famous climber journalist, who once managed to climb halfway up the North face, summed up this tendency well: ‘The problem with climbing the North Face of the Eiger is that in addition to getting up 6,000 vertical feet of crumbling limestone and black ice, one must climb over some formidable mythology. The trickiest moves on any climb are the mental ones, the psychological gymnastics that keep terror in check, and the Eiger’s grim aura is intimidating enough to ruin anyone’s poise.’
At Grindelwald Jon Morgan, one of Kenton’s guide friends, took charge and Stephen, Jon and I travelled to the base of the Eiger by train, the amazing legacy of nineteenth-century Swiss railway fever which tunnelled into the North Face itself. We got out at the Eigergletscher station and started walking up the gentle south-west flank of the mountain. Stephen takes up the story:
We were still in shadow, following Jon up scree slopes and occasional little rock steps. When it got steeper he stopped to put Ran on a ‘short rope’, leading him on a 10-foot tether up hard frozen snow, then a little rock overhang, which got us onto classic Eiger territory – downward sloping tiles of grey limestone, littered with rock debris.
Then suddenly it all changed as we emerged onto the crest of the west ridge proper, where the sloping tiles reached a knife-edge between two utterly different worlds – on one side our rambling sunny slope, and on the other an immense sombre abyss.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 34
