by Clint Willis
Chris, still leading the third rope, climbed the roof and arrived at the base of the groove. The exposure—the vastness of the space that had opened up around and beneath him—was again tremendous. He continued to climb and his momentum soon took him 50 or so feet past his highest piton. His forearms shook with fatigue. His position was too precarious for him to pause. He continued to climb higher in the dwindling hope of finding a crack or other weakness—a place to drop a nut or place a piton, a decent hold, some reprieve from the fall that would otherwise come. He found nothing, and still his inclination was to move higher and now it was too late to retreat.
He knew that he had made a mistake he might not be able to fix, that he was staking everything on the outcome of the next few moments. He struggled higher; at one point he tried and failed to thread a sling around a stone that had lodged in a crack. Even now, he found that he was too proud to ask the others to drop him a top-rope. This view of his own stubborness gave him access to an unfamiliar strength and he tapped this new resource with a deftness that surprised him. He was able to cling to a sloping hold with one hand while he reached up and over a shelf; there he found a better hold that allowed him to heave himself onto a ledge and sit gasping next to Paul Ross—who casually informed him that he’d followed Don up the wrong groove; the one next to it was much easier.
The climbing became still more exposed. The space opened out until its tug came from every direction; they might sail into space as easily as fall to the glacier. Falling might come as a relief; they were partly convinced that the real danger was above and behind them; they might disappear into this yawning distance. They could not protect themselves; they must try to be inconspicuous; they must hope to creep unnoticed past this great void.
They came to an enormous ledge in the waning hours of the day. It was a fine site for a bivouac. The four British climbers stopped, and the ledge was soon littered with their gear and their sprawled or crouching bodies. The Austrians moved higher, placing pegs as they went, making use of the light that remained; they established their bivouac at a slightly higher point.
The British settled down to make tea, melting snow on their portable gas stove. Chris and Hamish had brought along some of Bonington’s stolen survival rations. Don and Paul contributed real food—bread and sausage and bacon. The climbers had leisure to contemplate the view. They were comfortable enough on their broad ledge to enjoy their position as darkness came on. They were tired, and they could savor the pleasure of doing nothing for a time. The day had gone well. The climb was no longer entirely a mystery or a choice that lay ahead as it had been the night before.
Hamish gazed at the lights of Chamonix and Montenvers. He took pleasure in the contrast between the earthbound villagers’ situation and his own lofty perch. He lifted his eyes to stare across at the Grépon and the Charmoz. He’d soloed both peaks during his alpine apprenticeship. His rappel anchor had failed on the Charmoz. He’d plunged 40 feet to a ledge. The impact had damaged both of his feet, and his knees had slammed into his eye sockets, blinding him for a time. Raymond Lambert—the great Swiss guide—had been climbing nearby; he had rescued the foolish young man. Hamish thought back to that now. He thought of the climbing that lay ahead tomorrow.
A roar of falling rocks—an enormous avalanche of stone-fall far below—interrupted the climbers’ thoughts and conversation. The torrent of rocks clattered and rumbled across the gully they had climbed to reach the Pillar; the rocks struck sparks in the dim light and sent up a tower of dust that stank of brimstone.
Don spoke first, noting the obvious: the avalanche had it occurred that morning would have killed them all. They were silent for a moment in contemplation of this fact and what it implied, and so they all heard the high-pitched whine of a rock falling through space. It hit Hamish in the head, gashing his scalp and fracturing his skull, and knocking him off the cliff.
He had clipped into an anchor for the night. He hung from it half-senseless, blood pouring from his head. He was able to gather what was left of his wits, and he struggled back onto the ledge. The others, horrified, stared at him; even Whillans seemed concerned. Chris had the group’s first-aid supplies—a single dressing—and he dug the bandage out and set to work wrapping the wound. The dressing turned black with blood, but the bleeding slowed and then stopped.
The climbers’ next concern was to get out of the line of fire. Whillans found a spot that suited him, and the other three Brits hunched together in a niche in the wall. Hamish spent the night in a haze, occasionally losing consciousness and slumping against Bonington, threatening to dislodge him from his precarious stance.
Chris was tired but he didn’t sleep. He lay hunched against the rock; he was cramped and cold. He watched the lights flicker in the valley. He shivered in his down jacket and yearned for sunrise even as he dreaded the trials of the coming day; he wished himself down in the village, having dinner with people who slept in beds.
Retreat would not be possible now. The party had made several long rising traverses during the day. It would be too difficult and dangerous to reverse that ground on this steep terrain. Also, they did not wish to try to down-climb the gully at the bottom of the Pillar—not after watching the rockslide that had wiped out their tracks of the morning. They would have to try to finish the climb. The route was a difficult and uncertain endeavor even under the best of conditions; they would have to do it with a climber who had a fractured skull.
They all knew such moments, when matters took on a new degree of seriousness. A climber trudging across a snowfield might glance down and recognize that a fall would kill him and his partner. Or he might top out on a high ridge and look west to see thunderheads advancing rapidly across the sky. At such times one’s options narrowed; ambition and preference and other trivia fell away. The climber was left to determine what the situation required of him and to try to do it.
The six young men on the Bonatti Pillar of the Dru had the night to consider their predicament. They knew they couldn’t carry Hamish. He must try to climb. If he couldn’t, the group must split into two parties. One party would try to finish the route and go for help. The other would stay with Hamish, knowing that a rescue was unlikely and that a change in the weather—snow or rain—might strand them with the injured man. Hamish, slumped against Chris, was not fit to contemplate such contingencies. Chris was alive to them.
Dawn came at last. The four British climbers pottered about on their ledge; they moved stiffly and uncertainly, like old men. They were glad that the day had come, but the sun did not warm them much; their cliff faced west and so they rose in shadow. Hamish suffered from bouts of dizziness, and he looked terrible: black sheets of dried blood streaked the right side of his gaunt, white face. Young Richard Blach peered down from his perch at the Austrian’s bivouac site and turned pale himself at the sight of the Scotsman.
Chris didn’t think he could get Hamish up the climb. He asked Whillans to rope up with the injured man. Don accepted the proposal as a sort of tribute and as an example of Bonington’s good sense. It was the beginning of an understanding between them.
Hamish MacInnes and Paul Ross on the Bonatti Pillar
CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY
The Austrians started up the face, hammering in a ladder of pitons that led up a series of grooves. Don followed with Hamish. Chris led the third rope, with Paul coming up behind him to remove pitons. Don, after leading each pitch, clipped to an anchor and hauled on the rope as Hamish climbed. Hamish’s strength came and went; he lost consciousness from time to time and simply hung on the rope that snaked down from Whillans. The pair made slow but reasonably steady progress. Chris, whose periodic funks alternated with fits of optimism, began to imagine a happy ending to this adventure.
The party reached a ledge around midday and stalled there. The sun by now was very strong; the climbers forgot how they had suffered from cold during the night. Hamish, looking up from the ledge in a haze of fatigue and pain—craning h
is neck made his headache worse—could see the Austrians working their way up a smooth wall. Walter from time to time called down for more pitons. Whillans, resting from his own labors, watched for a time and decided that the Austrians had wandered off Bonatti’s original route.
Don took a belay from Hamish, and moved around a corner to discover an enormous overhang of dark rock split by cracks that bristled with rotting wooden wedges. He had found the right way, but it would require strenuous aid climbing. Hamish clambered awkwardly over and inspected the overhang, privately doubting his own ability to climb it.
The Austrians came down and followed the others across to Whillans’ overhang. Don meanwhile set off. The work consisted of hammering in a piton and clipping a sling to it, then standing awkwardly in the sling to hammer in another piton. The other climbers, reduced to bystanders, clustered at the base of the overhang. They watched Whillans work his way across the ceiling of rock and reach up over the lip of the overhang and heave himself out of sight. Time slowed down for the climber and his watchers, but the sun tracked through the sky at its usual pace, spending the day. The weather had changed; the cliff was swaddled in swirling cloud, and it was cold again.
Chris took a picture of Hamish. The injured man sat with his back to the rock, craning his neck to stare upward, the blood-soaked bandage wound around his jaw and over the top of his head like a sort of scarf—the sort of bandage that once indicated a toothache. His tousled dirty-yellow hair escaped in front and covered most of his forehead; his dark blood covered the side of his face. Hamish’s short, blond beard made him look a little like someone’s idea of a saint or a sprite, gaunt and mischievous. Chris recognized in his friend something of his own youth, of the ignorance and shaky glamour of leaving childhood.
It was seven o’clock. The party wouldn’t all get up the overhang that evening. Whillans shouted down that there were no decent ledges above it. He anchored a rope and descended it to rejoin his companions. Five of the climbers retreated to a convenient series of ledges to establish a bivouac. Hamish remained on a smaller ledge 50 feet higher than the others. He didn’t want to give up height that he would have to regain the following morning. He lowered a rope for his supper—a pair of sausages. The climbers had nothing to drink; the rock up here was too steep to hold snow or ice, so there was nothing to melt for water.
The party had climbed only a few hundred feet today, their second day on the route. They were weary and dehydrated. Hamish seemed worse now; it seemed unlikely that he would have the strength to get past the overhang Whillans had climbed that afternoon.
Chris shared Don’s shelter—a large plastic bag, which the two men draped over their heads. Don chain-smoked much of the night. Chris was not a smoker, and his throat was raw from thirst and from the dry mountain air. He worried out loud that he might suffocate under the plastic. Whillans replied that suffocation wasn’t such a bad way to die—better than bloody freezing—and continued to smoke.
The climbers’ ropes and boots froze during the night. The five men on the lower ledges awoke and untangled the mess and made breakfast: a lump of oatmeal. Don proposed that the Austrians resume the lead. Don himself would follow with Hamish, but he knew that it would be impossible to haul the injured man up the overhang. Hamish himself would have to do much of the work, and it would be better for him to try it now, before he grew even weaker.
The Austrians climbed the pitch, and Don went up after them. He put Hamish on belay, and the Scotsman started up the roof, clipping a sling to a peg and hanging from it; reaching up for the next peg to clip his second sling; moving up onto the high sling; reaching behind to retrieve the first sling and repeat the process.
Chris followed just behind. He broke tiny icicles off the rock and sucked on them as he hung from the pegs low on the pitch; he could only watch. Hamish every few minutes sagged on the rope, breathing in great rasps and recovering to glance down at his boots and find that he was swimming in 2,000 feet of empty air. He felt himself to be trapped in some odd and uncomfortable dream; someone had granted him powers sufficient to come to this alien place but not to survive here, and not to leave.
Hamish somehow got past the overhang, which led to another. This one was less difficult, but it was in the sun. The heat made the climbers miserable. The Austrians carried on higher, followed by Don and Hamish. The four of them disappeared up the seemingly endless Pillar. Chris and Paul fell behind as Paul worked to collect the party’s pitons for use again higher on the climb. Chris in his growing weariness felt the solitude and a sense of abandonment.
Chris led a ramp and then a short wall to the beginning of a slab—sweeping, low-angle rock featuring tiny holds and halfway across a single piton. The slab called for delicate climbing. He moved very slowly, aware again of his fatigue. He stopped to rest on a good foothold and allowed himself to try to remember the feeling of standing on the earth, on a field or a road or a floor. It was a mistake. Thoughts arose, among them the thought that he would never leave this place. He was again aware of the exposure; it gave him to understand that he was stuck in a universe that operated by implacable laws, that circumstances and outcomes did not reflect his wishes, that he was alone and mortal. The climbing on the slab wasn’t near his limit; even so, Chris was frightened almost to tears. He reached the peg at the center of the slab and gripped it fiercely and called out to the climbers who stood on a ledge just above him. Someone dropped him a top rope, and he finished the pitch in safety.
Whillans had found some dirty ice in a crack and he was melting it on his stove. He added tea leaves to make a gravelly drink—the climbers’ first fluid in more than thirty-six hours—and they swallowed it and set off again. The paltry drink intensified their thirst and made them suddenly eager to be done with all of this. The Austrians made their way up to the shoulder of the Pillar, where the angle relented, and now the three roped pairs moved quickly until in the gathering dusk they reached the top.
They stood stunned, self-conscious at finding themselves inside of this view, specks in this beauty—huge shapes and spaces in every direction. They peered up at the dome of sky as if for relief from the vast clutter of the range and found themselves peering into the seats of some empty arena. They were at once relieved and cast down to find that no audience awaited them, that they stood alone on this high and desolate platform.
They had done the climb but there was still the descent to make—it would have to wait until morning—and the weather had changed. The wind blew hard and cold, and clouds filled the sky from the south. Snow flurries skittered down like handfuls of rice flung across their bleak pinnacle.
They had escaped from the route just in time—they could not have finished it in this storm—but they were not out of trouble. The six men had been climbing for three days on short rations. Their food was almost finished, and they were cold and wet. Hamish in particular seemed likely to collapse at any time. Chris was tired and hungry, and he was frightened at the prospect of a long descent. He’d nearly died getting down the Pointe de Lépiney with Hamish, and this descent posed far greater difficulties.
The climbers shared their last food, a single packet of soup that yielded each man a few swallows. They clipped into anchors and climbed into their bivouac sacks in the dark. They listened between snatches of sleep to the wind and the ominous patter of snowfall on plastic. The snow found its way into their sacks, where their body heat melted it; the water refroze into ragged ice sheaths as the night grew colder.
It was still snowing at dawn. The ropes were frozen. The climbers untangled them and set up the first rappel. Walter Phillips, the more experienced of the two young Austrians, had been in this place the previous year, when he’d climbed the Dru by its West Face. He offered to lead the descent.
Four rappels later, Walter and the teenaged Richard Blach stood on a tiny ledge a rope’s length below the others. The Austrians in their haste to escape the storm had descended the wrong gully without realizing their mistake; if the climbers carrie
d on much further, they might not have the strength to climb back out and find the right way down.
Don Whillans saved them. He was known already for his mountain sense—his uncanny ability to find a path through difficulties or to judge when to turn back. He decided that the party had veered off route, and he shouted his opinion down through the storm to the Austrians on their ledge.
Walter and Richard accepted Whillans’s word on the matter—his tone was convincing, not to say intimidating. The Austrians struggled back up through drifts of new snow to the others, drawing deeply on their fading strength. Don and Chris by this time had set off down a line that Don liked better. Paul Ross followed them. Hamish had rallied; he waited for the Austrians. They arrived and the three men started down after the others. Walter slipped on the snow and barely managed to stop his slide, using his axe as a brake in the snow. Hamish noted mechanically that Richard Blach was near the limit of his endurance. The teenager staggered and lurched through the snow, his eyes at once empty and stricken.
The snow stopped and the wind fell. The climbers could see now. They were back on the proper descent route. Walter, shaken by his slip, seemed nervous as he helped set up a rappel anchor at the top of a steep section. He threw a sling over a sharp spike of rock and threaded his doubled rope through the sling. Hamish watched and suddenly knew what was going to happen. He was too slow to stop it. Walter leaned back on the rope, the rock sliced through the anchoring sling, and Walter fell.
His body careened through the gray air. He smacked into a snow bank 20 feet below and came to a halt at the brink of a cliff that overhung the storm-shrouded void. He was unhurt, but a sloppy fatalism that had briefly settled over the climbers left them as they continued their descent. They were no longer philosophical about their chances; they understood as their ordeal drew to a close that they had a say in their survival—they were more likely to live if they were careful.
