I always felt the Romantic view of mountains was only for the long retired or those who could only imagine what it would be like, for poets not climbers.
For me it was just a battle, and that’s the only way you could write it up.
On the third day we woke without the dull hum of the wind. Digging away the snow that blocked the door, we stuck our heads out into a blue sky, but on scrambling out we discovered why it was clear – a cold so deep it almost sent us back inside. It was bitter, but bitter was good. Bitter meant stable weather, a big block of cold holding back the warm wet winds from the Pacific and Atlantic.
Fitz Roy stood before us, filling up most of the sky, unimaginably huge. Four times higher than Canary Wharf in London, a squat tower of granite fringed with storm-whipped eyebrows of snow. The mountain was so incredible it cried out to be climbed. I wanted to touch it. It was easy to see why so many climbers had wished their lives away waiting for the weather to clear, simply to have the chance to reach its summit.
When I looked at Fitz Roy, all doubts about what climbing meant to me vanished. It stood as an answer in stone.
On either side rose other peaks equally amazing and only diminished because of their place alongside Fitz Roy. Poincenot was the large fang to its left, which I’d climbed in the winter of 1999. Other peaks included Guillaumet and Saint-Exupéry, named after the pioneering French pilots of the early 1930s, as was Mermoz, its huge East Face sweeping down from a toothy ridge, the chain forming a climber’s fantasy of what an alpine ridge should be.
We could easily make out our line on Fitz Roy, the Devil’s Dihedral, the Flushing Death Couloir, huge snow mushrooms clinging in its darkest corners. It looked even more fearsome than I’d imagined, a climb you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
‘I need to take a picture,’ said Ian, crawling back into the snow hole, and backing out with his two cameras.
‘Good job you brought spares or you’d have missed this,’ I said as Ian lifted up his much beloved Voigtländer.
The shutter clicked, but the sound was far from normal.
‘That’s odd,’ said Ian. He discovered the camera wouldn’t wind on. It seemed the shutter had broken, perhaps from bringing it from the warm snow hole into the freezing air outside.
‘Arse!’ shouted Ian, his curses drifting out towards Fitz Roy.
‘At least you’ve got the Contax camera,’ I said.
We woke at five, had a brew and some food, packed up and left for the mountain, following tracks we’d prepared the day before, not wanting anything to go wrong.
It was super cold, and every part of our bodies was covered. Only our eyes were visible, my lashes sticking together when I blinked. We reached the huge bergschrund, dawn breaking behind us, the first rays of light illuminating the face above.
It was so big. Bigger than I remembered.
We were so small.
And we knew it.
We sorted out the ropes, both sixty metres long, one ten millimetres thick, the other eight, a choice born from bitter experience. In Patagonia there are no easy ways down. For every metre climbed, you add another metre that must be abseiled. In a storm ropes can become unmanageable, impossible to pull when frozen stiff, or whipped away from you in the wind, their ends becoming jammed behind some distant flake of rock. In Patagonia your two ropes are your only escape. A thick rope will fall straighter in the wind than a thin one, but a thin rope can be pulled through a far-off anchor more easily than a fat one. Having ropes of different diameters gave us one more small advantage. On my first visit to Patagonia in 1999 we’d abseiled a total of three thousand metres, so I guess I had a PhD in retreat.
Tying on, we set off.
Ian led with a small sack while I climbed behind with all our bivy gear in a much bigger sack, shouting instructions as I climbed behind. I seemed to be possessed by a manic urge for speed, no doubt because I knew the longer we lingered at the bottom of the route the greater the risk of being squashed. We moved together, and every time Ian slowed, or tried to place gear, I’d shout up ‘Keep moving!’ or ‘Don’t bother with gear, you’re not going to fall.’ It was like our time on Les Droites again, Ian trying his best, while I bullied from behind wanting more than that.
Moving up an ice field on our front points, the ground grew more complex and so we began pitching it, me belaying while Ian climbed up a steep and difficult-looking buttress that ended at a snow ledge. He found a belay and I jumared after him, finding my own speed wanting under the weight of the sack.
I felt so small.
‘Your turn now,’ said Ian, taking the sack from me, a vast never-ending corner stretching up and up above our heads.
While Ian put on his belay jacket and made himself comfortable, I took the small sack and then racked up. This did not take long since most of our rack was now living with our taxi driver in Buenos Aires.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Climbing.’ I made a few free moves then stuffed in a cam and pulled up on it. The crack looked good but was gritty and dirty, no doubt from having a lot of junk falling down it from the summit. I climbed on, leapfrogging two cams up and up, one stuffed in and stepped on, the other removed, placed above me, and the action repeated again and again. All the while I knew if one blew while moving the other, I’d fall back to the belay, then on again for the same distance.
The crack widened a little and I stopped and looked down, taking a photo. Ian looked up at me, dressed in his blue belay jacket, one I’d designed, the face below sweeping away beneath us, the face I was willing to give anything to climb, the route I’d trained hard for. We’d climbed a long way in a short time, and could get up a few more pitches before dark.
I looked up.
I looked down again.
It was so cold when you stopped. It dug into you, fingers and face first, crawling down your back, biting, stinging, hurting, bitter like poison.
I was cold because I’d stopped.
I looked up and imagined what would happen if the wind came. It would be as cold as climbing on the moon.
I had never been scared of dying, never scared of suffering to some end. It was always worth it, to get to the top. But now I felt fear. This was a turning point in my life. How much did I want this? In that moment my headlong charge to be the best alpinist in the world stopped dead.
‘I think we should go down,’ I said, the words coming to my lips still half formed in my mind, as if some part of me knew my thought process too unreliable to make such a call, as if someone else was speaking on my behalf. ‘I don’t think we have enough gear to get up this, and I don’t think we have enough to get down if we can’t.’
Ian looked up at me and smiled.
‘Okay.’ Just like that I let go.
And so the long descent began.
We were back in the snow hole by midnight, neither of us saying a word about what we’d just done, or not done, crawling in and making ourselves at home again, reading another chapter as snow melted for a midnight brew before bed.
‘What are we going to do instead?’ asked Ian.
FIVE
Mermoz
I moved up slowly, aware I could fall at any moment, half hooking my axes on flakes of rock, half balancing on blobs of snow. If anything popped, so would I.
Then I heard Ian swearing below. Shouting.
‘What?’ I shouted back.
It sounded like he was talking to someone.
‘WHAT’S THE PROBLEM!’ I shouted down but got no reply.
With night only a couple of hours away, I still hadn’t finished the first pitch, and already there was a drama.
‘I can’t hear you, Ian,’ I said, and just kept going, the ropes feeding out easily behind me.
Having given up on Fitz Roy, the next most obvious objective was Mermoz, which had never had a winter ascent, and few in summer, with no easy routes to its summit. A vertical sweep of granite six hundred metres high, the most obvious winter objective was Andy Parkin’s route, an unrepeated mixed c
limb up a prominent groove. Parkin had soloed it in 1993, a tour de force that very few had tried to repeat and without success, me included. I’d made my attempt in the winter of 2000 with Rich Cross and found the first quarter, which we’d done before a storm arrived, pretty challenging. It had reinforced everything I believed about Parkin, a climbing demi-God. Andy was also the man who’d lent us his portaledge after we dropped ours off the Dru, so it seemed fitting.
Reaching the end of the rope, I found an ancient bolt and clipped the piece of old tat tied through it, a remnant of some past siege. Then I brought Ian up. He looked flustered as he climbed, carrying all our bivy gear in one big pack.
‘Who were you talking to down there, Ian?’ I asked as he reached me.
He stopped and pressed his head against the ice. ‘I took the battery out of my Contax camera to warm it up and ended up dropping it down the bergschrund.’
‘Ah.’ Now he had no working cameras left.
‘You can use my compact,’ I offered. ‘I’ll use my SLR.’ It seemed a generous offer, but wasn’t really, as I wanted some nice shots of me climbing just as much as Ian needed shots to sell. The only problem was my cheap Olympus wasn’t quite up to Ian’s standards. Still, with it being the only one on offer, he took it. I guessed Ian had some camera curse, maybe having not bought some film from a gypsy or something, and funnily enough when we got back down this loaned camera never worked again.
It was dark already, and a few pitches higher I found a narrow snow ledge, the size of a small two-seater settee. ‘We can chop this down and sit here tonight,’ I said as Ian joined me.
‘Oh God, I’ve had enough of horrible bivys this year. I’m sure we can find something better,’ he said, looking around. This was fair enough. Only a month before he’d endured a sequence of gnarly nights on Denali in Alaska, including the bivyist’s worst nightmare: the standing bivy.
He and Kenton Cool had opted for a one-man bivy tent to save weight, a plan that was light, but not as light as bringing nothing, which may have been a better idea when it came to squeezing themselves inside a tent built for one. To make matters worse the tent was a one-off, designed for a single Sherpa to camp out on the summit of Everest, and so was Sherpa-sized, unlike Kenton or Ian, who is more yak-sized.
This was not the end of their tribulations as the tent was only a mock-up of the one used on Everest, nothing more than a shop display, and so had cosmetic poles, which broke, and cheap non-breathable nylon fabric instead of Gore-tex, which meant their precious down sleeping bags got wet with condensation. Every night was a long, drawn-out icy torture. Then came the worst bivy, a spot too small to sit, and they had to stand inside the tent pitched on a vertical wall.
‘Let’s try down there,’ Ian said, pointing in the fading light at a snow mushroom the size of a table below us, a hard-packed blob of snow stuck to the wall by who knew what. Ian climbed down and stood on it and when it didn’t fall off the wall I climbed down and joined him. We stood there gingerly for a while, and when the snow mushroom still didn’t fall off we hacked it down to make a bed, aware that at any moment it could disappear from underneath us.
I pulled out the bivouac tent, really no more than a Wendy house, a bag with two cross poles just big enough for two, and pitched it on the spot we’d cleared, with one end hanging over the edge.
‘That’s your end, Ian,’ I teased, nodding at the fabric flapping in the light wind. We climbed inside, pulled out our sleeping bags, took off our boots and lay down, heads together at one end, our feet dangling over the other. It was only now – with us squashed together – that I noticed the difference in size of our sleeping bags. Ian had pulled his from a bulging stuff sack, grunting with the effort and slowly filling the tent, while mine came out with the ease of a condom sliding its wrapper, and with about the same insulation value. To make matters worse the days spent in our snow hole had not treated my bag well. Lacking a waterproof outer like Ian’s, it had got damp, and I could already feel lumps of ice clogged among the feathers. Having picked the lightest option I could to save on effort, I had no one to blame but myself.
‘That was a cold one,’ said Ian from deep within the warm confines of his bag, as the alarm clock beeped away somewhere near his head.
I could hardly answer, having spent most of the night awake and shivering violently. Only the warmth stolen by pressing myself against Ian had kept me alive.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, not sure if I meant up or down, but hoping that the weather was crapping out so it would be the latter.
‘I think this is colder than Alaska,’ said Ian, with the air of a man who wasn’t particularly cold.
I’d never been to Alaska but it sounded warm.
‘Looks like another clear day,’ Ian said, peeping out from the open door of the tent.
The snow mushroom remained stuck fast as we packed everything away, the stove hanging from a nut in the wall melting water for tea as I stuffed the tent away. Its fabric shed frost like old skin. I was cold to the bone and wanted to get moving, but needed a brew first. I thought about dancing to warm up but decided against it, too afraid the blob would give way. So I just stood there, like a moody popsicle.
‘You’re quiet this morning,’ said Ian.
Tea drunk and a muesli bar scoffed, I climbed up to our high point, brought Ian up, and let him pass to push the route on. Stiff with cold I was still glad it was his lead as he took the gear and stepped over me. Above him was a steep slab, just off vertical, with a slim vein of ice trickling down, the kind of trickle you get from leaky drainpipes in winter, a few inches thick and only a foot wide. The rock down which it ran was blank apart from a slight overlap way above, the wall kicking out a little beyond, making the ice higher hard to see.
It was the perfect pitch for Ian – bold, gearless death.
He tapped in the pick of one ice tool like a man hammering a very fragile copper nail into concrete, then the other, a little higher than the first, so as not to create a fracture line. Why or how ice stuck to nothing was a mystery, a mystery we had no wish to dwell on, just happy that it did. Ian was using ‘mono-point’ crampons, with just one tooth sticking out no more than an inch from each boot. He gently swung his boots at the ice.
Tap.
Tap.
He straightened up and took a breath, both of us expecting the ice to disintegrate.
‘Okay,’ he said in a soothing voice, perhaps addressing himself to the ice more than me, ‘I’m off.’ It wasn’t a great choice of words, but off he went tiptoeing his way up the ice.
I fed out the rope, my head drawn in tortoise-like between my shoulders, my body racked with cold. My only comfort was the bomber belay, which gave me a rosy glow of security each time I looked at it.
Ian moved up higher.
‘Any sign of gear?’ I said, obviously a stupid question, although one meant as confirmation that I was taking an interest. If there were gear he’d have placed it. He didn’t reply.
Moving higher, Ian stopped below the overlap, a sort of mini-roof, only a foot wide, but a place you’d hope nature would have left a crack.
‘Thin up here,’ said Ian softly, his expression as light as he could make it. He was now twenty metres above me, a body-breaking distance to fall.
‘Can you see anything above?’ I asked, again a stupid question, as if he’d forgotten to check out the ground above his head.
‘Thin.’
I considered telling him that if it looked too dodgy he should climb back down, but I knew this pitch could be the key to the route, and that down might not be possible anyway. Plus, I had a great belay, so I was safe.
‘Climbing,’ said Ian gently, as if he was reminding himself that all this was for fun, rather than admitting he was trying not to die.
I held my breath as he placed his tools over the overlap and moved up, so carefully now, the ice so thin I could no longer see just what he was climbing. The rope fed out and out and out, its end creeping nearer and nearer, and with
it my turn to follow.
I felt butterflies in my stomach.
‘Peg,’ he shouted down, and I craned back to see him balanced just one foot above the overlap, fiddling for a quickdraw then reaching out and clipping it into what looked like a thin knifeblade, probably left by Andy on his descent.
I heard the click of the karabiner.
The thick rope was pulled up a little.
Another click and the rope was clipped in.
‘Any good?’ I shouted cheerily, not feeling it.
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘Climbing.’
The rope fed out again.
Out and out and out.
‘Can you see a belay?’ I shouted, no longer caring how stupid my questions were.
The rope fed out and out and out.
‘Can you see a belay?’ I shouted again. ‘You’re nearly out of rope.’
In fact Ian still had plenty of rope. It was me who was running out.
‘Five metres left!’ I called.
No reply.
‘IAN, FIVE METRES LEFT!’
‘Start climbing,’ came the distant reply.
I let go of the rope, which made no difference since I was the belay now, and started to take out the gear, one piece at a time, hoping that giving him a few extra feet might just get him to a solid belay.
The rope fed out.
The rope went tight.
The rope went tighter. There would be no reprieve.
I pulled on my sack, cinched up my axe leashes and began to climb, not tapping like Ian, just hooking my axes into the holes that he had made, my heart well and truly where you’d expect it to be, my mind nowhere to be found.
Now we were moving together, only a single poor peg between us. I hung there, waiting for Ian to make his next move and release some rope, and then I’d hook my axes a little higher. The chances of either of us falling seemed very high indeed.
Cold Wars Page 10
