We were soloing.
I reached the overlap and peered round it. I could see Ian had stopped moving, his heels wobbling. One hand gripped the shaft of his ice axe; the other was fighting with a sling caught on his shoulder. He was trying to free it, a sign there must be some gear.
‘Praise the lord,’ I muttered to myself.
Only the sling was hung up on his rucksack, and Ian couldn’t release it. He let go, and grabbed his axes again, steadying himself. It looked like he was barely keeping it together.
Deep breaths.
Ian dropped his heels and his feet stopped shaking. Then he let go again with one hand and tried another sling, tugging at it and grabbing his axe, tugging at it and once again grabbing his axe. From below I saw he must have put the sling over his shoulder before his rucksack, and so it was hopelessly stuck. He held onto his axe again.
‘FUCK! he shouted.
A few sharp breaths.
He shook out his hand and tried again, tugging at the first sling again, each pull leaving him unbalanced but freeing a little more of the nylon webbing from whatever was trapping it. Finally it came free but for a moment I thought Ian had dropped it and was off, but he held on, regained his balance and with a cowboy flick cast the sling to one side over some unseen spike. The rope went tight, a karabiner clipped shut and Ian’s body slackened.
‘Safe.’
Never had the word been more apt.
We were going to live. Plus, I’d warmed up nicely.
Swapping leads for the rest of the day, the route getting steeper and steeper, we followed a corner system that split the vertical to overhanging wall, which proved just as exposed as the Lafaille, only this time we had only what we carried with us and no portaledge to hide in, totally committed.
Ian seemed to keep getting the hard leads, but he seemed to like it so I didn’t complain. After all, he was a full-timer. My biggest worry was the lack of anywhere to sleep, just patches of snow somehow stuck into corners and bands of rotten ice. Shuddering at the prospect of both a night in my frozen bag, and having to stand up or hang in my harness, I pulled out all the stops to reach somewhere we could bivy, but the further we went the more desperate it became. The only relief was finding the peg Rich Cross and I had abseiled off from our highpoint in 2000. It seemed a lot of effort to retrieve a four-quid peg.
The sun began to set as we reached a cul de sac, the corner we’d been following tapering down to nothing, ending at a jutting roof. Two cracks led up, one thin the other wide.
With the temperature dropping fast, it seemed a good moment to put on all our spare clothes and thick belay jackets. Unfortunately, we already had them all on.
There was nowhere to sleep, just a steep patch of snow where the belay was, about ten metres below the roof, a foot or so beneath it seventy-degree ice pitched above a vertical drop.
‘This is a bit desperate,’ I said, trying to work out how we could rig somewhere to sleep. The most optimistic assessment was a sitting bivy, one above the other. There would be no shared warmth and no tent. I wasn’t sure I’d survive that.
‘There might be somewhere better on the next pitch,’ said Ian, reading from the desperate alpinist’s charter, both of us knowing that there never was.
‘Okay, I’ll carry on,’ I said, pulling on my headtorch. Even if there was nothing, and even though I was knackered, the longer I climbed, the less amount of time I would suffer trying to sleep.
The crack was just wide enough to squeeze into, and I udged a bit, not trying too hard, just inching up, knowing the harder I fought the more chance there was of slipping out. The crack was very insecure, and I quickly knew that Andy, no matter how good, would not have gone this way.
I placed our largest cam and stopped.
‘Ian,’ I shouted, the face below me now pitch black apart from a pinprick of light from his headtorch, ‘I’m going to clip the ten millimetre rope into this gear, then swing over to the other crack and try that instead.’ Then I’d switch to the thinner, eight-millimetre rope to avoid any drag.
Ian lowered me and with a few strides back and forth, my headtorch flashing across the wall, I grabbed the thin crack. ‘Hold me there, Ian,’ I shouted, plugging in a cam.
Straightaway it was obvious Andy had come this way, as the crack was solid and just ate gear. Very soon I was up close to the roof itself.
I was glad it was dark, well aware of the exposure below me as I moved up using aid, placing a nut or cam, clipping in an aider and cranking up a little higher. Passing the roof on its left side, I saw that a few metres higher the crack came to a dead end, tapering down to nothing.
I knew there was a way.
Placing a solid nut in the last good spot, I clipped in the thin rope and stepped up in a sling, thinking I might have to start climbing free.
Nothing.
I hammered in a stubby knifeblade, just its tip going in no further than an inch. Clipping in another sling I stepped up again, knowing it was crap, but happy to try with a good nut just below it.
‘Watch me, Ian,’ I shouted and then moved up, pawing the rock, looking for something, for a sign of Andy, maybe a hook placement or a hidden…
Pinnnggg!
The peg ripped.
My heart lurched as I began to fall, but experience held my fear in check, knowing that in a moment I’d stop, the solid nut holding my fall.
Only I didn’t stop, the rock carried on shooting past, splashed white by my headtorch, a jangling of gear, my body brushing the rock until it slipped away, out into space, the skinny rope slack.
Down I went.
‘I’m not stopping.’ The thought floated through my head. ‘I’m going the whole way.’
But then it came, slow at first, and then a sudden, stretching stop, my body swinging back in, hitting the snow a few feet above Ian’s head.
Silence.
I was alive.
‘Fuck me,’ I shouted, my feet almost level with the belay. ‘What happened? The gear was right next to me.’
Ian didn’t say anything.
Angry, I grabbed the eight-millimetre rope and began pulling myself back up to my highpoint. When I was almost there I shouted down: ‘Take me tight on the eight.’
‘Eight?’ came the reply ‘I thought you were climbing on the ten?’ That would explain it. Ian had not been holding both ropes.
‘Lower us down,’ I said, suddenly not keen to push on into the dark. ‘I think we’ve got to finish this in the daylight.’
Down I went, and nothing was said about the ropes. It was an easy mistake to make. Instead we began trying to make the best of a bad deal, to make a home for the night.
With much chopping we cut out two poor bunks into the ice that spanned the chimney, one above the other, both too narrow to lie on properly, or wide enough to relax. My bed seemed to have half a dozen rocks sticking out of it, so while I chopped away Ian cooked.
I tended to do most of the cooking, being a bit OCD about it, having had some bad experiences of the only food you have getting burned. We’d brought two days’ worth, dinner being rice, cheese, olive oil and chilli powder; an odd meal for some, but pretty good on cold climbs.
My bed made, I sat down as Ian passed up the pan.
‘Here you go mate, you deserve the first mouthful.’
I was starving, having eaten nothing but a banana energy gel all day, or monkey cum as we affectionately dubbed it. I swallowed a mouthful, the cheese and rice already cooling on the spoon.
Then it hit me, a fire that filled my mouth and burned my throat.
The food, our only food, seemed to be contaminated by rat poison or napalm or something.
‘My God Ian, what have you done to this?’ I said, panting like a dog.
‘Nothing,’ he said, looking confused.
‘Its bloody burning my teeth,’ I replied, grabbing a handful of snow and stuffing it into my mouth.
‘I just put all the rest of the stuff we had left into the pan,’ he said,
looking up sheepishly.
‘How much chilli powder did you put in from the film canister?’ I asked.
‘Erm …all of it?’
It was our total supply, a month’s worth in one hit. It was our only food though, so we forced it down.
On the upside, it did warm us up a bit.
Tea over, I pulled out my sleeping bag, which now seemed to be simply a frozen lump, retaining its stuff bag shape even when slid out, the down the consistency of stale candy floss. If that wasn’t bad enough, the inside was frozen together, requiring me to peel it apart to get in. With all my clothes on already, all I could do was keep my boots and mitts on as I squirmed in, careful not to tumble off the ledge.
‘You okay, Ian?’ I asked as Ian moved around beneath me.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘In one word, good,’ I said. ‘In two words, not good.’
The best thing about climbing hard late into the night is that you do get tired. Within a few minutes I was sound asleep.
First there were the sounds. I could hear a steam train puffing along, loud and getting louder. I could hear voices, like a million possessed people speaking in tongues, an ominous jibber jabber.
I could hear an Indian sitar playing.
Each sound overlaid the next until all I could hear was a formless din that ran through my brain.
Someone once told me that you can’t die of hypothermia in your sleep, that your body will wake you first as some physiological alarm is triggered. I was aware that I was cold – beyond cold. I was a lump of meat left for too long in a freezer, a body trapped beneath the ice, sinking down into the dark.
I was freezing to death.
I fought, fought to come round, to move, to stay alive.
The sound of the sitar drifted away.
The voices stopped.
All that remained was the train chugging on, pistons driving air in and out. The sound came from me, from my lungs. I was hyperventilating, the cowl of my bivy bag over my face like a shroud.
With all my will I pushed it away, feeling the cold, as sharp as the Arctic ocean, rush in, waking me, making me aware not how cold I was, but of how little warmth remained. I lay there stunned, visualising the heat drifting off me to be swallowed by the black night. In my mind, solid and real, I could see a gauge measuring my life. It read sixteen percent – its dial in the red.
I felt each and every particle of energy leaving my body.
Numbed beyond numb I fumbled for my headtorch; still attached to my helmet, and switched it on.
There was no light.
For a moment I thought I’d gone blind, only to realise I’d forgotten I’d put my balaclava on backwards to stop my face freezing. I unclipped my helmet and twisted it round.
I was beyond shivering, but knew I had to escape. But there was no escape; I was stuck. The only option was to go into Alcatraz position, so called because this is how prisoners, denied enough blankets, slept on that cold island. I turned over and made myself into a ball, lifting my knees to my chest, hugging my legs, trying to expose as little of my body as possible. From below I heard a movement, the shift of another body moving with its sleeping bag. I wondered if Ian was suffering like me?
‘Ian, are you alright?’ I whispered, my words warm against my lips. I thought: perhaps if we shared how we felt then things would seem much better, or at least less lonely. I heard a zip slipping and a groan.
‘Ian, are you okay?’ I said again.
‘I’m so hot!’ he muttered. I felt his warmth drift past as it escaped from his bag.
‘What time is it?’ I asked, hoping we could get moving soon.
‘One-thirty,’ said Ian.
It was late the following day, as we moved up a large tilted sheet of rock-hard ice, that we knew we were at last close to the top, thinking it could be only a pitch or two higher.
As I took over the lead I was certain that there would be no more bivys for me. We had to finish it now, or else retreat. I wouldn’t make it through another night.
What’s more, as the sun began to set somewhere out of sight we could see red clouds gathering up for a storm. Our time left could be measured in a few hours. We were a long way up, a long way out, a long way from home. Every metre we climbed would have to be abseiled, which in a storm would be hell. All we had to do was hold our nerve a little longer, inch our necks a little further onto the block.
Just one more pitch.
It grew dark and cold. The wind, still only a whisper, was turning me to stone as I stood paying out the rope, Ian grunting above out of sight of my headtorch.
‘Only one more pitch,’ I told myself.
This time, like the last, we knew there could only be one more pitch left to do, and then we could go down.
Ian spoke, but I knew he was talking to himself. He was at the end of his tether.
‘Ten more minutes.’ I thought, ‘that’s all I’ve got left.’
I jigged on the spot, trying to spark up some heat, but it was no use. I stood feeling utterly naked, the cold cutting through eight layers.
I froze.
The rope stopped moving up but jerked around instead, a snake in its death throes, no longer slithering through the night.
I think I was sleeping.
‘Ian must be at the top,’ I said out loud, the words coming out like glue, my lips slow and awkward.
I looked down and saw I was no longer holding the rope, my hands just hanging by my side.
I knew whoever was above, tied to me by this rope, wouldn’t fall. Not now.
Who was above?
What was above?
Where was above?
I heard a noise, a tiny noise, too quiet to write.
‘He’s there,’ I said, grabbing the rope.
I followed, up past marks of Ian: nosebleed blood, fractured ice, the odd piece of gear. And there he was, smiling, sat astride that midnight ridge, greeting me with a tired pat on the back – not too hard, it was a place easy to fall from. All those metres of hard climbing, and two tough nights, but we’d done it.
‘Right,’ I said, standing up, my axes dangling from my wrists, the wind blowing harder through the gap. ‘Lets get the fuck out of here.’
All the way down I focused on not making any mistakes, Doug Scott’s voice in my head: ‘Be careful on the descent youth.’ Every rap was perfect, and I gave no thought to the cost of leaving valuable gear behind, only the price of not leaving enough. Being the most experienced in going down, and the most paranoid, I went first each time, hitting the bottom slope shattered in all senses.
It was 4am.
Almost at the rope ends I made one last leap across the bergschrund, then unclipped my belay plate from the rope.
‘DOWN!’
At last I could relax.
Safe.
I stepped back, only to feel myself falling, down into a second hidden bergschrund. Instinctively I dove downhill, falling past the hole, tumbling head over heels to the glacier. Ian just thought I was being selfish, seeing my headtorch slide away and leaving him to sort the ropes. I waited where I’d come to a stop. It seemed so warm down here, the comfort of the snow hole only half an hour away. Tomorrow we could be back in El Chaltén eating steak and chips, drinking cold cans of coke.
Ian stumbled down to join me, dragging the ropes behind him through the snow, smiling a big daft grin of victory, not victory over the mountains, but the victory of the living. He started to sort out the gear, then sat down, only to stand up again, neither of us knowing what to do now we were down, intoxicated, exhausted, no longer needing to watch over each other, or ourselves.
‘Well done,’ I said, giving him a pat on the back.
‘Well done yourself.’
For once my mind was free of climbing thoughts.
Empty.
Empty of everything.
I wondered if it was worth climbing such things, to go through it all, just to reach such a place as this, a mind for once empty
of absolutely anything, a moment belonging only to me.
SIX
Park
The slide was high and very long, built into the side of the park’s wooded slope and obviously constructed long before society’s obsession with health and safety. A flight of concrete steps led up to its dizzying summit, from where you could look down at the stainless steel chute kept mirror-smooth by generations of children.
The rest of the park was down-at-heel: broken swings with twisted chains; roundabouts that no longer went round; blank spots with empty foundations, and just the scuff marks of feet, like fossils, left to show what might once have been there. It reminded me of the parks of my youth, dangerous and exciting, worn out through a strange combination of love and neglect. Before computer games and kids’ television channels, the only place to be when not at school was in the park, an arena for crazy kids and their stunts, gladiators among the welded tubing and battered wooden boards.
I brought Ella and Ewen here most weekends, walking up the valley of parks that snaked out from Sheffield’s centre, a long trail through woods and fields, crossing roads, rising towards the first hills of the Peak District, each step a step away from the city, the valley closing in on us as we climbed.
The parks not far from the centre were well managed, with statues of kings and queens, rockeries and a nice cafe. Its rides were still in one piece, a place for middle-class parents to fuss over their kids. Up here, where the valley began to pinch, things always seemed a little darker and danker, the Wild West end. It was further to walk and there was more to worry about.
Whenever I was away climbing, I often wished I were back in that park with Ella and Ewen.
My uncle Doug used to take us to a big wood outside of Hull and tell us to be quiet as there were cannibals living there, which scared me to death, and I carried on the tradition, telling Ella and Ewen about the wolves that roamed among the trees. You knew – like I did when my uncle told me stories – it was make believe. Yet like magic, UFOs and God, although it scared you, you wanted it to be true.
Cold Wars Page 11
