Cold Wars

by Andy Kirkpatrick

  Christian asked us what we fancied climbing while in the US, and I said we’d been eyeing up the Grand Traverse of the Teton, which, amazingly, had never had a winter ascent, even though it was one of the most famous routes in the United States. Living in the shadow of the Grand, Christian said he’d look into conditions for us, which I thought was nice of him.

  The big night came around and it seemed like every climber within a hundred-mile radius turned out, the theatre humming with climbing talk. The one thing I love about Americans is their enthusiasm and lack of pretence. People dressed up, some in what I took to be fancy dress, but may well have just been flamboyance. Everyone seemed to be grateful for a fun night full of climbing. The great and the good were there, many climbers I’d only seen in magazines.

  Being surrounded by climbers always made me feel uncomfortable. It was as if I was scared they would find me out, see I was a fraud, say something like, ‘Do us a one-arm pull-up Andy.’ I knew that as a well-known climber I would always be a disappointment. One problem was that the more I tried to convince everyone of my inadequacy, the more people believed I was simply bluffing.

  The people in the theatre seemed so perfect – perfect bodies, perfect tans, perfect teeth – and ready to crank their way up anything anywhere, it was hard not to feel out of place. I was overweight, shortsighted, wonky-toothed. If they’d lined us all up that night, and someone had been asked to pick out the two people who weren’t climbers, Ian and I would have got picked.

  I assume the Yanks like us Brits for our character. And for making them look good.

  Michael took the stage, but the theatre had been constructed with a bar at the back, and because of his quiet style of speaking he didn’t engage immediately with the audience. The initial hush rapidly turned into a trickle of background noise of climbing chatter, then a torrent, until ten minutes in no one could hear him at all. Instead of speaking up, or just walking off, he carried in the dogged fashion that had made him a climbing legend.

  Unfortunately, most people had soon forgotten he was even on the stage, the theatre just a din of chatter and laugher.

  Soon it was my turn, and I walked up onto the stage feeling nervous at getting the same reception, which would be a shame seeing as I’d come so far.

  ‘Hi everyone,’ I said, at the same volume as Michael, unclipping the mic from its stand. ‘My name’s Andy,’ I went on, sounding as if I was about to take part in a spelling bee, my voice already almost drowned out by the festivities. ‘Before I start I’d just like to say – WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!’

  If someone had dropped a pin we’d all have heard it.

  Off I went at breakneck speed, my topic climbing Mermoz and about how crap British climbers are, mocking Americans along the way, with their new age, hippy ways: slack lining, yoga, being ‘at one’ with everything.

  I think people were a bit stunned at first, no doubt having never heard this kind of tirade. But slowly the laughs built, as people began to work out it was all a joke, and it was okay to laugh, and that I didn’t have special needs or anything. They were all at one with me.

  When my bit was over, Jimmy said he was too intimidated to go on, probably because I’d used up all the expletives he knew, and so he showed some slides over reggae music instead. The wimp.

  The evening finished with lots of drinking and not being a big drinker I drank too much and made a fool of myself. Standing in a group someone asked me what I’d thought about the other speakers and I’d said that Michael Kennedy was a bit rubbish.

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ said the guy, who looked familiar.

  ‘Did you hear him?’ I asked, surprised that someone had thought he was any good.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but then I would. Being Michael Kennedy.’

  Ian went home and I went to a party. People generally don’t bring alcohol to American parties, preferring quiche and a guitar. A tall male model introduced himself – by this point I began wondering if there were any ugly people living in Colorado – and asked if I remembered him. I looked him up and down and tried to place him, knowing he was too old to be my illegitimate son.

  ‘Sorry I have no idea.’

  ‘When you soloed El Cap in 1999 I was soloing the route next to you,’ he said.

  Being only a tiny speck half a kilometre below me I guess he could excuse my poor memory for faces, but it did occur to me that I had probably pissed on the guy several times.

  I stood in the kitchen and looked around at all these people talking and having fun, mostly couples, their arms around each others waists. I had no idea why I was there.

  Slipping out of the party, I made my way back to Rolo’s, the streets almost empty, just the odd student walking home, yellow taxis and squad cars cruising by. I looked in through windows and saw people sat in their living rooms drinking, scenes plucked from the television shows of my youth. I felt a familiar pang of loneliness and isolation, the sensation of being an outsider. I tried not to dwell on it, knowing self-analysis only makes things worse. It was best to put this stuff in a box and file it with the others.

  All I knew was I wanted to be normal, to sit and drink and make life a party, to fit in. But I couldn’t. I could never be still enough to exist in other people’s lives: Mandy’s, my children’s, those of my friends. It was easy to think it was all part of being a self-made man, and that I was always moving – moving up. Now I felt I was falling. Perhaps climbing hard climbs was the only way I could become fixed for a while, in one place, and with a single mind.

  Tomorrow we had to come up with a plan.

  Frank’s truck made its way slowly up into the Rocky Mountain National Park, Ian crunching through the gears, me navigating with a hangover, the engine, weary and beaten, straining in the skinny mountain air.

  Frank’s truck had belonged to the eponymous Frank, a Spanish climber who’d died soloing Fitz Roy in Patagonia a few years ago, leaving the old truck he’d bought behind for all and sundry to use. Rolo had given us the key.

  Although I’d never met Frank, or even seen his picture, I felt I knew about him, and had thought a lot about this dead climber, a climber who seemed to haunt me, his story drifting in and out of my life. I’d heard about him setting off to solo the Californian route on Fitz Roy and never returning, and being a fellow soloist I’d dwelt on this a lot: how easy it would be to fall down a crevasse with no one to rescue you; to tumble down the mountain with no one to see you fall; to just disappear.

  To die quickly wouldn’t be so bad. But to die jammed in an icy slot, death taking hours or longer, knowing no one knew where you were, and there would be no rescue, was unimaginable.

  A soloist’s mind can only be full of positive thoughts, but in their last moments I wondered if every dark thought, saved up from a lifetime of pushing them to one side, rushed in. In the moment of your death you would see everything you believed was just an illusion.

  And what about those who didn’t disappear: parents, friends and lovers – partners on the rope and in life? They had only their imaginations to bridge the gap in their lives. You have to be selfish to climb, perhaps even more so if you choose to take extra risks by soloing.

  The story of Frank haunted me.

  The night before I had been talking to Timmy O’Neill about Patagonia. The subject of Frank cropped up. Timmy had known him. As a leading American alpinist, Timmy had also climbed Fitz Roy by a new route and at the top decided to abseil back down the seventeen hundred metre Supercanaleta. I’d climbed the couloir in 1999 and it’s a fearsome place to be – a shooting gallery of loose rock and ice. As soon as Timmy and his partner set off down they knew they had made a mistake.

  To add to their growing sense of foreboding, a little way down they found Frank.

  Timmy had seen hair blowing from a wide crack and on closer inspection saw it was his old friend, jammed tight, a thousand metres up, trapped forever, or at least until Patagonia thaws out. He had fallen on his way to the summit, or on his way down, down t
he Super Couloir, the mountain catching him as he tumbled.

  Stories like Frank’s are not stories to dwell on.

  But that’s exactly what I did.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Ian, nodding at the map on my lap, the key to our new objective.

  ‘It looks like a long walk,’ I said, tracing a zigzagging line up into the winter high country to the Diamond.

  The previous night at the party, Christian informed us that the word on street was the Grand Traverse lay under deep snow and so was out. The next big objective was a winter ascent of the Diamond, the thousand foot vertical wall that led to the summit of Longs Peak, the highest mountain in the park, its summit sitting almost as high as Mont Blanc. In January it’s seldom climbed, partly because it’s hard to climb in such cold temperatures, but mainly thanks to the seven-mile approach walk, often through deep snow. Nevertheless, being cold, hard and big it ticked all our boxes.

  ‘We’re going to freeze our arses up there,’ said Ian.

  I couldn’t wait.

  It was mid morning by the time we started up the path, the snow lying knee deep. We took turns breaking trail. The first stop was to sign in at a wooden box at the trailhead, scribbling down our route and the date of our expected return. Being slow, we opted for caution, meaning if anything did happen we’d be long dead before a rescue party came looking.

  The path zigzagged up and up through a thick forest named Goblin’s Forest. It was totally silent apart from our breathing and our feet potholing through the snow. Ian and I had spent too long walking into climbs so conversation was minimal, a sign of deep friendship rather than a lack of anything to say as we took turns breaking trail.

  Frank walked by my side.

  I often wondered if Ian ever thought about dying, since he was the person I knew with the greatest chance of dying doing what we did. I considered asking him, there on the trail, but the question seemed so personal. It made me flinch to even think about saying it out loud. I thought about it a lot. Not death itself, but the guilt I felt about dying.

  I had Mandy and Ella and Ewen, whereas from my point of view Ian had no one. If I was him I’d be free of guilt, free to do what I wanted. I often wondered what it felt like to be Ian. To have no one to worry about, to be fearless, free of the hurt you could bring, the lives you could destroy.

  To have a life without consequences.

  Then again, what did it feel like to come home after months away and have no one to greet you?

  We emerged from the trees into the high country, a barren rocky plain swept clean by a wind that seemed much colder than anything in Patagonia. The Diamond came into view, steep, dark, cold, sitting above its frozen lake like a bird, wings wrapped around its frozen waters as though waiting for the cold to pass.

  It was dark by the time we made it to the bivy spot, a flat area just before the lake and still a distance from the wall. I felt rotten, head banging, limbs aching, and assumed I was coming down with some kind of flu, forgetting we had raced up to three and a half thousand metres very quickly and therefore had mild altitude sickness.

  I suppose the hangover also compounded things a little.

  Pitching the tent in the dark we scampered inside and tried to stay warm in our sleeping bags, Ian looking after me as I lay there feeling pathetic. We were using a stove I’d made myself that could be hung from the middle of the tent, which although great for climbing had the nasty habit of melting anything that touched it. Soon the tent filled with smoke as holes appeared in Ian’s brand new five-hundred-quid jacket.

  At least it was warm.

  The following morning I felt no better, wanting only to go down and get warm and eat food that wasn’t as dehydrated as I was. Ian agreed, and decided we could leave all our stuff there, make a quick descent and come back a few days later once I felt better.

  We made it back to Frank’s truck before dark and drove over to Estes Park, a small mountain community not too far from Longs Peak, to visit Kelly Cordes, a young alpinist who was making a name for himself, who we’d met at the party two nights before. Once again, although we turned up unannounced, the code of climbing bums kicked in and Kelly made some space for us on his living room floor.

  Or, more accurately, he made room for us on his girlfriend’s living room floor, Kelly’s place being, quite literally, a one-room chicken coop in someone’s garden measuring five feet by ten. Luckily Kelly’s girlfriend Bronson – as in Charles – was also a bum at heart, and happy to oblige.

  Kelly was not a man to cross. Although he spoke with a slow drawl, as though he were slightly drunk, he was a boxer, wrestler and master of jujitsu.

  Sat drinking small bottles of beer, Kelly told us a funny story about how a French climber had assumed that with a name like Kelly he must be a girl – and a hardcore climbing girl at that – and sent him some saucy emails. This was until Kelly put him straight.

  After dinner Kelly took us over to a tiny homemade climbing wall, which, like Frank’s truck, had been bequeathed – perhaps unofficially – to the climbing community by the previous owner, who died when an ice climb collapsed. Stripped off, Kelly looked like pure muscle; a construct of intense training over years, his physiology moulded into a climbing machine.

  I thought about my own body, something I tended to conceal. I usually blamed being too busy, or the kids, for my lack of training, and although I thought it would be nice to be that ripped, that strong, I knew myself well enough to accept that I just couldn’t be arsed. All I wanted to do was climb.

  Sat watching Ian and Kelly bouldering, all I wanted to do was get up the Diamond.

  Once more, we walked up through Goblin Forest, the trail now easy as we retraced our steps, this time without the tent, the idea to bivy right at the base of the wall, get up at four in the morning and climb it in a day. The idea was a good one. By making it to the base of the wall and digging a ledge to sleep on, we had every intention of cracking the route.

  Passing our last bivy spot, we gathered up our rack and ropes, feeling smug at our good planning, then continued up to the lake, its ice a foot thick and crisscrossed with white cracks. The Diamond looked very impressive now, rearing up from the black lake like a wave of rock.

  We plugged on to the next bivy spot, stamping down a platform as the sky grew dark, suddenly wishing we’d brought the tent as the temperature dropped quickly from bitterly cold to vindictively cold. Unpacking, we soon realised we had a problem.

  In our haste we’d left most of the food in the truck.

  Then Ian realised his headtorch had been left switched on in his rucksack, and the batteries were flat. We had no spares. All we could do was set Ian’s alarm and hope we could cobble something together from the emerging disaster.

  Of course we couldn’t even do that.

  And so we lay there, watching the sky lighten, cursing the missed alarm, yet secretly thankful we wouldn’t have to climb in such cold. We had an excuse to go down. Yet retreat, instead of being a welcome respite from the cold, would be a hollow experience. We really hadn’t done anything to warrant failure.

  It was turning into one of those crap holidays; not fun enough to be a good time, not gnarly enough to be a great climbing trip. We were running out of time to get something done.

  ‘I can’t be arsed walking all the way back here again to do this route,’ I said, knowing we had to get moving. ‘Lets just give it our best try. We can climb up as high as we can and bivy,’ I said, my plan overlooking the fact that we could only climb in the light, and that we had no food.

  No matter. We got up, quickly packed and set off.

  Our plan was to climb a line up the middle of the face, but out of time we opted for a system of chimneys and grooves that went up the side of the face with just four steep pitches to the halfway terrace, then snow and mixed climbing to the summit, with the odd patch of snow or ribbon of ice making it look like a winter route. Rolo’s stories had inspired me to try climbing as fast as I could, my determination sharpen
ed by the knowledge that Ian was filming me with the little video camera he had.

  My pitch over, I belayed Ian, filming him in turn, then checking the footage of me. I expected to be dazzled by my speed. But instead of the slick and super-quick dude I thought I was, all I saw was a shuffling bumbler, who apparently had no understanding of the word ‘speed.’ I saw myself making a very small movement, then I would stop, think about it for a while and either reverse that move or make another very small movement.

  I checked to see if the camera was switched to slow motion.

  It wasn’t.

  Ian’s pitch was also a slow one. He disappeared for half an hour behind a big flake. At first I thought he’d just stopped to have a crap, as nothing had happened for quite a while, and although the days were getting longer, they weren’t going to be long enough at this rate until June. Then I saw a hand waving from inside a crack high on the wall, which was off-putting. It turned out the climbing involved a bit of caving, as Ian was forced to pass a huge chockstone before making a hard exit out onto the wall.

  It was pure Parnell. With very little ice to help him, he indignantly bullied his way up, ignoring the fact that really he shouldn’t have been able to do so.

  You could tell it was hard as the wordage dropped with every metre gained, always a sign things aren’t good, especially if the climber is a journalist.

  ‘Watch me on this bit, Andy.’ Pant. Scrape.

  …

  ‘Watch me here.’ Scrape, scrape, pant.

  …

  ‘Watch me.’ Pant, pant, scrape.

  …