Armed with my Foot Fangs and reverse-pick axes, I could enjoy modern climbing to the full. There is a beauty and adventure in winter climbing that can never be matched by summer rock climbing. It’s not a poor man’s alpinism, nor training for the Himalaya, for it is an end in itself, a joyous commitment to steep ice and snow-covered rocks, to swirling spindrift and cold fingers, to rolling snow-clad mountains, whose shades and tones of white and grey or warm rich yellow change through the day with the shift of clouds and the angle of the sun.
With the spring and summer came rock climbing. As with ice climbing, I have embraced all the modern gear; elaborately cammed devices called Friends that will slot into any crack, specially curved wedges called Rocks, sticky-soled climbing shoes called Super Ratz and chalk to give the hands a better grip. These are the aids of the modern rock climber and, combined with intense training on climbing walls and multi-gyms, they have pushed the standard of modern climbing to new heights that have far outstripped my personal climbing ability. Nonetheless I have steadily improved my own skill over the years. To understand how the standard of climbing has increased in the post-war period one can examine the Extreme grade which is the top grade in British climbing. It was introduced in the late forties by the very talented English rock climber, Peter Harding, in the climbing guidebook to the Llanberis Pass. In the Lake District the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, who have traditionally produced the area’s guidebooks and always been fairly conservative, clung to a top standard of Very Severe, even though this was having to embrace a progressively wider spectrum of difficulty as standards improved.
Eventually the Extreme grade was accepted throughout Britain, then with the advent of steeper, thinner, more strenuous and more necky climbing, this grade, too, became over-full. A numerical grade was then introduced which, in 1983, ranged from E1 to E5. The hardest climbs put up in the fifties – the most significant ones being by Joe Brown and Don Whillans – are classed as E1 today, though one, a ferocious overhanging groove called Goliath on Burbage Edge in Derbyshire, even today is considered E5. This is a tribute to the quite extraordinary strength and determination of Don Whillans. E2 was the grade of the sixties, produced in part by a radical improvement in protection techniques with the introduction of nuts. Metal nuts of various sizes with their threads drilled out, strung on a loop of nylon line, are jammed in cracks for use as running belays. These were the predecessors of the more sophisticated tailored metal wedges and the cammed devices that have since been introduced.
I suppose my own rock-climbing zenith was in the late fifties and early sixties when I was climbing the hardest routes of the time and even making a few new routes of my own, but the seventies brought an explosion in climbing standards equivalent to the jump forward pioneered by Whillans and Brown in the early fifties. Pete Livesey, a Yorkshire climber who came to the sport comparatively late at the age of thirty, was in the forefront of this new development. He came from a background of competitive sport and had run middle distances as a junior at national level. He had then taken up white-water canoeing and caving before being attracted to climbing. He immediately saw the potential for systematic training as a means of improving his climbing standard and began to put up a series of very hard new routes, at first in his native Yorkshire, then branching out into Wales and the Lake District. Quite a few of them were routes that had originally been climbed using a lot of aid. The most outstanding route he put up in this period in the Lakes was Footless Crow, a bold line that weaved its way through a series of overhangs on Goat Crag in Borrowdale.
These new Extreme climbs are way beyond my powers, but each year I have enjoyed pushing up my standard that tiny bit, trying to do the odd E3. There is a level of ego gratification in chasing the grades. I get satisfaction in knowing that I can climb something that is harder than anything I have done before and I must confess to thoroughly enjoying happening to mention, ‘Oh, did Prana the other day, my E3 for the season.’ But there’s more to it than that. The harder routes take you onto lines that are so much more committing, aesthetically pleasing, cleaner and bolder. There is an immense sense of achievement in pushing one’s own boundaries, in overcoming both one’s fear and also one’s physical limitations. I know a heady joy when I push my limits climbing on our own small British crags. There is also the excitement of climbing hard; an adrenaline rush that I suspect becomes addictive. I certainly need this surge of excitement on a regular basis and become irritable and sluggish if I’m denied a fix of my own special climbing drug.
There is never any shortage of climbing partners. Living around the flanks of the northern fells are a dozen climbers who have settled here over the years. Doug Scott moved in just a few fields from us in 1983. Since both of us freelance, we can steal fine sunny days in the middle of the week, when the rest of the world is at work, to go out climbing. In doing this we have rebuilt a friendship tested by the pressures of expeditioning. My half-brother, Gerald, whom I introduced to climbing in the Avon Gorge when he was five, moved into the village a few years ago, and has become a close friend and a keen climber. These, then, are my afternoon and evening climbing partners and in a good season I go climbing three or four times a week.
The summer of 1983 was a good one and I ticked off a whole series of routes I had long dreamt of climbing: The Lord of the Rings, a complete girdle of the East Buttress of Scafell, over 300 metres of hard climbing; Saxon, a tenuous crack line that cuts the smooth wall of the upper part of Scafell’s Central Buttress, the most spectacular stretch of rock in the Lake District; and Prana, my statutory E3.
Jim and I climbed together at weekends, building up a partnership that was to stand us in good stead later on that summer. Our most enjoyable foray was to Scotland, when we drove up to Aviemore one Friday night, slept out on the shores of Loch Morlich and then walked over Cairngorm in the early morning to Shelterstone Crag at the head of Glen Avon. It is one of the finest crags in the Cairngorm, 300 metres of steep dark granite in a stark lonely setting above Loch Avon. We climbed a route called Steeple. Smooth compact slabs alternate with overhanging rock, culminating in a sheer corner leading to the top. It has an Alpine scale, pitch after pitch of exhilarating climbing. Three tiny figures walking along the shore of Loch Avon were the only signs of life we saw that day.
On the way back we soloed up one of the easier climbs on Hell’s Lum Crag, tiptoeing insecurely in our climbing shoes up the steep drift of hard compact snow left from the winter. We dropped down Coire an t-Sneachda in the golden light of the early evening, passing the empty skeletons of the ski lifts, ugly against the heather.
That evening we drove over to Fort William, slept in the car park by the golf club, and set out once again in the early dawn for the north side of Ben Nevis. We were bound for Cam Dearg, a great buttress of rock that acts as a portal to the cliffs of the Ben. That day we completed a climb called Toro, another 300-metre job, pitch after pitch of stimulating climbing. Neither of these routes was hard by modern standards but that didn’t matter. It was the quality and length of the climbs, combined with their situations that made them so rewarding.
Jim and I were building up as a team. We understood each other’s style of climbing, thought processes, strong points and faults. There was an element of competition to get the best pitch, but even this was muted, since we both tacitly recognised that Jim had the edge on me when it came to hard and particularly necky rock climbing. The difference in age probably helped.
One wet weekend we went high on to Ill Crag above Eskdale to scramble on easy rocks and find new routes on little moss-clad outcrops which had avoided attention because of their height and isolation. We continued discussing our plans for the summer and examined alternative objectives. A friend of Jim’s had climbed in the Gangotri the previous summer and provided some more pictures and a report on the size and challenge of the East Face of Kedarnath Dome. It looked attractive – a 3,000-metre face that in the picture seemed as sheer and blank as the walls of Yosemite. The other side, its w
est flank, was a huge easy-angled snow face providing a straightforward descent. It had everything; hard challenging climbing, size, easy descent and, because it faced east, it got the early morning sun, more than a luxury after cold bivouacs. We decided to change our objective.
It was the end of August 1983, time to go. Putting together a two-man mini-expedition is delightfully easy. We already had most of the gear we were going to need. Jim spent a morning in his local supermarket buying expedition food. We had grain bars, dried fruit and nuts from the health food co-op that Jim’s wife Penny had helped to found, and I had written off to White Horse for whisky, Dolamore for some boxed wines and Olympus for their latest miniature cassette stereo system. I have always believed in living well on an expedition.
We packed the expedition gear one sunny afternoon in my garden. We had to sample the wine and so broached one of the boxes. It was disorganised, fun, and by the time we had finished we were both tipsy – a long call from fraught days spent in an icy, dusty warehouse before the 1975 Everest expedition. Jim was suffering from house-moving teething troubles so flew out a few days later than me.
Three days of speeches, elaborately exquisite Indian buffets and meetings with many old climbing friends gathered from around the world was an unlikely prelude to an expedition and yet a great deal of fun. The Indians have a capacity for hospitality and a love of conferences. The money for it all comes from government sources. Indira Ghandi opened the conference amid great pomp. I was frequently asked by the Indians when a European country would host a similar get-together, and, of course, we do, but without the same scale of government funding these affairs are inevitably more parochial, with only a small number of foreign guest speakers.
This was both a mountaineering and tourism conference and the organisers had planned to link it with a series of treks going into the foothills of the Himalaya, led by some of the eminent mountaineers attending the conference. I had agreed to do the honours in the Gangotri, taking a group of tourists as far as our Base Camp. In return for this Jim and I were to get free transport. The Indian Tourist Board had prepared an elaborate brochure advertising the trek but, unfortunately, had published it only a few weeks before the conference, which was too late to get many customers. They ended up with just one taker, an Australian girl called Jean who came from Sydney. The numbers were to be made up by some of our fellow guests. There were three Everesters, Barry Bishop, who had been to the summit of Everest in 1963 as part of the American Everest Expedition, Wanda Rutkiewitz from Poland, one of the most talented women climbers in the world and the third woman to reach the summit of Everest when she climbed it in 1979, and Laurie Skreslet, the first Canadian to reach the top. We also had with us Adams Carter, editor of the American Alpine Journal, arguably the finest and most comprehensive compendium of mountain information in the world, John Cleare, mountain photographer and all-round expeditioner from Britain, and Warwick Deacock, an old friend from my army days who had emigrated to found the first Outward Bound school in Australia. We also had an Australian film crew who were going to make a promotional film of the trek.
Jim had arrived the previous evening and, on the morning of 30 August, our little expedition, accompanied by its prestigious trekkers and our Liaison Officer, Captain Vijay Singh, set out in a tourist coach from the portals of the Janpat Hotel. Adams Carter, as senior member of the team, cut the ribbon across the doors of the coach. Garlanded with flowers we piled in. Jean looked slightly bemused.
That night we stopped at Rishikesh in a government rest house near forested hills. Wanda and I went for a walk in the early morning following a path through creeper-covered trees that wound up the steep hillside. Monkeys chattered in the mist. We were on the verge of an adventure. It was slightly incongruous through the sheer luxury of our approach; a conducted tour viewed through the naive eyes of our ebullient film crew and the dazed eyes of our solitary free-paying customer, but it was fun and it was India, a country that I have come to love.
The road wound in a series of wild corkscrews up and over the foothills of the Himalaya. We were still in the dying stages of the monsoon and rain fell from heavy grey clouds. We caught glimpses of pylons carrying electricity cables, marching over the forested hills and we stopped at a village perched high on the top of a hill for a tea break and the chance to buy fresh vegetables in the market. Vijay, determined to look after his little flock, bargained hard over the price of bananas and garlic.
We crossed a hill system and dropped down into the valley of the Bhagirathi River, a tributary of the Ganges, and consequently also one of India’s holy rivers. Our destination that night was the town of Uttarkashi. It was also to be a reunion for me, since Balwant Sandhu, my co-leader on the Changabang expedition, now ran the Nehru Mountain Institute, situated in a fine pine forest above the town. Balwant had hardly changed, apart from his hair being slightly more grizzled, and he was as warmly enthusiastic as ever. Since Changabang he had married a German girl called Helga and they had a six-year-old son. He was still an active climber and was organising and leading a training meet for the first Indian mixed-sex expedition to Everest. He would be climbing in the Garhwal mountains whilst we were in the Gangotri. We reminisced that night over a good German dinner and Balwant told us that he would trek into his expedition via the Gangotri so that he could come and see us.
We set out on the final leg of our journey the next morning. We were now on the pilgrim trail, joining queues of buses heading for the holy town of Gangotri. The monsoon rain was falling in a steady deluge from heavy clouds. Every stream was a muddy, swirling cataract and the hillside was a sheet of tumbling water carrying rocks and earth down onto the road. The convoy of buses frequently stopped for minor earth slides and rock falls which the passengers cleared by hand, but then we reached a major fall that completely blocked the road. Engineers were laying charges of dynamite to shift a huge boulder. A dull thud, a puff of yellow smoke and the rock had disintegrated, but there remained tons of rubble to clear away. It looked a good moment to start walking. People materialised out of the gloom eager to carry our gear, and we all set off, umbrellas raised, through the deluge. It was good to be walking.
That night we stopped at a rest house by a spring so hot that it took five minutes of gradual immersion to adjust to the temperature. Next morning we began getting tantalising glimpses of high snow-clad peaks at the ends of the deep-cut side valleys that fed the Bhagirathi River.
Gangotri lies in the base of the valley, a collection of shingle-covered lodges and ashrams around a garish little temple. Jim and I joined the pilgrims to wash our feet in the icy holy river, and went up to the temple for a puja. We made an offering of a few rupees, had a blob of red paint daubed on our foreheads and a blessing muttered over us.
Vijay, meanwhile, had hired the porters. We were to take three short days to reach Tapoban, the grassy alp which is the accepted base for most Gangotri expeditions. It was as well to take it slowly for we had made such fast easy progress by bus that we had hardly had time to start acclimatising. We were already at 3,000 metres and in the next few days would reach over 4,000.
It is a beautiful approach along a path well crafted for the more energetic pilgrims who want to bathe in the Bhagirathi River where it emerges from the snout of the Gangotri Glacier. The rock scenery is magnificent. Great buttresses of weathered granite tower on either side of the valley. If they had been in Europe or North America they would have been meccas for climbers, but here, on the way to the greater peaks of the Himalaya, they are just passed by.
On the third morning we crossed the rocky debris of the bottom of the glacier and climbed a long broken spur to the pastures of Tapoban. It was as lovely a spot as I have ever seen in the Himalaya. Wild flowers nestled amongst the rocks and lush grass, and clear streams trickled amongst the boulders. The entrance to the Gangotri Glacier is flanked on its western side by Shivling, a magnificent phallus of ice and granite, aptly named, Shiva’s penis. On the other side of the glacier, its east
ern gatepost was Bhagirathi III, our original objective. It looked steep and hard, and didn’t get any sun until late in the morning. We didn’t regret changing our objective to the East Face of Kedarnath Dome.
We were not the only ones to have chosen Tapoban. A big blue tent sat in the middle of the field. It belonged to a Polish women’s expedition who were attempting a route on Meru, a massive complex peak to the west of Shivling. The team were on the mountain and the only occupants were one of the Poles who was feeling sick and Mala, their liaison officer, a young student from Calcutta who was very glad to have some one with whom to speak English. We invited them to dinner. Sitting round a fire in the light of a full moon, we washed down our boeuf bourgignon with red wine. The grass was soft beneath us and the mountains black jagged silhouettes against the starlit sky. It didn’t feel like a Himalayan expedition – it was too much fun. Balwant arrived in time for the dessert. He had walked all the way from Gangotri in a single day. We broached the whisky in his honour and talked and laughed long into the night, waking the next morning with terrible hangovers to a perfect dawn.
I was keen to explore the Gangotri Glacier and establish our base at the foot of the East Face of Kedarnath Dome. Jim had picked up a bad cold on the way in and was acclimatising slowly. I must have seemed unbearably enthusiastic and at the same time edgy. I was worried whether Jim was going to be fit for the climb – always the risk on a two-man expedition. We decided that I should push ahead with the porters to establish a camp as far as possible up the Gangotri Glacier. Laurie Skreslet, Wanda Rutkiewitz and John Cleare had moved up with us to Tapoban and were also going to come as far as the foot of our climb. I was already viewing them as potential porter-power.
I got away first with the four porters we had kept on to make the initial carry. As porters always do, they stopped every few hundred metres for a rest. I kept with them, partly because they knew the way and also to chivvy them on. They had carried for a Japanese expedition that had made a new route on the South-East Face of Shivling and so thought they knew where our Base Camp should be, just round the corner of the mountain on the northern bank of the Kirti Bamak. It took some persuasion to coax them to the other side of the glacier and around the eastern flanks of Kedarnath Dome. I was reminded of walking with my own children when they were young, jollying them on to the next bend, and then the one after that. At last, at five that afternoon, we reached a sandy moraine flat on the end of the East Ridge of Kedarnath Dome.
The Everest Years Page 18
