Over the Hills and Far Away

by Rob Collister

  The approaches to the Col de la Chaux, our final col, were in shadow by now, and it was with the never-failing thrill of emerging from darkness into light that we stood on top in the warm gold of evening, taking off skins, already freezing rigid, for the last time. Down below, on a prominent knoll beside the glacier, stood the Cabane Mont Fort, for so long a goal, suddenly a tangible reality.

  One and a half hours later, and nineteen hours after leaving the Schönbiel, having traversed the hillside below the hut to the ski complex known as la Ruinette, and descended the icy remnants of a piste, we were walking the last few hundred feet down towards Verbier. The sun, which had played so large a part in the pleasures and anxieties of the day, had bowed and gone, leaving the mountains sharply silhouetted against a backdrop of flawless pink. Neon signs in the town flickered, garishly like ill-chosen footlights to the show. Intent on beating the dark, we had scarcely noticed the last act of the drama. Now the curtain was dropping. We had won the race, but for a moment, I almost wished we hadn’t.

  – Chapter 11 –

  NORTH FACE DIRECT (1975)

  I’m not sure how it happened. My axe had been stuck into a lump of snow, leaving both hands free for a lay-away up a protruding fin of rock. One moment I was poised on a steep slab, coated with ice too thin and snow too rotten to offer any security, contemplating an unpromising future. The next I was watching numbly as the axe, flashing in the sunlight, cartwheeled down a sheet of ice and disappeared over the rock wall at the bottom. Comprehension of what I had done slowly dawned. Incredulity gave way to shame, and shame, as so often, took refuge in anger. Dick Renshaw never said a word. He did not even look reproachful. So there was no one to be angry with but myself. What a place to lose an axe – halfway up the Droites, with 600 metres of steep snow and ice below and 500 metres of ice-smothered rock above. Morale sank to a nadir. There seemed no option but to retreat. I did not fancy continuing up such difficult ground or, for that matter, descending the steep snow on the far side of the mountain with only a short, wooden-handled hammer.

  It was ten in the morning. If nothing else, we had plenty of time to get off the mountain. I teetered precariously down a few feet, reversed a tension traverse in a slithering, scratching swing and was lowered the rest of the pitch from a peg. Then downwards over the ice field, pitch after pitch, swapping the axe over to share the strain of being at the sharp end. Climbing down on ice is unnerving at the best of times. With a drop of that magnitude unavoidably before one’s eyes, it was doubly so. At first it was genuine ice, hard and glinting; then, worse, snow which had been a joy to climb on the way up but now was just a treacherous camouflage for the ice beneath. To make matters worse, the sun, tiptoeing along the rim of the face far above, was throwing things at us. Sheets of ice peeled away from the rock every few minutes, to break into lumps as they bounced, gather up loose snow lying in their path and, with diabolic accuracy, rush straight at us. I felt like an insect in one of those public urinals that flush automatically at regular intervals. Being snow, not stones, once we had survived a few such avalanches, they were more alarming than dangerous; but once or twice the spindrift threatened to become suffocating and there was always the fear of a really big hit which would be more than just painful.

  In time, the sun went and we found ourselves descending through cloud down, down, down, each to the other a vague shape materialising only to disappear again as pitch succeeded pitch. The snow steepened to almost 70° on the rib running through the slabs near the bottom. A groping traverse through the gloom, crampons scraping every now and then on rock; then once more down through snow, deep and wet, crossing the bergschrund blindly and wallowing thigh-deep in the avalanche cone. Stars appeared as we crossed the glacier, and on the moraine we met parties bound for the Couturier Couloir. We stumbled into the workmen’s doss behind the new five-star hut at midnight, exactly twenty-four hours after leaving it.

  * * * * *

  The North Face Direct of Les Droites (to distinguish it from the Lagarde Couloir and the North East Spur, both of which have in the past been dignified by the title of North Face) from the glacier appears to be divided into three equal sections. The bottom third is composed of rock slabs which are sometimes obliterated by snow but which, by mid-summer, can be completely bare; the central third is an ice field, black and forbidding for most of the year and, like most ice slopes, best caught in early summer or in autumn; the top third is rock permanently enmeshed in ice. Although the slabs can be extremely difficult, it is this top section that provides the steepest and most technical climbing. There is no obvious line up it and probably every ascent is by a slightly different route. Moreover, the division into thirds is an illusion created by foreshortening; from the top of the Chardonnet it can be seen that the upper rocks in fact comprise more like half the face than a third. On the epic first ascent in September 1955, despite reaching the top of the ice field in one day, Phillippe Cornau and Maurice Davaille bivouacked five times on the face.

  The weather broke and it was ten days before we ground a second time up the stony piste from Argentière. Securely attached to my person with wristloop and cord was a shiny new Chouinard axe. This time we found a comfortable ready-made gîte on rocks below the Grands Montets. Not that it would have mattered where we spent the night. As usual before a big route, I scarcely slept a wink and Dick seemed almost as restless.

  At midnight we were up and away, scrunching beneath the Verte, only occasionally falling through the crust. The moon was out of sight, but across the glacier it had fashioned a big white prick-eared owl which lay on one wing across the Chardonnet surveying us. Snow conditions on the face were even better than before. We did not need the rope until the snow ribbon finally ran into bare ice, a mere three rope-lengths below the slender spur which hangs down from the upper rocks. As day spread across the sky, we breakfasted at the foot of the spur, watching little dots moving just perceptibly up and down the south side of the Argentière.

  In the valley we had looked more closely at the French guide. Instead of attempting to go straight up the middle of the face where the ice was only the thinnest of veneers over almost crackless slabs, this time we followed the left edge of the spur on steepening ice until a series of grooves and chimneys slanted rightwards towards its crest. The climbing was difficult but, when flakes and cracks had been cleared of snow, surprisingly well protected. It was here that we came across two pegs, the only ones we found on the route. All was not well with the weather, however. A sinister band of iron grey in the west had been insidiously expanding, growing ever larger and blacker. There could be no doubt that real weather was on the way, not just an afternoon shower.

  On the other hand, we were halfway up the face and our previous experience did nothing to make retreat an attractive proposition. We decided to ‘wait and see’ which, in effect, meant climbing on until the storm broke. It did so even sooner than we had expected, suddenly covering the sky in one swift leap. As Dick bridged, jammed and mantelshelfed up the second pitch of mixed climbing, the snow began to fall. By the time I reached the footholds that comprised his stance, the wind had risen and snow was sliding off the face in torrents.

  Hastily we dug out overtrousers only to discover that, despite new-fangled knee-length zips, they were not wide enough to be put on over crampons. Cursing the makers and balancing on one leg like inebriated storks, we struggled first with crampons, then with the trousers, while woollen breeches became furrily matted with snow, storing up prickly dampness for the future. By now the storm was so violent that there was no question of going either up or down. We pulled the bivvy sack over our heads and, for want of anything better to do, brewed up, gingerly holding the recalcitrant petrol stove between us like an unexploded bomb. Round and over the sack and, where there was a gap between us, under it also, snow flowed almost continuously. Dick hung resignedly from the belay in his Whillans harness. Lacking such a refinement, and tied on around the waist, I found a ledge wide enough to support one cheek an
d waged a losing battle with the snow that sought to push me off. Occasionally there was a rumble of thunder. But it was the wind that caused most concern, seizing the nylon and shaking it in gusts that had us eyeing the stitching anxiously. Inside the sack, body heat alone kept us relatively warm; but without it, we were very much aware, no amount of down clothing would have sufficed.

  In a lull six hours later, we emerged stiffly from our pink fantasy world to the grey gloom of reality and abseiled five rope-lengths down to the foot of the spur. As night fell we hacked out a platform large enough to curl up like twin foetuses and soon, despite wind and snow, we were asleep.

  Towards dawn I become aware that all was still. I was not prepared, however, for the perfection of the day that greeted me when I peered through a ventilation hole. I had expected to look out on swirling mist. Instead, the only cloud to be seen was hugging the valley floor in friendly fashion. From the northern peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges in the west right round to where the bulging forehead of the North East Spur hid Mont Dolent, the horizon glowed with anticipation and as we lit the stove, the sun burst upon us. Nor was there any need to be worried about snow conditions: the face was as clean as if it had been swept by a broom.

  We started to climb again, slow and hesitant at first, the ice seeming somehow steeper and harder. Nevertheless, by eleven we were back at our high point, having lost exactly a day, and Dick shuffled off rightwards along a toe ledge crossing an otherwise holdless wall. It would be tedious to describe the day’s climbing in detail, but it was ice or iced-up rock all the way, hard water ice never less than 60°, frequently steeper. At times it would have warranted Scottish grade IV, usually it was more like III; not technically desperate but sustained, the strain on calves and nerves never easing. After those initial pitches on the spur, we trended left towards the middle of the face, but rarely in a straight line, more often in tortuous zigzags dictated by the thickness of the ice. Not until the blue haze of evening was filling the valleys did we emerge on to a snowfield; and a mere sixty metres higher we were once more engulfed by rock and ice.

  Still well below the summit we bivouacked again, forced to make do with two separate lumps of rock, a one-metre gap between us. To be covered by the bivvy sack I had to sit sideways, my feet dangling in the gap, my back aching for something to lean against. Dick was better off until, in the middle of the night, half his ledge collapsed. Passing from an uneasy doze into a waking nightmare, I found him thrashing about in the bottom of the sack like a monstrous fish in a landing net.

  Day came at last. It was another perfect morning, as if the mountains, having expressed their disapproval, had decided to accept our continued presence with a good grace. Once again, a string of little black dots was discernible on the Argentière. There had been none yesterday. Suddenly I felt a sense of proprietorship, born of living on and with the mountain. The people on the other side of the glacier would be back at the hut by midday, having enjoyed their climb and savoured the pure air of the heights. But they would not have been absorbed into the mountain, they would not be a part of it as we were at that moment.

  Petrol fumes and frozen-fingered fumbling with the chaos of gear hanging from one ice-screw quickly brought me down to earth. Climbing again, we traversed to the right at first, then straight up on steep flaky rock which was a pleasant escape from the ubiquitous ice, until the sun reached it when, almost instantaneously, the flakes became loose in their sockets. After two pitches we were presented with a choice. Somewhere to the left lay the summit; but near at hand on the right was a tempting snow couloir descending from the Brêche des Droites. For the first time the line of least resistance and the correct line were not one and the same thing. We chose the line of least resistance. Our concern now was simply to reach the top and to descend the south-facing slopes on the other side as early in the day as possible. Eagerly we kicked up the gully until Mont Blanc and the Grandes Jorasses lay before us. Panting with heat and thirst I leant against a boulder, suddenly weak, while Dick struggled up broken rocks buried under loose snow. Then a real ridge, a sharp snow crest with axe one side, feet the other. Up and down, going strongly again, and Dick taking photos. One rope-length, two, three, horizontal distance, not vertical, but further to the summit than we had realised. Finally moving together up a last little rise, wearily, till only sky was above and far away lay the Oberland and nearer at hand were the familiar profiles of the Valais.

  Sprawled on a rock we made a drink and gazed round. Two yellow butterflies came dancing by. What accident, or audacity, had brought them here? What would become of them? The parallel was too obvious. Empathy with the mountain dissolved like ground-mist under a morning sun. We were impudent intruders, vulnerable and at risk, perched upon the back of an irascible monster. And every minute the deep snow of the southern slopes was growing softer and soggier. Gathering up the rope, we began the long descent to Chamonix.

  – Chapter 12 –

  GRANDS CHARMOZ IN WINTER (1976)

  It was pelting with rain when we arrived late one night at the end of December. Chamonix, next morning, looked more like Fort William in July than one of Europe’s fashionable ski-resorts. Gloomily, we splashed through the puddles in double boots, regretting the waterproofs we had left at home. We had only a week and it seemed that the most we could hope for was some piste skiing. Then, magically, the clouds cleared revealing the hard blue skies and dazzling white mountains of the postcards. We gave the snow two days’ grace and set off along the smothered railway line for Montenvers, grateful for an existing trail of knee-deep craters.

  We were making for the North Face of the Grands Charmoz. The Mont Blanc routes had seemed too long and too high to attempt in deep snow without acclimatisation. The Argentière basin had already received a lot of attention, and the combination of a downhill approach and a hut to stay in seemed almost like cheating. The Jorasses would have been too ambitious for us. So that left, to all intents and purposes, the Aiguilles, and in the Aiguilles I had an ambition to fulfil. Exactly two years before I had sat on the moraine beneath the Dru, gazing across the Mer de Glace at a face I had somehow never noticed before. Pondering its formidable yet elegant appearance – a central ice field enclosed by rock walls above and below, and flanked by steep pinnacled ridges tapering to a spire – the Charmoz had tempted me even then as a winter climb. Being mixed it would certainly be harder than in summer, without requiring quite the same degree of masochism as a pure rock climb. And, more important, the stones for which the face is notorious would be stilled. The other three – Geoff Cohen, Henry Day and Alec Stalker – had needed little persuading that this was a suitable objective for a lightning visit to the Alps.

  At Montenvers the tracks ended and we were on our own. A bitter wind was picking up the snow and playing with it. The sky, starlit and frosty when we left the valley, was filling with ominous black clouds. A solitary ptarmigan swept away down the wind. Descending steep snow we joined the line of the summer path, often indistinguishable from the white hillside, and followed it as far as the ladders – or where the ladders ought to have been. Continuing to traverse, steeply at times, rock or frozen turf not far below the surface, we came to an easy gully which led down the moraine wall to the glacier. We followed the glacier edge for half a mile till, beneath the dramatic finger of the République, we could climb without difficulty towards the little Thendia glacier. We had debated the pros and cons of snowshoes long and anxiously before deciding against them. We were relieved, therefore, to find the snow rarely more than calf deep and, in sizeable patches, covered by a hard wind crust. The weather was not so promising, though. Angry clouds were spilling down the Verte and the wind was gusting viciously. As we emerged from the shelter of some rocks on to the open slopes beneath the face, we were greeted by a stinging blast of drift that stopped us in our tracks. A bivouac in the snow was going to be uncomfortable. Necessity is the mother of invention, however, and casting around for alternatives, my eye was caught by the glacier snout not fa
r above. Beneath its left-hand end was a large cavity. What better place for a bivouac, provided the glacier did not choose to lurch forward. Geoff and I climbed up to it and set to work filling in holes between fallen blocks, chopping away ice and shovelling snow – thankful, not for the last time, that we had brought a shovel. By the time the snow-encrusted forms of Alec and Henry appeared out of the mobile murk, a palatial platform, large enough for four and completely sheltered, was waiting to be occupied. We settled down for the night snugly but with little hope for the climb.

  When I next looked at my watch, I could hardly believe it. It was six o’clock. I had slept for twelve hours. Geoff heaved himself upright to look out of the cave. ‘Look,’ he exclaimed, ‘stars!’ Startled out of sleep we sat up and hastily began brewing. An old Gaz cylinder did not make for speed, however, and it was eight o’clock before we were moving and another hour before we roped up at the foot of a steep snow-filled corner.

  In the north were some little fishy clouds, but they swam away and nothing bigger came to chase them. Across the glacier the Dru, snow-free and sunlit, looked inviting. Not so the rock above us; grade IV in summer, it was considerably more difficult now. There was surprisingly little ice in the cracks but unconsolidated snow everywhere. It was a matter of rock-climbing in crampons, and trusting untrustworthy snow. After a few feet I realised that I would have to leave my sack behind.

  While Henry and Alec jumared up, we emerged on to snow, turning a rock buttress on the left before making a long traversing movement right, crampons grating on rock from time to time, probing for a weakness in the walls above. Finally, a short chimney, where again I had to sack-haul, and a ramp leading yet further right, gave access to a small snowfield between rock-bands. With alarm we realised it was already four o’clock, only an hour till dark. Moving together up soft but stable snow, we set off diagonally leftwards, at last gaining height. Henry and Alec arrived at the chimney some time later. Deciding that they were climbing too slowly, they retreated. We did not see them again, but they reached the cave that night and descended to Chamonix without incident the following day.