by Sandy Allan
I hid my passport in my Blacks sleeping bag, something every British kid had at the time, and we walked into Chamonix for our first beer in the famous Bar Le National, a longstanding bastion of British climbing. By the bar sat the owner, a well-rounded man called Maurice Simond who seemed almost always half asleep. He had two wonderful daughters, Sylvie and Christine, who were both very welcoming. None of us could afford to buy more than one drink there and we soon learned to go to the supermarket and buy cheap bottles of beer before meeting up at the bar, where we would buy one beer from Maurice, drink it and then top up our glasses under the table. Maurice knew what we were up to but let it go, a kind man and welcoming to all British climbers. When he passed away many years later I wrote to the British Mountaineering Council suggesting we do something on behalf of British climbers to mark his passing. A little brass plaque was fixed to the wall of the Bar Le National recalling his hospitality ‘with thanks from all British alpinists’.
For a young man from the Highlands, Chamonix was an eye-opening experience. The girls were beautiful, always in their summer dresses, their legs tanned and long, and speaking English with French accents. Surrounding Chamonix, the mountains and rock faces were incredible; one could not look at them and not be inspired to climb. It was an amazing town back then, overflowing with free spirits. Everyone seemed to climb or live to be in the mountains; everyone I met seemed in some way unconventional. Real jobs, proper mundane work, was something to be put off until later. Years later. Most people had good enough climbing equipment and clothing, some even had good off-piste ski-mountaineering skis and climbed in the Himalaya, but otherwise we all avoided spending money on unnecessary stuff. Hitchhiking was how we travelled, or by taking possession of someone’s old banger of a car. Living on a shoestring was the norm.
Our ‘guides’ took us to the Bossons Glacier, in those days much closer to the road, and after a short walk through the pine-scented forest we arrived at the ice. (These days, with climate change and glacial retreat, it’s no longer considered a safe training venue.) I had never really used ice climbing tools before. I had an axe with an adze and an axe with a hammer, and some long nail-like ice screws called ‘warthogs’ and some clever new tubular screws introduced by a man called Yvon Chouinard. I wrapped long neoprene straps across my boots and through the rings on my crampons in a very deliberate pattern. Strapping on crampons was considered an art form. Then, with the buckles done up, I stomped along the ice.
It’s the most fantastic feeling, being able to tramp across slippery blue ice. Our guides top-roped us at first and apparently I was good at it; I was soon climbing up and over ice walls with overhangs and even soloing about. I loved it – I felt I was born to do this. The next day we were up on the Aiguille du Midi and I was taking my first nervous steps down the razor-edge of the Arête du Midi. How anyone expected a sensible human to walk down it was quite beyond me. Now of course I laugh at myself and as a guide I can be up and down it dozens of times in a climbing season. I was roped to a guy called Paul, a good climber Mal had hired even though, like Mal’s other ‘guides’, he had little formal training on how to look after me. But he did his best and gave me the confidence to proceed.
After that we climbed Mont Blanc du Tacul by the normal route and I relished every single moment. We came back to bivvy, illegally of course, at the cable car station on top of the Aiguille du Midi. It did occur to me that Mal’s course was more than a little unconventional, led by a dreamer who inspired adventure. Then again, I could afford it. I would have never been able to afford a proper organised course with qualified Chamonix guides. After it was over I stayed on with one of the instructors and we climbed the Brenva Spur on Mont Blanc. I climbed Mont Blanc again that season with Dave Cuthbertson, one of the best climbers of his generation and a well-known guide.
We ended up traversing the mountain, and I remember walking back to Snell’s Field with him, traversing the Géant icefall, climbing into and out of huge crevasses with Cubby keeping me safe on a tight rope. We continued down the miles of frozen ice of the Mer de Glace to Montenvers and down through the thick forest to the Pierre d’Orthaz and our scruffy tents. I had a brew, and fell asleep for fifteen hours straight. I woke delighted with myself and the whole world, confirming in my own mind that I was destined to be an alpinist. Handing the instructors a gift of Johnny Walker whisky I left Chamonix to return to my job at the Balmenach Distillery. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t wanted to get back to work and life in Scotland.
Mal had disappeared into thin air by the end of the course. Nobody seemed to have much idea where he was but by now we didn’t expect otherwise. Some of the others thought him a cowboy, but I liked him a lot, recognising he was a rough diamond, a dreamer – and so inspiring. He reminded me of my older brothers Max and William, who were always up to tricks but somehow always avoided getting into trouble. All the guides had been good fun, but Mal had something else. He was enterprising and a risk-taker. He read widely and seemed to retain every single word. Little did I know that he would influence my life again in the future, and that I would attempt to climb Everest with him.
In those days it wasn’t really illegal to work as a mountain guide and not hold a proper qualification. No one seemed to care much back then. But the world was changing. A more formal approach to mountain activities was beginning to evolve. The UK was now in the Common Market, as the European Union was then known. Chamonix was becoming famous for qualified mountain guides; the names Croz, Charlet and Ravanel were among the famous local families who had swapped farming for the mountains. It was not unlike my own experience in the Highlands where people were born, worked and made their meagre livings in the hills. They understood the mountain moods and the many eccentricities of the mountain weather.
At that time I didn’t like mountain guides much – although a few of us would go on to become IFMGA qualified guides in years to come. They seemed slow and pedantic, taking delight in elaborating needlessly on each step a good and prudent guide should take but instinctively knows anyway; the type of person that felt it necessary to explain what most people with an ounce of practical ability would know from birth. I suppose I should have been more understanding as many were city kids. I’d grown up a Highlander, running over the hills, chasing red deer as a feral five-year-old in the arctic conditions of the Dalwhinnie hills. They weren’t so fortunate.
My twin brother and I worked on farms too, driving tractors and Land Rovers at an incredibly young age, shepherding sheep and rescuing beasts from big winter snows. We were fortunate to be so privileged. We learned naturally. It was a slow process climbing behind these guides, and at the time I thought so bloody English. I soon knew not to get stuck behind them and used to ask them rather bluntly to get out of my way. Now I can’t believe how crass my egotistical behaviour must have seemed, but I couldn’t understand how anyone could find ice climbing difficult. I had taken to it as a duckling takes to water. I cringe at the thought that I must have spoken harshly to some of these good and highly experienced guides.
Back home that autumn, my life in the world of whisky distilling went on, although I climbed more and more. Yvon Chouinard wrote Climbing Ice, a book with lots of technical information about the art of ice climbing, interspersed with tales of road trips through America in cars with white-walled tyres, climbing in Patagonia and beyond. It inspired me. I started winter climbing on Ben Nevis, and my first winter climb was Vanishing Gully, which, in those days of ice tools with straight picks, was considered one of the harder and more technical climbs around.
When we got down to Fort William that evening, everyone was very impressed. Alex MacIntyre was in the pub that night, the only time I ever met him, and he came over to congratulate us. He was one of those people that you know is special and strong as soon as you meet them. He had been doing some amazing climbs with Nick Colton and John Porter. Years later, after Alex died on the south face of Annapurna, I climbed with Voyt
ek Kurtyka, who had known Alex well and climbed with him in the Himalaya. Voy often spoke of Alex, telling me how he’d been a poor rock climber but was great on ice. It’s how I am myself. Many climbing partnerships are like this, relying on each other’s strengths for the overall good of the team.
I climbed Vanishing with a pal introduced to me by Mal Duff called Robert Bruce, a direct descendant of the Robert the Bruce, whose family owned Glen Tanar Estate in Deeside. We teamed up with a young, long-haired American called Rob Milne who worked at Edinburgh University developing a system that allowed you to talk to computers. He was clearly an exceedingly intelligent and bright kid, and had established quite a reputation for bold leads on ice climbs. He showed us how to hang off ice screws, which was considered quite radical and even stupid by us Scottish climbers back then. He also climbed with Hummingbird picks on his Lowe ice tools. These were tubular and worked well on thick ice but often became bashed at the ends by the time he had climbed a typical Scottish route of rotten or thin ice.
I climbed with one Chouinard Zero hammer, which had a wooden shaft and a curved pick with teeth along its whole length. It was my pride and joy. In my other hand I used a Chouinard-Frost ice axe with just five little teeth at the end of the pick; it was pretty rubbish but if used well would let you climb very steep ice. Strapped to my feet I had Salewa crampons with stubby angled front points. To climb steep ice, I needed to really hang out on my crampons to allow the front points to penetrate the ice.
The technique and body positions I had to adopt helped me become a technically very competent ice climber. Once Hamish MacInnes brought out his dropped-pick Terrordactyl axes lots of us began to climb very technical steep ice and then moved on to the steep and technical mixed climbing on the buttresses and rock faces. With crampons on I was convinced I could climb almost anything. Simond, the Chamonix manufacturer, then brought out an ice tool named the Chacal. This was the first ice tool with an ‘inverted banana’ type blade, inspired by MacInnes’s Terrordactyl but more finely machined with very sharp picks, well-designed teeth and a good shaft that one could grip with ease. It made ice climbing really quite easy.
I loved and lived for Scottish winters and while I spent my summers returning to Chamonix, I could hardly contain my excitement as I waited for the snow to fall back home. A river flowed past the distillery through a gorge and I would train on its steep and often unstable banks. There were also some old warehouse walls and a disused industrial chimney stack. I would climb these in crampons and ice axes, torquing the picks of my ice tools between the bricks and resting them on tiny holes or ledges in the concrete or between the brickwork. This type of climbing is now known as dry tooling, although in Scotland we still often call it mixed climbing. To me, mixed climbing is the best sport of all, where one climbs on thin ice, exposed rock and a mixture of both. The Cairngorms were good for this, from Lochnagar to Ben Macdui, since the granite there has lots of cracks that one could clear of ice and snow and place semi-reliable protection. It was much harder to find useful cracks on Ben Nevis.
My life in those days had a quiet simplicity. Having perfected our technique with traditional gear, the advances in ice tools and protection gave us the confidence to try harder climbs. With these modern ice tools, in the late eighties my good friend Andy Nisbet and I climbed some of the first grade-VIII winter climbs. Some of them are still unrepeated today. Our ascents of Grey Slab on Coire Sputan Dearg, and Black Mamba and the Rat Trap on Creag an Dubh Loch caused quite a stir in the winter climbing community when we reported them. Rat Trap took seventeen hours and we had all sorts of fun and games with a broken pick and hypothermia.
What young climbers do now is simply incredible and the current generation amazes and inspires me. Mountains are still mountains though; understanding the weather and developing other skills like navigation and good practical mountaineering knowledge are still important parts of the game we play. Accidents occur and these days it’s often experienced climbers who are involved. Some people say that this is due to young climbers developing skills at indoor climbing walls where objective hazards have been removed, and risk suppressed. Some say that climbers these days haven’t had a proper apprenticeship in the unpredictable outdoors. This notion may have some truth in it, but it’s much too simplistic an answer. I see lots of young climbers who are skilled and experienced.
It takes years and years to develop the necessary skills for mountaineering, and more years to develop the confidence to listen and canvas other people’s views and opinions and then to dismiss the silly parts and take on board the useful stuff. It’s hard for us not to be influenced by others, to know our own limitations and have the confidence to turn back in pressing weather. As in most things, if you think you are a master, you’re kidding yourself. There is always more to learn.
When I was young, I benefited hugely from having some great mentors. One of them was Doug Scott, who features a lot in my story. I can hardly remember how I got to know him, but his son Mike often dossed in a plastic palace in Snell’s Field and we hung out a lot. Chamonix is also where I got to know Mark Miller. Mark was totally sound and wholly inspiring. I rented a small and very basic mazot, or chalet, in a quiet but quite central location in Chamonix with a lot of grass and woodland behind. I remember barbecues out back, wrapped in blankets with our girlfriends, staring at the fire’s glowing embers under a star-washed sky. We’d talk about everything, especially the long Alpine routes we hoped to climb. It was a fine mellow time.
By this time I was working on exploration oil rigs in the North Sea, and I always returned to Chamonix for breaks. I was earning amazingly good money for the time and had an old Mini that we charged around in. We partied hard. Coming back from the rigs, I’d meet my girlfriend and with Mark we’d go out around town, trying to see how many days we could keep going before going home to curl up in my mazot. Chamonix had a few establishments that allowed you to get a drink twenty-four hours a day as long as you bought expensive cocktails. Our record was four days straight. Then we’d all crash, eventually resurfacing to try a big Alpine route.
Alpine winter climbing was really serious in those days. Clothing was inadequate compared to now; it’s easy to forget how important breathable fabrics and other developments were in allowing mountaineers to push the limits in hostile conditions. Weather forecasts were not as good then as they are today – there were no mobile phones, let alone the internet. Even good route descriptions were often non-existent. The Alpine Climbing Group newsletter was the main source of new route information, along with, of course, the Sheffield-based Mountain magazine.
Mark and I hung out a lot and I had enough money to buy him the occasional cable car ticket. Between our wild parties, we climbed constantly. One of the more famous things we did was the north face of Mont Gruetta, which had never had a British ascent, although Doug Scott and Roger Baxter-Jones had tried it. We survived despite consuming many little tabs of a cardboard-like substance with little mallard ducks printed on one side. I had no idea what the card was impregnated with but it turned out to be LSD. Man, that made us laugh. The route took way longer than it needed as we broke every rule in the book. We seemed to lose a day or two in the hut under the influence.
Our bivvy food on that climb was a tube of condensed milk, some packets of potato powder and dried bananas. Our last bivvy was in a wild storm which would have frozen most people to death. Mark and I just grinned through it all, frozen solid in our neoprene jackets. I seem to remember having a Gore-Tex jacket, but it was so expensive that I protected it under the neoprene layer so as not to tear it on the rough rock. The Gruetta taught me a lot and having a first British ascent was something we valued. Roger Baxter-Jones and other Chamonix guides and climbers knew what we had done and began to treat both Mark and me as serious people whose views and opinions were worth hearing. That all felt good and was an acknowledgement that we were indeed growing up.
I went away to work on the rig i
n the North Sea and was pissed off to read a report by Lindsay Griffin that ‘Mark Millar’ had done the climb with some unknown Scot. No wonder we had a chip on our shoulders. It did seem that no matter how well we climbed, Sheffield magazine editors never had anything positive to say about us, whereas if a climber was English you were the best thing since sliced bread. I didn’t want to be famous, but I did want to be acknowledged by my peers.
I actually spent quite a lot of time in Sheffield. I was holed up for a while with Mark in a rented flat on St Ronan’s Road with some of the legendary ‘Alpine binmen’ – like Sean Smith and Murray Laxton. Mark and I were climbing hard, were now both broke and had one pair of rock shoes between us. He was technically a much better rock climber than me; even now I still feel a level of self-doubt about my rock climbing ability. But we got on so well that we had the necessary synergy to get up stuff, swapping leads and sharing the rock shoes and the chalk bag. Mark had put up a small testpiece called Sex Dwarves and we played on that lots. In my scatter-brained way I got the name wrong. I remembered it as ‘Pink Dwarf’, which is actually a kind of Japanese maple, and I put up several ‘Pink Dwarfs’ after that, one on a remote crag in the Lairig Ghru and another in Northern Ireland.
If Mark was stronger on rock, the roles were reversed on ice. He would smash his way up ice pitches, breaking ice tools and bending his crampons. In those days ice axes often broke, but I only ever broke one and that was on the blackest, hardest winter ice in the Alps. When Mark and I did a very early ascent of the Supercouloir on Mont Blanc du Tacul the ice was incredibly hard – ‘harder than a Millwall supporter’ was how Mark described it. When I tried to hammer in a warthog it bent like a carpenter’s nail against metal. The warthog jumped out of my gloved hand and bounced down the climb, narrowly missing Mark. He’d already dropped most of the rack when he opened his rucksack after crossing the bergschrund. We climbed it anyway, without placing much protection, because we were climbing so well in those days and the idea of actually falling off never occurred to us. Most young climbers go through this stage of feeling invincible.