“Trango?”
“Later.” We could go there anytime, But Meru Central! An unclimbed peak by its hardest line. And we would try and free it. Naive? Maybe. Then I hope we never ‘grow up’.
We looked further into the future. Trips to all corners of the world – Asgard, Dickey, Antarctica, the Trangos, Spitzbergen. The plans spiralled and I reckon we shared the same broad vision of what these trips meant. Not single accomplishments one after the other, but an urge to explore deeper and deeper. Elemental forces and toil. But the dreams of future adventures, which want to turn into granite plans, can, it seems, become as ephemeral as a dream in the dawn hours.
This is about Philip as a part of a team, on this climb and on others, and he was like us. We came from Britain and he from South Africa. He was a qualified lawyer but he soon found that the mountains gave him the food for which he hungered.
On that trip all was shared – the dahl, the load-carrying, the close calls and the exhilarating sights. How close we have all come – the day on the glacier when the sun was so hot it made our heads spin. I sat under an over-hung boulder which gave shade whilst Phil was on top of it stashing gear. When we came back six hours later the huge rock had toppled. We joked of charmed lives and good omens for the climb, but I chilled momentarily as I looked in the direction of Bhagirathi 3 and recalled my other brush with granite when a rock dropped hundreds of metres landing on my arm and ending my climb.
While resting at camp, we received a letter from the parents of a Spanish girl who had been swept down in an avalanche on Meru North. They requested of us that we cement a plaque to an appropriate boulder. Philip was alarmed at the idea of a plaque on such beautiful rocks. What finer monument than the mountains themselves? But the plaque was fixed in place.
And the shared sensations. The jumps in the cardiograph pattern which make a life special, load-carrying in the gully at night on those eggshells, trying not to wake the sleeping snow, careful not to talk too loudly. The torchlight in our footsteps illuminating crystals of snow, white electricity flashing over Shivling, breathing in moments of adrenaline too numerous to recall.
At the top of the gully we hacked out an ice cave in a peculiar spherical sérac that we named the hanging globe of pleasure. Noel couldn’t make it that far because of his ‘bad altitude problem’, so he started drawing up plans for the LAMC – the Low-Altitude Mountaineering Club.
One night we talked of the past. I first met Philip in Patagonia when Noel and I were attempting the Central Tower of Paine with Sean Smith and Simon Yates. He was working, like others all over the world, just to finance more climbs. A collector of experiences rather than of things. But I guess the experiences collect themselves.
A sponsor said to me recently, “Isn’t it about time you lucked out and got up something.” You try your hardest, but topping out matters even less than the amount of experiences you gain. Phil had already climbed twenty big Bolivian peaks and on his days off work he climbed the North Tower of Paine and La Aleta de Tiburon which, coincidentally, translates as the Shark’s Fin. We teamed up for some intense free ascents. Intense for the speed with which we had to climb and walk to complete each route in a day. How easy it would be to miss the climbing partner who complements your mood and skill so well. With this man there was no argument, no indecision, only laughter and swift movement.
I was fit then but I found it hard and challenging to keep pace with Philip. He loved to read Tilman. He was his hero and, like Tilman, he was hard on himself, as his uncle said, “allowing no room for mediocrity”. Later Philip made an outrageous climb, Una Fina Linea de Locura, to the right of the South African dièdre on the Central Tower of Paine and a new route on the Painetta. He then went on a very adventurous winter trip to the Cordillera Sarmiento where he made the first ascent of the Fickle Finger of Fate at the head of the Fjord of the Mountains. With such strength, five languages and a law degree he became affectionately known to the Meru team as the Robot and every time he went to his tent we pictured him recharging his nuclear battery pack.
On the morning of our eighth day of upward movement on the Meru Shark’s Fin, Johnny accidentally dropped his plastic boot whilst trying to get it on his foot. With the sight of a falling boot fell the vision of a summit ridge. Phil gave Johnny a hug and rigged up the rappel anchors. There was no place for anger over a dream which was misplaced in the night. Destiny can’t be side-stepped.
An image flits by of the big man carrying two enormous haul-bags full of kit back towards our advance camp, whilst Johnny and I struggled behind with one rucksack each.
Back at camp, knackered: “Hey, Phil, I think we need to get straight back on this next season.”
“Count me in.”
Then he went off and soloed Bhagirathi 2 in less than twenty-four hours, camp to camp. Camp was about seven miles from the start of the route.
Who knows what the future would have witnessed. With him other climbers’ dreams are lost. Dreams of repeating more Lloyd routes. There have been others in climbing’s short history; John Hoyland fell in the Alps in 1934 at the age of nineteen and he had made some of the most audacious leads of the time on Cloggy and Glyder Fach. His peers waited to see what he’d do next but, like Phil, he never had the opportunity to face his limitations.
The team, as others, will always carry his inspiration and I will hold on to some of the stoic and perhaps sometimes dangerous refusal to be budged into retreat which only developed, for me, in our partnership.
Philip lost his life in December 1993 when a rappel anchor pulled as he retreated from the Towers of Paine in a storm.
He knew Paine.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ACCIDENTAL HERO
– SILVO KARO
I’ve never really had a climbing hero. There’s people I’ve respected, people I’ve thought crazy. There are people who’ve fired me up with their actions and I’ve wanted to emulate them. And then there’s the odd climber from deepest history who perhaps I’ve credited with being slightly more superhuman than they really were. But there’s no one great name for whom I’ve actually felt a nervousness about meeting. No one whose image (the image I have created) has elevated them above the other great climbers so that they have become ‘obviously’ invincible and their feats, their legacies almost divine. Well perhaps there was just one …
In September ’96 Johnny Dawes and I waded around below a huge Himalayan wall, well out of our depth. Rocks whirred and whistled through the air like helicopters and bombs. Neither of us had been mountaineering before but we had come to try the unclimbed West Face – thud – of Bhagirathi 3. A rock impacted the slope nearby and vanished into the soft snow. The rubble was falling from the shale cap of the mountain a thousand metres above and the barrage increased as the sun swung around the sky to edge onto the wall. Pathetic little mites with a gigantic monster looming over them. Just as we had decided that our objective was inconceivable the whirr of one spinning lump of shale grew much louder than the others and I was smashed down the slope. Johnny helped me get back down to camp with a knackered arm and we both agreed a wall like that would be sheer suicide.
When we returned to Delhi we found the report of a Slovene pair who had just climbed the wall seven days before we had arrived. Straight up the centre, no fixed ropes – straight up the shale for God’s sake. These people weren’t like us. They must live at a different level of commitment, their skill must be complete mastery and, God, they must be single-minded. Silvo Karo. Janez Jeglic. Who were they? Since then the names have always jumped out at me from the pages of journals and magazines. Hazy black and whites of Cerro Torre in old copies of Mountain, dark figures grimacing out from the walls. That was them. As I researched my own Patagonian trips, I discovered that their names were synonymous with that wild place. Jim Bridwell wrote that the South Face of the Torre was the hardest ascent ever made in Patagonia, a place where I soon learned you can just about substitute the word epic for the word ascent. As you wander around the
Fitz-Roy massif, Karo’s routes stand out. The biggest lines on the biggest peaks. If, like me, you had read up on the place those routes dominate your view. The local experts, the annual big wall pilgrims from around the world, talk of his routes with a hint of humour, they are so audacious. Two of the routes, Devil’s Dièdre on Fitz and Directissime de l’Enfer on Cerro Torre, are typified by great objective danger and are sometimes independently known as “that flushing Slovene death couloir”.
In ’93, whilst I was attempting a new route on the East Face of the Torre, we watched the avalanches and rocks roar down the corner line of his route every day. This just served to reinforce my image of this man’s invincibility even more. I mean was he constantly dodging the rocks for weeks on end or were they bouncing off him? His name became a kind of joke to me and my friends. If it was too scary we’d “leave this one for Silvo Karo”. Or if we saw a huge tottering pile of shale we’d say, “Look, there’s a Silvo Karo route.” His Eastern European origin added somewhat to the mystique, as here in Britain we have all too often lumped the Poles, Czechs, Russians, Hungarians and Yugoslavs together as another world of crazy climbers with no sense of self-preservation. I have even heard climbers bemoan the Eastern European bravery and try to demean their achievements: “How can we compete with psychos?” or “They only go for it so much because of the rewards they can reap off the state if they are successful.” This attitude stems from deep-seated ignorance and is why even now many Eastern Europeans, even if they are doing the most important ascents in the world, receive hardly any financial help from the big companies. But somewhere out there was a man who beyond the mystique was only human, someone who took his craft very seriously. I wondered would I ever meet him.
The phone rang. He was here in Scotland and apparently interested in climbing with me. I began to feel nervous. Me and my friends laughed uneasily. What would he be like? Would his shoulders fit through the door? His hands must be like shovels. Imagine getting into a fight with him! I drove at night through the snow to where he was staying. On my way over a deserted moor I came upon an upturned car with its lamps on. This was turning into a surreal evening. Bricking it, I shone my torch through the window expecting to see a blood-spattered corpse. There was nothing. Phew! Then I began to have the ridiculous idea that perhaps these kind of events surround this man’s life. Like climbing those couloirs, perhaps he saunters through his life while chaos reigns around him.
I pulled up at a remote house and knocked. I wiped my palm and prepared to meet a legend. I was led through to a room where a short well built man was sitting on the sofa. He rose and we shook hands. Just as I expected this hurt. “Hello. I am Silvo.” He spoke like Dracula and seemed quite edgy. Without any further pleasantries we got down to talking of the big walls we had climbed in far off places. I felt like I had nothing to offer and everything to learn but due to his modest disposition I became less starstruck as the night ran late. I asked him how he had first come to go to Patagonia. He spoke slowly and with difficulty.
“We always went to Italy to buy shoes. Under Tito we could not get these things in our country. There I saw a poster of FitzRoy and I thought this was a most beautiful mountain. In November of ’96 I went with my friends, Franček Knez and Janez Jeglic, and we make a very hard new route, mixed. It was from the summit that we saw Cerro Torre.”
I had seen the Devil’s Dièdre, the flushing couloir. It still hasn’t had a repeat.
“We climbed in poor equipment and very bad clothes,” he continued. Up until recently Silvo had made do with fur hats, stripy Eastern block tracksuits and ‘Russian Gore-tex’ (nylon).
That night we debated long over the Maestri affair. Silvo knew every shred of evidence for and against Maestri’s claim to the first ascent of Cerro Torre. The debate was obviously one of his favourite cerebral pastimes, yet he wouldn’t commit his opinion. I detected a dubious smirk though.
We arose at dawn to a puncture on my old motor. Silvo quickly replaced it with the bald spare and for the rest of my Scottish winter I never found a garage who could take it off to put a new one back on, so tightly did he screw the nuts up. After that his finger-strength became instantly legendary within the team. And so it was off to the Cairngorms, passing the wrecked car en route.
Below the Shelterstone we roped up and set off. Though feeling under pressure to perform, my pitch went OK, dot-to-dotting up clumps of turf on a protectionless slab. Silvo lead through, moving fast and determinedly. I watched closely to see what I could learn from his movements. At first I was almost disappointed to see him thrashing and using his tools so heavily but then it made me glad. Yes, he was ‘only’ human after all. Perhaps we could all aspire to these things … A hundred feet above me, with no gear in, he’s out of sight. A barrage of junk snow falls on me and I hear a muffled cry. I brace myself on the belay and one of the two pieces I am on pops. I scramble back onto the stance. No falling body appears above me, so I frantically begin rebuilding the belay whilst those preconceptions begin to creep back into my mind. Maybe he is an Eastern European psycho after all … But the rope continues to run out steadily and I follow him up a pitch of hideously rotten snow. “Good lead, Silvo. Bad conditions, very Scottish.” We moved together up the last hundred metres of our climb and clambered onto the flat summit. It was a rare, perfect day and there where people, scurrying dots, all around below us in the fresh snow, making the most of the sunshine. We smiled and shook hands.
“Our first climb. But perhaps not our last.”
No way. Did I hear right? Does that mean that the great man might want to do a proper route with me one day? I could hardly contain myself as we sat and admired the view. I pestered him with questions about his life and his culture. I began to piece together a life story from his stilted English learned from base camps around the world.
Silvo was born in 1960 on a little farm near the town of Domzale, the second of four children. He grew up happily, working hard, caring for the animals and getting the crops in. “A hard worker will always make a good climber,” he had said. His family lived in the mountains, so it was only natural for him to walk and scramble amongst them. He then went on to join the climbing club and begin the courses. I learned that the main work of the clubs under the communists was to take novice youths and train them to become mountaineers. In turn, they would train other novices. He progressed rapidly until, at nineteen, national service stole one and a half years from him. He hated the army and longed to be free to get back to the Julian Alps which he loved. Silvo then talked of his friends, his companions on some of the most treacherous walls in the world … Whilst in hospital recovering from a broken leg received during a military exercise, he looked out of the window and saw a man climbing on the stone wall of the building. Back and forth he went repeating the same moves over and again. Silvo befriended him and credits the slightly older Franček Knez with being the first Slovene to train and climb really hard moves. A little later a young Janez Jeglic joined the club and the trio made a tight group, climbing the hardest routes of the day in the Julian Alps. All their climbs were made with the pitons and wooden wedges all other Slovene climbers were using in the early eighties.
In 1981 the team visited America on an exchange. It was an exhilarating time. They used nuts and Friends for the first time. They saw just what was possible and had a chance to compare their ability, which was considerable. They were soon racing up the hardest routes on Devil’s Tower, Eldorado Canyon and the Needles of South Dakota, making new climbs and first free ascents. On return to their home Silvo, Franček and Janez turned their attention to Triglav, the highest point in their country. On consecutive weekends they made three new winter ascents on the 800-metre North Face, Silvo returning to his mechanics job in the factory mid-week.
“And then it was to FitzRoy, our first expedition.”
We waded over the Cairngorm plateau and out of the mist appeared Sneachda. It was quite late in the day but I thought we could squeeze another route in.
“What are all these people doing?” Silvo chuckled and began snapping photos. “They will laugh in Slovenia when they see this.”
“But this is the most popular crag in Scotland,” I replied feeling protective.
“Why do they not wait for the snow to go from the rock before climbing?”
“It’s the Scottish speciality. Mixed climbing. Don’t you have cliffs like this in your home country?”
“Yes we have … But we do not climb on them. Let us go and drink coffee.”
Fair enough, I thought. Must seem pretty tame after the East Face of Torre Egger.
These climbers were bringing new levels of difficulty to Slovenia now, making routes that were unimaginable with only pitons or without the new found strength reaped from dedicated training, but Silvo was taking more and more time off from his factory job. This was frowned upon but, unlike other communist regimes, Tito’s government wasn’t nearly so oppressive. In 1985, after an attempt on Kangchenjunga with a giant Yugoslavian expedition, on which Tomo Cesen topped out and Borut Bergant disappeared, Silvo decided he needed to take a year off to fulfil his climbing goals. He found his small-scale trip to Patagonia had suited him much more than the enormous machine of the Kangchenjunga expedition.
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