by Clint Willis
The rope now ran from Chris down through each protection point, all the way to Hamish at the start of the pitch. Hamish had passed the rope around his waist. He fed out slack as Chris moved higher; he would hold the rope if Chris fell. The length of the fall would depend upon how far Chris had climbed past his most recent protection; assuming his gear held, he would fall roughly twice that distance.
The climbing here was difficult. Chris was forced to resort to artificial techniques; he tied long slings to wedges and stood on the slings to gain height. That’s what he was doing when one of the wedges came out.
He hurtled through sky, utterly disoriented, and then stopped. He was intensely relieved—his lower wedge had held—but dimly aware of a mindless, a physical, disappointment, as if his body had wished to keep falling. He dangled upside down over the glacier. The rope had twisted itself around an ankle and his foot went numb for a moment.
He wrangled himself back onto the rock and climbed again to his high point. He continued past an overhang to finish the pitch, but the next overhang looked harder still. Worse, the weather was turning. The clouds moving toward the climbers looked threatening enough to deter even Hamish, who suggested that it was time to go down.
They moved left and descended easy rock for a time. It brought them to the top of a steep gully. They prepared a rappel, placing a piton for an anchor and feeding their rope through the eye of the piton until they reached the rope’s midpoint. Hamish tossed the ends of the rope into the gully. Chris straddled the doubled rope and reached back with his right hand to bring the rope up across his chest and over his left shoulder so that it ran down his back. He took the rope in his right hand—his brake hand—and backed down into the gully’s invisible depths.
Once in the gully, they couldn’t climb out. The walls were too steep. They could not climb down, either; they could only rappel. This meant they must find sites for rappel anchors every 80 feet or so. Otherwise they would be stuck, and they would freeze to death. Dying wouldn’t take long; as the day progressed, the gully was turning into a sort of vertical riverbed for a torrent of melted snow.
Hamish rappelled one rope-length to a tiny stance, where he placed a single piton as an anchor. Chris followed him. Both men were wet to the skin. They moved quickly, both reaching to pull on one end of the doubled rope to bring it down for the next rappel. The rope wouldn’t budge; it was stuck somewhere over their heads.
A stuck rappel rope is a mountaineer’s nightmare. A stuck rappel rope in an alpine waterfall is worse. Hamish tried to climb a slab in the torrent to retrieve the rope, and failed; it was too slippery—a fall here would be fatal. Chris tried, and sheer desperation got him up the slab and out of the main flow of meltwater. He still couldn’t free the rope, but now he could think. He stood shaking with cold and anxiety, and realized that he’d have to climb the rope itself.
He wrapped two bits of cord around the doubled rope, using prusik knots. The prusik when weighted will grip a rope, but otherwise will slide easily up it. Chris clipped himself to both knots and then—shifting his weight from one prusik to the other, each time sliding the unweighted knot a bit higher—climbed the rope to the point where it was wedged. He quickly freed it, and carefully climbed back down to Hamish.
The climbers set up one last rappel, past a bulge of rock. The doubled rope didn’t reach the ground; it dangled over the jaws of an enormous bergschrund—a yawning crevasse between the base of the route and the snowfield that lay below. They would have to cross the crevasse somehow. They considered the problem for a moment and concluded that they would have to use the rope to swing across—a sort of Tarzan maneuver—and hope to clear the gap.
Chris balked. He imagined letting go of the rope at the wrong instant, and falling forever into the black, frigid depths of the glacier. Hamish went first, and managed to land on the crumbling edge of the snowfield and maintain his balance. Chris was now even more afraid but he rummaged and came up with what felt like the ghost of a memory—it might have been an old dream—of himself pursued, in flight. He gathered himself and leaped.
He landed well clear of the gap and fell forward into the snow, skidding downhill, scattering chips of half-melted ice so that bits of it got into his eyes. He picked himself up. Hamish was already moving and Chris followed as quickly as he could, feeling suddenly light, almost weightless; he wondered for a moment if he had somehow left his rucksack on the other side of the bergschrund. The bedraggled pair walked downhill for what seemed a long time and at last came to the hut where they had spent the previous night. The caretaker was a young woman; she had made much of the two young climbers—in particular, Hamish.
They were too ashamed to face her. They carried on past the shelter as daylight faded, picking their soaking-wet way down to the empty shepherd’s hut they’d occupied for the season; the hut was at Montenvers, still 3,000 feet above Chamonix. They shivered as they walked; the mouths of crevasses loomed beneath them in the shadowed glacier. Chris’s weariness now rose in him like night itself, a deep and inexorable tide so that moving even downhill was like trying to run in deep snow. He walked stiffly, almost staggering; once his knees gave way under the weight of his rucksack, and he collapsed in a momentary heap. He noted from time to time that he was horribly thirsty.
He didn’t mind any of it—the shame, the weariness, the thirst. He could barely make them out. He was listening, enthralled, to the high-pitched buzzing of his happiness, to the joy that fairly sang in his bones.
THE TWO YOUNG climbers had met almost six years earlier, when Chris hitchhiked up from London for a taste of Scotland’s famous winter climbing. He’d come across Hamish and several of the Scotsman’s mates at a climbers’ hut. Chris was eighteen. He had quit school after failing an examination, and was awaiting his call-up papers from the Air Force.
Hamish was a different story; at twenty-two, he already cut a figure in British mountaineering circles. Like other young climbers of the day—in particular Scottish ones—he was a troublemaker. He’d done his national service in Austria, climbing in the Alps and learning to use pitons for aid: hammering pegs into the rock and clipping slings to them; standing in the slings to reach up and hammer another peg in. He had brought the technique home to Scotland, where he pegged his way up difficult climbs over the objections of traditionalists, who thought such devices were a form of cheating. Their complaints—they dubbed the young man Hamish MacPiton—served mainly to encourage him.
He often plucked his partners from the ranks of newcomers to the climbing scene. Such innocents didn’t yet know better than to accept his invitations, which typically involved them in some absurdly ambitious and perilous venture. Hamish would adopt a wistful manner; he would gaze stoically into the middle distance and speak as if to himself, describing some soul-destroying route as a plum, a real beauty; it’s nothing too hard, really, barely worth the bother, but still . . .
Hamish saw the young Chris Bonington as a potential recruit. The other Scots drinking tea in the climbing hut that day in the winter of 1952 regarded the English boy in quite another light—as an object of mild contempt. They were part of climbing’s emerging elite, a club-centered culture composed largely of working class lads who were terrible snobs; they despised any climber with a new pair of boots, let alone an expensive education. They certainly weren’t inclined to befriend this young Englishman with his rosy cheeks and his upper-class accent; as one climber remarked, the poor lad looked like he’d been raised in a fucking doll’s house.
In fact, he’d grown up in boarding schools, and with women. His father had left when Chris was an infant. His mother and his maternal grandmother fought over the boy after that; between schools, he lived with one or the other, depending upon his mother’s mental state. He’d emerged from those difficulties as the sort of earnest and self-absorbed young person, slightly fussy, who sometimes gets himself disliked.
He seemed vulnerable—even a bit fearful—but he was a bold climber. He was self-conscious and a
mbitious; he carried in his head a picture of himself and he wished to live up to it. He wanted to be accomplished and he wanted to behave well. He wanted his way, and he wanted to be liked—admired—by men he respected. The complexity of his agenda set him apart and made him hard to understand.
He had discovered climbing almost by accident. He was already sixteen when he traveled to Ireland to visit his paternal grandfather near Dublin for two weeks. The old man had run off to sea as a boy and had seen the world, finishing his career working with Aborigines as a member of the British forestry service. Chris’s journey to Ireland offered the teenager a glimpse of the mountains that lined the Welsh coast. He stopped on his way home to visit an aunt who happened to own a book of mountain photographs, and the pictures of Great Britain’s various ranges impressed the boy deeply. He returned to school that fall and talked a friend into hitchhiking to Wales that Christmas. The two of them floundered around in the snow on Snowdon, eventually triggering an avalanche that might easily have carried them both off a cliff.
Chris found it all enthralling—the danger, the weather, the mountains themselves. He convinced a family friend to take him rock climbing near London. Chris loved that as well. Something—an interior buoyance as mysterious as gravity itself—rose up in him when he climbed.
He was soon seeking out more serious partners for harder climbs. He was still a teenager, and he had a talent for playing the protégé, finding and enlisting mentors who could teach him what he needed to know. Chris by the time he met Hamish MacInnes was a climber of sorts, one well-suited to the Scotsman’s purposes: eager and talented, surprisingly bold but still willing to let the more experienced man take the lead.
The two young men roped up together for the first time a week or so after their initial meeting. The climb was a terrifying experience for Chris—the first of many he was to endure under his new mentor. Hamish had a frightening enthusiasm for new and difficult routes, and he often climbed long distances without placing protection. He had impressive powers of endurance, and seemed impervious to cold. Chris on one occasion that winter followed his new friend up a gully, emerging soaked from a torrent of melting snow. Hamish, holding the rope, stood in the snow in his socks; he’d taken his boots off to climb a difficult bit of iced-over rock. Chris, through chattering teeth, asked Hamish if his feet weren’t cold.
No, replied Hamish. I can’t feel them.
They made several climbs that first winter in Scotland. Chris left to report for his military service with the Air Force. He spent roughly a year with the RAF, including a stint at the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, during the autumn of 1953. His Air Force experience ended in disappointment when he washed out of pilot training the following spring. He had terrible trouble trying to land the plane; strangely enough, he couldn’t tell how far away the ground was.
He transferred to the army. The transition period left him free to spend the summer in Wales, where he climbed a series of increasingly difficult rock routes. He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in the fall of 1954. He had always had an interest in military games and history, and he liked Sandhurst. He polished his accent and bought a bowler hat and umbrella for trips to London. He also became a leading figure in the Sandhurst Mountaineering Club. He put up new routes in the Avon Gorge in Bristol—a 200-mile round trip from school—and made more trips to Wales. He was becoming a fluent climber; he would take his time to sort out a route, and then climb it with a minimum of fuss. He wasn’t what you’d call a rock athlete, but he was very smooth.
He finished the eighteen-month Sandhurst course in early 1956, and the army sent him to Germany to take command of a troop of tanks. He made his first foray to the Alps in the summer of 1957. The idea—Hamish’s, of course—was to climb the North Face of the Eiger, a 6,000-foot wall of crumbling black rock, punctuated by huge, steep fields of ice and snow; by most accounts, it was the most dangerous climb in Europe.
Chris was vastly relieved when the weather turned bad low on the route, forcing Hamish to admit defeat. Hamish had other wild ideas, though. For starters, he wanted Chris to join him on the almost equally daunting Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses. Bad weather again came to the rescue; the Walker remained plastered with fresh snow. The two friends waited three days at their campsite before snatching the first ascent of a minor route, a rock buttress some 1,500 feet high. The descent, unroped, frightened Chris; still, he had completed his first route in the Alps. He returned to his tank troop the next day, glad to have escaped his first alpine adventure with his life.
And now, a year later, he was back for his second alpine season. He’d met Hamish in Chamonix in early July. The two of them had immediately moved up to occupy their rickety but rent-free shepherd’s hut at Montenvers. Chris was growing tired of army life after another winter of training and military routine. Hamish was lean and tan; he’d spent part of the winter searching for the Yeti in India’s Valley of the Gods.
The two climbers were utterly broke, living mainly on stolen tank rations and figs—and once again, Chris was in fear of his life. The failure on the Pointe de Lépiney—with its hideous overhangs and near-fatal waterfall gully—had been only the start of their season. Their horrifying epic had been a warm-up, a mere exercise.
Hamish had big plans.
2
CHRIS WAS LEARNING that memories of the fear and discomfort endured on a difficult climb fade quickly. Each climb was a blur of intensity that he carried until the colors died away to leave a picture like a Japanese wall hanging; the picture carried an abstract beauty that made him long for the real thing.
He wanted to climb. A greed for it grew in him when he was away from the mountains. Chris and also Hamish were riding this particular kind of momentum, beginning to live in it like addicts. Their clothes were still wet from their epic on the Pointe de Lépiney when Hamish announced his intention to try another first ascent. This time, he had his eye on a 2,000-foot wall of ice known as The Shroud.
Chris, suffering from a nasty head cold, declared that he would not participate in such madness. The climbers spent three rainy days more or less happily debating the issue. They eventually reached an agreement: Chris would climb anything—if someone else had climbed it before. Hamish saw his opening and at once proposed the formidable Southwest Pillar of the Dru, known to climbers as the Bonatti Pillar.
Like many of his ideas, this one was ridiculous. The Bonatti Pillar was a 3,000-foot spur of sheer granite: the hardest rock climb in the entire Mont Blanc Massif, the center of world mountaineering for almost a century. The massif is a complex of stupendously beautiful peaks, glaciers and sheer rock outcroppings where France, Italy and Switzerland converge; it culminates at the summit of Mont Blanc itself (4,807 meters; 15,771 feet).
The great Italian climber Walter Bonatti had made the first ascent of the pillar just three years earlier, in 1955. He had climbed the route alone, relying on a cumbersome belay system that often offered little or no protection from a fall. Other climbers had rightly hailed his ascent as one of the great achievements in mountaineering history. The Bonatti Pillar had seen four subsequent ascents by strong parties, but several groups had been forced to retreat—and no British climber had yet done the route.
It was perfect.
IN TRUTH, BRITISH climbers during the first half of the century had fallen behind their counterparts on the Continent. The British obsession with Everest was largely to blame. Great Britain had sent a series of official and unofficial expeditions to the mountain over a period of thirty-two years, beginning in 1921 and culminating in the first ascent of Everest in 1953. The quest for Everest had been an overriding mission—and an enormous distraction—for Britain’s strongest mountaineers, drawn from the upper ranks of their class-bound society.
Their attempts on Everest had been very serious affairs, due to the mountain’s remote position, powerful winds and extremely high altitude. The early climbers on Everest had all they could do merely to survive the frigid winds and t
hin air above 20,000 feet. The British expeditions took on the shape and aura of military campaigns, laying siege to the mountain. That suited a generation of privileged climbers often drawn from the military itself—men accustomed to giving and taking orders.
A typical expedition would establish a well-stocked base camp at the bottom of the route. The climbers—supported by scores or even hundreds of porters—would spend weeks or months ferrying supplies to a series of higher camps. The top camp would serve as a launching pad for one or more attempts on the summit. Ultimately, success or failure boiled down to logistics. The actual climbing—most of it, anyway—consisted of low angle snow slopes and rock slabs that would have been considered easy ground in the Alps.
Mountaineering meanwhile became a popular sport on the European Continent, where millions of young students and workers—Austrian, French, Italian, German—lived within easy reach of the Alps. The range provided challenges and opportunities very different from those the British found on Everest. The Alps’ major peaks (the Matterhorn was the most famous) had all been climbed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, mostly by well-off British adventurers, who enlisted local guides to help them find the easiest routes to various summits. But the young continental Europeans who escaped to the Alps after the nightmare of World War I brought a new intensity to the sport of mountaineering. They pioneered more difficult routes, often targeting subsidiary pinnacles, ridges or buttresses that posed extreme difficulties. The new generation developed new techniques and better gear to meet those challenges; they also took greater risks.
The British climbing establishment—epitomized by the stuffy Alpine Club, founded in 1857—held itself aloof from such practices. But a small vanguard of British climbers, mostly drawn from the working and middle classes, eventually began to develop the sport of extreme rock climbing on crags in Wales and England; they also explored the more difficult ice and snow gullies in Scotland’s mountains. Most of these climbers—who eventually included young men like Chris Bonington and Hamish MacInnes—were a far cry from the Oxbridge elite who had gone to Everest. The new generation had grown up in a Great Britain where class identity was losing some of its power to define a man’s career or social position. They brought their personalities and their ambitions on their climbs, and carried a very different set of experiences.