‘Right lads, what are you two going to climb this year?’ asked Kenton, as Ian and I sat on his settee drinking tea. Straightaway, I was on my guard, anxious he would shoot down any plans we had with his clear, alpine-god rationality.
‘Not sure,’ said Ian, looking at me. ‘Don’t really have any plans, do we?’
‘Well, I hope you’re going to be a bit faster this time, and not drop all your gear,’ said Kenton, laughing.
‘We’ll try not to,’ I said.
‘Also, try and do a proper winter route, not a bleeding rock climb,’ he went on. ‘Anyway, conditions are rubbish at the moment.’ he said. It was the same tale I heard every year.
‘If this was Scotland you’d think it was amazing,’ I replied. ‘Just because it’s the Alps everyone sits around waiting for the conditions of the century.’
‘Well mate, this isn’t Scotland.’
‘We might try Omega on the Petites Jorasses,’ Ian interrupted, always the peacemaker.
‘Cartwright won’t be happy if you two rock up and climb his route. He’s had his eye on that for a long time.’
We knew Jules Cartwright was interested in this ephemeral route, a slender ribbon of ice firing up the barrel-shaped buttress of the Petites Jorasess, and that it was still awaiting a second ascent.
‘He’ll have to pull his finger out then, stop skiing and go climbing. Everyone’s going soft with this skiing lark, it’ll be the death of British alpinism,’ I said, sounding pompous.
‘You should try it mate,’ said Kenton.
‘I don’t have time for fun’ I replied grumpily. And it was true.
The following morning we slowly made our way up to the West Face of the Aiguille du Plan, towards a route called Sylchris, a seldom climbed line up a deep gully first done in 1985. It was meant to be a warm-up for Omega, but that was the only thing warm about it, the temperature plunging off the scale as cold winds blew down from Siberia.
The face was complex, seamed with spurs and couloirs and seven hundred metres high. We were hoping to bivy at the bottom and climb it in two days, or less, since the bitter temperatures weren’t conducive to a good night’s sleep.
‘What an awesome spot,’ said Ian as he broke trail, the face opening up in front of us, able to look over at the vast North Face of the Aiguille du Midi to our right, looking across at the Frendo Spur, a steep ridge, dark and towering, over a kilometre high, the place where it had begun for me. It was my first alpine route, climbed in the winter of 1996, a grim battle where everything went wrong. Yet we got up it, although my partner Aaron quit alpine climbing on reaching the top. Not me. That battle, both physical and psychological, had got me hooked. I guess it was a traumatic birth for an alpinist, and it soon became the norm, each route chasing that feeling of being on the edge between success and failure, life and death. There is no beauty or pleasure or fun, just struggle and fear and anxiety. I was addicted to cold war.
Looking up at the Frendo as we climbed I wondered where I would be now if I’d failed up there. I’d been lucky. Most of my trips had been fruitful, if only due to sheer force of will and desperation. How long could you go on if every trip was a failure? How long till you cut your losses and took up golf?
We reached the bergschrund, climbed down into it and fashioned a place to sleep, the temperature too cold to sleep outside its shelter.
Just above us I could see the route Le Fil à Plomb, a ribbon of ice with the crux up high, a vertical smear about forty metres high. I’d soloed it in 1997 and looking up at its exposed vertical crux, I wondered just what I’d been thinking to do such a thing. What had my mental state been like? I knew the answer. Someone had asked me the day before, after I’d failed on yet another climb, ‘Why don’t you do easier routes?’ Those words, his lack of faith, got me up the route. Gazing up, linking those thin veins of ice, remembering hooking up ice only an inch thick, I envied that carelessness of youth. Soloing that route had been an advance in my self-belief, making me feel for the first time like I really could be a good alpine climber, that I had the guts, and not just the ambition, that I was able to risk it all. In that route I saw my potential. I had tested my courage. Two days later I soloed the thousand-metre high North Face of Les Droites in six hours, a premier league solo. I know now that I didn’t really care if I’d died up there. I guess not caring is what it’s all about.
‘Coming in?’ asked Ian, crawling into the hole we’d dug.
I crawled after him, dragging my rucksack, and we made ourselves at home, putting on the stove for a brew, pulling out our sleeping bags and mats.
‘Sleeping in snow holes seems to becoming a regular thing,’ I said as I scraped off any lumps and bumps in the roof, knowing that they would create drip points once the temperature rose.
‘I think I’ve gone off sleeping outside in the cold,’ replied Ian. ‘I think maybe I’m getting old.’
‘No, I think we’re just going soft,’ I said, having also noticed both of us had much heavier sleeping bags, and lots more warm clothes than in the past.
‘Do you think we’re the only people daft enough to be climbing right now?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then I guess we’re not totally sensible yet.’
The alarm beeped at six, quite a late wake-up call, but then we were on our holidays, and the route started pretty much at our door. Ian put on a huge down jacket, and I wore every stitch I had as we picked our way up a series of short technical steps, gaining height until at dawn we reached a deep wide chimney, the crux of the route.
Ian led up a corner with just enough ice in it, carefully planting his front points and hooking with his axes for balance, finding a peg halfway up.
I followed then led on up to the crux of the route, a kind of open elevator shaft that soared up between granite buttresses. Jules Cartwright seemed to keep reappearing on this trip. He’d soloed Sylchris a few years before but the route had come at a cost, his toes suffering frostbite. I could imagine Jules not paying any heed to his poor toes as they froze, always a climber who made no compromises, showed no weakness.
I’d met him on the day he reached the summit, slowly hobbling up towards the Aiguille du Midi cable car at the top of the face, looking exhausted and obviously glad to be in one piece with the end in sight. It was the one and only time I’d seen him struggling. Now, at the base of the crux, I could see it was a tough solo, and recognised his boldness.
Climbing up the chimney, my way was blocked by a car-sized blob of hard-packed snow, formed by the wind and probably weighing a ton or more. I moved up until I was below it, banging my helmet against its mass to check it was solid. It was. There was no way round, so I’d have to go through it.
‘Ian,’ I shouted, ‘there’s a bloody massive snow mushroom up here. I’ll try to dig through it’.
‘Be careful,’ he called back, both of us aware that although appearing harmless, these blobs of snow had killed many climbers when they fell. Ian had several ribs broken by one several years before in Alaska.
I took off my sack and hung it from a nut, then started digging, chopping away lumps until I made a space and inched, snow showering down on me, sticking to my face. I soon became chilled in the mushroom’s shadow.
Hack hack hack.
Inch up.
Hack hack hack.
The snow was dense, like ice cream, hard and heavy, a block only as big as a football enough to brain you. This blob was vast and if it fell would crush me, squeeze the life out of me.
Hack hack hack.
Inch up.
Hack hack hack.
The more I chopped the more I sensed how dangerous it was, that something this unstable would be more unstable when I hit it with an ice axe. It felt like defusing an atom bomb with a hammer.
Hack hack hack.
I heard Ella crying.
I knew it was all in my mind and tried to ignore her, sensing the hallucination was triggered by fear, and that it was irrational.
I could still hear her but I kept on digging, knowing the sound and how it made me feel was simply an expression of weakness, some part of me trying to gain leverage to force me to back off.
‘Daddy.’ It was Ella at the airport, repeated over and over again. I swung my axe less energetically. ‘Daddy!’
I remembered my promise: ‘I’ll be back soon.’
I stopped digging.
I focused hard, forcing the memory away, until there was just the muffled sound of my breathing within this tomb of snow.
I lifted up my axe to hit the snow again but couldn’t.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ I whispered to myself, banging my head against the snow.
I climbed down a little way, still in the firing line, looking for something else, something safer. To the left there was a faint, hairline crack. Perhaps I could aid around the mushroom? Climbing up I placed a birdbeak, one of the tiny bits of aid gear I carried as a kind of ‘get out of that’ rack – two beaks, two hooks and two copperheads. I tapped it in with my axe. It seemed good. I could see that half a dozen placements would see me on top of the mushroom.
It would be thin.
I hesitated.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I shouted. But only once the words were said did I realise just what it was I couldn’t do. I knew I could do the climbing.
I knew I wanted too. Sort of.
I just couldn’t.
‘Okay,’ said Ian, down below and out of sight.
‘Maybe you want to have a go?’ I asked, thinking a man less attached to this world might do better.
‘It’s okay, I’m not that bothered,’ came the reply, a response no doubt inspired by standing around too long in the cold.
And so down we went, telling ourselves it was just a warm-up after all.
It snowed a few days later, and we hung around town, letting our psyche build again, drop by drop. I tried ringing home but couldn’t get through. I was almost glad I didn’t have to hear Ella’s voice.
One night we went out for a pizza with a group of superstar alpinists from Britain and the United States, the talk mostly about climbing and skiing, but mainly skiing. I ended up sat beside an American climber called Sue Nott, an up-and-coming star of world alpinism.
She had that look most good American climbers have, tanned, perfect, a proper athlete, serious and ambitious. She told me about future trips, each one booked in her calendar – Alaska, India, Yosemite, Canada – the list long and exciting, and no doubt never ending. She was a rock star, with a world climbing tour all planned out. Like Ian she was working to a plan, working towards some far-off goal, some alpine gold medal. She seemed well sponsored and supported, and much of the talk with the other sponsored climbers was about who was doing what, and how much ‘what’ was worth to their sponsors.
The big thing was to do a photo shoot for your sponsor’s catalogue and website. That made you harder to ignore. The climbers round the table needed cash to live the life of a full-time climber; its pursuit was as important as the climbing itself, just as it is for any top performer. If you wanted to be a pro, you had to act like one. I could see that even without money or the limelight these people would climb just the same, only on a shoestring like climbers of old, stealing, scrounging and pushing their luck in the valley just as they did in the hills. They’d do anything to keep climbing.
Sue’s eyes sparkled as she talked about Alaska, and as she talked I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a climbing girlfriend, to not have to worry about climbing as an issue. Maybe, like most things, it would be the other side of the same coin. Who could live with someone as bad as me? To know that fundamentally, and no matter how much they denied it, you were never really first in their thoughts, the person to come back to, to fill the times in between.
‘What are you up to next?’ she asked, her face bright and smiley, realising the conversation had all been about her.
‘Not sure,’ I said, feeling like a troll beside her. ‘I’ve got two kids, and it’s becoming hard to be away from them.’ She nodded as if she understood, but I knew she must have no idea, that I just sounded weak, my sentiment as good as a death sentence, something like: ‘I’ve got cancer, I don’t have long to live.’ I knew because I used to feel the same.
‘Would you like kids?’ I asked, the question unexpected, deviating as it did from climbing and training and skiing, a question that only a grown-up would ask.
‘One day,’ she said as she lifted her beer to her lips, her eyes moving away from mine, the conversation over.
Jules Cartwright came in, short and stocky, holding a large jug of beer, sitting down next to me. The beer was all for him. He eyed me up and down.
‘Why are you wasting your time on easy routes Kirkpatrick, you should be up on the Jorasses.’
I made some lame excuses, probably that we were warming up, thinking he must not know we were after Omega. Jules could be an intimidating character, with that public-school directness comprehensive kids like me lacked. ‘You need to pull your finger out and get to the proper mountains and stop fucking around, you’d do well in the Himalayas.’
I tried to tell him why not, that six weeks away was too much for my marriage to bear, but knew he’d just laugh at my feebleness.
‘Why are you married? It obviously makes you miserable. You should be like Ian,’ he said. Ian turned and smiled at both of us, as if to say he knew he was the topic of conversation.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, laughing off his directness, but knowing he was right. I was miserable. ‘I don’t let go easily,’ I said. ‘That’s why I get up hard routes sometimes. That’s why I’m still married’.
Jules didn’t reply, just lifted up his glass and waited for me to do the same. Then he made a toast: ‘To never letting go.’
It was a late night, but my heart wasn’t in it, all the talk of other people’s trips only making me feel down. I felt they all knew I was losing my edge, getting weak, but I’d show them all. They had no idea. If I was them – free of responsibility – I’d be the best climber in the world. I couldn’t know that within a few years half the people round the table would be dead.
The following morning we shuffled up to the Leschaux hut on borrowed skis, our minds set on climbing Omega on the Petites Jorasses, the frozen wall left of the Grandes Jorasses.
The hut was still a few hours from the base of the route, perched on a buttress of rock, and so we left our skis on the glacier and climbed up to it, a simple wooden box with a door at one end and filled with bunk beds.
Once inside, we found we were not alone. Two young eastern European climbers were already installed, sharpening their axes and looking focused and serious.
‘Hello,’ I said, stepping through the door.
They nodded, but remained silent.
‘Hi,’ said Ian, following behind me.
The same nods.
We put the kettle on the stove and asked if they fancied a cup of tea, miming drinking from a cup. They shook their heads and continued sorting their gear.
‘What route you climb?’ asked one.
‘Omega maybe, on the Petites Jorasses,’ I replied, both of their faces relaxing a little, no doubt finding we were not in competition for the same route, ‘- and you?’
‘We climb the Croz,’ he said, a classic route on the Grandes Jorasess. His tone – deep-voiced and matter-of-fact – made it sound like a one-way mission during wartime. ‘We leave at two in morning.’
‘That sounds nice,’ said Ian.
The tension was high in the little hut that night, but not with Ian and me. Watching the two young climbers, who turned out to be Slovenian, sort and resort their gear, reminded me of so many pre-climb nights of my own, that feeling of excitement and terror, the constant fussing and repacking the only way to take your mind off the climb. Getting up early had nothing to do with an early start. What else could you do when you know there is no way to sleep?
&
nbsp; This was no longer true for us. Our gear stayed in the sacks, and we flicked through old magazines and the visitors book, looking through it to find our own entries, and those of friends.
‘Fancy another brew before bed?’ asked Ian.
‘Not sure. I’ll be pissing like a Chinaman.’
Going outside just before bed to have a piss and check the weather, I noticed that it was getting warmer, and that the wind had got up, blowing snow around outside the hut, making me shiver at the thought that tomorrow we’d be sleeping on the face.
‘I am getting too old for this,’ I said out loud as I pissed over the edge into the darkness, then went back inside, making sure the big solid wooden door was pulled tight before going to bed.
I switched off the hut light and got into bed next to Ian, the two of us looking like Morecambe and Wise. It was still early so we lay in the dark talking.
‘Have you got any good hut stories?’ asked Ian, knowing I tended to have some stupid tale to tell about most things.
‘Paul Ramsden once told me a story about being in a hut one night, its bunks full to bursting, so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and how he’d heard a woman whisper in the quietest voice to her boyfriend, “Do you fancy a blowjob?”’
Ian giggled, and so did one of the Slovenians.
‘What happened?’ asked Ian.
‘Paul couldn’t help himself and whispered “Me next”, and then someone else said the same, and then the whole place erupted with laughter.’
There is no such thing as a lie-in when in a hut. When someone’s alarm goes off, everyone wakes up. You think it would be annoying, but instead there is the comfort of knowing that although awake you don’t have to get out of bed. And that makes you ungrumpy. So I lay in my bunk and listened to their whispers, the clunk of their boots, the stove being lit, water boiling, eating, drinking, until at last I heard them gearing up to go, the clink of gear on their harnesses, and the click of buckles being snapped together.
Cold Wars Page 13