The Next Horizon

by Chris Bonington

  ‘That’s the line,’ said Martin. ‘Up that undercut ramp to the left of the cave.’

  ‘It looks bloody hard,’ I replied. ‘Are you sure it’s possible?’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ll do it all right. I’d only just recovered from glandular fever when I tried it.’

  And so I found myself at the sharp end. I was well armed with a wide selection of nuts. We were still in the primitive nut era, when you simply scrounged a collection of nuts from the local garage and threaded them on a few slings. The smallest were Meccano-style nuts on thin bits of line that would barely have held a man’s deadweight, and the biggest were over an inch across and weighed a pound a time. The purists drilled out the threads, but I hadn’t bothered.

  I didn’t feel like leaving the ledge – the rock leaned back the wrong way; the holds seemed minute, tiny flakes, cracks that took a finger tip and no more; and after forty feet or so, a nasty little overhang jutted out at least a foot.

  ‘I’m bloody sure I won’t get up this. There’s nothing for protection.’

  ‘Course there is,’ replied Martin. ‘I got a good spike runner about six feet up – look, you can see it.’

  With a careful look I could – and it was minuscule, but at least it provided some kind of haven to head for. I balanced up gingerly, weight on fingertips slotted into horizontal cracks; a couple of moves and I’m at the spike; it’s just big enough to balance a thin line sling round. Another move and I manage to slot a small nut into one of the cracks. I begin to feel better. Even if I fall off, I shouldn’t hurt myself.

  My arms are beginning to ache, but the long disappointing season in the Alps is beginning to pay off. I am at least fit and mentally attuned to the rock. I am even beginning to enjoy myself; I stop threatening to turn back; edge my way from hold to hold, relaxed, wary, looking for possible runners. Forty feet up, and the base of the overhang, a perfect thread belay, just big enough for a piece of line. I untie the knot of a sling, using one hand and my teeth, push the end of the line into the crack and get out my wire threader to thrust and manipulate the nylon string behind a bulge in the crack – I’m like a safe-breaker, playing the tumblers of the safe in the Bank of England – total concentration – a touch of exhilaration. And the sling is through. More one-handed contortions to tie the knot – my other hand is getting tired. I’m safe again and happy – a master of the steep rock around me, master of my mind and muscles. I jam a hand in the crack beneath the overhang, place a foot in just the right place to give me leverage, and swing up, reach up; fingers play over the ledge above the roof, slot naturally on to a dimple in the rock – it’ll suffice – and I step up on to the ledge with ease, muscle and mind tensed, knowing it’s hard, yet everything slipping into place. This is the joy of climbing, the absolute freedom of mind and body, a short-bloomed euphoria that flowers in the process of climbing, and can be savoured while resting on the stances before another pitch, lasting through to the top of the climb and down to the pub that evening – the logical end to every Lakeland climbing day. And then next day, with the confrontation of work, of day-to-day problems, the euphoria fast vanishes and the climb is just one more incident docked up in the past. But still it has an importance, as a moment of total relaxation, of unspoilt joy, the repetition of the experience, a goal to seek for other days, till one day, when muscles will no longer respond to the command of mind, this precious euphoria might prove unattainable. I wonder what then?

  But I’m at the top of the overhang; a black groove beckons me on, and Martin shouts out from below:

  ‘How about belaying there, Chris?’

  He’s worried I’ll get the whole climb. Fair enough, after all the line was his concept, not mine. And so I hammer in a piton, slot in a couple of nuts and, half hanging off my belay, take the rope in. As Martin climbs up, I gaze down over the dark tops of pine trees, across Thirlmere, a twisted sword stabbing at the vitals of a Lakeland Valley. Not so many years ago there were no sombre pine trees; farmhouses nestled in the bed of the valley and a Lakeland road, narrow, between dry stone walls, wound across the valley bed. This has now been changed by the hands of man – the valley bottom was flooded, forests were planted on the slopes, and a new beauty has emerged, more sombre, brooding, but nevertheless with its own attraction. I can feel the heat of the sun on my face; feel the warm rock against my back; rub a little patch of dried moss into a powder and watch the specks of dust float down towards Martin, as he moves slowly, but oh so easily, up towards me.

  And then it’s his turn to go out in front. He tries the groove behind me but makes no progress, swings out on to the wall. It’s steep and flaky, with tiny spikes for finger- and toe-holds. Another few feet, he pauses, goes back a bit; most unlike Martin, but he’s still recovering from glandular fever. I’m bored, the rope begins to cut into my back and I think of pints of cool beer, the reward for victory.

  Martin seems to be struggling; a tension is transmitted down the rope. He’s standing in a sling balanced over a small flake; the flake breaks off, Martin slips, seizes a hold and somehow manages to remain hanging on to the rock; another struggle and he’s up. I quickly bring up Mike Thompson to join me, and then, in turn, we climb to the top of the crag.

  Pints of beer, jubilation at snatching a fine new route and talk of other possible lines. Mike is the great strategist. We’ve been climbing together for nearly twenty years, and on hard ground I have done most of the leading, but almost all the new routes we have done together have been Mike’s discoveries. In the same way that he quietly seeks out interesting old houses, he searches for new lines on the crags. That day he had seen another possible route, straight up the centre of the crag. We returned, just the two of us, a couple of days later, to complete a route which was slightly easier than the Medlar, but longer and with a more satisfying line, straight up the centre of the crag to the barrier of overhangs that guard the top.

  And so September slipped into October, a gently vanishing Indian summer that blended imperceptibly with the chill clouds of late autumn, and the start of a new lecture season – our sole source of income, £20 a time at luncheon clubs, lecture societies or mountaineering clubs. I hated the nomadic existence – the series of one-night stands, the driving, the filling in of time before another lecture, and, above all, the worry that I was getting nowhere. The carefree joy of a summer’s climbs vanished in the reality of making a day-to-day living.

  – CHAPTER SEVEN –

  HOGMANAY

  It is not always the mammoth successes or the major ascents that are the most memorable. Sometimes an epic failure – a combination of struggle with wind and storm, and the interaction with one’s companions – turns what could have been a very minor, low-key incident into one that will never be forgotten. This was the case over New Year, 1965. It started normally enough. We had been invited to see the New Year in with some friends just north of Glasgow, and were then going to meet Tom Patey on New Year’s Day, to get in some climbing. But I should have known better – things happened when Tom was around. Mary Stewart, our hostess on New Year’s Eve, also has this catalytic quality.

  Mary is a vet who lives in the most wonderfully chaotic house I have ever known, with her five children, dogs, other animals, and a succession of friends – often flotsam from the competitive society, who finally end up under the ever-open hospitality of her roof. The house is in the middle of a golf course outside Glasgow, was once a stable but now has a couple of big rooms and a kitchen downstairs and a warren of rooms upstairs.

  After graduating, Mary, an American by birth, came over to Scotland to do postgraduate work and had fallen in love with the hills and the country. She had taken up climbing and had married a member of the Glasgow Mountaineering Club. Unfortunately the marriage had not worked. Her husband was a solicitor, and Mary was a warm-hearted Bohemian with little interest in being a suburban housewife.

  Strongly built and wiry, with a hand grip as firm as a man’s, Mary would have been the perfect frontierswoman on a ra
nch at the edge of Indian territory in the Far West. Her hair is a rich copper, long and thick, and her face seems perpetually weather-beaten; but there is a rare warmth and kindness in her face that cancels out any danger of over-masculinity. I can always see her in my mind’s eye – barefooted, clad in a pair of old Levis and a simple sweater worn outside her trousers, ornamented by a big, broad, patterned belt.

  Wendy and I drove up to Scotland on New Year’s Eve, with Conrad, now one year old, asleep in the back of the van. The trip was starting badly; I could feel depression creep over me – the result, I suspected, of the proximity of a New Year and its festivities, with my own doubts for the future. The book was barely half-finished. I had just completed a gruelling lecture season, giving the same lecture on the North Wall of the Eiger, which was now two years old, over and over again. It wasn’t just the boredom of repeating the same lecture, it was the worry that this was something of the past – that I was leaning backwards, unable to go forwards.

  The party was well under way when we arrived. A record player throbbed out its beat. People were dancing, dark gyrating shadows in a candle-lit black-draped room. We were deafened, confused, out of tune with the rhythm of a party that had been under way for some time. Martin and Maggy Boysen, who had been staying with us at Woodland, were already there. So was John Cleare, a climber who was also a professional photographer; he had with him a statuesque, very extrovert, very blonde girlfriend, and seemed the symbol of the success and self-confidence which at that time seemed to be eluding me. He had a real skill – a positive career. This shell of self-confidence probably hid much the same uncertainty that I felt, but that night it seemed real enough to me.

  Another friend, who seemed to have found happiness in another way, was Eric Beard. Slightly built and wiry, with an attractive ugliness about him, big ears framing a crew-cut head of hair and a gnomish face that was one big grin, he had devoted his life to becoming a brilliant fell runner. He held the records for running the Welsh three thousanders, and a host of other records. Stripped off, he was all legs – strongly muscled, bonded to a lean, compact body and topped by his big grin.

  He had no qualifications, had spent some time as a Leeds chippy, before abandoning steady jobs for a nomadic existence, instructing at climbing centres, or working as an odd-job man. He was the traditional life-and-soul-of-the-party, joking, singing, exuding a simple warm-heartedness, and yet behind this there was an indefinable wistful sadness, as if, in his complete freedom from material pressures and the ties of family or a fixed base, he also was a lost soul, searching for some kind of fulfilment.

  I sat on the floor in a dark corner, and tried to drag myself out of my own mood of depression. But it was no good – the New Year was very nearly on us and the spontaneous enjoyment of the others was alien to my own feelings; the New Year was full of foreboding and before it arrived I sneaked up to bed. Wendy, upset, confused, tearful, followed me, trying to understand the depths of my mood, trying to pull me from its dark trap, till at last love and sleep curled round us, and we were lost in oblivion.

  We woke to a bright sun, cloudless sky and a hard, keen frost. No depression could survive against such a stimulus – New Year’s Day, 1965, didn’t seem so bad after all, and anyway, who cared about the distant future when, with a bit of luck, there would be some good snow and ice conditions in Glencoe? I had one plus from my mood of the night before – I had drunk comparatively little and had gained a lot more sleep than the others. We got up, helped clear the debris of the party, and planned the rest of the weekend. Tom Patey was going to meet us that day in Glencoe, and soon we had three car-loads of climbers ready to set out for the hills. Even Wendy was coming, leaving Conrad behind for the first time ever, with Mary’s children.

  As we drove up to Glencoe, she looked anxious and worried, like any animal taken away from its newborn litter. But I had now recovered completely from the previous evening’s low. There was a sprinkling of snow on the foothills as we drove round Bearsden to Balloch, and then, as we came to the foot of Loch Lomond, we could see Ben Lomond near its head, serene, magnificent, plastered in snow.

  It was like one’s first trip to Scotland, as we careered round the bends on the shores of the loch and then chased over the great sweep of Rannoch Moor. Buachaille Etive Mor, a cathedral of black rock interlaced with snow, beckoned us on our way. We stopped at Altnafeadh, a stalker’s house with a couple of barns by the road, and wondered what to do. It was already past midday, and it would be dark by six that night. There were three of us, Mary Stewart, a friend of hers called Jock, and myself. It was obviously too late to tackle any of the harder routes, and anyway we were too polyglot a party. I suggested the Left Fork of Crowberry Gully – the guidebook assured us: ‘It is fairly certain that this fork will provide an exciting finish to the gully.’ The Right Fork is one of the great classic gully climbs of Glencoe – comparatively straightforward by modern standards, but nevertheless sufficiently long and difficult to trap the unwary into enforced bivouacs.

  The Left Fork is slightly shorter than the Right, but makes up by steepness, being a narrow fissure capped by a jutting roof overhang. It was a joy to leave the car and walk through a light covering of powder snow towards the towering mass of the Buachaille. Soon we were at the foot of Crowberry Gully itself. Lined with firm snow, it curled up between the steep, dark rocks of the Crowberry Ridge and the North Buttress – and on this sunny New Year’s Day, there seemed little threat or foreboding about the climb. We put on crampons and started soloing up the lower snow-slopes in the gully, boots kicking with an easy assurance into the firm snow. As we gained height, and came to the first little step, we put on the rope – and on we went, till we reached the foot of the Left Fork, a narrow gash in the upper rocks leading on to the crest of Crowberry Ridge. I was itching to tax myself, to get on to some hard climbing.

  The Left Fork was little more than a wide chimney, lined with ice, and blocked near its top by a smooth roof. I swarmed into the chimney, wriggled and thrutched up its narrow confines, to a point below the roof. The capstone jutted smoothly over my head – there were no holds, and the chimney widened so that I was nearly doing the splits in my effort to straddle both walls. Providentially, someone had left a piton in place, so that I had some protection in the event of a fall; I was now nearly a hundred feet above the other two. It was the kind of climbing that I have always enjoyed, gymnastic, contortionist, and yet, by using either side of the chimney to the best advantage, I could avoid putting too much weight on my arms – just as well, for there was nothing to pull on anyway. The holds above the roof were all sloping, glazed in ice. The jut of the overhang forced my body backwards; I was dimly aware of the situation as I was forced out of the secure confines of the chimney, but I knew no fear. My concentration on those few feet of rock in front of my nose was too great. Crampons scraped on rock, dug a fraction of an inch into the glaze of verglas. The world contracted into those few feet immediately above me – a pull, a straddle and I was up; a few more feet and I was in the gap just below Crowberry Tower. I knew a delicious sense of achievement – of freedom – of pure, simple joy at my situation; how different from the dark mood of the previous night. Climbing, the great healer, had restored my self-confidence.

  It was now the turn of the others. Mary was justifiably apprehensive; although strongly-built and a good climber, her family and work commitments had kept her away from the hills, and this was obviously going to be considerably harder than anything else she had ever tried.

  Jock swarmed up the pitch to join me; and then it was Mary’s turn. I got into a good position to give her a tight rope. By this time I was getting worried about having brought her on a climb which was obviously too difficult for her. She started up steadily enough – slow, but steady progress – the sound of panting and scraping of crampons on rock drifted up the fissure, getting stronger as she came nearer. The scraping and panting got louder, the rope crept in more slowly as she came up to the roof overhang and came t
o a dead stop. I was getting cold and gave the rope a reassuring heave.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t pull, Chris, you’re pulling me off,’ came a shout from below.

  The rope was arched over her head round the roof, so that any pull tended to pull her outwards and off what precarious holds she had managed to find. There was another long pause, a lot more scraping:

  ‘Come on, Mary,’ I shouted. ‘We’re bloody freezing up here. Straddle across the chimney and just bridge up. As soon as you get free of the chimney, we’ll be able to pull you out.’

  ‘I can’t make my feet stick on the rock,’ came the reply.

  ‘Just slap them on,’ I shouted. ‘They’ll stay there. Come on; one big effort.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll try now. Hold the rope tight.’

  Another long pause and the rope moved a few inches – more scraping from below, and suddenly the rope tugged at my hands and body, pulled me off my stance, and I found myself hanging on the belay with the rope nearly cutting me in two. Mary had lost contact with the rock, had spiralled out into mid-air, and was now hanging in space below the overhang – even with the correct knot, it’s no joke hanging on the end of a rope. You can survive about ten minutes before losing consciousness and suffocating.

  ‘For God’s sake, let me down,’ shouted Mary.

  ‘Hang on, we’ll have a go at pulling you up,’ I replied. There were two of us, and with a bit of luck we should be able to haul her up to the holds above the roof overhang.

  ‘Be quick, I’m being cut in half,’ she shouted.

  Jock climbed down to me and we both heaved on the rope, but it was no good. There was too much friction as it went over the overhang, and anyway it is nearly impossible to haul up the deadweight of a person without some kind of pulley system. We heaved and hauled with very little effect, until the pleas from below, to be lowered back down, became irresistible.