Reluctantly, we lowered Mary about thirty feet, till she came in contact with the ice once more. I then gave the rope to Jock and climbed down to a point where I could see her. She was slumped, exhausted, on the ice.
‘Come on, Mary,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll talk you up. You’ll be all right.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry, Chris, for being such a nuisance, but I just couldn’t stay on, and I think I’d have been cut in two if you’d kept hauling much longer.’
It was typical of Mary to apologise for a situation that was mainly my fault. Anyway, she soon started to climb again and, exhausted, cajoled and shouted at, she struggled over the overhang.
By this time it was beginning to get dark and in the dusk we scrambled, well content, down the Curved Ridge, back to the cars. We drove down to the Clachaig Hotel, where we had arranged to meet Tom Patey, Martin and the others. So far, the weekend had been enjoyable, but in no way specially memorable from any other winter’s weekend. But Tom had a way of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and this was to be no exception. Tom was a great traveller; he thought nothing of driving from his home in Ullapool to Speyside, in the Cairngorms, a good hundred and fifty miles on narrow roads, for an evening drink and a sing-song. His standard weekend could include an itinerary that most mortals would spread over a week – a lecture on the Friday night in Cambridge (to pay the expenses), then a quick flip over to Wales to see Joe Brown, and on the way back he would often make a fifty-mile diversion to call in at our cottage in the Lakes. He was a genius at concocting complicated plans for a party’s entertainment, which might include a ceilidh a hundred miles away, followed by a day’s climbing in the opposite direction. In fact, climbing with Tom Patey was a kind of magical mystery tour, in which no one, except perhaps himself, knew what was coming next.
He was already ensconced in the bar at the Clachaig, his squeezebox out, a dram of whisky at his side and a cigarette in his mouth.
‘The snow conditions are no good here,’ he greeted us. ‘They’ll be a lot better on Creag Meaghaidh and I’ve got a good line you’ll be interested in.’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘The Buachaille seemed in great condition to me.’
‘Ah, but on Meaghaidh it’ll be even better, and we’ll be able to drink at the Loch Laggan Hotel.’
And so we drank and argued till closing time at the Clachaig and, well oiled with beer and whisky, were ready for anything. We left Glencoe at eleven o’clock, and raced in convoy round Loch Leven, through the still, silent streets of Kinlochleven and Fort William, past Ben Nevis, massive, squat, gleaming in the moonlight, and up to Glen Spean, over a road white and shiny with hard-packed snow. This was Patey country, and he drove his Skoda like a Timo Makinen, careering round the bends at a steady fifty. I followed, dogged, rather nervous, but determined not to be left behind – apart from anything else, I didn’t know where we were bound.
At last we came to a stop outside a hotel. It was dark and silent, but there was a bothy, Tom said, down by the side. The bothy was an old hen house, with holes in the floor and gaps in the door, but it had a roof and walls, and we all got sleeping bags out and snuggled down. Wendy muttered about the cold, and snuggled close to me. She’s a comfort-loving girl with an appalling circulation. It was three in the morning when we got off to sleep; even so, we woke quite early. There was little temptation to stay in bed – it was too cold, draughty and uncomfortable.
Breakfast in the hotel with bowls of porridge, Aberdeen kippers and plates full of toast; time slips by and it’s midday before we get away.
‘It’s only a wee walk to the crag,’ Tom reassured us. I suspect he enjoyed the perpetual confrontation with time, the game of brinkmanship, of leaving at the last minute, and then snatching the chosen climb from the oncoming night. Tom didn’t believe in coolly laid plans – his climbing was one of instant pleasure, based on his own close knowledge of the hills and the most intimate details of almost every crag on the Scottish mainland.
But it was more than a wee walk to the foot of the crag – snow was knee deep, in places thigh deep, and our progress soon slowed to the laborious plod of the man in front who was making the route. There were six of us – Martin Boysen, Tom Patey, Eric Beard, Mary Stewart, John Cleare and myself. Only Tom had ever been to the crag before – but he, of course, knew every foot of the way, every indentation on the crag. We didn’t need a map or guidebook, for we were with the local expert. And so, thoughtlessly, chatting, joking, wading, we walked towards Creag Meaghaidh.
This was just another light hearted day in the hills; it was too late to think of trying any of the more difficult climbs, and in any case we were all feeling tired after only a few hours’ sleep the night before. The weather was overcast with a ceiling of featureless grey, merging with the grey-white of the upper slopes of the cliff. There was no wind, no sound; everything was muffled by the snow. It took us two hours to reach the foot of the crag – it seemed lost, smothered in the mountainside. At three o’clock in the afternoon there were only two and a half hours to dark.
‘Do you think Martin and I have time to do South Post?’ I asked Tom.
‘Och yes, it’ll only take an hour if you move fast,’ he replied. ‘You go straight up that tongue of ice above the big gully in the centre.’
We waded through the snows into the gully. There was no sense of perspective or scale; everything was black or white, black rocks and snow merging into mist, merging into snow. We stumbled through the snow with the exaggerated slow-motion movements of a cinematic dream-world – raise one leg, plunge it into the snow, transfer weight to it and sink, down, down, down into the clinging morass of soft powder snow. It didn’t matter how much you cleared with your hands, you still sank into it; we never reached the foot of the climb – it was only fifty feet away, but we just never seemed to get closer to it. Martin lost patience first, suddenly erupting into a frustrated rage at the soft, cloying mass, hammered it with his axe and cursed at the top of his voice, curses that were instantly muffled in the snow around us.
‘Come on, let’s bugger off from here – we’re wasting our bloody time.’
I agreed, and we turned round to flounder back down the gully to the foot of a snowy ramp which the others had followed to complete an easier route. We soon caught them up, near the top of the ramp, at the foot of the head-wall of the cliff. A steep ice pitch spiralled upwards into the mist, and we could hear Tom hacking away somewhere up above. Flakes of ice, loosened by his axe, tinkled down the rock, and we sat huddled at the foot, waiting for him to finish his work.
It was now four-thirty, only an hour to dusk. At last, there was a shout from above and Mary, who was tied on to Tom, followed him up on a tight rope. I went into the lead, trying to keep up with Mary, but the ice was steep and I found that I needed to cut the odd extra hold. As a result, I soon got left behind. By the time I reached the top of a narrow scoop that led out on to the summit plateau, Tom and Mary had already vanished. I could just discern a line of footsteps, fast drifting over in the wind. John Cleare and Beardie had tied on to our rope, which meant that Martin and I had to wait until all four of us were on top. It was very nearly pitch dark before John Cleare reached the top.
I had been getting increasingly worried. Tom was the only person in the team who knew the way down. Neither Martin nor I had map, compass or torch. We didn’t know the general configuration of the mountain with any degree of certainty. ‘Has anyone got a torch?’ I asked.
‘Not me,’ admitted John.
‘I’ve got one,’ said Beardie, and dug it out of his sack.
‘We’d better keep on the rope,’ I said. ‘We could go over a cornice too bloody easily in this light.’
I started to follow Tom and Mary’s tracks, but after a few paces they vanished, drifted over by the ever-shifting snows. We stopped in the pitch dark, somewhere on the top of Creag Meaghaidh.
‘Has anyone got a map?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
&n
bsp; ‘No.’
‘Compass?’
‘I’ve got one,’ said Beardie, and produced it with the aplomb of a conjuror. It turned out that he had some food as well. He, who had least experience as a mountaineer, was the only one who had the bare essentials of equipment.
But a compass without a map is of only limited value. We sat down on the snow and I tried to draw, with the tip of my glove, the configuration of Creag Meaghaidh from what we could remember from a glance at the map on the hotel wall, and from what little we had seen on the way up.
‘I think the line of the cliffs should be north and south,’ said John.
‘I suppose Tom went down one of the gullies,’ suggested Martin. ‘We could try to find it and go down it ourselves. It would be the quickest way back down.’
‘How do we know which is the right gully, though?’ I pointed out. ‘I think we should try to get to the col on the north of the crag and cut down that to the gully bottom. If we follow the line of the top of the crag on the compass, as soon as it starts curving round to the east we should know we are heading for the col. Then all we’ve got to do is keep going down till it starts climbing again, and that must be the col – we turn right and we’ll get back down into the corrie.’
It sounded simple, but we weren’t even sure if the cliffs did lie in a north-south line. Cloud merged with snow at the end of the torch-beam – it was very difficult to tell where snow ended and space began; it was like being in a white box. I started off leading, the others following at intervals of about fifteen feet, all linked by the rope. It was a strange, elating feeling – the situation was undoubtedly serious, for a bitterly cold and gusty wind was playing across the undulating surface of the plateau. We had no bivouac equipment, very little food and only one torch which we couldn’t expect to last for more than a couple of hours’ continuous use.
In addition, Martin had only recently recovered from a bout of ’flu, and was already feeling tired and weak. Without Beardie’s food, the position would have been even more serious.
‘You’d better take the torch,’ I told Martin, who was just behind me. ‘If I go over a cornice, there’s less chance of us losing it if you have it.’
We peered into the mist, trying to differentiate between the edge of the cliff and space, kept checking the compass, and advanced slowly and carefully, keeping what I thought was a safe distance from the cornice edge. But it was very difficult to tell just where it was. Martin shone the torch from behind. It cut a bright swathe through the snow-filled clouds, so that the line of light also looked like the line of the slope.
‘I think we’ve come to the place where we can start dropping down,’ I shouted. ‘Martin, can you come up to me so that we can see just how far this slope goes down?’
Martin came up to my side and altered the angle of the torch so that it was shining straight down. We were standing on the very lip of a huge cornice, looking straight down into a bottomless void. Had the cornice collapsed, the pair behind us would have had very little chance of holding both of us, and almost certainly, all four of us would have fallen to our deaths.
It didn’t take a second to sum up the situation. We both scuttled back to safety, and resumed our tortuous progress, trying to follow the top of the line of cornices to where we thought the slope should drop away to the col between the two mountains – and imperceptibly the ground did begin to drop away – we were losing height in our tiny cocoon of dim torchlight. Surely, we must be heading for the col – but were we? Our blade of light was no longer a brilliant white; it had faded to a smoky yellow – a sure sign that the battery was dying. Once dead, we should be unable to read the compass – unable to see the line of a cornice – and should have no choice but to stop where we were and wait for the long night to end. But would we all survive it? The wind was now gusting hard, tearing gaps in the thin layer of cloud above us, to give glimpses of a black, star-studded sky.
With hope buoyant, we plunged down the easy slope, trending eastwards as we had visualised the descent to the col. But there was no sign of any col. We could just discern what seemed a steep drop to the right, and on the left and front, the slope dropped away, undulating gently.
‘Are you sure this is the col?’ asked John.
‘I don’t know,’ I had to admit. ‘It could be a depression on the main ridgeline, or I suppose we could have missed it altogether. Anyway, we’d better keep going while we’ve got a bit of light left in the torch.’
We kept plodding on, now going gently upwards. Suddenly, glancing at the compass, I realised that the steep drop was now to our west. Had we somehow doubled back on ourselves? Surely not – the steep slope was still on our right. But where the hell were we? Without a map, without any more than a vague impression of the configuration of the land, we were basing all our movement on a series of guesses – an edifice of decisions as fragile as the proverbial card house – but once we stopped reasoning out each move based on these fragile hypotheses, we should be totally lost. I was uncomfortably aware that the mountains to our north and west stretched for miles, without road or human habitation. We might have been in the middle of the Antarctic, our situation seemed so isolated, the immediate surroundings so bleak.
Looking at the compass, it seemed just possible that we had crossed the col we had been seeking, and were now on top of the hill immediately opposite Creag Meaghaidh. But if this were the case, were the slopes immediately below us precipitous, or would we have an easy run off? There seemed only one way of finding out – to start down and hope for the best. The torch battery had, at last, died on us and we could just see the ghostly glimmer of snow against rock. I worked my way to the brink, fearful that I might be trying to step over a cornice, prodding the snow in front of me like a blind man with his stick. It dug into snow – I was on a straight slope. Slowly, we worked our way down – each little drop assumed the scale of a major cliff – even three feet seemed a bottomless pit, and it was only by lowering oneself gingerly down each step that one could find just how extensive it was.
At last the angle of the snow around us began to level out, and we came out of the cloud to see, spread below us, dark and ghostly, the corrie we had left so thoughtlessly the previous afternoon. It was nearly midnight, but we still had an hour of floundering in front of us before we could get to the road. Beardie now came into his own. Throughout our adventure he had kept up a patter of jokes and sensible suggestions. Now he forged into the lead and broke trail almost all the way back, wading thigh deep through the snow. Just short of the road, we saw the glimmer of torches. Patey was there with the beginnings of a rescue party. He, also, had had his share of adventures.
‘Why didn’t you follow my tracks?’ he asked.
‘They were covered over by the time we got up.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I never thought you’d have any trouble following them, and I wanted to get Mary down the gully before it was pitch dark.’
On the way back down the valley, Mary had fallen through a snow bridge into a stream. She had been soaked to the skin, and her clothes had frozen solid on her. Tom, who had just recovered from a bad attack of ’flu, had been on the verge of collapse.
Altogether, we were all lucky not to have had at least one serious casualty from exposure. We had, undoubtedly, broken just about every rule of mountain safety that had ever been made.
And yet I am unrepentant – it had been an extraordinary, rather wonderful experience. Half the attraction of climbing is playing with danger and the unknown. It would have been lunatic to have consciously sought the particular set of circumstances that faced us, but having landed ourselves in our predicament through lack of forethought, extracting ourselves from what could have been a dangerous situation presented an intriguing challenge.
If we had been taking out school students our conduct would have been unforgivable – but we weren’t. All of us were experienced mountaineers who should, perhaps, have known better. Each individual had his own responsibility, to wife and
child in my case, to girlfriends or parents in that of the others. If we had died, it would have been our own responsibility. It would have been more difficult to define our responsibility to a search party, if it had been called out. Had we got ourselves well and truly lost, and then collapsed from exhaustion, it could have needed the efforts of several hundred searchers to find us. In this instance, we should have come in for a lot of justified criticism for causing others inconvenience entirely through our own lack of preparation. But we had got away with it, and I suppose, rather like mischievous schoolboys, who have successfully played truant, were filled with the excitement of the experience, feeling closely united through the way we had worked together.
It was two o’clock in the morning before we got back to the hotel. Tom played his squeezebox, and we all dissected the experience with as much satisfaction as we would have done a major first ascent. Wendy and Maggy had spent a chill day in their sleeping bags in the bothy, getting more and more worried by our non-appearance, but neither was prepared to show her fears to the other; neither wanted to increase the worry of the other. In every way, they had had the most trying time, as I am afraid women almost always do in such circumstances. There was none of the excitement of being involved in danger – just the long, cold wait, with nothing to do but worry. They needed much more self-control and courage than we might have shown, and yet it was all too easy for us to take it for granted. Fortunately, they were so glad to have us back, uninjured, that they chose to put aside the agonising hours of waiting.
Are we being selfish or irresponsible if we go on climbing once we are married? I suspect we are, but equally, I know – and Wendy knows – that I would not be the same person if ever I were to give up my climbing. I think this is something that every girl who marries a climber has to come to terms with. At the same time, the married climber should probably take greater precautions to avoid unnecessary risks and danger, though this is difficult to undertake, as was demonstrated by our own near-debacle which occurred because we had taken the hills for granted – something one can never afford to do in Scotland in winter.
The Next Horizon Page 12