Quickly, we crossed the firm snows that led to the base of the Pillar, and started up the broken rocks at its foot. These led to a steep rock buttress and two good pitches up a series of steep cracks which, in turn, led to a ledge that stretched across the Pillar. Above it, the rock stretched steep, smooth, seemingly impregnable. We traversed the ledge, trying to outflank this obstacle. Time slipped by. We were on the side of the Pillar; the rock, no longer red-brown and firm, was that dusty shade of grey that almost always means bad rock with a lack of crack lines. Suddenly, the climbing had lost its attraction, and we started fumbling around, wasting time in changing belays. We were hesitant, indecisive. It was now early afternoon, and we had still gained no height above our traverse line.
‘This is no bloody good,’ I said; ‘we’ll have to get back into the centre of the Pillar. At least there are some decent cracks there.’
As we travelled back into the centre of the Pillar, we felt hot, tired and thirsty. Looking up at the rock above, the line seemed obvious enough – up that big clean dièdre – but what about the overhangs above? We had lost too much time, and felt very small, weak and helpless as we sat on the ledge, still near the foot of the Pillar, in this remote spot.
‘Let’s bivouac here. We’ll have a go at the groove tomorrow,’ I suggested. Rusty didn’t take much persuading, and we settled down for the night. A trickle of melt water gave us a little to drink, though barely enough to slake our thirst. Packets of soup and tea bags were a hollow mockery without the burner on the stove – but still, we had a good large ledge on which to sleep, and the weather seemed settled.
Next morning, we started up the gangway that led to the groove. Rusty led the first pitch up steep but perfect rock – the red granite of the south side of Mont Blanc is superb climbing rock. I followed up to the foot of the big groove. It curved up in a single sweep, just off vertical and without a ledge and hardly a single hold – only the crack in its back provided a mixture of hand-jamming and lay-back holds.
I sorted out some gear and realised just how optimistically light we had travelled. I had only four pitons large enough to use in the crack – over 200 feet of climbing; and what about those serried roofs above?
I set out, half-hearted, already beaten. I worked my way a few feet above Rusty, hammered in a peg, hung on to it, and stared upwards. The crack seemed endless, full of unknown threats.
‘We just haven’t got enough gear,’ I shouted down.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ asked Rusty.
‘There’s only one thing – we’ll have to go and get some more.’
Go and get some more! Go down 7,000 feet of snow, scree and grass, all the way back to the valley and Courmayeur, just to get a few pieces of hardened steel – and then all the way back! That is what we did. We abseiled right down to the lowest rocks of the Pillar, for the way we had followed the previous morning was now being swept by a continuous hail of stones, dislodged by the afternoon sun. Abseil after abseil, until we were nearly down; nearly, but not quite, for between the foot of the Pillar and us was a monstrous bergschrund, a huge, mind-boggling chasm about fifteen feet across, with its lower lip about twenty feet below. The schrund itself vanished, seemingly bottomless, in dark shadows. Always frightened of jumping from heights, I hate leaping over crevasses. In theory, it is easy enough; you leap out on the rope, let it slide through your fingers and land on the other side. But what if it snags – if you miss the other side and go swinging back against the sheer ice wall, to be left hanging in the void? I stood there, determined not to show Rusty how frightened of the jump I was. Pride giving me the necessary impetus, I leapt, reached the other side, let the rope go and rolled down the slope. Rusty followed, and we plodded back to the Eccles Bivouac Hut, to reach it just before dusk.
After sleeping in the comfort of a bunk, the next morning, in the dawn, we raced back down towards the valley. An afternoon was spent shopping for pitons, more food, and a burner for the gas stove. We were ready for another onslaught. We walked back up to the Monzino Hut that very same afternoon and spent the night in its lush comfort. No more wallowing in wet snow for us.
This was to be a serious, systematically organised attempt; we had a mass of high protein food; nuts, cheese, salami, chocolate, tea bags and tubes of condensed milk. The warden of the hut called us at three in the morning, with boiling water for our tea. Piling our gear at the side of the table, the food neatly packed in a single nylon stuff bag, we packed our rucksacks. We were being so methodical – so uncharacteristically efficient. I knew that Rusty had packed the food – he thought I had packed it – and we both left it, in its stuff bag, sitting on the table.
We set off through the night, head torches throwing small islands of light in a glittering black world as we progressed up the long scree slopes, cramponned across the snow slopes, and reached the Col de Frêney just as dawn broke – time for a first breakfast.
‘Might as well have a quick brew,’ I suggested. ‘We’ve got enough food with us for a five-day siege.’ We sat down and looked at each other expectantly.
‘How about some cheese?’ I asked.
‘Good idea.’
‘You’d better get it out.’
‘But you’ve got the food.’
‘Have I, buggery. You took it.’
‘No, it was up to you to take it. I’ve got all the pegs.’
Recriminations followed quickly, each determined that it was the fault of the other. Having searched our rucksacks, we discovered we had six tea bags, a bag of sugar and a handful of almonds – we were back to normal – disorganised. But at least we had some means of melting snow for drinks, and enough pitons to climb the big groove.
Swift easy movement over the hard, frozen snow was balm to our anger and worry about the loss of the food. We soon reached the bottom rocks of the Pillar and climbed to our highest point.
I set out, once again, up the groove. With sufficient pitons to hammer one in every twenty feet or so, it no longer felt either so long or so committing as before. It was certainly magnificent climbing. I ran out 130 feet of rope, hung on a piton to bring Rusty up, and then led another pitch, up towards the big roofs. The angle had steepened and the cracks had thinned down, but the peg-climbing was straightforward, and I was happily lost in the concentration that good, hard climbing always offers.
It was now Rusty’s turn to lead. The way above was barred by the roofs, and the only possibility seemed the crest of the buttress to our right. The wall between was steep and blank and Rusty fussed around it. Holding the rope I began to notice the passing of time and the big clouds that were growing out of nothing in the blue air around us. Just afternoon cloud – or something more ominous? The cloud line to the south, like the front face of a giant tidal bore, seemed to carry a more serious threat, but with its own wild beauty, enhanced by the very vulnerability and isolation of our position. The maze of crevasses and chaos of ice towers in the Brouillard Glacier were etched as black shadows drawn by the afternoon sun. Then, as the sun became diffused, blanked out by the fast-piling cloud, shadows also vanished, the snow and rocks around being flattened into menacing greys and whites by the even lighting.
The rope in my hand had gone still. Rusty had vanished round the corner. I cursed him, to myself, for his slowness and shouted:
‘What are you doing? Have you reached a belay?’
But there was no reply.
At last – ‘Come on, I’m belayed.’
The rope pulled in tight. I followed it, uncomfortably aware that if I did fall off, I should go spinning round the corner, as the rope was going away from me horizontally, offering scant support. Rusty was on a ledge round the corner; a crack line vanished upwards into the mist that now enveloped us. It was impossible to see if it led anywhere.
‘I think this pitch is mine,’ said Rusty very firmly. ‘You had the two in the groove.’
‘All right, but you’d better be quick, I think the weather’s breaking.’ Rusty set out, ham
mering his way up the crack, at times nearly invisible as the mist swirled around us. I had sweated up the groove and now my clothes were cold and clammy. I shivered, cursed Rusty, and shouted up:
‘If you can’t get up any faster, you’d better come back down. We’ve not got long before dark.’
No reply, just the ping of the hammer. He was now sixty feet up. He paused, obviously enjoying himself, let out some rope and swung back and forth across the face, trying to work out the best line. ‘Bloody idiot,’ I thought, ‘what the hell does he think he’s doing!’ There was a roll of thunder in the distance to emphasise the danger of our position.
‘It’s great up here,’ came wafting down. ‘I think we can get across to the right. You’d better come up.’ And so I followed.
It’s strange: once you’re out in front again, all fears vanish. We had nearly reached the top of the Pillar; a blank slab barred our way. I climbed a few feet, managed to place a peg and then tensioned out from it, working my way, though constantly pulled back by gravity, till I was able to reach a series of ripples in the smooth granite. I let go the rope and balanced up; six feet, and I was on a sloping ledge. Rusty followed up, and I began hunting for a way up those last feet. But our luck ran out. The mists suddenly turned to flurries of snow; snow ran down the rock, covering every hold and, in a matter of seconds, what should have been quite easy climbing was rendered impossible. The change had all the dramatic suddenness that makes mountaineering the exciting and exacting sport it is. At midday, we had stripped down to our shirtsleeves under a blazing sky. The transition from sun to blizzard had taken about three hours, but the final transition from cloud to scudding snowflakes had been instantaneous, turning a straightforward climb into a struggle for life.
I slithered down to the little sloping ledge, which was already banked up with snow, and we started preparing our bivouac, hammering in pegs, spreading the rope on the floor of the ledge to act as a rough cushion and insulation. It was now snowing too hard to think of dressing for the night, unless sheltered by the bivvy tent; so we got out our red nylon bag and Rusty got under it to get ready for the night. This meant slipping off his breeches to put on his long wool underpants, then removing his anorak to put on extra sweaters and a down jacket – the whole time being careful not to drop anything. The perpetual nightmare on any bivouac is of dropping your boots. I stood and stamped and shivered outside, as the storm which had hit us so quickly rose to a crescendo.
At last it was my turn to crawl into the bivvy sack. It was almost impossible to brush all the snow from my clothing – as fast as I brushed it off, more cascaded down from the rock above. Finally, I gave up and crawled into the tent-like sack – it was just a big bag of lightweight, proofed nylon, which we could pull over our heads. With me inside it as well as Rusty, there was hardly any room to move, let alone change my clothes. I managed to pull my boots off, slipped them in my rucksack and then pulled the pied d’éléphant over my legs, ending up with my feet in my rucksack.
By this time the storm had reached a new fury; it was nearly dark, and flashes of lightning lit the outside of the tent. Thunder crashed with ever-increasing reverberations. Our position was undoubtedly dangerous, but we felt a strange sense of security, almost contentment, while squeezed on that little ledge. The wafer-thin walls of the sack guarded us from the cruel talons of the wind and inside, uncomfortable though we were, there was an element of relative luxury, compared with what it could be outside.
We got out the gas stove and started melting snow which we collected from just outside the tent. We were already nearly buried in it on our ledge. After a few minutes, the flame went a dark colour, and then went out altogether. We had sealed ourselves in the sack too efficiently, and were fast running out of oxygen. The cold and snow gusted in, as we pulled up one side of the tent to admit some air. The flame of the stove flickered into life, and after half an hour or so we had a panful of lukewarm water in which to drop our precious teabags. The night passed slowly. We dozed, talked spasmodically, and tried to climb back up our sloping ledge, down which we were perpetually sliding. I thought (as no doubt Rusty also thought) about just how desperate our position was. There was the memory of the 1961 disaster, during the first attempt to climb the Central Pillar of Frêney, when four had died in a retreat after a storm very similar to the one which was striking us. There was, however, one big difference – we had the Eccles Bivouac Hut as a retreat – though even reaching that in a severe storm could prove a cruel test.
When morning came, the wind was as fierce as ever, and, to delay the moment when we should have to abandon the partial shelter of our bivouac tent to fight with tangled ropes and snow-buried gear, we had another brew and a handful of almonds. With no other excuse for delay, we struggled with frozen boots, and at last emerged from the sack into the full force of the wind. In an emergency like this, one must be very, very slow and systematic, checking everything twice, and three times, to ensure that knots are tied correctly, karabiners are clipped in, pitons secure. At last, with ropes untangled, a piton in place, we hurled the rope so that it disappeared down into the void. Rusty went first. There was a long delay – I couldn’t hear anything – just stood shivering until the rope went slack. It must be my turn. I clipped in and started abseiling. We had never heard of the karabiner brake abseil, and were using the old-fashioned method, where you thread the rope through a karabiner clipped into a thigh loop, and then pay the rope over your shoulder. It offers the minimum of friction, and as soon as I launched myself out on it I realised there wasn’t enough. The face of the rock was encased in wind-blown snow, the rope itself had an icy sheath, and I just went plummeting down, barely in control. It was just as well that Rusty had secured both bottom ends to a piton he had hammered in, otherwise I doubt whether I could possibly have stopped myself. How Rusty managed to stop himself, I just don’t know.
‘Nearly went off the end,’ he stated tersely. There was no ledge, just a horizontal crack into which he had hammered a couple of pitons. We now suffered the nightmare: were we going to be able to pull down the doubled rope? We pulled one end; it jammed solid, and was so badly iced that even with jumars we could never have climbed back up to free it. We heaved again, and it gave a little, another pull and it started running through our hands. I threaded it through the piton for our next abseil as Rusty heaved. It was my turn to go down first, into the unknown.
Down and down we went in a succession of abseils, through the wind and snow and storm, building up a rhythm with a weird enjoyment at our sense of control in the face of the fury of the elements. I regarded Rusty in a new light. At ground level, even on the climb when things had been going well, many of the quirks of his personality had irritated me, in exactly the same way as I am sure I had irritated him. Now, confronted by the sheer scale of our struggle, we were closely united, and I was able to respect his calm, methodical approach to our problem.
We reached the great bergschrund at the bottom, hardly noticing its size as we leapt across and then groped through the white-out, towards the crest of the Innominata Ridge, where we knew the hut should be. But what if we couldn’t find it? If we went too high or got on to steep ground? But then, in a break in the cloud, we saw the gleam of the tin roof below us.
We were tired and hungry, but with a few more hours to dusk, we kept on going down, hoping that the great piles of fresh powder snow would not avalanche under us. At the Monzino Hut, the guardian gave us a bowl of soup, but the goal of wives and food and sleep kept us going down, automaton-like, till we reached the valley and great mounds of antipasti, litres of red wine, and long, deep sleep. We had reached a point fifty feet below the summit of the Pillar, had come tantalisingly close to success, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. The experience had been exacting and rewarding, and at no time had either Rusty or I felt out of control of our own destiny, even though the margin for error was nil. This, perhaps, is what climbing is truly all about. You would never seek out the situation, but once in it,
fighting your way out stretches nerves and mind and body to the limit, and in so doing brings new levels of awareness of yourself, and your companions.
We slept in the van and next day drove back to Leysin to two very worried girls. There, we had an interlude; the weather continued unsettled, and Rusty was getting married. He had met Pat, a practical, down-to-earth girl, while in Kenya – she had followed him to Europe. The ceremony took place in the Mayor’s office and then in the church in Leysin; I was best man. Returning to John’s house, we had a magnificent buffet lunch, prepared by Marilyn and Wendy.
Rusty did not have much time for a honeymoon. The weather improved after a few days, and we resolved to make another attempt at the Right-hand Pillar of Brouillard, this time increasing our team to four by including John and Brian Robertson, who had just arrived in Leysin.
The Next Horizon Page 17