‘So what you’re saying, Chris,’ Ray joked, ‘is that after living with Tim, married life is going to be a breeze!’ Everyone burst into uproarious laughter, but try as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me see the joke. To me, Ray had just pronounced the most blaringly obvious fact in the universe. How on earth could anyone compare the trials and tribulations of living with Tim to the joy I was expecting from being married to Nat? I shook my head, confused, and they laughed all the more.
I got up early the next morning and made a quick breakfast of instant porridge with Tim. He had decided that he would carry on ahead for a day, walking fifteen kilometres down into the next big river valley, where he’d wait for us. I was going to take the opportunity to climb the towering mountain I’d first seen on arrival in the valley. And the others, still sleeping soundly, were probably going to deal with the rest of their hunk of sheep.
I’d already spied out my route. First I would ascend around 1000 metres to a peak similar to the one we’d climbed the previous day, only about five or six kilometres further away. From there, I’d try to traverse a kilometre across an extremely exposed and jagged-looking saddle to reach the soaring peak in the distance. My peak.
‘If I’m not back by tomorrow,’ I told the half-awake Englishmen, ‘come look for me, all right?’
I scrambled steadily up through the treeline, and climbed further on steeper and steeper rocks until I finally reached the first summit around lunchtime. I stopped and had a bite to eat, admired the view and steeled my nerves to press on.
I worked my way tentatively out onto the top of the saddle, scrambling and scaling big boulders and rock formations as the crest narrowed to a knife-edge. I crawled cautiously out along a narrow ledge of rock and saw with dismay that it ended in a vertical drop of about ten metres. I took a breather and weighed up my options.
I was born with neither the skill nor the inclination to be a rock climber, and although the rock face was generously creviced with hand and foot holds, I decided against taking the risk. The rock was flaky, and I didn’t have any ropes. A slip would more than likely transform me into a bloody pulp among the rock heaps half a kilometre below.
I crawled backwards and gingerly climbed down a crack off the side of the ledge. I eased my way around a little way, onto another tiny ledge that protruded out a centimetre, but it didn’t continue and I had to go further down.
I reached the bottom of the high rock pillar and found myself standing at the very top of a long rocky chute that cascaded down into a gigantic scree slope below. The gradient was about eighty degrees and it stayed that way for hundreds of metres. The vast slope was littered with loose rocks and stones and I could hear a constant background clatter as boulders slipped downwards in mini-avalanches.
I inched my way along the top of this slope, willing myself to stay calm and to not look down past my shaking legs. I kept all of my weight on my toes and pressed my arms, chest and face up against the rock face in front of me, straining with all my will to adhere to it. Every time I lifted a foot to move, rocks clattered downwards and I had to test carefully before trusting my weight on anything.
After travelling thirty metres in half an hour, the end of the ordeal was in sight. Just two steps away was another flat ledge and after that, the obstacles looked more manageable. My self-control and my strength had almost left me and I was desperate to get away from the brink of that terrifying fall. I took one careful step forward then tried to make a quick lunge to safety.
As I pushed off with the toe of my right boot, the rock I was standing on dislodged and went plummeting down. I crashed downwards. Gravity seemed hell-bent on sending me to my doom, but in a reflex action I managed a desperate grab at a small rocky protrusion on the solid face above me and checked my fall. I wasn’t able to hang on and the shock removed the skin from my fingertips and nearly wrenched my arm from its socket, but at least I wasn’t falling. I slid very slowly downwards with the rocks, pressing myself flat and digging my hands and feet desperately into the moving mass.
The slope was so steep that I was standing virtually upright. I felt like a very small bug clinging desperately onto the top of an extremely high wall – only this wall was sliding. Within a second, I was beginning to pick up speed, but at the end of that second, just moments away from careening down to death or serious injury, my foot found a stable rock and I stood still.
The world held its breath while my heart pounded furiously. A cold sweat was pouring off my skin and I dared not move until I was sure I wasn’t going to take off downwards again. Carefully, I climbed back up to the safety of the ledge and there I sat, regaining my composure, thinking of how much I loved Nat and mentally thanking each and every god I could ever remember hearing of.
The going became easier from there and, within half an hour, my panic had given way to a towering optimism. It was by far the most technically difficult and dangerous scrambling and climbing that I’d ever done, but I was being very careful now and was loving it.
I reached the saddle and began to climb up the ridge to the mountain on the other side. The climb was steep and exposed but much safer than the descent now behind me. I reached the top and stood like a king claiming virgin territory. I spun around and exulted in the view of mountains and mountains and mountains. As far as I could see, in every direction, towering peaks and valleys that stretched away to every horizon. The peace and tranquillity of this wild world was seeping into my consciousness, and every day I was feeling a stronger sense of calm.
If only Nat could be here with me, I thought. This is heaven!
I reached camp at one in the morning and found Ray and Brendan eating their fifth meal of mutton stew for the day. I was exhausted but also deliriously happy. I told them of my day’s adventure and they seemed relieved that I’d made it back. I was glad too.
We broke camp the next morning and walked down the valley to find Tim. The trail became indistinct, and we split up to try and find a way through. Brendan, a little short-sighted, thought he saw Ray in front of him with his back turned and sneaked up to give him a surprise. He stopped only a few metres short, though, looked again, and slunk back, terrified. He’d been about to land a walloping whack on the shoulder of a big brown bear!
We found Tim collecting firewood and he led us back to an empty cabin near where he’d been camping. Compared to the scant shelter of our tent, this was a veritable mansion! There was a two-room hut – slightly musty and rat infested, but fantastic nonetheless – that became our home, a traditional log and bark yurt of the semi-nomadic Altai people, a smelly pit toilet and best of all, a log banya.
Tim had the furnace heated and the water barrel filled. We dumped our packs and gladly jumped in to steam the dirt from our bodies. It was fifty metres to the river on a rocky, slippery path strewn with tree roots, and we raced there and back a couple of times, in between bursts of almost unbearably hot steam, to dive into the freezing alpine torrent. On the way back after our second exhilarating dip, however, Brendan slipped and stepped heavily on a sharp rock. He gashed the sole of his left foot badly, and after we’d bandaged it up, he decided that he’d best not try to walk on it for a while. We moved into the hut and waited another two days while it healed.
After Brendan recovered, we walked south-east for a few rainy days, up the banks of the gushing River Shavla until we reached Lake Shavlinskoye. It was a pristine, jade-coloured alpine lake set like glass in the bottom of what was almost a deep crater surrounded by snowy peaks and alpine mountains. On the far side, vertical cliffs rose straight from the water, towering hundreds of metres into the air.
Scattered about we found clusters of age-old shamanic totem poles. Woodcarvings of long, hideous faces stared menacingly from crooked poles, and the occasional tree trunk was carved with the dancing face of a forest sprite. Some of the carvings were obviously new, others had been vandalised and others again were strewn with the drying underwear of a party of Russian walkers. But the majority of the figures were cl
early hundreds of years old, remnants of an otherwise forgotten culture that had inhabited these mountains for centuries. They lent a sombre aspect to the magnificence all around.
We camped by the lake and enjoyed a sumptuous dinner of instant mash potato and mutton (by this stage Ray and Brendan were willing to swap their meat supplies for just about anything we had to offer). We sat up late, talking of our plans to find a way up and over the main range the next day, but when Tim and I got up early in the morning, we were in for a surprise. We hung around, kicking stones and getting increasingly frustrated until mid-morning. Finally, we stormed into their camp and tried to get them moving. I prodded Ray’s sleeping bag with the toe of my boot and he rolled over angrily.
‘We need our fuckin’ beauty sleep, so sod off!’
The previous evening they’d seemed keen on finding a way through the mountains, but now they’d changed their plan and seemed completely unconcerned about how it would affect us. Tim and I spent an hour arguing about what we should do. Tim was annoyed, but still tempted to stick with them, while I was really pissed off and wanted to keep going. Eventually, Tim agreed to come with me. It was the thought of spending most of a week walking back the way we’d come, rather than crossing the range and completing a round trip, that changed his mind more than anything. It would probably be a long time before either of us was able to come back to these mountains again, and six more days was still a lot of time in which to explore.
We woke the Brits again and told them our decision. We agreed that if we didn’t see each other beforehand, we’d meet for a beer at Novosibirsk train station a couple of hours before their train was due to depart. From Novosibirsk, Ray and Brendan would take the train west, back to Finland, and Tim and I would travel east again, to our bikes in Ulan Ude.
They were good mates and it was sad to say goodbye, but Ray had changed a lot. As for Brendan, although he was a really nice guy and played an incredible didgeridoo, he often seemed pretty bent on getting his own way. We said goodbye and headed off around the edge of the long, oval-shaped lake and up into the mountains. It was back to the two of us again.
We spent the day climbing to the headwaters of the river and found ourselves in a huge flat rocky bowl. The river started in a series of small tarns fed by the run-off from several gigantic glaciers that stretched upwards to the glistening peaks all around. We climbed further and camped in a cleared patch on top of a rock pile at the bottom of a glacier. The night air was haunted by the sounds of avalanches and the eerie groans and sharp cracks from the melting ice-mass, weeping as it retreated beneath the fierce heat of summer.
The best map we’d been able to buy of the area was a 1:250 000 sheet – one centimetre of the map showed 2.5 kilometres of the ground – and this made navigation sketchy and haphazardous. We wanted to cross the huge ridge before us, but we weren’t sure if and where we would be able to do so. By a combination of visual sightings and guesswork, we followed the glacier to its very peak, and then climbed upwards onto a steep rocky scree slope bounded by the solid, near vertical walls of the mountains. We climbed steadily for hours, curving away from the bulk of the glacier and around to the left until a snowy saddle came into view to our right.
‘Over there. Tim, mate! Look! Woohoo! That must be it. Yes! We’ve found it!’
Tim took one look and dug in his heels.
‘No way, mate. I don’t reckon that’s it. And if it is then there’s no way I’m going to climb it, anyway. That scree chute leading up to the top is way too steep!’
‘Huh?’ Tim wasn’t usually like this. He’d been fine with the heights on Mount Elbrus the year before, and the stories he’d told me of his risky mountaineering feats in the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe had been enough to make my blood run cold.
‘What do you mean it’s too steep, mate? That only looks a little steeper than what we’re on now.’
‘Bullshit, Chris!’ Tim really didn’t like the look of that saddle. ‘If those rocks are anywhere near as loose as they are here, then it’d be impossible to climb.’
‘Okay then, mate,’ I agreed, still uncertain. ‘We’ll keep on going round here then and see if we can find another pass a little further along. But if we can’t, then that one there definitely looks like one way across, so maybe we could at least have a look at it on our way back. Right?’
We kept on climbing, still curling round as we hugged the rock wall on our left, the scree slope getting steeper and steeper. Every footstep slid backwards, and although there was no real danger of falling, we had to work hard to make progress. Eventually, a saddle came into view. The climb up to it was extremely steep and the loose rocks were becoming dangerous.
It was a long, long way down when I looked back between my legs to see Tim a little way below me taking off his pack and bracing himself against a boulder.
‘What’s up, mate?’ I called.
‘It’s too steep, Chris. I just don’t feel safe.’
‘It’s not too bad.’ I tried to encourage him. ‘Just don’t look down. We’re not far off the top now, anyway.’
‘Nah. Look, I’m sorry mate, it’s just …’ Tim was upset. Somehow he’d lost his natural recklessness and along with it his head for heights. ‘It’s just like … I didn’t make it up Elbrus last year and before that, the last time I did anything really challenging in the mountains it was with Bruce. And now he’s gone … I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just can’t do this right now.’
‘That’s okay.’ I thought for a moment. ‘How about if I leave my pack here and scoot up to the top. If it’s good and it looks all right on the other side we can try it then, right?’
He agreed, and I set off, much lighter without my pack; and after five minutes of hair-raising scrambling I reached the crest.
I crouched down on an extremely narrow precipice and took in the glorious view. An overwhelming sense of vertigo swept over me and with hundreds of metres of steep falls on either side I couldn’t trust myself to stand. It was a wonderful view, though. Magnificent peaks and ridges stretching away … But hang on … I looked again and started to recognise some of the features. I wasn’t looking south toward the peaks of the Altai in China and Kazakhstan at all; I was looking back down at the lake where we’d camped two nights before!
We’d climbed the wrong bloody saddle! I looked around carefully and realised that I’d practically ascended to the top of a little island peak that protruded north from the main east-west range. We’d climbed around in a circle!
‘Bugger it!’ My yell resounded and echoed from a dozen different mountains. I laughed at myself, then scrambled down to tell Tim.
The break had done him good. I told him the bad news and he grinned.
‘Good thing it was you that climbed up there then and not me, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah … right.’
‘I’ve been thinking, though, mate. That other saddle over there is actually lower than we are at the moment. I reckon that maybe I’d be ready to have a go at it if we could get over there.’
We scrambled back down the scree slope, sending hundreds of kilograms of loose rocks catapulting loudly down before us, then traversed over to the other side of the slope to reach the bottom of the chute leading up to the new saddle.
It was steep, but no worse than anything either of us had done before. Tim went first and he looked a different person to the one I’d seen just a couple of hours before. He slammed his ice-axe into the hard snow that still clung to gaps in the rocks and drove upwards with his legs. I swung my own axe and followed, scrambling in places, and after about fifteen minutes, we reached the top.
The landscape ahead equalled any that I’d seen before in sheer, captivating beauty. A vast, white glacier stretched out below us and a magnificent river valley with ice-capped mountains on either side flowed into the distance.
We cooked our usual lunch of textureless mash potato and considered the glacier below. Neither of us had ever tried to cross such a large glacier before, and
we were nervous about the danger of hidden crevasses. Luckily, though, we spotted a party of Russian climbers coming our way. We watched carefully as they weaved their way across the huge ice mass. Later, we were able to safely follow their footprints across the melting surface.
We climbed carefully off the glacier to reach dry ground and entered the amazing world of a warm, green and grassy valley blocked at one end by an ice cliff and scattered here and there with rocks and snow. We walked till dark. Exhausted and unable to find a suitable spot to pitch our tent, we simply set up on the gentlest slope of a scrubby hill, climbed in, and collapsed into instant sleep.
———
We woke early the next day to a beautiful sunrise of wispy orange clouds and a light dusting of powdery snow. We had four days and about 100 kilometres till we’d reach the road, and we were short on food. We’d added an extra day to our journey when we split from Ray and Brendan, and having eaten too much already we were now having to cut back to two-thirds rations to make our supplies last the distance. My trousers, which had once been a little tight, now slid easily halfway down my hips and Tim, constantly starving at the best of times, had adopted an ‘energy conservation strategy’. When he wasn’t walking or busy making or breaking camp he would lie perfectly still, willing his body into a sort of hibernation while he waited for the next meal.
I cooked our meagre ration of instant porridge for almost half an hour, adding extra water and watching the oats swell into bloated puffs, until it looked like a decent-sized meal. I spooned a generous half of the slop into Tim’s bowl, added a handful of sugar and pushed it towards him. He sprung into instant life, sat bolt upright and wolfed down the meal in what seemed like a few spoonfuls. He carefully licked every last trace of sustenance from his bowl and his beard, then burst out of the tent and quickly started packing all his gear. ‘Breakfast energy doesn’t last long!’ he explained in between shoves. ‘Gotta get a move on now before it all runs out again!’
Off The Rails Page 24