Psychovertical Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Epigraph

  Map

  Hard work kills horses

  Bird rock

  The valley

  Pebbledashed

  A very brave man

  Windows

  Max load

  Alpinists

  Solo

  Snow gets in your eyes

  Robbins’s peg

  The knot

  It’s all easy until you fall

  The last time

  Black bites

  On fire

  Expando

  Fly or Die

  For Emily

  Hell freezes over

  Wino

  Truths and lies

  Fearometer

  Mad youth

  Music lessons

  Safe

  Masters of stone

  Cold war

  Psycho

  Down

  Picture Section

  Glossary

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Words like boldness, adventure and risk were surely coined especially for Andy Kirkpatrick. As one of the world’s most accomplished mountaineers and big-wall climbers, he goes vertically where other climbers (to say nothing of the general public) fear to tread.

  For the first time, this cult hero of vertical rock has written a book, in which his thirteen-day ascent of Reticent Wall on El Capitan in California – the hardest big-wall climb ever soloed by a Briton – frames a challenging autobiography. From childhood on a grim inner-city housing estate in Hull, the story moves through horrific encounters and unique athletic achievements at the extremes of the earth. As he writes, ‘Climbs like this make no sense … the chances of dying on the route are high.’ Yet Andy, in his thirties with young children, has everything to live for. This book – by turns gut-wrenching, entertaining and challenging – appeals to the adventurer in all of us.

  About the Author

  Andy Kirkpatrick has climbed the hardest routes in the Alps and has mountaineered around the world, including Patagonia in winter. His film Cold Haul, about his and Ian Parnell’s ascent of the Lafaille Route on the Dru, won first prize at the Graz Festival. He is a popular climbing journalist and his website www.psychovertical.com receives thousands of hits every month.

  Psychovertical was awarded the Boardman Tasker Prize 2008.

  To the patient people who helped gather up the words that almost escaped me

  List of Illustrations

  1. Who would have thought I’d become a climber?

  2. AK on El Cap (Andy Perkins)

  3. Aaron learning it’s best not to play with strangers

  4. Dick Turnbull

  5. Day two of our Frendo epic

  6. The North Face of Les Droites and the North East Spur (David Rudd)

  7. Helicopter rescue on the Dru Couloir

  8. El Cap (Ian Parnell)

  9. Paul Tat skyhooking on A4 terrain

  10. A storm hits the Shield headwall

  11. AK reaching the top of El Cap (Paul Tattersall)

  12. Andy Perkins

  13. AK’s shadow on Lost in America

  14. Jim Hall, Paul Ramsden and Nick Lewis

  15. Two a.m. on Fitzroy

  16. Super Couloir

  17. Our homemade tent struggles against hurricane winds

  18. Jim Hall prepares to descend 56 pitches

  19. Fourteen hours later and the strain is showing (Paul Ramsden)

  20. Es Tresidder on the North Face of Les Droites

  21. Abseiling Lesson

  22. Contemplating a close run thing

  23. Matt gets the cosy hammock

  24. My kingdom for some socks … and gloves

  25. Matt reaches the ledge

  26. Rich breaking trail

  27. Most Alpinists just do it for the food and the sex

  28. By day five we’d run out of food (Rich Cross)

  29. Going home empty handed

  30. Twenty days’ water

  31. The biggest fall of my life

  32. Hauling on El Cap

  33. The last pitch of the Reticent Wall

  34. Dizzy on the Summit

  35. El Cap (Ian Parnell)

  All photographs, maps and line illustrations are by the author, unless otherwise attributed.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Mandy, who unlocked many doors, and helped me discover who I could be – and for being my toughest critic. And for giving me Ella and Ewen, gifts that will take me a lifetime to unwrap.

  To my Mum, the strongest person I’ve ever met. It’s a shame people don’t write books about people who climb real mountains every day. I finally get what you mean about the world being my oyster.

  To my Dad Pete, who gave me my thirst for adventure to begin with – one of the greatest people I’ve ever known. The older I get the more I understand.

  To my brother Robin (you’re a real hero, not the wimp I’ve made you out to be). I just want to say sorry for pushing you in the docks that time (and all the other stuff … like the fish tank). To my sister Joanne who has climbed her own mountain to become the type of teacher every child deserves, and to another teacher, Mr Peterson of Villa Junior School, who took the time to see between my spelling mistakes.

  To Karen Darke for stopping me from writing, and reminding me that having adventures is more important than writing books about them.

  To Tony Whittome, Marni Jackson, Jim Perrin, and Andrew and Sharisse Kyle at Mount Engadine Lodge and everyone at the Banff Centre for giving me the chance, and the push I needed, to write this book. And to Bill Gates for Word, without which I’d never have written a word in the first place. Thanks to Duane Raleigh and Alison Osius at Climbing magazine who made me believe I was a writer, plus they would actually pay me for my words, and not forgetting all those poor editors that came afterwards who pulled their hair out with my never-ending ‘eny’s’ and ‘becouse’s’ that slipped past the spell checker.

  To Dick Turnbull for giving me a job, but never giving me an easy ride, and for inspiring me to suffer in the first place. I am also indebted to the support from Berghaus, Black Diamond, British Mountaineering Council, Buffalo, Lyon Equipment, Petzl, PHD, Mount Everest Foundation, Sportiva, and Patagonia, without which I’d never have been able to afford to go away, or replace the thousands of pounds of kit I lost or dropped over the years. I also want to single out Chris Watts and Siobhan Sheridan at First Ascent for always going out of their way to help and making me feel like a sponsored hero.

  Lastly to all my climbing partners, who I expect, if you bump into them and ask about their role in this book, will tell you that every fall was half as far, and every near-death experience was nothing to write home about. Don’t believe them, they’re all in denial, it was always worse. But it was always more fun than it sounds … wasn’t it?

  Prologue

  I sat alone in the small white room, my attention drifting from the snow that built up on the windowsill outside to the two test papers on the desk in front of me. I fidgeted with my pencil, chewing the end until my lips were speckled with red chips of paint. My mouth tasted of damp wood. The wind rattled across the corrugated roof of the building. The sound of air being sucked under draughty doors and past ill-fitted windowpanes grew loud, taking my concentration away with it.

  Time was running out.

  Although this was an exam I had sought out, it felt no better than all the others. I felt small, awkward and stupid. The first paper had been easy, but the second had turned my brain into a thi
ck slow glue as the numbers fell from their places, lost upon the page. Even though the room was cold, I was feverish with that familiar panic which I had thought I’d never feel again. It was as if I were back at the school I had hated. An old self-loathing returned, but I pushed my brain to form some answers out of the murk.

  None came.

  Drifting out of the storm, we trench through deep snow until we come to the edge of the loch, its surface frozen beneath a winter blanket. My partner takes a bearing and shouts into my ear that it isn’t far. The buttress above comes into view for a moment as the cloud spins away from its summit.

  We have left the car in the dark, woken early by the wind buffeting it on that empty high mountain road. Groggy with the long journey north from England, we had dressed while still in our seats, fighting like Houdini to pull on boots and salopettes in our confined quarters – neither of us really wanting to venture outside until the last possible moment. The early start has proved useful in the long approach through the deep snowdrifts. With luck it will allow enough time to climb the route.

  We recheck our bearings, wanting to avoid the avalanche-prone slab to the left of the loch, and gain another quick glimpse of the wall when the cloud thins. It is steep and covered in rime ice, which clings to the rock just like ice clings to the inside walls of a freezer. It offers an equivalent security.

  The conditions are far from perfect, but this is Scottish-winter climbing. Here you just climb routes as you find them, not as you’d like to find them. It has been pointed out by a visiting Slovene climber that here in Scotland we ‘ski on the grass and ice-climb on rock’, but at least today the rock looks wintry enough. Stuffing the map away and pulling on goggles, we take the easy option and set off across the loch’s creaking edge.

  I turned the paper over and looked up at the snow, lying thick as a bed on the sill. I had a few minutes left until the examiner was due to return, but I knew from experience that it would take more than time to get these answers right.

  Teachers always said I was lazy, that I lacked concentration or was a slow learner, then went on to label me as having some kind of learning disability. The schools I went to were filled with ‘problem children’ and I was just one more. I remember learning in biology that the brain has two sides. It came as a bit of a revelation at the time. It seemed to explain why sometimes I felt slow and stupid, one of the school’s stigmatised, remedial kids, while at other times I felt bright and intelligent, capable of producing drawings or solving puzzles that were beyond the others. Most of the time I kept the dark side in the background, concentrating on what I was good at, but at school that wasn’t easy when the narrowly focused world of school subjects gave you almost no way of shining.

  The route looks hard. A tenuous mixed line up a steep wall and arête, it is a classic rock climb in the summer, but now, with a coating of ice, it is one of the hardest climbs on the crag. I visualise the moves, how I’ll link up those rounded horizontal cracks and vertical seams, digging through the wall’s thick winter coat of rime for secret places in which to twist and hook the picks of my axes.

  I’ve wanted this route for a long time, storing in my head every scrap of information I can find. Although I can’t spell the name of the routes, or the corrie we are in, I can list everyone who’s tried them, what else they’ve done and why they failed.

  As I step up to the base, I remember the discouraging words of a climber who has failed on this route twice: ‘You’ll never climb it, there’s a really long reachy move on it – you’re too short.’

  Flicking my picks into the hard cold turf that sprouts in patches on the climb I close my eyes and visualise the route as a puzzle, the pieces jumbled in the snow. I see the first piece and start to climb.

  The examiner opened the door and asked me to stop.

  I looked out of the window feeling sick and empty.

  At school my worst nightmare had been the times table. The teacher would start in one corner of the classroom and go around, making each child stand up at their desk and say the next figure. As the moment snaked nearer, the blood would drain from my face as my heart beat faster and faster. I would feel hollowed-out and sick. The dark half would scramble any thought as I struggled to calculate an answer. Finally, on shaky legs, I would stand and speak. I always got it wrong. The other kids would laugh as I sat back down, thankful the ordeal was over.

  Totally immersed in the climbing, my brain is powered up and energised, working to its full potential, its limited memory freed from all those confusing hoops it has had to jump through in the real world. Up here everything is real. No numbers. No words. The only calculations are physical, the only questions how to progress and how not to fall off.

  Winter climbing is 10 per cent physical, 90 per cent mental. If you’re good at jigsaws you’ll probably be good at this sort of climbing. It’s simply a frozen puzzle, your tools and crampons torquing and camming the pieces to fit – and like a jigsaw, the moves are easy. It’s just finding them that’s hard.

  The examiner picked up the sheets and asked me to come to his office while he marked the papers. Seeing I was pensive he chatted about the storm as we walked through the old Victorian building.

  It wasn’t leaving school with few qualifications that mattered to me or to anyone else; it was leaving with the belief, created by society, that these things really mattered. At sixteen I thought I had been graded for life. The only skill that I knew I possessed was my ability to be creative. This initially manifested itself in painting and drawing, but, like anything that comes easy, I had no way of knowing that this was any kind of skill at all. I found it hard to get people to take me seriously when they found I couldn’t remember my date of birth or the months of the year. I was always fearful that I would be found out, that people would dismiss me as thick or stupid. Yet slowly, as I grew older, I found ways around this by trying to avoid any contact with words or numbers.

  I left home and moved into a squat near the city’s university, and slowly I began to mix with people who could get things right, people I had never met in my remedial world. It was like meeting people from another culture, and yet I found we weren’t that different – and that in some ways I had skills they lacked, or maybe even envied. I slowly learnt that I had to tag abstract words or numbers with images for reference words, and that way could bypass the sludgy part of my brain. My party piece back then was trying to remember all twelve months of the year, and get them in order, something for the life of me I just couldn’t do. It was only at that point that my new acquaintances made me see that this and all the other things that once did matter meant nothing at all. One night at a party someone said my linear brain function was perhaps a sign of dyslexia and maybe I should be tested, just to find out what exactly was wrong with my brain – and that’s how I found myself doing this one final test, wondering if, at nineteen, it no longer mattered.

  * * *

  I get to the place where the other climbers have failed. Two spaced, flared, horizontal cracks, the gap too wide to span with my axe. I hunker down on my tools and try to solve the problem.

  Hammering my axe into the crack at chest level, I mantle up on it, palming down on its head, straightening my arm, one crampon point scratching near its spike, the other crampon latched around a corner. It feels as if I’m about to do a handstand. I blindly scrape away the thick stubborn hoar with my other axe, searching for a secure home for its pick. There is nothing.

  I think about backing off, about failing, but I’m not sure I can. I imagine the good nuts set in poor icy cracks below and feel committed to the move, as I blindly scrape for something to hang. With my arms cramping, I’m forced to commit to laying away off the rounded arête, the teeth of my pick skittering and skating around until I pull down hard and trust it, wiggling my other axe out as I slowly stand up straight, my body hanging on tenterhooks.

  I try not to shake too much.

  I take a deep breath and look for the next piece.

  The firs
t test paper had comprised a hundred complicated cubes, with four options of how they would look opened out. The other paper had been covered in words and numbers. The boxes were easy and I had wondered if I’d been given this by mistake. Then I had come to the other sheet and the lights had gone out. Feeling like an idiot, well aware I hadn’t done well on the second sheet, I sat and watched him mark the answers, ticking them off as he went.

  Reaching easy ground, easy in comparison to what it took to reach it, I race up a hanging corner, sacrificing protection for speed. I pop up onto a narrow foot ledge, a grassy escape route into an easier climb on the left. I hesitate. Above, the wall looks compact and steep. It would be so easy to avoid what waits there. Plenty of possible excuses. The dark. The storm. I look down at my partner Dick and think of the hollowness of giving up now. I know he doesn’t care as long as I get a move on.

  With a nut placed at my feet I boulder out the moves above the ledge until I’m committed. I can see where I’m headed: across the wall to a ledge on the arête. Sweeping away hoar as I go, I try not to think about getting pumped as I scratch until I find one good tool placement on round edges, crampon points poised on sloppy holds that look like flattened chicken-heads. Matching tools together I look down at my partner far below as he tries to stay balanced in the wind, his flapping red jacket barely visible through the blown snow. The two ropes arch, plucking out questionable protection, but the big one stays put. There should be great fear, there should be great doubt, but all I see is possibility.

  The teacher looked up from his marking and removed his glasses. ‘Remarkable. You’ve scored 99 per cent in the spatial test. I’ve only ever had one other person score so high. He was a headmaster. As for the other test … I’m afraid you only scored 16 per cent.’

  My overwhelming joy was quickly crushed: the second test was much more important to real life. Being able to recognise what boxes look like opened out would get me a job in a cardboard box factory.

  ‘You’re a classic dyslexic,’ he said. ‘One side of your brain doesn’t work as it should, so the other half compensates.’ He told me the symptoms of dyslexia and my pieces finally fitted.