Psychovertical Read online

  I pressed on.

  As is often the case, darkness came while I was far from the next belay and my headtorch was still below in my haul bag, leaving me to finger my way up the cast of the shit-choked crack. As I squirmed and whimpered I could hear the voices of the Russians, high up, drifting down the crack. The image of their smiling, welcome faces pushed me on rather than allowing me to back off. It would be good to spend the night with them, and take away some of the frustration that had got hold of me.

  The last few moves saw me reaching blindly over a small roof, feeling for a set of bolts and, I hoped, the edge of the ledge, but when I followed my fingers round, instead of a ledge full of smiling Russians, I found yet another soaring crack.

  I’d made a mistake and had another pitch left to go.

  I wouldn’t be able to make it to the ledge.

  Tying off my ropes, all I could do was abseil back to my bags and sleep there.

  Once I had found my headtorch, and after hanging a while feeling sorry for myself, I pulled out my portaledge. With no ledges to sleep on, this contraption of nylon fabric and alloy tubing provided the only way to get a rest. Unfolded and fitted together to form a narrow bunk just big enough to lie on, it could be attached to the wall via straps leading up to the bolts.

  After some aggressive tube bashing, taking my frustration out on my portaledge, I had it up, and fell onto it despairingly, a millimetre of nylon suspending me above the black drop below.

  To say I felt low was an understatement; I’d made mistakes and I felt useless, incompetent and far from ready for this route. I was also crushingly lonely. With companions, when things go wrong, laughing about your failings often takes the edge off your incompetence. In fact, for British climbers, incompetence is all part of the game. But when you’re alone, laughter is harder to come by, and it only makes you feel closer to insanity.

  I lay there and felt the pulse of the bats as they swooped down out of the crack, clicking. The chill of the Sierra night enveloped me now I’d stopped, so I reached into my haul bag and pulled out my fleece to put on top of my black T-shirt. Next I pulled out a tin of stew, opened the lid and sat watching the headlights of cars leaving the valley, going home, and the constellation of big-wall headtorches beaming down the wall round about me. I found Ella’s toy in my pocket and held it in my hand.

  I wanted to go down.

  I wanted to go home.

  Then I smelt something, something amazing, mouthwatering, the smell of meat being cooked. It was the Russians’ barbecue, the aromas wafting down the crack from the ledge above.

  My cold stew suddenly didn’t seem very appetising.

  Then I heard them begin to sing to the twang of a balalaika. I wondered if taking musical instruments was part of the ‘Russian way’. I switched off my headtorch, lay in my portaledge and listened to them sing. I thought about them above me, having fun, strong, well fed, confident, a team, sharing the load of such a hard climb. I thought about me, alone, out of my depth, the hardest climb of my life stretching on for weeks ahead.

  How will you ever do it?

  Snow gets in your eyes

  DICK, MY NEW boss, entered the boot room and began pacing backwards and forwards. Then he came and stood over me. He had something on his mind. I knelt at the feet of an old lady, carefully fitting a pair of lightweight leather walking boots, doing my salesman patter, double-checking myself, in case Dick was just making sure I was following the party line.

  I’d come to work for Dick Turnbull in Outside, a stone’s throw from my old job, after moving back north with Mandy who had now finished her teacher training. It was odd to be working for the author of the article that had propelled me to the Alps in the winter. No doubt having that experience on my CV had gotten me the job.

  After the woman had paid for the boots and left, Dick came over and told me what was on his mind. ‘I need a partner for this winter. My regular partner can’t go to the Alps, so I was wondering if you wanted to come instead.’

  I could hardly believe it: the man who less than a year ago had inspired me to go on the greatest adventure of my life, was asking me if I wanted to go back with him.

  ‘I want to try a route on the North Face of the Dru – would you be interested?’

  My excitement suddenly went cold, as I imagined the reality of what this would mean. I would be lashed to this God of winter alpine climbing who had scaled the North Face of the Eiger and the Matterhorn in winter, with me having failed to climb even a lump of frozen dirt. And a route like the Dru North Face in winter – that would be seriously hard, long and dangerous. Dick obviously imagined that I must have a vast amount of experience, with my one winter trip being the culmination of several years of hard climbs in summer. Only I didn’t. I was still a novice. But I was incredibly keen. Maybe that was enough.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that would be great,’ I replied, too scared to say anything else.

  Dick lay beside me in the reclined driver’s seat, snoring away under a giant duvet jacket while I sat shivering in a thin fleece. I was frozen, the cold seeping into the car from the icy French car park beyond, but sleep didn’t escape me because of the chill. What bothered me were the images of being with Dick on some winter north face in a few days’ time.

  I had spent the last few months gradually getting more and more worried about the trip. The greater the excitement on Dick’s part, the deeper my concern. He would come up and tell me about some horrendous icy crack high on the face, too wide for hands and feet, and too narrow to slide your body into, only to be climbed by desperate lay-backing, hundreds of metres from the ground. As he described what he’d heard about the pitch, he’d act out the moves, the rest of the staff standing around looking from him to me. ‘Yes, it’ll be desperate,’ he’d say, ‘but it’ll be OK, because you can lead it.’

  I beefed up my training for the trip, walking the twelve miles to work several times a week carrying a forty-kilo rucksack. I tried to get out climbing as much as possible, going to the climbing wall when the weather was bad, traversing backwards and forwards for hours, trying to strengthen my fingers, wondering if they would survive the Dru intact. Wondering if I’d survive the Dru.

  Friends who knew how little I knew shook their heads when I told them what was planned. ‘You’ll fucking die, Andy,’ they would say, and I knew they were right. This was no game. People did die. Or worse. Yet somehow I found the strength to believe I could do it. The route was first climbed in summer in 1935, so how hard could it be? This was only let down by the fact the Eiger North Face was climbed in 1938 and was still, by all accounts, desperate.

  Biking to work I would ponder every eventuality, every possibility. I would imagine the pitches, the bivies, the descents, building up a model of the climb that I believed matched the scale of the real thing. This went on for months. Every mile I cycled, or ran, or walked under the yoke of my murderously heavy rucksack, I worked to reduce the climb by another inch.

  The problem was now, lying in the dark and cold, I felt the mountain topple under the reality of finally being en route. One part of me told me it wasn’t too late, that I could tell Dick the truth, but another part of me didn’t care about the risk, the danger and the fear; this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had to take it.

  And just imagine if we actually got up the climb.

  Dick woke as the dawn broke, pulling off his duvet jacket to light up a cigar and turn on the engine to get the heater on.

  ‘Sleep OK?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘Not really … I was a bit too cold,’ I replied.

  ‘Fucking hell, you’re not one of those people who complain about the cold all the time are you?’ he shouted angrily.

  ‘No,’ I said meekly.

  I wasn’t.

  The snow was up to our knees. Amazing rock faces hung above me, walls of ice, granite buttresses, high jagged summits, but I kept my head down, too terrified to look up at the Dru.

  A pillar
as high as the Eiffel Tower loomed over me, black and sinister. It was very cold, and only the pumping of my legs as I made slow headway through the snow kept me warm.

  Dick followed me, both of us tied together in case of crevasses. Every now and again he would shout about how amazing it looked, how much bigger it was than he’d imagined, how we’d probably take at least a week to get up it, and that he hoped we had enough gas. At this last comment I stopped and asked if we did, praying we might put off execution for a few days by going back for more. ‘I think we’ve got enough,’ he said, stamping his ski poles into the snow and carrying on.

  A few hours before dark we reached the bergschrund below the route (a crevasse that forms between the mountain and the moving glacier), and decided to bivy there rather than risk being caught out on the steeper ground above.

  Chopping out a long flat spot below the bergschrund, we lay toe to toe in our giant sleeping bags, Dick melting water for tea, while I prepared for the first couple of pitches above. All my confidence had left me, and now it was only blind fear of embarrassment that kept me going. Dick chattered away as he piled snow into the pan, seemingly oblivious to the seriousness of what lay in store for us tomorrow. It occurred to me that he was actually looking forward to it. He was mad. I was mad. I felt as if I was sitting in a hospital ward waiting to go under the knife, my stomach so knotted I doubted I’d ever get it untied again.

  Dick vomited up the first mouthful of food and passed me the rest, saying he couldn’t eat anything due to the altitude. He pulled from his rucksack a packet of ginger biscuits instead. I sat in the dark and shovelled down the food, a rehydrated mush in a thick plastic bag. I shone my headtorch inside every now and again to see if there were any choice bits left. There weren’t. I could tell why Dick had puked it up.

  The warmth of our sleeping bags, the light from our torches, were now making me feel immune to my surroundings, perhaps because they were hidden from view. I finished the last of the food and folded up the packet, slipping it into my rucksack. I lay back, only my eyes and nose protruding from the sleeping bag, and for the first time in days felt relaxed. The stress of the last few hours, days, weeks and months suddenly left me, as the magic of the place began to play across my mind.

  I imagined that I was lying back amongst the tower blocks in Hull, the silence of the space between filling my mind. I felt a bolt of excitement race through my body when I thought about tomorrow. I had passed through a maze of doubt, countless turns that should have stopped me dead, but now I was here and I would live up to expectations.

  A snake slithered up out of the bergschrund, its body wide, wet and cold, coiling on top of me, slipping into the cowl that covered my face, and settling down on me, its skin icy cold, plastic, sweaty, its tongue hissing in my ears. Hissssssssssss. Hisssssssss. Hissssssss.

  ‘Andy,’ it said.

  ‘ANDY,’ it repeated, this time louder. Strange, I thought. It sounds just like Dick …

  ‘AAANNNDDDYYYY,’ Dick shouted.

  ‘What?’ I mumbled, coming round to find a faceful of frozen sleeping-bag fabric smothering me, the snake hiss still ringing in my ears.

  ‘It’s fucking snowing!’ he shouted.

  I pulled open the zip in the cowl that covered the head of my sleeping bag, designed to keep snow out in just such circumstances. I had borrowed the sleeping bag from Dick for the trip. The twist of light from my headtorch illuminated a world of large feathery snowflakes drifting down, every few minutes joined by the rumble of a mini-avalanche as it poured down the walls all around.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said rather pointlessly.

  I looked at Dick, just the top half of his body protruding from the snow, the look on his face telling me he was not amused.

  ‘Might clear up later,’ he said. ‘The route is so steep, we don’t have to worry about avalanches,’ he went on, lying back down.

  I lay back myself, suddenly filled with disappointment. I hoped the weather would pass. The weather forecast had been good. Alpine climbing seemed to be full of hope, fear and disappointment.

  Sleep came back to me soon, only this time without dreams of snakes. The protection and warmth of my sleeping bag insulated me from the reality of where I was; that was until, some time later, I smelt something unfamiliar. Smoke. Was I dreaming again? No, I could smell smoke. My brain tried to work out what it was, but the only thing that we had that could start a fire was the stove.

  ‘Shit!’ I thought. ‘The stove’s set Dick’s sleeping bag on fire.’

  I sat up with a jerk, and for the second time ripped open the cowl of my sleeping bag, ready to dive on Dick and put out the flames. Only instead of finding a mass of flames and smoke, I saw the small red glow of a cigar sticking from a tiny gap in Dick’s sleeping bag. I twisted on my headtorch.

  ‘Dick?’ I asked, his name combining every question I needed to ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, the cigar disappearing, replaced by one eye. ‘I always smoke a cigar at night; it helps me sleep.’

  I lay back down and tried once more to get to sleep.

  This time I fell into a seriously deep, deep sleep, exhaustion weighing me down. Then yet again something tried to wake me up. A muffled voice tried to prise me out of my slumber. I rebelled against the words and tried to block them out, only for the noise to increase. Someone was shouting my name, but the words sounded as if they were coming from a loudhailer wrapped in a blanket.

  ‘Andy,’ the voice said. It sounded concerned. I thought I’d better get up. Only I suddenly found I couldn’t. The weight of sleep pressing on me wasn’t imagined, it was real. I was buried.

  Shifting and fighting inside my sleeping bag, I eventually forced my head up out of the snow to find Dick shouting my name and the snow pouring down in torrents directly onto us.

  ‘Bloody hell – I thought I’d lost you then,’ he shouted over the hiss of the cascading torrents of snow. ‘This is shit,’ he carried on. ‘We can’t climb in this.’

  Resigned, we crawled up out of the snow and sat on our rucksacks for the remainder of the night, snow blowing its way into our sleeping bags and melting, leaving us pathetic, cold and deflated.

  As soon as we could go, we did. Dick stamped around in a bad mood, stuffing his gear away. I packed mine, worrying about the dangerous sugary snow on the descent, knowing we had no choice but to go down.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said cheerfully. ‘We might get another chance before we have to go home.’

  Luckily for both of us, that chance didn’t come.

  Robbins’s peg

  Pitch 6 New Dawn; Pitch 1 Reticent Wall

  I PULLED UP onto Lay Lady Ledge the following morning, just in time to watch the Russians disappearing up the wall with a wave.

  The ledge was large, triangular and sloping, set within a deep corner, around 200 metres up the wall. A small barbecue was stashed amongst some boulders at its back. The New Dawn route, which I had followed up to the ledge, and which was first climbed by Charlie Porter in 1972, now carried on upwards, while the Reticent headed off on the right-hand side.

  Charlie Porter was a Yosemite legend who tackled many of the hardest walls in the 70s, often solo, redefining hard aid climbing. This ledge must have been welcome to him after the steep pitches below, although it came at a high price. Porter had set down his haul bag containing his food and sleeping bag but he had neglected to clip it in, no doubt because of the size of the ledge. Unfortunately, the ledge has a slight angle to it, and Porter turned to see the bag rolling away. Giving chase, he thankfully stopped short of the edge as the bag went over and crashed down the wall below. Most climbers losing their sleeping bags and food would have retreated, but not Porter, who carried on and altogether took seven days to complete another first ascent.

  Porter had long been a hero of mine, both for his toughness and for the quality and vision of his routes, climbed at the limit of the gear used at the time and at the limit of what was imagined to be possible. He took this ability to suf
fer from Yosemite to the Arctic, climbing a big new route on Baffin Island, then on to a mind-bending solo ascent of the two-kilometre-high Cassin route on Denali, the highest mountain in North America and considered one of the hardest mountain routes in the world. Always reticent about his achievements, Porter gave up climbing at the top of his game, swapping his haul bags and ropes first for a kayak, making the first solo circumnavigation of Cape Horn, then a yacht. The last I heard, he was still active down at the tip of South America, a well-known skipper sailing out in the harsh South Atlantic and the fjord-lands of Patagonia and Tierra Del Fuego.

  What would I do if I gave up climbing after this?

  I hauled up my bags, and then, pulling out my hand-drawn topo, I tried to work out how to do the first pitch. The first pitch of the Reticent.

  I’d been told that the Reticent was so hard that even the easiest pitches were harder than the hardest climbs I’d done. Looking up the blank sweep of granite I could understand why. It looked impossible. There simply didn’t seem to be anything there at all, no cracks or edges to use to ascend, let alone places to protect myself. Worse still, the pitch stepped off the ledge, so within a move you were suddenly faced with having a huge drop, six pitches of vertical rock, beneath your feet.

  Impossible.

  I looked harder.

  There was no way.

  I sat down on the ledge, feeling despondent. I’d been an idiot. What had I been thinking? All I could do was go down.

  Down.

  My mood lifted. I suddenly felt relieved. The doubt was over. I could only go down.

  At least you know now that it’s too hard for you.

  At least not many people know what you wanted to do.

  I felt foolish, it should have been obvious that this would happen. I was so out of my league. I should have listened to my instinct lower down.

  At least I could still retreat from this point.

  I looked down at the valley, people setting up picnic blankets in the meadow, ready for some climber-watching.