Psychovertical Read online

  Two days later our recklessness was becoming all too apparent as I pulled into a snow-choked chimney, and, digging above my head, inched upwards. Having drunk less then a pint of water in the past three days, I could feel my body shrinking by the hour. Luckily, the climbing had been far too hard and scary to worry about such trivial matters. Too high to retreat, and too British to ask for rescue, we felt we were climbing for our lives, unsure whether we had the reserves to make it.

  The feeling of being so strung out and exposed both terrified me and made me aware that this was the greatest adventure of my life. In that moment there was nothing but Rich and me.

  It was only while belaying that we could dwell on our crazy position, near the top of this huge north wall in winter, hands pumping to stave off frostbite, worrying about frozen toes, Frankenstein feet, hoping they would rewarm once we began to move again. Standing there, head bowed, only looking up as the rope was drawn out by Rich’s slow progress, I became acutely aware of the tiny dot I was, a speck of lichen on this tombstone. How misguided I had been even to dream of such torture.

  Twisted awkwardly in the narrow slot of the chimney, I desperately swung my axe above my head, searching for purchase, until with momentary relief I felt it sink into a solid lump of snow the size of a TV. Trying to relax, I pulled down on it as I wriggled my body up a few inches. The axe ripped and the block of snow smashed down on my head, the force transferring down my body to my feet. My crampons slipped on the granite, a sharp steel point tearing into the back of my leg. Snow tumbled down around me. Somehow I held on.

  I looked down, panting, and saw a blotch of red grow below me on the snow, not realising at first that it was my own blood dripping from my leg. It was at my temperature of course, vivid, alive, but it quickly cooled and then froze. I didn’t think then of the beauty of the white and the red, the hot and the cold, the alive and the dead. All I thought about was a blood-flavoured slushy drink.

  I wriggled up further, where the snow blob had been, until my head butted up against another barricade of snow. I set my feet in case of another impact and began to punch and hack until this block also split and crashed down, once more nearly dislodging me. My crampons screeched as they slipped, then held.

  I wondered where my courage and strength were coming from.

  Almost at the top of the chimney, I hooked a loose flake that protruded like a petrified giant’s ear, knowing that this was all the chimney had to offer. It groaned with a cold, terrifying grinding sound, shifted in the crack and pinned me to the wall. Nonchalant with fatigue, I wrestled it out and heaved it over my shoulder.

  Only when I heard it crash below did I think of the damage it might have inflicted on my ropes or on Rich.

  I hung there and looked down, and saw with relief that both Rich and the ropes were still intact. I felt my head throb with dehydration, and my belly painfully squeeze itself tight with hunger. For a moment a sense of hopelessness came over me, a sense of utter despair. I wondered how or where I would find the energy to push on to the top. It seemed I was living from second to second, without the energy to achieve anything more than a heartbeat. I could not dwell on what the next pitch would bring, or the following day, or my life beyond this climb. All I could hope to do was string together these separate moments of brief activity.

  Two hours later and one pitch further up the buttress, I woke up, blind, terrified and startled, as a piece of ice ricocheted off my helmet. It was cold and dark and I felt like a drunk as I fumbled with my headtorch with thick-gloved fingers. I was lashed to three pegs, my body suspended in a hanging chimney above some blackness. Then I heard Rich high above me, panting in the dark, moving slowly up the steep smear. There was only a bad nut in an icy flared crack between us. I remembered where I was and checked I was still holding on to Rich’s ropes.

  I scanned up with the beam of my headtorch as Rich shouted something – it sounded as if he were at the belay. I hoped this was the last hard pitch. I hammered out two of the pegs at my belay, then waited for the ropes to go tight before knocking out the last. Then I heard his voice again, clearer this time: ‘Watch me here, Andy, I might come off.’

  I turned off my headtorch, and closed my eyes again.

  Some time later that night we finally broke away from the top of the buttress onto a long corniced ridge that led to the traverse across the huge North Face and then on to the summit. Any relief here was short lived as I soon found myself in a nightmare of vertical crud, bad snow lying over bad ice. My arms were buried up to the hilt, my feet pedalling, and all the while I was conscious that Rich was probably asleep at the belay below in the darkness. I knew I didn’t have the energy for this, but somehow the flame kept burning as I fought my way upwards.

  It was way past midnight when I found a place big enough for us to lie down. We cut it out of the snowy ridge, working in slow motion until we had a space big enough. Even so, our feet hung over each side. We crawled into our frozen sleeping bags, boots and all, and lay shivering, too hungry to sleep, too tired to talk. I tried to find some relief by imagining myself soloing on gritstone on a fine summer afternoon, the smell of the heather, piecing those familiar moves together, the smooth stroking curve of the rock, and its texture.

  I woke up to the sound of my Gore-Tex bivy bag flapping. Wind. I sat up. It was light, but the sky was grey and overcast, black clouds filled the valleys, wind and storm boiled over the highest mountains. I looked to the east, my heart racing, and saw a huge weather front coming out of Italy, just as one had on our last day on the Frendo. In our extended condition, a storm this high on a route could kill us easily, the wind putting us beyond rescue.

  ‘Get up, Rich!’ I shouted. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here!’

  We madly stuffed everything into our sacks and set off immediately, forgetting about such things as food and water as survival instinct suddenly took over.

  Unseen by us, the ground had changed as we had climbed in the dark, the Spur kicking back to an easier angled ridge that could lead us to the top in a few hours. After so long on the route it was almost impossible to believe that such a place could even exist.

  We moved as fast as we could, yet remained slow and methodical, aware we were so extended it would be easy to make a mistake and plunge back down the Face. We moved off the Spur onto the sweeping kilometre-high North Face, the steep ice making our calves burn. Halfway across a long traverse, Rich slumped down on his axes, his helmet pressed against the ice.

  ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it – I need some water,’ he said.

  For the first time since I’d met him he was showing weakness. Not knowing what else to do, I pulled the rope tight. The moment passed and Rich looked up at me, shook his head, then carried on again.

  The summit was a trick. We had to keep going, and going. Maybe we had died days before and this was our vertical hell. Starving, thirsty, for us the climbing would never end.

  I saw a strange piece of yellow ice. A hallucination? A piss stain! We had joined the regular North Face route. I turned and shouted the good news to Rich, who looked a little bemused, but I knew no climbers would take a piss until they felt they had time to stop and relax. The summit had to be close.

  Up we climbed, ice giving way to deep snow, which in turn gave way to windslab that broke away and fell into the gloom, and then … nothing.

  I collapsed onto the summit, dry heaving with pain. Rich arrived grinning, full of a new-found energy, enough to get us both down. We shook hands and slapped each other’s backs, then sat down and savoured the knowledge that there was no more ‘up’, only ‘down’.

  The Mont Blanc Massif stretched out all around us, panoramic-postcard perfect. Rich pointed out the Matterhorn in the distance, and said we should climb that next. We sat in silence. We knew we should get a move on and abseil down the other side of the mountain, in order to reach the glacier and the long walk to the hut, but we couldn’t help waiting for a moment on this pyramid of snow. The Frendo Spur had mean
t so much to me, and I had thought about it every day since I had reached the top, but now my world had changed. This was my second route, but it was my first real summit. Ten metres below, I would have bet all I had that I would never climb another mountain in my life. Now all I could see was possibility all around me.

  Inside the hut, I listened to the wind outside. Rich was having a nightmare beside me. It would soon be light.

  Get down and ring her, tell her you are all right, tell her this is the last time you’ll put her through the pain.

  The phone rings, a stranger answers. After a while I get her to speak to me, but she seems stronger than before. She’s changed.

  I start to cry but she’s made up her mind.

  ‘No more, this was the last time.’

  ‘Don’t go, please,’ I hear myself say, but she’s gone …

  I wake up with a start, shaken, heart beating fast. I’ve been dreaming again. The silhouette of the Grandes Jorasses has grown darker, it’ll soon be dawn.

  I lie back one more time and listen to the wind.

  Black bites

  Pitch 3 Reticent Wall

  THE STORM RAGED all night.

  I was alive.

  I knew I could just as easily have been dead, hanging frozen on the end of my haul line.

  I lay in my warm sleeping bag on my portaledge, the flysheet clamped down tight around it, listening to the hail rattling on its taut skin, knowing I’d been lucky.

  In the morning I emerged like a mariner from his crow’s nest. My home, now suspended from two bolts, was a shipwreck of storm-battered rigging, ropes, bags, hardware hanging from every portion of my camp, clipped on in haste last night. I found a food bag of bagels and cheese, climbed back into bed, and waited for the sun to take the post-storm chill out of the air.

  From now on every night would be spent in this bed. My harness would stay on until I reached the top – slept in, climbed in, even worn on the toilet.

  I ate a bagel and thought about how close I’d come to hypothermia the previous day. The reality was that I could have died.

  I also thought about my past close calls – avalanches, falls, crevasses and falling rocks – and how each time, because the outcome was positive, the experience was simply shrugged off.

  Perhaps what worried me was the fact that yesterday the outcome was black or white: either get back to the belay and live, or be stuck and die, first by losing all motor skills, then by swift hypothermia as my core temperature dropped until I lost consciousness. The significance of yesterday was not that it was any worse than other close calls, it was that it was experienced alone. I had been a victim of my own incompetence, but also my own saviour.

  I had to start taking this more seriously, and that was best achieved by not wasting my mental energy or thoughts on useless doubts and fears. I had to keep a cool head and stay rational. I had perhaps two weeks of climbing left, and countless opportunities to make a mistake that could cost me my life. Next time I would probably not get a second chance.

  The sun was getting close, so I sat up in my sleeping bag and started to warm-up my aching muscles. The tightness and stiffness in my back and biceps felt good, but it had been a long time since I’d felt so wasted. How would I feel a week down the line? Could my body and mind take it?

  My fingertips were already looking pretty ragged, my fingernails scratched and sore around the edges. I wore fingerless leather gloves to protect my hands, but whatever you did your fingers always got hammered. I also had a few mosquito bites from my time in Camp 4, that had turned alarmingly black. I thought for a minute about blood poisoning, lying on my ledge slowly dying of septicaemia, waiting for a rescue that could take too long. I shook the vision from my head, knowing that fear of dying was almost worse than dying itself. If I got blood poisoning then I got blood poisoning. I’d worry about it if it happened.

  I swung my legs over the edge of the ledge; the drop below was now over a thousand feet. I could see people moving around, carrying haul bags slowly up the trail to start other routes, oblivious to my presence.

  I looked up and tried to spot the next belay. All I saw was seemingly blank rock, but I knew that somewhere up there I’d find bolts.

  Bolts are 12-millimetre steel rods with a plate screwed into the end for a karabiner, and they provide islands of security in what can otherwise be a desert of fear and anxiety.

  On any climb you have to trust that you, your partner, maybe even three or four of you, plus all your monstrous haul bags weighing hundreds of kilos, can hang solely from two steel rods no thicker or longer than your little finger. Such bolts gave the only security on a climb like this. They provided the comfort of knowing that although you could potentially fall and rip every piece of gear out, taking maybe a 400-foot whipper, at least the belay would hold.

  The numbers of bolts drilled on a first ascent is often used as an indicator of how brave the first ascensionists were. Most climbers, running it out on terrible gear, and looking at a death fall, will eventually reach for the drill and place a bolt for protection mid-pitch, or place two bolts in order to make a belay and a shorter pitch. The Reticent has very few drilled holes, the belays are far apart, the team had pushed their skills and mental fortitude to the max. The result was pitches that went on seemingly forever, often longer than the length of a standard rope. The mental weight of the climbing built with every metre until the leader would be a gibbering wreck, praying to get to the bolts before his mind snapped.

  The sun was only fifty feet away now, so I pulled on my shoes, being careful not to drop them. Next came my knee pads, then my helmet and leather gloves, the material stiff with cold until I flexed it back into life. I pulled myself up and stood on the unsteady portaledge, the thin fabric holding me above the void. I strapped on my chest harness, used to hold all my gear, and began clipping on nuts, pegs, cams, hooks, copperheads, each one making me feel heavier and heavier. Next came the ropes, tied to the belay I’d escaped from last night in the storm, stacking them ready for the next pitch. Lastly I set about dismantling my portaledge and stuffing my sleeping gear away in my haul bags, each piece fitting into its own stuff bag, each stuff bag stowed in its set place in the haul bag. Finally I was ready to move.

  The sun was now two hundred feet further down the wall. It was already getting hot. I clipped in my jumars and started up, back to the next belay where I’d haul up my bags and begin the next pitch.

  I still couldn’t see the belay bolts.

  My brain throbbed, my head felt as if it was on the boil. I took the last sip of water from the bladder attached to my back. It was hot. Grainy granite dust and sweat covered my face, stinging my eyes and finding its way into my cut fingers each time I tried to wipe it away. I could taste the wall and my fear.

  I’d been climbing for four hours; the wall was the blankest section of rock I’d ever climbed, smooth and almost faultless. The only way to progress was to follow a braille of tiny geological flaws: a scab of iron, a crystal standing proud, a fingernail edge, revealing themselves one at a time, more often than not at the very limit of my reach. This route must have been climbed by fucking giants!

  I hung from a single hook, a few millimetres of hardened steel clawed over a tiny crystal that stood proud of the wall. The last piece of protection was several metres below; my rope snaked in the wind down to its winking karabiner. If I messed up here I’d be in for the biggest fall of my life. I’d be falling into space. I wouldn’t hit a thing. The thought brought little comfort.

  The hook was called a pointed Leeper, designed by a climber called Ed Leeper back in the sixties and still one of the best hooks around. I looked at it, and thought it amazing that all my weight could be held by such a small piece of folded steel. I knew Leeper had been a rocket scientist once, with climbing hardware as a sideline. This hook had been made by hand in his forge in Colorado. It was a work of minimalist art. On the scariest placements I would often repeat the words ‘Leeper was a rocket scientist, Leeper was a ro
cket scientist’, a mantra that for some reason seemed to help.

  I’d hung from the hook for fifteen minutes, trying to find the next tiny hold, repeatedly stepping up high in my aiders, each time fearful I’d pull the Leeper hook off. The blanker the rock, the higher I had to step; the higher I stepped the more unbalanced and insecure I felt; the higher I went the bigger the chance I’d fall. I felt on the edge of control, tasting, hearing, feeling the drop below. Being so close to disaster was like falling itself, that stomach-lurching drop on a roller-coaster. I could feel the taunting pull of gravity.

  I tried again, moving up the steps of the aider, one at a time, until the hook was at my knees. My sweaty hand fingered around for anything. My stomach muscles tensed as I held on to the hook with my other hand, every ounce of physical control used to avoid a slip.

  There must be something.

  My fingertip brushed an edge no bigger than the thickness of a tooth.

  Too small. There must be something else.

  Trying to stay calm and breathe evenly I felt around further, my body stretching out, looking for anything, a matchstick edge or matchstick flake.

  Nothing.

  I pulled up my other aider and clipped on a pointed Black Diamond hook, its tip filed sharp for the tiniest of edges. I clipped in a daisy chain and aider, stretched up and carefully placed it on the minuscule edge, trying to set it in the optimum position, difficult when I could only work blind by touch. The hook was placed and, careful not to disturb it, I crept back down on the aiders below and psyched myself up for the test.

  You must calm down, be methodical, test the hook.

  On hard aid, where falling has to be avoided, the only way to proceed with any degree of safety is to test everything. This is a rule I live by. No matter how poor, no matter how fragile, everything must be tested. By testing everything with your body weight, giving it a little bounce, then a few harder shocks, you know that the piece can hold you – it’s a psychological aid more than a physical one.