Psychovertical Read online

  I eased my weight onto the Black Diamond hook in increments. Small jolts, slowly. My left hand held onto the Leeper hook below, my foot lifted off the aider by only a centimetre, ready in case the hook above popped.

  I watched it flex, wobble, but hold. It defied all reason to hang on the edge. I rested back on the Leeper.

  It must be the one.

  I didn’t want it to be the one. I thought about the other climbers who had passed this way, tried to imagine what they had felt and thought.

  Were they as scared as me?

  I looked down at the rope, flapping in updraught, the fear of the fall rising in my throat like sick.

  It must be the one. You must test it one more time, then get on it.

  I began testing again, counting out the number of jolts.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  My body shock loaded the hook with increasing force.

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  I pulled hard. I wanted it to fail. I wanted an excuse not to trust it.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  The hook held.

  Eleven …

  PIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGG!

  The hook sprang from the edge and smashed into my helmet, sending me back into the Leeper hook below. Instinctively I caught myself with my hand, slowing my impact onto the hook, my foot falling back onto the aider, with a jerk.

  I was off!

  I let out an involuntary yelp, but my mind was screaming.

  The whooshing fall didn’t come. I was hanging from the Leeper hook.

  Calm down, you haven’t fallen.

  I clipped back into the hook and tried to pull myself together.

  I thought about a friend who’d made lots of hard and scary rock climbs, and whose advice on how to overcome fear had been, ‘Just imagine you’re someone else.’ This was the perfect time to find out if it helped. It didn’t.

  I pulled myself up and searched once more for a better edge or flake, stretching up as far as I dared. All I could find was the same tiny edge. My head hurt. I wanted it to be over.

  Keep focused. Don’t get sloppy. If you fall you’ll only have to climb all the way back up and do all this again.

  I blindly placed the Black Diamond hook once more, and began a second bout of testing. It held. I tested it again, counting the jolts out. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Again and again, until I had no excuse.

  There was no way back, I had to commit to the hook.

  Go on.

  Holding my breath I transferred across. It felt as if my heart was shaking.

  Go on. Go on. Go on.

  I accidentally caught the Leeper hook with my foot and saw it tumble off its perch.

  I was now totally committed.

  No going back.

  I hung, unable to move, waiting tense, for the whooshing fall, feeling that any movement would disturb the fine balance of hook and steel. My whole weight and future were focused on one square millimetre. I couldn’t imagine how it could be so strong, or the structure of granite be so resistant to my enormous and concentrated weight.

  I hung there for ten minutes without moving, every second giving me hope.

  You can’t get any heavier than this.

  With bomb-defusing slowness I began to move up the aider, feeling the nylon stretch and shift, my eye never leaving the hook’s point, the fulcrum of all my hopes and fears.

  On fire

  Chamonix, France. January 1998

  I CROUCHED ALONE at the bergschrund and waited. Flicking the beam of my headtorch upwards I studied the wave of ice above me, and wondered how much it must weigh. It looked like an Arctic tsunami, just hanging. I looked down into the darkness and considered the gap I would have to jump before I could begin. I shivered. It was cold.

  I sat on my rucksack and waited. The night was growing pale, the snow grey, the mountains around me developing slowly.

  I looked down into the bergschrund and tried not to imagine what it would mean to fall down there, to be trapped between rock and ice, to be smothered by the snow that fell with me, arms and legs twisted and wrenched back.

  No one knew I was here.

  It wasn’t good to think about death. Not now. I shivered again. I sunk my head down and shrugged my shoulders to warm me up, then watched the far summits begin to light like slow candles. This is it, I thought, it’s time to go, it’s time to do it.

  I stood up. My legs felt tired. I hadn’t even started yet. I flicked my torch upwards again, and was glad of the bergschrund’s overhang. It hid the face above me. I felt utterly terrified.

  I picked up my axes and slipped a spare into my harness in case one broke, then clipped in the trailing rope already uncoiled at my feet.

  It was light enough now to turn off my headtorch.

  It was light enough to start.

  Everything was in place.

  I thought about dying.

  I thought about him.

  I thought about him falling.

  I first met Thierry one cold winter’s morning high on the Dru Couloir. It had only been a few days since Rich and I had stumbled back to town after climbing the North East Spur of Les Droites. Now, although we were wasted, good conditions on one of the plum hard alpine ice routes had been too much of a draw.

  Staying true to form we had been slow on the route, our bodies aching as soon as we’d set off through deep snow to the base of the climb, an 800-metre helter-skelter of hard blue ice that spiralled down the North Face. The Dru is one of the most iconic mountains in the world, a true skyscraper of rock that overhangs the village below, its plummeting faces devoid of easy lines or safe descents. To climb the Dru in winter is a true test of an alpinist’s mettle, and the Dru Couloir, once hailed as the hardest ice route on the planet, a rare climb to come into condition.

  As we left the warmth of the téléphérique station and went into the cold alpine night, I regretted my eagerness to return, missing the luxury of being back on the flat, not yet having washed away the hunger for food, warm baths, or nights spent without a harness on. My body stung with the cold, almost bewildered and disbelieving that I’d brought it back so soon. We climbed as a three, me, Rich and a friend called Steve Mayers. I remember thinking it was funny having Steve along, because, although he was in fact one of the UK’s strongest and boldest rock climbers, he appeared to my inexperienced eye a novice. I was forgetting that this would be only my third alpine route if successful. It seemed slightly crazy to have made the big leap from nothing to the Frendo in winter, and then the even bigger leap to the North East Spur, and now this. I wondered if I had just been lucky. How had I managed to find the courage for such a scary and fraught learning curve? I viewed myself as weak both in body and mind, timid, useless, almost still a child, and yet, somehow, deep inside me something was driving me on. But what?

  The climb had started with a race, a two-person French team appearing out of the pre-dawn as we neared the route’s bergschrund, and overtaking us as Rich’s bowels overtook him. Forced to climb a few pitches below, we had to deal with a shower of ice as they hacked their way up above. Then they slowed when they reached a barrier of overhanging rock that had to be aided. Once they had disappeared up over the fifty-metre wall I started up behind them, aiding up on rusty pegs which were shrunken by the cold, wobbling as I clipped in and crept on by. Rich and Steve were tied to the wall below me, eager for me to climb the pitch quickly and get up the route before nightfall.

  The climbing was slow and scary, made all the harder by the fact that I chose to climb it with my rucksack and crampons on, rather than haul them up afterwards. My world shrank down to just the peg I was hanging on – and then the next, my heart in my mouth. I had only aid climbed a few times in a local quarry on wet-weather days, and although cheating – hanging off your protection rather than using fingers and toes – it seemed monumentally terrifying and strenuous.

 
Only a third of the way up the wall, my attention was suddenly drawn away from the peg I was lashed to, by the sounds of shouting from above, a panic shout, a warning, then a blood-curdling scream mixed with scraping rock, as if the mountain were grinding the climbers to death. Then I saw a body falling, mixed with rock. The body disappeared out of sight onto a ledge, but the rock carried on, straight at me. I was in the fall line, there was no way I could duck or even move, I was a dead man, my body about to be cloven in half by a spinning meteorite of granite. I looked up, knowing I was about to die, and was surprised at my reaction: not fear or anger, nor a lifetime passing before me, only a deep sense of sadness. Of loss. It was the same as I had felt when my father hadn’t come home.

  The rock slipped by, a degree or so saving me as I hung, and smashed down the gully below. The feeling passed.

  We shouted to each other, myself, Rich and Steve, making sure we were OK, then shouted up at the French guys. All we could hear were groans.

  ‘Get up there and see if they’re OK,’ shouted Rich.

  I wanted to call it a day. My body and mind were in agreement that we’d pushed it far enough last week, and this was just taking the piss. Yet at the same time I knew I was in the middle of an epic, it was my duty to climb up and help these guys, and also, I hoped, climb the route.

  On I went.

  A few minutes later, the helicopter appeared and began making its way into the enclosed couloir.

  The three of us sat on a tiny ledge, our feet stuffed in our rucksacks, tied off to the remains of the French climbers’ ropes, left after their long and dangerous rescue. I slept and woke, and slept and woke, the space for my bum no bigger than a loaf of bread, only not so soft. The rescue had left us sitting at the top of the rock wall, the darkness of the North Face all around us complete, a black hole that sucked starlight and climbers deep within it.

  When dawn came, so did Thierry.

  He and his partner, living in Chamonix and not wanting to sleep out on a mountain when their beds were so close by, had chosen to climb through the night.

  Shivering and tired after a horrible night out, I felt in adequate and embarrassed for being so British, for being so crap, as he mantled onto our ledge, cramponed past me with a grunt, clipped in, shouted for his partner to jumar, then began rolling a cigarette. I tried to smile, the stove balanced on my knee, brewing up a cup of tea, hoping to show that I may have been slow but at least I was having fun. But I expect he saw through my chapped grin. He just ignored me, no doubt cursing his bad luck for being held up by a bunch of bumbly Brits on a camping holiday. At the time I just dismissed him as yet another ‘French climber’, but, looking back later, I was impressed by his skill and motivation: he had climbed up in a few hours what had taken us all day. He had an efficiency and ease that I lacked. He was in his element, while I was out of my depth. I watched him, standing there in his one-piece Gore-Tex suit festooned with sponsors’ badges, smoking. I think I was both jealous and inspired. I could see a fire burning inside him, a fire I wished I possessed, impelling him to succeed and powering him on to bigger and harder routes, whereas I was resigned to climbing at my limit on pedestrian routes put up before I was born. I could see it in his eyes, he was driven, he was hungry for success and he approached his climbing as a professional. More importantly he believed he could do it. Maybe he could have learnt to play the guitar, joined a band and found what he was looking for, but instead he chose a pair of axes to carve himself a niche in the world.

  His partner arrived, out of breath, carrying their single rucksack, and then they were gone, moving off our bed.

  Packing up, we followed them, and as the day progressed and the climbing grew harder, we kept at their heels. At one section, they stopped to aid up another rock wall, and Steve overtook them, hooking his way up with his axes, running it out, while they stopped to place gear. I could feel an air of competition grow, the climb becoming a race. Near the top, they argued for us to let them pass, saying we were too slow and were holding them up. Behind the armour of Gore-Tex and youthful bravado, I could see they were now as concerned as us about this route and just wanted to get to the top, so we let them pass, our own pace slowing as ice crashed down from their axes and crampons. But as I watched him climb into the gloom, I felt that maybe I was at a turning point in my climbing, realising that all I had to do was believe that anything was possible – and of course it is. Hadn’t this been proven by my climbs so far, which on paper were impossible for such a climber as me to pull off? Although I had so little confidence in myself, somehow, somewhere, there was belief.

  As night fell once again, with the summit passed and abseiling now down the back of the Dru, I felt a warm stirring inside, a hunger.

  A few months later I was asleep in the dirt of Camp 4. It was my first visit to Yosemite, in fact my first real climbing trip beyond the Alps. I was there with Paul Tattersall, who had recovered from his virus, and was keen to climb big walls. After my struggle on the aid pitch on the Dru Couloir, I had decided I wanted to learn all the skills necessary to climb the hardest routes – not just free climbing, but aiding, jumaring, hauling, everything I would need when I went back to the Alps. That was my goal, this novice alpinist, to return and, in the space of three climbs, repeat the hardest winter routes.

  Paul had climbed El Cap twice before, and I wondered at the time why he would go back with a novice, but I suspect he saw my wild ambition, and ignorance, as a sign that I had the right stuff to fulfil both our ambitions.

  I woke to shouting, a French voice asking where his bread, butter and cheese had gone. His corner of the steel bear box, designed to protect food, was empty. I unzipped the tent and looked out at him, as he stood there furious, surrounded by sleepy climbers. A dirty climber told him a bear had run off with his food in the night, which in fact was true, as this man had been so drunk he had gone to bed leaving the bear box open.

  ‘All is left is my coffee,’ the Frenchman shouted.

  ‘Aye mate,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘Bears don’t drink coffee.’

  I recognised the Frenchman immediately: it was Thierry.

  We had arrived a few weeks before and, being ravenous to climb, wanting to squeeze the most out of my precious and expensive four weeks off from work, we started climbing immediately, making a five-day ascent of the Shield on El Cap, a 1,000-metre climb where each pitch was harder than the last. It was a perfect introduction when we really knew nothing about climbing big walls. Our first mistake was that our haul line was too short, with Paul being unable to get to the first belay as the rope twanged tight to the haul bags. Not wanting to fail for such an oversight, I tied on a length of rope we’d found at the base of the wall. Although this necessitated passing a knot every time we hauled, and gave us a few raised eyebrows when we passed other teams, it did allow us to continue. The next mistake was a lack of toilet roll, again remedied by scrounging a patch of gaffer tape found stuck to a sharp edge a few pitches higher. Although it was not ideal – the smooth side being far from absorbent, the sticky side being far too painful – Paul made do, and I just didn’t go.

  Our ambition was painful. The route had only been climbed once before without placing any pegs. We decided we would climb with a hammer.

  Fiddling in bad wires where a stonking peg would go, and leapfrogging our precious cams where a solid peg could be hammered, we climbed for three days.

  I could hardly believe I was actually on El Cap, hanging out on our portaledge, hauling, jumaring. We joked as we sat in the dark, tired and content, buzzing still with the day’s climbing, that we were living the dream. We weren’t. It was the first part of a nightmare.

  On the fourth day we woke to a storm, and I started up the crux – the triple cracks – hoping we could get to the big ledge three pitches higher before it hit hard. The triple cracks, first climbed by Charlie Porter in 1972, were once hairline cracks that necessitated dozens of tiny RURP placements, each one going in no further than a fingernail. Now, de
cades later, these cracks were full of big holes that took big wide pegs, the tips sawn off so they fitted snugly against the wall. Without pegs, we were forced to make do with sky hooks and ‘just in’ cams, reaching up to clip old fixed gear, broken pegs, twisted nuts, and rusty copperheads. As I climbed my fear grew, the mind-bending drop sucking at my confidence. This section of the wall barrelled out, with nothing but air below for seven hundred metres. I moved with total concentration, aware that no matter how scared I became, this pitch was down to me, no one else. I had to climb it.

  Then, halfway up, with virtually no gear clipped below me, I made a long reach for a tiny fixed copperhead, taking out the bombproof cam below me as I moved on up, in case I needed it again.

  Hanging there, the rope whipping around in the storm below me, I suddenly felt something was wrong. My body suddenly flushed with cold, the hairs on my head stood on end. The wire of the copperhead, swagged together maybe decades ago in a tight alloy sheath, was slowly creeping apart under my weight. I froze with panic. The terror of the inevitability of my plummet was indescribable.

  And then I fell.

  It was the first big climbing fall of my life. And it was BIG. The fall was long enough for me to think: Shit, I’m falling off a big wall!

  Then slowly, as if caught by the hand of a caring god, the rope stretched out and I stopped, and looked into the eyes of Paul, tangled and shocked at my unexpected plummet from above.

  ‘Pass me the pegs,’ I said.

  A few days after the bear box incident Thierry came up to me in the campsite while I was sorting some gear.

  He was short and looked very French, with his sunglasses balanced in his hair. He asked if I could give him any information on the Shield, as he wanted to climb it hammerless. I asked him what else he wanted to do and he told me, ‘I come to climb A5s.’ I knew he didn’t recognise me, but why should he? My face had been hidden by a balaclava on that occasion.