Psychovertical Read online

  He stood a while and talked to Paul and me, told us how he had failed to climb the Moonflower Buttress on Mount Hunter in Alaska a few weeks before, after the death of another climber. I wondered if his failure in Alaska had caused some doubt in himself. How long can you believe everything is possible, how far can you push it? I could see that fire burning inside him though, as strong as ever, but this time I understood how he felt. I could feel the energy building in me as well.

  The next time we met was at the base of Zenyatta Mondatta, a tough and dangerous El Cap route with a reputation. A soloist had fallen to his death a few months before when his rope had snapped when it had run over an edge. We had climbed the Pacific Ocean wall the week before, the route steep and hard, the climbing at our very limit. Once we’d reached the top, instead of thinking of getting down and eating pizza, of going home to Mandy, all I could think was ‘What next?’ We were both worn down, but even so I wanted to climb an A5 before we left, and so I’d talked Paul into it. One more route.

  I sat belaying Paul on the first pitch, harder and more run out than anything on the Pacific Ocean Wall. Thierry walked up and began sorting out a tiny rack of half a dozen pegs, two hooks and three aliens, and lowered himself to ask me if it was ‘enough for A5?’ I said it was, knowing it wasn’t. We sat and watched Paul, his fear of being on such hard rock, so close to the ground, passing down the rope to me.

  ‘I’ve met you before,’ I said to Thierry, my head craned up checking Paul’s progress, ‘on the Dru Couloir last winter.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said, looking surprised.

  He asked me if I was going back to Chamonix that coming winter. When I answered yes, he asked me what routes I planned to climb. ‘New ones,’ I heard myself say, watching his expression. Then I went back to watching Paul.

  When he reached the top, the longest lead of his life, he just looked down and said, ‘Stick a fork in me and turn me over – I’m done, Andy.’ And that was the end of my dream to climb my first A5.

  I heard a few months later that Thierry had also failed to climb Zenyatta Mondatta – but had soloed the Shield instead.

  That winter we met again. I was wandering around Chamonix, depressed after two failures in the mountains. I had had such hopes for that winter, but was now partnerless. Paul had come out to the Alps with the same dreams as me: big alpine winter walls, mixing winter climbing with big wall climbing on the biggest alpine faces. I knew we would be an unstoppable team, and had planned and trained all autumn. Berghaus had been impressed with our Yosemite trip and had sent us a big box of fleece and Gore-Tex for this winter expedition, thinking that we might in fact be able to climb something hard.

  However, my dream quickly unravelled. Paul, the hardest person I knew, left after two weeks and two big failures, declaring alpine winter climbing ‘too cold, too frightening and too expensive’. I was staying in a gîte with a bunch of climbers, but no one wanted to climb anything hard. The well-known Sheffield climber Andy Cave was staying there with his girlfriend Elaine, still recovering from his fraught ascent of Changabang a few months earlier on which his partner Brendan Murphy had been killed. Andy was famous for being an ex-miner who’d learned to climb during the miners’ strike, and both Andy and Brendan had been heroes of mine since my Hitch and Hike days reading Mountain Review magazines. I’d expected Andy to be full-on, like me, ready for anything. But he wasn’t; he seemed to be hesitant, stand-offish. I was disappointed, my obsession clouding my ability to see that this man’s love of the cold, of high mountains, was crushed under the weight of the avalanche that had taken his friend.

  One night, as I was complaining about my lack of success, someone asked if maybe it was because the routes I chose were too hard for me. I felt the words strike into my well-shielded heart, the thought that it might be true almost overwhelming the illusion of who I thought I was.

  I bumped into Thierry in the street.

  We shook hands coldly and each asked what the other had done. Both of us seemed to be at a loose end, maybe a bit down. The weather was bad: rain in the valley, and grey clag blocking out our dreams above. Nevertheless our fires were still smouldering. In that instant we could have planned to do a route together, we should have, we wanted the same thing, to climb hard routes, to stand out, to do something amazing. To amaze even ourselves. But we didn’t. I didn’t like him. He was competition. And so we wandered off with our own separate plans.

  That night my inner fire got out of control as I tossed and turned in bed. Losing all rational thought, I got up and left the house early the next morning, leaving a simple note saying, ‘Couldn’t sleep. Gone to Chamonix, back tonight.’

  It really began to burn as I waded to the bottom of the North Face of the Midi Plan a few hours later, towards the 600-metre ribbon of ice of Fil à Plom, an ice route to the left of the Frendo Spur. The fire was driving me forward, stoked by my recent inactivity. In the background, almost driven out by the white noise of my mind powering up, was a tiny rational voice asking what I was doing, and for whom I was doing it? I thought about Mandy, and about the chances of dying, but then I thought about those words, ‘Are these climbs too hard for you?’ The lack of belief in me hurt, both from the outside – teachers, bosses, friends – and, worse still, from inside. There was a shard of unhappiness in my heart that undermined everything I wanted to believe about myself. No matter what I did, no matter how good I felt, it would be there, bringing me down again. Now I would do something that would remove it for ever.

  I began climbing.

  Right axe. Left axe. Right crampon. Left crampon. Up I went. Metre by metre. Steeper and steeper. No rope to slow me up. No hope if I fell.

  As I gained height, I noticed footsteps in the snow, leading off to another climb close by, and wondered if I wasn’t alone. Then I turned my attention back to the ice.

  I kept climbing, hoping that the higher I went the saner I would become, but it was only once I reached the top of that dark icy face, and collapsed into the sun, that I felt some peace and control return.

  I sat there for a long time, one leg hanging down the face in shadow, the other in light, thinking hard about what I’d done, going through the motions of asking why, knowing I didn’t need to ask. I thought about my father, always observant, telling me for the first time ever ‘to be careful’ before I left. Maybe he saw in me what I’d seen in Thierry.

  A few hours later I was back in Chamonix, now walking tall and proud, feeling that maybe I was finally beginning to shake off the mediocrity that dogged my belief. The shard seemed to have gone. I felt the heat of the fire inside me, the possibilities that it opened up. I could do anything.

  Walking down the street I kept an eye out for Thierry. Now I felt that we could do a route together. Maybe now I could accept I was more like him. In the Patagonia shop I overheard two people discussing an accident on the North Face of the Midi Plan, then as I left I watched a helicopter buzz the face. At the time I thought maybe someone was looking for me.

  Two days later I stood below the North Face of the Droites.

  Alone.

  I looked at the face as the sun lit up the glacier, and both rocky buttresses of the North East Spur. We’d climbed it only a year ago, that vast ice field topped by a castle of granite. I thought back to looking at this face and imagining the impossible, of climbing it. I thought about Dick Turnbull telling me how he took two days to climb it in the 80s, and how Doug Scott had phoned to congratulate him. And here I was. Nothing but my axes and crampons, a helmet, a water bottle, a single rope to abseil down the back, a thousand metres of ice between me and the summit I had stood on a year ago.

  I thought about what had brought me here.

  I thought about what I could be about to lose.

  I thought about what I could be about to gain.

  I felt empty and lost. My fire had been extinguished the night before by a late telephone call from my friend Andy Parkin, an artist and climber who lived in Chamonix: ‘By the way, did you kno
w Thierry?’ he’d asked. The word ‘did’ was enough to know he was gone. He’d fallen, alone, on the North Face of the Midi Plan.

  Now I felt cold, crouched by the bergschrund, waiting for the right moment, savouring who I was, thinking that after this, whatever happened, I would never be the same.

  I wondered if I really knew where the line was, if I could control the fire inside me, forgetting that just being here meant I knew neither. I didn’t want this to be so complicated. I wanted to be in love. But it seemed to be something else. I wondered if I could be strong enough to climb this face and never tell a soul, to prove my motives were pure.

  I took one more photo for my sponsors, and started climbing.

  Expando

  Pitch 4 Reticent Wall

  THE PITCH BEGAN like all the rest – from the end of my bed, a shallow corner stretched up for several metres.

  I stood on the edge of my portaledge and placed the first piece of the puzzle – a thin knifeblade peg. The peg slipped in easily, prising the rock apart with a dull thunk instead of its usual rising tone indicating solidity.

  Expanding.

  The crack was expanding – elastic. Any piece of gear placed in it prised it further apart, then it snapped back again once the gear was removed. This in itself was worrying enough, as it’s a fine line between an expanding feature and a loose one, especially when the feature in question weighs several hundred tons and hangs, unstable, above your belay.

  The problem with an expanding crack is that even if the first piece holds your weight, as soon as you begin tapping in the next piece, this will expand the rock further, causing the piece below to loosen its grip and rip out. It’s not unknown for every placement to fail as the leader plummets down, snatching all the hard work out and often leaving a sole peg to show the high point.

  The only technique to employ on such terrain is to clip yourself into the peg as you drive it home, hammering it in as fast as you can so that the moment the peg you’re standing on rips, the peg above may hold. This of course isn’t rocket science, but is rather a terrifying ordeal of nerve and concentration. Climbers push both the limits of protection and their own mental stamina. It is without doubt the most terrifying technique employed in big-wall climbing. It was all I could do, however.

  I stepped up on the first peg, clipping the eye of the peg to my harness, which allowed me to stretch up as high as I could to place the next peg. This I tapped in slowly at first. Then, clipping it into my harness, I tapped it in faster, feeling the peg I was on shift with each blow. They both held and so I crept on up.

  As I pegged my way up the crack, my heart was in my mouth. I tried to make every placement, every movement, perfect, yet I felt that at any moment I could fall, knowing that nothing would hold me if I did. I would smash into my haul bags and ledge, then carry on down an equal distance below. Apart from the chance of breaking or spraining something in such a fall, this wasn’t so bad as the whole flake ripping off with me. If this happened, that would be it.

  I carried on. Tap … Tap … Tap. Each blow was designed to get the peg to stick, but without causing any tremors which would disturb the pegs below. Once I felt I was getting close to a good fit I would step up the tempo, stopping the moment I thought it would hold me. My hands tingled with fright, and my head began to thump as I climbed, knowing I was hammering on the brink of disaster with each blow.

  On I went.

  I stopped repeatedly and tried to calm my nerves.

  An hour had passed since I’d set off, but time meant nothing. Everything was an irrelevance apart from each placement, a lifetime’s worth of worry and contemplation spent on each one, each forgotten in an instant as soon as I moved on.

  Finally, I came to the top of the crack where it pinched down and became part of the wall itself, the peg I placed there singing a rising song of security and life as I struck it hard with my hammer until it wouldn’t go in another millimetre. The feeling of safety that washed through me was indescribable.

  I clipped into the peg and looked for the next feature to climb.

  Surely that had been the hard part of the pitch?

  The wall above seemed blank, apart for a loose fin of exfoliating granite, seemingly stuck to the wall to my right. This was six feet long, finger-like and only a finger’s thickness. It was terrifying to look at, defying gravity. Any climbers would steer clear of it, knowing that, if they touched it, it would instantly break away and crash down.

  The climbing below had only been a warm-up. This was the next piece of the puzzle. I had to climb out along the flake.

  I tapped it with my finger. It moved.

  I tapped it with my hammer. It made a sound like a giant cup being set down on a saucer.

  It only seemed to be attached at my end, the rest being totally detached. It was insane to climb onto it. It was impossibly dangerous. There was no way I could do it.

  But I knew there was, because other climbers had thought the same, yet carried on and it had held them.

  You have no choice. It’s the only way.

  I thought about the people I knew who had lost fingers when such flakes broke off; an image of four pink tips sitting on a ledge came into my mind. If it broke it would be more than fingers I would lose.

  I tried to think more positively. The flake had hung here for ten thousand years, through winter cold and summer heat, earthquake and continental drift.

  It will hold you.

  I unclipped my sky hooks and carefully placed one on the flake, the steel scraping on granite making me feel sick, sounding like fingernails on a blackboard. I crept onto the hook, and stood there, proving to myself it could hold me.

  It did.

  I placed my second hook further out, clipped in my aider and moved over onto it, trying to transfer my weight as lightly as possible.

  My skin tingled with fear again. Goosebumps rose along my arms as cold sweat crept up my spine. This was the most stupid thing I had ever done.

  I pulled the first hook off, moved it over, and placed it and the aider on the flake.

  What are you doing?

  Go back.

  I stood between both hooks. The flake was perched directly above my belay below. If it broke it would sail down and chop clean through my ropes. We would fall together, a thousand feet, to the talus and trees below.

  Go back!

  I wanted to go back. It was all I wanted right then.

  Please don’t break, please don’t break, please don’t break, I muttered, but I knew that this was not a place for prayers, only movement.

  Go on. Go back.

  I had never been as terrified.

  My legs began to tremble, shaking so much I thought I would dislodge the flake. I had the peculiar feeling of tunnel vision as the world began to turn grey, then grow black at its edges.

  I wanted to go back more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life, but I knew the fear came from the knowledge that I wouldn’t.

  I moved over and stepped onto the hook.

  Fly or Die

  Yosemite, USA. September 1998

  I DEVOURED BOOKS on climbers and their epics, wanting to know what made them tick, and more importantly what skills they had that brought them back from the brink. My days sat reading Mountain Review magazine while working in climbing shops had left me with many heroes, but one that stood out was a climber named Andy Perkins, a northern climber who always seemed to be pushing the limits. He climbed hard on rock, ice and in the mountains, from the Alps to the Himalaya, Patagonia to Yosemite. I’d seen him on the crag a few times, always looking strong and in control, his body and demeanour unlike most climbers, neither lithe nor athletic, but more akin to a tight knot.

  The first time I actually got to talk to Andy was in North Wales, on a training trip out from the shop. Andy worked for a climbing company called Troll, a manufacturer near Oldham. Paul Tattersall and I had travelled over the night before we were due to meet up with Andy and the rest of the staff, wanting to get
some bivy practice on the thousand-foot face of Llwidd on the flanks of Snowdon. We’d driven over after work and arrived at the car park late that night, Paul’s tiny Bedford Rascal van buffeted by the wind, the snow racing through his headlights, barely lighting up the lonely patch of hillside in front of us. It would have been easy just to head down to the valley, go to the warm pub and camp, rather than head out into the storm to climb and shiver the night away in a damp sleeping bag on the side of a rock face. But we didn’t, and that’s why Paul was always a great partner. He was as stupidly keen as me. Life was too short for soft options.

  We set off, our plastic boots scuffing up the snowy path, arriving at the bottom of the face around midnight, and started climbing, keen to get to our beds. The ground was fairly easy, snow and frozen springy turf and grass into which axes could be thunked, but there had been no protection, so we kept climbing, hoping to find a nice ledge to sit on round the corner. But none came.

  On we climbed until about one in the morning, when all of a sudden, and with combined surprise, relief and disappointment, we found ourselves looking down the other side of the mountain. Forgoing a mountaintop bivy we stumbled down instead, soaked and tired, and slept among the bins in the car park.

  We arrived in the cafe only a few hours later, where everyone was waiting, Andy sat with the rest of the Outside staff drinking tea and working out what to do on such a foul day. Most of the people I worked with weren’t interested in mountains, and no doubt we looked quite comical wandering in late, still drenched after our night-time jaunt.

  We all sat and talked about climbing, excited to be out of the shop, going climbing yet still being paid. The usual climbing stories were told as tea was drunk, Paul and I sitting next to the gas heater trying to dry ourselves before getting wet again. Andy didn’t say much. I studied him, his giant forearms folded, his face crinkled and lined by what I imagined were years of facing up to starlight and storm, looking more like a salty sea dog than a climber with his black beard and streaked hair.