Psychovertical Read online

  Then in a quiet moment in the conversation Andy spoke. ‘What’s the biggest fall any of you have ever taken?’

  The question silenced the room. Someone said he’d once taken a huge lob with just the rope tied around his waist and had pissed blood for days, and a few others had some small fall stories of half a rope length. ‘Well … I once fell five hundred feet’ said Andy.

  ‘Did you survive?’ I asked; everyone laughing and somewhat defusing the tension Andy had just built up.

  Ignoring me, Andy went on. ‘We were climbing on Creag Meagaidh, on a grade 5 ice route and my partner was climbing above me, with a snow belay. All of a sudden he fell off.’ The room was quiet now. ‘He fell past me and I knew I had to reduce the load on the belay, so I let the rope slip through my hands, hoping I could slow him down before his weight came onto me.’ I tried to imagine what it must feel like to know you’re about to die, how you could have the mental control not to just freeze and let it happen.

  ‘And then I was ripped off the belay.’

  Andy described how they had plummeted down the face, over steep bulges of ice and near-vertical snow, until with two thuds they landed at the bottom.

  ‘We were both pretty smashed up,’ said Andy, straightening. ‘My mate got an ice axe stuck in his chest, and I injured my ankle, but we were very, very lucky.’

  The training had been great, with Andy limping around to remind us of the story, showing us the ropes, the whole shop thrutching its way up a snow-covered crag. Andy seemed to have a very professional approach to climbing; he was solid, which was perhaps how he’d survived the close calls that go with his kind of climbing. Only the year before he’d been climbing a hard route on El Cap called Sunkist, when he and his Norwegian partner had been trapped in a storm for several days, ice-cold waterfalls striking their tent directly, bringing them close to hypothermia. They had only survived by getting into the same sleeping bag for two days until a rope could be lowered to them and they could jumar out.

  On the last night of the training we had a slide show by a sponsored Troll climber called Adam Wainwright, who gave us a talk about climbing a route on El Cap called Aurora with two top American climbers. The route had been put up in 1981 and graded A5, and was the hardest climbed by a Brit at the time. I found it hard to imagine climbing anything that long and difficult, listening to him describe ladders of copper heads stretching into space, tiny hooks gripping fractured crystals, and the never-ending fear of the drop.

  Then Andy gave a slide show about his near ascent of Cerro Kishtwar in India in 1991, with Brendan Murphy – days with minimal food, equipment failure, going to the edge, and just getting back again. I was in awe of anyone who could combine all the climbing skills, rock, ice and mixed climbing, then project it onto a big wall, in the Himalayas, and push on for days and days. I think that night I decided that of all my heroes, I most wanted to be like Andy. I wanted to devote my life to climbing wild big walls.

  A few years passed, and on my return from Yosemite and then the Alps, I began to send Andy some feedback on Troll gear I had been using, though it was probably more like pestering a hero then actually doing anything of any value. After soloing the North Face of the Droites I sent him an email about the climb, and how I’d done it in six hours, but misquoted the route’s height as 10,000 metres rather than 1,000, to which Andy responded, ‘You must be a very fast climber, youth.’

  I began planning for a return trip to Yosemite that year, and was looking for a partner as Paul had moved to the far north of Scotland. At the time you could probably count on one hand the number of climbers in the UK who were up for hard big walls and so when I heard Andy was also planning to visit the valley, somehow our plans converged and we ended up going together.

  To meet your climbing heroes is one thing, and to climb with them another, but to climb with them on El Cap is something else altogether. With Paul it was always so easy. Even though Paul is a phenomenal climber, we just kind of wrote each other off as being crap and useless and took it from there. We could only get better. With Andy I felt he had an image to keep, he was a solid and competent climber, very old-school in some ways, not quick to show weakness or incompetence, whereas weakness and incompetence seemed second nature to me. I found this hard to begin with, and felt very much the apprentice, but as such I was keen to learn everything I could about climbing from Andy.

  Things didn’t start well. Andy rang me on the Wednesday night to ask if I was packed. I replied I hadn’t started yet, believing we were flying Friday morning from Manchester, only to discover we were flying the following morning. I was fitting a parquet floor in our new house while Mandy was away on holiday. I hated DIY, believing that it stood for ‘don’t involve yourself’. I was suddenly forced to pack and finish the job. My haul bags, when emptied a few days later in the dirt of Camp 4, contained dozens of pieces of wood parquet, with glue sticking everything together. Several pieces ended up stuffed in cracks on the wall, no doubt confusing many of the climbers that followed.

  Sitting sorting gear in Camp 4, we realised that we’d forgotten to bring a ‘shit-tube’ for the wall, and started asking around if anyone knew where we could get one. The Camp 4 camper is either a climber, a walker or a nut, and as it happened we ended up sharing our site with one of the latter, who appeared to be a Vietnam vet who was into survivalism. He had no tent and chose instead to set out all his gear on a tarp beside our picnic table; knives, bed roll, camo clothing, more knives. He had a hard time understanding our northern accents, but when Andy asked if he knew anything about ‘shit-tubes’, he quickly departed, asking us to keep an eye on his gear as he scuttled into the woods.

  Eventually a guy rode up on a bike with the unlikely line ‘Hey dudes, I hear you’re looking for a pipe bomb?’ He produced what looked like a well-used piece of white plastic pipe for us. ‘Be careful though, dudes,’ he said, as he passed it over. ‘It’s still loaded.’

  Unscrewing the cap on one end, we found it was indeed still ‘loaded’, the stench of the contents enough to make you want to turn and run. I came up with a plan, and boiling a pan of water, Andy poured this in while I held the tube at arm’s length. Sticking the cap back on, and still holding it as a man holds a shitting baby, I gave it a big shake to dislodge the contents.

  BANG. The end shot off, and a long spume of brown water and paper shot out of the tube, turning to a cloud of vapour that descended, to our horror, down onto the survivalist’s neatly arranged tarp, covering all his gear.

  We decided it was time to get on the wall.

  The route we chose, Iron Hawk, was a jump up for both of us. The first section had a bad reputation for looseness, and Paul and I had tried it the previous year, but had got lost, confused and a little scared by the black, intimidating lower half. Yet again things didn’t go quite to plan. The black diorite was a magnet for the hot Californian sun, reflecting off it in waves, the heat hitting us both back and front. Andy started acting a bit oddly in the heat, his black helmet contributing to his overall heat exposure. He flaked out under the only tree on El Cap, aptly named ‘El Cap tree’, while I led the lower crux. It was obvious that Andy had heat stroke, but although I was worried he might pass out while holding my ropes, my full attention was on the climbing. The pitch was a horror show of loose blocks and shifting flakes, danger everywhere you looked or touched. I felt as if I was making my way up an earthquake-wrecked tower block: pull on the wrong hold and the whole lot could come down. The only way to progress was by a combination of free climbing and skyhooking, as only by touch and feel, testing each hold, could I be sure that it was safe to move up. Cracks split off everywhere, but there was little in the way of protection. I eyed each fracture with suspicion – a sign of weakness rather than a place to stuff in a piece of protection. It was a hard choice, but it seemed better to risk a clean fall onto the jagged ledge where Andy lay than to yank the mess of rock down with me. Put simply, there could be no falling. I moved up slowly towards a big roof, the w
ay blocked by a giant flake the size of a car. I assumed that such a feature must be well attached to the wall, otherwise it would have fallen off long ago, so nothing I could do could possibly dislodge it. I began placing cams, one above the other, and moved up, conscious that my rope was running underneath the flake, and if it were to fall, that would be it.

  Halfway up I reached high and, retracting the lobes of the cam attached to my daisy chain, I set it in the space between the wall and the flake and began to transfer my weight.

  The moment I did, I knew something was wrong. I looked up and saw the cam: its four curved opposing alloy lobes, instead of locking in tight and solid, were instead slowly creeping open. My weight was prising the flake off the wall. Before I could react, there came a low groan that seemed to start deep within El Cap itself and travel out towards me. It sounded ancient, like a two-hundred-year-old oak tree fighting gravity in its final death throes. The flake, which had hung here for perhaps a million years, was about to fall, unlocked from the wall by my cam.

  Trembling, I grabbed for the piece below and swung down onto it.

  The groaning slowed. Then stopped. The monster fell back under the sleeping spell of time.

  I clung to the lower cam, feeling like I was perched on a swaying wooden ladder.

  I began shaking uncontrollably, hardly believing I was safe. It was too close. I could have called it a day but instead I shouted for Andy to send up our cheater stick, a long length of tent pole used to navigate past sections of blank rock; and gaining control of myself I reached up with it and bypassed the flake.

  A few years later this whole feature broke off, chopping the ropes of the leader to pieces, and smashing inches from the belayer. Incredibly they both survived.

  As I climbed up to the roof and clipped an old and rusty set of bolts, my clothes drenched with both the sweat of the climb and the sweat of absolute fear, I wondered what I had let myself in for, and if I were ready to climb in the premier league.

  All I knew was that this was a dream that couldn’t be dashed by fear. I had to reach deep and find the strength that my heroes had obviously found before.

  The route had been named Iron Hawk for two big roofs that split the wall higher up, set like the spread wings of a hawk, and for several days we inched up it. I felt that not dying the previous day had been a big success, and maybe finding Andy ill with heatstroke made me see him as just as human as me, so we began climbing more as equals. There was no division of labour based on competence, the pitches alternated one after the other. It felt great to be back on El Cap, and in many ways I was more comfortable than Andy. Of course he’d almost died there, something apparent by the way he eyed every cloud that passed.

  The worst thing about Andy to my eyes was his bowel control. He would have to have a crap once a day, whereas I would go once a week. He seemed to have the knack of being able to drop his trousers and evacuate his bowels at a moment’s notice, something he put down to his years of practice with ‘Delhi Belly’. He told me a story about getting food poisoning on Changabang, and that his explosive diarrhoea had projected thirty feet down the face, which I assumed was some kind of record. The worst thing about Andy’s toiletry habits was he would go the moment he’d finished his food, and the moment I’d start mine. For breakfast we had a big tin of fruit to share, and every day he would eat his half, then in the same motion as he passed the tin to me, pull out a paper bag, pull down his pants, and have a dump. It’s not surprising that more often than not I would lose my appetite, the sight, smell and sound unconducive to keeping a mouth full of pineapple and grapes. ‘Not eating, youth?’ Andy would usually say, taking the tin back off me as, in one motion, he stuffed the paper bag into the now full shit-tube.

  On the last evening, we reached the route’s only platform and, putting up our portaledge, we sat looking at the sunset. We were both content with what we had done, climbing a hard route with little fuss and no epics or falls, well, that is apart from the death flake. Andy had been good company, and I thought it amazing that I was there with him and, what was more, that I felt his equal on the route. How far I had travelled from the day at a trade show where I was too intimidated even to talk to him. Andy was a great climber, but I wondered how different he was from me.

  We got back down to Camp 4 the following night, and met up with a friend of Andy’s called Ian Parnell, a relative newcomer to big walling, but already well known as a hard climber. It was a relief to be safe, sat around the picnic table, bullshitting, all the time keeping one eye and one nostril out for the survivalist … ‘What do you fancy doing next, youth?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Why don’t we team up and do another wall? I replied. ‘Only this time let’s try something much much harder.’

  The flake groaned like an old man.

  I froze as I had the last four times I’d tried to weight it. I stepped back down quickly on a birdbeak, the dirt that had spilled out from behind it clogging up my sweaty eyes, sticking to me in the dark, and to my trembling hands. I felt like a prisoner of war trying to dig his way out of a collapsing prison-camp tunnel. If the flake, the size of a door, broke off, I was dead. I couldn’t believe I was wrestling with yet another expanding flake.

  ‘The flake’s expanding,’ I shouted down into the night, my words travelling along the rope to my two partners thirty metres below with no interruption from solid gear, only tiny pegs and heads. ‘I think I might have to free-climb around it,’ I shouted again, the words ‘OK’ coming back up. I knew they didn’t really care. They just wanted me to get a move on so they could find a place to sleep.

  I began to unclip myself from my aiders and gear, one at a time, methodically, psyching myself up, preparing to launch myself onto the rock with only my hands and feet to hold me there. I wished I had my sticky climbing boots on, not my trainers. I began sorting out my rack, clipping what I wouldn’t need to my last piece of gear, reducing my weight, and so the strain on my arms. Finally I rubbed the dirt off my headtorch, then my hands, the grime smearing onto my grubby shorts.

  ‘OK, watch me here,’ I shouted, again knowing that they didn’t care, imagining them both sitting below on the portaledge, chatting and wondering what the fuss was all about.

  I placed my toe out on a small dish-shaped hold to the left of the flake, and grasping its thick edge, I pulled up, my fear increasing the moment my right foot left the security of the sling I had stood in for nearly half an hour, trying to avoid the very thing I was now doing.

  I moved my left foot up a few inches, then shuffled my hands one at a time, laying away on the flake like a man climbing a drainpipe. I knew at any moment I could pop off, one foot slip, one greasy hand sliding from the rounded granite flake. But there was no way I could, and so I wouldn’t. If I fell, that was it. The idea was unthinkable.

  Up I moved, groaning, panting, glad of the dark that hid the drop. Above me, one or two feet higher I could see a slot between the flake and the wall, a place to jam in a cam and rest, out of the danger zone where the flake could break off.

  Hanging one-handed, my forearm burning, I fumbled with my tangled cams, searching for the one with the blue sling, but in the yellow light of my headtorch they all looked the same. Almost spent, I just grabbed the one that looked good enough, stuffed it into the crack and, close to puking, clipped in and sagged down onto it.

  I wondered why I hadn’t just backed off and let someone else try this.

  Then the flake broke and we both fell into the dark.

  I fell and fell and fell. Everything was black. Black and heavy, the flake pressing on me as we dropped down the wall. I felt no tug from my protection as we dropped, the rope probably cut as the flake sheared.

  My brain was numb, totally accepting my fate.

  Then the rope began to pull, elastic, still there, my lifeline, pulling hard. I began to slow. The flake slipped away and we parted in space, and I sensed it fall five hundred metres until a delayed boom let me know it was dead and I was still alive.

>   I was still alive.

  Andy began shouting. ‘Are you all right, youth?’

  I checked that my fingers were still intact, then my limbs, then my face, the only wound a hole in my shoulder. ‘Yes,’ I shouted back, slowly spinning in space.

  ‘Check your rope isn’t cut,’ he shouted.

  I scanned up, but knew that if it had been, it would have snapped.

  ‘I’m going to jumar back up the rope,’ I said, unclipping all the karabiners which had slid down the rope from the gear that had been ripped out. ‘I’m going to try and finish the pitch,’ I said, suddenly feeling invulnerable, adrenaline shooting through me.

  Up I went to my high point, a single rusty rivet. It seemed incredible it had held. There was no gear after it. My life had been saved by an old bolt, probably one found on the floor of a garage.

  I began hammering the gear back in, moving up, repeating what I had done, until I reached the scar where the flake had been. Instead of granite, there was now a dirty patch, into which I hammered tiny birdbeaks, forcing them straight into the spongy rock. One, two, three, four beaks saw me to the top of the fracture. I hung from a skyhook and suddenly felt very tired. I felt as if I were melting. I clipped the rope into the hook, even though I knew it would topple off as soon as I stepped off it, and placed a peg above, the steel blade sliding in a few inches until it stopped. I tied it off short, and clipping my rope to it, then attaching my haul line, abseiled down to the portaledge. The rest could wait for tomorrow.

  I woke in the morning, and my first thought was of having to go back up and finish the pitch I’d fallen from. My night-time adrenalin was over, and all I could think about as I ate my bagel for breakfast was jumaring back up the rope that hung in space. Perhaps, if I’d been braver, I would just have asked someone else to do it, after all I had nearly died up there. But putting on my gear, it seemed easier just to get on with it, after all if someone asked me to swap I probably would have said no. This was my lead. The haul line hung way out in space, and it made my stomach lurch as I pulled it in tight and attached my jumars. Andy was quiet. I suddenly wished I’d set a better anchor above, rather than a single tied-off-peg.