Psychovertical Read online

  I unzipped an inch of my bivy bag and looked out.

  It was our second day on the face, and the storm had found us squatting in a graveyard for unlucky alpinists, 700 metres up the route, perched on two nicks in the ice just big enough to hold us in check against gravity. The storm was intense and unexpected – good weather had been forecast for a few days. The nature of the face meant snow was funnelling down like Niagara Falls, a terrifying, but thrilling spectacle.

  I shouted to Es to see if he was awake. He was, but his black sleeping bag was bent over under the hail of snow; his rope, attached to his harness, and fed out through the zipper of the bag, was pulled tight against the anchor, a peg and nut in a shield of rock behind us.

  I told him we’d have to see what happened, perhaps give it a few hours. After all, the weather forecast had been good, so maybe this would clear.

  But what if it didn’t? I peered down at the line we had taken the day before, up the ice face below us. Now it was a river of powder, metres deep in the places where streams joined to form rivers. There was no way we could get back down the way we’d come up. Going up was also out of the question: the spindrift avalanches would knock us off as soon as we began, filling our faces and cooling us down until we froze.

  But we couldn’t stay here either.

  We were trapped.

  I thought about the previous night, as we’d sat brewing up in the freezing dark, tired and thirsty after climbing up to our perch. Es had said that he’d been told by one of his friends not to go climbing with me. I asked why, and heard that his friend had been to one of my slideshows, and that in his opinion I was a ‘fucking psycho’.

  Almost exactly a year before, two British climbers, Jamie Fisher and Jamie Andrew, had become stuck only a hundred metres higher in just such a storm, pinned down for nearly a week. With no chance of a rescue, they had quickly succumbed to the cold. Jamie Fisher had died of exposure, and Jamie Andrew had been minutes away from death when they eventually managed to rescue him. He was terribly frostbitten, and lost both his hands and lower legs.

  Their epic seemed very close.

  We too were trapped. We too were fucked.

  People often ask me what to do when you have no control at all over the situation you’re in. The only answer is that how you react to having no control is often the first step in re-establishing control.

  ‘We’ll give it three hours,’ I shouted to Es, trying to sound as if nothing was wrong, as if I had found myself in such a predicament many times before. Actually, I had, but nothing quite this bad.

  He mumbled something back, but his words were lost to the snow.

  I sat and thought about the two Jamies. What would happen to us? What would happen to Es? I felt ashamed at my ambition, for bringing Es here. He didn’t have a clue. For him this was about fun, a game, just climbing, but it was anything but. What had I been thinking? How could I be so callous and selfish, getting him into such a mess? What if he had been my child?

  What if he dies and you survive?

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ I shouted.

  Only fifteen minutes had passed.

  Es poked his head out of the cowl of his bivy bag and smiled as if nothing was wrong. I smiled back and wondered if we’d see the end of the day.

  With the unrelenting snow trying to bully us off our perches, our only option was to attempt a retreat. I knew I would have to use all my experience to make it down. I was glad I’d survived the retreat down Fitzroy. Now I could call on every scrap of skill I had learnt there.

  The only problem was that this was worse.

  Getting ready was a mess of cold fumbling, juggling gear, everything buried, frozen or just lost. We pulled up our boots from the bottom of our sleeping bags and strained to get them on, all the while trying to remain in our sloping snow-filled bucket seats.

  Wearing every item of clothing we had, we pulled ourselves out of our bags and tried to stand against the force of snow and sort out a system for retreat.

  Es was small and very skinny, I was not, so I took the enormous rack of hardware and our single giant rucksack, and got ready to set off down first. The plan was that I would abseil from two anchors, one main one and one back-up. Es, being light and unencumbered, would then take out the back-up anchor and descend on just one, with the belief that if the main anchor held me, it should hold Es. With such a long descent, it was the only way we’d have enough gear to make anchors all the way down, while maintaining a good safety margin.

  Triple-checking my abseil device, and trying to kick my crampons into the ice, I lifted my head and tried to smile at Es as I set off. All I could see was his hooded head bowed under the pummelling snow.

  I unclipped myself from the anchor and began walking down the face, trying to keep my weight on my crampons and off the rope.

  The normal line of retreat was a roaring freeway of snow, and to go that way would have meant death by drowning. We had to head down a thousand-foot steep blank rock to its right. This was our only option, but came at a high risk, as, once we started down, there would be no way to climb back up. We would have to find a crack or spike every sixty metres to make the next anchor. Without this we would be stuck, probably succumbing to hypothermia quickly, left to hang in our harnesses. There was no time for ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ though. It was the only way. It had to work.

  Down I went, head bowed under the battering snow, my mind thinking of nothing but the next anchor, holding off my search until I could see the two ends of my ropes sixty metres down.

  Locking off the rope, I swung from side to side, looking for a crack or spike under the white-coated rock, my fingertips wiping the powder away, until with relief it offered up a place for a nut, then a small cam as a back-up.

  ‘Off belay,’ I screamed, snow filling my mouth as the words left.

  Es removed the back-up anchor and slid down the rope to me.

  Anchors were difficult to find and construct; snow covered everything. Each time, all I could do was get to the end of the rope and begin swinging left and right, my crampons scraping, brushing frantically with one gloved hand until they un covered a place I could hammer in a wire or peg, or found a spike or flake over which I could drape a length of our rapidly dwindling five millimetre-thick abseil cord.

  The position was incredible. We moved down the blank expanse of rock, snow snaking down in torrents all around us towards the glacier which was still hundreds of metres below but obscured by cloud. Soon I slipped into a familiar pattern of systematic and methodical action, making sure that of the hundred things that could kill us, those which were in my power to avoid were avoided, leaving to fate the few that were out of my control: total anchor failure, huge overpowering avalanche, chopped rope.

  At one point, strung out at the end of the rope, all I could find for an anchor was a single incipient hairline crack, and spent several long minutes searching for something better until cold made it hard to hold onto the rope, forcing me to make do with what I had. The only anchor that fitted was our shortest, thinnest knifeblade peg. I slid its tip into the crack, and hammered it in, hoping brute force would achieve a deep and secure fit. It bottomed out after only an inch. Both our lives would have to hang from a peg only a few millimetres thick. It was all there was.

  Luckily a thin ledge led across the wall a few feet below the anchor, so I didn’t have to hang from it. I could stand with my feet stacked sideways, my body only just in balance, as I shouted for Es to follow.

  He came down and I showed him the anchor. His head was bowed under the snow, and I knew he wasn’t really taking it all in. The peg was already half hidden under the snow.

  ‘You don’t have to clip into the peg if you don’t want to,’ I shouted, aware that if it ripped as I started down the next pitch, Es would be pulled off with me. ‘You can either clip in or just cling to the wall and hope no big avalanches come down.’

  It was a hard choice, either die with me if the peg ripped as I went down, or s
tand on the spot until an avalanche or hypothermia pushed you off.

  Es unclipped.

  I had no fear as I pulled the rope down, and fed it through the peg. It was obvious that this was all there was. I had no option.

  Feeding the rope into my abseil device, Es shouted to me, asking how much further. We’d been moving for about five hours, and still had a long way to go. Neither of us had been able to eat or drink anything, and as Es spoke the air filled with a foul smell that made me feel like vomiting. It was Es’s body, much thinner and leaner than mine, probably beginning to digest its own muscle. It was almost comical to be standing there, about to make the most committing abseil of my life, yet I was gagging at my partner’s bad breath. I was almost glad to be going.

  I stepped down and weighted the peg, watching it bend slightly as my full weight went through it for the first time, then began walking down the wall, trying to think the lightest thoughts possible.

  Down I slid for another sixty metres, a timeless span of hope and expectation, imagining the sudden and final drop if the peg ripped.

  Nothing pulled, and at the end of the rope I found the best anchor so far, hammering an alloy nut so hard into a crack that it will probably still be there in a thousand years.

  My thoughts turned to Es.

  ‘OFF BELAY!’

  Es moved around above, clipping into the ropes, then slowly slid down to me and clipped in. After that I thought maybe we could make it.

  With a smile of relief I pulled on one rope to drag the other through the anchor. It wouldn’t budge. It was stuck. I tried pulling the other one, thinking maybe I had made a mistake, knowing I was right the first time. I was. It was jammed.

  I clipped on my jumars and tried to use my body weight to pull it through, trying to imagine what the problem could possibly be. The rope remained stuck. We had no choice but to turn to the unthinkable. Someone would have to jumar back up, trusting the single peg once more, in order to free the rope.

  Unclipping the jumars of my harness I passed them to Es. ‘Sorry, you have to go back up and sort it out. You’re lighter than me.’

  Es took them without a word, jugged back up into the storm, and did.

  Fourteen hours later we rattled over the bergschrund in the dark, the storm unabated, and swam as fast as we could away from the face, snow up to our armpits, our ropes dragging down behind us. The whole area was awash with avalanche debris, and we knew another could come down and wipe us out just like that, making our slow pace as we lurched through the snow even more traumatic.

  At last the ground changed. Horizontal. The snow grew less thick. Safe. We were down. We had made it.

  I fell onto my knees and began dry-heaving with exhaustion and relief. Es looked on, swaying in the wind, his eyes wide and bloodshot. I tried to stand up but I had absolutely no energy left.

  He pulled me up by my shoulder and smiled, saying he’d get us back to the hut. He was stronger than me now. I knew he would get me back.

  He put on the rucksack, strapping one rope to the side and, tying us together with the other in case of crevasses, he got ready to lead off. I tried to steady myself and find the energy for the last leg, tried to show I was OK by joking that the meaning of adventure was being unsure of the outcome.

  Es just looked at me, his young face old in the yellow light of my dying headtorch. The sparkle of youth had gone.

  Music lessons

  Pitch 9 Reticent Wall

  MY KARABINER CLOSED around the belay bolts at the top of pitch nine. There was none of the usual euphoria. I was just glad the pitch was over. Another pitch closer to this being finished. I was feeling glum.

  The belay was special. It featured a tiny sentry-box-type ledge set into the wall, onto which I shuffled my bum and sat on my throne. It was only just big enough for my hips, but I sat there resting my head on my knees, looking down the wall. I’d never felt so drained. I had nothing left to give.

  The last two days had been intense. Yet again I doubted I had it in me to carry on.

  You’re just tired.

  I had no idea how I was going to find the energy to abseil down and begin cleaning and hauling the pitch.

  You will.

  The pitch, like all the rest, had stretched on and on, culminating in a wide crack full of batshit and the bones of small animals. The dust had covered me and choked me until I had reached this tiny perch.

  My eyes felt heavy; I just wanted to sleep.

  I sat there a long time, my head and arms resting on my knees, and I felt my whole being fall apart. There didn’t seem to be one bit of me that wasn’t throbbing, bleeding, bruised or close to breaking. I was done in, and just couldn’t imagine how I would have the energy to complete the five pitches to come.

  You still have the crux to climb, but at this speed you could be there in two or three days. You’re faster than Humar.

  I don’t care.

  I hugged my legs and wanted them to hug me back. I felt destitute and alone.

  What did you think it would be like? Fun?

  I wished I had a phone so I could ring home and tell Mandy how much I was suffering, but I knew she was unimpressible. Climbing was a disease. Climbing was a curse. Climbing was making both our lives hell.

  It’s not about your climbing.

  I thought about talking to Ella, imagined her voice, what she would say.

  She would ask when I was coming home.

  I often wondered about writing her a letter, to tell her who I was, why I climbed, and why I left her, even though she was the greatest gift I had ever been given. But every time I started, my words sounded like the excuses they were. The only thing I had to give were the photos I had taken of her, boxes full. Through them you could see my love for her. And her love for me.

  One day, I would write a book and hope she would then understand that fathers are only children too.

  You need to abseil down. It’ll soon be dark.

  I looked over the wall. To my left I could see a climber leading, heading up to the twenty-fifth belay on the Pacific Ocean Wall, shouting to his partner that he was almost there.

  I wished I had a partner to shout to, to clean the pitch, and help me haul the bags.

  I looked around, and tried to tell myself how lucky I was, – more people have sat on the summit of Everest than have sat here. I didn’t care.

  Then I saw something close by, the edge of a piece of card sticking out of a thin crack just above my head. Teasing it out with my fingers I found it was a tatty old business card advertising the services of a ‘Lance Millo Eagle – Rock and roll, blues and jazz for all occasions. Banjo and guitar lessons given’. I looked at it and blinked. Inside my head a pilot light came on, and my brain turned over and restarted as it took in how surreal it was to find such a thing here.

  Had it been blown up here from the valley, or perhaps it had been left behind by Lance himself, moonlighting as a big-wall climber, maybe the world’s greatest banjo-playing big-wall climber? It didn’t matter, the card had pulled me back from my self-indulgent funk. The pity party was over and the laughter inside my head reminded me that I was still here.

  You’re the luckiest man alive.

  I stood up on my stiff legs and rigged up to abseil back down to the start, remembering what the taxi driver had said about hard work killing horses.

  Give yourself a little slack.

  When you’re soloing, it’s important not to imagine yourself as cold and hard like the stone you climb. You must find some softness within, and see it not as weakness but as compassion and support. You must learn to think about yourself as you would about a friend, a lover, a mother, a daughter. In all the anxiety and fear, you have to make time to love yourself. If you are alone, there are no kind words save your own. This was a lesson I had forgotten. I sat awhile, just admired the view and took a moment to understand what I’d already achieved on this climb.

  I clipped in my belay device and double-checked it. Then I slipped once more bac
k down my haul lines. The top now seemed so near.

  Safe

  Yosemite. April 2000

  AIRLIE MOVED SLOWLY, so slowly she might well have been climbing down. She tapped at a peg ineffectually, like a sullen teenager hoovering her bedroom.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I shouted up to her body dangling only six feet above my head. This was the type of comment that would be translated by any leader as ‘what the fuck are you doing up there?’

  Airlie had been at the sharp end for over an hour.

  It was day two of our ascent of Zenyatta Mondatta.

  Myself and Esmond sat on wooden belay seats amongst our large and bulging haul bags and shivered; it was only April and a winter chill was still blowing through the Yosemite valley.

  ‘I’m not sure what to do,’ shouted Airlie, continuing to tap, a slight wobble in her words. ‘I think I might need a mouse beak or something.’

  ‘You mean birdbeak?’ I corrected.

  Airlie had never climbed a big wall before. Neither had Esmond, and at this rate neither of them ever would.

  The idea of climbing El Cap with a novice was pretty outrageous. Two novices doubly so. But here we were, trying to climb one of El Cap’s harder routes, graded A5 in the guide book, and the hardest big wall in the world when it was climbed back in 1981. Since then the route had been downgraded with traffic, but was still considered loose and dangerous. A climber died on it few years before, his rope cut in a fall.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Esmond, digging his face out of the neck of his duvet, ‘you’re doing well.’ Es had only just recovered from our trip down the North Face of the Droites. On his return to Edinburgh University he’d become withdrawn. But being young and keen, he’d made a swift recovery just in time to sign on for another crazy trip.

  ‘Do you ever get bored on belays?’ asked Es, shuffling his bum on the hard wooden belay seat, a plank of wood with rope attached to it. ‘Not really, I think you’re just glad you’re not the one leading,’ I said, not mentioning I’d been sitting for four hours already today while he led his first proper aid pitch. It had been graded A4 in the guide book, and had been a baptism of fire, with me shouting up instructions on copperheading and hooking. A novice at the start, by the end of that pitch he’d learnt everything he’d ever need to know.