Psychovertical Read online

  We’d been on the move since 4 a.m., slipping out of Chaltén to the moonlight serenade of barking dogs and the muffled crush of our skis forcing down deep powder. At first light we saw our objective: Cerro Torre, a mile-high needle of rock that lies at the head of the glacier. If you were to ask a child to draw a mountain they would produce something like Everest, 45-degree slopes with a pointed summit; Cerro Torre looks like something a teenager would draw: nightmarish sweeps of vertical rock, tortured ridges, and a ghastly mushroom of ice that hangs from its summit. Cerro Torre is one of the hardest mountains a climber could wish for, and no other mountain on earth holds such daunting terrain. A summer ascent was big news. More people had stood on the moon than had stood on its summit in winter. It was obvious why.

  I told Rich that the ice was thick enough to hold us, and when he was confident I was right, he followed me out onto the lake.

  Our rucksacks were insanely heavy, our hands chilled because the crushing pressure of strained shoulder straps cut off the blood supply to our arms. People often called this style of climbing lightweight: just taking what you could carry, no porters or huge teams of climbers to break down the challenge. Unfortunately to us this style of climbing felt anything but light.

  We didn’t need a thermometer to tell us the temperature was below minus 30 degrees Celsius, the air burning any exposed skin. I shuffled along, the atmosphere seemingly a vacuum, as if every atom had grown heavy with frost and dropped out of it. When I removed my thick hood and balaclava, it felt as if I’d immersed my head in the waters of an Arctic ocean, the skin tightening in the cold, giving me an ice-cream headache.

  How could we climb in this?

  After our three-day nightmare on Fitzroy the year before, each of us went home deeply affected by our experiences; you could say we all suffered from a little post-traumatic stress. Everyone looked at life and their future through new eyes, dealing with it in different ways: confrontation, commitment, love. The outcome brought a year of weddings, babies, and separations.

  I had gone home feeling like a soldier, thin and tired. It was hard to re-adjust, but I was relieved to be back with my Mandy and Ella. Driving to the seaside one day, I said then that I didn’t want to do this any more, and like any addict I had meant it. But words come easily. A month later I had left them again.

  It would not end.

  I consider myself a simple person, but I was gradually becoming aware that something was wrong, something inside me seemed to be broken, or perhaps unmended. I hated the restlessness in me that drew me to the mountains. It had gone beyond climbing; I was now looking for something but I didn’t know what. I was also scared about what I might find. There seemed to be only one cure, one thing that would give me peace. An endgame.

  We skied around the edge of the lake, heading for the mouth of the glacier, our eyes fixed on the golden glow of the Torres high above, the moisture in my eyelashes sticky with the cold.

  I thought about the route ahead, and tried to imagine that perhaps the sun might warm us on Cerro Torre, yet knew it wouldn’t. Then I stared at my feet and tried to think about other things such as the thickness of the ice; then my mind turned to abstract thoughts: whether light rays could freeze, suspending what I could see now, such as this lake, until spring.

  Rich scraped up snow into a pan and placed it carefully on the stove, then zipped himself back into his sleeping bag with a theatrical shiver. We had reached the bottom of the mountain by nightfall, finding shelter by digging ourselves in beneath a house-sized boulder. This wasn’t a place for camping. The cold, the weight of our packs, and the deep snow had pushed us close to exhaustion on the twenty-hour slog here. In summer you could make this trip in a couple of hours, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I pulled out a picture of Mandy and Ella, taken in the park. The grass on it was the only green I could see anywhere.

  ‘Am I missing you already?’ I wondered. It was strange to have such feelings so early. When I was with them I could think of nothing but being in these frozen mountains.

  How could that be right; what could I possibly find here?

  I thought about Mandy shouting at me in the kitchen the day I left, how she used to worry when I was away – now she just hated me for putting her through it. I knew that my life was unbalanced. There were no fond farewells when I left, only a cold kiss, because that’s what you do when someone leaves and you don’t understand why.

  What if I were to die tomorrow?

  Would this make anything better? On the mountain there would be no fun or laughter, no beautiful views, no poems forming in the head. Only fear and cold and anxiety. But I had to believe this route would be worth it.

  We made dinner, eating some of the weight we would otherwise have carried up to the base camp tomorrow. Then we lay unable to sleep, listening and talking about nothing, just words, their breath turning to frost that coated the rock above our heads.

  In the coldest hour of the predawn morning, we crawl out from beneath our boulder and start climbing up towards the black space in the stars where the Torre stands.

  The route is a nightmarish spine that spirals up the tower, bounded on its right by a mind-blowing wall of granite. To reach this ridge we first have to climb 1,000 feet of snow, ice and rock – a route in itself – piecing a line together that will allow us to reach a small col at the beginning of the ridge.

  We climb up onto the face, moving together in stops and starts, our hands growing colder as we climb, which means we have to co-ordinate warming them. Like an archaeologist, I scrape about and come across old soft-iron pegs, rattly and loose with cold, and bleached ropes, pulled tight and disembowelled by the moving ice. I wonder who hammered and tied these artefacts here, and what tales they could tell.

  Dawn arrives beautifully, but with a price, its vibrant golds and reds heralding a coming storm. I want to go down, but I stop myself from saying it. Rich has yet to experience a winter Patagonian storm, so I keep my fears to myself and carry on climbing, eyeing the wispy clouds that arrive soon after the dead sun.

  The first thousand feet are a slog through deep powder, interspersed with hard pulls into loose, spiky corners. The higher we get, the deeper my anxiety. All the strength I thought I had leaves me. The snow and easy climbing come to an end just below the Col of Patience, forcing Rich to work hard in order to reach the slope above. I had always thought that when this day came, I would find it hard to believe I was actually here on Cerro Torre, and in winter. Now I’m far too aware of where I am and what I’m doing. I’m shit-scared, fighting to stay warm, my mind a jumble of dark thoughts; this is too much, the experience, the dose, far too intense. Shaking, I pray that Rich will back off so we can go down, before I crack. Having persuaded him to come here, I can’t bring myself to pull him back. I also don’t want him to see I’ve lost my nerve. The only thing worse would be for me to see him crack.

  The weather quickly turns moody, then vicious, lashing out at us and sending the wind chill off the scale. Every time a blast comes you feel death brushing past. In the calm moments I hear the musical tinkle of ice particles falling a thousand metres from the summit mushroom, rattling down onto the glacier. Rich shouts that we can dig a snow hole on the Col and wait out the weather. We only have four days’ food and I instinctively feel the creaking of a door about to shut. I tell myself he wants to go down as much as I do, but doesn’t want to be the first to say so. I stand shivering, looking up at him – a few feet to go and then it would mean that the easiest option would be for us to try and ride out the storm. I don’t want to do that.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I yell. ‘I don’t like it … let’s get out of here.’

  Rich looks up, then down at me. He doesn’t argue and lowers off. We retreat to the glacier.

  ‘Don’t forget how you feel now,’ I tell myself as I stagger down. ‘Don’t come back here.’

  The storm lasts six days.

  It took us two days to get down to Chaltén. We arrived in time for home-made pi
zza. Ruban was glad to see us safely back. We used the last of our energy to stamp the snow off our boots and then collapsed at his table, leaving our hated sacks outside in the snow. In his kitchen, I felt warmed with relief, glad to be back. I could see the snow falling thick through the porch light, and felt like never climbing again.

  One week later, I scream at myself for being so slow and useless as I try to wrestle my way up a wide overhanging crack, unbalanced by my rucksack, and hindered by my crampons. I’m wasting time and I know it. I scream again knowing it won’t make anything better.

  In a moment of bravado I once told Rich that I’d never failed to climb anything in my life. Now I stupidly grind and scratch without success halfway up the East Face of Mermoz, a 600-metre face below Fitzroy.

  The more I shout, the more impotent I feel in my struggle, hating the world and blaming everything in it, except myself.

  I finally reach the top of the pitch, and with feet loosely planted in uncertain snow, I take Rich’s weight as he ascends the rope, not wanting him to see how bad the anchor I’m tied to really is.

  ‘That looked hard,’ he says, being charitable, while I curse his jumars for robbing me of the chance of letting him find out how hard it really was. He snatches some gear and launches off up the next pitch, an overhanging corner of jumbled rocks, as the flat, cloudy day comes to a close.

  My two hours of standing in the dark, dangerously cold, too scared to let go of Rich’s rope in order to pull on my down jacket, see Rich through the crux of the pitch but unable to carry on in the darkness. We argue where is best to spend the night, each wanting the solution that entails the least effort on his part. Should I go up to him or he come down to me? Gravity is in my favour so Rich rappels down, leaving his ropes fixed for tomorrow. We chop out two bucket seats in the snow, one above the other. As usual we both strike rock well before achieving comfort, but we’re too tired to start again.

  I watch Rich wriggle into his sleeping bag below me as I carefully get out the stove and balance it on my knees. Cooking under the shelter of my bivy-bag cowl, I mix cheap dried potato with raw onion and bad cheese, not a meal that’s conducive to high morale. Our diet has been abysmal on this trip: not enough calories, not enough food; it affects my psyche. I wonder if perhaps all my doubts can be put down solely to the malnutrition. After only a few mouthfuls, I pass Rich the pan and he scoops food down, hiding in his bivy bag from the torrents of spindrift that pour down the wall. ‘You finish it,’ he says passing the pan back. It’s now peppered with snow. Nearly vomiting, I shovel it down, then, wrapping a sling around my waist and knees, try to find a little comfort.

  It really starts snowing around midnight, pummelling us as we sit there, halfway up the wall. Every few minutes I push the snow off the cowl of my bivy bag, the cold clammy weight too heavy to ignore. I turn on my side, my knees hanging in space, and try to fall back into a claustrophobic half sleep.

  The snow builds up between me and the wall. My mind tries to form warm memories, of lying in bed, my daughter still unborn, Mandy’s bulging abdomen pressed against my back, feeling their warmth and her kicks. Eventually I fall asleep only to dream about cold dead babies … Then I hear Ella, two years old, hissing, ‘Horsy, horsy,’ in my ear. She climbs up onto my face, she starts to suffocate me …

  I wake up feeling as if someone has placed a plastic bag on my head, and claw at the fabric of the bivy bag, sending the piled snow down onto Rich. I breathe in the snow and cough. Too scared to go back to sleep, I feel inside my jacket for my laminated photo of Ella. I can’t see it; only feel the hard bent plastic. I do this to give me some strength, but it makes me feel weaker, reminding me of what a foolish gamble this is. I wonder what kind of father I am. I think about my father. I try not to think about him. I feel I’m falling apart.

  I start to cry.

  At 3 a.m. we know it’s over. Unable to stand it any longer, battered by the heavy spindrift, we get ready to leave. Rich jugs up to our high point to retrieve the ropes while I stand there under the showers of snow. I know I must not forget how I feel right now. I’ve never felt so alone.

  The retreat, a part of climbing I seem to have become expert in, goes quickly, landing us back at our skis muggy and bad-tempered as dawn arrives in the continuing storm. Our old tracks are buried under the thick snow, leaving us with nothing to follow back.

  Clipping on the skis, I feel anxious, knowing that even if we find our way to the pass, the slopes back to Chaltén will be loaded with fresh snow. I don’t want to die. I decide I’ll make sure Rich goes first. He has no kids. To find our way, with no choice, map or compass, all we can do is probe for our old tracks with our ski poles and keep moving.

  The driver spoke no English and we spoke no Spanish, but I knew he thought we were crazy as he dropped us off at the trail head and drove off back to Chaltén, back to bed. We were going into the mountains.

  We had spent a week waiting for the weather to clear and as it did so, so did my mood. An improved diet of steak, chips, and eggs boiled, fried, or poached, had helped, restoring our energy and morale. I felt fitter and more confident. I’d had time to digest my thoughts and feelings and felt more in tune with the mountains and less negative towards them and myself. We had a week and a half left, and we both felt ready to get to grips with the mountains one last time.

  Two days later, as darkness falls, we take turns making a small snow hole high on a remote glacier, the only shelter that will stand up to the pounding of the wind. The weather is nasty, and we shout at each other as we desperately try to dig. Above us lies the North West Face of Fitzroy, but at the moment the biggest challenge is staying alive.

  Once we are inside the hole, sealed in by the snow, everything feels back under control. We are in a good position to attempt a route on Cerro Pellone, a Tolkienesque spire on the edge of the ice cap, having hauled seven days’ food and fuel over the high Paso del Cuadrado. It occurs to me that our objectives are gradually becoming smaller, as in desperation we try to salvage something from the trip. We know we could do the route in a day. All we need is that day. I place an ice screw above my head as Rich primes the stove for a cup of tea. I hang my barometer watch on the screw, lie back and wait.

  ‘Want another cup of tea?’ asks Rich, gaunt-faced as he lights up the stove. He picks a bleached tea bag out of our overflowing garbage sack and drops it in the pan. The storm is still raging. Six days have passed. All thoughts of climbing have been replaced with thoughts of food, oxygen, and escape. Our supplies are down to almost nothing. We have grown weak, lying bedridden, bodies slowly digesting themselves. On the third day, Rich dug outside for a crap and almost froze to death squatting in the maelstrom. Luckily my bowels have remained still.

  The interior of our hole is total squalor. At first, it was only like being in hospital: confined to bed, three poor meals a day, cold white walls. Now the walls are black with soot from the stove, dripping down on us every time we fire it up. Constant tea drinking, our only entertainment, has produced several gallons of urine, which now make up about 50 per cent of our floor. On the fourth day, dizzy and careless about carbon monoxide poisoning, I let my sleeping mat get too close to the stove and it burst into flames. Twisting and scrabbling like astronauts trapped in their capsule, we managed to get it under control, then spent the rest of the day with toxic headaches.

  At least our brains are occupied. I do most of the talking. It’s hard to be entertaining though. After all, I’ve heard it all before. Finally, with all words and food used up, we know, as we listen to the wind, that tomorrow we will have to fight our hardest battle yet and get back to Chaltén.

  Leaning into the wind, we bolt for the col, carrying our skis, trying to breathe. I try to cover every inch of my face but my skin and eyes still feel as if they’re being dragged through gravel. I visualise myself storming ashore on D-Day, my heavy skis some kind of cumbersome weapon to be carried through the thundering enemy fire. I can feel the soles of my feet beginning to go har
d, beginning to freeze. I know I’m close to getting frostbite, but I’m beyond worrying about such trivia. Our old footprints stand out proud from the wind-scoured slope, a trail of crumbs to follow through the screaming wind, as we both drop down onto our skis and take cover, exhausted.

  ‘Not far,’ I shout at Rich as we cling to each other, feeling naked and exposed even in our thick layers, waiting for the eye of the storm to blink and let us pass over the col.

  It seems cruel to have come so far, to have suffered so much, and all for nothing. It’s easy to say that I’m not cursed, that I am blessed: lucky in just having the chance to come and fail, to steal a moment in such a high places, to survive, victorious or not.

  But that’s not true. It’s all bullshit.

  I came to win, came as I always do, in order to justify who I am and what I have become; now I don’t even know what that is. The rot inside me, the cancer of desire, feels unbearable, now it knows it won’t be sated. There’s a malignant discontent in there, and without a climb there will be no peace. When – if – I pass over to normal life I know I will drag this feeling with me.

  What do I want, why can’t I be happy with what I have? I want to escape.

  I want to climb something so difficult that I’ll never feel like this again.

  As the wind draws its breath, the two of us spring up and run for our lives.

  Psycho

  Pitches 13 and 14 Reticent Wall

  I WOKE AT dawn. I lay there for a while and waited for the sun to arrive at the ledge. Almost at the top of the wall the sun came early.

  There was no rush.

  It was colder here than down below. Now I could see snow out on the Sierras. I was glad of my warm sleeping bag. I snuggled down into it.

  It’s not every day that you attempt to climb the hardest, most dangerous pitch of your life.