Cold Wars Read online

  Both of us wore plastic snowshoes, but instead of allowing us to float on top of the snow, they simply tripped us up, designed more for gentle rambles through the woods than hardcore alpinism. Luckily for me, Ian was the only one to fall down a crevasse, saved by his bag wedging in the hole. At last we waddled down to our cache hidden in a jumble of boulders, the Dru soaring above our heads, the West Face lit up by the setting sun.

  ‘Want another brew?’ Ian asked. He sat up stiffly in his sleeping bag, like a vampire emerging from its coffin, his head bent sideways to avoid banging it on the roof of our cave, heavy flakes of snow drifting past outside.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ I replied, lying with my head just out of the way of the snow, which had been falling for two days.

  The weather was becoming a problem, since each day we waited in our cave we ate up more of our supplies, food we’d busted a gut to haul to the mountain. We knew that Chamonix, with its food and entertainment, was only a few hours’ walk down the hill, a tempting option after two days of nothing but tea and roof staring. But going down and coming back would also use up our most precious commodity of all – time. Not to mention having to do the hellish walk in all over again. By sitting put we could get on the route, only a hundred yards from our cave, the moment the snow stopped. Assuming it did.

  Filling up a pan with snow I passed it to Ian and he stuck it onto the stove.

  Lying there, you could just make out the base of the Dru’s battlements, its height drifting up and up, until the snowflakes grew too thick and barred our view of what lay above. I thought how this waiting period could prove valuable, the Dru growing used to us, and us to it. The space we inhabited was utterly silent, nothing but the sound of yourself, the rustle of clothing moving, the beating of your heart, the boiling of tea.

  ‘Here you go,’ said Ian, passing over my metal mug, the tea inside almost transparent, the teabag the same used the last two times, the milk on ration. ‘At least it’s warm and wet,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Like a good woman,’ I added.

  Ian groaned.

  Ian was easy company, undemanding, not hyper through inactivity, more sloth-like, like me – fleecy and cuddly, but in a manly way. He never had a sense of urgency about him, always relaxed and calm until he started to climb. He was like no climber I’d ever met. I guess he thought the same about me. His biggest asset seemed to be a lack of any fear whatsoever. He could climb like a man who had nothing to live for, and although there were many climbers better than him, he topped the rankings purely due to the fact that – from the outside, at least – he had what looked like a death wish. Unlike some climbers who climb with grace and confidence, balletic footwork or Herculean strength, Ian climbed like someone who believed the gods were on his side, no matter what. I often imagined that he was so successful because he tricked the mountains he climbed, this shabby looking tramp racing up the walls before the rock had a chance to take guard. I also really liked him as a friend. Ian was one of the few people I knew outside of climbing.

  The topic of Lafaille came up, the man in whose shadow we well and truly stood, whose every move we planned to follow. He was a legend, and it was easy to see why so many climbers viewed him as one of the best climbers in the world, pushing each climbing discipline – rock, ice, alpine, and Himalayan – as he rose in the sport. He had begun like many of us, just rock climbing on his local crag, only he was much stronger – albeit shorter – than most. In a few short years he reached the forefront of sport climbing, the safest discipline, clipping lines of bolts as he reached the very highest standards. Lafaille had climbed one of the world’s first sport routes graded 8c, and soloed routes of 8a. Most climbers would have been content with that. Instead he took up alpine climbing. In only a few short years he was soloing the hardest faces in the Alps, following in a tradition of many great French climbers, putting up new routes and pushing the boundaries of his new discipline, establishing himself as a star not confined to safe, sunny cliffs. He was seen as a great new talent, and was asked to attempt a new route on the South Face of Annapurna in Nepal with Pierre Béghin, France’s premier Himalayan climber.

  Lafaille was twenty-seven, Béghin forty-one, their objective a new line climbed alpine-style on one of the world’s biggest faces. The climbing was extremely hard, and for four days they moved up the wall, one night spent hanging in their harnesses, until bad weather stopped them close to the top. With no option but to descend, Béghin set up an anchor, a single cam in a crack, and set off down. The cam ripped, and Béghin fell two thousand metres to his death. Lafaille watched as he saw his partner fall, knowing that he too was in all likelihood dead, since Béghin had taken both ropes and all their hardware with him. Lafaille was alone, in the swirling cloud, standing on a tiny ledge, as alone as one human being can be. It seemed a death sentence. But with no other option, and a wife and child waiting at home, Lafaille had to try. He took some thin cord from his harness and tied himself to his ice axe, so if he slipped it might stop him. Then he started down.

  Climbing down seventy-five degree ice, he reached their tent, and a stash of gear that included twenty metres of thin rope. This Lafaille used to abseil down the steepest sections below, cutting up the tent’s poles to use as anchors. The distance he abseiled each time was tiny compared to the scale of the wall, and the risk unjustifiable to anyone but a man who was already dead. But despite all that, he kept his faith that somehow he might survive.

  During the second day of his retreat, as though things weren’t bad enough, a rock spun down from above, striking his forearm and snapping both bones. Reeling from pain, he cut away his jacket as his arm swelled. Lafaille was now a thousand metres from the base of the climb. Knowing he could go no further, and believing others would come to rescue him, he waited for two days on a small ledge, watching the flash bulbs from trekkers’ cameras each night.

  Yet no one came. At nightfall on the day after his accident, Lafaille took his life back into his own hands, and began climbing down again, using his one good arm and relying on moonlight to find his way. Five days after Béghin’s death he reached base camp, amazing a Slovenian team, who had reported him dead. Lafaille’s wife Véronique had already been told the news.

  ‘How could you climb after that?’ I asked Ian. ‘How could you journey so far into your own death, like a dead man climbing, come through it, only to go back for more?’

  ‘Maybe climbing’s worth it?’ said Ian, taking a sip of his tea. ‘Why are we sat under this rock, ready to follow that same man up his hardest alpine route? I don’t think we’re so different. On the Reticent you must have thought you were going to die didn’t you?’

  ‘A few times,’ I said, nodding.

  ‘But when you didn’t, what did you do?’

  ‘I kept on climbing, but then I was trapped, it was all I could do, I had to keep going. Once you get back to the real world you have a choice,’

  ‘You could always have stopped on the Reticent, but you just didn’t want to,’ said Ian.

  I drank down the tea, leaving the last gritty dregs, then laid back again and contemplated the act of climbing.

  ‘It seems so simple when you’re doing it doesn’t it’ I said. ‘And yet we seem to always be looking for an excuse.’ Ian said nothing, and I wondered if it was only me who was looking for an explanation.

  Outside, the snow fell.

  Climbing up the corner, I bridged out, crampons scraping and scratching, the rope pulling hard at my waist, causing me to curse my poor choice of gear placements below. It would soon be dark, and I seemed stuck, too much drag keeping me from making it easy. It was our second day of climbing, the bad weather having cleared the previous afternoon, but tonight would be the first sleeping on the face.

  I tried to move up, and force the rope to follow, but it wouldn’t budge. Down below I’d obviously done a bad job of extending a piece of gear – or several, since the pitch started with aid, but ended with free climbing in crampons. I forced
out a few inches, calves burning, with no place to rest, then holding on with one hand, pulled the rope up with all my strength, holding what I’d gained in my teeth as I reached down again. In this way I gained a few metres of rope and holding a huge loop of slack in my mouth, moved up and reached a sloping ledge.

  ‘Safe!’ I shouted down, the sky growing dark, night almost on us. Scrabbling to find some gear for a solid belay, I ended up with nothing I really trusted, a crap peg, a sling on a dubious spike of rock, some cams wedged between two wobbly blocks, nothing great, but with so much drag I couldn’t do anything else. I just had to hope it would take Ian’s weight and the much greater load of two haul-bags without ripping out.

  I clipped a long sling through everything, drew it to a single point and tied a figure of eight knot, clipping the haul-line into it via our locking pulley.

  ‘WILL BELAY HERE AND HAUL,’ I shouted to Ian. ‘YOU JUG WITH BAGS TO STOP JAMMING!’ A tiny yell back suggested he had understood.

  The weight of the bags slowly came on to the belay as Ian lowered them from his, the slings growing tight as they took the strain, the pulley creaking. Nothing ripped out.

  I started hauling – exhausting work – the tiny pulley too small for such a load. We’d left the big one at home because it was deemed too heavy. Now it felt as if I was pulling a car uphill, a car with flat tyres, and a hill covered in speed bumps. I hauled in the darkness, the rope only slipping through the pulley a few inches at a time, every inch a mile it seemed to me.

  Stooping for a rest, I peered down, hoping to see the bags in the beam of my headtorch, but saw only the white static rope disappearing into the dark, knowing they would not appear until I’d given up looking for them.

  On I hauled, my waist hurting from the strain, wishing that Ian would hurry and help me, that with so far to haul this climb would set new standards of pain. On the Reticent Wall a few months before, my bags had weighed in at over a hundred and fifty kilos, but they were a doddle compared to this.

  The rope lurched, and the load seemed to lighten, but then I heard a thunderous bang as something heavy crashed down the face. The bags had clearly been hung up on something that was now at the bottom of the face, something big and heavy.

  ‘Ian? You okay?’

  I got no answer so just kept on hauling.

  Ian appeared, and jugged up to the belay, looking hot and flustered. He stepped past me and began pulling at the rope.

  ‘The bags are still a long way down. I’ll pull while you counterbalance them on the end of the haul-line,’ he said.

  Using me as a counterweight, Ian pulled the rope, clipping his jumar close to the pulley, while I slowly dropped downwards, foot by foot, as the load lifted. Sometimes being a fat knacker has its benefits.

  As I descended, I pulled up on the live rope, the rope coming up from the bags, expending all the energy I had to get the bags to where we needed them, until with a jolt I stopped moving down, my own rope coming tight to the belay. I’d jug back up and start again. All the while there was the discomfort of knowing we were putting a huge strain on a belay I didn’t trust in the first place; the only consolation being that at least if it held we’d know it was sound enough to sleep on.

  At last the bags appeared, one huge, the other just big with the portaledge attached to it. The portaledge unpacked to the size of a large tabletop and was inevitably harder to set up when tired. We grumbled away at each other while trying to get the tubing slotted together, both just wanting to crash out after a long day. Finally, with the ledge set and our nylon bed taut, we fed it into the expedition flysheet, made from heavy-duty fabric and designed to totally enclose the ledge and keep us out of even the worst storms.

  Ian leant against the belay as I took control. It was my bloody ledge. ‘You’ve got it upside down,’ Ian said. I pulled the ledge out, flipped it over and tried to insert it again. ‘Now it’s the wrong way round,’ he said wearily, sounding like my old driving instructor, notifying me of my errors without telling me how to correct them. ‘You bloody do it,’ I snapped, shoving the ledge towards him, clearly beyond this simple task. Ignoring my childishness Ian held the ledge, telling me to hang onto my end, before slipping the bed in without any more fuss. ‘You get in and I’ll pass you the stuff from the haul-bag.’

  The portaledge was pitched at a poor angle, leaving less room than normal, which wasn’t much anyway. The thing was designed more for vertical walls than mountainsides. Nevertheless, with the stove purring and snug inside two sleeping bags, I felt calm return, that sense of being on top of things, rather than them being on top of me.

  ‘Sorry for shouting,’ I said, as Ian measured out a few spoons of hot chocolate.

  I pulled out the night’s food bag, containing: one small bag of nuts to share; one packet of couscous to share; a small packet of butter each; one instant soup and two hundred-gram bags of muesli for breakfast. It had seemed like enough when packing in the valley, but now it didn’t seem quite up to our hunger.

  ‘We should get to the big snow terrace tomorrow,’ said Ian, warming his hands against the stove, snow melting for tea. ‘From there the climbing should get more interesting, and a lot steeper, which should make hauling better.’ Having so much stuff seemed to increase the work load and slow us to a snail’s pace, but it also gave us the confidence and ability to hang out if things got rough. It was easy to see why it had taken Lafaille so long.

  Someone had described this kind of climbing as having a ‘guaranteed outcome’, and it was sort of true, but that guarantee came from the vastly higher workload you took on, something I doubted many would want to tolerate. So far, the best job was to lead, as belaying was long, cold and tedious. Hauling was an exercise in slow, exhausting torture by haul-bag. The best thing about this kind of climbing, compared to racing up a face with a tiny rucksack and a handful of food, was the sense of engaging in a long, hard-fought battle with the climb, a war of attrition and logistics, rather than gymnastics. I had no doubt that in the week, or weeks to come, our resolve was going to be tested. It was this that I looked forward to the most.

  We reached the big snow terrace late in the day, time slipping through our fingers yet again. Night was at our heels. I kicked up the slope to the belay getting my first sense of the wall above. It had seemed steep on the two hundred and fifty metres of rock below, but the face really did tower up above us now, plumb vertical and overhanging in places. I thought about how intimidating it would look to any climber, and wondered if Lafaille had soloed it because no one else would climb with him. It was hard to make out where his route went, but there was certainly a great deal of blank sections, up which a climber might knock out a very hard line. The thought of being up there made me giggle with excitement.

  I reached the base of the wall, the bags hanging fifty metres below at the edge of the slope, set up a solid belay, fed the haul-line through the pulley, and shouted for Ian to lower them out, just as we had all the way up so far. The pulley took the strain. Looking down and holding the rope, I began walking back down the mountain, pulling the bags through the pulley, the rope locking when I stopped, the mass of luggage sliding up nicely on the slick snow.

  I felt a sense of pride in my work, of being competent at this art of big-wall climbing and the meshing of so many skills. We could set up a nice little bivy here and really get to grips with the climbing above tomorrow. The climbing below hadn’t been really hard, but it had helped iron out a few problems that could have proved disastrous above. Now we were on our way.

  Ian appeared at the lip, and took his time sorting out the rack, seeing that the hauling was all in hand. The bags slid up until they were halfway to me, when they suddenly stopped dead. Looking down I saw they were hung up on a spike of rock, and so I pulled harder, straining with my legs while pulling up with the rope. I’d had the top bag the longest, having been up El Cap with it ten times, the only sign of damage the worn stitching, while the bag attached below was pretty new, and held all our bivou
ac gear and the precious stove. One or both of them was stuck, and so I jerked my body, hoping they would pop off the rock, not wanting to have to climb down and do it myself.

  They remained stuck.

  ‘Ian?’ I shouted down. ‘Can you sort out the bags?’ He was fiddling with his camera now.

  ‘In a minute,’ Ian shouted back, lifting the Nikon to his eye and capturing the wall above in the beautiful glow of evening light.

  I stood impatiently, wanting to get the ledge sorted before dark.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said, untying and clipping into the haul-line, sure I wouldn’t fall off, then climbing down to the bags, grabbing the top one and pulling it hard. It remained stuck. I pulled harder. The top one weighed close to fifty kilos, the bottom one half as much, with the portaledge in its own bag attached to it. I pulled again, only very hard. There was a ripping sound of very worn stitching giving up the ghost. To my horror and disbelief I watched the bottom bag and the ledge slide away towards the edge.

  For a moment I thought that perhaps they might get stuck on something and be saved. After all, the bastards had become stuck every other time they moved. But no, this time they seemed to welcome the activity. The bag and portaledge swept down the slope, shot over the edge and fell, silently, all the way to the bottom of the face.

  Ian looked up at me with tears in his eyes. All our hard work, the climbing, two walk-ins, all of it was for nothing. The portaledge was destroyed, all our bivy gear gone, darkness now all but upon us.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’