Psychovertical Read online

  I looked down at my shoes, two pin-pricks below, thinking that that would be where I’d land, imagining the air exploding out of me as I slammed into the rock. I thought about them sitting beside the door at home, the image of Ella walking into the living room with them on her tiny feet, pretending to be me.

  I looked up at the wall.

  The Russians were hauling their bags up onto Lay Lady Ledge.

  I looked down.

  Carefully, I let the rope slip through my hands.

  Alpinists

  THE STORM WHIPPED around me as I clung to the slope, stinging, blowing, sucking, blasting snow and stones at me like machine-gun bullets. I kept my eyes closed and held on, hoping the wind would die, not yet experienced enough to know that it never dies until it doesn’t really matter.

  It was winter, high in the Mont Blanc Massif, the mountains empty, only me and my partner, balanced on a near-vertical slope of alpine kitty litter.

  The wind blew harder, snow stuck to the few areas of flesh not covered by my balaclava, the ice crystals sucked away my heat until they turned to water, more snow stuck to my wet skin with the next blast. Slowly my head turned into an ice pop. My calves stung, their muscles like tight hot fists; my body balanced on crampon points that stuck into mud the consistency of yet-to-be-defrosted chocolate cheesecake.

  I squeezed open my eyes and looked at my belay, just a thin sling draped over a nub of flint that stuck out of the frozen dirt, then on down at the glacier a hundred metres below. The snow looked so soft and inviting, the open crevasses snug and cosy, a haven from the storm. I wondered – for the first, but not the last time – what my chances would be if I were to fall now, my body rag-dolling down the slope until it hit the snow below.

  If I fell, I’d die. I knew I was close to the line, balanced, the wind about to undo me at any moment. I would have screamed, but I couldn’t. I was holding my partner’s rope in my mouth, giving the illusion that I had him on belay. If Aaron fell, I’d never hold his weight with my teeth.

  This is the overriding memory of my first trip to the Alps and, although I wish I could say I was hanging on the Eiger North Face or the Matterhorn, in reality I was halfway up a steep moraine slope – nothing but the combined frozen detritus of centuries of glacial rock grindings – having gone off-route in a storm on our way to a mountain hut. This was the pinnacle of my first alpine season, the highwater mark, the closest I had yet got to an alpine climb. I didn’t want the indignity of dying on the walk in. I looked down at Aaron, who was climbing up below me, slowly stepping from frozen pebble to frozen flint, moving in between the blasts of wind, unaware that if he fell we’d both end up back on the glacier below.

  ‘Tight,’ he shouted, as I struggled to pull the rope up with one hand, saliva dribbling onto the rope and freezing as I locked my teeth around it after each yard was pulled in.

  ‘TIGHT,’ he shouted again, his usual calm exterior cracking under the strain of the terrain.

  ‘Argh,’ I mumbled back, my mouth full of rope, trying to give the impression that everything was fine.

  ‘Watch me on this bit!’

  ‘Argh, argh,’ I mumbled back.

  This was not how I’d imagined alpine climbing would be.

  I suppose it all started with a book.

  It was a quiet Wednesday morning in Hitch and Hike, the tiny climbing shop hidden in the corner of a Derbyshire garden centre where I worked. This was the second real job I’d ever had. It was simple, just selling climbing, walking and caving gear. The only qualifications needed were enthusiasm, the willingness to work for just a hundred pounds a week, plus a strong pair of legs as the shop was a twelve-mile bike ride from home, with one of Sheffield’s biggest hills blocking the way. I have never once in my life hated the thought of going to work. I’ve always had the luxury of poorly-paid jobs that I actually quite liked doing, unlike my friends who had highly-paid jobs which they hated. These friends would often tell me they were jealous of me, doing a simple job, cycling through the Peak District to work every day, while they sat on tubes and trains and at their desks. In fact, the only part I didn’t look forward to was that commute, especially towards the end of the week, when my legs had clocked up triple figures. Nevertheless, I did relish the surprise on customers’ faces when they found out where I cycled from every day. What I liked most about the journey to work, my thighs straining up the hills, rain spraying up into my grubby face, was the space it gave me to think. Maybe it was an escape or distraction from the boredom of seeing the same road pass below my wheels, but this time alone was full of plans. All my life I had been a dreamer, the dreams changing as I grew from adventures on distant planets, to adventures on this one. These dreams would always grow out of all proportion as they were nurtured in my head, my imagination seemingly boundless. I would think about walking the Pennine Way, then I’d decide I would do it in winter, then dump the idea and switch to the high-level route across the Pyrenees in summer, then winter, then switch to a walk from northern Norway to Gibraltar. Each dream built on the next. The more I became obsessed with climbing, the more my mind filled with climbing dreams, although always of rock climbing. Dreams were all I needed to get through my dull rides to work, and the work itself.

  On that morning there weren’t many customers, just the gentle tap of rain on the roof. The crags were too wet for climbers, the caves too flooded for cavers, the tea shops too inviting for walkers, leaving me time to focus on some personal retail training, namely drinking tea and reading climbing magazines. People often complain about the low pay of staff in climbing shops – well, climbing-shop staff do – to which I have to point out that really they can’t expect high pay as selling boots and rucksacks is hardly assembling cruise missiles.

  With all the magazines read I switched over to the guidebooks. For months I had pored over the rock-climbing guides to the Peak District, each one covering only a small area. They were divided into gritstone guides and limestone guides, and every line climbed on every crag, no matter how small or insignificant, was marked. I would thumb through the pages, looking at the climbs I’d done, re-reading the ones I wanted to do, imagining what it would feel like to be up there, visualising the gear, the risks, sometimes the summit. I would obsess about these climbs, each becoming so much more than a line of holds, each route climbed leading on to another.

  I had become obsessed with climbing since moving to Sheffield, climbing on my days off, stopping off to do some on my way home on my bike, often even on my way to work. I had no climbing partner, and so soloed everything, slowly increasing the grades as my confidence grew. Gritstone climbs are generally short enough so you can cover a lot of ground, climbing up one route and down another, hands punching and twisting into cracks, palming on rough rounded holds, sticky rubber shoes smearing for all you’re worth. At work I would devise grand soloing adventures: climbing all the three-star routes on a crag of a certain grade or linking up one climb on every crag in the guidebook. Climbing alone, I had a few hairy moments of course. As I committed to an exploded arête one morning on the way to work, my hands numb in the cold winter wind, my jacket flapping open as I moved up slowly, a big blast sent my jacket up over my head, blinding me. Breathing hard, all I could do was hang there until another blast blew my jacket back off again and so I could continue. I only fell off twice, once running back down a steep slab as I fell and clattering into a heap at the bottom, winded and vowing I’d never solo anything again if my breath returned, and the second time, slipping off a climb above a shallow pool as I tried to reverse a route that was too hard for me, the water, only a few feet deep, breaking enough of my fall to save any broken bones. Soloing is an addictive activity, the freedom, the self belief, being aware only of that very moment of existence. Someone once said that soloing on gritstone, devoid of heavy ropes and protection and with perfect rock, how could you ever fall? Unfortunately a few months later he did and bled to death, his pelvis broken as he crashed down onto the hard slab below.
/>   For me, these small plastic-bound books, uncommercial but written with care, so British with their love of detail and desire to document a history of rock, were my school books. Reading about the climbs, about the people who had climbed them and the fragments of stories that surrounded them, then actually climbing those routes myself, created the physical and cerebral buzz that made climbing unique. Without these other factors, climbing was no more than pull-ups. I was never a great climber, but I had passion, and was embarrassingly keen.

  As Mandy was living down in London for a year, studying to be a teacher, I travelled down on the train when I could, but with neither of us having any money it was hard finding the cash. After our first meeting I had followed her to France, where we lived together. We now found it strange to be living apart, and Mandy missed me, even though she was living in a large house with friends in New Cross. I missed her as well, but was also revelling in the freedom of doing whatever I wanted, with no emotional tie to her, no guilt for being obsessed. I had unlimited freedom to do whatever I wanted. Guilt-free climbing hedonism. My days belonged only to my employers or to climbing.

  With all the local guidebooks finished, I picked up a small green-spined guide to the Mont Blanc Massif in France. Alpine climbing had always appealed to me, ever since I read Joe Tasker’s book Savage Arena, borrowed from the library in Hull. His tales of scaling the Eiger in winter had sounded as if they were set on another planet, but the book had really only taken root in me when I discovered Tasker had come from Hull. I had always thought that mountaineers were a different breed, middle or upper class. The only climbers I’d come into contact with in the shop had been either professionals or students. Alpine climbing also seemed expensive. Rock climbing in the Peak District required only the bare minimum of equipment, with zero spent on travel. Going to the Alps, buying the kit, paying for camping and cable cars – it always seemed to be beyond me.

  However, there had always been a part of me, when climbing in the wind and rain, or on a big Welsh crag, that pretended I was Tasker, climbing on a big alpine giant. Every two months the magazine Mountain Review would appear in the shop, full of stories of Patagonian big spires, Yosemite big walls and winter alpine climbs. The stories and the people who wrote them were larger than life. They seemed to be addicted to danger and risk, pitting themselves on some of the most terrifyingly committing adventures you could imagine. I read and reread a piece by a UK climber called Andy Perkins, about an alpine attempt on a granite spire in India called Cerro Kishtwar, and how he had spent seventeen days on the face, only to retreat through hunger and fatigue a hundred metres from the summit. I looked at the pictures of him and his partner Brendan Murphy, a team with no chance of rescue, living out there by their wits, and felt envious of such an experience. Andy worked for a climbing company called Troll and I had seen him on their stand that summer at the outdoor trade show in Harrogate. He was shorter than I’d expected, but looked tough, with a scraggy beard and hair that still seemed styled by the Patagonian tempests of his last expedition. I wanted to talk to him, but what could I possibly ask, me a shop assistant who dreamed of being like him. Once I’d plucked up courage and talked to him, my thoughts began to dwell more on mountains than on the local outcrops; my beloved buttresses of gritstone slowly became my training ground for something bigger in the future. Alpine climbing seemed to offer more scope for dreams, the greater ranges of the Andes and Himalayas beyond even more so, and gradually I began to wonder what it would take to get there and who I would go there with, as I had no climbing partner.

  The green-spined book was full of small, far from inspiring black-and-white pictures of ice faces, snowy peaks, and towers of rock. Also it was written in some kind of code that made no sense. I thought about my microscopic climbs, so small they wouldn’t even make it in as alpine footnotes, and wondered how you could climb routes so huge.

  I closed the book and was slipping it back onto the shelf when I saw the back-cover shot for the first time, a picture of a vast wall of ice with a castle of rock standing at its top. Maybe it was because it was the only colour shot in the book that it grabbed me, maybe because it looked like a mountain dreamed up by a sci-fi artist, but for whatever reason the image gripped me like no other. I flicked to the front of the book and found its name: North Face of Les Droites, 1,000 metres, Grade ED (extremely difficult). I imagined what it would take to climb such a face, how you would feel standing on the summit, the exposure, the wildness of space all around you. It must be like standing on the moon, as removed from this world as an astronaut. I flicked through some other books in the shop, and found some more pictures of the face. In Doug Scott’s Himalayan Mountaineering picture book he had a series of shots from a winter ascent of the North East Spur of the Droites, a vast leaning granite pillar on the edge of the North Face. There was an image of his partner, picking his way across a steep ice field with axe and crampons, a tiny rucksack on his back holding everything he needed to survive. I tried to imagine living on such a face for three or four days, the cold, the vertical world all around you. I tried to imagine something so large; the largest structure in my head was the Humber Bridge, its supporting pillars scraping the sky at 450 feet. I calculated the difference in heights, and my head spun at the thought of the face being eight times higher than that.

  Now on my way to work my dreams were of alpine climbs, namely the Droites. My problem was I had almost no real experience for either that face, or anything else. I began immersing myself in as much information as I could get on the techniques and gear necessary, filling the gaps in my knowledge.

  Then, in the autumn, I opened a copy of High magazine, one of the main climbing magazines, and saw two articles on winter Alpine climbing by Dick Turnbull. Dick was the owner of the other climbing shop up the road, called Outside, and he had a reputation as big as his shop. Hitch and Hike was a hill-walking and caving shop and, like most other small shops, seemed far from glamorous to me. Outside on the other hand was like a temple to cool gear and people, its rafters hanging with portaledges and exotic rucksacks and sleeping bags. When you went in Dick’s shop you always had the impression that everyone in there was ‘someone’, and the staff usually comprised top climbers trying to earn enough cash to keep climbing. Dick was larger than life, rather bombastic, but a true climbing fanatic. He had climbed the North Faces of the Eiger, Matterhorn and Grande Jorasses in winter, a very big tick back then when these faces were considered hard, long and dangerous once you entered the winter season. I had to cycle past Dick’s shop on my way to work every day, his staff often beeping me as they passed in their cars, and I had wanted to sneak in and pick his brains for my own climbing plans. Now fate had intervened and Dick had answered all my questions in his article.

  My main problem would be the lack of a climbing partner, the lack of any skills, and the lack of any money – but, as I found out early on, if you have the will, ways will always be found.

  Aaron came up in jerky movements, palming down on a large cobble that stuck from the slope, his hand joined quickly by a foot, then another foot, then his other hand, leaving him perched like a gargoyle, unsure where to go next, uncertain even if the cobble would hold him.

  ‘Andy, this is crazy,’ he shouted up, a small spindrift avalanche filling his mouth before he could make a list of why this was so stupid. I looked at the glacier below and tried to work out what would happen if Aaron fell and pulled me off. The distance was a couple of hundred feet of steep rocky slope. We’d probably survive the fall, but not without breaking many bones and getting badly lacerated by rocks on our way. The snow would help to cushion our fall, that was as long as we avoided the crevasses. Yes, if we fell in one of those it wouldn’t be good.

  Aaron stretched up and hooked a flint with the pick of his axe just as the cobble broke loose and sent his feet pedalling. ‘Take in the rope!’ he shouted, ‘take me tight!’ He screamed as the flint shifted.

  ‘I can’t,’ I shouted back. ‘I don’t really have a b
elay.’

  I had met Aaron at a party a few days after deciding I wanted to become an alpinist. He was the boyfriend of a friend and she introduced me as Andy the climber, telling me that Aaron also climbed and that he’d been to the Alps. Great, I thought, someone with experience.

  Aaron was doing a Ph.D. in something to do with physics, and looked very hippy with his long hair and glasses. He was also very short on words; in fact I spent most of the party talking to him rather than with him. I found that you could get to the Alps for just one hundred pounds on the bus, and although that was a week’s wages, we could camp for free and live very cheaply for two weeks. It was autumn and the summer alpine season was still months away, but I was so impatient to go that I suggested we went there in the winter. Dick Turnbull had said winter climbing was the future – no crowds, perfect weather, the mountains all to yourselves. Being a salesman, I must have been convincing as Aaron said it sounded good, and we agreed to go out in early January.

  The only thing I forgot to tell him was I’d never been ice climbing, and didn’t even know where the Alps were on a map.

  ‘What did you say?’ shouted Aaron, his quiet demeanor suddenly shattered by the news of no belay.

  ‘I don’t really have a belay … I didn’t like to say.’

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me when I was down there at a good belay?!’

  ‘I didn’t think I could climb back down again … sorry.’

  Aaron peered around. It was ridiculous, the two of us strung out on a slope of frozen mud – a rubbish heap from the glacier above. This was far from the North Face of Les Droites, our predicament way short of Touching the Void.

  I had only been out of the UK twice, so the journey to Chamonix was exciting, from the bustle of Victoria bus station, replete with Glaswegian dossers, on to Dover and the ferry, which I boarded with my new one-year passport clutched in my hand.