Touching the Void (4 page)

I had no ice screws. I had forgotten to take them from Simon and had used my only screw down at the bottom. I did not know what to do, 120 feet up very steep ice. Go back down? I was scared of the unprotected drop beneath me, and of the idea of needing an ice screw for a belay if I couldn’t find any rock. I shouted again but there was no reply. Take a few breaths and get on with it! I could see the top of the couloir fifteen feet above me, the last ten feet rearing up steeply, tubeshaped, the good ice giving way to mushy powder. I bridged across the tube, legs splayed against yielding snow. I flailed my axes, dreading the 240-foot fall below me on to one ice screw, and thrashed about me, breathing quick, frightened gasps of effort before I could pull myself out on to the easy snow slopes above the couloir.

When I had regained my breath, I climbed up to a rock wall and arranged a belay in the loose cracks and blocks.

Simon joined me, breathing hard. ‘You took your time,’ he snapped.

I bristled. ‘It was bloody hard, and I was as good as soloing it. I had no screws with me.’ ‘Forget it. Let’s find a bivi.’

It was ten o’clock, and the wind had got up, making the minus-fifteen temperature seem a lot colder. Tired and irritable after a hard fifteen-hour day, we had dreaded the hour or so it would take us to dig a snow hole.

‘Nothing doing here,’ I said, eyeing the slope critically. ‘Not deep enough to dig.’ ‘I could try that dollop up there.’

Simon indicated a huge golf-ball of snow, fifty feet across, which clung defiantly to the vertical rock wall thirty feet above us. He moved up to it and cautiously started prodding it with his axe. On my shaky belay, I appreciated his caution, for I would be swept away if it suddenly parted company with the wall.

‘Joe!’ Simon yelled. ‘Wow! You’re not going to believe this.’ I heard a piton being hammered into rock, and a few more squeaks of joy, and then the call to come up to him.

I felt dubious, and gingerly poked my head through the small hole Simon had made. ‘Good God!’

‘I said you wouldn’t believe it.’ Simon sat back comfortably on his sack, belayed to a good strong peg, and waved regally at his new domain. ‘And it has a bathroom,’ he said with glee, all tiredness and bad humour gone.

The snow was hollow. Inside there was one large chamber, almost high enough to stand in, and beside it another smaller cave. Here was a ready-made palace!

Yet, as we got organised and settled into our sleeping bags, I could not help turning over in my head my usual dislike of bivi sites, trying to assess the safety margin. I had good reason to be alarmed about the precarious state of this one, and Simon knew why, but there was no point in harping on about it. There was nowhere else.

There had been no alternative, as I remembered all too vividly, two years earlier when climbing on the Bonatti Pillar on the south-west side of Les Petits Drus. I was elated to have made such fast progress with Ian Whittaker up the 2,000-foot golden-red granite spire which dominates the view from the Chamonix valley. The architectural magnificence of its lines drawn sharply by the shadows of the sun against the softer backdrop of the whole range of the French Alps had made this climb one of the most aesthetically pleasing routes in the Alps. We had climbed well that day to establish ourselves by nightfall just a few hundred feet from the summit, though still on very steep and difficult ground. There was no possibility of reaching the top that night, nor was there need for haste in seeking a ledge on which to sleep, for the weather was clear and settled, and we would certainly reach the top the following day. It would be another warm night, and this high up, at 17,000 feet, the sky would be brilliant with stars.

Ian had climbed above my small stance overlooking the airy sweep of the precipitous walls below. The corner he was following was relentlessly steep and failing light made him painfully slow. I waited, shivering in the chill evening air, hopping from foot to foot, trying to regain circulation despite my cramped position. I was tired after the long day and yearned to lie back and rest in comfort.

At last a muffled shout told me he had found something, and soon I was cursing and struggling in the gathering dusk up the corner Ian had just led. Even before it had darkened I had spotted that we were slightly off route. We had climbed directly up a steep crack splitting a vertical wall instead of traversing to the right. This had placed us beneath a huge overhang about 150 feet above us. No doubt we would have to resort to complicated diagonal abseiling in the morning to get past it. For now, it had its advantages: at least we would be protected from any rockfall during the night. I found Ian sitting on a ledge about four feet wide but long enough for the two of us to lie down foot-to-head. It would be quite adequate for a night’s sleep. As I climbed up to him I noticed in my torchlight that the ledge was in fact the top of a large pedestal fixed to the vertical wall above the corner we had just climbed. It was solid and gave us no reason to think it might be unsafe. An hour later we had fixed a handrail safety rope, strung between an old ring peg and a spike of rock, clipped ourselves in and settled down to sleep.

The next few seconds were unforgettable.

I was inside a protective waterproof bivouac bag, half-asleep, and Ian was making final adjustments to his safety line. Suddenly and without warning, I felt myself drop swiftly. Simultaneously there was an ear-splitting roar and grinding. With my head inside the bag and my arms flailing outside the opening at my chest I knew nothing except the sickening dread as I went plummeting down into the 2,000-foot abyss below. I heard a high-pitched yelp of fear amid the heavy roaring, then felt a springy recoil. The safety rope had held. All my weight was held on my armpits, as I had accidentally caught the safety rope in the fall. I swung gently on the rope, trying to remember whether I had tied-in to the rope and gripping my arms tight just in case.

The thunderous sound of tons of granite plunging down the pillar echoed and then died to silence. I was completely disorientated. The silence seemed frighteningly ominous. Where was Ian? I thought of that fleeting yelp, and was horrified by the idea that perhaps he had not tied-on after all. ‘By heck!’ I heard close by in gruff Lancastrian.

I struggled to get my head out of the tightly squeezed bag. Ian was hanging beside me on the Vshaped safety rope. His head was lolling on his chest, his head-torch casting a yellow glow on to the surrounding rock. I could see blood on his neck.

I fumbled inside my bag for my head-torch, and then, carefully lifting the elastic torch strap from his blood-matted hair, I examined his injury. He had trouble talking at first, for he had hit his head hard in the fall. Fortunately the cut was a minor one, but the shock of the fall, while half-asleep in the dark, had completely confused us. It took some time to realise that the whole pedestal had detached itself from the pillar and dropped straight off the mountain face. There was a good deal of nervous swearing and hysterical giggling as, gradually, we became aware of the seriousness of our position.

At last, we fell silent. A terrible fear and insecurity had overtaken our boisterous reaction to the unimaginable event. Shining torches below, we saw the remains of our two ropes, which had been hanging beneath the ledge. They were cut to pieces, shredded by the falling rock. Turning round to inspect the safety line, we were appalled to find that the old ring peg on which we hung was moving, and that the spike of rock had been badly damaged. It looked as if one of the two attachment points would give way at any moment. We knew that if just one anchor point failed we would both be hurled into the void. We quickly searched for our equipment to see how we might improve the anchors, only to find that all of it, including our boots, had fallen with the ledge. So confident had we been in the safety of the ledge that we hadn’t thought it necessary to clip our gear to the rope. We could do nothing.

To attempt to climb up or down would have been suicidal. The shadow of the huge overhang above us put paid to any idea of climbing in socks without ropes. Beneath stood a vertical wall hidden by the darkness—an obstacle we could descend only on ropes. The nearest ledges were 200 feet below, and we would certainly fall to our deaths long before we got anywhere near them. We hung on that fragile rope for twelve interminable hours. Eventually our shouts were heard and a rescue helicopter succeeded in plucking us from the wall. The experience of that long, long night, expecting to fall at any time, one minute laughing hysterically, then silence, always with stomachs clenched, petrified, waiting for something we did not wish to think about, will never be forgotten. Ian returned to the Alps the following summer, but his desire to climb had been destroyed. He returned home vowing never to go to the Alps again. I was lucky, or stupid, and got over my dread except when it came to bivouacs.

‘What shall it be then?’ Simon held up two foil bags. ‘Moussaka or Turkey Supreme?’ ‘Who gives a toss! They’re both disgusting!’

‘Good choice. We’ll have the Turkey.’

Two brews of passion fruit and a few prunes later we settled back for sleep.

Storm At the Summit

Getting organised in the morning was a much easier business than it had been previously. We had the advantage of standing room when it came to rolling up Karrimats, packing sleeping bags, and sorting out the climbing gear that had been dropped in a tangled mess on our arrival the night before.

It was my turn to lead. Simon remained inside the snow cave, belayed to a rock piton, while I gingerly stepped out of the small entrance on to the sloped ice of the gully we had ascended in the dark. The ground was unfamiliar to me. I was standing on good ice which funnelled down into a narrowing curved cone below me before disappearing into the top of the tube which I had struggled so hard to get out of last night. The huge icefield we had climbed yesterday was no longer visible. I looked over to my right. A short distance above me the top of the gully reared up in a vertical cascade of ice, but over on its far side I could see that the angle eased and there was a way up and past the cascade into another gully above.

I tiptoed to the right, stopping to drive in a screw before launching up the side of the cascade. It was excellent water ice and I enjoyed the aggressive warming work. I glanced back at the entrance of the snow cave and saw Simon peeping out, feeding the rope as I climbed. The structure of the natural cave looked even more impressive than it had last night and I couldn’t help wondering at our good fortune to have found it, for a night spent in the open at the top of the gully would have been, to say the least, uncomfortable.

Above the cascade I ran out the rest of the rope, following a snowy gully. Simon quickly joined me. “Just as we thought,’ I said. ‘We should reach the hanging on the next pitch.” He set off to the right before disappearing from the minor gully, where I stood resting, into the key ramp line we had,A seen so long ago on Sena Norte. I reckoned that the main difficulties were now behind us and it would be only a matter of running it out to the top of the ramp, and then up the summit slopes. When I joined Simon in the ramp I realised that our problems were not over. At the top of the ramp we could see, that there was a formidable barrier of tooth-shaped seracs with no apparent way through them. The vertical rock walls on each side of the ramp would be impossibly hard to ascend, and the seracs stretched from wall to wall without a break. ‘Damn!’

‘Yeah, it’s bad news. I wasn’t expecting those.’ ‘There may be an exit,’ I said. ‘If not, we’re stuck.’ ‘Bloody hope not! It’s a long way back.’

I looked at the near-by peaks, trying to gauge our height on the mountain.

‘We bivied at five eight hundred metres last night. That’s what? Nineteen thousand feet…right, that means we have about fifteen hundred to go,’ I said. ‘Two thousand, more like.’ ‘Okay, two, but we did at least two and a half thousand on harder ground yesterday so we should top out today.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Depends on how hard that exit is, and remember the last bit is all flutings.’ I set off up the 550 ramp and made fast progress. We alternated leads, rarely talking to each other, concentrating on forcing the pace. Yesterday we had used ice screws to protect each rope length, and the steep ice had slowed us down. Today we could feel the thin air taking its toll where the easier ground enabled us to climb an almost continuous double pitch, kicking steps up to the leader for 150 feet, and then up past him for the same again.

I was breathing heavily as I dug through the soft surface snow to find the firm ice below. I drove in two ice screws and planted both axes above my stance before tying into them and shouting for Simon to come up. We were close to the serac barrier, having climbed 1,000 feet up the ramp. I checked my watch: one o’clock. We had overslept and made a late start, but, after ten pitches in four and a half hours, we had made up for it. I felt confident and at ease. We were a match for this route and I now knew that we would finish it. I felt a thrill at the knowledge that I was, at last, on the verge of achieving a first ascent, and a hard one at that.

As Simon panted up, the sun crept over the seracs at the top of the ramp and spilled bright white light down the sweep of snow below us. Simon was grinning broadly. I needed no explanation for his good humour. It was one of those moments when everything came together, and there were no struggles or doubts, and nothing more to do but enjoy the sensation.

‘May as well get past the seracs and then rest.’

‘Sure,’ Simon agreed, as he studied the barrier above. ‘See those icicles? That’s the way past.’ I looked at the cascade of ice and, at first, I dismissed it as too difficult. It was clearly overhanging at the bottom. A leaning wall of smooth blue ice with a huge fringe of icicles dripping from its head provided the only solid surface across the otherwise powdery seracs. Yet, this cascade was the only weakness that I could spot in the barrier. If we were to attempt it, we would have to climb the initial ice wall for some twenty-five feet and then break a way through the icicles and continue up the more reasonably angled cascade ice above.