ASIAN ALPINE E-NEWS
Issue No 94. August 2021

Kitaraju 6040m seen from the bergschrund on the south-west face of Alpamayo, Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Fruit in Failure
Tales from Mountains Never Climbed
ADAM G. COOPER

Contents
Climbing book draft 2021 with photos
of Dr Adam G. Cooper from Australia

1Page 2 ~ 130

Fruit in Failure:
Tales from Mountains Never Climbed

ADAM G. COOPER

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FRUIT IN FAILURE

My eyes turn upward to the looming peaks.
“My God!” I gasp. “How will I ever survive this?”Psalms of David

Adam G. Cooper
Energeia Press
Melbourne2021

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The author geared up to ski the Vallée Blanche, French Alps, 2013.

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Fruit in Failure:
Tales from Mountains Never Climbed

ADAM G. COOPER

Energeia Press
Melbourne, Australia

6© 2021 by Adam G. Cooper
Energeia Press
Melbourne, Australia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, except as permitted by the Australia
Copyright Act (1968), without the prior permission of the publisher or author.

Cover photo: On the icefields near Mueller Hut, Mount Cook Region, New Zealand.
Photos on page 36 reproduced with kind permission from Somers Carroll Productions.
Photo on page 48 kindly provided by the Federation Quebecoise de la Montagne et del’Escalade. Photo on page 80 reproduced with kind permission from Lorne Gill at
Nature Scot. All other photos are from the author’s own collection.

Contents

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CHAPTER 1

Failing Well

CHAPTER 2

First Years

CHAPTER 3

Superstar at Arapiles

CHAPTER 4

The Outdoor Athlete

CHAPTER 5

Abseil Fail at the Onkas

CHAPTER 6

Channel Nine at Morialta

CHAPTER 7

Avalanched on Mt Cook

CHAPTER 8

Thin Ice in the Rockies

CHAPTER 9

The Wolf

CHAPTER 10

Mt Andromeda Fail

CHAPTER 11

Death on Alpamayo

CHAPTER 12

The Mountain Lion

CHAPTER 13

Terrorists in Huaraz

CHAPTER 14

Tragic Deaths

CHAPTER 15

Diamond Couloir Fail

CHAPTER 16

Fall on Centre Post Direct

CHAPTER 17

No Picnic on Mont Blanc: Part I

CHAPTER 18

No Picnic on Mont Blanc: Part II

CHAPTER 19

No Picnic on Mont Blanc: Part III

CHAPTER 20

Burglar in Langtang

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CHAPTER 21

The Need for Speed

Summit Ridge of Nevado Pisco (5752m), Peru.

CHAPTER 1

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FAILING WELL
I’m a very ordinary climber. My achievements on rock, ice, and alpine
routes do not rate a mention in any esteemed climbing circles. I have neverclimbed Everest, never entered the “death-zone”, never pioneered any newroutes. I have no heroic example to hold out to budding climbers who want
to reach for the stars and fulfil their dreams, for I have been to the highest
summits of exactly zero countries and continents on earth.
Sometimes I have tried to make excuses for my failure as amountaineer. For a start, my physique is not well suited for hard rockclimbing. While at six foot six I may have great reach, I am also heavy, andweigh in at a lean 110kg. I’d have done well as a rugby winger, but burn out
quickly on an overhang. I also have a few congenital and chronic ailments.
I was born with spina bifida occulta in the lumbar spine, and have taken
digoxin, beta blockers, and aspirin for a heart defect since it was diagnosed
at the age of 25. I have chronic nerve and circulation problems in my feet. I
sweat profusely and so easily get wet and chilled. My boots are always tootight, my gloves too small, my sleeping bag too short. And so on.
But then I read stories about the climbing achievements of people
with severe physical disabilities. Over fifteen disabled climbers havesummited Everest, including several double amputees! By contrast, I havealways been healthy, active, and athletically able. Neither a lengthy anatomy
nor a dodgy heart prevent a person from exercising the truly non-negotiable
practices necessary for athletic excellence: mental resilience, soundjudgement, and sheer dogged determination.
So what is this book about? Well, as the title suggests, it is not a
catalogue of remarkable climbing achievements. It is, rather, a litany ofclimbing failures. It is an autobiographical collection of humiliating tales of
defeat, embarrassing stories about mountains I have never climbed, goals I
have never reached, best laid schemes that have “gang aft agley.” In thatsense this book is something like a project in solidarity with the vast sea of

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average Jill and Joes who will never climb like a Catherine Destivelle or a
Lyn Hill, an Alex Honnold or a Ueli Steck, yet who can’t help but feelsomething of the same yearning, enchantment, and motivation which only
the actual experience of climbing and standing among great alpine ranges
can inspire. You know your limits, whether in ability or opportunity. But
you have also felt the captivating call presented to you in climbing to test
your known limits, to extend yourself, to find and realise your purpose andmeaning in life in an ekstasis (a standing outside yourself), as the ancientphilosophers would say.
There is a well-known adage among climbers: you’re only as good as
your next climb. It expresses a commonly felt anticlimactic feeling every
climber has after a noteworthy personal success on a route. You should be
feeling elated. You should be feeling proud, grateful, satisfied. Your family
and friends think that you should now be over whatever it was that drove
you to such lengths, that you should have it out of your system, that you can
get on with life in the “real world” at last. Instead you feel empty, eaten up
inside by a curious and unfathomable melancholy, a reconstituting andinsatiable hunger for more: something steeper, longer, harder, colder, moreisolated, or, best of all, unclimbed. It is only when I have fulfilled that urge,
grasped hold of the new challenge taking shape inside me, before me, that I
will be happy, that I will be “over it.” But of course, I never reach that goal.
It’s like making love. You are sure that this time it will make all things right,
this time will be better than the last. But after all the huffing and puffing,after all the playful or animal exuberance, after all the expressions ofaffection and satisfaction, you are overwhelmed with a melancholic spirit,liquefied by the petit mort, reduced back down to your carnal, finite self.
You become aware that despite the wonder and grace of it all, there is more:
more to this relationship, more to happiness, more to life. There is always
more. Our true fulfilment lies in a beyond.
In a line that inspired the title of this book, American alpinist Steve
House once remarked how deceptive success in the mountains can be.
“Failure is the more valuable fruit, borne as it is from the knurled vine ofprocess. Taking up crampons and ice axes after failure forces me to own my
own shortcomings, learn from them, and to capitalize on the strengths that I11have found.”1 In fact many climbing coaches are now referring to the valueof failure, regarding it as a potentially positive experience in one’s overall
approach to and assessment of climbing progress. House calls it ‘learning to
fail well.’ The adage about only being as good as the next climb expresses a
personal re-evaluation, a necessary relativisation of my best effort. Perhaps
I did do well. Perhaps it was a laudable or even superlative achievement,
comparatively speaking. But now that it is done, none of that matters. Thereis only what lies ahead. No matter how poorly or well you climb, no matter
how mediocre or outstanding your gym, crag or alpine achievements, it’s
actually a level playing field. If it is true that you are only as good as yournext climb, if all climbers are only as good as their next climb, then the fieldlies open, and every attempt to rate yourself according to your pastaccomplishments is misguided.
I understand that not every person interested in reading this book will
be a dedicated climber. I don’t believe you have to be to enjoy it. Although
I have always appreciated Yvon Chouinard’s assessment of adventure travel
as “pure bullshit”, there is possibly enough travel and adventure in thesetales to arouse interest in this world’s natural wonders and to enable a certain
imaginative escape to environments beyond the immediate and familiar.
There may also be some historical value in the tales about certain personages
and the accounts of traditional climbing in South Australia in the 1980s. As
far as I know, the Channel Nine visit to Morialta in the 1990s has not been
recounted elsewhere, and the Glenelg beach bouldering wall has long since
been demolished.
Of course not all my climbs were fails. My mountaineering exploits
have taken me to six continents, and I have told here of some successful
ascents, and of the redeeming qualities possessed by those that weren’t. The
quality of a climbing adventure lies in aspects that cannot be reduced tosuccess or failure in sending the route or reaching the summit. Moreover,many tales have been left out. I have not included stories about mydeportation from Argentina, the tarantula in the Santa Cruz Valley, the lynx
attack on a young chamoix in Argentière, rock fall strike beneath Malte Brun(with a hole in my pack to this day as witness), exploring prayer-caves in
1

Steve House, Beyond the Mountain (Sheffield: Vertebrate Publishing, 2010), 173.

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the crags of northern Iraq, winter-soloing Scotland’s Buachaille Etiv Mor,
ice cragging in the English Pennines, lightning strike in Westland, New
Year’s Eve midnight solo of Cascade Falls, and so on. In a time of my life
where I have faced unprecedented personal challenges, recounting what I
have here has provided an unexpected recovery of self. As I entered mythirties and forties, my climbing experiences defined me less and less whilefamily, vocational and academic endeavours increasingly occupied thecentre. Looking back through these relived memories I can now see that myearly years of climbing shaped me more than I knew. It was not just I whowent into the mountains. They went into me, into my bones and soul andblood, mysteriously contributing to my entire self-constitution. With thereflection that has been prompted by writing these stories, I can finallyacknowledge that, despite all the summits never reached, I really have hadsome extraordinary mountain adventures. I should stop lamenting mydashed or abandoned dreams and just get on with it: with climbing, withtraining, with life, and last but not least, with this book. Enjoy!

On the summit of Aiguille Rouge, New Zealand (1987).

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Leading The British Beat (21), Arapiles (1989).

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Topping out on the fourth pitch of the classic Siren (9), one of the first climbs everpioneered at Mt Arapiles.

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CHAPTER 2

FIRST YEARSMy earliest memories of wanting to climb stem from my childhood years
living at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. It was the mid-1970s. My
father was a teacher at the international school in Moshi, and my mothernursing their just-born youngest of four boys. Our family’s small bungalow,
surrounded by mango trees, was sat in the midst of maize and coffee fields,
and lay in direct view of Kibo’s soaring white summit and Mawenzi’s
rugged crags. The river that ran alongside our place, where we would
explore and look for Colobus monkeys, was fed from its snows. I remember
sitting oftentimes in the branches of the jacaranda tree outside our sharedbedroom window, gazing longingly at the white glaciers of the upper slopes,
mesmerized by hopes of savouring for myself its inaccessible wonders.
It was no wonder then that I suffered such bitter disappointment one
day when I learned that my two older brothers, and not I, had been invitedon a school trek up to Horombo Hut on the now nicknamed “Coca-Cola”
route above Marangu. I couldn’t believe the injustice of it. Despite mypleading and desperate defence of my ability to keep up, at six years old I
was considered too young for the altitude, and on the night following theirdeparture to the mountain with my father I cried myself to sleep.
We returned to Australia in 1976, and although no opportunity toclimb presented itself in the years ahead, my childhood in mostly rural
settings was filled with mischievous adventure. I took to hiking, hunting,rabbit trapping, and fishing, either with my brothers or alone. I avidly
consumed climbing literature, studied maps, planned expeditions, andcreated lengthy equipment lists. My dream in life was to return to Moshi towork as a doctor at KCMC, the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre. This
was the ill-equipped hospital where Rob Taylor underwent treatment (and16

torture) after his leg-shattering fall while climbing the icicle of the BreachWall with Henry Barber in 1978.2 From there I felt I could simultaneously
serve the world and embrace adventure. But although I did well enough at
school, I was prone to distraction and keeping bad company, and my parents
must have feared greatly for my future when at eight I was arrested for arson(accidental) and at twelve got away with a police warning for vandalism(also accidental).
I was sixteen years old and in my final year of school in Adelaide
when I finally started climbing. I had got a part time job at one of Adelaide’s
outdoor shops and saved enough to pay for a six-week indoor climbing
course at the Parks Community Centre. The wall there was unlike today’s
climbing walls with their bolt on moulded holds. It was instead built of brickand creatively reproduced a wide range of real-life crag features. The
sessions ran on Friday nights and for the first meeting I had to catch several
buses to get there. From then on however I was offered a ride to and fro by
one of the other course participants, a dope-smoking builder whose old
Kingswood smelled like an opium den.
After the six weeks the course culminated in a two-day outdoor
climbing experience at Morialta Falls. By this time I had purchased my own
gear for top roping, but as a school boy whose only friends thought I was
mad I found it hard to find a climbing partner. That didn’t stop me fromabseiling, and I abseiled off nearly everything I could find, which included
not only all the obvious cliffs at Morialta but also oddities like the crumblingand overhanging Black Cliff at Hallett Cove and the smooth granite Reedy
Creek cliffs near Palmer. I also taught myself to solo top-rope belay, using
a petzl jumar on an 11mm static rope. Having got my driver’s licence soonafter I turned sixteen, I was able to borrow my parents’ car most weekends,
and when I couldn’t, rode my bike from the western suburbs all the way up
Norton Summit Road instead. On my final day of matriculation in 1985, on
so-called muck-up day, I planned to abseil off the Immanuel College Chapel,
and had even found a way through the man-hole onto the roof. But I lacked
tactical support from my peers and chickened out on the day, perhaps an
2

See Rob Taylor’s personal account of events in The Breach: Kilimanjaro and theConquest of Self (1981).

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early sign of my perennial tendency to play it safe rather than push throughthe risks.
At the beginning of 1986, as I turned seventeen, I started planning myfirst New Zealand alpine climbing trip. I had done a solo walk in south-west
Tasmania during the September school holidays the year before, and despite
getting wet, cold, and disoriented on Mt Olympus, was eager to seek out
bigger hills. I wrote to Dave Macleod from Alpine Guides Westland, andDave agreed to take me on a specially arranged course up the Fox Glacierin September, though he had never had someone as young as me before, anddemanded that I get fit. So I started running, and when I couldn’t climb I
practised bouldering at the Norton Summit cave by lamplight at night, oralong the long stone wall that used to border the lawns at the Glenelg beachforeshore. The cave was sheltered from the rain in winter, while the wall
was particularly attractive in summer, as I could ride my bike down to
Glenelg in the evenings, boulder on the wall for an hour, then cool off witha swim before heading home.
It was at the Glenelg wall that I met Simon Parsons, legendary
hardman of Tasmanian rock, who was completing his medical degree in
Adelaide. Simon was all athlete and playful energy and, although nearly ten
years my senior, very friendly towards me. He took me along in his classic
Saab 900 turbo to belay and photograph him doing hard climbs at Norton
Summit and Victor Harbor, some of which I published with an article on
South Australian rock climbing in Action Outdoor magazine. At a later time
I met up with Simon again at Arapiles, and watched in amazement as he led
climbs like India (29) and Anxiety Neurosis (27). He possessed beautiful
form when climbing, and I have always tried to imitate his precision, poise,elegance and balance on rock, though with nothing like his strength andcourage. With his encouragement I led Little Thor (20), and later Pilot Error(21) and British Beat (21), to date my best climbs on rock. His stories ofclimbing hard rock with Kim Carrigan and steep ice with John Fantini fueled
my imagination and motivation. My favourite memory of Simon is blastingalong the road in his Saab from Arapiles to Horsham at 170 kph, windows
down and Sade’s seductive voice issuing smoothly from the stereo throughthe wind. Having owned and tuned classic Saab turbos in my middle age,

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including the incomparable c900, I know now for myself the thrill of their
sharp torque curve and driver-focused dash design.
September soon came and I headed off for New Zealand, hitch-hiking
my way from Christchurch to Fox Glacier township via Arthur’s Pass. Dave
had found one other client to share the course, and the three of us flew byhelicopter into Fox Glacier hut, perched just above the icefall, with six days’
supplies. It was my first time in glaciated terrain and I was enchanted by thecreaks, crashes, and groans of the ice-fall, the rumble of avalanches, and thetowering white spires surrounding us. The course taught us crampon
technique, ice axe arrest, crevasse rescue, avalanche safety and rescue, snow
belays, snow survival, and numerous snow and ice climbing and rope work
skills. The September conditions made for slow going, as we waded aroundthe nearby valleys, gullies, ridges, and plateaus through deep spring snow.
But it was the perfect initiation for me and my new-found love for rockclimbing found its happy complement in this alpine version of theextraordinary pursuit.
With our week above Fox Glacier concluded, I hitch-hiked down to
Wanaka for a few days, learning to ski for the first time. Then I hitched to
Mt Cook village where I teamed up with a pair of Canadian skiers (one ofwhom - Jim Baker, now of Banff Mountain Film Festival fame - became aclimbing colleague and long-term friend) for a multi-day ski touring trip up
the Tasman Glacier. I was a novice on skis, but I had a rope and my newly
learned glacial travel technique to share. After catching a back-flight in via
ski-plane, I struggled at first to ski with a pack on, and fell often in thesteeper snow fields around Tasman Saddle Hut where we were based. I felt
embarrassed by my ineptitude, and watched on enviously as the two
Canadians carved up the slopes below Hochstetter Dome on their telemark
skis with easy virtuosity. By the time we skied out five days later via
Beetham Valley, however, I had gained enough proficiency to makesweeping turns on easier angled slopes. In bidding my Canadian friends
farewell, I made arrangements for Jim to meet me at Arapiles that summer,
floating tentative plans of a future climbing trip to his hometown in Banff,smack-bang in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.

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I made that trip to Canada at the end of the next year, 1987, stopping
first for two months in New Zealand again. By then I had gained theexperience of living like a true climbing drop-out at Arapiles for weeks onend, meeting legends like HB (Malcolm Matheson), Louise Shepherd, Jon
Muir and Greg Child. I never climbed hard, and in fact accomplished very
little, due partly to my innate lack of courage (animated by too active an
imagination of what would happen if I fell), and partly to my failure tosecure a climbing partner. Besides the rendezvous with Jim and otheroccasionally passing pilgrims, I often found myself partnerless at the Pines.
During those days I would usually spend the cooler mornings boulderingand doing pullups, and the afternoons brewing tea, reading the guidebook,sorting gear, and snoozing, and through it all basically trying to look andfeel like a real climber who belonged in the place.
On one occasion my fortunes changed when a Swiss couple set up
camp alongside me. He looked like a serious climber fresh out of some
European movie: lean, brown, strong, and tall, with long blond hair andbright blue eyes. His wife was also athletic, but was sporting a prominent
baby bump. She was obviously heavily pregnant. On the morning after theirarrival, the Swiss superman approached my tent with his climbing pack on,looking ready for a day out. Maybe this was the moment I had been waitingfor. A real partner at last. A climbing superstar who would lend me his
courage and brawn, while I could belay like no one else, and could
personally guide him around all the crags and climbs, which I knew (fromthe guidebook!) like the back of my hand.
‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he called as he approached my tent. ‘I was justwondering if you have any climbing planned for today?’I trembled inside with anticipation. This was it. This was my open
door to a new world, a new future. ‘Ahh, I’d love to. I’ve been looking forsomeone to climb with for days. What about you?’‘Actually I’ve already got plans to climb with another guy for the next
two weeks, but I was wondering if you wanted to climb with my wife? She’s
six months pregnant, so she can’t climb anything too difficult, but she’dreally like to get out and do something.’

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And so my destiny was realized. I was to climb with a pregnant
woman. But as it turned out, how fitting a destiny it was. Anna may havebeen heavily pregnant, but she was lithe, strong, and fit. We settled on
Arachnus, the classic four pitch grade 8 on the Watchtower Face. With
shared leads, she proved more than the partner I needed, and her amiable
company and confidence-inspiring style made my day.
There was one tiny crisis that nearly eventuated, and that could haveruined the day. While she was leading the first pitch, and I was sat on a rockat the base belaying, a large brown snake slithered into view. It was sliding
along the base of the cliff towards me, where the rock meets the ground. Atthat moment, Anna was stationary, either putting in protection or perhaps
working out a tricky section. Either way, she was out of sight. I froze when
I saw the snake, but as it slithered closer, I nervously began to wonder what
to do. If Anna moved or called for rope, I would have to move too. But thenthe snake might strike. I had to do something, before it got too close. Whenit was only about a metre away from my feet, I deliberately startled it,
shifting my feet and issuing a sharp hissing sound. The snake stopped andreared back and up, its head swaying in the air and its tongue flickering withagitation. Then it darted away, back the way it had come, just as the rope
pulled upwards and I had to pay out slack.
How laughable that my most terrifying moment as a wanna-beprospective career climber should have arisen in the form of a snake, as it
did for the first man in his paradise. And that while enjoying one of my mostmemorable days out, with the delightful Anna, six months pregnant, from
Switzerland. It was our only climb together. The next day she and herhusband packed up shop and moved to Horsham, to be nearer more
comfortable amenities. I too soon packed up. Having run out of money, I
needed to get back to work at the outdoor shop, and save my pennies again
for my grand New Zealand and Canada expedition. And so ended anotherof my numerous half-baked adventures at the Piles.

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Following on Cassandra (18), Arapiles.

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Keith “Noddy” Lockwood, 2020.

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CHAPTER 3

SUPERSTAR AT ARAPILES

After a decade or more of absence, recent years have seen a resurgence in
my climbing visits to Arapiles. I have been blessed to get to know and climb
with Keith “Noddy” Lockwood, whose theologian brothers I have known
well through my own vocational circles since the early 1990s. Keith
continues to surprise by still leading exploratory adventures up virgin lines.
He has demonstrated to me that the days of pioneering quality new trad
routes at Arapiles are far from over.
Conversations with Keith have ranged in focus from accounts of his
early days mountaineering in New Zealand and Patagonia to incidents withfamous climbers he has known. Rockfall on the Sheila face, new routes inthe Darrans, uncrossed passes in northern Patagonia: his overseas climbing
accomplishments, largely unsung, impress me as much as his endless list ofcreme de la creme new routes in Australia since the 1970s, not to mention
his literary achievements and tireless championing of an environmentally
responsible rock climbing culture.
One story Keith related to me concerned the visit to Arapiles in 1988of David Lee Roth, one time lead singer of the rock band Van Halen.
Surprisingly the visit passed by relatively unnoticed, receiving only local
media attention. Keith, who at the time was a journalist at the Wimmera
Mail Times, received a tip-off about the arrival of Roth’s huge entourage at
the Mount. Neither the name David Lee Roth nor Van Halen meant anything
to Nod, a true country rustic. But he headed out to the Mount nonetheless to
see what all the fuss was about and whether he could come up with aworthwhile story. On ambling up to the Plaque area, he happened upon what

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seemed to be a mini travelling circus: two tour buses were parked in theblazing sun, plus three or four vehicles, surrounded by tent shade awnings,
umbrellas, folding chairs, and oodles of people milling about. On the Plaquecliff a number of top ropes were strung up, with much attention focused ona strapping young man with a reversed base-ball cap puffing on a top-rope
about half-way up Maximus (17). Nod whipped around to the top and,leaning over the lip with his camera, managed to squeeze off a few nice shotsof the rock-star just past the crux. While Roth forced a smile for the camera,
according to Nod’s version of events, it turned out Roth wasn’t too happy tohave had some unauthorised photos taken, though later calmed down when
he learned they were destined only for the local country newspaper. One
picture did go further, ending up in Keith’s superlative study Arapiles: A
Million Mountains (2007). It is hard to tell if the yawning grimace on Roth’s
face is one of terror or delight!
Keith’s account of Roth’s visit interested me all the more in that I
have my own story to tell about the rockstar’s visit to Arapiles. Earlier inthe same year, I had caught up with an American lass at Arapiles whom I
had met in New Zealand the year before. In New Zealand we had exchanged
contact details and agreed to meet up at Arapiles to do some climbing for a
few days. Debbie and I climbed mostly in the Organ Pipes, and she wasimpressed by Arapiles’ quartz-hard bulging sandstone and varied terrain. On
parting she promised to be back.
A couple of months’ later I was woken by a phone-call in the dead ofnight. Nobody ever called us at this hour. I was 20 at the time, still living athome, and I heard my mother answering the phone in her serious formal
voice, no doubt fearing some bad news about a death in the family. But then
the tone of her voice changed to her polite, motherly, caring voice, and she
put down the receiver and padded towards my room. “It’s for you dear,” shesaid softly, “a young lady calling from America.”
America? Who could it be, I wondered, as I stumbled to the phone
and held the receiver up to my ear. My voice was broken and croaky.
“Hello?”25“Hey Adam, remember me? It’s Debbie calling from the US!” sheshouted enthusiastically. “How’s the climbing?” The words entered my ears
but meant nothing. It took me some moments to piece things together in mymind. Debbie? The US? Oh yes, Debbie, Arapiles, rock climbing, New
Zealand. In the background I could hear loud banging music and raucous
voices. Still in stupor I mumbled some kind of idiotic reply, disoriented andhalf-asleep. She ploughed on undaunted. “Hey, guess what? David Lee Rothis coming to Australia, and he wants to go rock climbing with you at
Arapiles!”“David who?”“David Lee Roth, the rock star! The lead singer from Van Halen! He’s
right here with me at a party in Seattle, and he wants to go climbing at
Arapiles!”I had heard of Van Halen – my brothers’ musical interests ensured
that much - but the name David Lee Roth meant nothing at that dread hourand I failed entirely to fire to the keen spark of her excitement. “Umm, yeah
ok. That sounds great. Look, um, it’s two o’clock in the morning here, soum, maybe could you call back during the day sometime and we can worksomething out? Or maybe write me a letter.”
The phonecall ended somewhat abruptly. “Yeah, ok, I’ll talk to Daveand we’ll be in touch.” But that was the last I heard of it. I have never heard
from Debbie since. The opportunity to host David Lee Roth’s rock-climbing
tour of Australia had been plonked right into my lap, and I had dropped itstone cold. They were in another league. Ignorant of both Roth’s fame andclimbing interests, it all mattered little to me at the time. But when I told mybrothers they laughed incredulously at my naivety. Who knows what might
have come from it? There might have at least been money in it for me,
perhaps even an opening into some kind of career in rock climbing
adventure agency. Years later I learned that none other than Yosemite
legend Ron Kauk had acted as chief rigger for Roth’s photo shoot on Half
Dome for his Skyscraper album, released in 1988, whose cover photo had
been taken by Galen Rowell. The climbers had been rewarded with pay and26a gold-plated karabiner to boot! It was only when I read Keith’s Arapiles
book, and saw Roth’s grinning face in its pages, that I realised that he did
make that visit to Arapiles after all. Who hosted and arranged it, I do not
know. All I know is that Debbie’s dead of night phone-call proved to be themoment in my life that I missed out on introducing a world superstar toAustralia’s greatest crag. Now that would have been something worth
talking about!

Gearing up for a climb with Noddy at Arapiles.

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CHAPTER 4

THE OUTDOOR ATHLETE
I think that the idea of seriously training for climbing first entered my mind
thanks to Steve Ilg. His book, The Outdoor Athlete, arrived in my mail-box
sometime in 1987 after many weeks of eager anticipation. Ilg was (and stillis) a self-styled spiritual guru: on his current website he describes himself
rather charmingly as “a very feeble mountain yogi/fitness monk.’’ Although
I found his idiosyncrasies endearing, had I read the more critical reviews
that appeared soon after his book’s publication, I might not have bought it.
In the words of one reviewer, “Grotesque paragraphs, their meaning
obscured by cascading rolls of verbal flab, lumber shamelessly through thebook.”3
Yet Ilg convinced me of a few important principles which haveguided me ever since. First, he persuaded me to start squatting with a heavybarbell, a lesson that back in the day I suspect got me up big mountains in
Peru and which today, into my 50s, I continue to practice and value. Ilg also
introduced me to a neat little circuit training routine that combined a suiteof bodyweight strength moves performed at high intensity tempo. The
circuit, at least in my modified and adapted form of it, consisted of a simple
superset of five exercises: pullups, pushups, bench triceps, ab crunches, andsplit squat jumps. Each exercise was to be performed to what Ilg called
MMF, momentary muscular failure. The set was followed by 60 seconds
rest, then repeated for a total of three sets. I would often do this circuit
having just run the 7 km home from work, already warm, loose, and a little
taxed. As I improved I wore a pack for the pullups and pushups to add someresistance. Sometimes it burned and felt like I was dying (was it Ilg who told
me to train through the burn, not to the burn?), but with the barbell squats it
served as superb preparation for my 1989 expedition to Peru and in 1990 to
3Richard Goldstone, in a review for the American Alpine Club.

28

the Diamond Couloir of Mt Kenya. Before that the only climbing-specificstrength training I had done was weighted pullups and dips (I wanted triceps
like Wolfgang Güllich’s when he sent Punks in the Gym in 1985), so thisrepresented a significant step forward. After Peru I got access to a gym andadded a range of exercises to construct a regular strength training repertoire.
Ilg also stressed the need for mobility and good diet. For a while I
adopted a virtually Pritikin diet of lentils and salad, though once I learned
that Pritikin had died of a heart attack I lost some of my original enthusiasm.
As for the lentils, besides giving me flatulence, a minor crisis at home put
paid to them. I had put some on the stove to cook in one of my mother’s
good stainless steel pots and promptly forgot about them. Half an hour later
clouds of smoke billowing from the kitchen into the lounge room alerted me
to my unattended task. I spent several hours over many days scrubbing thatpot, but it never found its original lustre. My mother, thankfully, was very
forgiving.
As I hit middle-age I discovered the benefits of strength training
combined with clean eating for fitness and mental health, joint and bonestrength, and a healthy level of mass and power against the tide of natural
muscular atrophy. Learning the olympic lifts in my mid-40s, the snatch andthe clean and jerk, was an especial boon. These moves train the entire bodyand mind in synergy in the way they demand you to direct concentrated
energy and power into a single, balanced, co-ordinated dynamic effort. They
have direct carry over into almost any kind of athletic endeavour. Throughthe olympic lifts I have learned that strength is a skill: it can be trained andlearned and practiced and applied with ever increasing success. And it is notjust about strength. By scheduling higher volume training, using multiple
sets of higher reps (without loss of form), an amazing level of cardiovascular fitness can be reached just through these lifts and their
supplementary exercises. As in my climbing grades, I never attained
significant numbers in the olympic lifts, but I got serious enough to enter anumber of state-level masters competitions. These events provided a goal towork towards, a test of my own progress and determination, just as an indoor
climbing competition or mountain racing event might for the devoted
climber. To this day my best lifts were made on the competition platform.

29

With strength training has come my share of overtraining and injury
too. Hemorrhoids from heavy squatting; rotator cuff injury from behind thehead pullups; a torn calf from uphill sprints; tendonitis in my elbows;
chronic spondylolisthesis in my lumbar spine. Unwelcome as these havebeen, all can be accepted and viewed as pedagogical opportunities.
Overtraining has taught me that when it comes to strength training, less is
usually more, that the body has its own voice and wisdom to which theperceptive athlete will give due attention. Climbing has its own specificrange of overtraining injuries, usually joint and tendon related. Long layoffs
to give inflamed tendons or torn muscles time to recover can provoke
depression and malaise. It’s easy to lose motivation, or else, impatient withthe enforced layoff, to get back into things too soon and relapse into further,possibly career-wrecking, injury. The climbing athlete, like the olympic
weightlifter, needs to adopt a long-term approach to training: I am nottraining for tomorrow or even this weekend. I am training for next year, forthe next decade, for middle and older age. You need to ask yourself: do I
still want to be climbing actively and well into my forties, fifties, and sixties?
While it is important to be disciplined and not put off training whenscheduled (and climbers are notoriously lazy, happy-go-lucky athletes),sometimes your body knows better. I don’t mean you should skip training,but maybe you need to ease off the intensity or volume for that day, orschedule for an extra day per week of ‘active recovery.’ As long as it follows
hard and focused physical work, it is in fact while you are resting that true
progress is made.
All the great masters of athletic formation know and teach theseprinciples, having learned them mostly through trial and error, painful
experience, and the university of hard knocks. Marc Twight, the once hardcore alpinist, has become an internationally acclaimed trainer, coach, andfitness mentor to hundreds of world class athletes using just these lessons,along with the relevant knowledge from the biophysical sciences. Anotherleading alpinist, Steve House, founder of The Uphill Athlete training
resource company and now in his fifties, teaches similarly. Dan John andDave Draper from the weightlifting world stand out as experts who know
the wisdom of listening to the body and not being enslaved to equations,charts, prescriptions, cult fads and internet opinion. Chris Sharma, ranked

30

among the top rock-climbers in the world, established his own gym branddevoted to climbing-specific training, all on the back of submitting to his
own mentor and coach, who wisely steered him through a long and gruelingregime to enable him to actualise undreamed-of possibilities.
To all these we could make additional reference to the growth oftraining literature that affirms the need for mental training anddevelopment. Climbing is very much a head game. Climbing coaches andauthors like Arno Ilgner and Dave MacLeod have brought to heightened
attention the obstacles to progress created by fear of falling and failure
anxiety. In fact MacLeod claims that fear of falling is the primary weakness
in over 50% of the climbers he coaches, and that confronting it requires not
only practice in falling and targeted mental exercise, but ‘a dramaticreorientation towards what failure means.’4
So now there is no excuse. In the 1980s we had Nathan Pritikin andSteve Ilg. Today every climber and outdoor athlete has a plethora of trainers
and methods to choose from. The internet is saturated with information andguidance on training for climbing in all its various manifestations: gym,
bouldering, crag, solo, waterfall, dry-tooling, alpine, high altitude and so on.
Maybe that’s the problem. Too much choice, too many options, cripple themind and inhibit decision. With decision comes risk and responsibility, thevery factors many young people fear the most. But when we accept risk andresponsibility and move forward in action, we discover real freedom. Thereis no freedom in a plethora of choices, per se. There is only freedom inaction. Should we settle for anything less?

Dave MacLeod, 9 out of 10 Climbers Make the Same Mistakes: Navigation through theMaze of Advice for the Self-Coached Climber (Spean Bridge, Scotland: Rare Breed
Productions, 2010), 12. See also Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training
for Climbers (La Vergen, Tennessee: Desiderata Institute, 2003).
4

31

The snatch combines speed, strength, power, mobility, and co-ordination in a single
dynamic movement.

32

Strength training at Derrimut Gym, Melbourne.

33

My brother Simon conjugating his Greek verbs on abseil at Onkaparinga,
South Australia.

With Simon at Arapiles, 1988.

34

CHAPTER 5

ABSEIL FAIL AT THE ONKAS

We should have stayed home. It had been raining most of the night, and theshowers hadn’t really abated. But my brother Simon and I had been planning
this little foray down to the crag in Onkaparinga Gorge for some time. We
donned our rain jackets before hiking down from the car park, the misty
damp cloud obscuring the view over the creek gorge below.
“Where’s the track down?” called Simon. I didn’t really know. But I
had figured on abseiling down anyhow. “Why don’t we rap down?” I
replied. “Pretend we’re in the mountains.”
Simon didn’t seem too confident. “You reckon? Looks pretty
slippery.”I felt playful and adventurous. With the weather so crapped out, any
decent climbing wasn’t going to happen. I wanted instead to practice rope
work, climbing wet slippery rock with a pack, maybe even use some piecesof aid, anything that might be useful training for alpine climbing. “Justimagine we’re on the Eiger. Retreating in bad weather. I’ll go down firstwith the pack. I can hold the rope while you rap down. That way you’ll besafe.”
I dumped the pack down on the muddy gravel and proceeded to pullout one of the two 8.5mm ropes and gear to set up an anchor around a fattish
tree about five metres or so from the cliff’s edge. The wind lashed light
drizzly rain across our faces as we fiddled with our harnesses over our bulky
jackets. I stuffed the rack and second rope and all the remaining kit back into
the pack and slung it on my back. Like most trad cliff climbers, I was
abseiling at this time with a simple figure 8 descender, without any form of35

third hand backup. To my mind, prussiks were for caving, glacier travel andcrevasse rescue. I pushed the rope through and clipped in while the doubled
fifty metre rope was still piled up on the ground next to me; then, having
coiled the rope, called out “Rope!” and hurled it out and down into thecloudy void. Being so used to climbing at Morialta’s short twelve to fifteen
metre cliffs, I hadn’t bothered tying a knot in the end, foolishly assuming
the Onkaparinga climbs were of similar height. Just before leaning back, I
asked Simon to check my set up. “Harness doubled back, screw gate tight,
anchor looking good. You got everything you need? Ok, here I go, see you
down the bottom.’’
It was an awkward lip, complicated by a thin wet rope and a heavy
rucsac adding to my then already considerable hundred kilo frame. As I went
over and into the vertical I soon found my feet and composure, but with thedescender lacking friction in the wet I had to grip the doubled strands extra
tight to keep control. I was about half-way down when the base of the cliff
came into view. To my horror, I saw that the ends of the rope were dangling
some fifteen to twenty feet from the ground. By the time I had grabbed therope tightly enough to stop my descent, with some burn, I was only about
six feet from abseiling off the ends into thin air, facing a fifteen foot fall
onto rocky, bone splitting ground.
Desperately I wrapped my right leg around the few spare feet of rope,
locking myself enough to free a hand to tie a rough overhand knot with theloose ends of the rope. But even a biggish knot will pull through a figureeight descender, especially with 8.5mm rope. I lashed the rope more tightly
around my leg, trying to halt the inch-by-inch slip through the descender.
Meanwhile the weight of the pack was pulling me backwards, forcing me touse one hand on the upper part of the rope to keep myself upright, while myfeet, still in runners, slipped around on the wet muddy rock, searching
unsuccessfully for purchase to ease my weight. During my descent, the rain
had picked up, and a stream of water started flowing down the rope, soaking
my hands and harness.
“Hey Adam! You there yet?” Simon’s voice echoed down the cliff.
“Umm! I’m stuck!” I cried out. “The rope doesn’t reach the ground. I’m
stuck. I’m gonna need you to help me. Right now. Quickly! You need to36lower a rope down to me!” No sooner had I said those words when I realized
the spare rope was in the pack on my back.
You can probably imagine the scene: how I wrestled the pack off myback and managed somehow to clip it to my harness; how I extracted therope and a prussik; how I dropped the rope to the ground; how Simon slippedand scrambled down the wet descent track to the base of the route to fetch
the rope, then back up again to secure it to the tree. How in the meantime I
tied a prussik to secure myself to the rope and waited for Simon to rig up abelay and send down the rope with ready-made bight and carabiner to clip
in to; how he lowered me to the bottom, relieved but soaked, muddied, andabove all, chastened by my mis-judgement.
If I remember rightly, Simon actually ended up leading a nice little
route that day, in the wet, holds slimed with dirty grit. I don’t think I
followed, opting instead to scramble up the track to the side. I wasn’t too
shaken, but I had learned a lesson. Unless you can see both ends of the ropeon the ground, with slack to spare, always tie a knot in the end of your abseil
rope. Unfortunately it took a somewhat uncontrolled speedy and slippy
sticht-plate rap down a thin rope on the Cosmiques Arete on the Aiguille deMidi many years later to learn the further lesson that, for both crags andmountains, you should always use a “third hand” prussik backup.
All that happened in 1993. It could have been much worse. I don’t
think I would have died. But it would surely have ended in broken bones.
I’ve only been back to the Onkas once since, on a hot summer’s day, withboth Simon and our oldest brother Michael, and with leisure enough to swim
afterwards in the long dark pool in the creek below, under the sweet coolingshadows of the gum trees.

37

One of our several appearances on Red Faces in the 1990s.

‘Gonged but not forgotten.’
The Channel Nine filming session at Boulder Bridge, Morialta.

38

CHAPTER 6

CHANNEL NINE AT MORIALTA

During our years of undergraduate study and vocational training in the early
1990s, my brothers Simon and James and I appeared three times on Channel
Nine’s Hey, Hey It’s Saturday for the Red Faces variety show. Hey Hey wasimmensely popular in its day. It ran for some 29 years, during which it
clocked up over 500 episodes and won 19 Logie Awards. At its peak it
attracted over 2.5 million viewers, surpassing ratings of top current shows
like Masterchef, The Block, Married at First Sight and My Kitchen Rules.
The Red Faces segment on Hey Hey attracted little real talent. Being a spoofof real talent shows, it wasn’t meant to. But there were some exceptions,
including leading actress Cate Blanchett, who appeared on the show when
she was just 17. My brothers too were (and still are) both gifted musicians,
so while we were there purely for the fun, we actually won first place twoout of the three times, receiving high scores from the normally severe judge
Red Symons. The welcome prize money paid for much-needed books andtuition, and the TV appearances won us a certain dubious celebrity among
our disbelieving peers.
A few years after our Red Faces appearances, Channel Nine in
Melbourne got in touch with us about sending a crew over to Adelaide tointerview and film us for their Red Faces spin-off show Gonged But Not
Forgotten, a kind of bio-documentary series based on old Red Faces acts andhosted by comedian Peter Rowsthorn. Besides filming us at our respective
places of work, Peter and his crew requested a full day to shoot a groupinterview. Given our shared fraternal interest in climbing we selected thecliffs at Morialta Falls as our preferred location, with a rock climb to serveas the main visual feature.

39

The day dawned sunny and clear. We met the crew at the top of thecliffs on the Norton Summit road and toted all the gear, which included
Simon’s guitar, down the track towards the crags. It was slow and awkward
getting the camera and sound man down the descent track with all theirequipment, but eventually we had all our people and kit safely down at thebase of the orange wall at Boulder Bridge. While they set up we began layingout all the gear from our climbing packs and putting on our harnesses. Peter
came over and started inspecting our stuff, fascinated by the rack. “What do
you call these things?”, he asked, fingering a carabiner.
“That’s a carabiner, or crab.”“A crab? Ok. Doesn’t look like a crab. And what about these?” He
pointed to a Wild Country friend.
“Ahh, that’s called a friend”, came the reply.
“A friend? Are you serious? Why do you need so many? I guess doing
this sort of thing you could use a few”, he joked. “What are they for?”“Well, you squeeze this trigger-thing here, like a syringe, and the front
part narrows, like this. Then you push it into a crack in the rock and let go,
and it jams tight, like this.” I placed the camming device into a nearby slot.
“Then you clip a quickdraw or the rope into the crab and you can use it tomake an anchor or protect yourself on the climb.”
Peter looked on amazed, my jargon lost on him but the demonstration
apparently making some sense. Chalk bags, harnesses, nuts, wires, hexes,
crabs, friends, quickdraws, belay devices, nut removing tool, helmets, ropes,
shoes, slings, bolt plates: all the familiar business of a complete trad rack
were splayed over the flat rock before him. “Wow! I guess all this lot cost afair bit?” he asked as he moved back, stepping onto the rope draped over arock. “Ahh, yes. I’ll just move that rope…. Yeah, it’s not cheap stuff. But
your life can depend on it, so you want to make sure it’s up to scratch.”
The first few shots were of Peter introducing the surrounds and theplan for the climb. He donned a helmet for the sequence, his already big ears
accentuated by the smooth bowl of the lid. We decided that Simon would
lead Muesli, a classic 18 metre grade 16 arete first put up by Colin Reece

40

and Mike Round in 1972. The crew would film the lead from the ground.
Then they would shift the camera to the top of the cliff to get a few shots ofme following, before a final set of shots of the three of us sitting under the
Sheoak at the top of the orange wall singing a song accompanied by Simonon his guitar.
For us the climbing was enjoyable but pretty uneventful. There werethe usual safety and belay calls, along with the odd shout of encouragement.
Occasionally Simon called out for slack, commented on possible protection
or made some exclamation when dealing with a difficult or exposed move.
Peter, picking up on our verbal exchanges, poked fun at how calmly we were
facing the challenges of the vertical terrain. With his helmet pulled harddown on his ears, he leaned close into the camera and whispered in a hoarse
voice. “The great thing about watching a couple of Lutheran priests
rockclimb is that when things get a bit stressful, instead of blaspheming or
swearing, they go, ‘Golly gosh’, ‘Oooh’, ‘Hooley dooley!’ All the big ones,yeah, they use ‘em, they’re not scared!”With the climbing over, the final request was for the three of us to siton the edge of the cliff with our legs hanging over the orange wall. Theinterview, filmed just back from the edge, focused on our childhood days in
Papua New Guinea and East Africa, our love for climbing and adventure
and making music, and the apparent contradiction between our Red Faces
acts and our more serious roles in pastoral care and hospital chaplaincy.
After they shifted the camera position back to take in the drop, we sat down
and strummed our song. With the midday sun beaming brightly over the
beige-orange rock and the valley below, we sang Paul McCartney’s Mull of
Kintyre to Simon’s guitar, breaking into a crisp three-part harmony for thechorus and looking out over the bush covered hills.

Far have I travelled and much have I seen
Darkest of mountains and valleys of green.
Past painted deserts the sun sets on fire
As he carries me home to the Mull of Kintyre.

41Peter and the crew were thrilled. They had got what they came for. It
had been a colourful two days and all had gone like clockwork. These days
climbing is all over the news and media. Everyone is doing it, thanks to the
explosion of indoor walls, school climbing programs, professional
instruction and commercial groups. But 25 years ago it was regarded as a
bizarre and exotic novelty, the pursuit of freaks and death-wishers. It wasprobably not the first time a camera crew had filmed climbers at Morialta,
but as far as the Channel Nine team knew it was a first for a national-level
prime time entertainment show. Their job now was to head back to
Melbourne and edit the two days of filming into a 30 minute segment in time
to take it to air in the next month or two.
Looking back now I realise that it was a significant historical moment.
Without trying to orchestrate anything, still less deserving of any fame, mybrothers and I had played a small part in propelling climbing along the path
towards its present-day popularity. Whether that was a good or bad thing,
I’m not sure. Certainly there were others in the Adelaide climbing scene far
more qualified and able to do so. Nonetheless, we were still laughing withincredulity as we wound our way down the Norton Summit road, carwindows down, with the afternoon sun in our faces, the warm northwest
wind tussling our hair, the picture of the crag fresh in our minds and the
lyrics of our song reverberating in our ears:

Smiles in the sunshine and tears in the rain
Still take me back where my memories remain
Flickering embers go higher and higher
As they carry me back to the Mull of Kintyre.

42

CHAPTER 7

AVALANCHED ON MT COOK

In the spring season of 1987 I spent two months ski-touring and climbing in
the Mt Cook region of New Zealand. I arrived at the Mt Cook Youth Hostel
without a partner, and over the following weeks teamed up with a varying
range of climbers, misfits, and wanna-bes like me. Among the climbers I
remember Heinz Schwarz, the Swiss mountain guide who had climbed theEiger Nordwand. Together we went up the Beetham Valley and climbed
Aiguille Rouge. Another was Paul Horne, an Australian entomologist who
had wintered in Antarctica, and with whom I spent a week climbing various
routes from Mueller Hut. Paul and I went on to forge a brief but solid
partnership, culminating in our Diamond Couloir expedition on Mt Kenya
in 1990. Yet another was Uli, at that time co-manager of the new YHA
hostel in Mt Cook. Early one morning we raced off on a fitness run to the
Copeland Pass. It was Uli’s first time in crampons, and coming down fromthe pass he slipped, somehow managing in the panic to arrest his slide with
his ice-axe. We took a wrong turn in cloud past the shelter on the way down
and got waylaid, but needless to say we were back in the Mt Cook pub by
opening time to celebrate our success.
Another unforgettable outing took place with legendary Twizel
mountain guide Shaun Norman and an American client of his by the nameof Tom. Tom had engaged Shaun to guide him up Mt Cook via the Linda
Glacier route on touring skis. In the days prior to their trip, Tom and I had
teamed up to do some cragging and fitness hikes in the surrounding hills.
We negotiated for me to accompany them on their flight into Plateau Hut,spend a day assisting them practice some crevasse rescue, leave them to theirclimb while I fiddled around skiing around Glacier Dome and Mt Dixon,

43then ski out with them via Cinerama Col and down Boys Glacier and theTasman to the road-end past Ball Hut.
It turned out that Tom was not as fit as he needed to be to ski up the
Linda. Maybe he was freaked out by the scale of the looming seracs. The
day spent doing crevasse rescue had exhausted him. Looking out from ourvantage point near the base of Mt Dixon across the vista presented by theavalanche-raked faces of Mt Tasman and Mt Silberhorn, the seracthreatened Linda Glacier, the long Zurbriggen Ridge, the enormous east faceand east ridge of Mt Cook down to the vast cirque of Grand Plateau spilling
into the Hochstetter icefall, Tom looked puffy and overwhelmed. Even so,he had paid a lot of money to be there, so that night at 2am he and Shaun set
off in perfect conditions.
By lunch-time from the summit of Glacier Dome, sitting in the snow
with my bare skin soaking up the gammas, I saw their two tiny figures
skinning slowly back across the plateau. They had got fairly high on the
Linda, zig zagging their way up through the deep spring snow on skins, butwere too late to attempt the rock band below the summit ice cap. Having
met them back at Plateau Hut, we made ready for an immediate ski-out, with
Shaun aiming to reach the radio at Ball Hut in time to call Alpine Guides
before they shut shop at 5 pm to arrange a ride and spare us the long 15 km
walk-out.
By the time we reached Cinerama Col, with the daunting 7000 footCaroline Face of Mt Cook alongside us, it was obvious we were going tohave to hurry to reach Ball Hut by 5pm. With our skins peeled and stowed,
Shaun asked me to bring up the rear and pressed on ahead around the baseof Anzac Peaks and down the slopes of Boys Glacier, soon disappearing
beyond view. Tom struggled to ski under the weight of his pack, falling often
in the deep snow, then flailing around like an upturned turtle trying to geton his feet again. As the slope steepened, Tom was forced to ski in long
diagonal traverses across the slope, while I waited for him to get down
enough to resume my own descent.
It was there on the southern edge of Boys Glacier that the avalanche
happened. Tom was on his back again, pack beneath him, wrestling to righthimself with his poles. A long crack appeared in the snow above and around44

him as the slab he was sitting on gave way. He slid down the slope on a
massive carpet of moving snow, looking around helplessly with surprised
shock.
“Stop! Stop! Save yourself!” I screamed out, realizing the futility of
my words even as I said them. Tom by now had rolled onto his front, andwas clawing desperately at the collapsing snow pack, trying to halt his slide.
The avalanche had picked up speed, and the snow was crumbling into heavy
fluidity, narrowing like a river as it funneled towards the rocky outcrop
below. Tom’s body had sunk into the advancing waves of snow, half buriedin their depths. His arms had stopped moving and he appeared resigned tocertain death. But as the avalanche funneled into the rock gully, its paceslowed and the snow jammed up on itself, momentarily blocking its
cascading descent. I began to ski down towards Tom, who had come to astop just metres above the drop. Getting his pack off, I helped him to his
feet. Recovering a buried ski and pole, we half skied, half scrambled off tothe left onto firmer snow, out of harm’s way. From here I spied Shaun about
200 metres below, looking up and waiting to see what the hold-up was. He
had seen the avalanche running over the rock outcrop and was wondering
what the hell had happened.
It took a while to regroup and recover. Shaun skied quickly back up
to us while I sat Tom down and plied him with drink and food. Meanwhile
I started transferring part of his load into my pack: sleeping bag and mat,helmet, crampons and axes. On his arrival Shaun loaded up the other half,
until Tom’s pack was nearly empty. It was about 4pm. This time Shaun
stayed with Tom, while I headed off down the slopes, ungainly under the
additional load, angling across toward the base of Ball Glacier.
I made the radio call by 5pm. Someone promised to send a car anddriver. It was well after dark by the time we got to the road end. Tom
slumped down into the back seat while we loaded up the skis and packs. As
the car rumbled down the rough road, I imagined his troubled thoughts. He
had nearly died in an avalanche. I remembered how helpless I had felt,
watching him slide away, and thought how ridiculous had been my cries for
him to save himself from such a mighty, mindless force. Once again I had45

returned from the mountains enchanted by their power and splendor,
humiliated by my vulnerability, relieved and thankful to be alive.

The view across the Grand Plateau from Cinerama Col, New Zealand (1987). This
photo was taken on my camera by Tom just minutes before the avalanche.

46

CHAPTER 8

THIN ICE IN THE ROCKIES

Quebecois climber Serge Angelucci has been at the forefront of extreme
waterfall climbing and alpinism for three decades in the Rockies, Baffin
Island, Greenland, the Alps and the Himalayas. Even today, in his late 50s,
Serge’s name appears in climbing annals with new and difficult routes
besides his name. Back in 1990 he appeared in the climbing movie A boutde glace with French alpinist Francois Damilano, with whom he has
pioneered numerous hard routes in Canada and Europe. A few years later
Serge teamed up with Jeff Everett to send a variant on The Terminator
which at that time was possibly the most visionary and difficult big ice climb
in the Canadian Rockies. The ascent was filmed and circulated in the movie
Walking on Ice. There’s a great photo of Serge hanging off Icetroman (M8R) on the front cover of the French Canadian climbing magazine Le
Mousqueton 28/4 (1998). When he first sent it in 1996 it was the first M8
ice-route in Quebec.
I had the privilege of climbing with Serge when I was in Banff for the
winter of 1987-1988. I met him by accident, I think, when he was in Banff
doing some illegal carpentry work for cash at a building site, and I was
hanging around looking for a climbing partner. My friend Jim Baker had letme sleep on the floor in his condominium and given me liberal use of his
car to go climbing or skiing, but Jim himself was busy managing Monod’s
ski store twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Serge had an old tank of acar, and though it was less reliable than Jim’s more luxurious cruiser, weonly resorted to Jim’s car when temperatures dropped below minus fifteen
and Serge’s wouldn’t start.

47

Serge and I were both living on a shoestring budget. During
December I lived rent-free at Jim’s place, but his landlord started asking
questions so in January I moved to the Hostel up on Tunnel Mountain. I wasable to get an evening job there in the kitchen washing dishes, which paid
for my bed and gave me daytimes and weekends to climb. By living on
peanut butter and jam sandwiches and vegetables salvaged from the bins at
the back of Safeway I was able to splurge on a new Stubai ice hammer toreplace my retarded Camp alpine hammer. The Stubai had a multi-function
head with spare pick. It paired nicely with my Chouinard axe. Serge’s
carpentry job dried up for the Christmas vacation, so he only had enoughmoney for petrol. His climbing kit was cobbled together from who knows
where. For boots he used an old pair of ski boots, which set his lower legs
at such a forward angle that he was often banging his knees on steep ice andlosing purchase on his front points. His ice tools had huge coarse teeth thatmade extraction laborious. On harder pitches when he was leading I would
offer him my Stubai hammer which, with its heavy head, placed very cleanly
and with its finely serrated teeth extracted effortlessly. For protection I had
three Chouinard ice screws, two bang-in snargs, a warthog, and a soft
Russian ‘titanium’ screw.
Our first climb together was Professor Falls. It was there that I learned
that Serge didn’t care much for formal climbing calls and belay
communication. When he got to the top of a pitch, I learned to wait for him
just to pull hard on the rope. That was my signal to climb. At first I had triednervously to ensure that I was on belay. “Serge, am I on belay?!” I would
shout out. “Ok! Climbing! Am I on belay?” But after several attempts withno reply, I would just entrust myself to a moving rope and climb on up.
Once, on Cascade Falls, I had just led a pitch and was setting up theanchor for a belay. I had already clipped into a good screw and called “Safe”,
and so expected Serge to be cleaning the belay below and getting himself
ready for my shout of, “On belay, climb when ready!” With the anchor readyI started pulling in slack rope, waiting for it to tighten up so I could clip it to
my belay device. Instead, after pulling in a few lengths of slack rope, I heard
picks on ice, then saw Serge’s head appear at the edge of the belay ledge.
He had climbed the entire pitch without any belay. He must have started
climbing while I had still been finishing my own lead. Stunned with dismay,

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I didn’t know whether to apologise for failing to belay him or berate him for
climbing in synch without letting me know. Either way he had put theanchors at risk in case of a long fall. But Serge just smiled and proceeded toclimb through unapologetically, not even bothering to take the extra screws
off my harness. He just assumed I’d sort out the belay as he climbed. It was
only Grade 3 ice and I guess he was confident that I, like him, wouldn’t fall
off.
Another memorable day with Serge was on Bourgeau Lefthand, a 600
foot Grade 5 ice smear on steep rock below a massive avalanche bowl near
Sunshine Ski Field. The ice during the winter of 1987-88 was notparticularly thick, and when we got to the base of the climb we saw that that
our route consisted of a two metre wide, one inch plaster of ice with a hollow
backside. The entire slab looked like it might fall off with the slightest
weight, and as Serge started up the first pitch, his ice tools made dreadfulhollow echoing sounds as he gingerly hooked them in and transferred hisweight to them. The only screw he placed about thirty feet up went in aboutfour inches before it hit rock, with just the first inch of the screw in contact
with ice. I was relieved when at about fifty feet Serge declared in his heavy
Quebecois accent, “Thee hice here, he is very thin.” With some coaxing, I
persuaded him to come down, and we headed off to Johnston Canyon for a
consolation climb. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything to advance Serge’s
world-class climbing career, but I sometimes tell myself that I maybe saved
his life.

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Serge on the cover of Le Mousqueton, the Montreal-based climbing magazine

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CHAPTER 9

THE WOLF
There is another story to tell about a day out with Serge. One morning wewere driving along the Banff-Jasper Highway on our way to climb Weeping
Wall near the Columbia Icefields. Weeping Wall is one of the best known
and most road-accessible ice-climbs in Canada. In the winter of 1987-1988
it was comparatively thin, with only one or two climbable lines in the lower
550 foot-high tier. I had made a first attempt in early December, but beyond
the first pitch it proved unclimbable. It was now January, and we had heardthat the lower tier was better formed and inviting ascents.
There was a thin layer of fresh unploughed snow over the road andtraffic was scarce. As the highway opened before us, flanked either side byforest and spectacular mountains, we noticed far ahead something on theroad. Serge slowed down and we coasted the last few yards to pull up in
front of a plump freshly-killed bird. With the car stopped and engine
running, we hopped out and inspected the body, finding it still soft andwarm. Serge picked it up and held it in his hands. “Ha! A groose!”, hedeclared.
“A grouse? Wow! It must have just been hit by a car,” I said. “It’s stillwarm.” It was actually a ptarmigan, but it fit the bill of an edible game bird.
“I will take him”, said Serge. “My girlfriend, she will cook him.
Groose his very nice.” He opened the trunk of his car and laid the bird
carefully on a plastic shopping bag, smudging it with blood.
Just as Serge closed the boot and we stepped back towards the open
doors, we both noticed that we were being watched. To the right of the road,just at the edge of the trees where the verge meets the forest, there stood alone timber wolf. It had been watching us the whole time, stock still, as we
had taken its meal off the road and stowed it in the back of our car. It was a

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majestic sight. It stood motionless, fearless, condensed breath issuingsilently from its nostrils. With a large hungry wolf only twenty yards away,
I should have felt apprehensive. Instead I was awestruck with wonder,
momentarily enchanted by this mysterious, lonely creature with its
intelligent, penetrating gaze. After what seemed like minutes, with Serge
and me saying nothing, the wolf turned and trotted soundlessly away into
the forest, disappearing into its snowy depths. When it had gone, after a
moment of silent watching, we turned and looked at each other, knowing
without words that we had witnessed something special, yet feeling guilty
that we had interrupted its intentions and stolen away its prey.
A couple of hours later we were engrossed in the challenge of working
our way up the grade 5 four-pitch tier of Weeping Wall. The climb was
satisfying in every respect: shared leads; solid belays; long vertical sections;variable ice – sometimes thick and plastic, sometimes thin, delicate andhollow; the cave crux; the abseil descent down Snivelling Gully to the left.
But through it all, and ever since, the splendid and haunting vision of thatsolitary wolf, master of the forest, never left me.

Climbing partner Bill on Grotto Falls, Canadian Rockies.

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CHAPTER 10

MT ANDROMEDA FAIL
One of my last forays into the mountains during my 1987-1988 winter in
Banff was a half-baked attempt on the classic Skyladder route on Mt
Andromeda (11,318 ft) in the Columbia Icefields. The plan had been for Jim
and me to make the two and a half hour drive up from Banff after Jim had
knocked off work at Monod’s, bivvy in the carpark at the mouth of the
Athabasca Glacier, then set off around 3am for what we expected to be asolid 8-12 hour round trip. To add to the fun, Serge and a mate of his weregoing to come along as well, in their own car, to try the much more difficult
Andromeda Strain, a formidable winter test-piece. The idea was for all fourof us to meet in the carpark, walk in together, split up for our respective
climbs, then gather on the summit and return to celebrate.
It was midnight by the time Jim and I parked in the carpark at the end of
the road. There in the bleak darkness stood Serge’s car, but there was no one
to be seen, and the wind had swept away any footprints in the snow. Jim andI wriggled into our sleeping bags, hoping to get some shut-eye between thenand our scheduled wake-up at 3am. But in the cramped car, and with thefrigid wind buffeting the iced-up windows, sleep was impossible. Restless,I switched on my headlight and clawed around in my food bag, pulling out
a stick of salami and a tin of sardines. Both were frozen. Thankfully I had
put an apple inside my sleeping bag with my water bottle, preserving bothfrom solidification.
It was a relief to step out into the wind at 3am and stretch out into ourapproach walk along the top of the moraine wall on the left side of theglacier. The snow sparkled and glistened under the beam of our headlamps,
and our boots sunk deeply into the snowdrift, the arctic gusts blasting away
the loose spindrift released by our steps. Not far along, a hulking orange
shape came into view: it was a huge abandoned snowcat bus, its tracks

53

buried in drift. Once these had been used to cart tourists up the glacier, but
had been replaced by the new Brewster coaches with the giant tyres. It sat
looking cold and forlorn in the dark night, silent witness to a bygone era.
Soon the approach started meandering under the north facing slopes of
the Athabasca massif to our left. The wind had deposited tonnes of snow
over these angled slopes, and we began to feel uneasy about the stability ofthe pack. We found ourselves sinking ever more deeply with each step,
breaking through the wind-crusted surface. We were only a few yards apartwhen all of a sudden we heard and felt a shuddering “Whumph!” in the snow
pack beneath us. My immediate reaction was to turn and run, down and awayfrom any advancing avalanche. Jim stood his ground, and after a few
moments I stopped and turned to survey the slope. “What the hell was that?”
I shouted out through the wind. “I don’t know but it didn’t sound good!”
called Jim, as he plodded back down to join me.
For the next five minutes or so we consulted, casting our headlight beams
around on the snowy slopes above us and trying to assess the relative risk ofavalanche. In my understanding, lee slopes were susceptible to windslab
build-up. The “whumph” we had heard was the classic sound of a slab ofsnow shifting under weight, often the trigger precipitating its break and slidefrom the harder pack beneath. It was hard to work out where the leeside wasin our current situation. High above, the north facing Silberhorn Face ofAthabasca was bare of snow altogether, scoured by winds down to hard ice.
But here, with the wind funneling down the glacier and swirling in andaround the moraine wall, there were leeside drifts in multiple directions,none of them of massive acreage, but all worrying enough for a night-time
approach in unfamiliar terrain along a route neither of us had been on.
Eventually we decided to head back to the car, about an hour away.
In face of the icy wind and possible avalanche risk, without touring skis, andwith no sign of Serge and his mate other than an empty car, our motivation
had dwindled. Back in the car out of the wind, we figured we might as well
sit tight until light, just in case the others showed up. But at dawn there wasstill no sign, so before heading off down the Icefields Parkway, we stuck afolded note under their windscreen wiper, telling them we would meet themback in Banff that evening.

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I can’t remember how we spent that day. Did we go skiing or climbing
somewhere? Or did we just head home and snooze? I don’t recall. I do
remember, however, how we caught up with Serge and his friend later thatevening. They had had little more success than we. In an odd coincidence,
it turned out that they had been sleeping in the old abandoned snowcat when
we had gone past both ways, oblivious. They had waited there until light
before starting out on their own climb, but had turned back when they got
freaked out by the crevasses on the slopes below their route.
A few years passed before Serge eventually got his success on
Andromeda Strain. In 1994 he headed back to the Columbia Icefields with
French guides Christophe Moulin and Richard Ouairy. According to Chic
Scott’s account in his book Pushing the Limits, the trio “left Canmore in theearly hours, raced at 160 kph up the Icefields Parkway, climbed The
Andromeda Strain, and were back in Canmore for happy hour!”5

Approaching the 600 foot Bourgeau Falls, Canadian Rockies.

5

Chic Scott, Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering (Calgary,Alberta: Rocky Mountain Books, 2000), 409.

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Serge on Bourgeau Left Hand, Canadian Rockies.

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CHAPTER 11

DEATH ON ALPAMAYO

My first attempt on Alpamayo (5947m) in the Peruvian Andes was a failure.
Irishman Tony Duboudin and I arrived at basecamp with an arriero (donkey
driver) and two burros loaded with kit and food after an epic trek. Startingup the Quebrada Llanganuco, we had made a successful side-trip climb tothe summit of Nevado Pisco (5752m), then hiked over the Portachuelo de
Llanganuco down to Colcabamba village, on to the spectacular Punta Unionpass, and finally down the Santa Cruz valley. We were fit and acclimatizedand expectations were high. For me it was the culminating point of 18
months’ preparation going back to a conversation with Kiwi Anton
Wopereis in Banff in 1987. Anton had held a slide night at Jim Baker’s place
displaying exploits from recent trips to Peru and the French Alps. His photosof steep alpine ice on Les Droites’ north face and Alpamayo’s southwest
face were inspirational. Having climbed together at Lake Louise and Grotto
Falls, Anton assured me that I was more than capable for Alpamayo.
International trekking guide Val Pitkethli had also been at the slideshow,
and she had promised to provide contacts and support for any Peru trip I
might plan.
Val’s organizational skills ended up proving invaluable.6 I arrived jetlagged in Lima in May 1989 to taxi straight to the Hotel San Francisco which
Val had recommended. My first acclimatization ascent up Huamashraju(5434m) just east of Huaraz was achieved with her and local climber Jorque6

She has since written and published a guidebook based on her long experience in theregion. See Val Pitkethly and Kate Harper, Trekking and Climbing in the Andes(2002).

57

just four days after my arrival in Huaraz. She introduced me to all the bestand safest places to eat in town. Once I teamed up with Tony, Val continued
to help with arriero contacts and logistical support.
Our charged emotions on our arrival at the green meadow of
Alpamayo’s basecamp were soon dampened by news of a fatality on the
French direct on the southwest face, the very route we were attempting.
While we unloaded our burros and began setting up tents, a group of rescuers
were loading up a horse with the wrapped corpse of the dead climber. As
the horse was led past our camp we saw the stockinged feet of the victim
dangling loose outside the blanket. His body hung stiffly over the horse’s
back, bouncing awkwardly with its gait. It was a sobering moment.
It wasn’t until later, blizzarded in our snowcave at the high camp near
the face at 5400 metres, that we learned from two similarly ensconced
Canadians the details of the accident. Three Swiss climbers had been highon the French route, with the leader on the last pitch just about to tackle thehuge summit cornice. Suddenly the cornice collapsed and swept down theentire route, scouring it clear of snow down to bare black and blue ice. The
lead climber was killed, his body buried under debris near the base of theroute. A second climber was also swept down the route, pulling his anchor
and ending up in a crevasse some one hundred metres below thebergschrund. Amazingly, he suffered only concussion and a broken leg. The
third climber was left stranded at 19,000 feet with a shredded rope and some1500 feet of 70-80 degree angled hard ice below him. He managed todownclimb to safety.
The Canadians had witnessed the calamity and stitched together arescue to get the surviving climbers down. The body was retrieved justbefore a week of bad weather rolled in, making our attempt untenable. For
three nights we sat in our snow cave, dug laboriously with a pot lid after aregrettable decision not to bring the tent in order to save weight. In the whiteout conditions we made a half-hearted attempt on Quitaraju (6040m), but
got lost on the glacier on the approach. With our food and fuel all used up,
we retreated back down to the Santa Cruz valley and out to Huaraz,
disappointed, but happy to be alive.

58

About a week later, just before returning to Alpamayo for whatbecame a successful attempt on the Italian route, we saw a hotel notice-board
advertising a pile of assorted climbing gear for sale. It included a couple ofbent ice screws, one crampon, a tent, alpine clothing, freeze-dried food, andseveral picks and axes. It was the gear salvaged by locals from the Swiss
climbers’ tragedy. I thought of the dead man’s parents, their grief at hearing
the news and trying to get his body home. I thought of my own parents backin Adelaide, and prayed not to die, if only to spare them the sameunspeakable loss.

Leaving the bivy on the glacier below Alpamayo, first attempt.

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Lost on the wrong route on Nevado Toclaraju (6032m), Peru.

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CHAPTER 12

THE MOUNTAIN LION

I saw the mountain lion at the head of the Quebrada Ishinca in Peru. Or
rather it saw me. Tony and I had just failed on Toclaraju (6032m) and werebashing down the track through the moraine. We had left our arriero andburros in the Ishinca valley two days before, headed for the high camp on
the saddle at 5300 metres with sights on either the west face or the northwest
ridge, but made a wrong turn above the moraine. The mistake had cost us afull day. We had traversed west in deep snow around the wrong side of thespurs on the Toclaraju-Urus ridge to find ourselves on a totally different partof the mountain, somewhere on the northeast side of Urus Este, and at least
a good four hours away from where we had intended to end up. We wereforced to camp on a shoulder of snow and, having enjoyed a glorious sunset
with spectacular views over Laguna Aquilpo, dourly endured a wasted night.
The next day had been spent in regaining our original route. Although
the way was technically straightforward, it had almost ended in disaster.
Moving unroped up a hard snow slope of about 45 degrees, I had arrived ata rock band, beneath which we needed to traverse eastwards to reach ourridge. Steadying myself with my free hand on the broken rock to kick a stepin the snow, the huge boulder on which my hand was resting suddenly
dislodged and fell solidly across my legs, knocking me off my stance andsending me into an awkward slide. Amazingly, my cramponed boots caught
sharply in the frozen surface and lurched me upright, while the boulder,about the size of small fridge, bounced and skittered off at a frightening ratestraight towards Tony, some 100 metres away down the slope. I screamed“Rock!” just in time for him to look up and take guard. The boulder whizzed
by him, about ten feet shy, and blasted its way down the snow slope until it
disappeared with loud explosive cracks among the rocks at the base.

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As Tony cramponed up to me, I inspected my legs. My gaiter andgoretex pants had been ripped open, and my calf was grazed and bleedingslightly, but there was no real cut. Oddly, my gloves were also ripped andmy finger and knuckles were bleeding and bruised, though I don’t remember
how this happened. Had I not immediately righted myself as I had, it would
have been difficult self-arresting on such a hard surface.
From here we reached our intended camp on the broad exposed
snowfield without incident, set on the glacial saddle beneath the west faceand north west ridge. We pitched our tent alongside an amazing bottomlesscrevasse in which we spent the afternoon ice-bouldering. Its smooth, deadvertical sides, which went back as far as the eye could see, stood parallel
about 6 feet apart, and there was a way to walk in and out from the side via
a snow ramp. The entire crevasse was quite dark, being roofed above withan arched snow bridge, but reflected light entered through the ramp opening
off the side. Looking into its vast depths gave us the willies: our headlights
searched in vain for the bottom, and despite the secure placement of ourtools in the deep glacial ice, we mostly used a belay rope, going in one at atime while the other belayed off a bombproof screw at the edge of the ramp.
When we finally emerged from the crevasse around 5pm, it wassnowing. Ensconced in our sleeping bags in the tent, we melted snow andcooked up some soup and noodles, followed by numerous cups of tea while
we played rounds of cribbage. Feeling sleepy, Tony pulled the hood of his
sleeping bag up around his ears and began to hum and sing to himself in asoft, quasi-toneless voice. One song was an old Irish lullaby he learned fromhis mother:

When midnight comes, and people homeward tread,
Seek out their blankets and their feather bed,
Home comes the rover, his journey’s over.
Yield up the night-time to old John-o-dream.
Yield up the night-time to old John-o-dream.
Eventually around 9pm he rolled over and fell immediately into heavy
sleep, while I pulled out a tattered novel, Night Without End, by Alistair

62

Maclean. The snow continued to fall heavily, its patter audible on the taught
tent nylon. The aptly-titled novel gripped me, and I read by headlight long
into the night. Once during the night, while out to relieve myself, I had to
sweep a foot of snow off the tent roof with my gloved hands and clear away
the mouth of the vestibule. It seemed clear that the climb was off. I finished
my novel around 3am, my headlight battery almost dead, and with sore eyesand vivid snowy images from the novel whirling around my mind, drifted
into a fitful sleep.
In the morning, crisp cold air and a clear, windless sky filled us
momentarily with re-awakened hope. It quickly evaporated when a massive
rumble from nearby overwhelmed the loud chugging of my MSR stove. We
looked out through the open tent vestibule to see a huge avalanche
thundering down the west face of Toclaraju, sweeping across the approach
route to the northwest ridge. “Oi tink dat just about tells us everythin’ weneed to know about da snow conditions on da route,” Tony observed wryly,
as he turned his attention back to the pot of snow melting on the roaring
stove.
So it was that we packed up and headed back down to the Quebrada
Ishinca. I broke trail through deep snow, ploughing down the glacier withoutpause towards the start of the track at the top of the rocky moraine. When I
reached it, I looked back to check on Tony. I had been preoccupied during
the descent and hadn’t noticed that he had fallen way behind; indeed, heappeared to have stopped. I took off my pack and sat down on a rock at themoraine edge, sipping from my water bottle, chewing on some rat-gnawed
brazil nuts, and taking in the view southwards towards the rising bulk ofRanrapalca. Further below and west in the meadows of the upper Ishinca
valley lay our base camp attended by our burro driver. I enjoyed thewelcome spell. After about ten minutes, I looked back up towards Tony only
to discover that he hadn’t budged. He appeared to be sitting back in the snow
looking at the clouds.
It took a lot of frustrated shouting back and forth and wild handwaving to confirm that he was alright. Apparently he was just taking histime and enjoying the scene. I was a bit miffed as I loaded up and headed
off down the zig zag track through the moraine, wondering where this

63

Irishman had got his mountain sense from. My frustration was partly
motherly concern. What if he took a slide and smashed his head up on themoraine? Who would know? Who would help him? I wondered aloud
whether he had any thought for moving quickly, sticking together, or, evenmore basically, communicating to his partner what in heckfire he was up to.
It was while I was in this self-righteous and somewhat conceited stateof chagrin, muttering under my breath, that I sensed a presence in the rocks
off to my left. I stopped and saw it then, a heavy-set tawny brown mountainlion, or puma. It stood perched on a large boulder, some 30 yards away andslightly above me. Its dark eyes were fixed on me, and its white muzzle
barely concealed the sharp teeth set within a slightly open mouth. I stoodstill, transfixed by its stare, feeling a little vulnerable, even intimidated, by
my suddenly sensed solitude. I wasn’t really scared. Their usual prey would
include vicuña, rabbit, hare, and taruca or Andean deer. I had never heard ofa puma attacking people, though I have since learned that there are recordsof such incidents in Argentina, some with mortal consequences. For theindigenous Quechuan people of Peru, the cougar represents Kay Pacha, theworld of the living. Along with the condor, which represents the sky, andthe snake, which represents the underworld, it constitutes a triadic symbolof the cosmos.
After only a few seconds, the giant cat turned aloofly and effortlessly
sprang away into the rocks. I dumped my pack on the track, pulled out mycamera from the lid pocket, and scrambled over towards the boulder where
it had been standing, trying to get a second look without getting too close.
But it had vanished.
Our arriero was visibly pleased to see me. He had kept himself
occupied over the last two days collecting firewood, fishing for trout,checking on his burros and chewing lime and coca leaves. I was still excitedabout my puma and did my best to convey it. But despite his smiles andnodding, I’m not sure he understood. When at last Tony waltzed
nonchalantly into camp a couple of hours later, I found a ready audience formy story. I told him about the puma, emphasizing the point that if only hehad kept up, he would have seen it too. Tony listened with bemusedpatience. “Well”, he said. “I saw some amazin’ clouds, a real spectacle, like

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I’ve never seen before, nor likely will ever see again. If you hadn’t been insuch a blessed hurry to get down here, you would have seen them too.” With
our stories told and differences settled, we lit up our stove once again, set up
the tent on the flat grass by the stream, and lay back to absorb the vista andponder the regret of yet another unclimbed mountain.

The roofed crevasse near our high camp on Toclaraju.

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Tony and the fluted south-west face of Alpamayo (5947m), framed by our tent door.
This was on our second, successful attempt.

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CHAPTER 13

TERRORISTS IN HUARAZThe months that I climbed in Peru coincided with the violent Tiananmen
Square massacre in Beijing in June, 1989. It also coincided with the brutal
peak of the revolutionary activity of the Maoist-inspired Shining Path or
Sendero Luminoso movement in Peru. The group had been in operation foralmost a decade executing highly organized guerilla warfare and violent
terrorist activities throughout the country. In early 1989 the AustralianGovernment was warning its citizens against travel to Peru. But I had beenplanning and training for 18 months, and I had no intention of cancelling or
postponing my expedition.
Originally I had two goals that I wanted to accomplish in Peru. One
was to climb Alpamayo’s southwest face in the Cordillera Blanca. In this, I
eventually succeeded. The other was to climb the west face of Yerupaja(6635m), Peru’s second highest peak, in the neighbouring Cordillera
Huayhuash. On arrival in Huaraz I learned however that the Huayhuashregion was basically out of bounds due to hostile terrorist activity. Tourists
were not allowed to travel there, and no locals were prepared to support any
kind of climbing expedition in the region.
For the first six weeks or so of my two months in Peru, there were
few signs of the Sendero. Mostly I was up in the mountains climbing, where
the only people I and my team-mates encountered were either other climbers
and trekkers, arrieros, or local Quechuan villagers and farmers. When wewere back in Huaraz to recover between outings and buy supplies, theiractivity was a bit more noticeable. For example, every few days the power
would go off in town for a half day or more. When asked what was causing
the power outage, the local hotel or restaurant staff would invariably answer,“Terroristas! Sendero Luminoso.” Apparently it was one of the terrorists’67

favourite tactics to blow up power lines up and down the valley. (It could ofcourse have simply been the case that the local infrastructure was just fallingto pieces, but no one mentioned that.)
One morning, while breakfasting on the famous “Muesli Grande” atthe restaurant next to the Casa de Guias, we heard from some newly arrived
British climbers that a Welsh trekker had been murdered by Sendero
Luminoso terrorists in the nearby Cordillera Huayhuash. He had been
happened upon at night by a group of guerillas who had been raiding andlooting the village of Olleras, dragged outside into the village plaza, tied toa park bench, subjected to a mock public trial and then executed. The British
climbers had only recently read of the atrocity in their English newspapers.
There had been no mention of it in the Peruvian media.7
News of the man’s violent death certainly shook us up. It seemed clearthat the Sendero Luminoso would target westerners, given the opportunity.
It also confirmed the sense in the ban on climbing in the Huayhuash region,and on the need to take local advice seriously.
About a week later Tony, Val and I returned from our final climb
together on Huascaran Sur (6747m), the highest mountain in Peru. Val andI had almost reached the summit, turning back only about thirty minutes
short in worsening weather. On Tony’s and my arrival back at our lodgingsin Huaraz, the Hotel Colonial, we were informed by its owner Carlos that anight-time curfew had been imposed on account of a new threat ofimpending attack by the Sendero. To this was added the rumour that gringos
were especially in danger, and that a full daytime curfew was not off thecards. With this possibility in mind, we spent the next day buying foodsupplies so we could cook for ourselves in the hotel common kitchen for as
long as we needed. Sure enough, as the afternoon wore on we were informedthat the next day was to be a full curfew. Nobody, especially gringos, wasto be out and about in the town. The Sendero were planning an attack,probably at one of the popular restaurants frequented by western climbers
and trekkers. None of the restaurateurs wanted to take the risk of being
targeted, and so were planning on staying shut.
7

His name was Edward Bartley, aged 24.

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Before the sun had fallen, Tony and I decided to get word out to ourclimbing contacts around Huaraz to come around to our hotel first thing in
the morning for an all-day pancake party. We had bought plenty ofingredients, and just needed someone to bring the necessary beverages. The
weather looked to be clear and sunny and our hotel had a sizeable rearcourtyard, surrounded by a high brick wall. It was the perfect setting to sit
out the enforced lockdown.
By ten o’clock the next morning we had a good little crowd ofrevelers. Kiwi Lionel Clay and Brit Pete Sykes, fresh back from a difficult
new route on Taulliraju’s formidable south face, had brought along a box ofbeer. Val arrived with Jorque and a bottle of maple syrup from her luxury
cache of specially imported trekking expedition supplies. A number ofwelcome new faces appeared, climbers we had not yet met but who had
heard about the party and didn’t want to miss out. The only music we could
find was a Fleetwood Mac album, which we played over and over on abattered tape recorder powered by two raw wires stuffed into a wall socket.
By nightfall it began to dawn on us that our party-makers all had tohead home to their own places of accommodation. Val and Jorque hadsensibly left before sunset, but most others had been too lost in the cardplaying or dancing or culinary delights to consider the problems posed by
the night-time curfew. We took our problem to Carlos, who had had too
much to drink. He suggested that he, Tony and I should all escort the guests
home to their respective hotels. There would be safety in numbers, hethought.
It was eerily quiet on the streets. Normally the town would be alive
and thronging at night, with colourful street stalls and food vans andmusicians, children playing, dogs fighting, men drinking. Instead it was dark
and ominous, with shadowy figures disappearing down alley ways, theoccasional dog barking or trotting off towards the river. By the time we had
dropped off the last pair of guests at their hotel, it was about 9pm, and thethree of us made a bee-line down the main street past the Plaza de Armas in
the direction of Carlos’s hotel. Suddenly out of nowhere we heard the roarof a diesel engine. An armoured truck lurched towards us, blinding us with
its spot lights. Tearing along either side of the truck appeared about a dozen

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soldiers armed with sub-machine guns. Stopped in our tracks, we werequickly surrounded by balaclava-hooded soldiers thrusting their black
glistening weapons at us and barking commands of, “Manos arriba! Manosarriba!” At first we hesitated, stunned with disbelief and bewilderment at
what was happening. But the metallic racheting of weapons being cocked
prompted us to obey, along with the sense that these young soldiers, wound
up tight in expectation of a Sendero terrorist attack, were on a knife’s edge.
For a few tense moments confusion reigned, with our appealing cries of“touristas” being confused for “terroristas,” and the drunken Carlos
fumbling with his ID papers. I grimaced and braced my body, waiting forthe shock of hot lead to rip into my flesh, committing my life to God in silent
prayer. But Carlos, urgently pleading with the commander, managed to calm
things down, and soon the cordon stepped back, allowing us to lower ourhands, trembling with adrenaline-induced fear and relief.
On our way home, following a harsh reprimand from the commander,
Carlos explained in slurred and broken English what had happened. That
afternoon the military had received intelligence of a planned bombing
attack, and had been lying in wait to intercept the terrorists. When they had
seen our dark figures walking down the street, they immediately assumed
the worst and launched their offensive. We had been lucky: quite likely they
had been high on coca and primed for action. Thankfully Carlos had beenable to mediate for us his gringo friends, assuring the soldiers that we were
no threat and were on our way home.
Back at the hotel the electricity was out again. I wrote in my diary bycandlelight, still tense and alert and unable to relax. In the bed on the otherside of the room Tony’s body lay inert, a rhythmic snoring the only sign oflife. I envied his ability to sleep anywhere, anytime. We had faced many
dangers in the mountains together and survived. How ironic it would havebeen, right at the end of our adventures, to have been shot dead in downtown
Huaraz, branded as curfew breakers and foreign collaborators with theSendero Luminoso.

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Val Pitkethly with local alpine guide Jorque, Cordillera Blanca, Peru (1989).

Kitaraju (6040m) seen from the bergschrund on the south-west face of Alpamayo.

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Memorial stone in honour of guides killed in the mountains, in the church-yard ofL'église Saint-Pierre d'Argentière in the Chamonix Valley.

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CHAPTER 14

TRAGIC DEATHS
I haven’t known many climbers personally who have died climbing. Anton
Wopereis is one. Anton was 54 when he was killed on New Years’ Day in2008 after a sixty metre fall near the summit of Mt Cook with a client.
Details are sketchy, but the coroner’s report suggests an unprotected fall
triggered by a soft snow slide. I remember Anton for his enormous, tirelessstrides through deep fresh snow on Lake Louise, for demonstrating themethod of hanging on your ice tools to place a screw, and for his personalencouragement to me to take on big alpine ice routes. His slides of
Alpamayo inspired my own decision to head to Peru. When I first gazedupon the sheer and sinister north faces of the Argentière valley from the
Aiguille Tour in France, I remembered Anton’s pictures of climbing
unroped by torchlight up the first few thousand feet of seventy degree ice on
Les Droites.
Adelaide climber Mark Auricht was another. Mark died from somekind of cerebral haemorrage or oedema on Everest in 2001 at the age of 37.
He had made the first Australian ascent of Makalu with David Hume in
1995. I never climbed with Mark, but had enjoyed numerous conversations
about his trips and plans. For his trip to Ama Dablam in 1989 I gave Marka pair of strap-on crampons. I like to think I encouraged him in his love forthe mountains.
Colin Reece was one of the leading pioneers of crag climbing in
Adelaide from the early 1970s. He was known throughout the country. He
was killed in 2010 in a fall at Robin Falls in the Northern Territory. Climbing
blogs were soon filled with tributes after news spread of his death. One
contributor to Chockstone said this about Colin:
He was one of those rare breeds of people who has achieved greatthings but yet remained humble. Despite putting up huge numbers of

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new routes (including a significant number of great classics), he wasprepared to climb with anyone regardless of their climbing ability.
Many a beginner over the years has enjoyed his mentoring,encouragement and absolute passion for climbing. You could not finda more genuine person. He was a great guy and his tragic death is anenormous loss to his friends and the climbing world in general.
That also captures my experience of Colin, or Creece, as he was
known. He took me under his wing when I was just 17 and only a year into
climbing. I met Colin either at Morialta or at the outdoor shop I was working
in at the time, I can’t remember which. He arranged to pick me up fromhome one Saturday morning in his clapped-out Datsun 180B to go climbing.
I struggled to find a place for my big feet amid all the ropes, slings, drinking
bottles, and climbing hardware piled up in the footwell. The wheel bearingson that car were shot and once it passed 40 kph the already rattly engine wasaccompanied by a loud whirring from the front wheels, making conversationnigh on impossible.
Colin had climbed pretty much every line worth climbing in South
Australia, so keeping him interested was a challenge. Mostly we just
bumbled around at Morialta, but once we hiked up a creek near Waterfall
Gully, pushing our way through thick bush and blackberry thorns to what
Colin believed was a virgin unclimbed cliff. It was only about 8-10 metrestall, but Colin led two little routes, naming the grungier of the two Lawn
Green (12).
Many people are tempted to ameliorate the pain when faced withtragic loss by saying something like: at least he died doing what he loved. I
dislike that saying used of climbing deaths. They did not die doing what they
loved. They died falling, freezing, out of control, broken, afraid. I remember
when news broke of Ueli Steck’s fall to his death on Nuptse in 2017. I
recalled his saying somewhere that dying in the mountains was the one thing
he wanted to avoid. “I don’t have a death wish”, he wrote in 2010. “On thecontrary, I am hanging on to my life like never before.” The grim reality isthat he didn’t die doing what he loved. He died falling, sliding, bouncing,out of control. I would never wish such an end on anyone. In his book
Lament for a Son, written after his son Eric’s climbing death in Austria,

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philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff reflected on the irrationality of death andthe inability to fit tragic loss into a meaningful, coherent narrative. “There’s
a hole in the world now,’ he writes. ‘In the place where he was, there’s now
just nothing…. There’s nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what
he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved…. My son
is gone. Only a hole remains.”
It’s difficult to conceptualise the deaths of these men I knew.
Imagining their deaths is too terrible. But for me, somewhat removed fromthe loss experienced by people closer to them, there is more than just a holeleft where they once were. Even though they are gone, they are part of mymemory, and, through my experiences of them, in some way part of me. I
believe they were outstanding climbers and remarkable human beings. Who
was I that they befriended me? I certainly feel that I received from them way
more than I could ever have given. Yet they were gracious enough to receive
the little admiration, respect, and youthful company that I could offer, not tomention the odd belay. May they rest in peace.

Cactus flowers in the Santa Cruz Valley, Peru.

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Mt Kenya and the Diamond Couloir from Mackinders Hut. My brother Michael andPaul Horne in the foreground.

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CHAPTER 15

DIAMOND COULOIR FAIL

One afternoon in September of 1990 Paul Horne and I arrived at the oft-usedbivouac rock at the base of the Diamond Couloir route on Mt Kenya(5199m). The Diamond Couloir is, or was, a 2000 foot-long icicle just ten
miles south of the equator. Today, with global warming and glaciersreceding all over the world, it is pretty much non-existent. In 1990 it was
fully formed, but only just. Together with my brother Michael, who had
made the trek in from Chogoria with us and had settled in to Mackinders
Hut to watch our ascent, we had officially named ourselves the first ever All
Australian Diamond Couloir Expedition, although we were well aware that
one or two other Aussies, including Everest summiteer Greg Mortimer, hadalready climbed it in multi-national teams.
Seven days had passed since we had organized a driver with “fourwheel drive transport” to take us from Nairobi to the start of the approachwalk at the Mt Kenya Bandas at 10,000 feet. What turned up at our hotel
was a tiny beaten up Suzuki Jimny. My research since suggests that it wasprobably a 1984 SJ410, assembled in Nairobi. Its puny one litre engine wasbuilt to produce a maximum 45 brake horsepower. The specimen standing
before us, hammered by years of abuse, looked like it might just manage 30.
With its load of three big passengers and two weeks’ worth of climbing gear,
food and supplies, the little Suzuki laboured valiantly along the highway as
far as Chogoria, but struggled up the last ten kilometres through the bamboo
forest to the road end. Its low range drive-train options made no difference.
If we hadn’t hopped out to push it up the steeper sections, engine screaming
and clutch melting, we would never have made it.
I remember how magical the landscape appeared as we made the walkin up the Gorges Valley to Simba Col, up and back to Point Lenana (4985m),

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then down to the Teleki Valley with the hyraxes. As children Mike and I had
lived with our family in Tanzania at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro and
Mawenzi, and the same dreamy sense of enchantment and mystery took holdof me here in the alpine moonscape above the forest. At the Bandas we had
spied an elephant in the cool glades at the forest edge, monkeys frolicking
in the bamboo tree tops, and had heard a leopard coughing at night. There
we had also employed two porters to help carry our kit and show us the way.
At certain stages both Paul and Michael fell ill with altitude sickness,decorating the ground with their vomit and humouring the porters, but bothwere well by the time we arrived at Mackinders Hut. The Point Lenana
ascent made for excellent acclimatization, although it was marred by thediscovery of a recently dead Sykes’ monkey, its frozen corpse curled up on
the rocks near the Austrian Hut (4790m). One of our porters told us it had
been deliberately lured by some trekkers up the mountain with biscuits andleft to die in desolation from the altitude and cold.
Surveying the route from our bivouac, I felt both hopeful and uneasy.
Hopeful, because here we were at last, after all the long months of planningand preparation. Uneasy, because it was unseasonably warm, and even hereat just over 4000 metres, the little snow left among the rocks was melting
and there was no night-time freeze. Depending on what we found, Paul andI accepted that we might be forced to forego the Diamond Couloir and try
the Ice Window route to the right instead. Around 4am we set off byheadlight towards the icefield at the base of the route, stashing our bivouac
kit under the boulder and taking only our climbing gear and essential
supplies.
Paul was ahead, clanging and tinkling over the dark volcanic rocks
with his snow stakes and screws, pausing to put on crampons to head up theeasy ice of the lower icefield. It felt great to strap on crampons again andkick up the frozen slope, the first time for me since Peru fifteen months
before. Since then I had become engaged, and on the approach I had become
conscious of a new, unsettling feeling inside, a homeward tug on my heart,with constant thoughts of my beloved fiancé and of her thoughts of me: herworry, her fear, her longing, her simultaneous anticipation and dread ofnews. Looking up at the dark towering precipice of rock and ice above, I
suddenly felt out of place, like I didn’t belong. Michael too had just become

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engaged, and Paul had only recently married, and I wondered if they felt thesame. What had once been a singular devotion to and unalloyed love for themountains had now been divided and dispersed. I had something else,
someone else, to think about and live for now, and the whole “climbing
thing” had suffered demotion in my priorities, losing its once lofty pride ofplace.
Nearing the base of the couloir proper, Paul’s clanging stopped and I
saw his headlight beam searching around to set up a belay. While I continued
up towards him, the sudden sound of a big rock rushing past and thenimpacting with ice close by froze all movement. “Holy shit!” I called out.
“Did you hear that?” Just then we heard and felt it again. I sank my tools
into the ice and huddled my body into a tight, cowering ball, expecting more.
After a few seconds of silence, I shouted out to Paul again. “Was that rockor ice?” In the dark we had seen nothing, and I felt suddenly vulnerable andexposed. “Don’t know. Sounded like a rock. Or an ice-block. Sounded big,”called Paul.
Moments passed, while we each sat tight and silently thought throughour options. I didn’t feel at all confident. I wanted down, though wasembarrassed to say so. My motivation had already been diminished by my
new state of mind, and now, with this invisible threat and the possibility ofimminent rock fall or ice collapse, I just wanted to be off the mountain, outof harm’s way. I realised however that Paul might want otherwise.
Compared to me he was a seasoned veteran, and I trusted his superior
intuition and judgement when it came to assessing mountain hazards. I
understood also that our climbing partnership constituted a mutualcommitment according to which neither of us could just act unilaterally or
arbitrarily. If Paul was bent on pressing on, in the absence of any objective
evidence of disproportionate risk I would be bound to continue.
“What do you reckon?” Paul’s reasoned voice had a calming effect.
We had come such a long way and now the Diamond Couloir was withinreach, right in front of us. I was eager not to let Paul down, eager too not toappear a coward, but here he was, inviting me to share my doubts. The
dangers of rock strike would lessen as we got up into steeper territory, but
once we were into the difficulties, it would be awkward to retreat if one of

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us did get hit. There was no helicopter rescue system here. It was now ornever. “I don’t feel good about it Paul”, I admitted. “It’s much too warm. If
anything comes off from higher up, we’re gonna get it.”Paul hesitated briefly before his terse reply. “Ok! I’ll come down.”
The night had passed by the time we reached the bivouac boulder. We cast
our eyes back on the route, now illuminated in the brightening sky. There
was no sign of rock or ice fall, no scars in the snow cone, no large rocks
lodged its dirty glacial surface. Had we imagined it? If Paul felt any
disappointment, he never revealed it. As we made our way down themountain, right until we returned and parted ways in Nairobi, he remained
entirely gracious toward me, even supportive of my judgement, and his
generosity built up in me the belief that we had made the right decision.
Looking back today, however, I am not so sure. Perhaps it was justanother lost opportunity. Another failure of nerve in the face of threat.
Another fail in a long litany of climbing fails. From one perspective, what
happened on Mt Kenya those thirty years ago could be interpreted as a kindof emblematic paradigm of a whole series of personal failures that havemarked my life, of crises where - overwhelmed by fears, real or imagined,or divided inside - I have avoided, rather than pushed through, the challenge
before me. Many people would try to console me here. At least you’re alive,
they would say. At least you weren’t pulverised by a chunk of hurtling ice
or rock. And true enough, the expedition was far from wasted. Combinedwith a nostalgic visit back to our childhood home in Moshi beneath
Kilimanjaro and a week swimming, snorkeling and fishing on the Mombasa
coast, the entire adventure forged between me and my brother Michael aspecial bond which abides to this day. But what is life, what is brotherhood,
without courage and integrity? What is friendship and adventure without
shared, unwavering fidelity to a transcendent, all-consuming purpose? I
don’t want to allow past failures and dubious decisions to obscure the many
gifts, achievements, and successful adventures that grace my life. Yet the
Diamond Couloir stands forever in my mind as an ambivalent witness: tomy passion, drive and ambition on the one hand; and to my doubt, weakness
and fear on the other, both as a climber, and as a man.

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Paul at our camp on the approach walk from Chogoria, Mt Kenya, 1990.

Paul on the summit of Mt Sefton, New Zealand, 1987.

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Creag Meagaidh cloaked in winter dress, seen from the approach track up the Coire
Ardair valley. The Centre Post Direct route follows the longest, most direct, vertical ice
line in the centre of the main buttress, just right of centre in the photo.

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CHAPTER 16

FALL ON CENTRE POST DIRECT
My first foray on Scottish ice nearly ended in death. It was January in theyear 2000. I had now been married almost a decade, our son was eight, andwe had learned to live hand to mouth while I had been studying for church
ministry. There had been no time, or money, for climbing. At some point
during my seminary course I was invited to undertake further theologicalresearch on a scholarship, so in 1999 we moved from Adelaide to the
picturesque city of Durham in the north of England for me to pursue a PhD
at the university’s theology school in the shadow of Durham’s famous 1000
year old cathedral. We had been in Durham for about four months, and werereveling in its winter. Among the reasons I had chosen Durham for further
study was its dual proximity to the beautiful Lake District fells and to wild
Scottish ice. The university had its own mountaineering club, and I soon
learned they were arranging a trip to Creagh Meagaidh in central Scotland.
They were looking for an older driver for their rented sixteen-seater bus,
someone who would qualify for better insurance rates. When I volunteered,they were quick to bag my services. I was about a decade older than most ofthem, and as I steered the bus full of young climbers northwards along thecold dark roads, they regarded me with a certain awe as I shared tit-bits ofmy experiences of climbing around the world.
As far as my knowledge of Scottish ice crags go, I had heard of
Glencoe, the Cairngorms, and of course Ben Nevis. These were the famed
play-grounds of such old-time, hard-core mountaineers as Hamish McInnes,
Tom Patey, and Rusty Baillie. But Creagh Meagaidh was unknown to me,
and having never bothered to consult any guidebooks prior to our departureon that Friday evening, I wasn’t expecting anything impressive. I was stillnone the wiser as we made our midnight trek in up the valley from the
Aberarder Farm carpark in light snow. Clouds and light snow obscured any
view, and we hastily pitched our tents to get out of the increasingly blustery83

wind. By 3am it was blowing a gale, and I spent the rest of the night
struggling to keep the nylon ceiling of the tent, blown flat across my face,from suffocating me. When in the chill, cold light of dawn I emerged fromthe bent and battered frame of my new Vango tent, I finally took in my firstview of the wide corrie of iced up cliffs and gullies that make up Creagh
Meagaidh.
I gazed up at the dark iced-up faces, searching for possible climbs. I
was immediately struck by a steep, straight central line that divided the main
north east face into two. A narrow snow couloir over 1000 feet long, with asteepish couple of pitches about two thirds up before the exit gully, it
presented the most obvious and most attractive route to the top of the giant
crag. I had always read that Scottish ice was the worst: sugary, bottomlessvertical snow; chossed-up broken rock; verglassed edges and steps; mossfilled cracks; spindrift avalanches; bad weather; white-outs, and so on. But
here I was, staring up at what appeared to be a perfect alpine couloir, butwith easy access and straightforward descent. After a stormy night, the sky
was clear and the temperature comfortably below zero. It seemed like a nobrainer. I had been teamed up with two younger climbers, Dave and Wilkie,
and as we brewed up and organized our gear, they asked what I wanted toclimb. Without hesitation I pointed up to my line. ‘What about that?’ I asked.
‘Looks absolutely perfect.’‘Oh, wow! Ok. That’s Centre Post Direct. About Grade 5’, Davereplied. He sounded nervous.
‘What do you reckon?’ I inquired. ‘Looks like a perfect line. First 800
feet looks like just an easy snow slope. We can rope up and belay for the
steep pitches if you like. Then an easy exit out to the top. Looks very doable.
How do you get down from these climbs? Walk out the back across theplateau and down that big gully to the left?’
I was somewhat surprised, even bemused by their hesitation. They
had assured me that between them they had accumulated several years’
alpine climbing experience in Scotland and Europe, and apparently Davewas well accomplished on rock. For someone like me, schooled in themountains of New Zealand and the waterfalls of Canada, the route appeared
fairly benign. Unwisely, the fact that I hadn’t climbed with either of these84

young men before, not to mention that I hadn’t worn crampons or done any
alpine climbing since embarking on marriage and family life ten years ago,
didn’t enter into my assessment of the suitability of the route.
After a sluggish and late state, the first 700 feet or so passed like abreeze. The initial snow ramp of about 40 degrees gradually steepened to 60
degrees, and the first few hundred feet of soft snow gave way to firmer andmore consolidated snow-ice as we climbed. I had persuaded them to moveunroped with me, to trust good axe placements and maintain three points ofcontact. I felt invigorated, alive and entirely at home on this familiar ground,thrilled to be climbing once again after such a long lay-off. The view acrossthe crags and down to Lochan a’ Choire and the snowy Coire Ardair valley
was enthralling, and the speedy gain in height and exposure lent the routethe sense of a truly alpine endeavour.
Around 11am we arrived at the base of a steep wall of ice, kicking
narrow stances and tying off on a sling girth-hitched around a thickish freeicicle solidly fastened to the ice above and below it. Searching around it
soon became obvious to me that hopes of a solid ice-screw placement would
be vain. While the snow we had climbed and were standing on was hard, theice of the wall before and above us was mush, and to the right it was alreadyweeping with the daytime rise in temperature. The icicle we were tied intolooked pretty solid, but it was only about 6 inches in diameter, and its basewasn’t broad enough to safely accept a screw, which would probably
weaken the icicle anyhow. The idea of all three of us being tied into a single
point was unnerving, and I liked even less the thought of relying on it to leada steep pitch of bad ice. While Wilkie scratched around trying to find a rockplacement, Dave and I munched on sandwiches and consulted about theroute ahead.
‘So, do you want to lead?’ he asked.
‘Hmm, not really. I don’t like the look of that wall to be honest.’ I
craned my neck back to survey the pitch. ‘There’s at least a good 100 feetof steep climbing on pretty mushy ice. There won’t be any pro, and the belay
is far from ideal. I’m certainly not confident to tackle it.’85

‘Well I’m willing to give it a go if you like’, said Dave. I was
surprised. ‘You sure? It’s no problem for us to back off. No point in taking
any big risks. There’s always tomorrow. I’ve had a lot of fun already.’ Iturned to Wilkie for his opinion. He had managed to push a small nut into amanky-looking crack for the kind of anchor that amounts at best to a
psychological sedative, or at worst, to a false sense of security. He had therope nicely laid out over his feet and was hitched up and ready to belay. ‘Notme’, he announced. ‘If Dave wants to try it, that’s fine with me. Otherwise
I’ve had a cracking morning out. We can go down and do something else
later today, or wait ‘til tomorrow.’
Dave’s sudden confidence, after his hesitation earlier in the day,might have been encouraging in better circumstances. ‘Yeah, I’ll give it acrack. Can always come down if it looks dicey.’ But as he geared himself
up to lead the mushy ice wall I felt decidedly uneasy. While we had been
stuffing around, a thick blanket of cloud had formed in the upper valley andrisen to envelope us. It was definitely warmer than when we had started out.
And the ice wall, which wasn’t well formed to begin with, was literally
liquefying before our eyes. Dave’s first tentative moves out from our belay
stance, with Wilkie belaying, only heightened my anxiety. Raking
desperately at the ice with his tools, and kicking blindly with his front points,
he shakily moved upwards. He was hardly the example of balanced, precise
ice climbing. At about 20 feet out he tried to place a screw, pushing it into
the mush with his left hand while trembling precariously on his boots. But
no sooner had he had clipped into it than it pulled out and slid down therope. Moving up further, he kept thrashing his boots into the mush, keeping
his heels too high and never gaining any sort of secure footing. When he wasup about 25 feet, his axe swings became increasingly ineffective andunsteady, and I began to think I should say something. Was he pushing on
to make an impression? He really looked like he might fall at any moment.
It was becoming too agonising to look on in silence. ‘Hey Dave, it doesn’tlook that great’, I called out. ‘Why don’t you come down and we’ll call it aday?’
‘Yeah, I think I’m going to come down. Watch me here….’ And withthose words, Dave peeled off backwards. His tools didn’t seem to rake outor pop. It was more like he just let go. By the time he reached me, perched

86

on my narrow snow step directly in his fall line, he was a dead weight flying
upside-down. Although he only glanced me, the impact felt like I’d been hit
by a truck. I was knocked down and felt the rope jerk tight on my harness,my vision momentarily darkened and my breath gone. Dave’s body hurtled
on past, bouncing once on the angled snow just below us then disappearing
from view. He must have travelled 60 feet by the time the rope took hisweight, and Wilkie, catching some of the force of the fall on his belay device
attached to his harness, was ripped off his stance. Glancing up in bewildered
panic, I saw that Wilkie’s feel-good anchor had predictably pulled, leaving
all three of us hanging from the single sling tied off around the icicle.
It took a moment to regain both our senses and our feet. With ourstances recovered, our combined weight came off the anchor, but the live
rope still pulled hard and tight downwards out of sight, and there was no
movement nor any response to our loud shouts to indicate whether Dave waseven conscious. At last the rope stirred and the strain eased somewhat, andfinally we heard Dave’s forlorn voice calling from below. He was ok, hesaid. Or at least he thought so. He was bleeding from his face, but apparently
had no broken bones or serious injuries. I urged him to make himself safe,
to kick a stance and anchor into his ice tools, which he still had strapped to
his wrists. In the meantime Wilkie and I had to re-sort the ropes so I could
belay him down to Dave. With the fall I suddenly felt responsible to getthese young men down safely, and felt obliged by my seniority - perhaps alittle paternalistically - to belay them down pitch by pitch and leave the lessprotected downclimbing to myself. We were still uncertain of how Dave hadpulled up, whether he was in shock, how bad his bleeding was and so on. It
was only around 1pm, but we were 700 feet up and needed to get down
without further mishap.
After belaying Wilkie down to Dave, with instructions for him to set
up a solid belay with a snow stake or two, I got myself ready for Wilkie’s
belay call, before dismantling the anchor. The girth hitched sling had cut inand refrozen into the wet ice, and was impossible to remove without
damaging the icicle, so I left it behind and began the descent. Thankfully wefound that Dave’s bleeding from a cut on his forehead had stopped, and by
the time I reached them he had gathered his wits and appeared chirpy andprepared for the downclimb. My insistence that we belay the entire descent

87

was happily accepted, but it did mean that what had taken us only a coupleof hours to ascend would take at least three times as long to descend. Fromeach stance, I would belay first Wilkie and then Dave down a full 50 metres.
Then they would belay me down to them, and we would repeat the
movement. It was slow work. Dave moved laboriously and unsteadily, andWilkie seemed to take ages each pitch to secure a belay. I was spending atleast an hour at every belay point, often more: paying out slack, waiting,paying out again, waiting again, thirstily sucking on snowballs, shifting
weight, bracing my back to the rising wind. It was straightforward climbing,the even couloir only interrupted by a steep rocky step lower down that weneeded to bypass to the right. But at this latitude it fell dark by 3pm and thetemperature plummeted. Spindrift began to cascade down the couloir inendless waves, only to be whipped back upwards in wild wind gusts. I was
having trouble with my headlight, which kept slipping off my helmet, andmy jacket hood kept ripping off in the wind allowing washes of spindrift togush untrammeled into my exposed neck. I felt cold, thirsty, hungry, andfatigued. I began to realise how physically unprepared I was for the demandsof the downclimb, how a decade of sedentary life had sapped my stamina
and conditioning, and by the time we reached the easier ground near the baseof the snow ramp around 8pm, I was shattered.
Half an hour later we plodded back to the ring of tents, arriving to araucous welcome. With the hot drinks and soup came eager interrogation.
Some had seen us high on the route before cloud had hidden us from view.
What had happened? Why so late back down? Had we climbed the ice wall?
Had something gone wrong? As news of Dave’s fall got around, fits oflaughter began to break out. I was appalled. We had all nearly been killed.
Didn’t he know the basic rule of alpine climbing: do not fall? This ain’t no
indoor gym. This is a freaking mountain. This is ice climbing. As I railed
through these interior objections, I suddenly realized how angry I was, how
I had suppressed my fury on the climb for the sake of safety, getting us
down, shepherding the lads home to safety. Who did this Dave think he was,putting us through such risk? How dare he climb to the very edge of his
capacity, beyond it even, without a care for his colleagues and the potentiallydeadly impact of his failure?

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But still they laughed and chuckled. ‘Tell you what Dave,’ one young
lad piped up in a thick Yorkshire accent. ‘How ‘bout tomorrow we take you
up to the pinnacle atop Raeburn’s Gully, tie one end of the rope to a massive
big belay and let you throw yourself off for a huge fookin’ winger.’ I began
to catch on. Apparently Dave was infamous for falling off stuff, including
ice climbs. To them our mishap was a ‘here we go again’ event, and I a foolcaught up in someone else’s gamble. I had been duped, that was all. My
anger evaporated. I was too exhausted to nurse it further. After slaking mythirst and filling my belly, I crawled into my broken tent, and lay there in
my sleeping bag, trying to sleep, but unable to get away from imagining the
scenario had the anchor failed, had Dave broken his leg or neck, had I beenskewered by his ice tools or crampons when he crashed past me. I felt thenervous tension in my body and clenched fists as I saw in my mind’s eye
our three bodies bouncing and sliding down the couloir, smashed and broken
and lifeless as rag dolls. Tears rolled down into my ears as I thought of myfamily, and I thanked God that we had instead survived and got down safely,
vowing never again to take on such a serious undertaking with a stranger. I
had a wife. I had a son. I was an ordained minister with a vocation to serve
others. My days of youthful carelessness had to be over.

Malcolm Matheson (‘HB’) surveying the damage after sending a new grade 27 climb at
Norton Summit cave, South Australia, 1989.

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Above the Grand Montets col, Glacier d’Argentiere behind. French Alps, 2015.

Eric belaying me on Aiguilette d’Argentiere, France, 2015. Tour Glacier behind.

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CHAPTER 17

NO PICNIC ON MONT BLANC:
PART I
Anyone who says the via normale on Mont Blanc is a waltz deserves awhipping. Maybe in late August when the snow has all melted back to
12,000 feet and the Gouter Ridge is bare; maybe when the weather is sunny
and warm and windless; maybe when the last 1000 feet up the Bosses Ridgeis scoured by a two yard wide crampon track. True, on a clear day from the
Chamonix Valley Mont Blanc looks like a giant, benign ice-cream cone, anideal spot for a lazy afternoon sledging with the kids.
But in the near-winter conditions I found it in on my first ever visit to
the French Alps, Mont Blanc is another matter. From Chamonix the keeneye, lingering a while on the 15,700 foot summit ridge, may chance to spot
streams of spindrift blasting into Italy, the waxing and waning of smoothhogsback clouds – a sure sign of high winds, and the football field-sized
patches of rock-hard bare ice glistening through the snow. As many die inthis range each year as have ever lost their lives on Alaska’s McKinley inthe whole of its climbing history. I’ve heard the mortality rate has reachedas high as one a day through the high season. ‘Death Gully’ on the Grand
Couloir of the Gouter Ridge is no exception: it has become the specialized
research focus of mountain accidentality.8 It is no place for a picnic.
Underestimate this baby, and it will likely eat you.
8

See Jacques Mourey et al., ‘Accidentology of the Normal Route up Mont Blanc
between 1990 and 2017’ (May, 2018). On page 3 the authors report: ‘Between 1990
and 2011, 291 people were the subject of rescue operations between the Tete Rousse
refuge (3,187 m) and the Gouter refuge (3,830 m). The severity rate was extremely
high: 74 people were killed and 180 injured.’

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Our Mont Blanc expedition in 2001 was at least six months in themaking. After the accident in Scotland I had vowed to myself not to do
anything too serious in the hills any more. But the opportunity to climb Mont
Blanc was not something I could easily pass up. It held out to me the chance
to realise a long-held and seemingly impossible mountaineering dream.
Gaston Rebuffat’s sublime prose and stunning photos in his 100 Climbs in
the Mont Blanc Massif had, ever since it was given me by my eldest brotherfor my 15th birthday, long captured my spell-bound attention. But now I wasover from Australia for three years with my family to study in England’s
north, and over the last six months the dreams had started to come together
to form a real plan. My new climbing partner Eric and I had agreed on going
together and so set a date early in the climbing season to avoid the crowds
and thunderstorms of July and August. Then we headed to the Cairngorms
twice through winter and twice to the Lake District in order to get to know
one another better and practise working together on snow and ice. We
enjoyed some very successful trips and got on well to boot.
Climbing with Eric proved redemptive for my climbing ambitions
after the near disaster in Scotland with Dave and Wilkie. A good ten years
older than I, Eric had loved nature and the outdoors from his early youth. He
can name countless kinds of birds and plants and stops often on a climb ordescent to watch the sky or mountains or a little insect or flower or listen toa bird call or some such thing. His friends tease him for being a real toy
shopper as far as climbing equipment goes. I remember his barely concealed
pride and self-consciousness at buying two fancy curved ice tools only days
after I had slung off at all the unnecessary gadgetry available for steep ice.
Trying to admire his purchase, and at heart somewhat envious, I really had
to work hard to hide my stupefaction when he pulled out the additional
specially-designed stuffsac with embossed logo he had bought to hold them.
For a true outdoorsman Eric was a fastidious fellow in many respects.
He can live off bread and cheese or noodles and fish for a fortnight at a time,
yet unlike most climbers I know who are quite content to make do with thesanitary and domestic limitations imposed by life in the hills, Eric won’t
even touch say a cup of tea unless it comes in a carefully washed and rinsed

92cup, nor yet will he drink it with any milk but fresh pasteurised (no powderedor UHT thankyou very much!). And while he organises his personal items
and packing in minute and laborious detail, he often remains confused about
where things are, sometimes misplacing or forgetting items of importance.
He is notorious for taking ages to get ready – seeming constantly to be
adjusting laces, zips, pack, belts, hats, glasses (different kinds for different
light or temperature conditions). It became almost entertaining for me toobserve the way he entered into an endless ritual in removing and replacing
gloves at every belay point (all three sets!). On one climb at Corrie-anSneaichda in the Cairngorms he spent nearly an hour putting in a single pieceof rock protection, the gloves coming off and on several times, only to havethe piece fall out spontaneously as he started off climbing again - at which
there issued from his lips a violent, screaming bawl. All the while I had been
freezing my extremities on an eight inch belay ledge in a roaring wind withregular waves of spindrift avalanches sweeping over me, not daring to shoutat him or ask how things were going for fear of throwing his concentration,
or worse, of copping his wrath – of which I have not yet knowingly, nor everwish to be the object.
Could Eric be a clinical case of the true obsessive-compulsive
climber? Perhaps. Yet he is a careful, skilled, and competent mountaineer –far more so than I - a natural in the hills with good judgement and balance.
When many years later in the crazy hot season of 2015 we met in Chamonix
for a month of climbing, I was happy to let Eric - by then in his 60s - domost of the leading, especially on more difficult pitches. And while he seems
to take forever to sort himself out and will retie knots over and again to getthem just right, his rope work is sound when operative. Whether he endures
you or likes you, you can never be sure. But Eric and I understand each otherand climb well and don’t mind long spells of silence between us.
Eric invited along on the Mont Blanc trip three workmates, with oneof whom in particular - Dan - Eric has spent many years climbing easy snowroutes, winter scrambling, and walking and rock climbing in the fells. Dan’s
idea of a rewarding day in the hills is to hammer along a trail with a big packfor thirty miles or more. But his irritatingly high level of fitness is balanced
by a lively humour and irrepressible culinary skills with a single pot and93petrol stove. He also has a big car (by English standards), and so was neededto drive and fit all the gear. Then there were Paul and Kerry, a lovestruck
couple relatively new to rock climbing but who have been keen walkers andserious outdoors-folk for ages. All five of us headed to Helvellyn in the Lake
District for a snowy scramble to test crampons, boots and fitness. Yetnearing our departure to France I remained concerned that while all showed
themselves to be strong winter scramblers, neither Paul nor Kerry had hadmuch practice in basic snow and ice-techniques – right down to selfarresting with an ice-axe. In fact, I was the only one of the five who had
spent time in glaciated terrain, knew about rope-work for glacier travel andcrevasse rescue, and had much experience in lead climbing and various
belay techniques (for a variety of abnormal situations - running belays,prussik self-belays, pulley rescue, multiple abseil descent, boot-axe soft
snow belays, body belays, dynamic belays and so on), all of which areimportant alternative skills in out-of-the-ordinary conditions in themountains. I guess I kind of trusted that the three non-climbers would
recognise their own limitations. No doubt they would be able to enjoy someeasier acclimatisation climbs with Eric and me, but I believed they would becanny enough to know when to opt out if things got more technicallydemanding.
With busy schedules organisation came late. A week before the due
date of departure, Eric, Paul, Kerry and I headed out onto a local rubgy field
for me to try and teach them glacier travel and crevasse rescue in two hours
flat. Dan was too busy to join us. Then at sunset we headed for Eric’s tostudy maps and photos, and to draw up a gear list and game plan for the six
days we would have in Chamonix. I emphasised the need for appropriate
acclimatisation, drawing on stories from my exploits in Peru and Africa. So
did all the guidebooks and available route information. We were to spend
Friday and Saturday travelling to Chamonix, too long in Eric’s book, butmore manageable for the two drivers, Dave and Paul. So we agreed days 1
and 2 – the Sunday and Monday - were to be spent perhaps up the Argentière
Glacier climbing an easy snow-route on a mountain up to 13,000 feet,sleeping no higher than around 10,000 feet. By Monday night we would getto the Tete Rousse hut at 10,000 feet, established and in position at thebottom of the Gouter Ridge route on Mont Blanc. There we would also

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spend Tuesday night, perhaps with a short recce during the day to the baseof the Gouter Ridge, especially to check out the infamous ‘Bowling Alley’or ‘Death Gully’, a couloir crossing where many are killed every year by
rockfall or avalanche. Only on Wednesday, after two nights at the Tete
Rousse at 10,000 feet, would we ascend the 2,000 foot west ridge of the
Aiguille de Gouter to the Gouter hut at 12,523 feet, poised for the summit
bid. That would leave Thursday to ascend the mountain and return all theway to Chamonix, quite the normal scenario for summit day in Mont Blanc
climbing. Friday and Saturday would be buffer days in case of bad weather.
On Sunday night we had to be back in Calais for the ferry.
Ideally you should spend a whole week doing two or threeacclimatisation climbs, spend two days recovering in the valley, and then
only make for Mont Blanc or one of the other big 4000 metre peaks. Yet if
I were to return to Chamonix tomorrow for another six days, I would still
hold to the plan we drew up. It provides adequate acclimatisation within thegiven constraints of time. 10,000 feet really is, I believe, the first major‘threshhold’. Only when one can sleep well at that height should one moveon to sleep at the next stage, say, at 13,000 feet. It is not how high one goesduring the day that counts so much as where one sleeps at night. Climb high,sleep low, is the old adage. Years ago I climbed an 18,000 feet peak with
comfort in Peru on only my fifth day in the country, simply by working
progressively from three nights at 10,000 feet (with day-time sorties tobetween 11,000 and 15,500 feet), then one night at 13,800. From there wewent to the summit and returned to 10,000 feet. A week after that I was
climbing mountains to 20,000 feet with few altitude-related effects.
So, that was the plan. We popped the corks and drank to a safe andsuccessful trip. The week crawled past until at last Friday morning arrived
and we jammed into Dan’s car and headed off – I somewhat quiet andcontemplative, conscious of the fact that this was a serious undertaking andmay eventuate in death for one or all of us, if not on the mountain thenperhaps on the highway! On questioning Dan on his aspirations, he said he
was only out for a good time in the hills, and if he could manage the Mont
Blanc climb, he would consider it a bonus. Paul and Kerry too said theywould simply be happy to get to one of the high huts. They had recently

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studied a video of the sharp and exposed summit ridge, and wereapprehensive about their capabilities for such a venture.
I had been checking the weather forecasts on the internet. On mylatest search I learned that it was to be a sloppy weekend in Chamonix, withimproving weather from Monday right on into the week. That would work
well for us. Conditions were perfect for road travel: cloudy and cool, yet acalm sea for the crossing - a blessing since Eric is hopelessly prone to travelsickness, and even on the calm sea was queasy and paranoid about fallingill. He was hungry by then, Dan having polished off most of Eric’s
sandwiches on the drive down. I said some food in the belly would help, but
Eric fairly enough detests fast food at the best of times and even more sowhen travelling, so he starved his way virtually all the way to Chamonix,
bearing with sullen dignity a foodless night and morning in a village
campsite in northern France.
There was no view of the mountains. We camped in a soggy field in
the village of Argentière, 5 km up valley from Chamonix. You could justmake out the great icy tongues of the glaciers emerging from the misty
heights and cascading down into the valley. For me it brought homememories of Westland New Zealand with the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers
tumbling down to sea level. Here we were at 4,000 feet, but with nothing
but continuous rain we could do no more than go shopping and enjoy‘carbing up’ for when conditions would permit movement. I took the timeto go to Mass in the beautiful church in Argentière and visit the cemeterywith its many graves of alpine guides killed in the mountains. It was anemotional moment as I remembered my loved ones in the company ofFrench-speaking saints.
It was perhaps this set-in rain and cloud that got Eric wondering
whether we would get a chance at Mont Blanc at all. Rain down here spelledsnow up there, and that would slow things down considerably. Plus, he’dbeen talking to some old salts from the Sunderland climbing club. They saidMont Blanc was a romp, that you should hang about for good weather –don’t go out in it and get wet acclimatising - and then just ‘go for it’ in aclear weather window. Here we were in Chamonix, the alpinist’s Mecca,

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and the hours were ticking past with no let-up in sight. In a few days we’dhave to pack our kit and head home. We should wait for a good forecast, say
Monday night, then just go for it – straight to the top of Mont Blanc in athree-day push, forget the rest. At least, that was Eric’s proposal.
Indeed, the weather looked set to improve late Monday. Tuesday was
to be a bright start with cloud developing later, then Wednesday was to be
the first of a series of clear days right through until Saturday, whenthunderstorms were expected to develop. But that would be too late, thought
Eric, and millions of people would be on the hill, wanting to do what wewere doing. If we could be up at Tete Rousse on Monday night, then to theGouter on Tuesday, we could summit on Wednesday and chill out for twodays, maybe finishing up with some ice-bouldering on one of the glaciers.
Inside I wondered about all the acclimatisation plans we had made.
They had largely been my idea. On the way down through France I had
studied the guidebook, and even had two easy route possibilities in mind –one on the Aiguille d’Argentière, the other on the Aiguille de Tour. Then
there was the possibility of the beautiful Midi-Plan traverse. But they weremy ideas, my way of wanting to squeeze every ounce of value out of thesesix short days, and since the others seemed to think Eric’s proposal sounded
good, I abandoned my acclimatisation plans and capitulated happily enough.
Some small doubt came in the form of a question from Kerry. She asked me
if I thought it was pushing it – going straight onto Mont Blanc without
acclimatisation. Yes, I said, I think it is. It was bold, to be sure, but at least
it was action, and so perhaps better than sitting around in the tents getting
grumpy or else in Chamonix drinking expensive French espresso. Time
would tell.
So we rang the huts, only just open for the season and managed byfull-time staff. It is a system quite unlike anything I have known. The huts
are like spartan hotels: they feed you, bed you, wake you, even give you hut
slippers – all for a fee of course. One doesn’t need a sleeping bag, or even astove – so we were told. Just francs or plastic. It would mean light packs –day food, clothing, and climbing gear only. Our bookings went throughokay. We were going to beat the hordes. The French Alps are world-

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renowned for being hopelessly overcrowded. Gouter Hut swells with 200 anight through July and August, over half of whom fail to reach the summit.
So the plan was underway. We were to drive down to Les Houches aroundlunchtime on Monday, telepherique up to Bellevue, cog-tram-car up to Nidd’Aigle at 8116 feet, and ‘hike’ to Tete Rousse – one and a half hours in theguidebooks. Then Tuesday was supposedly to be another ‘easy’ day – theridge up to Gouter hut, a climb put at two and a half hours in the books. Then
all going well, the summit on Wednesday.

Eric ice bouldering on the glacier above Grand Montets, France, 2015.

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CHAPTER 18

NO PICNIC ON MONT BLANC:
PART IIWe left the tents up at the Argentière campground, and handed in our
passports to the campground manager, joking as we drove off that he would
probably wait until we got around the corner before dismantling ourcampsite and hocking off our stuff at the local dealers: ‘another group ofAnglaises dogs destined to die in our mountains!’ Those mountains werestill invisible, hidden by a dense but progressively thinning layer of cloud.
What would the queues be like for the telepherique? How low would thesnow line be, and how much fresh snow would have fallen in these last threedays? Would the sky clear for sunset? How would we fare at 8,000 feet for
the walk up tonight? And tomorrow to 12,500 feet? Each of us had ourquestions.
But the telepherique station was quiet, and we the sole passengers on
the cable car into the cold mist to Bellevue, just above the tree-line. Patchesof snow told us that it had been cold as low as this, and a cold sleet whippedup as we huddled at the lonely tram-way station for a long overdue train. It
finally came some three hours late, by which time we had been joined by a
Spanish threesome, equally equipped with bright goretex, plastic boots, andice gear. The tram ground its way up and up, deeper into the white cloud,until it last it stopped suddenly where the line was abandoned at the outbreakof the first world war. Here already the snow was deep, the way obscurredby mist and cloud. Four thirty pm, and it began to snow. Pack on andwaiting. Always waiting. Eric fiddling around with his pack, putting on or
taking off layers, not content to make do with being a little warm or a little
cold, adjusting his water-container on the outside of his pack, supposedly so
he can get at it without taking his pack off, but always having to ask someone

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else to get it for him anyway since he can’t reach it with all his gear on. I’m
keen to head off. The Spaniards seem to be delaying, to let us go ahead andbreak trail. Finally we’re off, and I set a slow, mechanical pace in the deep,
soft snow, slipping here and there in the melt. It’s puffing work. Sweat starts,
snow falls, goggles mist up and just making out some descent tracks which
I trust go the right way. I have memorised the map and the others follow
silently like lambs.
Dan takes over the lead. Two hours go by and the Spaniards havepassed us. The track has now joined the ridge which has steepened. We passa cross marking the spot where some soul has fallen or frozen, and I
inadvertently reach out for it for a handhold before I realise what it is. Kyrie
eleison. Ice axes out and hands needed every few steps. Plenty of exposed
scrambling, and finally quite a steep section of ice and snow on rock. The
Spaniards are still on it, and have the rope on. Do you want the rope, they
cry? I know I would: Si, muchas gracias! So a quick bowline around thewaist and I’m off. Eric, more confident on this kind of ground, follows
unroped, and by the time he’s up I’ve rigged up our own line for Dan, Pauland Kerry. It takes a little while, but it protects the exposed section where afall would be dangerous or possibly fatal.
With the breeze up, the mist clears for a moment and we can look up
and down the ridge. Below us trail our tracks in the snow and far below, thetramline. Up we can see the Tete Rousse Glacier and across it, flashingbright in the evening sunlight, the hut. Less than an hour to go. It is hard
work. What do I have in this rucsac? The mist closes again but we areoriented and Eric leads the final thrash across the snow-field to the hut.
Bedlam in the foyer, a dangerously exposed ramp to the ‘toilet’ (straight
through a hole in the floor of the outhouse onto the glacier – streams of used
toilet paper billow into the air in gusts and whirlwinds), and temperature
well below freezing now. Kerry has a headache, but we are happy to be here
and on the way at last. Yet here also we learn for the first time that the huts
have no supply of water. You have to buy it at £2.50 for a litre and a half,
and we know it will take at least three litres each to bring us back to
hydration just for the last few hours of effort! I kick myself for leaving thestove and pots. I had felt naked heading off without them – they are my

100lifeline and first aid kit above the snowline – the only means of staying alive,
melting snow for heat and water. So we pay up and drink and await our hut
meal.
Eric is eating alone. He is happy (he says) to live on bread, cheese,and saucisson sec for three days, three meals a day. Our round one comes asa steaming bowl of soup. Mine is down in seconds, but Kerry takes one sniff
and is feeling sick. I notice she is pale and her lips somewhat blue. I tell her,then to calm her look of horror assure her it’s a normal sign of oxygen
starvation. Would she like some aspirin? I’ve been popping one every few
hours to thin my blood, since its gets awfully thick and sluggish at heights.
She’ll need to eat something to take it, I say, so she sips at her soup. The
plan works. We each offer her some piece of ‘helpful’ advice as how to cope
best with her malady. She suffers us patiently. Then follows pomme mashand roast beef slices with onions – fresh out of the microwave I’m sure but
it’s hot and I’m gulping. Dan and Paul eat well enough but Kerry pokes andpicks with a dizzy head so I’m happy with the left-overs till I can fit no more.
Eric has stopped on his salami, feeling headachy too now. A team of Bosnian
climbers keeps us entertained: big men, my two metres tall with miles more
beef. One, the slightest, looks like a cross between Doug Scott and John
Lennon. We don’t know now but they are on a tight budget, their only ropea few yards of 6mm cord which they tie to with a bowline. No harnesses or
fancy kit. They’ve had a war and one hasn’t climbed for 20 years. They
smoke like troopers – in the hut too for us all to ‘enjoy’ – but this is France
and smoking was the norm inside public spots at that time.
Sleep a little fitful and cold at first. I’m wishing for my sleeping bag
but after wrapping myself with eight or so extra blankets I’ve rustled
together I’m warming and drying out. By two am I’m sweltering so layers
off and sleep only in thermals. A good sign. Dan sleeps not a wink, Eric andKerry rise feeling ‘poorly’, especially Kerry as she’s just getting over a flu
and with barely anything down her yesterday and a thin little thing to begin
with, there ain’t much in reserve.
The dawn is clear but blustery. I’m out early and meditating in the
sunlight, looking at the ridge before us and there, on its top, the glittering

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rectangle of the Gouter Hut. It looks closer than I had expected and the‘Bowling Alley’, with so much snow, appears unlikely to unleash stones.
Some team was up early obviously, for there are tracks across the snowfield
to the foot of the couloir. There I can make out the steel cable lifeline
spanning its 80 yards or so. It looks safer than they say and I’m confident
we’ll be up the ridge in an easy four or five hours.
No breakfast for Eric and Kerry though, and not a good sign. Kerryjust manages a bowl of tea with two sugar cubes in it, though I finish thedregs (‘I’ve lived in Africa you know’). For me I’m happy with prunes,
dates, and muesli bars to save dosh on the hut brekky. We’re off by 7.30, aslate as I’d like to be. Eric breaks trail and we follow until we come to whatlooks like a crevasse. He’s already over it so we detour and fall behind. Ericis steaming up the snowfield to the bowling alley. We catch him some onehour later and he’s puffed as they come. Behind us follow the three
Spaniards (again!), the seven man Bosnian crew, and one or two smallerropes. And already there are parties coming up the ridge from the Nidd’Aigle tram line. The first day of sun on the hill and out they come indroves. Better keep on moving.
It’s a new fast party of three that passes us to be first on the fixedcable across the bowling alley. Conditions are as good as can be – deep snowmeans slowed down rock fall if any at all. The first team, methinks a guidewith clients, clips into the line and moves across fast enough, one at a time.
I’m next and already looking at the steep pitch that follows at the end of it.
Here is no place for a fall as there is a bluff below and an icefall below that.
It will go better with the rope so when I’m across I’m rigging the belay for
Eric to lead when he’s ready. He brings up the rear, clips into my belay line
and is off in thigh deep 55 degree powder on rock. Skating a bit here as weleft our crampons off for the deep snow, but now wishing we had them as
ice coats the wee rock ledges. Finally Eric has the rope fastened and I’ve
already got the three hitched onto the newly fixed rope with prussiks so they
can ascend this section with joy. The mountain strewn with folk below us.
Two of the Spaniards have turned back for some reason, their third passes
us unroped and alone. I find out later from him in broken French-AngloSpanish that they turned back in fear. Taking one look up the ridge you can

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hardly blame them. This is a daunting environment and we puny mites in it.
The way now narrowed on an ever-steepening snow-covered 1600 footrock-ridge with terrific exposure all the way to the front door of the Gouterhut. If someone were to slip out of the hut door (and with the ice up there it
remains a distinct possibility!), he might bounce a couple of times before
hurtling past us on the ridge and sliding into the icefall another 500 feetbelow us, probably in several pieces.
With our rope pitch over we untie and head up a steep snow slope tofind a ledge where we can stop and put on crampons. Dan waiting patiently
and obviously comfortable on this kind of ground. It will be a slow day ofleap-frog. Five people on a ridge to protect, but too big a ridge to use therope the whole way. So we economise and sometimes Eric or I lead with arunning belay, covering long pitches up to 200 feet and placing a sling or
piece of protection every now and again. Sometimes we go unroped.
Sometimes there is fixed cable in the really steep sections, and we gladly
hold on to these as needed. We are amazed to be passed by guides dragging
heaving clients up the hill, strung together by a few feet of old rope. One
decent error on the part of either one of the two clients and the guide will bepulled off the mountain and they’ll all die. But they seem to know this ridge
like the back of their hand and weave their way back and forth, traipsing therope over every natural rock spike or protrusion in order to gain at least somesmall amount of protection in the event of a slip.
We stop a few times, at one point sharing a ledge with the Bosnianboys, one of whom delighted us by popping a prune into each of our mouths
just as we grunted up the last step to join them. They work by blasting up a
couple hundred feet of hill together (in two ropes, one of three and one offour), then stopping for a cigarette and a laugh, before moving off. They are
obviously enjoying themselves. All steepens considerably near the top, andwe see a helicopter dropping supplies at the ridge overhead. Clouds ofspindrift whirl about – the chopper doesn’t land as it’s too exposed a point.
Must be quite a wind up there as every now and again we see a stream of
spindrift shear off at 100 yards on the horizontal into the air. It’s increasingly
windy for us too, and near the top we’re tired and hauling on every fixedline we come to. One guide passes us with two dead-beat looking clients,

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chiding us for our method. Well, yes thanks for the advice mate but we’re
not letting go. And what are you going to do about it, throw us off? Call the
alpine police? We press on un-fazed.
At last we’re there. The place is milling with well over 60 people,
more as the evening wears on and the stragglers trudge in from above andbelow. Eric now feeling really ‘crook’ – that’s my word - and hits the pit
without food or water. It’s bright still – we’ve been on the go for eight hours.
Five o’clock and it will be light until ten at least. I’m parched so we buy six
bottles of water and drink on Dan’s plastic bill. Some of the guides are
rehydrating on beer. The tables are full to bursting with sun burnt, mountainbrowned lined faces laughing, talking, joking, silent, staring in a multitudeof languages and signs. My back is sore and I am certainly pooped, but wellenough I think with the altitude, though glad for the aspirin. Kerry a bit outof it, blue lips again, but she’s up and talking so there’s a good thing, wesay. Dan and Paul are going well - Dan proving an exceptionally strong andcompetent scrambler and could have done without the ropes or fixed cables
I’m sure on the way up, and Paul quietly fit and with loads in reserve, I
reckon, physically and psychologically. Food goes well with me – pasta with
big chunks of brazed tender meat cooked in wine and mushroom and onion– that after soup and followed by caramel custard. After, I gear up for
tomorrow, summit day. The weather is looking superb, and I pack lightly.
Then Eric appears looking like death with an announcement: I’m notgoing up tomorrow. I’m going down in the morning. Then he disappears
back to his pit. Already we had been talking about the dangers of descending
the ridge, how we were dreading going back down it, how Eric and I could
protect the steeper sections with two ropes and work the belays. It would be
slow, it would be painful, it might take all day, but it could be done. Could
be. But now Eric wants to go down alone – he’d take one of the two ropes
to be sure and possibly abseil the steeper sections. But could he manage? He
was ill as they come, weakened from altitude, dehydration and lack of food.
But you don’t argue with Eric, not when he’s like this. He’s stubborn as anox, affirms Dan, and once his mind is made up, proposing alternatives isinviting contempt.

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I’m all the time thinking of how best to keep us alive. What about ahelicopter, I wonder, not for rescue, but as an alternative descent – a fitting
way off a dangerous hill, as a reward for tomorrow’s summit efforts,
successful or not? I mention it to the others and I think they think I am
joking, but eventually I persuade Dan with his French to ask the hut manager
if the helicopter company did tourist flights to and from the hut, and if so,
how much? Watching his conversation from a distance, it doesn’t sound too
hopeful at first. The manager is shaking his head - ‘non, non, non, nonmonsieur’ – but it turns out he thinks we are asking to get a freebie returnride with the supply helicopter. Once he hears we want a tourist flight, andare happy to pay, he makes a phonecall for us and gets the details. Yes, thehelicopter company does do pickups from certain places in the mountains,
including the Gouter Hut. Yes, they could manage a maximum of fivepeople with packs. Yes, they could do it tomorrow, weather permitting,though we’d have to call nearer the time to confirm the arrangement. And
the cost? 5000 francs all told; that equates to £500 split five ways: 100 quid
each. It had to be the answer. We could make for the summit – whoever was
up to it that was - return to the hut, then fly out together happy and safe. No
splitting up. No death on descent. No risking our necks down that ridge. No
more expensive nights in huts – for we’d have to spend at least £50 moreagain each if we were to go down the ordinary way in hut fees alone, letalone in water! And one of us could catch a bus or train down to Les Houches
from the helicopter base in Argentière to get the car. Easy. It was certain.
But Eric would have nothing to do with it. All our persuading andcajoling and offering to pay his seat was to no avail, and seemed only toelicit scorn. Was it the money? The ethics? He wouldn’t say. He had sunk
into a depressed, morose state from which we were powerless to extricate
him. Our elation turned to misery. We were still bent on the helicopter. We
just couldn’t not use it. But what would we say to his wife, if he were to die
struggling to climb down ill, while we flew down in splendid safety? The
whole helicopter thing, far from being our salvation, looked like being thewedge that would split us in two. We didn’t know it then, but Eric later
confided that as we were bedding down in the bunk that night, he was awake
with the thought that he would probably never see his family again. He knew
the ridge was a desperate and dangerous climb alone, especially in his

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condition. Just before he rolled over to sleep next to me, I turned to him:
Eric, you know I really don’t like the idea of you going down that ridgealone. That was all I could say. I put in my ear plugs, crossed myself, andbegan my prayers.

Dent du Géant and the Vallée Blanche on my solo ski descent, Chamonix, 2013.

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CHAPTER 19

NO PICNIC ON MONT BLANC:
PART IIITwo am and it’s bedlam again. Forty or more people in this section of the
hut are thrashing about, putting on inner boots, outer boots, salopettes,
fleeces, jackets, balaclavas, gloves, gaiters, headlights, helmets, packing andrepacking stuffsacks, but all in a strange kind of tired, nervous silence. It’s
summit day. I’m dressed quickly and gather my things and just before
leaving the bunk room, I squeeze Eric’s foot. He looks up. I say nothing, butraise my hand in silent farewell. He does his and I walk from the room to
put on my boots. My insides are tense, but when I brace myself against thecold over the foul-smelling chasm which is one of the toilet holes, I am
unsuccessful. Eric is going down and I fear he may die doing it. Kerry wants
to go up today – or at least she’s giving in to encouragement to do so – butreally should be staying here. In fact we should all be staying here,technically speaking. We are not ready for a 16,000 foot hill. Yet I’m feelingconfident myself, fit enough. What can stop us now? Today I shall climb
Mont Blanc. I’m packed and order a bowl of tea. My dried fruit andpumpernickel don’t go down as well as I’d like, and I force the tea down
knowing I’ll need every drop of fluid. I watch in pain as someone returns
his breakfast tray to the kitchen with a full cup of juice, which is summarily
poured down the sink. That juice could save someone’s life, I think. The
others join me and Kerry I think gets some hot chocolate into her. Dan andPaul eat a few crumbs. We’re all tired of muesli bars.
Just then, Eric stomps in. ‘I’m coming,’ he says with a grimace. He’s
not happy. He looks terrible. He won’t say why, and we won’t ask. But
inside I’m so relieved, and, I know, so are the others. Well we had better get

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moving. Parties have already started out. It’s half two and it’s time to go. I
put on gaiters and crampons and I’m out on the terraced ice ramp leading up
the corniced snow ridge, ready and waiting. But there’s a hitch. Kerry has
lost her headlight. Everyone looks for it, but it’s gone. She can manage
without, I say. It’s a bright night, and on Eric’s suggestion I offer to rope her
to me for added security. Still I wait. I’m getting cold. Shall I put on mybigger mitts? I don’t want to, since I know I’ll start heating up once we getgoing. But my feet are getting cold. Numb even. I stamp them. I swing myarms. Eric comes out at last, but then I see he hasn’t even got his gaiters on.
I watch him go about putting them on, laboriously, fiddling with apparently
insignificant things, like whether to lie down or stand up his ice axe next to
him while he crampons up. After trying several times to stick his ice-axe
upright in the snow, he finds the ground too frozen and hard, so he lies it
down, but then it threatens to skitter away, off the edge, so he leans it against
his pack, but then as he lets go it falls down, so he tries it head side down.
Still no good. Finally he strikes the pick of his axe into the frozen snow. It
sticks. Now he can get back to his gaiter. Oops, wrong foot. Have to undo
the salopette zip again to get the gaiter on under it, with the salopette leg
over the top. Loop of the gaiter won’t fit over the boots. I moan inwardly. Is
he going to have to take off his boots? No. He struggles and yanks it, then it
comes. He can’t do the zip up with his mitts on. He takes them off. Then hetakes off his gloves, leaving his inner gloves. He does the zip. He fastens thevelcro. He hooks the stud into his front lace. Too tight? Try the next laceback. Hmm. Too loose. Better back to the front lace. Now zip back thesalopette leg. Do up the velcro. Oops. Dropped a glove. I pick it up speedily.
‘Can I help with anything?’ I bark impatiently. No. Now he starts on hisother foot. I crunch off to see how the others are getting on. They don’t havetheir crampons on yet either. And so it goes on.
Finally, we are the last group to leave but one: a middle-aged
Canadian mountaineering couple are right behind us. Not long after theyturn back in the wind, she ill with altitude. The snow conditions are perfect.
Sixty or more pairs of cramponed boots have trumped the soft snow down
into a nice firm little track, and I lead and settle into a steady, slow rhythm,
rope trailing behind me to Kerry. Looking up into the darkness we see a longline of lights, like a vast string of pilgrims setting out up some sacred

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mountain. We are gaining slowly, but there’s no effort to. Just a slow, steadypace I say. An hour or two pass, and Dan takes over in front. The wind has
increased, and the tracks are filling up with snow. Great drifts move acrossthe hill like sand. The sky lightens almost imperceptibly in the east. Ourroute having left the ridge of the Aiguille du Gouter ascends the long
featureless western slopes of the Dome du Gouter. At its top we breast thebroad col to a fierce, icy blast, the eastern sky cold and bluing, the sharp
skyline now visible as a jagged and endless sweep of icy mountains andridges. Away to the east there sits the tall cold Aiguille du Midi, beyond it
still the huge Aiguille Verte and the dark rock towers of the Dru. Is that the
Matterhorn way beyond in Switzerland? And the Grand Combin? Or is it
Monta Rosa in Italy? It is difficult to look up with the wind-driven spindrift
lashing my face like icy daggers. My goggles are still in my pack, so I pull
my hood down and press on down the other side of the col. From here now
we can see the summit ridge, though the summit itself is hiding just out ofsight. Clouds of spindrift are blasting horizontally off the top hundreds ofmetres into Italy. Finally the sun rises and we stop to goggle up. A slurp ofcold water and more stamping of the boots. My left foot and right hand arequite numb. It’s sure cold, I say. Do I take a photo? I don’t remember. The
rope comes off Kerry and I coil it in my pack. No place to stop for long inthis wind so we press on down the slope from which we eventually take thediagonal line up towards the Vallot refuge hut at 4360 metres, shimmeringin the dawn sun. Only metres from it we see someone on skis, lying downon the slope, motionless. On arrival we see why. The slope is bare hard ice– no death run out, but a nasty tumble and slide and impossible to cut alongwith skis. He can’t move up or down, and is worn out with trying to get themoff. But he’ll survive. My crampons bite but the ice axe is useless. Kerry andPaul thrash and struggle, feeling the precariousness in the new experienceof teetering on rock-hard ice. Dan sticks with them so Eric and I make it tothe hut, perched on a rocky outcrop exposed to the full force of the bittereasterly wind.
It is a sorry sight inside. The Vallot suffers serious neglect and is little
more than a rubbish tip. But it has saved some lives and inside we are out of
the wind at least. There are four German climbers supine, dozing fitfully on
the floor wrapped in blankets but looking cold. Four Bosnians look at us

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arriving, the lustre and sparkle gone from their faces. A Spanish crew are
messing about with their ropes, treading on them, rubbish and plastic
skewered and stuck to their crampons. There too is one of the French guides
with her two clients, looking worn-out and ready to descend. Eric tugs his
duvet weakly from his pack. I help him into it, then he drops in a heap in thecorner, arms folded, knees up, eyes closed, mouth agape, head lolled
sideways. I add my fleece and big mitts, stamping my feet and swinging myarms, at last getting some circulation back in painful, throbbing stabs. The
others arrive at last, and I help them through the trapdoor entry hole. Kerry
too flops down on the perished mattress next to Eric. Paul covers her withhis jacket, then scrounges up another dirty old blanket from the corner forher. You can cover her with all you like, I say coldly, but it won’t do her any
good if she’s not producing any heat. We three stand there studying themlike specimens, until Dan I think has the sense to sit between them in an
attempt to offer them his warmth. There are no hot drinks here. It’s way subzero inside, and we chat a bit, managing a laugh and a quip just to show that
we are still in control. Kerry retches into her glove, Paul encourages her to
use the floor. In minutes it will be frozen forever. It’s an ingenious way toleave your mark on the world. I drink more and eat a date. One date. It’s all
I can manage, though I recall longing for an apple.
Only 450 metres above lies the summit, perhaps an hour and a half at
a steady pace. But looking out the window of the Vallot, I can see the final
Bosses ridge is out of the question. I say as much. Eric hears and agrees.
With a pair of experienced climbers in acclimatised condition, the ridge inthis kind of wind would be a serious, though achievable undertaking. But
with Eric out of it, I would prefer not to go it alone, still less to takeresponsibility for another more dependent partner or three. While the snow
conditions were good, the wind was quite capable of throwing you down.
And we had all come up here too quickly, and now even the three healthieramong us were incapable of stomaching what food we had.
Meanwhile Kerry was turning blue, and she and Eric began shivering
uncontrollably. As I watched them I began to chatter myself. We aren’t
warming up here. We should start going down now. So my pack goes on,
but then I see the others have taken their crampons off. It takes an age, Paul110

on his knees strapping Kerry’s to her heavy boots, but finally they are readyto go. No mistakes now, the descent is as demanding as the climb. Nowhere
except at the hut entrance are we exposed to a death fall like the day before,
but the wind is as strong as ever and the cold can kill as quickly as anythingelse. I am slow. Many stops with deep breathing is the only way to go. Evenon Huascaran at 22,000 feet I don’t remember being this heavily affected.
Eric takes the front on the way back up the dome, but later I pass him
slumped in the snow. He’s okay he says, so I press on now and don’t turnback. All the way I go. Down and down. There are no tracks, just deep drifts
through which I plunge endlessly. Did we really come up all this way? Now
I can enjoy the view. Bionassay rears up beautifully, an icy, cornice-ridged
beauty inviting an ascent for another day, another life. Minutes pass into
hours and still I go on. At the very bottom of the dome I turn at last and spy
the hill behind. There is Eric, moving still. That’s good. Higher up, there are
the other three, Dan and Paul sticking with Kerry. She’ll be okay. Other
parties too are zig-zagging down the slope. I turn and continue. Just near the
hut at last, I stop and wait. There is a steep step here, awkward and exposed.
It wouldn’t be right to slip to one’s death twenty yards from safety. So I rig
a belay and wait in the sun and wind and spindrift, dreaming and warming.
Finally they come, worn out, silent but cheery. Dan goes ahead. He’ll beseeing about the helicopter tonight. I ask the time and it’s only 10.30 am.
But when I reach the hut, bringing up the rear, Paul has a happy
message. Helicopter’s on the way. It’ll be here in half an hour. I whoop withelation. Just time to gather the kit. I’ll take that rope Eric. Anything else,anyone? I jam it all into my pack, now twice it’s normal weight, and thrash
on up the deep snow to the landing zone on the ridge just behind the hut.
What a puff! These last 30 yards seem as hard as the previous 1000! Just
time to rig a safety line for the others again. No slips here please. Then weare joined by one of the guides from the hut who is out to check the windspeed. It’s calmer here than up the hill: ‘50-60 kph east, south-east,’ heshouts into his radio. I gasp – is it too fast? ‘No problem!’ he announces
loudly with a smile.
We wait with cocked heads, listening for the ‘wop’ of the blades. We
see it first, a tiny speck of a shadow grinding its way up the glacier below.

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Then the sounds come reflecting off the mountain to us, and before long itroars in from behind us, over the fatal drop, and as it rests lightly on thesnow with props at full chop, spindrift blasts us flat. At the signal I’m away,
propelled through deep snow by sheer adrenaline, towing the others in mywake. Belts on, gloves off, camera out, packs in, then suddenly the door isclosed, the rotors scream and we’re away – a wave to our hut guide as theblades take the load and we swoop down over the snow shelf like a speeding
bird. Eric’s reaching for something to grab hold of but it’s just lean and gowith the flow on one of these machines, trusting pilot and g-force to do theirbit. As we settle into a more steady descent, the alps open out before us, vast
sweeping rock and ice faces, supernal vistas of crevasse and serac andicefall. There’s the whole of the Grand Mulet and Bosses glaciers, winding
their way up to Mont Blanc’s shining summit. There’s the Midi, so elegant
from this angle, with the ever so delicate arete of the Frendo Spur dropping
clean away from its tops. There are the countless rocky Chamonix Aiguilles,
and the long, winding dragon’s tail of the Mer de Glace, which in years tocome I would descend solo on skis, and further south still the huge northface of the Grandes Jorasses looking austere and impressive as ever. Then
comes the Dru, dark and sinister and ice-laced as if wintered still, so early
are we in the season. Pine trees fly past now as we pass from white to green,
dropping all the while with Chamonix stretched out below us like a lazy,
sleeping cat. Over the telepherique line for the Grand Montets, thensuddenly a dive clean off the edge down into the Argentière glacial gorge.
Eric’s panicking and starting to swoon, but the dive only steepens as we cut
left and blast down between the towering cliff sides at right angles, massive
seracs only feet below. Then it’s another impossible cut right, improbably
fast, crushed to our seats and all squealing with terror-filled delight. Then
there’s the base, a tiny square way lower yet but in seconds a broad acre ofasphalt, and we’re down on terra firma, rotors slowing and we sweltering inthe sudden heat. Bravo! shouts Dan, and it’s merci buckets all round except
for Eric who retires to the shade, fighting back the nausea and the sheer,shocking incredulity of it all.
So what more can I say? It was the whimps’ way out, that’s for sure.
Eight minutes to cover what might have killed us over two days - £100
poorer but at the time I had no quibbles about the rightness of it all. I would

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see my wife and son again. So would Eric his! Just a shame to leave all those
suffering bods at the Gouter with a fight still before them and most without
the easier option. Two hours’ later we were sat at table minus Eric with beerand salad on the way. Kerry had revived almost instantly, but it was to beanother gut-wrenching 24 hours for Eric before he could take even a cup oftea, let alone a meal. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of his
high-altitude climbing career. How would he ever live it down with his nine
year-old son who so desperately wants to climb K2? As it turned out, all of
us along with Eric were forced to settle in our own way with the fact thatwhat had started out as a serious climbing trip would amount inmountaineering terms to little more than a pleasurable tourist jaunt. A picnic
after all! For Dan, Paul, and Kerry, there was no shame in that. For me,
consolation lay in the fact that I would live - again - to tell the story. For
Eric, perhaps the most morally conscientious climber of us all, thesimultaneous relief and disappointment was to become the catalyst for nosmall degree of intestinal and emotional havoc in the days that followed.
Since that first escapade in the French Alps, I have been back four
more times, in both winter and summer seasons: hiking in the forests andalpine hills, climbing waterfall ice in the Argentière valley, skiing solo andoff piste in the Valle Blanche, mixing rock and ice in the Aiguille de Tour
range and on the Aiguille du Midi. I still haven’t succeeded on my lifelong
dream climbs: the great north face routes on Les Courtes and Les Vertes,and of course the elusive Mont Blanc, yet another mountain I have neverclimbed. Each year Eric sends me an open invitation to meet up with him
and his now well-accomplished alpinist son. I guess I will just have to keepon trying, keep on remembering, keep on dreaming.

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Plan de l’Aiguille, Chamonix, France, 2015.

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CHAPTER 20

BURGLAR IN LANGTANG

They say that once you start climbing in the Himalayas your chances ofdying in the mountains soar exponentially. I didn’t want to die but I had
always wanted to climb the tallest mountains on earth. After Peru my Irish
friend Tony and I outlined plans to climb Ama Dablam near Everest, and I
even corresponded with Michael Kennedy, somewhat presumptuously inretrospect, to get route information from his remarkable 1985 winter ascentof the northeast face with Carlos Buhler. Within four months of returningfrom the Diamond Couloir in 1990, however, I got married and all futureplans to climb in the Himalaya, or anywhere serious for that matter, wereput on ice. In fact already before Mt Kenya my life had been changing
direction. I didn’t strap on crampons again for almost a decade.
I never regretted this shift in vocational focus. For a while I had
contemplated a professional career in climbing, and I don’t think this would
have been unrealistic, despite my mediocre abilities and accomplishments.
But I had begun to wonder what my climbing was doing to serve anyone
beyond myself, and felt myself increasingly drawn towards a religious
vocation where my intellectual gifts could be deployed in higher educational
research and for the hopeful betterment of others.
Although my new life did not afford me the luxury of flying off forregular climbing expeditions several months a year, as I had been used to,
my love for the mountains never waned, and an opportunity to climb at lastin the Himalaya presented itself on our return to Australia in 2002 after three
years away studying in the UK. My wife Lizzy had long dreamed of trekking
in Nepal, and our son Ben was now ten years old, a seasoned walker, andopen to a high altitude walking adventure. I wrote to the Nepal
Mountaineering Association requesting permission to climb one of the115

lower trekking peaks in the Langtang Himal, Naya Kanga. At 5844m(19,100 ft), Naya Kanga, otherwise known as Gunja la Chuli, costs less thanthe “Category A” trekking peaks in Nepal. Its northeast ridge presents amodest but attractive-enough and viable mountaineering target at the headof the Langtang Valley. It’s not that high or difficult by anyone’s climbing
standards, but this was going to be a family tour, and I didn’t want to tackle
anything too risky or demanding. By organizing our own expedition, thetotal cost of the trip, including peak fee, two climbing Sherpas, along withthe requisite cook, kitchen crew, porters, transport from Kathmandu, andinsurance, ended up coming to under US$3000.
The year 2002 turned out to be both a bad year and a good year tovisit Nepal. The bad side of it was that the Nepalese Civil War between the
Maoist Communist Party and Government forces re-erupted that year withpeculiar vehemence. In June 2001 virtually the entire Nepalese Royal
Family were massacred in one hit. Urgent peace talks were organized in aneffort to stem further bloodshed and retaliation. On our arrival in April 2002,
diplomatic efforts had broken down and the social tension and fear were
palpable, with many police, military and security personnel exploiting thepolitical situation as a licence for unrestrained cruelty and violence. In May,
right when we were completing our trek, the peace talks failed, andwidespread strikes, insurgency, and lawlessness broke out afresh, escalatingin the months that followed. The result was that during 2002 more people
died from the war than in any other year of its ten-year duration (some17,000 overall).
The good side was that, due to most foreigners cancelling their travel
arrangements, we had the Langtang Valley almost completely to ourselves.
Our small caravan of porters, kitchen staff, sherpas and ourselves snaked its
way from the cool monkey-inhabited forests of the lower valley up between
the towering faces of the big 7000-plus metre Langtang Lirung andLangtang Ri peaks unaffected by pathway or camp-site congestion. Our son
Ben proved to be a curiosity to the local village people, especially thechildren. Perhaps they didn’t often see western children trekking in thesemountains. They would often swarm around him, taking his hand in theirs,
stroking his honey-blond hair, laughing, staring, and apparently enchantedby this mysterious pint-sized human phenomenon. At first Ben was bit

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overwhelmed by the attention, particularly when he first experienced it in
the bustling and busy streets of Kathmandu. But here in the broad open
spaces of the mountains he seemed to feel safer, and during one of ourunscheduled rest days - precipitated by a nasty bout of gastro - Ben spent
the whole day playing with a lass who had sidled up alongside himchattering in Nepali. Despite the language barrier they mucked around like
old time friends.
The trek from the road end at Syabrubesi (1,460m) to Kyanjin
Ghompa (3,800m) near the end of the Langtang Kola took a leisurely fivedays, including rest days. At Langtang Village our tents were just about
destroyed by a freak thunder-storm that struck with fury. At one point in thenight, as the storm was reaching its wild pitch, Ben, who was sleeping
between me and Lizzy, sat bolt upright and declared fretfully that he wanted
to go home. It took several night-time visits from our two Sherpas, who wereup all night keeping the tents secure and who regularly checked on ourwellbeing, for Ben to gain enough reassurance finally to lie down again
before night’s end.
Of course Langtang Village is no more. It was destroyed by alandslide in April 2015 after the massive earthquake that struck the region
and caused death on Everest. Over 300 people were killed in the Langtang
landslide, and more than 100 bodies, including those of numerous foreign
trekkers, still lie buried beneath the debris, never to be recovered.
Our arrival in Kyanjin Ghompa coincided with two events: news of
the outbreak of strikes and insurgency after failed peace talks in the capital,
and the early onset of the monsoon season. Heavy flakes of snow fell as theporters pitched our tents on the northern fringe of the village. Only theshoulder of Kyanjin Ri (4773m), immediately behind and northeast of thevillage, was visible. Our own target, Naya Kanga, was swathed in a thickblanket of low cloud. A sense of inevitable finality settled upon us, as we
spent the next day drinking tea in the tent or in one of the local chai houses,
gloomily watching the snow fall. Our sherpas Dendi and Pasang interpreted
the snow as a sure sign of the monsoon, with its threat of more snow andincreased avalanche risk. Pasang especially also talked up the politicalcrisis: it would be better for us, he urged, to get back to Kathmandu as soon

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as possible, before strikes and curfews made getting to the airport andleaving the country impossible. It seemed obvious that they were happy tocall it quits. They spent the day crammed in the warm cook tent, playing
cards and buffooning around with the kitchen staff and remaining porters.
That evening, we agreed to pack up early and head home. We still had
five days planned here at Kyanjin Ghompa, enough time to climb the peak
had the weather been friendly. We were not scheduled to be back in
Kathmandu for another eight days or so, and there was no guarantee we
could arrange an earlier flight out to Bangkok and then on to Adelaide via
Sydney. Ben had coped exceptionally well with the altitude, with nonoticeable ill effects, and it seemed a shame to abandon the expedition after
all had gone so well. As we wriggled into our sleeping bags, with snow still
falling outside the tent, I became aware of the old dismal feeling of yet
another failed expedition. It was as if I was doomed never to succeed as amountaineer. Once again there would be no epic ascent through treacherous
conditions. No triumphant elation on summit day. No heroic return tobasecamp. No remarkable story to tell. I lay there, listening to the patter ofsnow and the steady breathing of my wife and son, and wondered how I
might redeem the situation and accomplish something worthy of theuniversal mountaineering spirit. Perhaps in the morning, while the others
started down the valley, I could race up to the summit of Kyanjin Ri, if only
to release some of the pent up energy and hope that churned around
unfulfilled and unrealised inside me. If I moved fast and all went well I could
easily catch them up by sundown, perhaps even by lunchtime. Maybe Dendi
would agree to accompany me? From my conversations with him he seemed
the more adventurous of the two sherpas, driven less by entrepreneurshipand careerism and more by sheer love of climbing.
As I lay there dreaming my plans, dozing in the half-world between
wakefulness and sleep, I vaguely heard the zip on our tent slide open. Lizzymust be going out for some reason, I thought. With my right hand I sleepily
reached for my headlight, which I kept by my head, and with my left reachedover towards her, expecting to find an empty space, but instead I found that
she was still lying there curled on her side, fast asleep. I sprang into
wakefulness, suddenly conscious that the zip had been opened from theoutside, and that there was someone rummaging around through our stuff in

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the vestibule. Twisting on my headlight and unzipping the inner tent, I calledout “Hey! Who’s there?”, and launched myself through the open flap into
the vestibule. I saw a dark body reel back and run towards a nearby stonewall, launch over it, and disappear with a terrific crash and splash on theother side. As I clumsily pulled my boots on, I called for help: “Pasang!
Dendi! Come, come! Thief! Thief! Pasang! Dendi!” By now Lizzy and Ben
had woken and were fearfully asking what was wrong, and I could hear
Pasang and Dendi’s voices from their tent. With my boots just on I stumbled
after the intruder, following his tracks through the snow towards the stone
wall. By the time I reached it, standing there in my long-johns and boots,
Pasang and Dendi had caught up, and we shone our headlight beams over
the wall. It was a wide but shallow sewage pit. The corrugated iron thatloosely covered it had collapsed with the intruder’s weight, and he had
plunged headlong into the watery shit below. Somehow before we got tohim he had managed to scramble out and make his escape, but had left adirty stinking trail in the fresh snow which eventually disappeared in themessed up muddy lanes between the houses back towards the centre of thevillage.
What he had been after is anyone’s guess. Boots, most likely. But hedidn’t find any. Even in these snowy conditions, we kept our boots and mostof our gear inside the tent proper, along with our money and passports.
Outside in the vestibule we had left only a stuff sac or two of some food andan empty pack. I wondered whether he had been tipped off that this was ourlast night. We would never know. I half-thought of launching an
investigation the next day, as it wouldn’t be hard to sniff the culprit out; but
on our trek in we had seen how violently rural Nepalese treated alleged petty
thieves among their own, viciously beating and publicly humiliating theaccused in question, and I figured this fellow’s run-in with the septic pool
had served punishment enough.
In the morning I floated my plan to race up Kyanjin Ri with Dendi,
who welcomed the proposal with enthusiasm, and so after breakfast, asLizzy and Ben headed down valley with the rest of the team, Dendi and I
turned uphill and made for a quick ascent of the peak. Despite the fresh
snow, the terrain was easy and the cloud layer lifted, granting us splendid

119views of the village below, though Naya Kanga, situated immediately
opposite us across the valley, remained hidden from view.
We paused on the summit only briefly, for a drink and a breather,
before tearing off back down the mountain, whooping and bounding likechildren. Once back in the valley, we trotted and galloped along the path inour big alpine boots, alive with the thrill of even a minor accomplishment
and the vigor and grace of good health. Sure enough, we caught up with theothers by lunch-time just past the village of Mundu (3550m). The trek backdown to Syabrubesi felt entirely different from the way up; it rained mostnights and our porters, some shod only in rubber thongs, slipped often, one
spraining his ankle just below Lama Hotel. His colleagues rendered first aid
by holding him down and lashing the affected ankle with huge stinging
nettles, while he squirmed and hollered in pain. Within half an hour he wasup and toting his load again down the slippery trail.
The five-hour bus journey to Kathmandu via Dhunche and Trisuli Bazaar
passed with no more than the usual discomforts induced by suffocating
diesel smoke, dust, heat, sweat, and minor break-downs, though there were
now more check points along the road, and Kathmandu seemed noticeably
more chaotic. Sorting gear and resting up at our Blue Diamond Hotel, we
succeeded in re-arranging earlier flights all the way through to Adelaide;
though on the day we were due to leave strikes had come into force, security
had been stepped up, and flights were delayed. The road to the airport was
clogged with traffic; the airport had been cordoned off and only ticketholders were being admitted beyond the check-point. We were forced todisembark a good half-kilometre away from the terminal and lug our four
giant duffle bags of kit between the three of us. It was a relief to flop down
at our departure gate to sit out the delay.
When at last we were called to board, we saw that our luggage had actually
not yet been loaded, but was laid out in a long line on the tarmac. Alongwith the 200 or so other passengers, we were herded outside into a group in
front of the jet, then told to walk over and select our own items of luggage
from the line and load them into the giant luggage containers ourselves.
Guessing that the odd process was intended as a precaution to prevent abomb being sneaked on board, we soon found out why. When finally all the

120luggage had been accounted for and all passengers seated and the doors
ready to close, a fancily dressed dignitary accompanied by two visibly
armed bodyguards boarded and sat down in the front row. It was Nepal’s
Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. It seems we had been allotted the mostsecure flight out of Kathmandu that day. I have never been able to discover
why he was headed to Bangkok at that moment, but it could have been
related to the fact that he was in the throes of being expelled from his own
party in the increasingly turbulent political crisis. Nepal was falling apart,and he was preparing for the worst.
With this modest foray in the Himalaya completed, and counting the ascentof Kyanjin Ri a little improperly as a “climb”, I realized during the longflights home that I had now climbed mountains on six of the earth’s sevencontinents. At first it sounded like a spectacular achievement, and I was
tempted to entertain a self-aggrandizing view of myself, until I admitted thatmost of my climbs had been a flop, and that the few successful ventures
amounted in any case to pretty average climbing accomplishments,
comparably speaking. I would have to accept my limits, and acknowledge
my status as a mountaineering mediocrity, an average and ordinary man,whose romantic aspirations seemed destined never to be realizable in theflesh. Yet through it all I knew myself to be remarkably blessed by theseexperiences, and even if I had not exploited to the full all the extraordinary
opportunities that had come my way, I had nevertheless been dramaticallyand permanently changed by them, and by the diverse, unique, and beloved
people with whom I had shared them. I trusted it was all for the better.

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Sunset overlooking the Glacier du Tour, French Alps, 2015.

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CHAPTER 21

THE NEED FOR SPEED

Speed climbing is all the rage today. On the internet you regularly comeacross news of some well-known route being completed in a new record
time. The Nose of El Cap or the Nordwand of the Eiger in under three hours.
Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn in under four hours - return! Everest basecamp to summit in eight hours. Almost invariably the records are solo
achievements, for that is by far and away the fastest, lightest, most efficient
way to climb a route, unencumbered by all the equipment, clutter, andnegotiation necessitated by a partnered or belayed climb. Why climb fast?
Is it just to break records? Speed is safety, as all mountaineers know. But go
too fast and you risk errors in judgement. Why climb solo? Isn’t itfoolhardy? Summing up the experience of so many others, Steve House, oneof the most accomplished alpinists ever, says he always found profoundest
meaning and greatest reward in climbing fast and alone. “My mostrewarding days were days when I cut away everything; when I redefined myunderstanding of necessity.”9
While I am no sport climber or super-alpinist, and have never nor will
ever set anything close to a record in the mountains, I have often foundmyself racing solo up a climb towards a summit against the clock, and I dare
say tasting something of the same liberty and clarity of the great solo speed
climbers. Sometimes the need for speed has been simply due to badscheduling. Mostly it has been due to family or work commitments, forcing
me to squeeze a climb into a tiny window of limited opportunity. I havealready recounted the story of racing up Kyanjin Ri on the morning of ourtrek out from the head of the Langtang Valley. Like many of my snatched
9

Steve House, Beyond the Mountain (Sheffield: Vertebrate Publishing, 2010), xi.

123ventures it was a more or less vain or valiant attempt to redeem a failed plan.
It seems to follow a pattern that has appeared with frequency through myadult life.
Take for example my winter solo of Great End in Borrowdale. It had
started out as a leisurely family drive on a cold winter’s day in Northumbria.
We decided to cross the Pennines from Durham and head for the CumbrianLake District. After lunch in Keswick, we headed along the road to
Borrowdale, parking at Seathwaite Farm at the road end. There my travelcompanions seemed to want to do little more than potter around and maybe
explore the track up by the long stepped waterfall, where once I had seen an
unwary climber, plodding across a frozen pond to his next pitch, breakthrough the ice-crust and plunge backwards into the deep pool, submersing
his entire body, pack, and helmet in the icy depths. I on the other hand wasitching to check out the ice in Central Gully on Great End, about which I
had read in Ken Wilson’s Cold Climbs (1983). I remembered that this classic
route was about grade 3 and almost a full day’s undertaking, but I figured if
I high-tailed it I might just have enough time to race up it and be back to thecar before I was missed. I wouldn’t be long, I said. Only a couple of hours.
I set off up the frozen path at double pace, my big plastic boots
thundering awkwardly beneath me. Nearing the base of the bulking crag I
was grateful to find that someone had left a well-formed trail through thesoft snow, and I ploughed upwards towards the iced-up gully. In short time
I had steamed up the gully to the crux pitch, where I found two parties ofclimbers queued in turn behind a third party whose leader was on belay andhacking away at the thick blue ice. I looked at my watch to see that I had
been gone almost two hours. If I politely waited my turn to solo up the easy
bulge of ice, I estimated it would take a further two hours to exit the climb
and return to Seathwaite. Alternatively I could ask the leading climber tostep aside and let me push on past, but then I figured that wouldn’t be cricket,
and I would still be pressed for time. So calling it quits, I downclimbed apitch or two before turning and bashing down the deep snowy gully backtowards the valley, clunkily galloping the last kilometre or so down the hard
path alongside the Derwent River. When I got back to the car, sweaty andbreathless, I had been gone three hours, longer than I had anticipated, but
thankfully not long enough to arouse any distemper in my wife and son.

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Sorry I had not topped out, I nevertheless felt satisfied with the experienceand the confidence to which it gave rise, having proved to myself that I was
still fit and able to move quickly in steepish winter terrain. Plus I was now
able to add Central Gully of Great End to my long list of attempted albeit
unclimbed routes.
I seized hold of another snatched opportunity a year or two later in
Switzerland beneath the Eiger. Again, the occasion was a family holiday,
and I had arranged for us to visit Grindelwald, though given our limited
budget had scheduled just two nights there in the cheapest hostel I could findafter which we would move on by train through the Alps to Chamonix. It
was late winter, and the place was crawling with skiers. The weather on our
one free day was mostly fair with high to mid-level cloud, and we joined thehoardes on the cog-train up to the Kleine Scheidegg (2070m), passing
beneath the soaring two kilometre-high spectre of the Eiger’s north face.
Gazing upon its sweeping ice-fields, broken ice-runnels and daunting
buttresses, my stomach churned inside with both wonder and dread, as I
recalled all that I’d read and studied about this iconic, archetypal nemesis,
at the same time aware that none of it did it true justice, nor could prepareanyone for this kind of face-to-face, carnal encounter. I suddenly wanted somuch to be on it, to feel for myself its primal power, and wondered how I
might get nearer and higher.
Disgorging from the train at Kleine Scheidegg, I felt so awkward andout of place among the pushing and bustling tourists. Proudly I wanted toshout out: “I’m not a tourist. I’m a climber. I don’t belong down here. I am
supposed to be up there, up that face, on those ridges, hidden, unseen,
struggling for my life alongside the mighty, cut off from the nauseating
opulence and luxury of cafes and chalets and apres ski society.” But thenmy son tugs on my sleeve and asks for a toilet and I am brought back toreality. There’s no escaping it: I am one of the barbarian hullabaloo, after
all. The ice-axe and crampons strapped to my pack seem suddenly
conspicuous, an embarrassing sign of my naïve and fantastical insanity, andI become self-conscious and impatient and angry: with my family, with theendless queues, with the expensively dressed throng, and above all withmyself and the inescapable mediocrity of my life.

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But casting my eye around, I spy a redemptive opportunity in the formof the Tschuggen, a striking pyramidal peak along the Lauberhorn ridgefrom the Kleine Scheidegg. In the climbing guidebooks, Tschuggen(2520m) rates a mention as a summer scramble, and on its western andnorth-western aspects it is actually surprisingly steep, undercut in places bysheer cliffs and overhanging bluffs. In its winter cloak of snow, it suddenly
appeared as an attractive goal, far from the crowds, a point from which I
could look back across towards the Eiger’s north face at a point about levelwith the start of the difficulties at the top of the First Pillar. Climbing the
Tschuggen would not challenge me technically, but it would get me further
into this legendary alpine range, and in some small way promised to satisfy
my yearning to get nearer to the Eiger, positioned to scrutinize and perhaps
even sense all those features which I felt I knew so well.
With Lizzy and Ben content to explore the snowy plateau around theJungfraubahn, I plodded off along the snowy track towards Mannlichen. The
path traverses around to the upper Honegg ski-lift station situated at thesouth-eastern base of the Tschuggen. Turning uphill, I was able to ascend
the first few hundred feet in narrow diagonals, but as it steepened and thesnow hardened, I tackled the angle more directly, keeping close to the righthand ridge. I can’t recall if I donned my crampons or not, but I certainly
remember using my axe, nervously aware of the precipitous slide down thesouth east face and the yawning exposure off the northern edge of the arete.
Arriving at the summit, the view answered to my expectations, and as I satjust below it munching cheese and salami at a safe distance from the sharp
drop, I soaked in the visual panorama of the Nordwand with the increased
appreciation of having earned it with at least a small degree ofmountaineering effort and skill. There was additional satisfaction in the factthat I had come here alone, for there is something both pure and purifying
about climbing solo, and wilderness solitude - doubtlessly diminished but
not entirely eradicated in busier ranges like this - has its own clarifying
power. Below me the busy crowds and chairlifts still buzzed, but here wasno sign of anyone: no tracks, no axe or pole holes, no litter. Little did I knowthat at that moment I was in fact not as alone as I felt, for Lizzy and Ben had
patiently watched the final part of my ascent through the telescope, thereby

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sharing with me, in their own way, my modest and momentary sanctuaryfrom the hubbub.
On at least three other occasions I have made climbs in circumstances
similar to these. One was on the Petite Aiguille Verte above Argentière,
where I whimped off the summit ridge and spent the three hours before thelast lift soloing around on steep glacial features above the Col des Grands
Montets. Another was on Victoria’s Mt Feathertop where, having raced up
through the forest from Harrietville, I found myself - shod in leather hiking
boots and without an ice-axe - having to kick seemingly endless steps up theicy, exposed, and heavily corniced summit ridge to the top. Needless to say
the descent was precarious. A third, a summer trip this time, was on Cradle
Mountain in Tasmania where, having left Mole Creek at 7am, I and a friend
set ourselves the rather ambitious goal of driving to Dove Lake, ascending
to Cradle Mountain’s misty summit, and returning back to Launceston intime to catch a 5pm flight to Melbourne. It all came together, though I was
lucky to avoid getting pinged for speeding on the return drive.
But there is one final speed climb I would like to share, this time madewith climbing partner Paul Horne, on the elegant conical volcano that is Mt
Taranaki (previously called Mt Egmont) on the north island of New Zealand.
In was October 1988, and we had met up in Mt Cook village ten days earlier
with the hope of climbing the South Face of Mt Douglas in winterconditions. But the low cloud and rain that had locked the mountains insoggy gloom for the last week or two failed to lift, and we felt increasingly
agitated as we helplessly watched any opportunity to climb slipping away.
With only three days before we were due to fly out of Christchurch
back to Australia, we cooked up a plan to travel to the north island where,according to the forecasts, the weather was fair, and climb Mt Egmont. By
no means was it comparable to the south face of Douglas, either in difficultyor seriousness, but besides being aesthetically pleasing it was something toclimb, and right now anything was better than nothing. We managed to bookcheap air tickets out of Mt Cook directly to Wellington for the next day, andswap our departing flights back to Melbourne to fly out of Wellington
instead. As we took off over the socked in southern alps towards sunnier
northern skies, our spirits rose, sensing that we might just pull it off.

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Taranaki (2518m) is bigger than it looks on the postcards. We had
settled on what looked like the speediest way up via Tahurangi Lodge on
the north east side of the mountain. The drive to New Plymouth from
Wellington takes over four hours, so by the time we had our rental car parked
by the North Egmont Visitor Centre and had hiked the steep five kilometre
track up to Tahurangi Lodge it was late afternoon, too late to ascend andreturn in softening snow. It was Friday, and our flight out of Wellington wasbooked for Saturday evening. We would have no time to lose if we were to
be back to the car by midday to make the drive.
Around 4am, as we speedily cramponed up the icy north ridge by thelight of our headlamps, we felt certain of success. Conditions were perfect:
clear, cold, and still. The sun breached the horizon out to our left just before
we topped out on the ridge under the brilliant Shark’s Tooth. We crossed thecrater towards the now brightly sunlit summit cone. A chilly breeze sprang
up while we paused for summit photos, and much as we would have liked
to ice-boulder on the steep crags encircling the crater we knew we had toscurry to make it down in time. Already the surface ice had softened over a
rock-hard icy layer several inches beneath, just out of crampon point range,
and the descent proved surprisingly treacherous. My rigid crampons balled
up with great wads of wet sticky snow and I utterly trashed my axe-shaft
clearing them at every step. Eventually we removed crampons and glissaded
in long semi-diagonal tacks, quickly descending what might otherwise havetaken considerably longer.
We stopped only to pick up our remaining gear from the hut and refill
our water bottles. Like many of my other speed climbs, the final thumping
gallop below the snow-line down the hard rocky track left me with achingknees and back. I wonder whether my recently developed chronic spinal
disintegration is one of the long-term effects of such physical abuse. But ofcourse, as always, despite anxious moments in traffic and queues, we madeour flight deadline, and as our aircraft pulled its nose steeply against a stiff
Wellington headwind we finally breathed a sigh of welcome relief, my mind
busy with images of what could have gone wrong, but didn’t. This time, atleast. All was well. Really well. “Thankyou,” I breathed. Thankyou.
Thankyou.

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Paul Horne nearing the summit of Mt Egmont (Taranaki), New Zealand.

129“Failure is a relative term. Adam Cooper has collected a cornucopia of valuable fruit,
rich experiences in the mountains, and lived to tell the tale. His ‘failure’ could also be
described as resounding success.”
Keith Lockwood, Climbing Guide, Historian, Author of Arapiles: A Million Mountains“Adam was always great for company and will be forever remembered in Peru as El
Senior Grande Mountain. His adventures continued around the globe with fantastic
climbs in many countries. His book is a great read and I wish him success and fun in
the mountains for many years to come.”
Val Pitkethly, International Trekking Guide, Author of Trekking and Climbing in theAndes, Founder of Light Education Development

Adam G. Cooper is a climber, writer, outdoor athlete, and academic theologian. He wasborn in Papua New Guinea and raised in East Africa. He has climbed on six continents
over a period of almost four decades. He has written numerous books and articles onbody theology, religious history, and outdoor pursuits. This is his first climbing book.