The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 9

  Above, the climb became very exposed and the void below our climbing boots seemed to have a magnetic quality as if trying to pull us into the depths of the couloir. I could see Don above. He had let Paul lead and somehow both ropes had got threaded through the karabiners with the result that Paul couldn’t now haul the rucksacks. Don had two of these on his shoulders and was climbing an overhanging pitch free, with his fingers hooked through the loops of the wedges. We heard him yell for the rope to be taken in, for there was slack, probably caused by friction through the runners. A peg he was holding on to with two fingers of his left hand was slowly coming out, but with a burst of energy he grabbed a small wooden wedge above and succeeded in fighting his way to the stance. He said later that this pitch had caused him more exertion than the rest of the climb put together.

  A couple of hundred feet above, there was a pendulum move across the wall from a flake. Actually, it was a tension traverse where we swung across a vertical smooth wall holding on to a short rope secured to a piton above; an exhilarating experience when there’s 2,000 feet of fresh air beneath boots that don’t have anything to stand on.

  After a short steep chimney we found ourselves on a luxurious ledge and as it was now late in the afternoon we decided to call it a day. Walter and Richard had gone up some eighty feet to a further small platform, which they informed us was quite adequate for their humble needs.

  We consulted our abbreviated bible, Bonatti’s description, and discovered that we had made good progress. It was obviously the wise decision to take advantage of this horizontal haven in such blank verticality. Directly above, the rock rose in one mighty sweep as high as the Empire State Building.

  One of the fascinating aspects Himalayan and Alpine climbing have in common with hitting your head against a wall is that it’s wonderful when you stop. Not that you hate the process of actually climbing, but when you settle down for the night in some airy bivvy, you have time to reflect and collect yourself, and, if it’s a good evening, soak in the view. At such times one almost feels like a bird – like Tennyson’s eagle, clasping the crags, lord of all you survey. It was such a night on our bivvy ledge on the South-West Pillar. The lights of Chamonix twinkled like a fairground, and across the valley above tourist-deserted Montenvers, the Grépon and Charmoz stood to attention in the twilight. My thoughts took me back to when I was a young lad traversing those peaks solo.

  Actually, I was following the famous French guide, Lionel Terray, who allowed me to tag along behind him and his current client. In this way I gained alpine experience and he kept a fatherly eye on me.

  That particular excursion, however, had a drastic ending. We had reached the top of the Charmoz and I was following them down in a series of abseils, when the sling I was abseiling from snapped. It had held for both of them. I fell about forty feet, fortunately stopping on a small ledge. Lionel, who was a few hundred feet lower, saw me fall and was with me in ten minutes.

  I had injured both feet and my knees had jack-knifed into my eye sockets with the impact, so that I couldn’t see. Lionel was obviously going to require help to get me down and after ascertaining that I could descend on a rope, decided to get me below the main difficulties and then go for help. He couldn’t abandon his client though, who was looking anxious, no doubt concerned at being left on his own.

  With Lionel telling me where hand and footholds were, I moved down stiffly and painfully. I could face in all right, but couldn’t put weight on my heels. I could just see through a red film; but we both realised that I would have to be carried back to Montenvers. I couldn’t walk on level ground. Lionel spotted the guide Raymond Lambert on the Grépon and shouted to him to come and assist. In some twenty minutes Raymond and an aspirant guide joined us. In such distinguished company I had made steady progress back down to Montenvers.

  My ruminations were cut short by the need to make our 9.00 pm signal to our friendly stationmaster. In a few minutes answering flashes winked up at us. It was comforting to know that down there, across the Mer de Glace, someone cared and took the trouble to keep in touch.

  Don and Paul also had their stove roaring and the aroma of soup and compo wafted luxuriously around the Pillar. It was so peaceful. I can still recall thinking that when there was a hideous cacophony of falling rocks; they were below, piling into the couloir, sending up showers of sparks. They took ages to sweep down the rock and ice of this bowling alley and presently the appetising smell of soup was replaced by the pungent smell of brimstone, a smell to me associated with death and destruction.

  “Just as well that bloody lot didn’t roll this morning,” Don remarked drily, “there wouldn’t have been much of us left.”

  All was quiet again, even more so after that shattering interlude. Then a high-pitched whine, like a ricochet from a sniper’s bullet, cut through the silence. It had that confident, predestined note, which we all felt meant it was destined for us. I was the prime target. The rock bit into my scalp like a blow from a stone axe, catapulting me forward under its impact so that I was left hanging from my belay. Momentarily I was stunned. Instinctively my hands went to my head and I could feel warm blood oozing between my fingers. I can’t remember a great deal of what happened next, but I gather that Chris, who had a wound dressing in his rucksack, pressed it over the gash to stem the bleeding and tied it under my chin.

  Seating arrangements were changed and we all huddled back against the wall of the Pillar, out of range of any other stray missiles. I was poised above Chris in a shallow groove and several times during the night I slumped unconscious on top of him. It was cold and I for one was in no state to think of tomorrow, but the others did. There was no question of retreat, the couloir was just too dangerous and it would have been difficult to abseil down the Pillar in any case, due to the traverses we made on the ascent.

  In the morning we unfolded like newly exhumed zombies, our joints cold and stiff.

  Chris asked, “How are you feeling, Hamish?”

  “Not a bundle of fun, Chris, but I’ll get by.” I must have looked a mess, for Richard, who was above, sharing a perch with Walter, turned pale when he first looked down.

  We had a brew and Chris suggested that Don should rope up with me as he was the strongest member of the party.

  “I’ll take out the pegs with Paul, Don.”

  “Aye, all right,” Don looked thoughtful. “That may be the best policy. You think you’ll make it, Mac?”

  “I’ll have a go,” I said, trying to muster confidence. “Not many alternatives, are there?”

  The Austrians had already started and the ring of pegs being driven home echoed from the rock. Walter was fighting his way up a line of grooves which scored the otherwise smooth face of the Pillar. It was climbing of a high order and Walter demonstrated his talent for pegging by inserting each new peg at the absolute limit of his reach, and he was tall. Sometimes it was possible to get finger jams and if it hadn’t been for my nocturnal mishap I could even have enjoyed it. As it was, from time to time I could feel the Dru and my surroundings slipping away from me as I lapsed into wonderful unconsciousness where, for a minute or so, all was peaceful. Don played me like a sluggish fish, not giving me an inch of slack and exerting a persistent and welcome tension, and on the hardest sections literally hauling me up.

  I looked up to where Walter and Richard were spreadeagled on the smooth red wall. For the last half-hour Walter had been requesting more and more pegs.

  “That’s the bloody lot,” Don yelled up as he tied on the last six pitons which Chris had extracted below – a strenuous and frustrating task.

  “You watch my rope, Hamish, if you can, and I’ll take a mosey round the corner to the right, there must be a bloody easier way than up there.”

  In a couple of minutes he came into view again, a small broad figure with his large rucksack making him look like a hunchback gorilla.

  “It’s this way,” he jerked a thumb, a wide grin on his face, “up the biggest overhang in the three kingdoms
.”

  When I went round to join him I saw this was no exaggeration. A great roof hung over the face up which ran a crack punctuated with wooden wedges in various degrees of decay. My heart seemed to stop, for I realised that I just didn’t have the reserves to climb it.

  Walter was recalled, de-pegging the long pitch as he abseiled. He had put a tremendous amount of work into attempting that terrifying red wall, all to no avail.

  I secured myself to a small chockstone in a daze and craned my neck backwards to where Don was now swinging from the wedges. It seemed as easy for him as climbing stairs. I had to give up watching after a time, for it hurt my head. Presently the others joined me on my small ledge.

  “What’s it like above?” Chris shouted up.

  “A bit steep, send up some more pegs.”

  “It’s getting late,” Chris yelled back. “It’s almost seven o’clock and it’ll soon be dark.”

  I could see Don looking at his watch.

  “I’ll come down,” he returned. “We can bivvy on the ledges where we spent most of the afternoon.”

  He pulled the two ropes up through the pegs and lowered them, where they hung out beyond us in space. When he abseiled he had to swing in and Walter fielded him and pulled him on to our ledge.

  We climbed down to the wider ledges, feeling despondent that we had made so little progress that day. Don had virtually pulled me up every pitch and I was feeling a burden to the party. But it was a matter of carrying on and not giving up, and I only hoped I would feel stronger in the morning. Chris signalled to the stationmaster, just the usual signal – we were continuing.

  It was a night which didn’t seem to end.

  I huddled in a crack above the others with a peg belay behind me because I didn’t want to descend any more than I had to, and Paul sent up my dinner, two bangers, on the rope. Anyhow, I suppose in some ways I fared better on my perch than Chris. He shared Don’s bivvy bag and as Don was a chain smoker and Chris a non-smoker, one puffed and the other coughed all night. We hadn’t had anything to drink since the previous morning and our throats felt swollen and sore. The cold was insidious, seeking out every chink and gap in our bivvy sacks and, as we were hidden from the morning sun, it took ages to sort out the frozen ropes and to thaw our boots. Breakfast was an oatmeal block which looked and tasted like plastic wood.

  Don suggested to Walter that he should lead.

  “I’m going to have to help Hamish up this.” He pointed a gloved finger in the direction of the roof. “It’s a bit strenuous.”

  I watched Walter climb. He seemed to have tremendous drive and literally threw himself at a climbing problem; usually he got up – but not always. He later told me of his attempt on the North Face of the Cima de Laveredo, when he fell from the second pitch and plunged the total length of the rope, a fall of 300 feet. At the full extension of the nylon he just touched the scree at the base of the climb and escaped with minor injuries. I felt envious as I watched him snap off icicles to suck as he climbed the overhang.

  It seemed to take me ages to get up that pitch. Don couldn’t give much assistance and from time to time I passed out. It was strange coming to again to find myself swinging from a rope threaded through pegs and wedges – a reversal of the normal nightmare situation, here reality was the nightmare. Chris coming up just behind was a comfort, he described me as “hanging like a corpse from a gibbet”.

  Above the roof was another, but not so overhanging. I was part way up, thanks to Don’s persistent tension on the rope, when the sun hit me. It was now the time of day when more sensible people were sitting down to lunch and there was considerable power in those life-giving rays. Before I reached Don’s ledge the heat was beginning to get to me and Chris, who was still wearing his duvet jacket, found it almost unbearable. It seemed amazing in so short a span of time to suffer such extremes of temperature.

  Paul was behind Chris de-pegging the overhangs. I sat recuperating while Don made a brew using ice he had found in a crack, his dixie piled up with this frozen aggregate, for it had a high gravel content. I heard a call from below and peered over the edge. It was Chris. He had reached a peg on a hard blank pitch and was feeling shattered with the combination of cold, heat and dehydration. He asked for a top rope. In a couple of minutes he had tied on to this and joined us on the ledge, his eyes lighting up when he saw the brew – even if it was only a gritty mouthful each.

  It was a strange situation. There was now standing room only, as the ledge was the area of a kitchen chair and with three of us on it everything had to be done by numbers. Walter and Richard were still ahead, and from what Don told us they were having trouble route finding.

  Five minutes later we heard a cry from above. It was Walter. He had found the right line and was almost at the Shoulder, he said. The top of the Bonatti Pillar was close at hand, hallelujah!

  I remember finding the last pitch of the climb desperately strenuous. With each new rope length my energy had ebbed. I felt completely done in, with a dull diesel-like throb in my head, realising that I couldn’t go much further. Don kept saying that each pitch was the last – the very last and definitely the last. At least he kept me moving. Lines from “Hassan” ran through my mind – “Always a little further: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow.”

  Not that the ultimate pitch was particularly hard. I simply seemed to have used up all my steam.

  During the day we hadn’t noticed that the weather was getting progressively worse. Now leaden clouds were seeping in from the south and the wind had a razor’s edge to it. It didn’t need a prophet to tell us that we were in for bad weather.

  The snow started to fall steadily and heavily and soon everything was blotted out. I remember seeing the Grandes Jorasses being swallowed in a white froth of cloud. We bivouacked on the broken rocks close to the summit. Don knew the route over the top of the mountain, but he felt that this would be too dangerous in the present weather. Walter, on the other hand, had gone down directly from where we were when he completed the West Face route the previous year, and felt that he could find the way. But not today, or rather that evening, for it was essential to get into our bivouac sacks to avoid being frozen. In ten minutes we were tied to our pegs, tethered like cowed dogs.

  It was an even worse bivvy than the previous night: bitterly cold, and the fine driven snow seemed to find every cranny and tear in our bags so that we were first soaked, then frozen as if set in casting resin. Our only food was one packet of soup divided by six. There was not a great deal to be cheerful about; no joy in having climbed the route, only a numbed realisation that we had got up, but what was now much more important was to get down, and fast, for we knew that we couldn’t survive long in such conditions.

  We witnessed dawn through storm clouds. It was still snowing and everything was plastered: a world of white and metallic-looking ice. The ropes were again frozen solid and our plastic bivvy bags, now the worse for wear, cracked like celluloid when we tried to fold them.

  Walter led the descent of the West Face, abseiling into a white nothingness on slippery ropes. The wind was so strong now that we could barely communicate. We had gone down about four rope lengths when Don, who had an acute instinct for danger, called a halt.

  “Walter,” he shouted, “I think you’re wrong. This is too dicey for the descent route.” Indeed it was becoming desperately steep.

  The Austrians, snow-covered figures on a minuscule ledge, were another rope length down.

  “I think you are correct, Don. We will try further to the right.”

  But they had trouble joining us again, and when they came alongside I could see that Richard was in a bad way, suffering from exhaustion and exposure. Don and Chris had already set off on the proper descent line.

  Now, for some strange reason I was feeling stronger, possibly because I was descending, which required less effort, and I was probably more used to these abominable conditions with my Scottish background of blizzard and flood than our Aus
trian friends.

  I tried to help Richard as best I could, while Paul and Walter were preparing the abseil belays. Walter had fallen when coming up from the low point of his descent and appeared in a nervous state. Now he launched himself on the next abseil. I could see, as if in slow motion, what was about to happen but my brain wasn’t working fast enough to prevent it. He had looped a sling round a sharp spike of rock so that there was no slack, and his abseil rope was threaded through this so that when he put his weight on the doubled rope the tight sling was under great strain. It snapped when he was a few feet down, but luckily Richard, who had him on a top rope, prevented a very nasty accident.

  I heard a call from Don below. “The Flammes de Pierre, Chris. We’re on the right route now.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. With my revival I could now grasp the seriousness of our situation, but in fact the worst was behind us. Both Walter and Richard, who had got into such a physical and mental state, possibly through lack of food, now responded like a pair of huskies that had scented home base.

  Abseil followed abseil, and with the lower altitude the wind dropped and we came out of the snow clouds. It was still miserable, but we could see the broad couloir below and shortly afterwards the hut.

  We decided not to stay at the Charpoua hut that night, but carried on in the gathering dusk to Montenvers where we ate and ate until we finally staggered off to our sleeping bags at the Chalet Austria. Above, a great storm raged in the Aiguilles, but we didn’t give a damn.

  It was the end of my holiday for I had to return to Britain nursing a fractured skull; an injury which with its legacy of headaches and blackouts was to remind me of our Dru epic and for ever make me grateful to Don, without whose help I may have remained on a lonely ledge on the Bonatti.

  I had been fortunate to be with some of Europe’s leading alpinists who knew exactly what had to be done when I cracked my skull on the Bonatti Pillar. We rescued ourselves. At that time perhaps you might say we had little option to do anything else.