– Chapter 1 –

Turning Point

I didn’t climb mountains because I was brave, I climbed them because I was afraid. The fear of falling, of being buried alive by an avalanche, or being crushed to a pulp by collapsing cliffs, were nothing compared to my fear of not being enough. Frailty is easily hidden behind a mountain’s big reputation. So, duelling with death, that’s where I tucked mine.

I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. When I opened my eyes, I was underneath one. In the first daylight of the year I could see its rusting belly, the drive shaft, its barrel-shaped fuel tank. The stench of old oil was nauseating. Next to my head a fat treadless tyre swelled beneath the weight of the dilapidated truck. If it rolled I would be crushed, perhaps that would make me feel better.

A shard of light pressed through a gap in the garage door and laid down next to me, a frigid reflection of the snow outside. I shifted in my sleeping bag, accidentally nudging Steve who made a noise that sounded like remorse. He rocked his head up to remind himself where he was. His face was a crumpled green as he turned to face me.

‘Your eyes look like piss-holes in the snow,’ he croaked, trying to grin. Steve’s broad Bristol accent was barely discernible.

‘What a night,’ I replied, throat like gravel. ‘Now it’s payback time.’ Each word was separated by a painful pulse in my head.

‘I’ve got a nasty feeling we made a plan last night. God, I hate alcohol.’

‘Happy New Year,’ I said. I really wanted it to be, because I’d made myself a resolution, the same one I made last year.

Fighting wicked hangovers, we grudgingly packed up our sleeping gear and shoved open the garage door. Bright white light charged in from the ground and the sky, illuminating our bedroom. Blimey. I had little recollection of how we got there. The last thing I could remember clearly was partying in the Bar Nationale and dancing in the snow-covered street outside. Oh yes, and a French girl who I’d asked to take me home. Obviously that didn’t work. I sighed inwardly. 1981. Another year had ticked by and I still hadn’t rid myself of my embarrassing secret.

Several hours later Steve Monks and I plodded the last few steps through deep snow up the railway track to Montenvers. It was deserted. Only mad dogs and Englishmen. Most sane people would be languishing in the bars and restaurants back in Chamonix, outwardly frustrated but secretly pleased that the sky was overcast and unappealing. All those hundreds of climbers shaking off their hangovers, while we were up here all alone with only our own hangovers for company.

Soon after Chamonix disappeared behind a bend in the railway track, the Mer de Glace came into view. The glacier was almost all white, a great frozen fiord winding between the spires of the Mont Blanc Massif. Far away at the head of the valley, the glacier climbed up to meet a sheer wall of speckled black and white. That was where we were heading, to the north face of the Grandes Jorasses.

The old hotel had an open room in the basement, so at least we had some shelter for the night. We only had six days’ food and fuel so we tried not to use any. Who knows how long the climb would take, especially with this poor weather?

The next day we clambered down the iron ladders on to the glacier, feeling much better after an alcohol-free night. The snow cover made it hard going, our boots breaking through a meringue-like crust and sinking knee deep into soft mushy stuff underneath. We were thrashing our way across a gargantuan pavlova. Every now and then I’d scoop some up, squeezing the air from it before popping it into my mouth like a lolly. It tasted of the mountains, cold and fresh. It made my teeth ache.

I’d been this way before when I climbed another route on the Grandes Jorasses, the Walker Spur, but that was in the summer when the going was much easier. Then it took a few hours to reach the foot of the climb, now it was taking a few days. We took turns to break the trail, changing over frequently as leading was so much more tiring than stepping into the leader’s footprints. The pavlova was not at all sweet, and by the time darkness descended and snow began to fall, it was positively bitter. There were no old decrepit trucks here so we broke a rule and slept beneath a large rock. We’d both heard the story of the Irish lad who’d done the same on this very glacier; the ice shifted during the night and so did the boulder he was sleeping under. He never woke up. We wondered which rock it was, whether he was still there.

It was still snowing in the morning. The tops of the mountains were obscured by the off-loading clouds, everything we could see was cold and grey and lifeless. The closest shelter was the Leschaux Hut, further still up the glacier. If we could get there we’d be well placed for an attempt on the climb when the weather improved.

The wind turned vicious, hurling snowflakes against our ski masks as we stumbled towards the edge of the glacier. We found a few crevasses, when a foot didn’t stop going down but kept going until stopped by a crotch, or the base of a rucksack. I’d pull my dangling foot out and look into the blackness of a bottomless hole. Somewhere deep inside this glacier was our friend Arnis Strapcans. He and Steve were leading lights of the Bristol climbing scene and they’d been a powerful climbing partnership. The previous summer Arnis had disappeared on a solo mission to climb Mont Blanc. He most likely fell into a crevasse. Looking into the cold dark hole I thought of Arnis’s face, his curly blond hair, intelligent blue eyes and wicked humour. His trademark sign-off was, ‘Have fun, or get hurt real bad!’. The Latvian bombshell was a one-off who’d touched many lives. We’d all wept for him.

We were lucky to find the hut. Only the roof was visible, the little veranda at the front being full of snow. We dug out the door and fell inside, taking a good deal of snow with us. After two days of floundering around on the glacier, it was a relief to have a roof over our heads. The hut was a ramshackle affair, little more than a shed with a line of bunks along the back wall. The water supply was frozen so we had to melt snow. We found a catering-sized tin of potato powder and lived off it for the next four days while we waited in vain for an improvement in the weather. Most of the time we rested, dozed and slept in the warmth of our bulky sleeping bags. Occasionally, we talked; mostly about climbing, sometimes about girls. Steve was considerably more experienced on both counts.

One forlorn evening, while we tucked into a cheerless meal, a sad thought crept in from the cold. ‘I was thinking about Arnis. What do you think happened to him?’

Steve knew Arnis better than I did, and I valued his opinion.

‘We can only surmise can’t we,’ replied Steve, resignation in his tone. ‘I don’t know what route he was trying. Something on the Brenva Face, but he may not have even got there. Lots of big crevasses up there.’

‘That’s the trouble with soloing isn’t it? There’s no one to tie on a rope with. Damn spooky walking across a glacier on your own!’

Steve was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. Then he said, ‘Did you hear about Jon Krakauer when he soloed the Devil’s Thumb in Alaska? He used a pole about five or six metres long tied to his harness and carried it like a tightrope walker. When he fell into a crevasse, which he frequently did, he was stopped by the pole.’

‘Pity Arnis didn’t do that,’ I sighed. ‘I keep thinking about that time we were on the Supercouloir, you with Arnis, and me with Marius the Viking. Sometimes Arnis and I were climbing side by side, front-pointing up the ice wittering on like idiots about how ‘super’ the climb was!’

We laughed briefly without mirth, the sound fading into the dull ache of an old wound. I returned to the present, which was almost as bleak.

‘Wish we had something else to eat other than this cardboard powder stuff. Do you really think it’s potato?’

‘Whose turn is it to make a brew?’

‘Yeah, I know it’s my turn.’ After delivering tea to Steve I wriggled back into my bag.

‘How’s it going with Liz?’ Liz was Steve’s live-in girlfriend, they’d been together for as long as I’d known him.

‘Okay I s’pose.’ Steve never gave much away, but was always ready to give well-meaning advice to others. ‘‘Bout time you got yourself a girlfriend isn’t it?’

It had been ‘about time’ for a few years now, but it didn’t seem like it was up to me. God knows I’d tried. Girls baffled me, they scared me more than mountains. I’d nearly died half a dozen times yet I’d keep going back for more. How could asking a girl out be scarier than that? Yet it was. Performance anxiety and the fear of rejection had locked me in a steel cage of self-doubt. It was my curse. Now I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin and I didn’t want anyone to know.

‘It would be good to have a proper girlfriend,’ I replied. Careful now, I told myself, don’t give anything away. Was that sufficiently vague?

‘Okaay’, drawled Steve, smiling. ‘Anyone in particular in mind?’ He was pointing his trademark grin straight at me, eyes laughing. Steve loved a bit of Bristol gossip.

‘Dunno really. I quite like Ness at the shop.’ Whoa! That was a punt! Hope you’re not setting yourself up for a fall!

‘Oh! She’s nice. Why don’t you ask her out?’

‘Yeah, I might....