Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But somehow it just didn't work for me; the only way I could follow him up this
stuff was to pull most of it down, performing a kind of vertical front crawl.
It was some time after midnight. The moon was full, but an incessant cloud of
spindrift wafted down, and its light became a dim icy halo. We had been climbing
for eighteen hours and were beginning to feel weary and worried. Everything
looked steeper above us and there was no sign of rock or security. Thoughts of a
ledge to rest on were as remote as the beaches near Lima. We had crossed three
flutes already, each more demanding than the last and after each sift Alex man-
aged to float up another pitch or two in the hollows between the flutes before they
joined again. The snow now was shoulder deep.
Alex shouted down a warning. 'It's getting very steep. Not sure how this stuff
sticks.' I was belayed to my two axes, and so pushed them in even further, a more
or less useless gesture. But Alex was a master of this stuff. Terry King had first
commented on it during their approach to
The Shroud
on the Grandes Jorasses.
Alex had a knack of staying on the surface: 'Pretend you are Tinker Bell,' Alex ad-
vised as everyone else floundered.
Here on Nevado III, our only consolation was that if everything collapsed, it
would be over pretty quickly. We were soaked, frozen and almost discouraged. It
looked certain we would need to muster the energy to carry on through the night.
It was now one in the morning and an overhanging wall of ice crystals blocked our
passage. Alex submerged himself in the adjoining edge of the flute to the right. The
moon and its pallid halo seemed to hiss down at us.
A sudden shout from Alex: 'There's ice here. It's solid! Christ, a bivvy.'
He brought me across into a small niche of heaven. In the darkness, we had tra-
versed to the eastern edge of the south face, where exposure to the morning sun
had worked some simple magic to create a crevasse beneath an exposed rock. We
stomped down a flat area and carefully beat the snow from the ropes and each oth-
er's backs. Then we pulled our rucksacks over our feet and sat down, pressing to-
gether for warmth.
Alex and I had by now climbed together on so many occasions that we were bey-
ond the stage of needing to enjoy it. We both knew that would come later. At mo-
ments like this, it was just a matter of getting up, or getting down, or just finding a
place to sit out the night. So much in climbing depends on the state of the moun-
tain, the state of your mind, or perhaps the meal you had that morning. Each
factor might be seen or felt differently by each individual. At least tomorrow's
morning meal would not be a factor. We had no stove or food.
But for the moment, it was fine just to be able to sit. There was no point in ima-
gining how much better it would have been if we had brought a stove, a pan and a
