Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'By dawn our sleeping bags were damp, and there was no sign of a let up in the
weather. After twelve days of effort on the face we were near the end our drive. We
had only eight hundred feet to go - probably two days' work in good conditions - but
we were in no condition to sit out a storm. It was impossible to dig out a good ledge
in hard ice, and the whole face seemed a raging torrent of spindrift.'
Meanwhile a Japanese team, led by Yasuo Kato, had arrived with the intention of
making a new route directly up the Pointe Whymper. This proved too difficult,
however, so the group turned their attention to the main Central Couloir and, after
thirty-seven days of effort, succeeded in forcing an exit at the col between Pointe
Walker and Pointe Whymper. The following year, a French party consisting of Yan-
nick Seigneur, Louis Audoubert, Marc Galy and Michel Feuillarade made the first as-
cent of the direct route up to Pointe Whymper. Having prepared the route in ad-
vance, they made their final push in mid January, taking sixteen days to complete
the climb. They made use of a helicopter in stocking up with supplies and in getting
off the summit.
Thus the only line that remained was the one that had been attempted by Boning-
ton and Haston. It had been described as a line too cold for ethics. But it was a good
line, one to be followed rather than constructed, taking the easier way rather than
avoiding it; a classical sort of line, but in the modern idiom. And, above all, it was a
line without end, a plum line.
Which is why, one night when 1976 was slipping into July, Gordon Smith and I
were sniffing around in the moat beneath the 'schrund system that fronts this line.
Haston had found a way on screws on the overhangs above, but it was now French
summer time and we were most interested in beginning this affair with some mo-
mentum, rather than in indulging in a vertical takeoff. That meant a low-level girdle;
a cluttered, magical mystery tour, up hill and down dale, inspecting the winter
debris. ('Is this a foot I see before me?' You can tell he studied classics!) Fishing for
Jason the Argonaut down a mean little water-hole, stepping daintily over the bot-
tomless blue monsters, but boldly over the tottering white towers, all the while cran-
ing our necks, searching for the all-elusive easy way, for a button, a rune (so to
speak) that would lower the magic bridge from the slopes above. But the slopes
lowered an avalanche instead, so we scampered back to our happy home,
crêperie
extraordinaire
, Frenchman fantastic.
Next evening, wined and dined once again on those amazing rum omelettes, we
meandered off, budding Captain Cooks on a rolling white sea, away to stake our
claim for England's Glory, for Queen, country and the SNP. Astonishingly, we had a
plan. We would begin just before nightfall, and we would pincer, fooling this nasty
bergschrund with an outflanking manoeuvre over near the Croz and, through this
subtlety, this monstrous right hook, we would arrive miraculously,
à la
Brehm and
Rittler, and move up and under, yet essentially across, sneaking past the mouth of
the Japanese Couloir to the base of the insidious little gullet which is the key to this
issue.
