Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'It's not too bad.' I tried to encourage him. 'Just don't look down. We're not far
off the top now, anyway.'
'Nah. Look, I'm sorry mate, it's just …' Tim was upset. Somehow he'd lost his
natural recklessness and along with it his head for heights. 'It's just like … I didn't
make it up Elbrus last year and before that, the last time I did anything really chal-
lenging in the mountains it was with Bruce. And now he's gone … I don't know.
I'm sorry. I just can't do this right now.'
'That's okay.' I thought for a moment. 'How about if I leave my pack here and
scoot up to the top. If it's good and it looks all right on the other side we can try it
then, right?'
He agreed, and I set off, much lighter without my pack; and after five minutes
of hair-raising scrambling I reached the crest.
I crouched down on an extremely narrow precipice and took in the glorious
view. An overwhelming sense of vertigo swept over me and with hundreds of
metres of steep falls on either side I couldn't trust myself to stand. It was a wonder-
ful view, though. Magnificent peaks and ridges stretching away … But hang on …
I looked again and started to recognise some of the features. I wasn't looking south
toward the peaks of the Altai in China and Kazakhstan at all; I was looking back
down at the lake where we'd camped two nights before!
We'd climbed the wrong bloody saddle! I looked around carefully and realised
that I'd practically ascended to the top of a little island peak that protruded north
from the main east-west range. We'd climbed around in a circle!
'Bugger it!' My yell resounded and echoed from a dozen different mountains. I
laughed at myself, then scrambled down to tell Tim.
The break had done him good. I told him the bad news and he grinned.
'Good thing it was you that climbed up there then and not me, isn't it?'
'Yeah … right.'
'I've been thinking, though, mate. That other saddle over there is actually lower
than we are at the moment. I reckon that maybe I'd be ready to have a go at it if we
could get over there.'
We scrambled back down the scree slope, sending hundreds of kilograms of
loose rocks catapulting loudly down before us, then traversed over to the other side
of the slope to reach the bottom of the chute leading up to the new saddle.
It was steep, but no worse than anything either of us had done before. Tim went
first and he looked a different person to the one I'd seen just a couple of hours be-
fore. He slammed his ice-axe into the hard snow that still clung to gaps in the rocks
