Imagination could scarcely paint a scene where humans have less authority. The elemental forces prevail. In this desolation the wider powers of nature despise control; as if to say “We are sovereign”. Here mankind does not look like the lord at all.
— Charles Darwin, Patagonia, 1834
A vertical sheet without horizons. Two dimensions. Up. Down.
Slide jumar up as far as it will go. Inhale. Weight foot loop. Pull with right arm. Stand up straight. Exhale. Clink. Sit down in harness. Gasp. Look up. No nearer. Slide jumar. Inhale. Weight foot. Pull. Stand. Exhale. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Slide. Clunk … Fraction point. A peg. Weight. Exhale. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Darkness. Moving points of light. Remove top jumar. Place above peg. Slide. Weight. Remove chest-jumar. Pull. Stand. Replace above peg. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Headtorch? No. Moon. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Fear. Perpetuating other thoughts. Family? Why didn’t I? Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Why did he shout at me? Said he thought I was hypothermic. Hate. Sweat. Prickles. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Why doesn’t she want me? What more can I do to convince her? Wild swings of conviction. Should I have gone to be a gold miner in Sierra Madre? The west coast of Ireland? No. Look up. No nearer. Breathe. Above laughter. Chatting. Not alone. Warmth. Food. Space. Still. A cavernous room. Spinning. Spiralling inside. Thud thud thud. Giggling. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Space. Nil comprehension. Emotion. Ever-changing. Sadness. Love. Anger.
A hundred questions. Why? Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Pain. In hand. In shoulders. In arse. Sack pulling backwards. Gasp. Again. Sleep. Ambivalence. Snap. Foos. Guts rising. Screaming. Intensifying. Gasp … Awake. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Slide. Weight. Pull. Stand. Clink. Sit. Gasp. Repeat. Again. Lamp light. A rock crystal reflecting. A mirror. Repeat. Repeat.
My jumar hits a fraction point. A peg in the corner that I am in and I am shocked back into the night. It’s 2 a.m. and we have been sliding up this line of ropes since the previous afternoon. The headlamp beam forms a mirror upon the wall. In this mirror I see the past, the present and appalling visions of the very near future. Below the rope fades limp into the darkness. Above it disappears, taut as a hawser, into the constellations of the southern night sky. Way below Sean follows. I know he’s thinking about the state of the fixed line. In this dark it’s impossible to see how much more damage our violent and unshakable companion, the wind, has made to our frail cords in the past five days of storm.
Five weeks earlier we had arrived in Chile joyful and unsuspecting, and with some glaring omissions in our badly packed equipment. Rattling down the country allowed time for our excitement to grow. Noel Craine and I were like the kids let loose, whilst Simon Yates and Sean Smith were the old hands at this world travel game. Hanneke seemed the most relaxed of us all. A Dutch woman, living in London, she had seen a fundraising slide-show of mine in the Heights, the Llanberis meeting place. Having always wanted to trek about Patagonia, Hanneke asked if she could come with us in the capacity of Sherpa, at which she was one of the stronger members of the team and very quickly became one of the gang. We went third-class on a train full of farmers lugging their crops from Santiago to Puerto Montt. Lucky as always, I found a canvas tent, which would be my home for a few months, left by the Boy Scouts under a seat.
We laughed and joked as the lush countryside floated by our window, until the train ground to a halt and we were faced with an ugly scene. Although we were only moving at twenty-five miles per hour, a campesino had stumbled onto the track right ahead of us and got under the wheels, somewhere in the Central Valley. Everyone got off the train to look as the drivers dragged out the badly mangled corpse. We were shocked by the reactions of our fellow travellers, “Un boracho,” they said, a drunk. Youths began breakdancing with ghettoblasters, a real party scene ensued and oldsters started passing around the maté, a potent stimulant drink made from herbs. It was only one year since Pinochet had been ousted and we wondered whether the people had been desensitised to death or just plain learned to live with it, and were now beginning to celebrate life again.
On the sixty-hour bus journey south across the Pampa, staring out of a dust-smeared window at the flat brown scrubland, it was easy to see how Southern Patagonia had become known as the uttermost part of the earth. Somewhere south of this monotony, over the horizon of this lens of barren soil, so level that in all directions you can make out the curvature of the world, so that it becomes simple to picture yourself on a great big ball, somewhere down there lay white and gold towers that even the most cloud-headed imagination could never dream up.
In Punta Arenas we tried to avoid sailors who wanted to drink with us. We were flattered to pose for photos and sign autographs for young women who didn’t see many blond-haired guys on the Magellan Strait. “One kiss!” they shouted to us and we were happy to oblige. We drove past millions of burnt tree stumps, the legacy of the beef industry, en route to Puerto Natales where we did our supermarket dash and bought $700-worth of food and pots and pans. Noel bought a football, keen that we should keep fit playing soccer at camp. During our first game, and much to the gauchos’ mirth, the ball punctured on a yucca plant.
When we arrived below the mountains we relaxed and partied with an American team who had been successful on the South Face of the Torre Centrale, and they gave us advice on big walling there. Eric, a huge, leglessly drunk wall veteran, told us to get up there and kick butt. We also partied with a local horseman who was to help us carry our kit to a camp high up in the beech forests. Pepe, a second-generation Croatian, and his family lived in tents in this grey and blue wilderness and, as they said themselves, had no use for the law. A man of great wisdom and few teeth, Pepe was to become our teacher in the customs and politics of Chile. He had seen many teams of climbers come and go. “Not many guys leave this place having made a summit,” he had said as the carafe of wine diminished. Later in the evening he spoke of the other days, of how Patagonia, or Magellanes, had held out longest. But of how eventually the regime took hold. “The soldiers stood on my head and cut my hair with a knife. You were not allowed to grow your hair.”
Walking behind Pepe’s horses, Noel and I raced to turn each spur to see what would confront us next in the mysterious beech forest of the Vallee Ascensio. Black woodpeckers flocked on a bush and a pair of condors arced lines about the summit of Paine Chico. “It’s like a zoo,” pointed Noel when he saw a family of guanacos trotting by. The team thought it highly amusing to nickname me Nandu after the rhea-type birds which ran about the place. “Yeah, very funny, Simon.”
At Campamento Torres we found two deserted cabins. Inside were fireplaces, black with years of use, well made botched furniture and plaques commemorating the great climbs, carved in their image with all the names scorched in below with red hot wire. In a side room off one of the cabins I found an oven made from a large square tin encased in stones and by its side a skillfully carved pizza shovel. There was even a wooden telephone which some homesick climber had lovingly whittled out, during some eternal infernal storm, to make a dream call home. I stocked the shelves of our new home, whilst Noel sorted out the wall gear with the impatience of a child – the weather was sunny and calm and we knew, from all we had heard, that it couldn’t last. We each put up our tents about the tranquil microcosm under the forest canopy. The wind could blow all it wanted outside but in here it would be calm. Our retreat. We came to know it very well.
Three days after getting off the bus we loitered below the gigantic pepper pot of the Central Tower of Paine. I hadn’t seen anything like this in my life, so overhanging for so far. It was like some kind of optical illusion, like it shouldn’t be standing, like it should be falling on us. I stumbled backwards, off balance. The other three had all done big routes before. I was the only one who hadn’t done this kind of thing. What if I let them them down? I was glad they trusted me. Noel and I were the best of friends and I knew he would always support me and help me through if I made a mess of things. I soaked up information and techniques from Simon and Sean. To me they were old hands, they seemed to know it all. They showed us how to make a snow cave and how to read the clouds, though the clouds didn’t behave as they should. All four of us were indecisive and nervous and argued about where to climb. The other face, on the west of the mountain, was only half the height of the face we were looking at but it took the full brunt of the wind. I wanted to go for the biggest face. I have always thought big and gone for the most daring option and many times I have failed, but that’s just the way it goes. The failures I have experienced far outshine the mediocre events of my life. After many hours of deliberation we stumbled upon a decision. The West Face was too far to walk and the East Face had the line.
We were the only climbers in the park. As we ferried our gear through wind and snow storms up the long talus slopes, we dined and slept in our own private forest. We now knew where we wanted to go. The steepest, smoothest and highest part of the East Face was split by a crack, but thin, too thin for fingers, for more than a kilometre. We were in awe but all agreed, over the sickly feeling this view caused, that we had to attempt this most aesthetic of lines.
Just as they had all told us, the weather was diabolical. At home that Patagonian veteran Rab Carrington shook his head and raised his eyebrows when I excitedly told him where we were off to. “What the hell d’ye want to go there for, lad?” he enquired. “It’ll just piss down for two months!” We spent our first week burrowing up the initial 300-metre apron which was buried deep beneath unstable powder snow. Under the snow we sometimes found bolts and much later, when the snow cleared, we counted sixty on rock slabs of a VS standard. We were dismayed. Who would want to do such a thing? The snow made easy pitches difficult and insecure, and spindrift and wind-blown ice ensured that all time on the wall was very uncomfortable. It was slowly becoming obvious; we had come on holiday by mistake.
We clambered onto a sloping snowy ledge just below where the face got really steep and set up a multi-storey portaledge camp. We had been warned against using ledges in Patagonia due to the fierce winds. Indeed, a past expedition to the South Tower was aborted when a large chunk of ice fell right onto a portaledge camp, breaking an occupant’s leg. But we were much too lazy to walk continually up and down the valley and, besides, the over-hangingness of the wall seemed to offer some protection. In fact, we hardly ever saw rockfall on this face and the huge pieces of ice seemed to fall horizontally with the south-westerly jetstream.
Simon pulled onto the ledge and scowled at me. “Don’t just sit there, do something.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Who did he think he was. I had been leading all day and had set up this whole portaledge camp with Noel. Now I was taking a breather for a minute or two and he just arrives and tells me to get a move on! I felt like hitting him or telling him at least I could do hard rock climbs, but I just kept quiet and held a grudge for most of that climb on the Central Tower of Paine. I couldn’t work it out. Back home in the pub he was always so relaxed and on our India tour he was easy-going when he asked me if I was into doing a big trip.
Andy Cave introduced me to him at the bar in a Harrogate hotel. I’d never been real mountaineering and I became transfixed that evening by his stories of faraway places; of Mark Miller getting beaten up by the taxi drivers in Rawalpindi because he’d spent his fare on a carpet, or the stories of tropical illness which Simon has had his share of (hepatitis, twice, or the mystery illness which, even after taking colon core samples, the doctors could never diagnose), or the many dealings on the streets of Delhi with Indian con artists. I could smell the sweet hot air, though I’d never been there. This man interested me. Now on our first big wall together I started thinking I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t want to climb with him. What if he turned on me again? For the next few days I stayed partnered with Noel.
I never confronted him about that incident by the portaledges until recently when he asked me if I could give him a few impressions of the climb for the book he was writing. I told him how I felt at the time and he replied saying he thought I was hypothermic and he was worried about me. What I mistook for a needless attack was in fact Simon showing his care for me!
I remember, a couple of years ago, climbing on a big loose and vegetated sea cliff on the Lleyn peninsula, I asked Simon why he wandered around the world so and his answer made me reconsider my own plans to keep on travelling the globe. “Hey, I’m trying to move a lot less now,” he said, looking searchingly out over the Irish Sea. “I’m only doing three or four trips a year now. I used to be on the move much more but that was because I was lost. It was something to do, there was nothing else for me. It became consumerism, like anything else, a list of places to be ticked off, and the experiences became flatter and flatter. I was searching for myself I guess.” Then he turned and looked at me knowingly: “You’ll do the same. You’ll want to step out of the fast lane and find out where you are. You’ll want a base and some stability.” That was the first time I found myself resenting him and his arrogance. How could he possibly know what I want? At the time I felt like I was being lectured, told to settle down. But later, for me, layed up with injury and illness, some of what he said, not all, rang true.
The sloping ledge was the high point for a Spanish team from Murcia who had made two expeditions to get there. Three years earlier they had abandoned nine haulbags full of gear which we had seen from below and which did play some part in our choice of route. As we rummaged in the bags we felt some twinges of guilt but these were easily cast aside as we did have the backing of the powers that be: the park rangers had enquired if we would be able to get that rubbish down off the mountain. They had been eyeing it up for years and were wondering what kind of flash clothing they might get out of it. But bootymania soon turned to disappointment as we unpacked our vertical salvage. Inside the bags were mostly very bizarre items, including a barrel with hundreds of rotting batteries, huge flags with company logos on, a transistor radio and fluorescent strip lights. What was going on? We thought with this much gear it’s no wonder they got no higher.
After a fitful night’s sleep in our portavillage, comprised of a double and two single ledges, Noel and I set to work on the hundred-metre spire above the camp. Although too overhanging to hold snow, there was much in the cracks. Noel took the first of numerous falls when he unzipped a string of bashies on an aid pitch and dived ten metres. He accused me of dropping him, which I did, but I denied it vehemently. Well, I was cold and daydreaming to relieve the boredom … And I did stop him, eventually. I ended that bout of activity by climbing an icefall in my flimsy rock slippers which froze my feet, so I packed them away not to be seen again.
The following day, while Simon and Sean worked hauling, the two ‘crag rats’ set about the Great Scoop, the formidable central feature of the line. Once again Noel tried to make swifter progress in slippers, but the intense cold forced him to lower off halfway up a pitch and don double boots. I then led on up a rotten choked up chimney. Halfway now and I was equalised on two tied off Lost Arrows, trying to arrange a blade. I heard the snapping of a hawser under tension, then more, and more. I knew what was happening, I’d been there before about thirty minutes ago, falling from the same spot. I bounced off the same ledge and landed on Noel again. He was disgruntled but still managing to smile, even though his belay was of the same wobbly pins as my placements. He seemed more upset that I had landed on him as he was rolling up his last tobacco. In time I reached another hanging stance on this great shield without the slightest foothold, a full rope-length above the last. I gobbed and it floated upwards like a spider’s web on the breeze. If I followed that strange urge, the one that everybody gets when they look over the side of the Eiffel Tower, and untied, I wouldn’t touch rock all the way to the glacier.
Christmas passed in an up and down succession of accelerating storms and retreats on ice-encrusted ropes. Weathering one forty-hour tempest in our constricted nylon tomb was to prove a particularly good insight into human relations when confronted by fear and poor personal hygiene. Through the maelstrom Noel shouted quotes from his book of quantum physics whilst I made long cigarettes from its pages. As we pondered Schrödinger’s cat, the ledge began to fly like a kite and the seams of the tent began to split. Cooking in there was a dangerous procedure and used up valuable oxygen. Condensation poured down the walls and created a kind of soup under our sleeping mats. It was infinitely preferable to be the cook than the one who went outside to collect the snow. Noel passed two pots of snow in and perched on the end of the ledge desperately trying to relieve his inertia-induced constipation. I shouted at him to hurry as the spindrift was blowing in, and in his haste he fell off into the whiteout, stopped only after two metres by his slack tether. “Lord, I’m not cut out to be a big wall climber,” he grumbled, and I giggled and shook my head as he hauled himself back into the ledge.
Then a day dawned calm and wondrous and two carbon-monoxide-poisoned figures jumared laboriously back to their high point. Noel began a huge overhanging corner with a stack of loose filing cabinets neatly slotted into the top of it. I was belaying directly below, in the path of any keyed in blocks he chose to unlock. To pass the blocks Noel first had to expand them with a pin, a delicate manoeuvre, and then aid up on micro nuts – I had nowhere to run. He would say to himself “I’m weightless. I have no mass.” Using that meditation even the most dreadful RURP placement could be forced into offering some support. Two days of worry, daydreams, fear and mind games were consumed by that pitch. I ran out another pitch up a smooth overhanging shield and arrived at the base of the Coffin, one of the few features we had seen from the ground. Again it was getting late and we could see Sean and Simon starting the long jumar 600 metres or so below. It was time to switch shifts.
For three more days the corner went on through snow storms and past false horizons. Everyone was growing weary and the twenty-four-hour attention to knots, karabiners and each other’s safety was becoming hard to sustain. Everyone had his close calls checked by his partner. But the view over the ridges into the surrounding valleys got better by the day; a little like climbing the oak in the back yard until you can see into the next-door garden.
Sean added to the collected air-miles when he stripped his gear out of an iced up chimney leading up to what was to become our top bivvy. The ground was so steep that it was an air-fall without danger. As the two ‘mountaineers’ prepared to spend the night up high, Noel and I rested at the portaledge camp, waiting nervously for a midnight start on the ropes. As we dossed and discussed relativity, we were startled by a twanging on the fixed ropes a few feet below our bed. This was weird because, aside from our friendly condors, we hadn’t seen a soul in this valley for over a month. We heard heavy breathing and then saw a pair of gloves. Then we laughed when the face of our American friend, Steve Hayward, popped up with a cheesy grin. He’d jumared 350 metres to come and have a big wall party. We salivated as he unloaded wine, beer, chocolate, bean burritos, real cigarettes and mail from our base camp manager and coach, Hanneke.
The middle of the next morning we rejoined the other half of the team, careful not to boast too openly of our gluttony. We huddled together on a piss-stained snowy ledge a thousand metres above the glacier, with Simon leapfrogging bashies up a thin seam way above. We were pitifully low on ’biners and he had nowhere near enough to clip every piece. At last, forty metres out, Simon found a good Friend placement and weighted it confidently. A scream … With our heads flung back we saw his soaring buzzard form silhouetted against the grey frothing atmosphere. He bounced and somersaulted down the corner and hit a ledge just above our heads. He made a long whine with an occasional splutter. We attempted to lower him but the ropes had become fast in the crack. We glanced at each other, terrible thoughts flashing through our minds. A serious injury here, so far from help, could turn into a right epic. He came round and answered our worried pleas with, “The rope’s stuck, I might have a broken arm. Give me a minute to sort this mess out.” As he had fallen the rope had become sandwiched in a thin crack which made it impossible for us to lower him to us right away. He acted hard, Simon has survived some terrible ordeals in his past, and soon he had got himself down to the ledge. He rolled the arm at the shoulder and it seemed OK but he was shaking. He apologised for cocking up and, in that bad situation, I found respect for him and my grudge disappeared.
Noel re-led the pitch, throwing caution through the window (in Paine the wind is too strong), and I swung through into a vice of an overhanging chimney. Massive hands of water ice grew out of the granite at bizarre angles and I wriggled in the fingers like Fay Wray in the grasp of King Kong. I pulled myself free and it was like coming up for air – there was the summit block and lesser angled ground. We were euphoric. Screaming and yelping I sent Noel up the next pitch, a hidden crack which took a big swing to find. In darkness we fixed our haul line and lead rope and slid down to the bivvy with tidings of great joy. Dinner was cold porridge and rehydration salts.
The day dawned strangely; it was too warm and very windy. Water was dripping onto us. I stood up and my sleeping mat blew away and circumnavigated the summit block like some unpiloted flying carpet. We didn’t pay too much attention to the ominous signs but within an hour a full thaw was upon us. We began by jumaring through a waterfall in the icy hands chimney. The nylon gardening jackets we had found in Noel’s parents’ garden shed had worked surprisingly well up until this point but were no match for this torrent of melting ice. Simon bravely led half a pitch but retreated, bitterly cold and in pain from the previous day’s plummet. Sean, who had decided to go for the top in his canvas hiking shoes, now had frozen feet. Added to the fact that we had no food or gas, this fuelled our decision to bail out. We slid down a kilometre of wet, deteriorating rope, but our hearts slid further. Once on the ground there is an odd mixture of emotions. We didn’t really want to go back up there, but we mouthed the words that we would. Did we try as hard as we could have done? Should we have moved faster on earlier days? All questions with no answers. We decided to escape.
We abandoned our base camp in the beech forest and ran the three hours to the roadhead, just making the last bus. Three more hours and we reached the fishing village of Puerto Natales. It was a depraved team of hill-billies that hit town. Starvation stares from behind scruffy beards and inane gruntings passing as language worried restaurant staff, who timidly placed endless plates of salmon in front of the savages, fearful of losing their hands. After a night in the bar, Sean and I visited the Mylodon Disco, a sound mountaineering decision. Reality became an obscure concept. A short while earlier we had been three pitches below the top of Torre Centrale, with all its sickly heights and violent winds. Now we were jumping to throbbing music below spinning lights of all colours. Velvet mylodons on the walls, senoritas, fluorescent liquids. Again I found myself screaming. We staggered out into the dawn and some local women helped us gain entry into another bar, though this one was obviously quite exclusive as it had no sign up and the door was locked. After a coded knock the door was answered by a blurred figure. Our friends ran away, I assume because they didn’t want to be associated with us, but we gained entry. I remember a very spartan living room with crates of alcohol. I remember ordering beer and Sean collapsing. After rifling through Sean’s pockets I had to admit to the blurred man that we couldn’t pay, so I was forced to drag Sean back into the street. I wasted some time trying to pull him down the pavement but Sean Smith is a big man. There was only one course of action – I had to abandon him.
When I eventually located the hotel I found the others having breakfast. I was in a drunken panic and quite emotional. “You’ve got to come quickly. I’ve abandoned Sean.” They ushered me out of the dining room because, they said, I was creating a scene and accompanied me to where I’d left him. When we reached the spot there was no sign of Sean, only a pile of vomit. Oh well! Sean’s a big boy now. He could look after himself. When Sean did show up in the middle of the day he described how he had woken in a strange room and how he must have been carried in by the house-owner with whom he could not converse at all. That was just one in many instances of great Chilean hospitality that I have witnessed. And so, sated, we headed back to our mountain.
Noel was becoming increasingly agitated and we were not quite sure why. It soon came out that he had told his Oxford University bosses that he was going on a short holiday to Chile. He wanted to get back to his laboratory as quickly as possible. I stole his passport in an attempt to get him to stay but he played his trump card and pulled out a second passport. Damn! We were sad to see him go. He had done more than his share of the graft and he deserved another crack. True though, the near future looked bleak.
It had been a stressful time for all of us. The seemingly endless problems which the tower and the weather had put in our way made the relations between the team progressively more tense as time had gone on. For Simon it seemed an especially stressful period. Later he revealed that he had agreed to come on the trip almost out of habit, though truthfully he felt as though he had been on the move for too many years. What else could he have done, though? This was all he had ever done – gone from one trip to the next, around the world on some frantic whirligig of tropical cities, walk-ins and mountains. He had always ploughed forwards, blinkered, not wanting to look to either side for fear of seeing … a home … a woman … some stability … a bit of cash for a change, all the things he had previously seen as a trap, a part of the rat race. Maybe there was something in it; to live like other people and not like some perpetual wandering freak. After his fall and our frightening retreat in a furious storm he also chose not to go back up there. The state of the fixed ropes worried him and there was too much to live for now his decision had been made. Fair enough, I thought. There’s no honour in dying, only image enhancement.
When my ascender hit the fraction point in the corner, I wearily removed the top clamp and replaced it on the rope above the peg. I raised my left leg in its foot loop and slid the clamp upward. With an effort I took my weight on one leg, unclipped the chest-clamp, stood up and replaced it above the peg. And so on and so forth.
At 9 a.m. Sean and I were together at the top of the ropes. The wind blew hard making shattering cracks, the likes of which we had never heard before, as the gusts exploded through the gendarmes above. At this moment the sky was blue. We had left our cabin in the forest a day earlier at 3.30 p.m. We had been moving continuously ever since. Over a few hours I led another long pitch with free bits, edging in plastic boots. I was tired of all this now and felt strangely detatched as I took risks above my gear. I was thinking about my father and his night club singing routines and how he liked to play the showman. But now I was the showman, as I took a large air-fall from a roof when I stripped a nut from a rock-ice sandwich. I had to wrestle with myself for control of my mind. There was no place for emotion here, only room for non-judgmental corrections and an awareness that an accident could have catastrophic consequences. Since the thaw the mountain had refrozen and the cracks had become choked in hard water ice. This made getting protection in time-consuming as every placement had to be chipped out. At the end of the pitch I arrived at a snowfield and above I could see old fixed ropes leading up toward the summit, not far away. This time, with the euphoria was a weary relief. But now it was certain. Just below, condors contoured the wall, shadows flitting from corner to face. Sean led through and after some mixed gullies and frozen frayed lines we wallowed onto the top. A different view! After twenty-one days on the wall we could at last look west. Lago Paine, La Fortaleza, El Escudo. The Fortress and the Shield. They appeared as hurriedly as they disappeared while the clouds shunted past with a fast-forward velocity. We were unable to stand and our eyes watered, from the wind rather than with tears of joy.
On the first abseil the ropes got stuck in some jumble of boulders so Sean had to reclimb the top pitch to release them. That wasted a lot of time and we didn’t land on our top bivvy ledge until midnight. I immediately fell into slumber, whilst Sean kept waking me up with brews to rehydrate us. With the daylight came our early morning alarmstorm. The wind blew vertically, which made the already desperate task of cleaning a kilometre of rope, and dismantling a camp with only two people, even more desperate. Our ropes spiralled and twisted above us in the updraft, searching for crevices and flakes to hook onto and forcing us several times to cut them. In my haste I raced ahead a couple of pitches to a ledge and waited for Sean, but he didn’t show up. After an age I leaned out and spotted him fighting with the ropes up in the foaming cloud. I shouted but my voice was ripped away from me. I could only wait. After an hour Sean slid to my side and went crazy. “I needed you up there and you just buggered off,” he bawled in my face. “You were supposed to take the loose ends of the rope down to stop them blowing away. They fucked off round the corner and got stuck in a crack. It took me ages to free them.” I apologised and felt ashamed. I had rushed things and put Sean at risk. Down to the base I tried extra hard to please, doing more than my fair share of the work. But we were focussed now on getting back to warmth and safety as we rappeled over the ice-coated rocks of the lower slabs. We descended the glacier in the night, front-pointing on twenty degree ice to avoid being swept away by the wind. And when we crept back into the forest in the early hours we didn’t wake the others. In the morning Hanneke and Simon came into my tent and told me they were happy for us. I got tearful and went back to sleep. Celebrations didn’t commence until a few days later.
Down in the meadow we were relaxing with Pepe and his family when we heard news of the imminent arrival of a Murcian expedition. There could only be one and they had probably already seen their clothes being modelled by the park rangers. We prepared for the confrontation by hiding when they arrived. Sean and I hid in a bush and watched the Murcians unpacking their two jeep-loads of gear and setting up camp. We began to get worried when they started to practise Kung Fu. What had they got in mind for us? The inevitable happened round at Pepe’s shack one night and the four unhappy Spaniards came out of the darkness. It started with hand-shakes but soon degenerated into a shouting match. After informing us that their leader was so upset that he had had to go to hospital because his stomach ulcer was flaring up, they then demanded to look in our tents. Sean wasn’t having any of this and, seemingly growing in the firelight, barred their way. What he wanted to know was why they used sixty bolts on the first 300 metres of easy slabs. A small scuffle broke out but no one was really willing to attack Tres Platos, the name by which the local gauchos knew Sean in respect of the inordinate amounts of food he could put away. We had nothing to give the Murcians. The few bits and bobs of clothing had been distributed among the gauchos and the rangers. The Spaniards left, hating us. Sean and I felt terribly guilty and left our ropes for the climbers, although they did seem to have arrived very well equipped. That was the last we saw of them, though we did hear that they went straight back home without attempting anything.
We named our climb El Regalo de Mwono, which means The Gift of Mwono, after the Tehuelche god who lives amongst those frozen steeples. The Tehuelche are gone now, wiped out by the settlers, many of them hunted down like animals. They chose never to set foot in the mountains for fear of inflaming the wrath of Mwono3 but I knew that one of them, perhaps a young agile, dirty lad, dressed in a guanaco skin, would not have been able to suppress his curiosity and will have ventured forth and explored and hunted below the great cliffs. Though I doubt whether he will have considered climbing them. The gift was the climb, not the booty which caused so much bad feeling, and we felt honoured to be granted such a gift.
3 Mwono is misspelt as Mwoma in many journals and on the plaque in the Torres Hut.