I had arrived in Aragon and it was with a nervousness I felt
I knew well that I punched in the six figures. Why was I calling him? I needed to talk but I didn’t know if he would want to.
I had met Pepé twice before. The first time, in Madrid Airport, I had noticed the expedition T-shirts and, like a spy, edged nearer to see where they were heading. Luckily the T-shirts weren’t heading to Cerro Torre’s East Face (where we were) but to La Catedrál. The next encounter was on a narrow trail by the side of Paine’s Lago Nordenskold. He and Lorenzo Ortiz approached and babbled, their eyes staring somewhere above and behind us. They were escaping the mountains after completing a new climb, Cristal de Roca, on La Catedrál’s East Face. Two months of precarious aiding, balancing around on a 3000-foot wall and jumaring fraying lines in awful winds would be enough to give any one of us the 2000-yard stare. So now, as the phone rang, he was a stranger to me but I felt as though I knew him. We shared something more than just the common bond of climbing or even the closer bond of Patagonian climbing, the shared experience of the wind and the waiting.
The telephone rang. Would he feel the same way? Beads of sweat broke out on the palms of my hands.
“Hola, Pepé. Esta Paul Pritchard aqui. Estoy en Riglos y quiero verte,” I spoke in faltering Castillano.
Do you remember his big lumbering way, his utter motivation, his daftness and his smile? How nothing was ever taken seriously, how generosity wasn’t a word in his vocabulary – whatever was his was common? How anyone would struggle to keep up with him on an approach? Philip said that on Torre Centrale he’d never seen a lead like it – out there on a vertical wall crimping tiny edges with the spindrift burying his knuckles. And …? And have they found him yet?
“Yes, Riglos is wonderful.” I hadn’t said what I’d wanted to but I hoped there would be time. “See you tomorrow.”
Pepé’s full name is José Chaverri. He arrived at Riglos with his partner Xavier at 6 p.m. and, as they were off to the eastern fjords of Baffin Island in a week’s time and he hadn’t climbed all year because he had to work for the money to pay for such an expensive trip, he was keen to climb. So without hanging around (and in true Spanish style) they set off up the thousand-foot overhanging face of El Pison. Darkness saw them on the summit without headtorches – so we all went to bed, as they made the long rappel descent, safe in the knowledge that, although slightly unorthodox, they could look after themselves. The next day I was off the ground and we didn’t talk. Well just once. “I don’t know if they’ve found him either.” Sometimes the will to climb is paramount. Almost anything can be delayed. This is understood, indeed expected, amongst climbers.
Sat in a darkened room the hypnotic click-click of the projector beckons us into Pepé’s memories as they are cast onto the wall. He first shows his slides of the Kurtyka/Loretan and then the Slovene route on Trango Tower. Astonishingly, he climbed both of these routes in one trip, though for him these memories seem a little tainted.
“Too much fixed rope. On the Kurtyka dangerous snow means we don’t stand right on summit and on the Slovene we forget our headlamps and get benighted only thirty metres below.”
He seems almost more lackadaisical than a British climber but wears his inner drive on the outside. As he smokes perhaps his fortieth cheap cigarette of the day he informs us in dislocated English, “For make expedition the physical is not so importante. It is the motivation.”
This talk of motivation and the click of the projector onto Patagonia makes my reason for coming here surface again. He had been mentioned now and again over the last few days but the mutual ice was hard to break. Teo – perhaps it’s better if they don’t find him. The memories flash onto the wall, each one punctuated by stark white light. Motivaciones Mixtos on Cerro Standhardt was their big new route together. Photos of golden granite glistening with trickles of water, front-pointing up ice-choked cracks. Immense, weird mushrooms of snow. For Pepé it was a departure from the siege tactics used on Trango and Catedrál. Eight times they walked up the miles of glacier and began the route, each time to be thwarted by storms. Teo’s unwavering motivation and fine sense of the ridiculous ensured that going home was definitely not an option. Then, at last, after climbing the lower pitches for the God-knows-how-many’th time, they found themselves swinging past each other in the sunshine. In the ultimate lightweight style they carried no sleeping bags or stove, only a small bag of food and a spare jacket each.
A thick cloud of smoke is illuminated in the cone of light between the projector and the dangerously thawing ice formations of the headwall. After a long hard day where, to pay for the good weather they were receiving, the pair had to struggle through rapidly deteriorating snow conditions, they found a bivouac site below the headwall. Their clothing had become soaked after climbing through the meltwater and Teo had dropped the food bag. When light came again they warmed themselves up to another day of heat and decomposure of the mountain. There was only one thing to do and that was to continue. The 200-metre headwall was mixed free and aid on rock running with water amidst a barrage of ice blocks and always under the shadow of the grotesque and unstable summit mushroom. Like ostriches they minimised the risk by building belays under small overhangs. As the slides took us higher I pondered over the results of chance meetings between certain individuals and the dynamics which lead to such ludicrous schemes being undertaken. If fate plays no part, as scientists will have us believe, then chance is the most wondrous thing in our world.
On the final pitch as Teo aided on axes around the last overhang a few more molecules turned back to water. A fridge-size block of ice plunged down the wall and landed in Teo’s lap, ripping every notch in his daisy chain, crushing his hands and tearing the muscles and tendons in the whole of one leg. With Teo’s backing, Pepé made him safe and completed the pitch onto the summit snow. Then, metre by metre, the descent became a slow misery. Teo couldn’t open a karabiner or shout directions and, occasionally, he would lose consciousness. No more slides appeared now. They had planned on rappeling the route down to the ramp of the original route, where they had bivouacked, and then descend, more or less on foot, the original route. As Teo could not walk, Pepé decided they would rappel straight down.
They had brought a very meagre amount of equipment for their lightweight ascent and were slowly using it all up on the endless rappels. Into the night they slithered. At the end of every rope-length into unknown territory Pepé built a belay with whatever kit they had left. Sometimes it would be one peg, in one inch. Twice the ropes got stuck and Pepé had to jumar up on unattached lines to free them. He placed their very last piton for their very last rappel and they collapsed to sleep out on the glacier. Pepé came round to find they were in a dangerous situation. Teo needed to get to hospital, he was hypothermic and his leg had swollen badly, though only twenty-one years old, he was already showing the mental skills necessary to be a survivor. Together they stumbled and crawled in the early morning light across the glacier to the Norwegian bivouac boulder where they had stashed food and sleeping bags. Ermanno Salvaterra, the Italian Patagonia expert had been watching their progress through the telescope from the Bridwell camp and, realising they were moving slower than was normal, had raced up to the bivouac to offer assistance. Soon they were in a helicopter heading for Calafate. That was in ’94.
Pepé then talked about the local people who live in El Chalten, a desolate outpost at the foot of the mountains and, from the warmth and tone of his voice, his love for everything about Patagonia became evident.
“The rescue cost $1500 and we had no money. The people of El Chalten each put $100 to help Teo. He was well liked there.”
An exhalation of sadness fell through the darkness, like the room had sighed and, momentarily illuminated in the stark whiteness, Pepé seemed more than his twenty-six years.
I drifted off to the Andean climbs I had made with Teo. The new rock climbs on La Pyramida above Bariloche. I could see him again on the end of a long loop of rope superimposed on the blue. Was Blood, Snot and Farts the best route name we could come up with? There were no such epics, though, and I felt jealous: I wanted to share the real intensity, too. But those pangs were dispersed as Pepé spoke.
“It was not as un compañero de climbing but as a life friend that I loved Teo. He is like a brother.”
At first, when I felt the nervousness, I had no idea what we would talk about over Teo. I just guessed they would be important things. Big words that would make some sense of it all. In reality the words came out flat. The same words I had heard in a thousand movies. But later I found that if I didn’t try so hard and just sat back and listened to Pepé’s stories, that was enough. It is in those tales, shared and exaggerated, that our dead friends live on. Click.
“It was in ’91 when I made Cerro Torre and Poincenot, and then FitzRoy with Teo. He only had seventeen years then.”
The last slide was of a very large and very blurred limestone buttress in the Aragon Pyrenees.
“And this is where we will go and climb.”
The alarm sounded at 5 a.m. I crawled out of bed hungover and cursing the fact that we had only had dinner five hours ago, but this is the way Pepé and his friends always seem to behave. It had transpired the night before that we were to attempt the third ascent of the 350-metre Pillar de Sobarbe on La Peña Montañesa which had taken three days to climb on the first ascent. During the evening Pepé had tried to contact Lorenzo (who had made the second ascent) to get an over-the-phone topo. He failed, so we would go with no idea of what might happen. After a high-speed slog up the scree slope in the darkness I was nearly vomiting and sweating heavily. We reached the foot of the route at dawn and I was shocked, as the buttress took shape, to discover that it was like 1200 feet of Stoney Middleton!
The pitches fell by and the rock was horribly loose – but these guys thought it was solid. This I couldn’t understand and felt embarrassed after boasting about the intricacies of loose Gogarth climbing.
“The route is too good, no?”
They had another way of climbing to me. They just seemed to go all out for every pitch, on or off like they were sport climbing next to bolts. The long layback up the creaking flake made me nervous but they didn’t understand my protestations. They went ahead and reefed on the loosest rock. A griffon vulture passed close and then rode away mimicking the drone of an unseen jet plane.
“Aaargh!”
I am awakened out of my enchantment by a loud deep scream. I look up for a second to see the blue sky above darkened by falling blocks. One of the blocks Pepé stops, but the others come thundering all around me before taking to space for the eight pitches below us.
“Hijo de puta,” he groaned and rolled his obviously paining shoulder before finishing off the pitch.
At the next belay we had a couple of hours to kill whilst Xavier led a long nailing and hooking pitch. Again the conversation turns to plans and past exploits. A couple of months before Pepé, with his friend Danial Ascaso (another Baffin partner), had made the first one-day ascent of the Torre Marbore in winter. This 400-metre mixed climb at Gavarnie, the jewel of the Pyrenees, is perhaps the hardest of its kind in Spain. The space below us seeps into the wall for a while as Pepé enthuses about the technicalities of free climbing steep snow-covered rock in plastic boots. He tells me of his Peru trip in ’89 when he did the Ferrari route on Alpamayo and Huascaran, and of how he soloed Vallunarraqu and climbed Quitarraju’s North Face. I inhale information for next year. We even touch upon the secret Peruvian granite big wall, and we laugh. It seems there are a few wall climbers around the world all with their imaginations churning over the same handful of lines on the earth’s most aesthetic points.
Pepé is also eager to talk about the Aragon way of life. He displays a love of his land and a pride in his culture which gives me a sadness. It has all but disappeared in the industrial North of England, my home. But here also it would seem to be doomed eventually. One by one as the old shepherds die there are few youngsters who want to take their place. The ancient fiestas, mountain people tying chickens on the ends of poles or throwing goats to their deaths from the tops of tall towers, are less each decade. But the mountaintop monasteries appear strong and impenetrable and the legacy of the Moorish occupation cannot be taken from the land. As a mountain guide in the Aragon Pyrenees Pepé is expected to know about his territory and he enjoys learning more.
On the free-hanging prusik the void floods back out of the wall and becomes a sea of dizziness under my foot loops. As we climb higher the rock improves, as does, I feel, my friendship with these Spanish strangers. The last pitch goes to Pepé, skyhooking up pockets on top of the world, and we top out to catch the sun setting behind the snowy Pyrenees.
Despite the rush to get down in the fading light I made a moment of silence for myself to picture his big lumbering way and just to say, “Cheers, Teo.”
Teo Plaza. An avalanche came and took him away on the side of Mount Tronador. Even though they haven’t found him yet – he is still under the snow close to his home in Bariloche, Argentina – he is still curbing the future of his friends lives and affecting the dynamics of those ‘chance’ meetings. Plans will be hatched.