‘Shall we take a walk up the valley?’ I was keen to find out how close to the mountains we actually were.
‘What about setting up the camp?’ Andy replied cautiously.
‘I wasn’t thinking of going far. Besides we’ve got plenty of time to do that later.’
Andy looked thoughtfully at our gear strewn around the clearing.
‘Yeah, sod it. Why not?’
I picked up my fleece jacket and headed upstream. The faint cattle trail we had followed intermittently to reach the camp clearing continued beyond. Occasionally there were obstacles to negotiate, limbs of old fallen trees, beaver dams and the muddy channels they make to get from one stretch of water to another. Everywhere were beech saplings gnawed off just above the ground. I was staggered at the amount of destruction caused by such small animals. Even some mature trees had been felled.
Beavers are not native to Tierra del Fuego. They were brought to Ushuaia in the late 1940s at a time when their pelts were fetching a good price and released into the wild in the hope of creating an industry. Unfortunately, the market for beaver fur collapsed and with no human or natural predators the animals flourished, rapidly spreading from their initial release point. The business idea had inadvertently caused untold ecological damage over a vast area, which was continuing to expand unchecked.
It was difficult to see how the cattle picked their way around all the debris but they obviously managed, as there was dung and hoof-prints everywhere. Not surprisingly, with Jose hunting them, the animals were very wary of people. We saw many signs of their passing, but never one of the beasts themselves.
As always it was good to be walking, particularly after the uncertainties that had beset this project. Somewhere above us were the mountains in which we had already invested so much time and effort. I felt a rush of anticipation as the reality of my dream finally began to play out.
Though it had been cloudy most of the day, now intermittent shafts of sunlight shone through the tree canopy, dappling the forest floor. It reminded me of childhood. Of how, as the spring days began to lengthen and warm, I’d walk with friends through the Leicestershire woodlands near our homes, exhilarated by feelings of freedom and space and enthralled by discoveries of new life emerging. Today I walked as I had always done in such places, occasionally pulling leaves from the trees and bushes and examining their delicate structures before crushing them between my fingers in front of my nose to release the aromas within. I paused regularly to study flowers or try and spot birds calling from the trees above.
I expected the valley to continue for a long way before reaching any junction and was surprised when after about an hour of gentle ascent the trees thinned out and we reached a fork in the river. The main valley continued straight on westwards but a smaller, steeper one entered from a more northerly direction.
‘What do you think?’
‘Let’s try up here.’ Andy pointed up the tributary.
It made sense to try this option first as it was obvious that there were no mountains for a considerable distance up the main valley. The steeper way offered the chance of getting among them more quickly. It also avoided having to cross the torrent. After a short rest we moved off up the side valley following a faint cattle or gaunaco trail up a grassy rib at the side of the stream. Guanaco are related to llamas and similar in size, but with a short uniform brown fleece. They are by far the largest animals native to Tierra del Fuego and in the past were hunted by the Fuegian Indians. Like the feral cattle they were shy and elusive.
The going was easy at first but the rib soon became steeper and rockier. I began to pull away from Andy, who always found such ground slower without full mobility of his left leg. His painful hours in the saddle earlier in the day can have done little to help either. Yet he never really complained, simply going at his own pace over terrain that many people without any disability would have struggled on.
The further I went up the valley the more excited I became. It was more of a narrow, steep gorge and I moved with increasing haste, almost desperate to see what lay around the next corner. Distances were much shorter here than we had originally estimated and I soon turned a bend to discover the valley floor filled by a wall of grey ice pitted in rocks. I wasn’t really expecting this and for a moment stood dumbfounded, as if I had never seen such a feature before. Finally the coin dropped. It was the snout of a glacier. Now I was very excited.
I raced along the upper gorge hopping from stone to stone at the side of the stream, then scrambled through a jumble of boulders where the water emerged from under the ice. Once on to this I was able to zigzag up the front of the glacier snout. It was steeper than I assumed and required some care; water was running over the surface of the ice in the late afternoon sunshine, making it very slippery. I tried to follow lines of rocks and gravel embedded in the ice, but this tactic was not always possible and sometimes I was forced to make barely controlled dashes up glistening wet ice. Eventually the angle began to ease. Off the snout of the glacier there was more debris lying on top of the ice and I began to move more quickly as the valley broadened and flattened out. Suddenly I crested a rise and saw mountains. A ridge of minor peaks ran up either side of the glacier towards larger ones at its head. Cloud obscured the higher peaks, however, the rest of the sky had cleared and I expected to be granted a full view before long. I walked up to a highpoint on a prominent ridge of moraine in the centre of the glacier, threw down my rucksack and lay down among the boulders to wait for Andy.
The cloud was moving quickly, blown by the near-incessant westerly wind I had come to associate with this place. A huge pyramidal bulk on the south side of the glacier appeared first, which I felt sure was Monte Bove. It is the biggest peak in this part of the range, nevertheless I was still amazed at how much snow and ice Bove was holding, considering it is only 2400 metres high and we were at a similar latitude to Manchester. As the clouds continued to lift and disperse a rockier summit became visible to the north. I immediately recognised this as the one in a photograph we had been given by the mountain explorer and doctor David Hillebrandt. It was the mountain we had come to climb. As I examined the whole scene more closely through binoculars I could hardly believe our luck. It was one of those rare moments when everything clicks: we had landed in the right valley, just a two-hour walk above the camp and the glacier approach to the base of our peak looked remarkably straightforward.
Andy appeared further down the glacier and I stood and waved to him. He waved back and walked up to join me.
‘This must be the Bove Glacier. Some place eh?’
‘You’re not kidding,’ I replied enthusiastically.
We sat and took in our surroundings for a few minutes. I sensed we both knew we had found a special place and I wondered if anyone else had been on this glacier before. From our researches before the trip it seemed unlikely. It was strange to think that we were probably the first people into this entire valley and therefore to enjoy this view.
‘I think we need to do a carry further up the glacier,’ Andy said. ‘We’ll get the gear closer and a better look at the peak.’
‘Good plan.’ I nodded my agreement while staring above. Shadows were lengthening and it would not be long before night began to close in. I broke from my trance.
‘Time to head back to the camp.’ I picked up my pack, turned my back on the mountains and set off down the glacier.
I raced back in just 45 minutes and started cooking. Later, I opened my kit bag, pulled out my tent and pitched it on a suitable flat spot in the clearing. Then I blew up my inflatable mattress and laid it down inside the tent. Andy arrived and began his own unpacking. As I emptied the rest of my bag I felt increasingly anxious. Something seemed to be missing.
‘Shit!’ I shouted. ‘I’ve left my sleeping bag on the boat.’ I cursed some more. Andy simply smiled at this most basic of omissions.
‘Sorry, I’ll have to go back and get it.’
‘Not tonight though,’ Andy pointed out. It was nearly ten in the evening.
After we had eaten I changed into warmer climbing clothes and slid inside my bivvy bag. The night passed uncomfortably with just the thin fabric cover, but at least it was not cold.
‘Good night?’ Andy asked teasingly over breakfast.
‘I’ve had better.’ I was still embarrassed at my mistake.
‘I’m going to stay put,’ Andy said as I prepared to leave. ‘I’m still sore from the horse riding yesterday and there’s plenty to do here.’
We needed to build some sort of shelter to live and cook in and to sort out the food and supplies we had brought up, and I hardly needed help with carrying a sleeping bag.
I set off, sticking as close to the river as possible, though occasionally it was necessary to go deeper into the forest to get above rock buttresses that dropped straight into the torrent. On the way in on horseback we had avoided these obstacles by fording the river. At some point however, I was going to have to reach the other side on foot in order to get back to the estancia. It was not a prospect I relished. Here the water was too deep and fast flowing to cross. I kept a look out for a likely spot, hoping to find a fallen tree or branch that at least partially cleared the river, but there was nothing.
By the time I emerged from the forest I was worried. The river was now a little more sluggish, but still maybe ten metres wide and too deep to wade. The only way across at this point was to swim. Then in the distance I noticed a narrowing with some tree debris stretching out to mid-stream. I hurried towards it and as I got closer noticed some old fencing wire spanning to the far side about a metre above the water. It was far from ideal but I had found a place to cross. I stripped to my underpants and put my clothes and wellies inside my rucksack. Walking over the branches with the wire as a handrail was easy enough but the watery bit was obviously going to be trickier. I dropped my weight on to the wire and took the plunge. The glacial water made me gasp as I sank up to my chest, but luckily the rucksack acted as a float and stopped me going deeper. With a series of rapid tugs on the wire I pulled myself across and up on to the bank. Amazingly, only a small amount of water had leaked inside my rucksack. Shivering, I hurriedly re-dressed, happy to be over the river and still have dry clothes.
Soon I was out in the main Yendegaia valley. Here the terrain was flat and much more open with just small patches of trees. However, a lot of the ground was boggy and the walk back to the estancia took longer than I expected. It was mid-afternoon before I arrived and the place was deserted.
Fortunately a dinghy was lying on the beach near the old pier. It did not have oars but we had laid a line to the pier from the boat to prevent Ada’s anchor from dragging. I pulled the dingy into the water and jumped inside. By pushing against the pier legs I soon reached the rope and was able to hand-over-hand along it back to the yacht. I tied the dinghy to the railings, climbed on to the deck, slid open the hatch and peered down into the galley. The girls and Jose were sat around the table playing scrabble. They looked up in surprise.
‘Simon,’ Jane replied, looking puzzled. ‘What are you doing back here?’
‘I left my sleeping bag.’
They all dissolved into fits of laughter and I felt the same flush of embarrassment as when I had told Andy.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Jane asked a little more sympathetically.
‘That would be nice.’
I hurried through the galley and into our cabin. The sleeping bag was lying in its stuff-sack in the middle of my bunk. How had I possibly overlooked it? I tried to reassure myself that it was the unfamiliar surroundings and complicated approach to the mountains that had led to the mistake; but I had left things behind before. On expeditions so much time is taken up packing that the climbing can almost seem like a secondary activity. Occasionally you get things wrong. I had got away lightly with an uncomfortable night followed by an unwanted hike and icy river crossing. If I had forgotten to pack something as vital as my sleeping bag when actually on the mountain the repercussions could have been much more serious.
I had planned to go back to the camp the same day, but I knew it would be difficult to get back before darkness fell. The girls had arranged to go riding with Jose the following morning and suggested that we all return to the camp together. If I spent the night on Ada I would save both the walk and a repeat dip in the river. It was not a difficult decision. I opted to stay.
Later that evening we all went ashore. The sky was clearing again and the wind tailing off. I could already see a general pattern to the weather, which was at its best early and late in the day. Celia went out into the bay with Jose to check his lobster pots and we watched while picking our way along the shoreline. They busied from one spot to another, Jose laboriously hauling up the lines and then wrestling the large baskets into the dinghy before dropping them over the side again.
The ground between the huts on the beach was littered with pieces of old farm machinery and hidden away among trees was a large, derelict, wooden shearing shed. The estancia had obviously once been a major operation, but those days were long past. Now it felt more like a run down museum, a relic of a pioneering era when people thought a worthwhile living could be farmed from this place at the end of the world. Nature was reclaiming the land: wooden fences were falling apart, trees were growing on previously cleared land and the huts on the beach were on the verge of falling apart. It was saddening to witness the failure of an enterprise after so much hard work, but at the same time uplifting to see the wilderness re-asserting itself. If ever land was too wild to tame, this place certainly felt like it.
By the time we returned to the huts Jose and Celia had finished checking the pots in the bay. Jose walked along the beach clutching handfuls of king crabs by their legs.
‘Centolla,’ he said dismissively.
‘Jose’s fed up of eating them,’ Celia explained.
Centolla are considered a delicacy in Chile and Argentina and much further afield. The ones held by Jose were a beautiful shade of pinky-red, with nearly round bodies, a pair of small short claws and long thin legs, all covered in sharp spines. In season, fresh centolla caught by fishermen in their small boats out in the Beagle Channel are flown daily to the fish markets of Paris and Tokyo.
Jose retrieved a large pan from his cabin and set about dealing with the crabs. One at a time he placed them on the ground on their backs, placed his boot on their stomachs and simply ripped their legs off. The legs went into the pan and the bodies were discarded. Jose, we were learning, was not squeamish when it came to killing things.
In the evening we brought some salad over from the boat and ate the centolla with Jose in his cabin. It tasted delicious, whatever the manner of the crabs’ death. Jose meantime stuck to his staple of roast beef and a few potatoes.
Afterwards we made a driftwood fire on the beach and stood drinking beer and chatting before returning to the yacht. Sitting on deck as the light started to fade we noticed the still water around the boat begin to come to life. Initially, there were small splashes on the surface that sounded like raindrops hitting the water. The splashes came and went, moving from one location to another. Soon large tracts of water were boiling with fish; an enormous shoal of sardines had come into the bay. Celia rushed to get a net from the bow of the boat and with one scoop caught about 20 fish, which we put in bucket of seawater for breakfast. Later, once it was dark, we started to pick out larger silhouettes in the water with the beams of our headtorches. The splashing got louder as the bigger fish fed on the sardines. We launched the dinghy and managed to catch one in the net. It was an ugly brute with a small body that tapered away from a large head, its enormous mouth filled with wickedly sharp, backward pointing teeth. Nobody dare pick it out of the net and we dropped it back into the water. We called them ‘Jurassic fish’, learning later they were a type of hake. The feeding frenzy continued into the night. Lying in my sleeping bag I could hear the hake thudding on the hull. I realised we had witnessed something very special and dreamt of times past when the world’s oceans would have been teeming with fish, the land covered in forest inhabited by a multitude of wild animals and the sky alive with birds. It was comforting to know that pockets of such places still remained, but shocking to think of the damage that humans have wreaked over a relatively short space of time.
By morning the sea was calm and the fish had gone. The only sign of their visit was a high tide line of dead sardines, beached in their panic to escape the predators. There were even some hake among them. A few seagulls were pecking lazily at the fish, almost as if they did not quite know what to do with so much food.
After a sardine breakfast we went ashore, helped Jose saddle the horses and headed up the valley. At the camp Andy appeared from his tent and came over to greet us as we tied up the horses.
‘I hope you don’t mind, but I decided to spend a night on the boat,’ I explained.
‘I’ve been keeping busy.’ Andy pointed to a newly constructed hut in the centre of the camp. We had brought a sheet of plastic and some nails in Ushuaia. Andy had put them to good use in my absence, making a timber frame and covering it with the plastic to produce a weatherproof shelter where we could cook and relax while at base camp.
‘Fantastic,’ I enthused, walking round the structure and admiring his handy work.
‘I’ll put a brew on shall I?’
The goodbyes were briefer and less heartfelt this time around and once the others had left Andy and I worked together putting finishing touches to the shelter. It was nice to finally be on our own and to focus our thoughts on the mountain we had come so far to climb. After dinner we shared a carton of wine and chatted enthusiastically about the days ahead.
I slept soundly in the comfort of my sleeping bag, but when I woke there was the unmistakable sound of water dripping on the tent. It was raining again and a quick check of the barometer showed that the air pressure had plunged overnight. I could hear wind howling above the tree canopy. It was already apparent that we were going to need a lucky break with the weather to be in with a chance of getting up something. However, there was little indication of that happening; the few spells of better weather we had seen were just hours long and confined to early mornings and evenings with the air pressure remaining stubbornly low.
There was little rush to start the day, so I lay in the tent and read until hunger finally forced me outside. It was a grey and dank morning and the river was noisier than before, swollen by all the rain that had fallen, however, I was pleased to see that our hut had remained dry. I filled a pan with water, fired up the stove and made some tea.
‘It doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere today,’ I said as I delivered a brew to Andy’s tent. He gave a knowing nod but did not look particularly concerned. Andy was hardly new to the expedition waiting game in this part of the world; he’d done several lengthy trips to the FitzRoy region of Patagonia, often on his own.
By mid-afternoon the rain had stopped and bursts of sunshine appeared through breaking cloud, making a mockery of my weather forecast.
‘I think we should make a carry to the glacier,’ Andy suggested.
‘Yeah, we’ve still got plenty of daylight left.’
We hurriedly agreed on a rack of climbing equipment, sorted out a few days’ worth of food and added a stove, pans, gas, ropes and a lightweight mountain tent to the mix. Then we split the load and packed, adding our own personal climbing equipment for good measure. As always the rucksack felt uncomfortably heavy. I consoled myself with the thought that not all of what we were taking would be carried on our backs once we began to climb.
Despite the weight it was satisfying to be moving again and we made rapid progress back to our highpoint of two days earlier. As before, the cloud was clearing, ushering in another fine evening. A shallow valley up the central part of the glacier provided gently angled walking over increasingly bare ice and I followed this to a large boulder that lay stranded on the surface.
‘This will do for the stash,’ I said as Andy arrived.
‘We’re not going to struggle to find it,’ he observed. The boulder towered above us and was by far the most significant piece of debris visible on the glacier.
‘Exactly, and we’ll need to rope up a little higher up.’
Further on the ice was covered in snow and rose more steeply. The slope was riven by crevasses, some were open gashes while others lurked just beneath the surface. The way did not look difficult but it would require care.
We emptied our rucksacks on to the ice and gathered everything under the boulder, taking care to cover the bin liners of food to keep off foraging birds or animals. The gear and food amounted to quite a pile. I topped it off with my ice-axes, then we shouldered our nearly empty rucksacks and set off down.
‘Now I guess we wait for some settled weather,’ I said with an optimism I did not feel.
The following morning cloud and wind had returned and light rain was falling in the forest. A glimpse at my barometer confirmed what I already knew — the air pressure had dropped again. Conditions in the higher mountains a few kilometres to our west would be much worse. Climbing, like sailing in this place, was obviously going to be a test of patience.
After breakfast Andy got out his paper, paints and charcoal and began to work. He always kept himself busy and I admired his industrious approach, even though I sometimes relished the chance to live the slower, simple life that being in such places allows. At other times he made me feel lazy.
Spurred into action I took the laptop and satellite phone into a small clearing, determined to try again to update the expedition website. My resolve did not last long. For some reason I was unable to log-on. The battery in the computer seemed to be getting very low and so I set up the solar panel in the hope of doing a re-charge. The kit was still all new and baffling, and to me looked incongruous in such wilderness: a piece of cutting-edge technology in a forest that must have changed little since it colonised this land at the end of the last ice-age. Andy showed a brief interest in the equipment, but as the low battery meant I could demonstrate none of its capabilities he soon drifted back to his painting. I vowed to try again later.
Voices broke the silence and moments later Jose and the girls rode into camp, all smiles and moving confidently on their horses. It looked like they were having more fun than we were.
‘We’ve just come up to take a walk to the glacier,’ Elaine enthused. ‘We thought you might have gone up.’
‘We carried up yesterday. Now we’re waiting on the weather and pressure.’ My reasoning did not sound very convincing, as again the weather appeared to be clearing.
While the girls took a walk up to the glacier Jose sat on a log in the centre of the camp and smoked regular cigarettes between cups of strong black coffee. He was not one for walking and anyway his cowboy boots and spurs would have prevented him going far. When the girls returned we chatted a little before they began to make ready to ride back to the estancia.
Jane seemed uneasy, putting me in mind of a time a number of years earlier when she had accompanied me to beneath a mountain in Pakistan. The peak was large and formidable to look at, and would give my climbing partner and I some difficult days. Jane had become upset when it came time to leave and we later confided that neither of us had found the experience particularly helpful. The mountains above the Bove Glacier looked nowhere near as intimidating, but this was still a committing climb. There was no search or rescue provision should anything go wrong. Once more Jane had shared our preparations and approach to the mountains, and also the consequent mounting tension. However, we were now in very different headspaces: Jane, Elaine and Celia were on holiday while Andy and I were psyching ourselves for a piece of serious exploratory mountaineering.
There were no tears this time. We embraced, kissed and said our goodbyes, knowing we were unlikely to see each other again until we had at least attempted the peak.
‘We’ll come back up to see how you are getting on in a week’s time,’ Jane said as she turned her horse to leave. All too quickly they had gone and once more we were left with nothing but the sounds of the forest for company.
Later, it rained and the weather was no better the following morning. Once again I set up the solar panel and plugged it into the laptop, but after what should have been a full day of charging, the computer still would not operate. I packed all the equipment away in disgust and did not touch it again. It had been a lot of effort and anxiety to post one brief message on our expedition website and I would not repeat the experiment again. My first brush with 21st century global communications had been less than successful, more a salutary experience.
As we shared a meal in the hut that night our restlessness was palpable. The barometer remained stubbornly low. Conditions were no better in the morning. Desperate to escape the camp, I walked up the hillside away from the river. As I got higher I felt a childlike urge to see beyond the leafy canopy. I picked a suitable looking tree and climbed to the top. By precariously balancing on the highest branches and gently standing upright I got my head above the leaves. There was sunshine down the main Yendegaia valley over the estancia and the sea beyond, but dark, brooding clouds over the mountains at the head of our valley.
‘I think we should go tomorrow whatever the weather,’ Andy said when I returned to the camp. ‘At least we’ll get a feel for the place even if we have to come back down.’ I understood his reasoning, but did not want to get caught high on one of these mountains in a storm. We had already seen how the wind could blow in this place.
‘I guess you are right,’ I replied cautiously, but also aware of a level of apathy creeping into camp life. ‘It’ll certainly be good to get out of here for a while.’
By mid-afternoon the following day we were back at our gear stash on the Bove Glacier. The morning weather had started badly again and we had waited until after lunch before leaving. It had been a wise decision, the clouds were parting and waves of warm sunlight were moving down the glacier. We loaded our rucksacks, put on our harnesses and carried on. Soon we reached the point where the slope steepened and was split by crevasses. It was time to rope up. Progress became slower as the snow deepened and we were forced to weave our way around the slots. Occasionally our feet would break through the slushy snow into a hidden chasm below. It was laborious work, but eventually we cleared the zone of crevasses and reached a plateau that led to the head of the glacier. At eight in the evening we called it a day, put up our lightweight tent and began melting snow. Then we turned our attention to the mountains.
‘What do you think?’ I pointed to our peak at the back of the cirque.
‘I can see a line up that couloir to the right of the ridge,’ Andy replied thoughtfully.
‘Yeah, and it looks like there’s a gully splitting the upper headwall.’ This welcome line of weakness had not been visible on the Hillebrandt photograph, which must have been taken from further to the north.
At four o’clock next morning Andy’s alarm signalled the start of our climb. He lit the small stove hanging from the centre of the tent and made drinks. Outside it was clear and still. Then we packed in silence. As we left the tent it began to get light. It seemed strange simply to abandon the tent in such a place, but we knew we would not be able to use it on the mountain — the terrain was too steep.
A short walk across the glacier took us to the foot of the face. Our planned line followed a vague set of features up the centre. By following slopes up the right of a buttress we hoped to gain access to a faint couloir running into steep snow slopes below a final tower. A prominent gully line then breached the tower.
Once over the bergschrund below the face we packed away the rope and climbed simultaneously up easy-angled slopes just to the right of the buttress crest. Already a large bank of ominously dark cloud had drifted into the cirque from the west and the wind was getting up. I sighed to myself as it started to snow — it was going to be a hard day.
The ground steepened and I was forced to move further rightwards into a broad couloir where I found a small section of rock protruding from the snow. It would provide an anchor, we would need to climb roped from here on. By the time Andy arrived I had chopped a platform, made a belay and uncoiled my rope. He unpacked his rope and handed me the remaining climbing gear. I crossed the gully in deepening snow and headed for a steep, rocky corner on the far side. Here my progress slowed. It was snowing hard and I could barely see what I was doing as I swept snow from the rock, only to find it almost bare of ice. Bridging my feet wide and making a series of insecure pulls on my axes I moved upwards, but it was taking a lot of time. Occasionally I glimpsed Andy through the whiteness, being deluged by snow from above and blasted by wind from below. Already our worlds had been reduced to the small zones of snow and ice immediately around us — two separate struggles at either end of the ropes. Bushed, I reached the top of the corner, anchored myself to the rock and pulled up the remaining rope. Andy inched his way towards me through the maelstrom.
‘That took hours,’ he complained when he joined me, looking chilled to the bone.
‘I had to clear away the snow,’ I replied defensively, ‘and the rucksack was heavy.’
‘You should have left it.’ It was fair criticism. I had not done much mountaineering over the previous year. These days when I did climb in the mountains it tended to be on expeditions abroad. In truth I felt a little rusty; unlike Andy I did not live in an alpine playground where I could take short trips into the mountains whenever I wanted. Now it was my turn to wait. The climbing above looked desperately hard.
Andy abandoned his rucksack before moving above me. He stopped at a small overhang and painstakingly cleared several cracks of ice and placed gear in them. Somehow he was going to have to move leftwards. I could not see how he was going to do it.
‘Watch me here,’ he said after clipping one of the ropes into the gear.
‘I’ve got you,’ I replied nervously.
Andy jabbed his left axe into what looked like soft, granulated snow lying on the slab above the roof and gently pulled down. It ripped straight through. Undeterred he tried again. This time the axe held and he transferred more weight on to it, removing his other axe from lower down and bringing it up to place alongside the first. Now he was out of balance, his feet scrambling for purchase below the overhang with virtually his entire weight on his arms. In a series of quick and insecure moves he moved left. At the far side of the overhang Andy needed to establish himself in a groove. The axe placements petered out and I watched with increasing concern as he tried to swing his weaker left leg across, before tiring and scuttling back. He nearly fell moving back off the overhang, but at least then he was able to rest.
After a few shake-outs of each arm Andy went straight back to it. I could tell from his body language that this attempt was do-or-fly and watched the ropes carefully. By quickly hooking his axes into their previous placements he moved back to the hanging groove and then stalled, his left foot pedalling for purchase. Then it stuck and he managed to rock on his axes and stand up, balancing on the very tips of his crampons. I watched helplessly; if he fell he was going to take a nasty swing into the corner below me. Somehow, precariously balanced and breathing hard, he managed to take a peg from his harness and at full stretch insert it into a crack above his head. I stayed braced, ready for the fall I was sure would come any moment. Andy started tapping the piton into the crack. The first few taps were tentative, so that he did not knock it out, but he was soon hitting the piton with force and after a few heavy blows a high-pitched ringing came from the metal. It was secure. With a precise movement he reached up with a tie-off and clipped the karabiner through the eye of the piton. Then, agonisingly slowly, he pulled up a loop of rope, as I hurriedly fed it out to him, and carefully clipped it into the other end of the tie-off. Andy let out a huge sigh. The tension lifted. A moment of danger had passed.
Now he was able to shift his feet and alternately rest weary calves while inspecting the moves above. He probed tentatively with his axes and found placements, but they were very insecure; the tips hooked on tiny edges. Suddenly came a series of powerful moves, Andy pulling from one improbable axe placement to another, crampons scratching on the rock for purchase. He disappeared from view and soon the rope stopped moving. Wet snow was falling very heavily and small avalanches were sliding down the gully line to our left with increasing regularity. I waited patiently.
A muffled cry of ‘Safe,’ finally drifted down. I had become cold and was happy to busy myself again. I tied Andy’s rucksack on to one rope and removed most of the belay. When the ropes came tight I let the rucksack go and it spun across to my left; Andy hauled it up until it wedged below the peg.
‘Climb,’ Andy shouted. I removed the remaining gear and set off. Almost immediately I was in difficulty. The axe placements above the small roof were terrible and there was little for the feet either. I lunged sideways; the axes seemed to hold better but I was getting tired.
‘Tight!’ I yelled, approaching the groove. I swung left into it and dangled on the rope. I couldn’t see what to do next. I tried the tiny placements for my axes, only for them to pull whenever I tried to weight them. My rucksack was not helping, even so I was amazed at what Andy had climbed.
‘Keep me very tight here,’ I urged. By making small movements as Andy took in the rope I inched upwards, embarrassment growing at my inability. As I reached the wedged rucksack I gave it a shove from below and Andy pulled it up. Retrieving the piton was a prolonged struggle. I simply hung on the rope and hammered away at it until eventually it dropped from the crack. Andy could see me now and was smiling at my discomfort. Finally, I put together a decent series of moves and arrived at Andy’s belay a little more composed.
‘Doesn’t look so bad above,’ said Andy. I was relieved to hear it.
After a brief rest we swapped the remaining gear and I led off into the snow and mist. It had developed into a foul day. The climbing was easier — ice under damp, heavy snow — but very insecure. Steep snow, poor ice, wind and regular avalanches that threatened to push you off meant complete concentration was required. At times the visibility was so bad that it was difficult to pick a way, nevertheless even as the weather deteriorated we continued to gain ground through the whiteness. Time slipped by. We had taken so long with the start of the climb that evening came quickly. It was difficult to tell how far we had come up the face.
‘What about a bivouac?’ Andy said, joining me at a stance at about eight o’clock. It was more of a statement than a question.
‘Where?’ The same thought had been crossing my mind but I had seen nowhere that looked suitable.
‘That cone of snow up to your right,’ he replied, undaunted by my negative response. ‘We can make a platform.’ I did not see it myself, but Andy moved across to his cone and started digging. By the time I joined him he had already hit ice below the snow. We soon made a body-length shelf, though annoyingly it was only wide enough for one to lie down and offered little shelter from the wind and incessant avalanches.
‘We’re going to have to dig up as well,’ I suggested. The light was beginning to fade and with no alternative sites nearby we would have to make the best of where we were. By digging carefully we managed to make an L-shaped chamber that bulged out on the inside. It was big enough for both of us to sit up and get out of the snow but our feet remained outside. It was dark by the time we both squeezed in.
Somehow Andy managed to get the stove going in a tiny space to his side, while I struggled to stop myself sliding towards the entrance. As I tried to wedge myself upright I punched a hole in the wall of the shelter. Spindrift poured through and into my sleeping bag until I managed to stem the tide with a few snowballs.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere as cold and wet,’ Andy said, handing me a drink.
‘Scotland,’ I replied, from memory born of grim experience.
‘Well I haven’t climbed there for years.’
‘It’s about as cold and wet, but if this was Scotland we’d be in a nice warm pub by now.’
Andy kicked away the snow that had piled up over the bottom of his bivouac bag and for a brief moment my headtorch beam illuminated the storm raging outside. Then an avalanche poured down, covering the bag and obscuring the view. Despite the circumstances we slept, waking periodically to kick accumulated snow from our feet. My sleeping bag got wetter and wetter and by daylight a puddle of water had collected under us. The weather had not improved. As we ate a leisurely breakfast I wondered how long we could hold out. Our position was beginning to get serious, spending another night out in similar circumstances did not bear thinking about. And yet I felt strangely comfortable with no pressing need to go down; in all likelihood we would encounter similar conditions on another attempt.
By mid-morning it was evident the storm was easing and we prepared to leave. I was pleasantly surprised on getting outside. It was misty and still snowing slightly, but the outline of the sun was visible through the cloud. Its warmth slowly permeated my wet clothing. We had left the ropes dumped in the snow the night before and they had become tangled and took some time to free. At one end was our gear secured to an ice screw. I carefully excavated it and immediately recognised something was missing. I quickly checked my harness and then probed feebly in the snow.
‘Shit! I’ve lost my figure-of-eight.’
‘That’s not very professional,’ Andy commented, barely looking up from his own preparations.
‘I can’t have clipped it in properly last night,’ I said apologetically. It was a double blow as I used the device for belaying as well as abseiling.
‘Here take this.’ Andy handed me his belay plate. Then he tied into the ropes, grabbed the gear and began climbing. He followed ribs of snow and runnels of poor ice until he disappeared from view. I climbed quickly when it was time to follow. It was good to be moving, to get warm and to drive some of the moisture from my clothing, but as I took the lead I realised the bivouac had taken more out of me than I would have thought. I slowed. Then the sun burst through the clouds, draining me further. At the belay I took off my rucksack and daubed sun cream over my face.
‘Lets leave the sacks and go for the summit,’ Andy suggested as he joined me.
‘Are you sure? I think there’s still a fair way to the top and what if the weather changes? The bivvy gear will be here.’
‘I think we can do this faster without it,’ he said forcefully.
‘Okay.’ Andy had been making the right calls up to this point, but I still felt uneasy about coming down the face. Our original plan had been to descend an easier-angled ridge from the summit further to the north. Now we would be abseiling the route and I had lost my descender.
We left the bivouac gear and sleeping bags in my rucksack and put some spare clothing, a little food and water in the other. Then Andy led off. He moved fluidly without the extra weight on his back and I followed quickly. A further rope length brought us to below the summit headwall. It was my turn to lead. Above, the thin gully we had looked at from the glacier cut through the black, overhanging, rime-covered rock above.
Snow and ice conditions had been gradually improving with height and here I was delighted to move up steep névé into the bottom of a corner. I placed a piece of gear in the left rock wall, clipped the rope through it and set off. There was a thin ribbon of ice in the corner and to my delight it took axe placements first time. I simply stacked one placement above the other, my left foot on the ice, the other out on the rime of the right wall. This was like climbing in Scotland at its best, I simply knew the axe placements would not fail. All too quickly the steep climbing was over and I found myself in a broader, more gently angled gully. I raced up this until the rope came tight, placed a belay into the rocky left wall and brought Andy up. For some reason I could not fathom, he followed the pitch very slowly.
‘It looks like the top up there,’ I said, pointing aloft as he joined me at the stance. I was barely able to contain my excitement as Andy disappeared above. The rope came tight. I dismantled the belay, followed up the broadening gully, cleared a small cornice and then walked up an easy-angled ridge in the mist. Andy was sitting in the snow on the top.
‘The cloud lifted earlier,’ he said simply.
We sat in silence as the mist drifted eerily around us. Suddenly a window opened to the east and we could see our approach route up the Bove Glacier and across to the Yendegaia valley beyond. More mist parted revealing Monte Bove, its weather-beaten, rime-covered west face a contrast to the rockier eastern side. We walked around the summit taking photographs as each new vista presented itself, from the foothills to the east and the ice cap in the north to the Beagle Channel glittering in the evening sun to the west. There were streaks of cirrus high in the pale blue sky and clumps of cumulus over the Pacific that looked like mushrooms. It was the most remarkable panorama I have ever had from the summit of a mountain.
At one point Andy was stood on the top smiling, waving at his shadow projected on to a misty cloud several kilometres away to the east. It was the first time I had seen a Brocken Spectre and we laughed together, shadow dancing like children before making our way down the ridge.
On the top of the cornice Andy got to work and dug a T-shaped trench into the rime. Then he placed a snow stake in the trench bottom and ran a sling out along the base of the T — towards the edge — before threading the end of a rope through and tying it to one end of the other. This would be our first abseil point. It was 7:30 in the evening.
‘Can you use a karabiner brake?’ he asked
‘Not very well.’ I knew that it involved threading the rope through two pairs of karabiners, but not exactly how it was done. However, I did know that if it was done wrong it could fail.
‘Here take this.’ Andy generously handed me his descender.
‘Thanks,’ I replied, feeling very grateful.
Then he threw the ropes down and started to abseil. When Andy’s weight came off the ropes I took one final longing look at the sun setting out to the west then slid down.
On the second abseil I went first and entered the steep corner I had led on the way up. The rime on the wall to the right of the corner was covered in scratch marks of crampons and the tiny notches of axe placements. I realised why Andy had taken so long to follow the pitch: he had been unable to climb the ice in the corner. The lack of mobility in his left arm meant he was unable to place that axe higher than his right in the thin ribbon of ice. Instead he had climbed the wall; it looked ridiculously hard and yet he had said nothing. At moments like this I had nothing but admiration for the man.
Our descent began to pass in a blur. We quickly reached the stashed gear, re-packed and carried on down. A little later darkness fell but it was a clear, still night. We continued by headtorch, clearing the bergschrund with a final scary abseil to the glacier. Then we walked below the face until we hit our upward tracks in the snow and followed them down. It was 2.30 in the morning when we reached the tent and we did little more than throw down our mats and sleeping bags, take off our boots and dive inside. The down filling of my sleeping bag had morphed into clumps with the consistency of wet papier-mâché. I decided to remain in my waterproof shell. It was wet and cold, yet within moments I was asleep.
