I woke to the sound of snow hitting the tent fabric. Frozen condensation had built up around my mouth on the hood of my jacket and more was falling from the ceiling of the tent. Our sleeping bags were dusted in ice crystals. I opened the tent flap a fraction and sneaked a glimpse outside. A fierce, gusting wind was driving snow over the col, enveloping us in whiteness. My movements had woken Paul.
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I told him. ‘At least not for the time being.’
‘Huh,’ came the muffled reply.
I was acutely aware of our vulnerability. We were stormbound high on a huge and complex peak in the middle of a mountain wilderness, with little food, marginally more gas and no way of summoning help. People often ask if I carry a GPS in the mountains, implying that the device somehow guarantees you will make it safely down. Paul and I knew better. In remote and uninhabited mountains, the only available maps are often poor, due no doubt to the difficulty of surveying such places and the lack of demand for the finished product. I have found it best simply to take a sketch map marked with spot-heights, peaks, ridgelines and an outline of any glaciers. Our proprietary map of the Wrangell range was cluttered with contour lines which at best were approximations of features but often bore little relation to the relief on the ground. Nor did it mark the boundaries between glaciers and mountains. The only way Paul and I were going to get off this peak and navigate our way back to base camp through vast, complicated glacial terrain was by sight. And while we remained cloaked in cloud there was not sufficient visibility to find our way.
We made tea, ate a cereal bar each and went back to sleep. Thoughts of Jane and the children back at home mingled with dreams. I was struggling to reconcile two very different worlds: I knew Jane would be expecting a call and getting increasingly concerned, yet for now the link seemed tenuous. Throughout the day the snow gradually piled up around the tent.
‘I’ve thought I’ve heard voices at times,’ I confided to Paul, knowing the notion was fanciful.
‘Yeah, me too. Strange isn’t it?’
It was reassuring to learn I was not losing my grip on reality, or that at least we both were together. In all likelihood there were probably only a handful of people in the entire Wrangell-St Elias area and we knew of none anywhere near Mount Vancouver.
That evening I ventured outside to go to the toilet. The cloud was clearing and I was pleased to see the Alverstone, Hubbard and Kennedy group to the east, but the sky was pale and still streaked with high cirrus. Later we ate a single leftover packet of mashed potato for dinner and went to sleep with the wind blowing hard. The night passed bitterly cold.
‘Hey Simon! Wake up!’ Paul was calling with urgency. ‘The storm has cleared. We need to get out of here.’
I sat up and immediately noticed sunlight filtering into the tent. The wind had gone. We quickly prepared tea and ate a couple of cereal bars each — the last of our food — then hurriedly packed. By eight we were ready to move.
We hoped to descend via the Centennial Route that follows a south facing spur from the shoulder we had camped on the east of Vancouver’s huge South Face. However, this was unseen ground for us; the speed of our approach to the climb had not allowed time for a proper reconnaissance. We would have to rely on sight, judgement and feel. Initially the way was obvious and we moved swiftly down easy-angled snow slopes towards the spur. Soon the terrain became more broken and open crevasses forced us into lengthy traverses. Then we spotted a large band of séracs that appeared to dissect the whole spur. We cast around for an alternative. More open slopes led east towards a gently angled ridge. We followed our noses and went with those. We were moving quickly again now, and needed to — cloud was beginning to build.
Suddenly my left foot broke through the snow crust and I fell very heavily. A searing pain ran from my ankle up my leg.
‘Shit!’ I shouted, lying motionless in the snow. I knew all too well we could be screwed if I had broken my leg.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I don’t know.’ I replied pathetically.
The pain was beginning to subside, but it was hard to gauge what damage I had done because my foot was still post-holed in the snow. I pulled myself into a sitting position and noticed a faint depression stretching across the slope. It was a crevasse line and I cursed myself for having not spotted it sooner. We were getting tired now; I would have to be very vigilant about getting down without further mistakes.
I managed to pull my leg from the snow, revealing a black hole where it had broken through into the icy chasm. I carefully stood up and gently weighted my foot. It hurt, but felt like the injury was not too serious.
‘I think it’s okay.’
‘Good, that was quite a bad fall.’ A look of relief spread over Paul’s face.
I delved inside my rucksack, found my first-aid kit and took a couple of ibuprofen to ease the immediate pain and counter any swelling. Then I shouldered my rucksack and carried on. The ankle was sore for a while but soon loosened up. We walked silently down to the ridge then followed its crest as patches of cloud drifted by. Once below the cloud base the weather began to improve, dispelling worries about a further storm. We were exhausted, but now it was surely just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and grinding it out until base camp.
The ridge became more pronounced as we got lower, with a steep rocky face on its southern side and gentler, snowy slopes above a glacier basin on the northern aspect. Then it terminated abruptly in a rock tower. I followed the line of least resistance down towards the basin, hoping to pick up a continuation to the ridge lower down. The glacier itself tumbled off into a large icefall that offered no way down, so I contoured below the rock tower to where I hoped the ridge would start again. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this place: the ground simply did not look like it was going to provide the walk down we wanted. Soon we were in a heavily crevassed area that ended in a drop-off. I climbed on to a crest and cautiously approached the edge. The view was horrifying. I was standing on the lip of a sérac perched above a rock wall. Hundreds of metres below, a snow slope fell away to a glacier covered in avalanche debris. The sheer precariousness of it all unnerved me and I hastily backed off the crest; it was simply not safe to descend here, even by abseil. I passed Paul without saying anything and began contouring some more, following an in-filled crevasse. After maybe 50 metres it too ended at a sheer drop into a very steep couloir at the edge of the sérac. I toyed with the idea of abseiling and even located a place to put an ice-screw for the first anchor, before I calmed down and reasoned it was madness. I turned around and made my way back up to Paul.
‘We’re going to have to go back up and find a way off the other side of the ridge.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now we are communicating again.’
I felt a little stupid. In my panic and haste, coupled with the dread of having to back track, I had omitted to share my knowledge and concerns with Paul.
‘Sorry,’ I replied. ‘There’s a huge, unstable sérac band over the edge. There’s no safe way down.’
With a resigned sigh I retraced our steps towards the ridge. It was energy-sapping and demoralising, but without risk. Within 30 minutes we were back on the crest. A col below the rock tower dropped into a steep gully running some way down the South Face. The rock was shattered and it was obviously a fall line, but it was significantly safer than the death trap we had returned from. I wound a screw into the hard, wind-blasted ice and set up the ropes to abseil.
The top of the gully was jammed with loose rock that would be difficult to avoid knocking down on each other. Below were less confined slopes, however, we were now bathed in fierce sunlight and the snow was pitted with rocks that had fallen from above. We tried to move as quickly as possible, even so time ticked by. The ropes would not slide when thrown below us; whoever went down first would have to free them while wallowing up to the knees or deeper in heavy, wet snow. Occasionally, rocks came from above. Some were moving at speed and made a high-pitched whirring sound before striking rock or snow; others literally slid into view and then gathered speed in a series of increasingly large and erratic bounces. This was our way off the mountain and we knew we had to make it work. We shouted warnings whenever rockfall threatened and tried to make ourselves smaller targets by bunching up under our helmets and rucksacks. Beyond that, all we could do was trust to luck.
The final abseil was the scariest. From the base of the last rock buttress in the snow slope, Paul went down a prominent runnel and disappeared from view over the lip of the bergschrund at the edge of the glacier. As soon as his weight came off the rope I followed. I felt vulnerable the moment I moved away from the rock and once in the runnel was acutely aware that it was the natural drainage line for the face above. I descended as fast as I could, pausing only on the lip of the bergschrund, which was huge and massively overhung. I took deep breath and went over the top. The first move was awkward, and then I was in space, slowly spinning as I slid down the rope towards Paul.
‘Nice one,’ he said as I landed beside him. We pulled the ropes down, coiled them and made a dash down a short slope into the glacier.
‘I think we’re safe here,’ I said once clear of the avalanche and rock debris that had fallen from the face.
It was nice to rest for a while in the warm spring sunshine. I felt happy and relieved but knew that we were not yet completely out of the woods. We had landed in a different glacier system from that of our base camp and would have to cross another watershed to reach it. There was little need for debate about the way to go; further down the glacier on its opposite side, gently angled slopes led up to a pass. We packed away the ropes, removed our crampons and set off.
It was good to move independently again, free of the rope and each able to set our own pace. I was soon across the glacier and on to the slope. Though the snow was softer, I broke trail strongly up to the pass — only to find a cliff plunging away on the south side.
‘We’re going to have to abseil again,’ I told Paul when he arrived, barely able to hide my disappointment. I wanted this to end now: to simply walk back to the camp, to eat and to rest. We dispensed with the obstacle in two long abseils.
‘We won’t be needing them again,’ I confidently predicted, packing the ropes away for a second time.
I set off again over gently undulating ground, contouring around a spur and into a valley below an icefall that guarded the way to the upper section of the glacier and our camp. It was not steep and did not look serious. I weaved up through it, my mind on autopilot as the sun dropped behind our ridge on Vancouver. Higher, I was able to look back at the Centennial Route in profile and discern a clear way around the sérac that had diverted us down the East Ridge. But it no longer mattered. We were almost back now and I was not going to beat myself up over a minor route finding error.
Then suddenly I came to a large crevasse running right across the slope. I moved leftwards, which looked likely to offer the best way across. There was a way around but it was going to involve a lengthy walk back down the glacier and we had walked enough. I dropped my rucksack where the crevasse was narrowest and went to meet Paul.
‘You’re not going to believe it. There’s a huge crevasse splitting the entire icefall. We’re going to have to jump across.’
Paul followed me back and inspected the crevasse. His face dropped as he peered into the abyss. It was maybe two metres wide at this narrowest point and about 50 metres deep; the sides were glistening smooth and vertical. It was the classic chasm of a movie sequence.
‘Are you sure there’s not a way further to the left?’ Paul’s tone suggested he already knew the answer.
‘Yes.’
‘Huh, okay. I’ll go first if you want.’
‘Be my guest.’
It was a generous offer. I had had enough for this day and perhaps it was showing. I got out a rope, booted my axe into the snow and firmly anchored myself; meanwhile Paul inspected his launch point and stamped down the snow. Then he tied into the rope and walked to and from the edge a few times, measuring his run-up while I calculated how much slack rope to give him.
‘Alright,’ he said finally, and started to run. He cleared the gap easily and landed gracefully on the far side. Then he hauled the rucksacks over and I took the leap.
‘This is becoming farcical,’ I said, picking myself up from a clumsy landing as we dissolved into fits of tired laughter. The days of accumulated tension were finally lifting. Surely now we were safe? We laughed at ourselves and at the slightly insane situations that our chosen sport sometimes drops on you.
The glacier held no further surprises on the short walk back to camp. It was 10pm and we’d been on the move for a full 14 hours. The tents had sunk into the snow over the previous days of sunshine; otherwise the camp was just as we had left it. We fired up a stove and began melting snow before digging out some food. There was plenty to go at that did not require preparation, starting with cheese and salami on crackers.
I knew it would be early morning back in Britain, so retrieved the satellite phone and made a call.
‘Simon,’ Jane said, in the same surprised way she always did when I called home, like she could still not quite believe that the technology actually worked.
‘We’ve just got back. It took a bit longer than we thought it would.’ There was silence for a moment and then I could hear the unmistakable sound of sobbing.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked, feeling rather guilty.
‘Yes, I just didn’t know what to do. You said you’d be on the mountain four or five days.’
‘Sorry,’ I replied rather feebly. ‘It was a great route. One of the best I’ve ever done.’
Jane’s sobs gave way to relieved laughter as she explained her dilemmas. She had started to get concerned after the fifth day, which had turned to worry as day six still brought no news. There was nobody living locally that she felt she could turn to for support and advice and so had texted Tom Curtis, a long-standing friend and ex-climbing partner who lived a little over an hour away in Newcastle. He called her back immediately, even though he was actually working in Norway, and offered his help if needed. Jane wondered how long to wait before instigating a search and rescue operation, but the immediate question was not ‘when?’ but ‘where?’ As Paul had taken care of logistics for the trip, Jane had little idea of our exact location or who had flown us to the mountains. On the evening of the sixth day she managed to arrange some childcare and went to my office in Penrith to trawl my emails. From these she was able to deduce that we had flown into the mountains from Haines. A search of the web provided the email addresses of three pilots in the town, one of whom was Paul Swanstrom. Jane emailed them all and Paul replied saying he had flown us in but had heard nothing. A little more reassuringly, he was able to report that the weather had been fine and settled. He also told her he would fly in and look for us the following day. She was waiting to hear back from him before making her next move — a full-scale search operation.
‘I think it was easier in some ways when I didn’t hear from you,’ Jane said at the end of her explanation. I understood what she meant. Before the communications revolution I would send a letter when I left for the mountains and then contact her on my return. There would be no information in-between, which in this case would have meant no worry: Jane would have been unaware we were overdue.
‘Maybe you should carry the phone in future. You wouldn’t have to call every day. Just keep it in the bottom of your rucksack for emergencies.’
I have thought long and hard about this since, but in my mind the arguments both for and against are strong and their polarisation allows for no compromise solution. In the end our decision had boiled down to gut feeling, like the multitude of decisions taken during any big climb. I still remain undecided about taking a phone on similar projects in the future.
We were tired and dehydrated, yet at the same time our minds were still racing, filled with the heightened awareness that comes from many days on a mountain. I opened a bottle of single malt whisky bought in the Heathrow duty-free in hopeful anticipation of this moment. We used the first of the melted snow to dilute the liquor and saluted our success. Then we gorged ourselves on peanuts, fig bars and tinned fruit before finally calling it a day.
I slept long and deeply and woke to hear, once again, the unmistakable sound of the wind and of snow falling on the tent. There were also less familiar noises: the fluttering of wings and a persistent high-pitched chirping. At first I thought my mind was playing tricks again, like the storm-bound day at the col, but soon realised there was a bird nearby. I unzipped the inner tent and peered into the porch. A small bird was flapping around in the space between the inner and outer tent. I had been amazed to see flocks of birds flying over us whilst on the climb, but this was even more startling. Somehow, in the middle of this vast glacial wilderness the bird had chanced upon our tents and taken shelter from the storm. I wondered how many others of its kind were right now dying, having been forced to land in less accommodating locations; we were, after all, surrounded by hundreds of square kilometres of utterly unforgiving terrain. Just like us with our climbing, the birds needed a touch of luck in timing their migrations. Those that had flown over us on Good Neighbor would by now be resting and feeding in forests to the north and west, while those attempting to clear the same barrier today would be having a grim time. At least we had been able to carry our own shelter and had a week’s worth of food and fuel to sustain us while on our climb.
Two more birds soon arrived, probably drawn by the other’s calling. Although I did not know the precise species I recognised the first bird as some sort of finch, and one of the two newcomers was the same; the third appeared to be a warbler. Confined to camp, we spent the morning eating, drinking and feeding biscuit crumbs to our guests.
Aware that Paul Swanstrom knew we were overdue, I made a call to him in Haines.
‘You guys okay?’ he asked.
‘Yes, we’re safely off the mountain and back at camp.’
‘The weather’s not looking so good for the next few days. What are your plans?’
‘We’ve got a couple of bottles of whisky and are not going anywhere.’
‘Good to hear that,’ replied our pilot, laughing.
‘I’ll call again when the weather improves.’
In truth we were grateful for the rest — our first since leaving home 12 days earlier. The birds flitted from tent to tent and occasionally perched on a kit bag under an upturned sled. The storm continued.
On the third morning the weather improved, but it was too late for the warbler. Unlike the finches, which were still with us, it had refused all our offerings of food. I found it lying on its side, dead in the snow under the upturned sled. Later, in a surge of optimism, I called Paul, who advised a ‘wait and see’ approach. Then the cloud returned, bringing with it large amounts of fine powder snow.
Next morning all was silent. I banged the inside of the tent to clear it of snow and the light and heat of sunlight crept through the fabric. It was a beautiful day and we soaked up the sun while making breakfast. The finches had already gone. It was time for us to leave also. When I called Haines, Paul was cautious about the pick-up, so I was surprised when I called again at 11.30 to hear he was on his way.
‘Be ready for when I arrive.’
We were outside the tents still packing when the tiny red plane came into view. Moments later it touched down on the glacier in a plume of snow; the roar of its engine grew ever louder as it bounced up the ridge behind our camp before spinning around and coming to a halt. The engine stopped and silence resumed as Paul climbed down from the machine.
We dragged several loads over to the plane, shook hands and then returned to collect more kit. The tents had to be collapsed and packed away. It took time. Patches of misty cloud began to drift by.
‘Hurry up,’ Paul shouted from the plane, pointing down the glacier. With perfect bad timing a bank of cloud was billowing up the valley below, heading for the icefall where we had jumped the crevasse on our way back to camp. We ran for the plane dragging the remaining gear, but it was difficult to move quickly in the knee-deep snow and we both arrived breathless, lungs screaming with exertion. Paul frantically stowed the last of our gear and we climbed aboard; then he quickly started the engine and gunned it for take-off.
Nothing happened.
Paul lowered and raised the revs several more times but the plane would not budge. One of its skis was stuck in the snow. A burst of digging and some well-placed kicks soon freed the ski, but by the time Paul had returned to the cockpit, re-started the engine and lined the plane up for take-off the moment had been lost. The cloud was now upon us.
‘God damn!’ Paul shouted, as we climbed from the plane.
I felt deeply embarrassed and uncomfortable. We should have been ready earlier and now we were stuck. More importantly, Paul’s plane was stuck. We were sat on a glacier in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shiny new aeroplane, which was effectively useless while we remained in cloud. It was obvious that Paul took great pride in the Bush Hawk; it was central to his livelihood and the life-style he had fashioned for himself. Our laziness had, however temporarily, put that in jeopardy. It was hardly surprising he was angry. We both felt incredibly stupid and tried to make polite conversation while silently praying for the cloud to lift.
Mists drifted around the cirque for more than an hour, occasionally offering tantalising glimpses of clear sky above. I consoled myself with the thought that at least the weather was not getting worse; even so it was a huge relief when the cloud eventually began to part.
‘Right. Let’s go,’ Paul said.
We climbed back into the plane and strapped ourselves in. The engine fired into life and Paul meticulously completed a series of checks before concentrating on the GPS mounted in the centre of the control panel. He scrolled through the menu several times as I watched nervously from behind. Preparations complete, he increased the engine speed and released the brakes. The plane began to move down the glacier, but much more slowly than I was expecting, having watched Paul’s first take-off from the same spot. The machine was struggling to accelerate with our extra weight and the softer snow. Slowly we began to gain speed, but we were covering a lot of distance. I felt a growing wave of anxiety; we were heading inexorably towards the icefall, and by now we were going too fast to stop. We were committed to the take-off, or at least its attempt. It was do or die.
The Bush Hawk became weightless just as we entered the zone of crevasses above the icefall. It skipped one slot and then took-off, the icefall gaping directly under us. I breathed a sigh of relief: we were airborne. However the easier feeling did not last long. A high-pitched screaming was coming from the instrument panel and more cloud was advancing up the glacier. Paul banked the plane sharply to the left and made a full one hundred and eighty degree turn back into the cirque we had just left.
‘He’s going to land the plane,’ I told myself. ‘Let the cloud clear and try again later.’ Then we hit the ground, bounced and were immediately airborne again, heading up into the back of the cirque. Clearly another turn was coming up. Paul waited until we were in the back of the basin before putting the plane on its wingtip. I could scarcely believe what was happening: instrument panel screaming, we completed the turn with the tip of one wing just metres above the snow. It was a moment of madness, but a very special kind of madness. In a way it was like climbing, but we were in a machine — a machine that nonetheless was still governed by the natural forces of gravity and the elements. It was frightening and exciting in equal measure. The moment felt surreal. Time slowed.
After what seemed an eternity, but could only have been a few seconds, Paul righted the aircraft and came out of the turn. We flew straight down the glacier gaining speed and height. The instrument panel fell silent. Our moment of danger had passed. Paul had made the whole series of dramatic manoeuvres to gain extra height and avoid flying through the cloud that was advancing up the lower glacier. It had been an incredibly brave and committing piece of flying.
‘That take-off was not for the faint hearted,’ Paul said dryly and we all managed a few chuckles of nervous laughter.
‘What was that screaming noise all about?’ I asked.
‘That was the stall warning indicator.’
It was a sobering thought that throughout the aerial acrobatics the plane was in danger of dropping from the air. Paul Swanstrom had certainly earned his money on this trip and his bold flying seemed to mirror our efforts on the mountain. I’m sure in pure business terms the potential risks of flying to and from such places must outweigh any gain. The main motivation must simply be the challenge and excitement. I felt very grateful that Paul was willing to risk it all to help us realise our dreams; in a strange way it seemed a fitting finale to what we knew had been a very special adventure.
Stepping from the plane, I felt like an astronaut returning to earth. For nearly two weeks we had been living in a sterile world of ice, rock and snow, our only contact with other visible living things our chance encounters with the birds. It felt strange to walk on concrete, to feel the heat of the sun and to be bombarded with smells. Spring comes quickly to this part of the world; now the grass was growing and the trees were sprouting leaves. The air was rich with the fragrance of new growth. I savoured each lung full and then as I took off my jacket other smells permeated the air. I badly needed a shower.
Two months after returning home an email landed in my inbox from Paul Schweizer. The news it brought was stunning. I immediately telephoned Paul for confirmation. It was a fact — ‘our’ route had been climbed way back in 1968 by a Japanese team.
After the climb we had alerted the usual climbing magazine and journal editors to our success. One — Lindsay Griffin, an associate editor of the American Alpine Journal — asked for precise information on the line we had taken. I explained how we had not seen a single trace of the passage of others. With his usual thoroughness, Lindsay had then exchanged information with a contact in Japan who had unearthed a magazine article detailing the ascent. The map attached to the email clearly showed their route and ours to be the same.
‘A bit of a blow,’ was Paul’s downbeat take on the news.
‘I suppose so. But it was still a damn good climb. And ours is the first alpine-style ascent.’ My words sounded a little hollow; we had thought it was a first after all.
We soon learned the detail of the previous climb. A 10-member team from the Osaka-Fu Mountaineering Association had tackled the route siege style over 13 days in May–June 1968. Starting from the Canadian-Yukon side, they had fixed a line of ropes and dug snow cave camps. Two climbers reached the top and on that same summit day three others had died in an avalanche. It must have been a remarkable climb at the time, but it was from another era on almost every level.
I could see there was little reason to feel disappointed. The 41 years that had elapsed since the original ascent meant that in essence we had done two different climbs. Only when confronted with such stark differences do you realise how things have moved on. Mountaineering in this sense is no different to anything else. It is a product of time and place, of cultural values and the technology of the age.
I could never envisage climbing Good Neighbor Peak as part of a 10-man team. Even, when I first went to the greater ranges in the 1980s I usually only climbed as one of pair, even if more climbers were sharing the same base camp. The use of fixed lines and established camps is similarly alien to me, while the logistics of travelling with such a large team with all their supplies and equipment is incomprehensible. It was hard to believe such an expedition had occurred within my own lifetime. Yet it is a fact there are still teams, particularly from the Far East, climbing Himalayan peaks in this fashion today.
Conditions on the mountain for the Japanese also sounded dramatically different from those we had encountered. Even though climbing later in the season, they had found the ridge so plastered in snow and ice that they were able to sleep in snow caves, whereas for us even finding and excavating tent platforms had been a struggle at times. Features we had climbed would have been buried beneath snow and ice. Since 1968 this mantle had melted back to the underlying ice, rock and névé that characterised our ascent.
The most striking difference was that of speed. We had completed our climb in a mere five days and descended in two, including a full day of inactivity in the storm. Technology had played a part in this: Paul Swanstrom had been able to fly us right to the base of the route, and better, lighter clothing and equipment meant we began our climb carrying much less weight than the Japanese. We could even have taken a satellite phone had we wished. Mostly though the difference in our times reflected a difference of approach — a seismic shift in mountaineering culture to one that advocates doing more with less. Both Paul and I had embraced this notion over decades of alpine-style climbing around the world, giving us a clear idea of what was possible. We had followed that vision and on this occasion the interplay of chance, experience, determination and skill produced something special. The knowledge that others had done the route before did not alter that understanding.
Life quickly moves on, yet I still find myself thinking about our precious days on that perfect ridge, surrounded by an arctic vastness. I remember the first long day racing the rising sun to the ridge and later watching it set in splashes of red and violet beyond the steely sheen of the Seward Glacier. Then there were the days on the ridge itself: I see Paul, a tiny and vulnerable looking figure adrift on an ocean of ice and snow, his key pitch that unlocked Good Neighbor’s upper slopes, the calm waters of Yakutat Bay at the far curvature of the horizon, and the magical final rope-length through the ice runnel and flutings to the summit plateau.
Deep down, I know that it was a moment of mountaineering perfection and that I will do nothing better, but the passion remains — I still want to try.