It is not always the mammoth successes or the major ascents that are the most memorable. Sometimes an epic failure – a combination of struggle with wind and storm, and the interaction with one’s companions – turns what could have been a very minor, low-key incident into one that will never be forgotten. This was the case over New Year, 1965. It started normally enough. We had been invited to see the New Year in with some friends just north of Glasgow, and were then going to meet Tom Patey on New Year’s Day, to get in some climbing. But I should have known better – things happened when Tom was around. Mary Stewart, our hostess on New Year’s Eve, also has this catalytic quality.
Mary is a vet who lives in the most wonderfully chaotic house I have ever known, with her five children, dogs, other animals, and a succession of friends – often flotsam from the competitive society, who finally end up under the ever-open hospitality of her roof. The house is in the middle of a golf course outside Glasgow, was once a stable but now has a couple of big rooms and a kitchen downstairs and a warren of rooms upstairs.
After graduating, Mary, an American by birth, came over to Scotland to do postgraduate work and had fallen in love with the hills and the country. She had taken up climbing and had married a member of the Glasgow Mountaineering Club. Unfortunately the marriage had not worked. Her husband was a solicitor, and Mary was a warm-hearted Bohemian with little interest in being a suburban housewife.
Strongly built and wiry, with a hand grip as firm as a man’s, Mary would have been the perfect frontierswoman on a ranch at the edge of Indian territory in the Far West. Her hair is a rich copper, long and thick, and her face seems perpetually weather-beaten; but there is a rare warmth and kindness in her face that cancels out any danger of over-masculinity. I can always see her in my mind’s eye – barefooted, clad in a pair of old Levis and a simple sweater worn outside her trousers, ornamented by a big, broad, patterned belt.
Wendy and I drove up to Scotland on New Year’s Eve, with Conrad, now one year old, asleep in the back of the van. The trip was starting badly; I could feel depression creep over me – the result, I suspected, of the proximity of a New Year and its festivities, with my own doubts for the future. The book was barely half-finished. I had just completed a gruelling lecture season, giving the same lecture on the North Wall of the Eiger, which was now two years old, over and over again. It wasn’t just the boredom of repeating the same lecture, it was the worry that this was something of the past – that I was leaning backwards, unable to go forwards.
The party was well under way when we arrived. A record player throbbed out its beat. People were dancing, dark gyrating shadows in a candle-lit black-draped room. We were deafened, confused, out of tune with the rhythm of a party that had been under way for some time. Martin and Maggy Boysen, who had been staying with us at Woodland, were already there. So was John Cleare, a climber who was also a professional photographer; he had with him a statuesque, very extrovert, very blonde girlfriend, and seemed the symbol of the success and self-confidence which at that time seemed to be eluding me. He had a real skill – a positive career. This shell of self-confidence probably hid much the same uncertainty that I felt, but that night it seemed real enough to me.
Another friend, who seemed to have found happiness in another way, was Eric Beard. Slightly built and wiry, with an attractive ugliness about him, big ears framing a crew-cut head of hair and a gnomish face that was one big grin, he had devoted his life to becoming a brilliant fell runner. He held the records for running the Welsh three thousanders, and a host of other records. Stripped off, he was all legs – strongly muscled, bonded to a lean, compact body and topped by his big grin.
He had no qualifications, had spent some time as a Leeds chippy, before abandoning steady jobs for a nomadic existence, instructing at climbing centres, or working as an odd-job man. He was the traditional life-and-soul-of-the-party, joking, singing, exuding a simple warm-heartedness, and yet behind this there was an indefinable wistful sadness, as if, in his complete freedom from material pressures and the ties of family or a fixed base, he also was a lost soul, searching for some kind of fulfilment.
I sat on the floor in a dark corner, and tried to drag myself out of my own mood of depression. But it was no good – the New Year was very nearly on us and the spontaneous enjoyment of the others was alien to my own feelings; the New Year was full of foreboding and before it arrived I sneaked up to bed. Wendy, upset, confused, tearful, followed me, trying to understand the depths of my mood, trying to pull me from its dark trap, till at last love and sleep curled round us, and we were lost in oblivion.
We woke to a bright sun, cloudless sky and a hard, keen frost. No depression could survive against such a stimulus – New Year’s Day, 1965, didn’t seem so bad after all, and anyway, who cared about the distant future when, with a bit of luck, there would be some good snow and ice conditions in Glencoe? I had one plus from my mood of the night before – I had drunk comparatively little and had gained a lot more sleep than the others. We got up, helped clear the debris of the party, and planned the rest of the weekend. Tom Patey was going to meet us that day in Glencoe, and soon we had three car-loads of climbers ready to set out for the hills. Even Wendy was coming, leaving Conrad behind for the first time ever, with Mary’s children.
As we drove up to Glencoe, she looked anxious and worried, like any animal taken away from its newborn litter. But I had now recovered completely from the previous evening’s low. There was a sprinkling of snow on the foothills as we drove round Bearsden to Balloch, and then, as we came to the foot of Loch Lomond, we could see Ben Lomond near its head, serene, magnificent, plastered in snow.
It was like one’s first trip to Scotland, as we careered round the bends on the shores of the loch and then chased over the great sweep of Rannoch Moor. Buachaille Etive Mor, a cathedral of black rock interlaced with snow, beckoned us on our way. We stopped at Altnafeadh, a stalker’s house with a couple of barns by the road, and wondered what to do. It was already past midday, and it would be dark by six that night. There were three of us, Mary Stewart, a friend of hers called Jock, and myself. It was obviously too late to tackle any of the harder routes, and anyway we were too polyglot a party. I suggested the Left Fork of Crowberry Gully – the guidebook assured us: ‘It is fairly certain that this fork will provide an exciting finish to the gully.’ The Right Fork is one of the great classic gully climbs of Glencoe – comparatively straightforward by modern standards, but nevertheless sufficiently long and difficult to trap the unwary into enforced bivouacs.
The Left Fork is slightly shorter than the Right, but makes up by steepness, being a narrow fissure capped by a jutting roof overhang. It was a joy to leave the car and walk through a light covering of powder snow towards the towering mass of the Buachaille. Soon we were at the foot of Crowberry Gully itself. Lined with firm snow, it curled up between the steep, dark rocks of the Crowberry Ridge and the North Buttress – and on this sunny New Year’s Day, there seemed little threat or foreboding about the climb. We put on crampons and started soloing up the lower snow-slopes in the gully, boots kicking with an easy assurance into the firm snow. As we gained height, and came to the first little step, we put on the rope – and on we went, till we reached the foot of the Left Fork, a narrow gash in the upper rocks leading on to the crest of Crowberry Ridge. I was itching to tax myself, to get on to some hard climbing.
The Left Fork was little more than a wide chimney, lined with ice, and blocked near its top by a smooth roof. I swarmed into the chimney, wriggled and thrutched up its narrow confines, to a point below the roof. The capstone jutted smoothly over my head – there were no holds, and the chimney widened so that I was nearly doing the splits in my effort to straddle both walls. Providentially, someone had left a piton in place, so that I had some protection in the event of a fall; I was now nearly a hundred feet above the other two. It was the kind of climbing that I have always enjoyed, gymnastic, contortionist, and yet, by using either side of the chimney to the best advantage, I could avoid putting too much weight on my arms – just as well, for there was nothing to pull on anyway. The holds above the roof were all sloping, glazed in ice. The jut of the overhang forced my body backwards; I was dimly aware of the situation as I was forced out of the secure confines of the chimney, but I knew no fear. My concentration on those few feet of rock in front of my nose was too great. Crampons scraped on rock, dug a fraction of an inch into the glaze of verglas. The world contracted into those few feet immediately above me – a pull, a straddle and I was up; a few more feet and I was in the gap just below Crowberry Tower. I knew a delicious sense of achievement – of freedom – of pure, simple joy at my situation; how different from the dark mood of the previous night. Climbing, the great healer, had restored my self-confidence.
It was now the turn of the others. Mary was justifiably apprehensive; although strongly-built and a good climber, her family and work commitments had kept her away from the hills, and this was obviously going to be considerably harder than anything else she had ever tried.
Jock swarmed up the pitch to join me; and then it was Mary’s turn. I got into a good position to give her a tight rope. By this time I was getting worried about having brought her on a climb which was obviously too difficult for her. She started up steadily enough – slow, but steady progress – the sound of panting and scraping of crampons on rock drifted up the fissure, getting stronger as she came nearer. The scraping and panting got louder, the rope crept in more slowly as she came up to the roof overhang and came to a dead stop. I was getting cold and gave the rope a reassuring heave.
‘For heaven’s sake, don’t pull, Chris, you’re pulling me off,’ came a shout from below.
The rope was arched over her head round the roof, so that any pull tended to pull her outwards and off what precarious holds she had managed to find. There was another long pause, a lot more scraping:
‘Come on, Mary,’ I shouted. ‘We’re bloody freezing up here. Straddle across the chimney and just bridge up. As soon as you get free of the chimney, we’ll be able to pull you out.’
‘I can’t make my feet stick on the rock,’ came the reply.
‘Just slap them on,’ I shouted. ‘They’ll stay there. Come on; one big effort.’
‘Okay, I’ll try now. Hold the rope tight.’
Another long pause and the rope moved a few inches – more scraping from below, and suddenly the rope tugged at my hands and body, pulled me off my stance, and I found myself hanging on the belay with the rope nearly cutting me in two. Mary had lost contact with the rock, had spiralled out into mid-air, and was now hanging in space below the overhang – even with the correct knot, it’s no joke hanging on the end of a rope. You can survive about ten minutes before losing consciousness and suffocating.
‘For God’s sake, let me down,’ shouted Mary.
‘Hang on, we’ll have a go at pulling you up,’ I replied. There were two of us, and with a bit of luck we should be able to haul her up to the holds above the roof overhang.
‘Be quick, I’m being cut in half,’ she shouted.
Jock climbed down to me and we both heaved on the rope, but it was no good. There was too much friction as it went over the overhang, and anyway it is nearly impossible to haul up the deadweight of a person without some kind of pulley system. We heaved and hauled with very little effect, until the pleas from below, to be lowered back down, became irresistible.
Reluctantly, we lowered Mary about thirty feet, till she came in contact with the ice once more. I then gave the rope to Jock and climbed down to a point where I could see her. She was slumped, exhausted, on the ice.
‘Come on, Mary,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll talk you up. You’ll be all right.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry, Chris, for being such a nuisance, but I just couldn’t stay on, and I think I’d have been cut in two if you’d kept hauling much longer.’
It was typical of Mary to apologise for a situation that was mainly my fault. Anyway, she soon started to climb again and, exhausted, cajoled and shouted at, she struggled over the overhang.
By this time it was beginning to get dark and in the dusk we scrambled, well content, down the Curved Ridge, back to the cars. We drove down to the Clachaig Hotel, where we had arranged to meet Tom Patey, Martin and the others. So far, the weekend had been enjoyable, but in no way specially memorable from any other winter’s weekend. But Tom had a way of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and this was to be no exception. Tom was a great traveller; he thought nothing of driving from his home in Ullapool to Speyside, in the Cairngorms, a good hundred and fifty miles on narrow roads, for an evening drink and a sing-song. His standard weekend could include an itinerary that most mortals would spread over a week – a lecture on the Friday night in Cambridge (to pay the expenses), then a quick flip over to Wales to see Joe Brown, and on the way back he would often make a fifty-mile diversion to call in at our cottage in the Lakes. He was a genius at concocting complicated plans for a party’s entertainment, which might include a ceilidh a hundred miles away, followed by a day’s climbing in the opposite direction. In fact, climbing with Tom Patey was a kind of magical mystery tour, in which no one, except perhaps himself, knew what was coming next.
He was already ensconced in the bar at the Clachaig, his squeezebox out, a dram of whisky at his side and a cigarette in his mouth.
‘The snow conditions are no good here,’ he greeted us. ‘They’ll be a lot better on Creag Meaghaidh and I’ve got a good line you’ll be interested in.’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘The Buachaille seemed in great condition to me.’
‘Ah, but on Meaghaidh it’ll be even better, and we’ll be able to drink at the Loch Laggan Hotel.’
And so we drank and argued till closing time at the Clachaig and, well oiled with beer and whisky, were ready for anything. We left Glencoe at eleven o’clock, and raced in convoy round Loch Leven, through the still, silent streets of Kinlochleven and Fort William, past Ben Nevis, massive, squat, gleaming in the moonlight, and up to Glen Spean, over a road white and shiny with hard-packed snow. This was Patey country, and he drove his Skoda like a Timo Makinen, careering round the bends at a steady fifty. I followed, dogged, rather nervous, but determined not to be left behind – apart from anything else, I didn’t know where we were bound.
At last we came to a stop outside a hotel. It was dark and silent, but there was a bothy, Tom said, down by the side. The bothy was an old hen house, with holes in the floor and gaps in the door, but it had a roof and walls, and we all got sleeping bags out and snuggled down. Wendy muttered about the cold, and snuggled close to me. She’s a comfort-loving girl with an appalling circulation. It was three in the morning when we got off to sleep; even so, we woke quite early. There was little temptation to stay in bed – it was too cold, draughty and uncomfortable.
Breakfast in the hotel with bowls of porridge, Aberdeen kippers and plates full of toast; time slips by and it’s midday before we get away.
‘It’s only a wee walk to the crag,’ Tom reassured us. I suspect he enjoyed the perpetual confrontation with time, the game of brinkmanship, of leaving at the last minute, and then snatching the chosen climb from the oncoming night. Tom didn’t believe in coolly laid plans – his climbing was one of instant pleasure, based on his own close knowledge of the hills and the most intimate details of almost every crag on the Scottish mainland.
But it was more than a wee walk to the foot of the crag – snow was knee deep, in places thigh deep, and our progress soon slowed to the laborious plod of the man in front who was making the route. There were six of us – Martin Boysen, Tom Patey, Eric Beard, Mary Stewart, John Cleare and myself. Only Tom had ever been to the crag before – but he, of course, knew every foot of the way, every indentation on the crag. We didn’t need a map or guidebook, for we were with the local expert. And so, thoughtlessly, chatting, joking, wading, we walked towards Creag Meaghaidh.
This was just another light hearted day in the hills; it was too late to think of trying any of the more difficult climbs, and in any case we were all feeling tired after only a few hours’ sleep the night before. The weather was overcast with a ceiling of featureless grey, merging with the grey-white of the upper slopes of the cliff. There was no wind, no sound; everything was muffled by the snow. It took us two hours to reach the foot of the crag – it seemed lost, smothered in the mountainside. At three o’clock in the afternoon there were only two and a half hours to dark.
‘Do you think Martin and I have time to do South Post?’ I asked Tom.
‘Och yes, it’ll only take an hour if you move fast,’ he replied. ‘You go straight up that tongue of ice above the big gully in the centre.’
We waded through the snows into the gully. There was no sense of perspective or scale; everything was black or white, black rocks and snow merging into mist, merging into snow. We stumbled through the snow with the exaggerated slow-motion movements of a cinematic dream-world – raise one leg, plunge it into the snow, transfer weight to it and sink, down, down, down into the clinging morass of soft powder snow. It didn’t matter how much you cleared with your hands, you still sank into it; we never reached the foot of the climb – it was only fifty feet away, but we just never seemed to get closer to it. Martin lost patience first, suddenly erupting into a frustrated rage at the soft, cloying mass, hammered it with his axe and cursed at the top of his voice, curses that were instantly muffled in the snow around us.
‘Come on, let’s bugger off from here – we’re wasting our bloody time.’
I agreed, and we turned round to flounder back down the gully to the foot of a snowy ramp which the others had followed to complete an easier route. We soon caught them up, near the top of the ramp, at the foot of the head-wall of the cliff. A steep ice pitch spiralled upwards into the mist, and we could hear Tom hacking away somewhere up above. Flakes of ice, loosened by his axe, tinkled down the rock, and we sat huddled at the foot, waiting for him to finish his work.
It was now four-thirty, only an hour to dusk. At last, there was a shout from above and Mary, who was tied on to Tom, followed him up on a tight rope. I went into the lead, trying to keep up with Mary, but the ice was steep and I found that I needed to cut the odd extra hold. As a result, I soon got left behind. By the time I reached the top of a narrow scoop that led out on to the summit plateau, Tom and Mary had already vanished. I could just discern a line of footsteps, fast drifting over in the wind. John Cleare and Beardie had tied on to our rope, which meant that Martin and I had to wait until all four of us were on top. It was very nearly pitch dark before John Cleare reached the top.
I had been getting increasingly worried. Tom was the only person in the team who knew the way down. Neither Martin nor I had map, compass or torch. We didn’t know the general configuration of the mountain with any degree of certainty. ‘Has anyone got a torch?’ I asked.
‘Not me,’ admitted John.
‘I’ve got one,’ said Beardie, and dug it out of his sack.
‘We’d better keep on the rope,’ I said. ‘We could go over a cornice too bloody easily in this light.’
I started to follow Tom and Mary’s tracks, but after a few paces they vanished, drifted over by the ever-shifting snows. We stopped in the pitch dark, somewhere on the top of Creag Meaghaidh.
‘Has anyone got a map?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘Compass?’
‘I’ve got one,’ said Beardie, and produced it with the aplomb of a conjuror. It turned out that he had some food as well. He, who had least experience as a mountaineer, was the only one who had the bare essentials of equipment.
But a compass without a map is of only limited value. We sat down on the snow and I tried to draw, with the tip of my glove, the configuration of Creag Meaghaidh from what we could remember from a glance at the map on the hotel wall, and from what little we had seen on the way up.
‘I think the line of the cliffs should be north and south,’ said John.
‘I suppose Tom went down one of the gullies,’ suggested Martin. ‘We could try to find it and go down it ourselves. It would be the quickest way back down.’
‘How do we know which is the right gully, though?’ I pointed out. ‘I think we should try to get to the col on the north of the crag and cut down that to the gully bottom. If we follow the line of the top of the crag on the compass, as soon as it starts curving round to the east we should know we are heading for the col. Then all we’ve got to do is keep going down till it starts climbing again, and that must be the col – we turn right and we’ll get back down into the corrie.’
It sounded simple, but we weren’t even sure if the cliffs did lie in a north-south line. Cloud merged with snow at the end of the torch-beam – it was very difficult to tell where snow ended and space began; it was like being in a white box. I started off leading, the others following at intervals of about fifteen feet, all linked by the rope. It was a strange, elating feeling – the situation was undoubtedly serious, for a bitterly cold and gusty wind was playing across the undulating surface of the plateau. We had no bivouac equipment, very little food and only one torch which we couldn’t expect to last for more than a couple of hours’ continuous use.
In addition, Martin had only recently recovered from a bout of ’flu, and was already feeling tired and weak. Without Beardie’s food, the position would have been even more serious.
‘You’d better take the torch,’ I told Martin, who was just behind me. ‘If I go over a cornice, there’s less chance of us losing it if you have it.’
We peered into the mist, trying to differentiate between the edge of the cliff and space, kept checking the compass, and advanced slowly and carefully, keeping what I thought was a safe distance from the cornice edge. But it was very difficult to tell just where it was. Martin shone the torch from behind. It cut a bright swathe through the snow-filled clouds, so that the line of light also looked like the line of the slope.
‘I think we’ve come to the place where we can start dropping down,’ I shouted. ‘Martin, can you come up to me so that we can see just how far this slope goes down?’
Martin came up to my side and altered the angle of the torch so that it was shining straight down. We were standing on the very lip of a huge cornice, looking straight down into a bottomless void. Had the cornice collapsed, the pair behind us would have had very little chance of holding both of us, and almost certainly, all four of us would have fallen to our deaths.
It didn’t take a second to sum up the situation. We both scuttled back to safety, and resumed our tortuous progress, trying to follow the top of the line of cornices to where we thought the slope should drop away to the col between the two mountains – and imperceptibly the ground did begin to drop away – we were losing height in our tiny cocoon of dim torchlight. Surely, we must be heading for the col – but were we? Our blade of light was no longer a brilliant white; it had faded to a smoky yellow – a sure sign that the battery was dying. Once dead, we should be unable to read the compass – unable to see the line of a cornice – and should have no choice but to stop where we were and wait for the long night to end. But would we all survive it? The wind was now gusting hard, tearing gaps in the thin layer of cloud above us, to give glimpses of a black, star-studded sky.
With hope buoyant, we plunged down the easy slope, trending eastwards as we had visualised the descent to the col. But there was no sign of any col. We could just discern what seemed a steep drop to the right, and on the left and front, the slope dropped away, undulating gently.
‘Are you sure this is the col?’ asked John.
‘I don’t know,’ I had to admit. ‘It could be a depression on the main ridgeline, or I suppose we could have missed it altogether. Anyway, we’d better keep going while we’ve got a bit of light left in the torch.’
We kept plodding on, now going gently upwards. Suddenly, glancing at the compass, I realised that the steep drop was now to our west. Had we somehow doubled back on ourselves? Surely not – the steep slope was still on our right. But where the hell were we? Without a map, without any more than a vague impression of the configuration of the land, we were basing all our movement on a series of guesses – an edifice of decisions as fragile as the proverbial card house – but once we stopped reasoning out each move based on these fragile hypotheses, we should be totally lost. I was uncomfortably aware that the mountains to our north and west stretched for miles, without road or human habitation. We might have been in the middle of the Antarctic, our situation seemed so isolated, the immediate surroundings so bleak.
Looking at the compass, it seemed just possible that we had crossed the col we had been seeking, and were now on top of the hill immediately opposite Creag Meaghaidh. But if this were the case, were the slopes immediately below us precipitous, or would we have an easy run off? There seemed only one way of finding out – to start down and hope for the best. The torch battery had, at last, died on us and we could just see the ghostly glimmer of snow against rock. I worked my way to the brink, fearful that I might be trying to step over a cornice, prodding the snow in front of me like a blind man with his stick. It dug into snow – I was on a straight slope. Slowly, we worked our way down – each little drop assumed the scale of a major cliff – even three feet seemed a bottomless pit, and it was only by lowering oneself gingerly down each step that one could find just how extensive it was.
At last the angle of the snow around us began to level out, and we came out of the cloud to see, spread below us, dark and ghostly, the corrie we had left so thoughtlessly the previous afternoon. It was nearly midnight, but we still had an hour of floundering in front of us before we could get to the road. Beardie now came into his own. Throughout our adventure he had kept up a patter of jokes and sensible suggestions. Now he forged into the lead and broke trail almost all the way back, wading thigh deep through the snow. Just short of the road, we saw the glimmer of torches. Patey was there with the beginnings of a rescue party. He, also, had had his share of adventures.
‘Why didn’t you follow my tracks?’ he asked.
‘They were covered over by the time we got up.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I never thought you’d have any trouble following them, and I wanted to get Mary down the gully before it was pitch dark.’
On the way back down the valley, Mary had fallen through a snow bridge into a stream. She had been soaked to the skin, and her clothes had frozen solid on her. Tom, who had just recovered from a bad attack of ’flu, had been on the verge of collapse.
Altogether, we were all lucky not to have had at least one serious casualty from exposure. We had, undoubtedly, broken just about every rule of mountain safety that had ever been made.
And yet I am unrepentant – it had been an extraordinary, rather wonderful experience. Half the attraction of climbing is playing with danger and the unknown. It would have been lunatic to have consciously sought the particular set of circumstances that faced us, but having landed ourselves in our predicament through lack of forethought, extracting ourselves from what could have been a dangerous situation presented an intriguing challenge.
If we had been taking out school students our conduct would have been unforgivable – but we weren’t. All of us were experienced mountaineers who should, perhaps, have known better. Each individual had his own responsibility, to wife and child in my case, to girlfriends or parents in that of the others. If we had died, it would have been our own responsibility. It would have been more difficult to define our responsibility to a search party, if it had been called out. Had we got ourselves well and truly lost, and then collapsed from exhaustion, it could have needed the efforts of several hundred searchers to find us. In this instance, we should have come in for a lot of justified criticism for causing others inconvenience entirely through our own lack of preparation. But we had got away with it, and I suppose, rather like mischievous schoolboys, who have successfully played truant, were filled with the excitement of the experience, feeling closely united through the way we had worked together.
It was two o’clock in the morning before we got back to the hotel. Tom played his squeezebox, and we all dissected the experience with as much satisfaction as we would have done a major first ascent. Wendy and Maggy had spent a chill day in their sleeping bags in the bothy, getting more and more worried by our non-appearance, but neither was prepared to show her fears to the other; neither wanted to increase the worry of the other. In every way, they had had the most trying time, as I am afraid women almost always do in such circumstances. There was none of the excitement of being involved in danger – just the long, cold wait, with nothing to do but worry. They needed much more self-control and courage than we might have shown, and yet it was all too easy for us to take it for granted. Fortunately, they were so glad to have us back, uninjured, that they chose to put aside the agonising hours of waiting.
Are we being selfish or irresponsible if we go on climbing once we are married? I suspect we are, but equally, I know – and Wendy knows – that I would not be the same person if ever I were to give up my climbing. I think this is something that every girl who marries a climber has to come to terms with. At the same time, the married climber should probably take greater precautions to avoid unnecessary risks and danger, though this is difficult to undertake, as was demonstrated by our own near-debacle which occurred because we had taken the hills for granted – something one can never afford to do in Scotland in winter.
But we survived, and we learned a lot and, in a strange kind of way, thoroughly enjoyed our experience.
Thus the New Year of 1965 was launched, in a way symbolically; for out of depression and near-disaster had emerged great experience. And 1965 was to prove a turning-point in my own new-found career as a freelance climber, writer, photographer and lecturer.