Driving through the Pakistani countryside, I rested my head on the window and thought of all the people who, over the years, had got me here. Mal Duff had been there at the start of it all. He was part of the reason I was on this bus now. I remembered waiting for another ride, from London’s Victoria station to Chamonix for one of Mal’s legendary climbing courses. He had sent me joining instructions through the post, because that’s how things were done in the 1970s. We were to make our own way to London and meet at an appointed hour under Victoria’s huge departures board. Mal would gather up his latest recruits and we’d all drive off together – only it didn’t work out that way.
As a nineteen-year-old lad, I was looking forward to my first season in the Alps. I’d learned the basics of rock climbing near my home in the Cairngorms. I had spent long evenings poring over books by famous climbers, from Albert Frederick Mummery and Edward Whymper to Gaston Rébuffat and Lionel Terray. My biggest inspiration, as a Scot, was the Edinburgh climber Dougal Haston who, in 1966, had climbed a new route on the north face of the Eiger after John Harlin had fallen to his death. Then, in 1975, Haston survived an unplanned bivvy above 8,000 metres on the south-west face of Everest with Doug Scott. I knew that both of them had climbed with a fellow called Chris Bonington, who seemed good at getting media attention and had written a book called I Chose to Climb, which was open and honest, inspiring and quite different to other mountaineering books of that time. Doug, who looked a bit like John Lennon, and Dougal were all over the news thanks to their success on Everest. Their mountaineering achievements inspired a generation – my generation.
So I found myself walking across the concourse at Victoria where a number of other youths waited for Mal under the departures board. We introduced ourselves, sniffing round each other in the way that young men do, trying not to appear like we cared, but caring a great deal. They seemed far more streetwise than me. Some had sprouted immature beards and had grown up in the city. I felt very much the country bumpkin. This was my first adventure away from home. Even the train down to London had been a novel experience. The only other train I’d been on was the small puffer we had at Balmenach Distillery, where my father worked.
The engine was owned and maintained by the distillery and ran down to the main line at Cromdale where it would pick up wagons left in a siding. The little engine would hitch up the big wagons, loaded with tons of coal or barley, and pull them back up to the distillery, where they were unloaded by men with shovels. The barley was turned to malt, a vital ingredient for the final amber spirit; the coal powered it all. With my twin brother Gregor and younger sister Eunice, I’d hitch rides on the train to visit the local shop and play with other kids.
Balmenach is an excellent whisky, a ‘single malt’ that without doubt is one of the very best from Speyside. Not only was my dad a distiller, so was his father before him and almost all my uncles on that side of the family. My mother was from farming stock and we have many relations who own large parts of the Black Isle and drive those big green John Deere tractors that delay motorists driving along the A9.
When Greg and I were born, our parents were running the distillery at Dalwhinnie, in a wonderfully isolated spot in the Cairngorms often mentioned on the news as the coldest place in Britain. My dad had driven Mum to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness when we arrived on 8 September, with me emerging fifteen minutes ahead of my brother. We have been good buddies since birth and have an uncanny connection to each other. To this day, one of us can pick up the phone to call the other and be connected without the phone ringing at the other end of the line. We have even gone out to buy ourselves the same new car – the exact same model, same colour and everything – without even hinting to the other that we were buying a new vehicle.
Greg now lives in the Channel Islands. He doesn’t climb but the bond we have gives me fantastic strength. He left school with ambitions to become a chartered accountant while I wanted to be a shepherd and whisky distiller. He now runs his own company advising large investment houses and multinational companies, and sits on the boards of huge financial institutions giving expensive and apparently sound advice. I am a shepherd in a way, shepherding people in the mountains, rather than sheep. We each have two daughters and all are the best of friends.
So there I was, a naive Highland laddie, standing in Victoria station daring to speak to these cosmopolitan youths apparently accustomed to crowds and swearing broadly, something I’d not heard at home. British Rail staff, many of them Afro-Caribbean, moved around us, the first black people I’d seen who weren’t on television. My Karrimor ‘Haston Alpiniste’ rucksack showed the wear and tear from years of Munro-bagging and other adventures in the Scottish Highlands, but otherwise I felt I was the novice of the party.
Hours later an older man with a proper beard approached us. He was quite skinny and had a fine, clear Edinburgh accent – Mal Duff. As he talked his arms waved. Our vehicle, supposed to transport us to Chamonix, had broken down. There were apologies galore. We were to board a train, pay for it ourselves, go to Dover, catch a ferry and then continue to Paris, where we would transfer by Metro to another station on the other side of Paris and catch another train to Saint-Gervais and so eventually on to Chamonix. He had no idea what trains to catch, which platforms they left from or a single clue about times. He winged it all the way, something I quickly learned was typical of Mal.
It was a mad but exciting rush between platforms, all of us running after him like chicks, bent double under our huge rucksacks. I was totally exhausted, having not slept since leaving Scotland, and I kept falling asleep, sitting on train floors since the seats always seemed to be occupied. Eventually, starving and bedraggled, we all tumbled out on to the platform in Chamonix to be told that it was only a mile or so to walk – in blazing sunshine – to the campsite.
This, it turned out, was on the wonderfully infamous Snell’s Field on the outskirts of Chamonix. The place is a legend in Alpine-climbing tales, a wild camping area in more ways than one and still home to a famous boulder called the Pierre d’Orthaz. (We all thought it was named after some guy called Pierre, maybe the guy who owned the field.) Mal had a team of illustrious British climbers working for him, none of whom were qualified guides, at least not then. There were tents pitched haphazardly and a kitchen area with gas stoves, pans and a water butt. We were given a quick introduction to the camping area, our tents and sleeping places, and were handed mugs of hot tea with a sachet of powdered milk.
I hid my passport in my Blacks sleeping bag, something every British kid had at the time, and we walked into Chamonix for our first beer in the famous Bar Le National, a longstanding bastion of British climbing. By the bar sat the owner, a well-rounded man called Maurice Simond who seemed almost always half asleep. He had two wonderful daughters, Sylvie and Christine, who were both very welcoming. None of us could afford to buy more than one drink there and we soon learned to go to the supermarket and buy cheap bottles of beer before meeting up at the bar, where we would buy one beer from Maurice, drink it and then top up our glasses under the table. Maurice knew what we were up to but let it go, a kind man and welcoming to all British climbers. When he passed away many years later I wrote to the British Mountaineering Council suggesting we do something on behalf of British climbers to mark his passing. A little brass plaque was fixed to the wall of the Bar Le National recalling his hospitality ‘with thanks from all British alpinists’.
For a young man from the Highlands, Chamonix was an eye-opening experience. The girls were beautiful, always in their summer dresses, their legs tanned and long, and speaking English with French accents. Surrounding Chamonix, the mountains and rock faces were incredible; one could not look at them and not be inspired to climb. It was an amazing town back then, overflowing with free spirits. Everyone seemed to climb or live to be in the mountains; everyone I met seemed in some way unconventional. Real jobs, proper mundane work, was something to be put off until later. Years later. Most people had good enough climbing equipment and clothing, some even had good off-piste ski-mountaineering skis and climbed in the Himalaya, but otherwise we all avoided spending money on unnecessary stuff. Hitchhiking was how we travelled, or by taking possession of someone’s old banger of a car. Living on a shoestring was the norm.
Our ‘guides’ took us to the Bossons Glacier, in those days much closer to the road, and after a short walk through the pine-scented forest we arrived at the ice. (These days, with climate change and glacial retreat, it’s no longer considered a safe training venue.) I had never really used ice climbing tools before. I had an axe with an adze and an axe with a hammer, and some long nail-like ice screws called ‘warthogs’ and some clever new tubular screws introduced by a man called Yvon Chouinard. I wrapped long neoprene straps across my boots and through the rings on my crampons in a very deliberate pattern. Strapping on crampons was considered an art form. Then, with the buckles done up, I stomped along the ice.
It’s the most fantastic feeling, being able to tramp across slippery blue ice. Our guides top-roped us at first and apparently I was good at it; I was soon climbing up and over ice walls with overhangs and even soloing about. I loved it – I felt I was born to do this. The next day we were up on the Aiguille du Midi and I was taking my first nervous steps down the razor-edge of the Arête du Midi. How anyone expected a sensible human to walk down it was quite beyond me. Now of course I laugh at myself and as a guide I can be up and down it dozens of times in a climbing season. I was roped to a guy called Paul, a good climber Mal had hired even though, like Mal’s other ‘guides’, he had little formal training on how to look after me. But he did his best and gave me the confidence to proceed.
After that we climbed Mont Blanc du Tacul by the normal route and I relished every single moment. We came back to bivvy, illegally of course, at the cable car station on top of the Aiguille du Midi. It did occur to me that Mal’s course was more than a little unconventional, led by a dreamer who inspired adventure. Then again, I could afford it. I would have never been able to afford a proper organised course with qualified Chamonix guides. After it was over I stayed on with one of the instructors and we climbed the Brenva Spur on Mont Blanc. I climbed Mont Blanc again that season with Dave Cuthbertson, one of the best climbers of his generation and a well-known guide.
We ended up traversing the mountain, and I remember walking back to Snell’s Field with him, traversing the Géant icefall, climbing into and out of huge crevasses with Cubby keeping me safe on a tight rope. We continued down the miles of frozen ice of the Mer de Glace to Montenvers and down through the thick forest to the Pierre d’Orthaz and our scruffy tents. I had a brew, and fell asleep for fifteen hours straight. I woke delighted with myself and the whole world, confirming in my own mind that I was destined to be an alpinist. Handing the instructors a gift of Johnny Walker whisky I left Chamonix to return to my job at the Balmenach Distillery. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t wanted to get back to work and life in Scotland.
Mal had disappeared into thin air by the end of the course. Nobody seemed to have much idea where he was but by now we didn’t expect otherwise. Some of the others thought him a cowboy, but I liked him a lot, recognising he was a rough diamond, a dreamer – and so inspiring. He reminded me of my older brothers Max and William, who were always up to tricks but somehow always avoided getting into trouble. All the guides had been good fun, but Mal had something else. He was enterprising and a risk-taker. He read widely and seemed to retain every single word. Little did I know that he would influence my life again in the future, and that I would attempt to climb Everest with him.
In those days it wasn’t really illegal to work as a mountain guide and not hold a proper qualification. No one seemed to care much back then. But the world was changing. A more formal approach to mountain activities was beginning to evolve. The UK was now in the Common Market, as the European Union was then known. Chamonix was becoming famous for qualified mountain guides; the names Croz, Charlet and Ravanel were among the famous local families who had swapped farming for the mountains. It was not unlike my own experience in the Highlands where people were born, worked and made their meagre livings in the hills. They understood the mountain moods and the many eccentricities of the mountain weather.
At that time I didn’t like mountain guides much – although a few of us would go on to become IFMGA qualified guides in years to come. They seemed slow and pedantic, taking delight in elaborating needlessly on each step a good and prudent guide should take but instinctively knows anyway; the type of person that felt it necessary to explain what most people with an ounce of practical ability would know from birth. I suppose I should have been more understanding as many were city kids. I’d grown up a Highlander, running over the hills, chasing red deer as a feral five-year-old in the arctic conditions of the Dalwhinnie hills. They weren’t so fortunate.
My twin brother and I worked on farms too, driving tractors and Land Rovers at an incredibly young age, shepherding sheep and rescuing beasts from big winter snows. We were fortunate to be so privileged. We learned naturally. It was a slow process climbing behind these guides, and at the time I thought so bloody English. I soon knew not to get stuck behind them and used to ask them rather bluntly to get out of my way. Now I can’t believe how crass my egotistical behaviour must have seemed, but I couldn’t understand how anyone could find ice climbing difficult. I had taken to it as a duckling takes to water. I cringe at the thought that I must have spoken harshly to some of these good and highly experienced guides.
Back home that autumn, my life in the world of whisky distilling went on, although I climbed more and more. Yvon Chouinard wrote Climbing Ice, a book with lots of technical information about the art of ice climbing, interspersed with tales of road trips through America in cars with white-walled tyres, climbing in Patagonia and beyond. It inspired me. I started winter climbing on Ben Nevis, and my first winter climb was Vanishing Gully, which, in those days of ice tools with straight picks, was considered one of the harder and more technical climbs around.
When we got down to Fort William that evening, everyone was very impressed. Alex MacIntyre was in the pub that night, the only time I ever met him, and he came over to congratulate us. He was one of those people that you know is special and strong as soon as you meet them. He had been doing some amazing climbs with Nick Colton and John Porter. Years later, after Alex died on the south face of Annapurna, I climbed with Voytek Kurtyka, who had known Alex well and climbed with him in the Himalaya. Voy often spoke of Alex, telling me how he’d been a poor rock climber but was great on ice. It’s how I am myself. Many climbing partnerships are like this, relying on each other’s strengths for the overall good of the team.
I climbed Vanishing with a pal introduced to me by Mal Duff called Robert Bruce, a direct descendant of the Robert the Bruce, whose family owned Glen Tanar Estate in Deeside. We teamed up with a young, long-haired American called Rob Milne who worked at Edinburgh University developing a system that allowed you to talk to computers. He was clearly an exceedingly intelligent and bright kid, and had established quite a reputation for bold leads on ice climbs. He showed us how to hang off ice screws, which was considered quite radical and even stupid by us Scottish climbers back then. He also climbed with Hummingbird picks on his Lowe ice tools. These were tubular and worked well on thick ice but often became bashed at the ends by the time he had climbed a typical Scottish route of rotten or thin ice.
I climbed with one Chouinard Zero hammer, which had a wooden shaft and a curved pick with teeth along its whole length. It was my pride and joy. In my other hand I used a Chouinard-Frost ice axe with just five little teeth at the end of the pick; it was pretty rubbish but if used well would let you climb very steep ice. Strapped to my feet I had Salewa crampons with stubby angled front points. To climb steep ice, I needed to really hang out on my crampons to allow the front points to penetrate the ice.
The technique and body positions I had to adopt helped me become a technically very competent ice climber. Once Hamish MacInnes brought out his dropped-pick Terrordactyl axes lots of us began to climb very technical steep ice and then moved on to the steep and technical mixed climbing on the buttresses and rock faces. With crampons on I was convinced I could climb almost anything. Simond, the Chamonix manufacturer, then brought out an ice tool named the Chacal. This was the first ice tool with an ‘inverted banana’ type blade, inspired by MacInnes’s Terrordactyl but more finely machined with very sharp picks, well-designed teeth and a good shaft that one could grip with ease. It made ice climbing really quite easy.
I loved and lived for Scottish winters and while I spent my summers returning to Chamonix, I could hardly contain my excitement as I waited for the snow to fall back home. A river flowed past the distillery through a gorge and I would train on its steep and often unstable banks. There were also some old warehouse walls and a disused industrial chimney stack. I would climb these in crampons and ice axes, torquing the picks of my ice tools between the bricks and resting them on tiny holes or ledges in the concrete or between the brickwork. This type of climbing is now known as dry tooling, although in Scotland we still often call it mixed climbing. To me, mixed climbing is the best sport of all, where one climbs on thin ice, exposed rock and a mixture of both. The Cairngorms were good for this, from Lochnagar to Ben Macdui, since the granite there has lots of cracks that one could clear of ice and snow and place semi-reliable protection. It was much harder to find useful cracks on Ben Nevis.
My life in those days had a quiet simplicity. Having perfected our technique with traditional gear, the advances in ice tools and protection gave us the confidence to try harder climbs. With these modern ice tools, in the late eighties my good friend Andy Nisbet and I climbed some of the first grade-VIII winter climbs. Some of them are still unrepeated today. Our ascents of Grey Slab on Coire Sputan Dearg, and Black Mamba and the Rat Trap on Creag an Dubh Loch caused quite a stir in the winter climbing community when we reported them. Rat Trap took seventeen hours and we had all sorts of fun and games with a broken pick and hypothermia.
What young climbers do now is simply incredible and the current generation amazes and inspires me. Mountains are still mountains though; understanding the weather and developing other skills like navigation and good practical mountaineering knowledge are still important parts of the game we play. Accidents occur and these days it’s often experienced climbers who are involved. Some people say that this is due to young climbers developing skills at indoor climbing walls where objective hazards have been removed, and risk suppressed. Some say that climbers these days haven’t had a proper apprenticeship in the unpredictable outdoors. This notion may have some truth in it, but it’s much too simplistic an answer. I see lots of young climbers who are skilled and experienced.
It takes years and years to develop the necessary skills for mountaineering, and more years to develop the confidence to listen and canvas other people’s views and opinions and then to dismiss the silly parts and take on board the useful stuff. It’s hard for us not to be influenced by others, to know our own limitations and have the confidence to turn back in pressing weather. As in most things, if you think you are a master, you’re kidding yourself. There is always more to learn.
When I was young, I benefited hugely from having some great mentors. One of them was Doug Scott, who features a lot in my story. I can hardly remember how I got to know him, but his son Mike often dossed in a plastic palace in Snell’s Field and we hung out a lot. Chamonix is also where I got to know Mark Miller. Mark was totally sound and wholly inspiring. I rented a small and very basic mazot, or chalet, in a quiet but quite central location in Chamonix with a lot of grass and woodland behind. I remember barbecues out back, wrapped in blankets with our girlfriends, staring at the fire’s glowing embers under a star-washed sky. We’d talk about everything, especially the long Alpine routes we hoped to climb. It was a fine mellow time.
By this time I was working on exploration oil rigs in the North Sea, and I always returned to Chamonix for breaks. I was earning amazingly good money for the time and had an old Mini that we charged around in. We partied hard. Coming back from the rigs, I’d meet my girlfriend and with Mark we’d go out around town, trying to see how many days we could keep going before going home to curl up in my mazot. Chamonix had a few establishments that allowed you to get a drink twenty-four hours a day as long as you bought expensive cocktails. Our record was four days straight. Then we’d all crash, eventually resurfacing to try a big Alpine route.
Alpine winter climbing was really serious in those days. Clothing was inadequate compared to now; it’s easy to forget how important breathable fabrics and other developments were in allowing mountaineers to push the limits in hostile conditions. Weather forecasts were not as good then as they are today – there were no mobile phones, let alone the internet. Even good route descriptions were often non-existent. The Alpine Climbing Group newsletter was the main source of new route information, along with, of course, the Sheffield-based Mountain magazine.
Mark and I hung out a lot and I had enough money to buy him the occasional cable car ticket. Between our wild parties, we climbed constantly. One of the more famous things we did was the north face of Mont Gruetta, which had never had a British ascent, although Doug Scott and Roger Baxter-Jones had tried it. We survived despite consuming many little tabs of a cardboard-like substance with little mallard ducks printed on one side. I had no idea what the card was impregnated with but it turned out to be LSD. Man, that made us laugh. The route took way longer than it needed as we broke every rule in the book. We seemed to lose a day or two in the hut under the influence.
Our bivvy food on that climb was a tube of condensed milk, some packets of potato powder and dried bananas. Our last bivvy was in a wild storm which would have frozen most people to death. Mark and I just grinned through it all, frozen solid in our neoprene jackets. I seem to remember having a Gore-Tex jacket, but it was so expensive that I protected it under the neoprene layer so as not to tear it on the rough rock. The Gruetta taught me a lot and having a first British ascent was something we valued. Roger Baxter-Jones and other Chamonix guides and climbers knew what we had done and began to treat both Mark and me as serious people whose views and opinions were worth hearing. That all felt good and was an acknowledgement that we were indeed growing up.
I went away to work on the rig in the North Sea and was pissed off to read a report by Lindsay Griffin that ‘Mark Millar’ had done the climb with some unknown Scot. No wonder we had a chip on our shoulders. It did seem that no matter how well we climbed, Sheffield magazine editors never had anything positive to say about us, whereas if a climber was English you were the best thing since sliced bread. I didn’t want to be famous, but I did want to be acknowledged by my peers.
I actually spent quite a lot of time in Sheffield. I was holed up for a while with Mark in a rented flat on St Ronan’s Road with some of the legendary ‘Alpine binmen’ – like Sean Smith and Murray Laxton. Mark and I were climbing hard, were now both broke and had one pair of rock shoes between us. He was technically a much better rock climber than me; even now I still feel a level of self-doubt about my rock climbing ability. But we got on so well that we had the necessary synergy to get up stuff, swapping leads and sharing the rock shoes and the chalk bag. Mark had put up a small testpiece called Sex Dwarves and we played on that lots. In my scatter-brained way I got the name wrong. I remembered it as ‘Pink Dwarf’, which is actually a kind of Japanese maple, and I put up several ‘Pink Dwarfs’ after that, one on a remote crag in the Lairig Ghru and another in Northern Ireland.
If Mark was stronger on rock, the roles were reversed on ice. He would smash his way up ice pitches, breaking ice tools and bending his crampons. In those days ice axes often broke, but I only ever broke one and that was on the blackest, hardest winter ice in the Alps. When Mark and I did a very early ascent of the Supercouloir on Mont Blanc du Tacul the ice was incredibly hard – ‘harder than a Millwall supporter’ was how Mark described it. When I tried to hammer in a warthog it bent like a carpenter’s nail against metal. The warthog jumped out of my gloved hand and bounced down the climb, narrowly missing Mark. He’d already dropped most of the rack when he opened his rucksack after crossing the bergschrund. We climbed it anyway, without placing much protection, because we were climbing so well in those days and the idea of actually falling off never occurred to us. Most young climbers go through this stage of feeling invincible.
Money was tight but we had a great time. Magic mushrooms, readily acquired in the Peak District if you knew where to look, were part of our staple diet, with pasta and tomato sauce and sometimes an onion. I remember being in Hathersage one sunny spring day, being so affected by whatever concoction of drugs Mark had given me that I could actually see the veins in the leaves of a sycamore pulsating with the liquids they sucked up from the earth. That night we dossed out in the hills above Sheffield and awoke to a vision of golden pools floating over the city’s industrial landscape. We stood there, in a trance, shouting: ‘Pools of gold, pools of gold!’ We realised later it must have been the rising sun reflecting off the conical roofs of some big gas storage tanks near the motorway. That’s about as romantic as Sheffield got.
Mark would get his girlfriend to paint his eyes and we would climb in whatever clothes we woke up next to in the morning. Black tights and tank-top T-shirts, often tie-dyed, was a favourite combination. God knows how we must have appeared and fortunately there are no pictures. Geoff Birtles was the editor at High magazine and seemed convinced Mark, myself and perhaps some of the others who dossed in St Ronan’s Road were gay. We have no idea why he started such a rumour, but we just laughed about it. Such tight climbing attire was actually very practical, being warm but light, and became the fashion at that time. Still, it makes me cringe a little, thinking of us wearing old woolly jumpers from charity shops and thick, girls’ tights.
Living in Sheffield, I came across some of the big stars of British alpinism at the time. Alan Rouse, who died in 1986 on K2 after making the first British ascent, was an influence on our lives. Al, Roger Baxter-Jones and Rab Carrington had done an impressive new route on Jannu in the Himalaya which massively impressed us. I had known Roger for many years through a mutual friend; he would stay at my rented house – in reality two big caravans welded together at Aultcharn in a remote glen by Grantown-on-Spey. Roger was doing his British Mountain Guides winter test and we did some routes on the Shelter Stone as practice.
At first, I wasn’t sure about Al; I thought him a bit of an ego-head. But without the cash to drink in pubs, we’d often end up at Al’s house smoking dope through a World War Two gas mask and having a wild time. Rab, a Scotsman who had the misfortune of being born in England, was also really helpful to me. He and his wife Sue, one of the kindest women I ever met, were often in The Moon Inn in Stoney Middleton and were working hard at a new small business making down sleeping bags. Paul Nunn, a central figure in British mountaineering at that time, also became a mentor, perhaps because I’d climbed with his old mate Richard McHardy and by that time a little with Doug Scott.
Sooner or later the wild times had to end. I had to call a stop to it all. The drugs thing was too much for me. Having had a strict upbringing, I had such a guilt-trip about it all and didn’t like the flashbacks that were becoming more common. Things came to a head on a particularly bad trip: it was grey and wet and we couldn’t climb, even on the gritstone walls around the city. I must have been in a really bad way as Mark and the others decided the best thing for my own safety was to lock me in a room with just a bed in it at the top of the house.
I woke up in the small hours with no idea where I was. I had just one thought: I have to end this and get away from here. So I tied my climbing rope, my most prized possession, to the bed post and abseiled out of the window, leaving it behind. Then I hitched north and caught a train to the village of Kiltarlity where I had a room at my parents’ house. I arrived in the wee small hours after my parents had locked the doors. Dad found me in my sleeping bag by the doorstep with the milk bottles when he came out in the morning.
Mark and I stayed close but we didn’t climb together much after that. Although the colours in my brain were wonderful, my body knew I had to leave that stuff behind. These days my sensible and wonderful daughters Hannah and Cara look at me in dismay when I tell them about those few months in my past life. I was lucky to get out of it without any lasting consequences. Mark went on to fall in love with a wonderful woman and set up an adventure climbing company called OTT with one of our friends, Andy Broom. Flying to Kathmandu in 1992 to lead one of their adventures, Mark’s Pakistan International Airlines flight smashed into a mountain on final approach. There were no survivors. Several other good British climbers were on the aircraft, including instructors and guides from Plas y Brenin, the national mountaineering centre in Snowdonia. There is a memorial plaque to them there and I think of these guys often. But there is no mention on the plaque of my closest ever friend Mark Miller, who could have become one of Britain’s most amazing alpinists.
After abseiling out of Mark’s window I didn’t go back to Sheffield until I had to get my rock climbing standard up when I started training for my guide’s exam. In my early youth I seemed to have trouble with places like Plas y Brenin and its Scottish equivalent, Glenmore Lodge. I have no idea why, but I suspect it was down to being young and not liking any notion of boundaries or rules or institutions. All the people I met at such places were always incredibly kind to me and I know full well that their work is invaluable. Still as Groucho Marx said, marriage is an institution and who wants to live in an institution?
Fred Harper was the principal at Glenmore Lodge and was not only a competent mountaineer and guide but a true gentleman. Over the years he became a good friend who supported me as I qualified as a guide and when I was going through my divorce. I made some good friends at Glenmore Lodge, well-known climbers like Allen Fyffe, Bob Barton and Martin Burrows-Smith. I also got to know some great guys at Plas y Brenin, especially Rob Collister, Dave Walsh and Nigel Shepherd, but I never felt comfortable there, as though I was being judged for living on my wits. I know that assumption was wrong and I have a great regard for these institutions nowadays. Climbing would be a lot more dangerous without them.
As I grow older I realise how precious the world is and how wonderfully fortunate we are to still be alive. Mal Duff and Mark Miller are both gone, so are Al Rouse, Roger Baxter-Jones, Alex MacIntyre, Rob Milne and Paul Nunn. Apart from Mark, they all died in the mountains. I often reflect on how much Mark has missed in life. I think of him most days. I have no idea what our lives would be like if Mark was here now. I guess it would be like the TV programme Last of the Summer Wine, except on a crag, with all those ageing faces that still remain. I am no longer strong or daft enough to think I am invincible but I still get a huge feeling of self-confidence when I strap on my crampons and have good ice tools in my hands.
When I set off on a huge adventure like Nanga Parbat, all those climbers who helped me along the way come with me.