Page 14 - 2018 AMA Summer

GUESTWRITER
Paul, day 6 on the descent after the storm. one more night on the hill after this found us back in the village where the LO was staying.Photo: Nick Bullock
obvious from his experience and the way he looked. Big legs. Dark Yorkshire tea. Paul told me he ran the Bob Graham Round when he was 17. Paul reminded me of the Shar Pei dog, the Han Dynasty’s favourite fighting breed, I had photo- graphed in Lhasa – loose skinned, so he could still turn and bite you, although the Lhasa Shar Pei looked old and flea ridden. Paul didn’t look like he had fleas and he is three years younger than me.
Leaving an iced gully with an overhanging section at its top, I post holed until stood on a perfect tent platform. I looked out to strange rounded mountains and Lake Namtso, the highest salt lake in the world at 4,718 meters and the second largest lake in Tibet. When I met Paul over a year ago, before I had agreed to the expedition, he had given me the hard sell to get me on-board, he had said we would use his and Mick Fowler’s proven formula for success: “Light and fast spells failure – take a few extra days’ worth of food, stop when a good ledge presents. Eat well, have a restful night, start early and do it all again the next day.” Paul had fibbed. I pointed out the platform, but 2pm was even too early for the Ramsden and Fowler master plan, so we continued until late in the afternoon, where we reverted to the Bullock norm and had an open bivvy squeezed onto a tiny snow step. Conned!
I was done. I had decided a year ago. 2012 had been my last expedition to the
Greater Ranges and I was done, finished, nada...Then Paul visited and showed me a picture. Maybe one more time? Go out with style, out with a good one? People asked why I thought younger climbers were not going on expeditions. The reason was easy for me to see. Expedition success was as addictive as crack cocaine but in the hands of an addict, more dangerous. I was a pusher. I wrote about what I found, the high, the biscuit at the bottom of the barrel, the release, the escape. But like Paul I had lied and as I pushed the glasses to the top of my head at last I could see clearly. At last I could write with honesty. I was some kind of throwback from a line almost extinct.
Threshold shift. Western society, or maybe society as a whole doesn’t appear to want to wait anymore. Some climbers don’t seem to want to wait either. Hardship over an extended time-frame is out of vogue so who can blame them? Instant... instant reward, instant success, instant gratifica- tion, instant pictures, instant recognition, instant fame and instant fortune... I’m getting old. And as for platitudes, I didn’t want those either. All of the platitudes can be left behind because I don’t ever want ‘he died doing what he loved’ Please never use those platitudes for me. Dying young or even dying old but still healthy is desperately sad and heart breaking and over rated and should not be celebrated, it should be seen for what it is, a terrible waste. Life is the prize. Living more so.
Day two on the climb was what Paul and I had christened the crux day. The steepest section of the face, was almost impossible to describe without using superlatives. It was a dream: it had runnels, ice, fields of snow, arêtes – the face twisted and turned in some warped massive monster Matterhorn way. We calculated that the climbing started at 5400m and we knew the summit was a reported 7046m, making the face a mouth-puckering 1600m. Paul and I now stood beneath a welt of thinly iced runnels criss-crossing the almost vertical band of compact rock. This was it, this was the test, but of course it wasn’t, the real test was continuing, the test is always the continuing. “It’s never as bad as people think.” Paul said twelve months before, “They always think it’s much worse than it actually is and come down.” Fair enough I thought, sounds reasonable. “You just have to wait it out
14 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER
Day 2 bivi after climbing the crux. Paul’s mother in law made the snow nappy the tent was pitched on. I took the outside! Photo: Nick Bullock