Page 15 - 2018 AMA Summer

and then carry on up, don’t come down.” But if it got bad I really wanted to come down, staying up was not a good idea in my mind, too many better climbers than me had stayed up, staying up was not something I wanted.
The day consisted of threading one thin ice runnel to another. I imagined myself climbing the Colton/Macintyre on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses, but the air was thinner and the situation lonelier. No one knew where we had decided to climb or even the mountain we had decided to climb. Our original plan was for the ridge line on Nyainqentangla I. Tashi, our liaison officer knew we had a permit for the range, but he had no idea where we planned to climb within the range. We were on our own.
The mountains and their lines are perceived as majestic. They are in fact majestic. But in the hands of the human they are twisted into something from which to boast and display. Ego. And at the head of that podium I stood, all bowed, ready to accept my medal.
Paul’s wife Mary isn’t fooled, before we left I could see it in her eyes. She is, I think, more open to the possible outcome than Paul himself who appears to have bought into the story that he has told to Mary and his daughter Katy. Denial. But then again maybe it isn’t. Paul is obviously very good and he almost believes in all he says and his track record is almost exemplary.
A few years ago, I bumped into Scottish alpinist Rab Carrington in the old chapel on Llanberis High Street that is now a gear shop. Around us, climbers pulled on new rock shoes smelling of glue and rubber. Couples wearing new and crunchy, vibrant-coloured jackets looked at each other and at themselves in a mirror. The coffee machine gurgled to the smell of espresso. I asked Rab why he had given up mountaineering at a time when he was still in such good form. “I wanted to continue living,” he said.
I’ve told myself it’s going to be the unsus- pecting thing that ends it all. But of course, this isn’t true, it will be the mundane, the same as everybody else, it will be the bad weather and the slab avalanche or pinned down until exhaustion gets the better of me. It will not be the exotic and I’m quite
happy about that. The bear whose claws had brushed me aside as it rushed to bite Greg Boswell, my climbing partner on my last trip to Canada nearly took the prize for exotic. For a while I thought it may be the same or similar in Tibet. Tashi and our driver, a young guy who wore his white sunglasses on the back of his head, and the village leader all sat together inside the village leader’s house, we never did get his name but he was very generous, all be it in a slightly stand-off kind of way,
‘The steepest section of the face, was almost impossible to describe without using superlatives’
the kind of stand-off that tells you more about yourself than the person doing the standing off. He was tall and thin and wrapped in a fur lined, wine-red coloured coat that touched the back of his knees. His nose was as dark as the earth itself and as rounded as a planet in a Roman way and inside that nose he regularly snorted some white powder that left a pale smear on the outside. I liked him, although I’m not sure the feeling was mutual but he was still very generous.
The three all sat together speaking Tibetan. Paul sat alongside me. I wasn’t really taking much notice, I was spinning a little as we were now sat at 4700m after being in the country for only five-days, until the conversation was broken by
action and it was an action that I could not help take notice.
“What was that Paul, what was that they just acted out?” I asked.
Paul sat upright. Tashi looked concerned before he said one word that caught my attention.
“Bears.”
“What does he mean, bears?” “Bears.” Tashi repeated.
“Paul, tell him to stop saying bears.” I pleaded.
But instead of stopping the three Tibetans then went full flow and Tashi mimed walking through boulders and a bear springing to bite him in the face and with that all three of them, in unison yelled ‘raaaaaaaaaaa.’
A week or so later, Paul and I sat in our tarpaulin kitchen at basecamp when a yak herder called in for a visit. We sat huddled beneath the plastic stripes and attempted to converse. Paul, who had never had any close-hand experience of bears, thought it all very funny and brought the conversa- tion around to his chosen subject. The yak herder shook his head, “No, no bears.” “There you go, no bears.” I said with relief. The yak herder pulled out his smart phone and began pressing the screen until at last he found what he was searching. I moved alongside to look at the screen. “No bears.” He pointed at the phone and the picture on the screen. “Lions.”
Paul on the approach to the route. Photo: Nick Bullock
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