Page 36 - 2014 AMA Summer

“It looks ok.” Houseman said. I thought it looked steep and difficult, and so did he after an hour. Seconding, nearly throwing up with the worst hot-aches of my life I clipped the belay; three stubby screws a poor wire and a half driven peg. I tried not to lean back. Youth pointed a big red mitt, “One of three ways I reckon?”
Looking up, boulders poke from an inversion of thin snow. Three very steep, thinly iced groove-corners presented. I didn’t like the look of any.
Jamming into an overhanging corner, calves burn. Fingers for the second time that day were wood. The voice in my head screams instructions, asks questions. The first thirty metres of the pitch had been on good ice and the angle was just off vertical... ‘It’s going to be ok,’ but the angle of the face increased and bulged. The ice became thin and hollow, detached. The ice spoke. “Write a will mate – no rescue – a million miles from anywhere.” I placed some gear and swung left into a runnel and hooked sheen millimetres thin. I still wore my pack and it pulled. “Take the pack off you fucking idiot”. But I didn’t. I always have a feeling of not being good enough when I have to remove the pack. Youth had similar ethics and we were climbing the only way we knew. The leader attempted to free-climb everything and the second follows in the same style.
Hanging from picks tapped less than a couple of centimetres, a bulge pushed and more than a thousand metres of air pulled. I questioned my philosophy, mentality, mortality. We were over a week’s walk and two days jeep ride from anywhere and I was climbing a pitch so insecure it would feel intimidating in Scotland. An overlap in-front of my face had to be passed, but the ice was an oil slick on the surface of the sea and the snow was yellow bubbled scum. Inching and tapping, crampon front points were placed on tiny rock edges, ice sheets shattered, snow broke off in lumps. Beautiful snow covered peaks were all around, but I saw nothing except the rock and ice in front of my face. Every move I expected to fall and still the difficulties kept coming. Wood fingers, wide eyes, burning arms – eventually the angle eased and the clock hands turned.
Three technical pitches followed until a steep snow field was reached. In the dark, I stood belaying Houseman and watched a light at base camp flash on and off... on and off... a lighthouse of
34 ARMY MOUNTAINEER
warmth and comfort. Buddy was signalling the same as he had the two previous nights. Cold penetrated, but seeing the light helped my feeling of separation. Youth climbed along side and in the dark we dug. The wind slung even more spindrift than the previous night. The stars in the dark sky flickered and the sky slowly spun. After only a few minutes of chopping we hit ice. On the Fowler one to five bivvy scale this was probably 2.5.
In the morning we traversed right aiming for the west ridge. The climbing was insecure – Peruvian style flutings and rotten rock, the face, a barren expanse. Emotions simmered. Mid-afternoon, three hundred metres beneath the summit we stopped, cut a cave into a fluting and worried about the way ahead. We had not crossed completely to the west ridge – to reach it we would have had to cross several deep flutings, convoluted monsters, twisted sagging seams of rotten snow – so we had opted for a direct approach. And a peak of aerated snow stood just above the bivvy giving no clue to whether we would be continuing to the summit or not.
We had made a mistake, I knew we had made a mistake, we were going to fail. Failure was going to tare my heart out. I sat all night in our small cave and worried. I made conversation in my head, “Why did you fail?” “We failed because of bad conditions, the poor weather, the dangerous climbing, sickness, we went the wrong way, the gear was stolen. We weren’t strong enough-hard enough-good enough.” For once, after a trip, all I wanted was to answer the question that everyone asked, ‘Did you summit’, with a simple, yes.
The wind gusted. Spindrift sliced into the cave. I sat holding the stove, the gas canister frosted. The flame sawed, pulsing blue. I could taste being on the top of Chang Himal. I could see myself on the summit. This is what I did, I imagined myself in these places, on summits or fighting spindrift, or stuffed tightly into overhanging runnels or bridging chimneys or climbing warm summer rock or pulling loose rock...
...for two years in North Wales I had imagined climbing a route called Rubble. Rubble was a Paul Pritchard and Lee McGinley route in Wen Zawn at Gogarth. The guidebook described it as the softest route in the world. Pritchard had been at the top of my list of inspirations when I was first climbing. I placed his climbs into