Page 10 - 2008 AMA Summer

by Nick Ord
It was freezing in the own highly successful com­ Instead he told us about
Vignette hut. I was gradual­
ly thawing myself out with a
hot chocolate after a bitterly have been Troy. He asked who were a few days behind
us. He added that he was not surprised that they’d baled out after a few days because they didn’t have enough experience. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “After all, they had only done about ten days ski mountaineering”.
Silent communication flick­ ered between me and my mates, Rob and James. We said nothing, not really need­ ing to look, just a small glance at each other. He continued, incorrectly suggesting that for us to be one day away from Zermatt and with a successful traverse of the Haute Route within our grasp, we must have more than a paltry ten days each. Again we said nothing. A pattern was emerging by now - he would say something, we would avoid answering, so he would speak again. Filling the silence he asked us how much touring we’d done. “W elLer...” , I shuffled about uncomfortably on the seat, “I’ve done a few days in
Scotland and the Alps....... Rob here did a day in the Cairngorms a year ago......... and James here, well, his first day touring with skins was four days ago”. To this day I can’t work out who was more surprised; our friendly American hearing that despite our relative inexperience we were a day away from finish­ ing the Haute Route, or us a day later in Zermatt, realising that somehow we had actual­ ly done it.
The truth of course is that we were lucky, and we knew it. I have met ski mountaineers who have tried it a few times, but been storm-bound in huts and forced to abandon it. Folk arrive in Chamonix well pre­ pared to do it but are faced with the wrong conditions, so end up going home earlier than planned. But I can’t help thinking that you can make your own luck by reducing the odds against you, at least to a point. I had been on the Haute Route back in 1991 on my first trip to the Alps as a sum­ mer glacier tour, so knew the Swiss part of it. Between us we had seasons of Alpine and
cold day on the Otemma
glacier when a friendly
American ski mountaineer
struck up a conversation with the Chanrion hut, we replied us. He was exactly what
you’d expect; tall, chiselled jaw, good looking, played in his college American Football team for a few years, ran his
that w e’d com e from Scotland. I was expecting him to say he had a load of rela­ tives in Scotland. Funnily enough he didn’t say that.
8 ARMY MOUNTAINEER
pany, that sort of guy. I’ve for­ another team from Scotland gotten his name, but it might attempting the Haute Route
where we had come from, so presuming that he didn’t real­ ly care that we’d come from