Footless Crow

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan

I had only just arrived back into ‘Beris after a long haul through feudal France. I am tired, it’s late and I am staggering down the road towards Spar, phased from a full days driving nightmare of Gallic shrugs, closed shops and wagging fingers, hoping that it will be open! I see the illuminated Spar logo ahead like a star of Bethlehem and guiltily, momentarily bless Mammon in Blighty, arms flung as if in prayer! At that instant, in the distance, as in a biblical miracle, a beautiful, mystical array of fairy-lights cluster manically like molecules in the dark-lab of childhood, hovering above the road, bobbing up and down in strange animation. I pause in wonder as twenty or thirty head-torches manifest heads and bodies and legs and mumbling charge towards me. I dash onto the pavement to prevent collision. What the fuck! I look back at their luminous tops – What the fuck! Runners!

A little later, a silent, barefoot group in wet suits, looking like a huge multi-headed seal anthropomorph, ambles towards the lake… what the fuck! Swimmers!

I had previously been held up on the road behind skeletal-buttocked, lycra-clad, heads down, could be anywhere, counting calories, monitoring heartbeat, and calculating elevation… what the fuck road cyclists! Get on a fucking hamster wheel fuckers!

Where are the fucking golfers putting balls into flagged grids on the road? Weight trainers lifting the cars? Kung Fu kids kicking over bins? I am on a theme, but is Llanberis now fit-city that I remember Boulder in Colorado to be? I laughed then at how ludicrous and mono-cultured it seemed, as if a plague of neurosis had spread from health-food shops, therapy and self-reflection groups, and clever advertising. Costumed with labels of fitness, sport, and a neat package for the new religion of the masses! Whatever, Llanberis has changed, it is a gluten free zone…arglwydd mawr…size eight turnstiles on entry – monitored by the thriving outdoor community businesses, selling activity and adventure from ex fruit and veg VW vans…

Next day. Petes Eats. Lashing down of course. Martin and I set off for a day’s bouldering. Our bouldering, of course, is not weather dependent. We have a lump and sledgehammer, assorted saws, a secateur, screwdrivers and chisels, a broom, a wire brush and several toothbrushes and cloths. These add to the array of old ropes, spades, mats and sodden but useful absorbent clothing and tampons, secreted in cracks and under boulders less that ten miles from Petes. This is Martin’s mountain toolshed. It is scattered over many a hill and woodland with items liberated from neat, cedar wood B&Q sheds, in the sodden and barren enclosures of ‘outdoorsy-ville’. However, we do not have an umbrella. Neither do we need one because our ‘look’ is of shady migrants seeking shelter.

We park up in horizontal rain. The tyres slide to a halt in deep trenches of squelchy toad-flaxed mud. No point in wearing socks, so pink Crocs are the sensible footwear of my choice…and I guess we are kind of migrants by choice and the shelter we seek is a cold, wet trek to yet another rock sanctuary…

Martin has prepared a 50m overhanging traverse mostly free of the rain which now falls more sedately through the hazel and oak. We try and warm up on mats already spotted by drips. There are sections of seepage, sourced and encouraged from the old ivy tight-squeezed in the fissures higher up, and fans down as rivulets caressing around the rock contours to pool into what are now finger-jugs, adding difficulty and technicality to a move. More body torque and subtle positioning are needed to negotiate such terrain. Normally a wet hold can be ignored but when integral to movement, more judgment and finesse are needed. Wet and cold fingers know exactly that they must adapt and try harder. A few moves can be an instant burn and a tumble into a soak. Enough!

An extra five meters of traverse is awaiting preparation. A huge flake we call ‘the canon’ protrudes from the bedrock of this ancient quarried face. The tools are laid out. We survey its character for weakness and with the age-old art of a mason, its moral is gently broken, and after half a day working with fissures and strata, it fragments into a landscaped path and a decent landing! A flat landing is a happy landing. The old quarrymen seem to applaud as we bless the rock and embrace the change.

We know we are not alone here. Why, because scampering across wet rocky textures is not the sole reason we are here. This is not the art or sub-sport of bouldering per se. If it were just the rock surface and body tensions and intel’ only, and moves only, all would be stillborn and sterile, a mere tool of the appetites and more to be done – and the appetite grows on that which feeds it. We are connected here…and it is something that has not let go from childhood. Here, we are still playing with the mud, the metaphoric, the mysterious, the dirty and poetic qualities of nature, not side-lining them into a neat commercial package of style and amenities. Yes, we are cold and wet, but have achieved as much as a summers-day cragging plus a session in the gym, touched something alive, aware that our breaths are also with the hazel and oaks, the ivy and the mosses damp to the bone. It is a melody of steamy sweat and cold wind, of bird song at one with the voice of all that flourishes here. Like visitors, this is how you find your way to things… in a mystery of kinship.

So unlike the true displaced migrants of a different jungle, we have the luxury to sojourn back into Petes, almost unjudged by our strange otherworldly appearance. Cups of tea are much needed and ordered, and indeed, today, paid for. The banter continues and characters move and flow around us in the ‘waiting room’ of life’s adventurers. I pick up the BMC Summit mag as I peep into the daily lives of other visitors. A theme soon comes to my attention as I concentrate my focus without seeming like a stalker. Suddenly the hilarious, cartoonesque contents of Summit mag culture seems to animate into real life with the conversations I am hearing and presents an abhorrent and nihilistic vision of the world…

“…beats me why you would want to climb outside. She’s happy as Larry and the café has all she needs. She’s well ahead of the competition and did her first Font 6b yesterday. Proud as punch. She’s only 14 and looks great in a crop-top! Fighting fit eh…”

“…yeah, he was inspired by a BMC film of an amazing young lad moving up the coloured grips on a wall. Hero. Inspirational. I bought a season ticket straight away. So colourful, happy family stuff and creative, I can’t get him out! He’s seeking sponsorship and wants to be a pro…”

It’s fun, it’s weird, it’s wacky, it’s totally crazy! Tackle a wall covered with large purple blobs, race the clock on the speed climb, shin up a drainpipe… we’ve got 12 different challenges to attempt and each one offers a completely different and completely crazy experience!

Learn how to climb outdoors on sport routes, under the guidance of an instructor, for only £30.

BMC National Academies for talented young climbers.

Join the BMC: Save 50% on your first year's membership

The horror, the horror! I am initially reminded of the Hebrew originators of the preaching, controlling ‘word’ and how false parameters and careful profiling can beget a myth-void-people unknowing of the Earth and how such enforced morality separates us further from its soul…

Well. Perhaps. I could just let it all go because such a ‘vision’ of a culture cannot stop my own soul being fascinated and to rejoice with the wet lichens and moss…in equilibrium with nature, including bashing ‘canons’ on a quarry face, in joy with the messy slops underfoot and knowing too of the biomass in which we all belong, where my skull will be before very long. But will I fuck let it go! Somebody once said that JR detests sport because he must have choked on a trainer as a kid! I like that.

I do not detest sports climbing but I am aware of sports insidious nature and offer insights into what I perceive as a menacing disintegration of creative and poetic significance and a deep threat to the interrelatedness with the living planet…a destructive quest to take control! But do what you want and do your best! Perhaps, through my articles and work, I have not quite made myself clear.

Glam-rock dictator of corporate Climb magazine thinks otherwise by saying, “British climbers do not care either for your verbiage or for the abhorrent views underlying it, John. They never have, and they never will.” Precious and proselytizing rock-climbing media’s Jihads! Wake up and crawl out the corporate arse you suave, thick bastards and stop turning kids into zombies of your own image! You give your readers nothing but tit-bits to promote an advantage over nature, personalities, style and ego and hence a decline of the soul - the world hasn’t changed that much really because people still need the same stuff as they always have, and THAT is why folk still need to be reminded through myth, poetry and art the substance of their heartbeat…in the heartbeat of the world. And yes, as corporate zombies, that would be an abhorrent view to you! Sport is generally the fear of helplessness in a meaningless, fragmented world…so lets be brave man and show the fuckers who’s who… enter the hero with a thousand poses. He will be loved.

Decline of the mysteries and sacred experience enforced self-reflection and alienation, dispossession and narcissism… Gnostic thought.

‘…and one for the crow’, strangely for me, one of the most inspirational climbing books according to Climb, expressly denounces the established mainstream, makes a plea for the wayward, the weird, the poetic, the lost and the unknown. It talks from the beady eye in the slops. I condemn magazines promoting sport, the commercial, the corporate and the glamour associated with movement on rock, generally promoting a spiritual poverty by espousing a quality of experience centred on the mere physical and clean, materialist energy. You will always want more and there is always something for sale! The eye is not beady; it focuses on the aesthetics and positioned labels. The glamour is arranged around the bland type of valueless political correctness agendas and a paid position. Fuck equality, it is a sham, a mere photo opportunity! This is institutional climbing by numbers…fuck the purple blobs, may they burn in hell! This is not a simple case of ‘climbers being as difficult to categorise as the vertical world they have created’, (John Sheard in Yosemite) but a blatant assault on our humanity and spiritual wellbeing.

There is some sort of hallucination taking place here! We are fed nonsense and believe it to be true!

‘There is a mental disease called the ‘metaphysical tendency’, by which man, by process of logically abstracting an individual being’s qualities, experience a form of hallucination which makes him accept the abstraction as the real thing’.

Malatesta

This abstraction is a corporate strategy!

A few observations in, ‘…and one for the crow’ -

‘I face the modern, unrebellious language of ascent as a format for describing much that is at odds in society, my own scratching involvement and the questions brought about by my work, observations, recollections and sudden themes that are ‘chanced’ upon along the way. I see the banal uni-sexed product of sports climbing as a sad, limp offshoot of the plague of the modern feminist agenda; this sickly sweet swamp of a people-bath emanates a nihilism on a par with the macho-laden boys of summer, charging and stamping their tribal machismo profanely across most of the special places on this wounded and ailing planet. Talk of abuse and pollution and disrespect merge with these agendas and seem only to tighten the confusions and alienation and further terrorise the weak and self-pitying in clouds of guilt and repression. Sport and leisure and pastimes neatly fill a painful present with style and artifact. Escape is very often the venture…’

‘…Climbing is nothing more than a ‘poise’ from which to explore other worlds, to be tapped into when questions arise. It is not a world in itself and must never be a language to rejoice in or identify with for its own sake. The rock is a sanctuary…’

‘Many of the ascents in this book were stalked through with a sense of annihilation, and were more hunter-gatherer than farmer in concept. Sports climbing is like farming, in which the ascentionist reaps a profit and attempts to gain an advantage over nature…’

Hundreds of thousands of homeless people…war torn areas…torture and cold blooded murders…acid rain…massacres and rapes and ethnic cleansing…religious fundamentalism…genocide…political correctness…bits of bodies set in clear plastic…sheep in formaldehyde…chip papers thrown from the window of a sparkling new Mercedes…global warming…chipped holds on Great Wall…kids demanding $100 trainers…everywhere the legacy of disassociation and suppression, of fear, guilt and shame…on your doorstep. Perhaps there is a need to climb…but how can you climb for sport?

www.johnredhead.org

John Redhead:2016

All images apart from 'Pete's'-JR

The most impressive early companion of my childhood was a dark cliff, or what looked like a dark cliff, to the south; a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun. This was the memento mundi over my birth: my spiritual midwife at the time and my godfather ever since — or one of my godfathers. From my first day, it watched. If it could not see me direct, a towering gloom over my perambulator, it watched me through a species of periscope - infiltrating the very light of my room with its particular shadow.

From my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley, that cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence. All that happened against it or under its supervision. At the same time, all that I imagined happening elsewhere, out in the world, the rock sealed from me, since in England the world seems to lie to the south. If a man's death is held in place by a stone, my birth was fastened into place by that rock, and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain. There was no easy way to escape it. I lived under it as under the presence of a war, or an occupying army: it constricted life in some way, demanded and denied, and was not happy. Beneath it, the narrow valley, with its flooring of cricket pitch, meadows, bowling greens, streets, railways, and mills, seemed damp, dark, and dissatisfied — dissatisfied because the east-west traffic poured through it on a main route, converting our town to a mere corridor between places of real importance, such as, to the east. Halifax, with its formidable backing of Bradford, Huddersfield, and Leeds; and to the west — after a grisly false start at Todmorden-Rochdale, backed by Manchester, Liverpool, and New York.

So while thinking distractedly out to east and west, we valley-dwellers were stuck looking at the dark hairy wall of Scout Rock, as it was called, and the final sensation was of having been trapped. The oppression cast by that rock was a force in the minds of everyone there. I have heard that valley is notable for its suicides, which I can believe, and I could also believe that rock is partly to blame for them. Most days it seems far enough off, deflated and scenic, with visible trees and scrambling walls to its steep fields, and clearly enough there is a farm or two along the top of it, people living happily up there and cattle grazing; and it is plainly no Eiger. But other days you step out of the house, or get off a bus come from elsewhere, and are astounded to see that blackish hogback mass riding directly overhead. Something about the clouds and light, the inclination of the season, or some overnight strengthening of the earth, has reared it right out over you, and you feel to be in the mouth of a vast dripping cave, in some hopeless age.

Now I think back I cannot understand why I almost never went near it. I remember the pylons that stepped away toward the moors behind its left shoulder — these were the first pylons I ever saw at close quarters- to read their danger sign and appreciate their single-minded soaring oddity, and their leaning stride. And I was familiar with the road that draggled off among farms and cottages down behind its right shoulder into Luddenden Foot. But the steep face itself I never encountered. The nearest I got was one memorable day I went there with my brother, up one side, through the steep bracken and birches, and along the top where a thin path kept braving the very edge. Four things make that day memorable. First, the unique new view of the valley spread out below, from a wholly unimagined angle, and from the other end of the telescope, as it were, up which I had gazed for about six years. I looked down at myself with the eye of the cliff, and that was a terrible piece of newness. Our house was not distinguishable. Too far off, too far below, in a tiny puzzle of houses. It was a balloon view: an alarming exhilaration. I felt infinitely exposed, to be up there on the stage I had been trying to imagine for so long. The second memorable detail was my discovery of oak-apples, in the little scrub oaks that twisted out their existence on the cliff-edge.

It needed this spotlit exalted rostrum to bring oak apples to my notice, though I had been seeing them all my life. Anyway, that is the first place I really concentrated on them with some surprise, and examined their corky interior and dusty wormhole, and tossed them in numbers, out into space, disappointing missiles, and put some in my pocket as if I might never find any again. And it was there that my brother told of a woodpigeon shot in one of those little oaks, and how the bird set its wings and sailed out without a wing-beat stone dead into space to crash two miles away on the other side of the valley. And there followed the story of the tramp sleeping up there in the bracken, who stirred at an unlucky moment and was shot dead for a fox by an alert farmer, and sent rolling down the slope.

But of the rock-face, the central character to all that, I remember nothing, though I imagine I stared down it thoughtfully enough. That visit altered nothing, did nothing to tame the strangeness of my neighbour. I went on feeling it was alien, belonging to other people. I went on disliking it. It worked on me constantly. It should have inured me to living in valleys, or gulleys, or under walls, but all it did was to cause me to hate them. The slightest declivity now makes me uneasy and restless, and I slip into the shadow of the mood of that valley — foreboding heaviness, such as precedes downpour thunderstorms on Sunday afternoons. It is a mood that seems to have saturated the very stones of the walls and houses — those scorched-looking west Yorkshire-grits — the pavements and the soil of the gardens and even the dark privet leaves: most of all the dark privet leaves.

A slightly disastrous, crumbly, grey light, sunless and yet too clear, like a still from the documentary film of an accident: The hours could be terribly long and empty, when the whole valley looked like a pre-first-world-war snapshot of itself, grey and faded, yet painfully bleak and irremovable, as if nobody could ever stir and nothing could ever happen there again. All because of that and its evil eye. It had an evil eye, I have no doubt. For one thing you cannot look at a precipice without thinking instantly what it would be like to fall down it, or jump down it. Mountaineers are simply men who need to counter-attack on that thought more forcibly than most people. But since Scout Rock was always there, that thought was always there — though you got used to it. It was not a frightening presence, it was a darkening presence, like an over evident cemetery. Living beneath it was like living in a house haunted by a disaster that nobody can quite believe ever happened, though it regularly upsets sleep. A not too remote line of my relatives farmed the levels above Scout Rock, for generations, in a black weepy farm that seemed to be made wholly of old grave-stones and worn-out horse-troughs.

Their survivors are still at it. And it was one of that family who once when he was out shooting rabbits on that difficult near vertical terrain below his farm, not quite in living memory, took the plunge that the whole valley dreams about and fell to his death down the sheer face. A community peace-offering, I feel. An assurance, too, that the watchfully threatening aspect of the rock has something genuine about it. Recently a hoard of gold coins was unearthed at the foot of it, which has left the dark face with an even stranger expression. Escape from the shadow trap was not east or west along the Road — with the end-less convoy of lorries loaded to the limit with bales of wool and bolts of cloth —but north and upwards, up the north slope to the moors. Ultimately, the valley was surrounded by moor skylines, further off and higher than the rock, folded one behind another.

The rock asserted itself, tried to pin you down, policed and gloomed, But you could escape it, climb past it and above it, with some effort. You could not escape the moors. They did not impose themselves; they simply surrounded and waited. They were withdrawn, they hid behind their edges show-ing their possessions only upward, to the sky, and they preferred to be left alone, seeming almost to retreat as you approached them, lifting away behind one more slope of rough grass or parapet of broken stone. And however rarely you climbed to investigate them in detail, they hung over you at all times. They were simply a part of everything you saw. Whether you looked east, west, north, or south; the earth was held down by that fine line of moor, mostly a gentle female watery line, moor behind moor, like a herd of enormous whales crowded all around at anchor.

And just as the outlook of a bottle floating upright at sea consists of simple light and dark, the light above, the dark below, the two divided by a clear waterline, so my outlook was ruled by simple light and dark, heaven above and earth below, divided by the undulating line of the moor. If any word could be found engraved around my skull, just above the ears and eyebrows, it would probably be the word 'horizon'. Every thought I tried to send beyond the confines of the valley had to step over that high definite hurdle. In most places the earth develops away naturally in every direction, over roads and crowded gradients and confused vistas, but there it rose up suddenly to a cut, empty, upturned edge, high in the sky, and stopped.

I supposed it somehow started again somewhere beyond, with difficulty. So the visible horizon was the magic circle, excluding and enclosing, into which our existence had been conjured, and everything in me seemed to gravitate towards it. I must have been quite young, three or four, when I started my walks to the moors. From the start, the moors were the exciting destination. It was a long climb to get up there, and a thousand distractions tended to draw me off along the slope, among the woods and lanes and farms, but even if I wasted too much time in these ways, and had to turn back, I was reserving the moors as you do reserve the really superior pleasures, even from yourself. The first half of the climb was over fields, and the first of these fields, 200 yards above the house, was a mild domestic incline belonging to the Co-op; heavily grassed, usually pasturing a herd of cows. Coming up on to that, and turning back, you met Scout Rock opposite in its most formidable bluish aspect, over the slate roofs.

The second field.belonged to the farms above. It was poorer, wilder, steeper and in it you began to feel a new sensation, the volume of space, the unaccustomed weight of open sky, and you saw that the ridge of Scout Rock was a ridge below the further ridge of moor,and moor was friendly. In the third much-steeper field you began to feel bird-like, with sudden temptings to launch out in the valley air. From that field kites or gliders would stand out at a great height, and the traffic far below on the main road was like slow insects.

Then the last fields rose in your face, and after almost a toiling stair you reached the farms, perched on knees of land or headlands, halfway up the valley sides. At that point you began to feel the spirit of the moors, the peculiar sad desolate spirit that cries in telegraph wires on moor roads, in the dry and so similar voices of grouse and sheep, and the moist voices of curlews. An avenue of tall trees ranged just above the first farm, I think sycamores, and the desolation of their foliage and silvery bark, the strange unearthly starkness of their attitudes, always struck me. I don't know quite what it was about them: something of the sky moving so close above them, of the bleak black wall at the laneside, the scruffy gorse-tufted bulge of hillside just beyond; or perhaps it was simply the light, at once both gloomily purplish and incredibly clear, unnaturally clear, as if objects there had less protection than elsewhere, were more exposed to the radio-active dangers of space, more startled by their own existence. But I liked that.

In an imperfect reluctant way, these trees were beginning to reveal what showed nakedly in the ruined farms, with their one or two trees, along the moor's edge, or in the foul standing pools on the moor itself, and in the inane frozen-looking eyes of the sheep. I suppose in some ways it was eerie, and maybe even unpleasant. But everything in west Yorkshire is slightly unpleasant. Nothing ever quite escapes into happiness. The people are not detached enough from the stone, as if they were only half-born from the earth, and the graves are too near the surface. A disaster seems to hang around in the air there for a long time. I can never lose the impression that the whole region is in mourning for the first world war. The moors do not escape this, but they give the sensation purely.

And finally, in spite of it, the mood of moorland is exultant, and this is what I remember of it. From there the return home was a descent into the pit, and after each visit I must have returned less and less of myself to the valley. This was where the division of body and soul began.

Ted Hughes. Text of a BBC Home Service programme given by the author in 1963

When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern
Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the start of work one day, he was hauled up unconscious – and resumed after a day or two once water had been thrown down the shaft ‘to absorb the gas’ and a bundle of brushwood had been dropped on a rope ‘to carry down pure air and stir up the poison’. This was only the most spectacular, and symbolically oppressive, of the Herculean ordeals which ingrained in Muir an extraordinary hardihood and helped to make him the finest field naturalist and most eloquent wilderness writer of his age. As eldest son he did most of the ploughing and stump-digging on the family’s virgin land and split a hundred fencing rails a day from their knotty oak timber: ‘I was proud of my skill and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stunted my growth and earned for me the title “runt of the family”.’

The beauty of Muir’s Eight Wilderness Discovery Books is that they make one weave of his life and his literary work – perfect for a writer whose thinking and experiencing are hard to separate. The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast rivers, the mighty resinous trees of the western Sierra Nevada. In a letter of 1871 to the friend who elicited much of his most heartfelt incidental writing, Jeanne Carr, wife of the professor of agriculture at San Francisco, he jotted down this statement of his ideal: ‘Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them.’ To another of his women friends – his ‘spiritual mothers’, as they are called by Thurman Wilkins, his latest biographer – he wrote the following year, welcoming her to come and camp in Yosemite: ‘People who come here ... should forget their individual existences, should forget they are born. They should as nearly as possible live the life of a particle of dust in the wind, or of a withered leaf in a whirlpool.’

‘Lying on the rocks for years’ is not a metaphor, it is how he did his fieldwork. He walked great distances and climbed great heights, nearly always alone. In the wilderness he lived on bread and tea, boiled on a fire of fossil wood or shavings from the underside of his sledge. To save weight he usually did without blankets and ‘made my bed of rich, spicy boughs, elastic and warm’. In a cleft three miles back from the brow of El Capitan, ‘I lay down and thought of the time when the groove in which I rested was being ground away at the bottom of a vast ice-sheet that flowed over all the Sierra like a slow wind.’ He carried little but his notebook tied to his belt and a spray of fir-needles in his buttonhole, and he walked extremely fast – a friend called him ‘dear old streak o’ lightning on ice’.

His daring was unshakeable. The rock-faces he climbed were often of the severity we now grade 5.8 (US) or Hard Very Severe (UK). This is near the limit I will climb with a companion and several hundred pounds’ worth of ropes and metal protection gear. Muir was climbing alone – to observe the glaciation of rocks and the moulding of valleys; the terrain was untouched; no guidebooks had yet been written.He was virtually naked in the face of the cliffs and cascades, the glaciers he explored in Alaska, and the deep trackless marshes in Ontario where he waded all day, steering by compass, in search of new flower species.

The two things in the Sierra which he did his utmost to save unspoiled, with results that have lasted to this day in the National Parks he helped to found, are the monumental sequoias growing on its western slopes and the glaciated granite valleys that make its arteries. The sequoias rise so tall, on their 200-foot trunks like furred brown tendons, that as you stand beneath them and look upward to their crowning needle-clusters, you feel yourself sucked through a time-tunnel into some primal and unpeopled continent. Muir rejoiced to think that they were in their prime and ‘swaying in the Sierra winds when Christ walked the earth’. He made some of the first estimates of their age and studied their distribution in relation to soil depths and water. As you walk through the Yosemite valley with the colossal front of El Capitan standing up straight and steely to your left and the hunched mass of Tissiack (Half Dome) to your right, its curve sheared off frontally, you feel your shoulders brace and your brain contract as though you were having to hold apart the irresistible gravity and closure of the Earth’s crust.

Muir called it ‘a grand page of mountain manuscript that I would gladly give my life to be able to read’, then did just that, moving across it with the freedom of a flying, swimming creature. He knew it through shepherding and sawmill working; he sensed the curve of its domes, the shining of its surfaces, the angling of its clefts so intently that he became able to explain its formation as though he had been an eye-witness of the Ice Age. When expert geologists were still asserting that the valley floor had dropped in some huge seismic event, Muir could see that it had been made by glaciers moving down the cleavage joints of the granite, shearing, graving, polishing, dumping boulders and moraines.

Now, after a century and more of aerial mapping, examining fossilised pollen through the microscope, sampling ice in cores hundreds of feet deep, we can say that the work of glaciers is obvious. To make sense of the labyrinth of mountain, forest, glen and ice-field by living in it and traversing it, with no instruments and precious few maps, was a physical and intellectual feat. Muir could comprehend that world – meaning both ‘encompass’ and ‘understand’ – because he delighted in it, was equal to its rigours, and craved to understand its least leaf and crystal, swarming up its pines in gales of wind and leaning out over the lips of its waterfalls.

His feeling for nature is scarcely separable from his piety, which is luxuriant and ecstatic. In the Californian Sierra, ‘the presence of an atmosphere is hardly recognised, and the thin, white, bodiless light of the morning comes to the peaks and glaciers as a pure spiritual essence, the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.’ Canoeing along the ice-cliffs of coastal Alaska he feels the same: ‘bays full of hazy shadows, graduating into open, silvery fields of light, and lofty headlands with fine arching insteps dipping their feet in the shining water ... Forgotten now were the Chilcats and missions while the word of God was being read in these majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the sky.’ So organised religion shrinks and falls out of the frame as the potency of nature comes over him. Essential belief never leaves him. On the glacier near Wrangell, among the ‘gashed and sculptured’ ice-walls and cornices, ‘every feature glowed with intention, reflecting the plans of God.’ He can see it all as divinely created (although he knew about evolution and wholly accepted it) because it strikes him as beautiful and wholesome – utterly so.

The ice, on which nothing can grow, which crushed rocks and swamped canoes (and nearly killed him as he paddled between two closing icebergs), has a ‘broad melting bosom’ which is ‘filled with light, simmering and throbbing in pale-blue tones of ineffable tenderness and beauty’. In this Nature of unalloyed goodness, there can be no poison, injury or disaster. When an entire cliff on the south wall of Yosemite collapsed, he saw the rockfall as ‘an arc of glowing passionate fire ... as true in form and as serene in beauty as a rainbow’. A spate that tore away rocks and swept whole trees down from Mount Hoffman to plunge over Yosemite Falls is part of ‘the universal anthem storm’. He developed a philosophy of storms to counter our tendency to fear them out of a ‘lack of faith in the Scriptures of Nature’ (for which he faulted Ruskin) and he argued that storms of rain or snow were ‘a cordial outpouring of Nature’s love’. Nature was whole, where people are divided and confused: ‘How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.’

His determination to see nature as benign has been called a flaw by his most intelligent critic, Michael Cohen, in The Pathless Way. As we climbed together on a route called Great White Book in the Tuolumne domes east of Yosemite, he told me how Muir was disconcerted by the writhen and stunted junipers rooting in crevices of the granite because they were struggling, not harmoniously healthy. For Muir nature must be good, and this goodness was almost personal. So storms ‘utter’; trees ‘behave’, whether they are ‘thoughtful’ or ‘wideawake’; rock pinnacles at sunrise ‘shout colour hallelujahs’. Lichenous trees ‘sing psalms’ in the light of an Arctic camp-fire. Grouse and ptarmigan, anemones and ferns, are ‘mountain people’ and ‘plant people’. Snowflakes ‘journey down with gestures of confident life’. Daisies and sedges, ‘brought forward in the fire-glow, seem full of thought as if about to speak aloud and tell all their wild stories.’ Tissiack (Half Dome) is ‘full of thought ... no sense of dead stone about it, neither heavy looking nor light, steadfast in serene strength like a god’.

Such personifications, all positive and happy, may seem too soft-focused. Sometimes the rhapsodies cloy: ‘Glaciers came down from heaven, and they were angels with folded wings, white wings of snowy bloom. Locked hand in hand the little spirits did nobly’ (letter of 1871 to Mrs Carr). Or again, from his marvellously fresh and sustained My First Summer in the Sierra: ‘it was in the wildest, highest places that the most beautiful and tender and enthusiastic plant people were found ... I said: How came you here? How do you live through the winter? Our roots, they explained, reach far down the joints of the summer-warmed rocks.’ Surely personifying nature flies in the teeth of the evidence that life is an unfolding of organic and inorganic materials according to their composition, without the intervention of any other agency? And yet, as an (almost) lifelong atheist, I can read Muir with more quickening and illumination than I get from either Ruskin or Thoreau, because his response to nature is so absorbed and direct. He sees, touches and hears far more than he philosophises. Although the pious remarks are heartfelt, they are not hard to treat as interjections in the flow of richly physical prose. In this he is closer to the master wildlife writers of our own time – Barry Lopez or Mike Tomkies, Jim Crumley or John Baker – than to the moralistic and didactic Victorians.

In Muir a delighted immersion was primary. He was born like that and he grew up like that. Activity and gleeful sensing were second nature to him – or should I say first nature? When he starts his Story of My Boyhood and Youth, he takes it for granted that he will begin, not with parents or forebears, but with the eels and crabs he found in the tidal pools along the south coast of the Firth of Forth. The first anecdote is about a walk in a hayfield when he was barely three, hearing a ‘sharp, prickly, stinging cry’, and delving in the hay to find a fieldmouse with six young ones suckling at her teats. The pulsing of the waterfalls, the springing of the forest trees spoke to him because their energies corresponded to his own.

A missionary, Samuel Young, who explored glaciers with him in Alaska, described Muir’s way of moving on rough, steep terrain: ‘Then Muir began to slide up that mountain ... A deer-lope over the smoother slopes ... a serpent-glide up the steep ... spreading out like a flying squirrel and edging along an inch-wide projection ... leaping fissures, sliding flat around a dangerous rock-breast ... always going up, up, no hesitation – that was Muir!’ This bodily fluency fed directly through to his observing of nature, his interpreting of it, his writing about it.

A technical paper on how glaciers change direction as they carve out valleys, illustrated by his own diagrams full of arrows and As and Bs, culminates like this: ‘we find everywhere displayed the same delicate yielding to glacial law, showing that, throughout the whole period of its formation, the huge granite valley was lithe as a serpent, and winced tenderly to the touch of every tributary.’ When rain falls, in his narrative of shepherding in the summer of 1869, he brims over at once into an unstoppable vision of the water ‘plashing, glinting, pattering, laving’, flowing over domes, through lakes, down falls, in and out of woods and bogs, glinting on crystals (each one geologically specified) and pattering on flowers (likewise botanically named).

This direct and unlearned affinity with the natural world – developed by lifelong fieldwork and reading – enabled him to see equivalences everywhere. His writing, considered as one piece, is a web of likenesses, noted with exactitude and delight. Butterflies emerge from the chrysalis ‘like cotyledons from their husks’. Plants of the Adiantum fern waving in air currents between the Upper and Lower Falls stir like the purple dulses he remembers from the tidal pools of Lothian. Woodsmen’s faces are ‘furrowed like the bark of logs’ and their trousers, sticky with resin and never washed, thicken as they build up concentric layers of sawdust like growth-rings in a tree-trunk. The song of the dipper is like the noises of the rapids it lives among, which the bird must learn ‘before it is born by the thrilling and quivering of the eggs in unison with the tones of the falls’. He tries to spell phonetically the song of the distinctive Western meadow-lark and is fired to this vision: ‘Drops and sprays of air are specialised, and made to plash and churn in the bosom of the lark, as infinitesimal portions of air plash and sing about the angles and hollows of sand-grains.’

On a larger scale, the gradation of spruces on islets of the Alexander Archipelago, from tallest in the centre to smaller at the ends, is as harmonious as ‘the arrangement of the feathers of birds or the scales of fishes’. Larger again, and the South Lyell Glacier has the gnarled, bulging base and wide-spreading branches of an oak. His life was confirmed in its direction by an epiphany he described many times. After crossing the Diablo range down into the San Joaquin valley, on first heading for the Sierra, he found himself wading through a meadow five hundred miles long and forty across, one golden drift of Compositae, daisies and tansies and asters, ragwort and dandelions. Three years later this issues in a Wordsworthian passage of seeing and connecting: ‘Well may the sun feed them with his richest light, for these shining sunlets are his very children – rays of his ray, beams of his beam ... The earth has indeed become a sky; and the two cloudless skies, raying toward each other flower-beams and sunbeams, are fused and congolded into one glowing heaven.’

In this climactic passage, from an essay called ‘Twenty Hill Hollow’, we can feel how he needs new language for his perceptions as he sees the ‘sunlets’ of the asters radiating ‘flower-beams’ that ‘congold’ with the light of the sky. His linking of natural things by their equivalence is knit into the fibre of his style, for example those distinctive compound nouns. Forests are ‘tree pastures’. Foam on rocks makes ‘wave embroidery’. Towering cumulus clouds above the Sierra at summer noon-times are ‘light fountains’ springing from ‘shadow caves’. Scars in the ground made by uprooted trees are ‘ditch writing’ – a metaphor that reminds us of the root of the word ‘write’ in the Old English writan, to ‘scratch’ or ‘score’. In those same years Hopkins was minting words like ‘bone-house’, ‘yestertempest’, ‘leaf-light’, ‘knee-nave’, ‘shadowtackle’, ‘trambeams’, because the stuff of life sank into him so deeply that to express its being he had to fuse one thing with another.

The muscular impulse of Muir’s writing was like his walking and climbing and probably like his speech. We know that he laboured over his writing, struggling to cope with the ‘lateral, terminal and medial moraines’ of notes on his study floor, and regarded the making of whole books as ‘unnatural’. He published only three in his lifetime, although he made a good income from his articles. He felt himself ‘begin to labour like a laden wagon in a bog’ when he took up his pen, yet his prose feels fluent, even headlong, and palpably has the character of his speech. This was so vital and appealing that people invited him to private and public gatherings and his conversation ‘lingered as a literary tradition in California’. In a sense he was preaching – akin to the ’almost wholly extempore and unrecorded sermons and prayers’ whose ‘astonishing wealth of imagery and illustration, sometimes sonorously eloquent and sometimes racily colloquial’, was regarded by Sorley MacLean as the ‘great prose’ of the (Gaelic) Presbyterian culture.

Muir had escaped from the fundamentalist Christianity of his father. When they set brush fires in Wisconsin to clear scrubland for the plough, Daniel compared their heat with hell and the branches with bad boys: ‘Now, John, just think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into that fire ... their sufferings will never, never end because neither the fire nor the sinners can die.’ Twelve years later Muir can write to his brother that he has been baptised three times that morning, in ‘balmy sunshine’, in the ‘rays of beauty that emanate from plant corollas’, and in ‘the spray of the Lower Yosemite Falls’. He made his own the thinking of the pioneering scientists, Darwin on species, Lyell on rocks. He saw that the Bible account of creation was for its own time, not for all time. A letter about Ruskin is vehement in its dislike of the doomy piety Muir saw in him: ‘Nature, according to Ruskin, is the joint work of God and the devil ... made up of alternate strips and bars of evil and good ... You never can feel that there is the slightest union betwixt Nature and him.

He goes to the Alps and improves and superintends and reports on Nature with the conceit and lofty importance of a factor on a Duke’s estate.’ (In Ontario Muir had met many refugees from the Sutherland Clearances.) He especially opposed Ruskin for regarding plants as ‘evil’ because they were poisonous. His only bête noire seems to have been the black ant with its seemingly wanton biting and widespread distribution. Here he perhaps laughs at his own Panglossian optimism: ‘I see that much remains to be done ere the world is brought under the universal rule of love and peace.’ This is rather like the devoted missionary Mr Sorley in A Passage to India, who believed that God’s mercy, being infinite, ‘may well embrace all animals’ but ‘became uneasy during the descent to wasps’.

Muir deeply respected Thoreau but he would not have sympathised with the sage of Walden’s dismay at the damp and mossy woods of Maine (in a posthumous book quoted by Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory): the swamps and the slopes pockmarked with bears’ dens were ‘the most treacherous and porous country I ever travelled’, the bare summits desolate and savage, ‘made out of Chaos and Old Night ... It was Matter, vast, terrific.’ Although Thoreau’s description, in Chapter 4 of Walden, of his new-scrubbed furniture out on the grass with blackberry vines running round its legs, is charmingly fresh, his account of the cabin he built for himself in the Massachusetts woods near Concord is low-key compared with the poem in wood which Muir (an inventor and skilled craftsman) made for himself in Yosemite. A stream ran through it to lull him at night, his bed was ‘suspended from the rafters and lined with libocedrus plumes’, and when Pteris ferns pushed up through the flooring planks, he trained them in an arch over his desk so that the tree frogs climbing up it at night could entertain him with their sounds.

Image:The Sierra Club
Thoreau had been conducting what he called an ‘experiment’. Ruskin was Britain’s most distinguished aesthete, travelling to Switzerland (on private means) to admire and paint the Alps from a distance. Muir worked in the Sierra (as shepherd, sawyer and fruit farmer), he explored them for many years on end, and the richness of his writing roots deeper into the terrain than any other wilderness writer known to me. To know this book* is on your shelf is like having your woodshed filled with dry peats or your mind with glowing memories.

* John Muir:His life and letters and other writings

David Craig: First Published in LRB 1997

John Porter and Alex MacIntyre in Peru: Photo John Porter

‘Your young men shall see visions’ The Bible

Recently I read an article by Nick Bullock bemoaning the fact that the present day climbing world is no longer as replete with ‘characters’ as it once was. He blamed this shallowness on such as the majority of the younger generation being spoon fed, with climbing wall introductions to the sport, consumerism and an-unwillingness to seek out new experiences in relatively unknown (unpopular) climbing areas and wilderness destinations.

I think it is only from a distance in time that we can appreciate the true worth of such character in our own climbing friends and acquaintances, but three mountaineers who worked alongside me at the BMC, would I believe pass Bullock’s designation as ‘characters’, namely Peter Boardman, Alex MacIntyre and Andy Fanshawe. However they were much more than their climbing record suggests, for all three became published authors, each had an academic record, and they had a major influence on their contemporaries and in the subsequent future direction of Himalayan exploration; and no three people in my experience exhibited such a degree of difference in their personalities. However, they each had enjoyed a similar introduction to climbing whilst schoolboys, one that demanded enterprise and keenness with no spoon feeding.

I first met Peter Boardman when I gave a lecture to the Nottingham University Mountaineering Club in 1970; he was studying English and had already made some impressive ascents in the Pennine Alps and the Mont Blanc Range (e.g The Bonatti Pillar of the Petit Dru). I got to know him better when he assisted during the BMC’s first ever International meet in North Wales in 1973, giving a lecture on the Nottingham clubs expedition to the Hindu Kush the previous year, and climbing with the brilliant Russian, Aleksandr Gubanov on Llech Ddu, ascending routes like The Groove and The Great Corner. By that date Peter was a post graduate at Bangor and typical of him he also studied Welsh in his spare time. He had also begun writing about his climbing experiences, including an outstanding article in Mountain No 36, ‘Long Necks in the Hindu Kush.’ On this his first expedition, they had made some spectacular ascents, including the North Face, of Koh-i-Kaak (5,860m). What made this even more interesting was they had driven overland to Afghanistan and inevitably experienced some hair-raising adventures en route.

Peter was appointed the BMC’s National Officer in November 1974, and although then only 24 years old, he exhibited a maturity which impressed all who met him at that time. He was above medium height, physically powerful, dark haired and quietly spoken. But he quickly adapted to a role of attending and steering meetings the length and breadth of the UK and abroad. But he was not all serious, and he was a member of the Mynydd climbing club, which he had joined as a schoolboy in Cheshire, and he was a keen member of their folk group, led by a climber known as ‘leather lungs’ and complimented by Pete’s fine baritone voice, whose party piece was ‘The Rawtenstall Annual Fair!’.

In September 1975 Peter was to achieve national recognition by summiting Mount Everest on the South West Face expedition along with Sherpa Pertemba, following on   Doug Scott and Dougal Haston who had climbed the mountain shortly before him. He was the last person to see Mick Burke alive just below the summit, and Peter awaited his return in deteriorating conditions whilst he also summited, but he was never to be seen again. Post Everest Peter was in demand to write articles and give lectures, but once back in the BMC office he was nose to the grindstone, answering phone calls and letters, attending meetings, whilst observing with some justification by what has occurred subsequently, that ‘we are creating a monster!’. But also whilst arguing between us about the merits of our favourite poets; myself being a fan of such moderns as Gary Snyder, and Pete condemning them in comparison to his own classical favourites such as Spenser. He was also a great fan of A.A. Milne’s ‘Pooh’ stories.

Joe Tasker was then based in Manchester, and he was a frequent visitor into the BMC office, so much so that I invited him to attend the staff Christmas party in 1975/6. He had also been away that summer in the Indian Himalaya and with Dick Renshaw had made the first ascent of Dunagiri (7066m). A brilliant achievement for they had driven overland to India in an old Ford van, but unfortunately Dick had contacted frost bite in a storm during the descent, and thus was unable to return with Joe to attempt an even more impressive objective for the autumn of 1976, which they had observed from Dunagiri, the West Wall of Changabang(6,864m). Joe started enthusing Pete about this, but there was a snag, for he had been away for many weeks in 1975 on Everest, and I was none too keen on being once more left to hold the fort for another long absence. However before he had started to climb as a 20 year old Joe had studied at a Catholic seminary,training to be a priest, and he had become a persistent debater. At the Christmas party after a meal, lubricated by alcohol he started on me, and I found myself some while later agreeing to Pete taking part with him in apparently what might be the most important ascent in the history of British Himalayan endeavour?

Joe and Pete had at that point in time never climbed together and so they came along one weekend in January 1976 to a weekend in the Peak District, with me and my family staying at the Oread hut near Baslow. The weather was dire, cold and wet, but we still did go climbing, and impressively Pete led the Right Eliminate on Curbar, for he was an outstanding free rock climber and both Joe and I needed an extremely tight rope in following. Later that year they trained together mid-week by spending evenings hanging off meat hooks in a cold storage in Manchester, so by the time they left for Changabang in early September 1976 they were well attuned to each other’s likes and dislikes!

Their successful ascent of Changabang’s West Wall over 25 days, was without doubt one of the outstanding breakthrough’s in modern Himalayan climbing history. And Pete’s award winning book of their climb ‘The Shining Mountain’ was agreed to be a classic of mountain literature and it is still in print.

Peter left the BMC at the end of 1977 to take over as the Director of The International School of Mountaineering in Leysin at the death of Dougal Haston in a skiing accident. His life from thereon was dominated by mountaineering, he had passed his guides carnet earlier that year, and eventually he became President of The Association of British Mountain Guides in 1979. He married in August 1980, and his wife Hilary Collins, a keen climber had previously taken part with him in making the first ascent of the South Face of the Carstentz Pyramid in New Guinea in December 1978.

Peter’s life over the next immediate years was to be a round of expeditions in between his guiding commitments. A tragic expedition to K2 in 1978 was abandoned when Nick Escourt was killed in an avalanche, a successful new route was achieved, on Kanchenjunga by its North Ridge in 1979 with Doug Scott and Joe Tasker, and the first ascent of Gauri Sankar’s south summit (7071m) was made in November of that same year. Attempts were made on the West Ridge of K2 in 1980, and success was recorded on the remote Xinjiang peak of Kongur (7,719m) with Joe Tasker, Chris Bonington and Al Rouse in 1981. Joe and Peter by that date must have been one of the strongest high altitude partnerships of their era, but it all came to a tragic end in 1982, when attempting the unclimbed North Ridge of Everest on the Tibetan side of the mountain during which Joe Tasker and Peter were last spotted on the 17th May at the foot of the second pinnacle (8,250m). A decade later, a Japanese-Kazakh expedition found Peter’s body around this altitude, but Joe’s has never yet been discovered despite other expeditions subsequently following this same route.

When Peter left the BMC I was so sorry to see him depart. Over the three years he worked with me, we had become close friends, and I did go out to Leysin in the summer of 1981 and undertook some guiding of clients for him. His loss was equably sad for all who were involved at the BMC at that time, both the staff and volunteers, for he had taken on the role of a Vice President in 1979 and he was still very much involved in shaping the organisations policies. Both Joe Tasker and Peter were fine writers, and each had published two books, Joe ‘The Savage Arena 1982’ and ‘Everest the Cruel Way 1980’ and Peter, besides ‘The Shining Mountain 1978’ , ‘Sacred Summits in 1982’, they had also contributed numerous articles to magazines and journals. And so we, who were their friends and most importantly including their families, set up the Boardman/Tasker prize for mountain literature in 1983. This is now the leading such award in the UK, and has gone from strength to strength in recent years, with over 80 entries from around the English speaking world in the last two years; the winner last year being a Canadian, Barry Blanchard. Whilst Peter’s old school; Stockport Grammar, has erected The Peter Boardman climbing wall as their way to keep his memory and example alive for their students.

Alex MacIntyre succeeded Peter Boardman as National Officer of the BMC at the end of 1977, he was 23 years old at that date, and a graduate in law from Leeds University. Although he had a very Scottish name he was born in Yorkshire, however his parents were from Caledonia, and the family moved south to Letchmore Heath when Alex was young, from where he attended Watford Grammar School. He started climbing whilst at school and joined the London Mountaineering Club, with whom he attended club meets in Wales, but which did not seem to affect his studies as so often happens to young climbers, for in 1972 he managed four Grade A’s at A level. Leading on to entry at Leeds University originally to study geography and economics, but later he switched to read law. He joined the University climbing club, which at that date was a dynamic force in the land and he began to hone his climbing skills alongside such as John Syrett, Brian Hall, John Porter, Roger Baxter-Jones and John Powell.

It was during that time I first met him, at the then famous Leeds University Wall. He was a striking figure in appearance (one of the wags at the wall, comparing him to the young Shirley Temple), of medium height, lithe, dark and with a shock of thick curly hair crowning his head. He looked like a rock star, a doppelganger for Marc Bolan. He was however no wall expert, in fact although he developed into an outstanding mountaineer, he was never a premier division rock jock, preferring to excel in the mountains.

Besides the University club being, at the cutting edge of disciplines from outcrop to alpine climbing in that era, it was also a part of a vibrant social scene of partying, clubbing and youthful exuberance. Alex was no shrinking violet and I once observed him at a club disco head-banging with the rest, and sometime into his studies at Leeds he took on a bet to wear the same clothes for a term, earning him the soubriquet of ‘Dirty Alex’, which took some little time to become inappropriate for in his later years, he became a wearer and a designer of some ‘smart’ outdoor equipment. Whilst at Leeds he started to travel (sometimes hitch-hiking) to winter climb in Scotland, and it was there he found out what he was outstandingly good at ice and mixed climbing.

In March 1975 he made solo ascents in a day of both the Zero and Point Five gullies on Ben Nevis, and soon he was transferring these skills to the Alps. After the usual early alpine bumble ascents, he really began to motor, and by the time he joined the BMC he had taken part in pioneering two new routes on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses (including the now classic Colton-MacIntyre in 1976), ascended the Shroud also on that face, and the Eiger Direct: the Harlin route on that mountains north wall.

Alex once in post at the BMC was so different to his predecessor, he was more ‘up front’, more argumentative in stressing his views, and more aggressive. But if it seemed in expressing his own stance so strongly he had over stepped the mark, he was sensitive to other opinions, and good at regressing and allowing others to make their case. His background of being a law graduate was good at helping to form direction and policies, and he had a very sharp intellect and was actually easy to work with, and many of the younger generation of activists appeared to agree ‘if someone like Alex MacIntyre could work for the BMC, it was a body worth supporting!’

An event that occurred before Alex joined the BMC   was to have great meaning for his own future development as a Himalayan mountaineer, this was a visit, organised by the Council of Polish climbers to the UK in September 1975. Peter Boardman was away on Everest at that time, and normally the hosting arrangements would have been his task as National Officer but in his absence I had to take on this role. To do this I needed to invoke the voluntary help of my own friends, one of whom was John Porter, and he joined the party to help during the stay of the Poles in North Wales.

He struck a strong rapport with our guests and subsequently he accepted an invitation from them to climb in the Tatra Mountains. It is worth recording that Eastern European mountaineers had by that date begun to establish a formidable record in Himalayan exploration, this despite having a much reduced standard of living compared to their western counterparts, and their initiative in overcoming travel and funding difficulties being one of an incredible ability at ducking and diving, all within their then pervasive communist-system of governance.

John was invited in 1977 to take part in an expedition to the Hindu Kush by the Poles, and in order to make this into a joint endeavour, he invited Alex MacIntyre to join him. They had met each other whilst studying at Leeds, and were close friends. This trip was to energise Alex and set his future direction, attempting lightweight attempts on the highest peaks. On this his first such expedition just reaching the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan was an adventure, travelling overland by train, and public transport as cheaply as possible all master minded by their Polish team members, one of whom Woytek Kurtyka would go on to be one of the most outstanding climbers of his generation. They enjoyed some spectacular successes on this expedition, including a major new route on Kohe Bandaka 6868m. The following year they were to repeat the exercise, a joint Polish-British expedition to the Indian Himalaya, with success in the ascent of the south buttress of Changabang 6864m, a highly technical route which took 11 days, climbing in Alpine style.

By 1978 and the Changabang climb, Alex-was deeply into his role as National Officer at the BMC. He had been given leave of absence to take part in that expedition, but we could not keep on doing this. The Executive Committee discussed what to do about such requests for absence in future and agreed that from there on any of the professional officers making an application for leave to take part in an expedition this could only be granted once in every five years of service. I realised that this would not suit Alex, but the work load was increasing exponentially at that time with a massive increase in participation occurring within the sport, and expedition membership forty years ago meant being away for many weeks. In the time it took for Alex and John to reach the Hindu Kush in 1977, most modern teams have been to their mountain/s and come back.

Once again as with Peter it was not all serious. On some of the International Meets one of our regular venues in the Peak District, after a day’s climbing was the Swan in New Mills, run by old friends Bob and Elsie Upton, members of Manchester’s Karabiner Club, so they were well attuned to visits by such a clientele. Usually our visitors enjoyed a pub meal, a lecture and afterwards a social when lots of local Peak District enthusiasts turned up in order to meet with our visitors. On one of these occasions, Alex raided his girl friend’s make up box and appeared late in the evening made up in highlights. This invoked from all present much laughter but things did get a little out of hand subsequently, when one of our guests began a simulated strip to the music of The Stripper! It was all done in the best possible taste, but next day back at my desk in the BMC Office I was stunned when a reporter from The News of the World phoned demanding details of who and what had been involved in such an organised orgy! It took me some time to convince the reporter that it was just a case of youthful high jinks, commonplace at such climber’s gatherings.

I had guessed that with his developing ambitions Alex would not stay too long at the BMC now we had instituted a five year rule on expedition leave. He wanted to develop and test his skills, climbing alpine style in the highest mountains. He decided to leave in 1980, and once again as with Peter Boardman I was so sorry to see him go. By that date I was almost old enough to have been his father, and I was worried where his drive for adventurous style ascents would lead him, and I feared for his long term future safety. Over the next two years his none stop activity was impressive, with ascents and trips to Dhaulagiri, Makalu and Shisha Pangma. This latter yielded an impressive new route on the mountain in 1981 by its south west face in the company of Doug Scott and Roger Baxter Jones. The book of the expedition, written jointly by Doug and Alex was an early joint winner of the Boardman/Tasker prize in 1984.

Like Peter, Alex’s demise happened at the frontier of what was then possible in Himalayan climbing, an attempt in autumn 1982 on a new route with French climber, Rene Ghilini on the South Face of Annapurna. John Porter had joined them, but was laid low at base with illness but watching their ascent via a scope. After some very difficult climbing they were descending to re-group at base, to rest ready to return to the face, when a single stone falling from high on the mountain scored a direct hit on Alex’s head killing him instantly. I was in Nepal when this happened for I had been speaking at a UNESCO/UIAA ‘Future of the Himalaya’ conference, and then subsequently out trekking finishing in the Rolwaling. I was awakened in my tent with a message about the accident to Alex, carried by a runner from Mike Cheyney in Kathmandu and so I immediately rushed back to there- where I met a distraught John Porter, who filled me in with the detail of what had happened.

John after many years of struggle with the subject matter has now managed an outstanding biography of Alex. ‘One Day as a Tiger’. A winner of the Grand Jury prize at Banff and short listed for last year’s Boardman/Tasker Award. And we who were Alex friends, in a similar move to what had happened at Peter and Joe’s sad deaths, wished to set up an appropriate memorial to him. He had been keen on Scottish winter climbing, and by an act of serendipity I had attended a meeting of outdoor organisations in Manchester at the headquarters of the Co-operative Holidays Association some time before Alex’s death. I found out they owned a property at Onich and they offered to let us rent a large cottage in the grounds which was surplus to their requirements. Initially we did do this, but subsequently we managed to persuade the CHA to sell and we purchased the property for £28,000 and it now stands as The Alex MacIntyre Memorial Hut of the BMC/MC of S, a suitable recognition of its named climber, which over the last twenty years or more, has been used by hundreds of climbers from the length and breadth of the UK and overseas.

Andy Fanshawe:Photo Fanshawe Trust

Andy Fanshawe was as different in character from Alex has he had been from Peter. Tall and angular, he exuded enthusiasm and caring, with a measured approach to problem solving, and he was universally popular. He had started rock climbing as a schoolboy at Wilmslow Grammar School from where he gained entrance to Imperial College to study mining geology. Whilst at University he organised an expedition to Ecuador and Peru, and during the summer before he was appointed BMC National Officer, as a 23year old in the autumn of 1986, he had taken part in the first successful traverse of Chogolisa 7665m in the Karakoram Himalaya. Like Peter and Alex before him, prior to taking on his role at the BMC he had completed some major alpine ascents, including the South West Pillar of the Petit Dru and the North Ridge Direct on Les Droites. The reader might wonder what was the role of The National Officer within the BMC?

It was one that demanded almost 24 hours a day, attending Area and other meetings, acting as Secretary to the Technical Committee, which had a major role in setting standards and equipment testing, dealing with queries and phone calls mainly in the safety and technical areas, and acting as liaison with the hundreds of clubs and organisations and individuals in membership of the Council; and organising a programme of International meets, expedition grants and advice. It required driving thousands of miles a year to meet the requirements of the job. In retrospect I am impressed with how well Peter, Alex and Andy carried out their work demands whilst managing to continue being active in the hills. During the period Andy was at the BMC we had a very cohesive working together staff, I have worked in many organisations in different parts of the world; in China, East Africa and Europe but none where the staff were so close as the BMC in that period. This was highlighted when Andy had a terrible accident during the New Year of 1986/7 on Ben Nevis.

After a successful climb he and John Taylor were descending off the mountain in bad weather. From the summit plateau they had descended too far east and found themselves at the head of the Five Finger Gully, a notorious accident black spot. Realising their mistake they started traversing, back the way they had come, when the slope they were on avalanched, carrying them along its wake. They were buried by this and though Andy survived despite his injuries, John Taylor died. Obviously this was a terrible event for John was one of Andy’s oldest and closest friends. I know he was deeply affected by meeting John’s parents who he visited as he slowly recovered. Back in Manchester my secretary, Leslie Smithson took Andy into her home and helped him to rehabilitate and get back to work within a surprising short time, taking into account the seriousness of the accident. In fact within four months he led his first E5 rock climb in Wales.

The next few years were full of incident, for there were always crisis looming at the BMC, especially in relation to access and safety problems, and combating threats to the integrity of our sport. However using the five year rule Andy applied for leave of absence to join an expedition, led by Chris Bonington to Menlungste West 7023m in 1988. An impressive peak in the Rolwaling Himalaya of Nepal, and along with Alan Hinkes he was successful in reaching its summit on this mountain which some refer to as The Matterhorn of Nepal.

I left the BMC in mid 1989, and I was heartened by both Lesley Smithson and Andy Fanshawe pleading with me not to leave, suggesting that after 18 years I should take a sabbatical. However I had given 8 months notice and wanted to do other things with my life. We all stayed good friends and I attended Andy’s marriage in 1990 to Caroline, a keen outdoor enthusiast herself, at which he also decided to leave the Council’s employ moving to live in the Eden Valley of Cumbia. In that same year he published a climbing autobiography, with a rather unusual title ‘Coming Through’.

He then worked as a fund raiser for the Barrow Hospital Trust, aiming to purchase a 1.5million pound scanner for that body, but taking time off to visit the Alps and climbing the North Face of the Eiger and the Croz Spur in winter on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses with Ulrich Jessop, a climbing companion from his University days.

Like Alex and Peter before him, tragedy was awaiting and on the 14th March 1992, whilst leading on the Eagle Ridge Direct on Lochnagar, he fell and though his second held his fall, badly injured his life ebbed away before he could be rescued shortly before his 29th birthday. Peter, Alex and Andy three incomparable characters who, were, to leave a void in the memory of all who knew them. Before his death Andy had started work on a coffee table book with Stephen Venables, ‘Himalaya Alpine Style’ and this was eventually finished by his co-author and published in 1995.

Once again friends wished that the memory of such an outstanding figure should be continued in a suitable form, and one thing that made Andy stand out was his social awareness, he appreciated that he had been fortunate in his mountain activities life style. And so The Andy Fanshawe Memorial Trust was brought into being, its purpose ‘To fund projects that give disadvantaged young people the opportunity to develop an existing interest in the Great Outdoors’. Since its inception hundreds of young candidates have been helped into meeting these objectives.

To return to the original hypothesis, namely the opinion held by some that we are no longer producing characters with the initiative and approach of the previous climbing generations in this country, but I am not sure that this is true? I am gob smacked by the levels of difficulty now reached by the present generation of rock climbers and mountaineers, but I will agree that they do not seem to have as much fun as hitherto. There is an awful lot of emphasis on achievement and not much humour?

Pete Boardman and Dennis Gray: Photo DG.

However whilst we do have the example of Peter Boardman, Alex MacIntyre and Andy Fanshawe so embedded in our sport via their memorials, I hope climbers will emerge wishing to emulate and climb/live in such an adventurous style.

Dennis Gray:2016

I first came across Ken Ilgunas when I received a review copy of his debut work ‘Walden on Wheels’ . What I first thought would be yet another road trip travelogue turned out to be a smart polemical work on the higher education debt trap in the US and the author’s unique solution to this quandary. Of course, travel did intrude upon the narrative and it was clear towards the end of 'Walden’ that Ken was destined to continue his growing political education and further develop his campaigning zeal by looking to new horizons. In his latest work, ‘Trespassing Across America’ the horizon in question turns out to be Texas’ Sabine Lake which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. A far horizon which was 1700 miles and three months distant when the author took his first soft footed steps upon his epic journey in the Tar Sands blighted tundra of Canada’s Alberta province. ( Currently in the grip of a devastating wild fire concentrated around the principal oil town of Fort McMurray)

The goal was to walk the entire length of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline which would take American produced heavy crude oil/diluted bitumen (Dilbet) from the tar sands of Alberta to the refineries of Texas for processing for domestic use and export. For environmentalists, the opposition to the Keystone XL project has multifarious elements. Not least; the actual extraction process which has had a devastating ecological impact on the local flora, fauna and wildlife. The vast highly toxic tailing lakes of sludge left over from the extraction process covers a mind boggling 176 square kilometres of formally pristine wilderness.Add to this the ecological impact of a 1700 mile pipeline which apart from the aforementioned impact on wildlife, carries a constant threat to vital and vulnerable water supplies. The final poisoned cherry on the cake is of course, THE environmental issue of the moment- climate change.

With fossil fuels recognised as a major contributory factor in global warming,the exportation of two millions gallons of crude oil a day from Alberta’s tar sands has to be recognised as a serious black mark on America-and Canada’s- commitment to reducing its Co2 emissions. Given the implications, what else is a spirited environmentalist to do than to walk the proposed route in its entirety to publicise the project and in September 2012,that is exactly what Ken Ilgunas did. ‘Tresspassing Across America’ charts that eventful journey and all its highs and lows.

As a pure travel book and leaving aside the author’s occasional environmental and philosophical musings, it’s a beautifully observed and painfully honest account of a hard fought labour of love. Ken’s descriptions of the land, the people and his own frailties recalls a recent reading of William Least Heat Moon’s ‘Blue Highways’.Insightful, honest and absorbing in his descriptions of the empty plains and its people. Naturally, there are those ‘Wild’ elements; the black toenails, the blisters, the hip lesions which took six months to heal and of course, the moments of overwhelming loneliness which inevitably inspired bouts of the blues.But more than this,the book succeeds through the author’s fascinating dissection of ‘Middle America’. That-for Europeans at least- unknown far country often referred to as ‘Godland’.

Swinging his walking poles through the great empty plains and former dust bowl states, Ken reveals a society and culture far removed from his secular liberal values. After crossing the border, his journey South takes him through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and finally into Texas. Within these largely agricultural states, paradoxes abound.Paranoia and the milk of human kindness fill each day. For those on this side of the pond, many of our preconceptions about Middle America prove sadly all too true. A society where private property forms part of a holy trinity with God and guns.

The subjugation of the native American population in the 19th century and the wiping out of the buffalo saw the previously pristine wilderness, claimed and fenced off by the white invaders who all too quickly exploited a new invention ‘barbed wire’ to mark their territory. From here on in to the present day ‘Private Property’, ‘Keep out’ and ‘No Trespassing’ signs became part and parcel of the landscape. Despite the fact that in the US, large parts are still state owned, land ownership is jealously guarded and a right to roam is relentlessly challenged. More especially in the wide open spaces which Ken travelled through.

Intending to-as far as possible- follow the route of the Keystone XL pipeline, the author had little choice but to trespass across farmland. Climbing fences and avoiding if at all possible,being observed. His descriptions of these clandestine wanderings are both amusing and at times, plain scary! It appears that hiking across the plains of Middle America is not a pastime which generally finds many takers. Witness the paranoia which stalks the land. If we think that England and Wales has half baked access laws compared to many European countries including Scotland, then you have to admit that it’s an egalitarian paradise compared to places like Montana or Kansas.

Instances of the author walking up to a remote farmstead to ask for water to be met by the homesteader retreating inside to unleash a gun from his rifle cabinet occurs not infrequently. As does those occasions when he is stopped and ID’d by small town police who appear to consider every stranger-especially a young bearded scruffy hiker- a potential Charles Manson. On one occasion he was even driven to the county line by a paranoid officer on the grounds that a house he had passed had discovered one of their dogs missing!

For those in the UK and Europe for whom a wandering bearded hiker would not raise an eyebrow then its certainly sobering to see just how hikers are seen as complete wackos in this central belt.(Note to European hikers: Give Kansas a miss!) However, I’m sure that the last thing the author wants is to present parts of his country as a third world backwater made up of bigots, fruitcakes and rednecks. Throughout his epic journey through Middle America, the author encounters great kindness and generosity at every turn. Certainly the good outweigh the bad and the ugly. Despite his secularism, Ken experiences untold acts of Christian charity from individuals and families who ask for nothing in return. Not even a shot at saving his soul.

As his walk progresses, he finds himself regularly seeking out the local churches and throwing himself on their charitable instincts and always he receives a positive response. Whether by letting him sleep in their churches, community centres or pitching his tent on their lawns. Many times, this hospitality extends to inviting Ken to exchange his cold tent and meagre rations for a shower,family meal and a warm bed.

As the walk progresses, the authors fame extends to local news outlets and even national networks which in turn brings out supporters who give him a hero’s welcome upon his arrival in the small towns and communities along the XL route. With winter chasing him south, the path is fraught and long. The elemental forces make progress miserable and slow. Driving him into churches and barns or falling upon the hospitality of supporters. Cometh the hour cometh the man, and right on schedule he stumbles into Port Arthur, Texas where nervous security goons at the Valero refinery alert the local police to this alien humblebum who is doing weird stuff like taking photographs of the refinery! With elements of farce intruding on the occasion, Ken slips through the net and legs it across a bridge, stumbling over the intervening levee banks to finally sink his hardened tootsies into the cold waters of Sabine Lake....Over!

The end is nigh.
The mild mannered and gentle author might lack the bad ass elements of Edward Abbey but like Abbey his gift and the contribution he makes to the cause of environmentalism is through his words. Softly spoken perhaps but powerfully and convincingly expressed. Like the works of the aforementioned ‘Cactus Ed’, Ken Ilgunas’ Trespassing Across America successfully combines eco politics with sharp observations of the land and its people and skillfully brings it all together in a highly readable work which deserves a wide audience.

John Appleby:2016

Photos: Ken Ilgunas

Keystone XL Pipeline

Obama rejects Keystone XL

Alberta oil sands

On the 11th September, 1944, a search for two missing mountaineers was launched on Ben Nevis. The climbers in question were Brian Kellett, a cragsman of the highest calibre, and a woman climber of vast mountaineering experience called Nancy Forsyth. Miss Forsyth had come to Fort William to spend a weekend climbing holiday with Kellett. They stayed at the C.I.C. but in Coire Leis and nothing was heard of them until the following Tuesday when Miss Forsyth, a schoolteacher, failed to arrive for work at her school in Dumfries. Her relatives, naturally concerned, informed the police at Fort William who despatched Police Sergeant Boa and a colleague of Kellett's to investigate. This was before the formation of the established mountain rescue teams when police, local shepherds and farmers were often called upon to perform rescue work. On arrival at the but they found signs of occupation by the missing pair and items of personal gear, but were unable to determine the climbers' whereabouts. A major search was organised by the police the next day who were later joined by many experienced mountaineers from all over Scotland, who had read or heard of the incident which had been given wide coverage in the local and national press.

After a search lasting several days, two climbers, thought to be Nancy Forsyth and Brian Kellett were seen lying together at the foot of Cousin's Buttress, situated between the North-West face of Carn Dearg and Raeburn's Buttress. Eventually, a stretcher party led by J. H. B. Bell reached the spot and their worst fears were realised — the missing pair were both dead, having fallen at least 200 feet. It was a distressing and harrowing experience for Bell, for he knew the couple, having previously introduced them to each other. Despite an inquiry set up by the S.M.C., the cause of the tragedy was never established. It was presumed that they had finished a climb (probably Cousin's Buttress Ordinary, graded ‘Very difficult’) and were moving together above the main difficulties when the accident occurred. Most of the rope was coiled neatly across Miss Forsyth's shoulder with the remainder, 10 to 15 feet, tied to Kellett's waistline. What happened must remain a mystery.

Could a rock fall, or a loose hold, or a slip on the wet rock have been responsible? None of the rescuers felt inclined to prospect higher to check for any visible signs on the rock face, which in the circumstances, is hardly surprising. Kellett's tragic death severed an amazing climbing career — in only two short summers, from 1943 to 1944, he discovered more than forty new routes or variations, many done solo, and at least half of them at a severe grade or above. A glance through the Ben Nevis climbing guide gives an indication of Kellett's meteoric career and his insatiable appetite for prospecting new lines. His knowledge of the complex, precipitous north-face of Ben Nevis was unsurpassed, perhaps rivalled only by the Ben's other two well-known devotees, Dr. J. H. B. Bell and Graham MacPhee. His identification with the mountain had much the same quality as Herford's exploration on Scafell or Edwards's infatuation with the Three Cliffs in Llanberis Pass. He was in many ways a victim of the times — as a conscientious objector at the beginning of the second world war he spent some time in prison before volunteering for service with the Forestry Commission in Scotland — his first choice was Skye, but as there were no vacancies in that area, he agreed to go to Torfundy, near Fort William.

And yet, for all his important contribution to Scottish climbing, little is known about the man. He appears as a solitary, almost mystical figure on the historical tapestry of Britain's highest mountain. Brian Pinder Kellett was born at Weymouth, England on the 15th May,1914, he attended Kingwell Hall Prep. School near Bath before moving on to Bloxham Public School. He was described as an all-round athlete and represented his school in the first team at rugby and cricket. He used his powerful build to good purpose in the boxing ring and was a keen soccer and hockey player. Kellett had the reputation as an accomplished chess-player and was at one time chess-champion of Lancashire.

It was on Dartmoor Tors as a boy where he first cut his teeth at rock climbing, but it was not until his late twenties that he became a committed cragsman. After he qualified as an accountant,he did some forestry work in the Lake District where he ascended many of the classic routes, normally solo, and usually without a guide book. Although his mother and sister did not share his convictions as a conscientious objector (his father, a naval officer, had gone down with his ship, HMS Flirt, in 1916) they stood by him, believing that his views were absolutely genuine. These were traumatic days for Kellett and his resilience and moral fibre were put fully to the test. Mrs South, a Quaker, who helped conscientious objectors and who was instrumental in seeing his third appeal was successful, had this to say about him: "I had a deep respect for Brian . . . he was a brave man — his courage was there for all to see ... I can see him now challenging the might of the Court Martial . . . he would have been happier in the more liberal days of the 18th Century when straight-forwardness and moral courage were rated higher than brute force ."

Brian Kellett was not alone among climbers who were registered conscientious objectors — the pacifist views of Menlove Edwards are well known and John Jenkins, a leading British mountaineer, who was an engineer by profession, was compelled by the authorities to spend some of the war working as a miner at Ashington Colliery in Northumberland.

After his release from prison in 1942 Kellett was assigned to Torlundy Forestry Village, near Fort William, where he quickly settled into his duties, feeling no bitterness or resentment for the punitive measures imposed upon him. This is more than can be said for some of the other conscientious objectors at Torlundy at the time. His popularity among his colleagues is summed up by ex-fellow workmate, John Elder, who spent most of his working life at Torlundy: "Brian always gave one hundred per cent effort and one would think that he had been born to work upon the land; nothing was too much bother and his great strength was a tremendous asset. I do not recall seeing him training to keep his fitness — forestry work, regular cycling and mountaineering seemed to be enough. He was an excellent chess-player and I have seen him playing chess against his workmates and at the same time repairing his clothing.

He learned Gaelic from books, probably to understand the meaning of Scottish mountain names, which he could pronounce as if he had been born in the Highlands. I recollect he stayed in a bothy with twelve other workers mucking in with them quite easily. I feel sure roughing it in the mountains helped him in this respect. I was the person, described in newspaper reports, who went with Police Sergeant Boa to the C.I.C. but when Brian failed to report for work — as soon as we entered the but we had a feeling of foreboding, as though some-thing terrible had happened—for one thing the fire had not been kindled for several days."

On the 30th August, 1942, Kellett gave a preface as to his future activities by ascending, with J. A. Dunster, the unclimbed No. 2 Gulley of Ben Nevis. It was a desperate place, stacked with loose blocks, hanging scree and wet, mossy holds. It's understandable why previous attempts on the gully by Raeburn, and later, by MacPhee were aborted.Needless to say the climb still holds a full very-severe grade! It is rumoured among some of the older Scottish mountaineers that B.K. climbed hard and solo to prove he was not a coward, despite his refusal to join up — this opinion was certainly held by the highly respected J. H. B. Bell — but present research into the background and character of the man would seem not to support this theory; Kellett was an individual of strong will, who appeared to care little what people thought of him, and it's worth remembering that he climbed solo before the start of the war.

Arnot Russell, who climbed with Kellett on a number of occasions looks back across 36 years: "I consider the view that Brian climbed solo to prove he was not a coward to be nonsense — he enjoyed climbing and did not climb solo because he wanted to do so. We enjoyed his company as he did ours. He seemed to be lonely, although outwardly seemed self-assured and self contained. My experience with Brian showed that he was always a very stable and careful climber. We always roped up and moved singly on anything more than "cliff' standard. We respected him and admired the way he climbed. I remember well the way he used to say quite seriously, 'it would be rather hard,' when we pointed out some impossible looking overhanging route to him."

He first met Arnot Russell on the 9th June, 1943; earlier that day B.K. had made a solo reconnaissance of the upper reaches of a line to the right of Route 1 on Carn Dearg Buttress. It seemed feasible, so he called into the CIC but looking for a partner to belay him on the untried lower section. Russell, who was staying there with a group from the St. Andrews University Mountaineering Club, volunteered his services and after using the start to Route 1, they managed to negotiate the greasy slabs, which were the crux of the climb, and register only the second route on the crag, which they named logically enough — Route 2. Watching from the sidelines was a young climber called Donald McCall who recalls that day: "All I remember is a cold dull morning, with cloud not much above 3,500 feet. We were looking up at the Ben from the door of the but when this stocky character arrived in shorts, wearing thick-lensed glasses. He was looking for someone to join him on a new climb attempt. Russell was the only really competent rock-climber among us, so he went off with Kellett, while Ed Carrick and I climbed the Direct Route on the Douglas Boulder. From time to time we watched with awe, and not a little fright, as Kellett and Russell worked their way out,up and right from Route 1 and under the big overhang on green shiny slabs. They had abandoned nailed boots for stocking soles and picked up their boots again at the end by descending Route 1, itself a Severe."

Brian Kellett on Route II, Carn Dearg,1943: Photo Lorna Kellett

Among the proliferation of routes that he discovered on the Ben, the more out-standing ones include Kellett' s Climb on the North Wall of Carn Dearg, his 1944 Route (VS), on the South Trident Buttress, the Left Hand and Right Hand Route (both VS), on Minus Two Buttress and probably his most daring lead — Gardyloo Buttress (VS). His climb on Gardyloo Buttress was the climax of weeks of painstaking investigation and was a magnificent solo-lead on a problem of long standing. There had been attempts on the Buttress during the early forties by strong Scottish parties; the first in July, 1940, by Ogilvy and Piercy who made considerable progress, but were repulsed by rain and made their escape by abseiling into Gardyloo Gully, leaving behind them two rope slings and two karabiners. The following June saw Messrs. Scroggie, Ferguson and Ritchie, in stockinged feet, reach Ogilvy' s highest point before they erred on the side of caution and roped down leaving four pitons and one karabiner.

Kellett mentions finding this hardwear in his notes and also records that he experienced much difficulty on the crux — a 15 foot, exposed overhanging corner which took an hour to climb — the total time for the route was about 3 hours. "I had hoped to accompany him on several of his latest routes," wrote J. H. B. Bell, .. but bad weather and wet rocks made this impossible. It is only fair to say that Kellett' s climbing, for sheer daring, was often uncanny to watch . . . His account of the first ascent of Gardyloo Buttress, matter of fact as it appears at first reading, is enough to bring out a sweat on the brow and the palms of a reader who has seen the place and is aware of the previous unsuccessful attempts on the formidable and sinister cliff. He invited me to join him on a second ascent. It was a high compliment, but the onset of bad weather relieved me from facing a difficult decision." Kellett never did a second ascent — Dougal Haston claimed this fourteen years later. When not active on Ben Nevis, Kellett sometimes spent his leisure time walking on the Mamores or cycling to Glencoe, where the Buachaille Etive Mor was a great attraction.

His burning ambition to climb in the Isle of Skye was never realised — during the war years all land north of the Great Glen was out of bounds to visitors, and this included Skye. Before his tragic death Kellett was involved in three falls — this may have invited criticism, but it should be remembered that he spent literally hundreds of hard-climbing days during his short and concentrated mountaineering career, exploring severe and often untried rock in all weather conditions. He suffered his first recorded fall in January, 1943. He was high up in Glover's Chimney, climbing solo, when he slipped and shot down hundreds of feet, over the lower 150 foot ice pitch, to land safely in snow above Garadh na Ciste. Seven months later he fell in the short chimney on Route A on the North Wall of Carn Dearg — a loose chockstone is thought to have been the cause. Then there was a fall whilst attempting a new variation of Luscher's Route with J. H. B. Bell and Nancy Forsyth. Bell later described in his climbing log what happened:

"Kellett started off, Nancy belayed near foot of chimney. I was unroped as I was coiling up the 100 foot line which was no longer necessary. A rumble from above and I caught sight of B.K. flying downwards past me. At the same moment I felt a blow on the head, not sharp but dull, and my head began to flow with blood. Nancy shouted to me to grasp and try and stop the rope — it was of course, utterly impossible. The thing was running so fast and jerking about, then it stopped and Nancy was drawn up sharp against the belay in a strained position — then there was silence. The rope to Kellett was taut . . . then he shouted up. One had no time to think at all. Everything happened so quickly. To our enquiries he said he was unhurt but shaken a bit with hands numbed. He was hanging with just faint pressure on the rocks and no real handholds." After several minutes of devious rope engineering they managed to extricate Kellett from his precarious position.

He probably owed his life to Nancy Forsyth's prompt action in arresting his fall from which she suffered a severely lacerated hand. An incident of cruel irony when one considers future tragic events. The drama of the day was not yet over. On the way down Kellett, still badly shaken, slipped when a hold gave way and he fell about 5 feet, seriously injuring his left knee and damaging his left hand when it was struck by a falling stone. It was later diagnosed that he had a cracked patella and a broken finger. Kellett's refusal to be intimidated by excessively steep or overhanging rock is illustrated by his attempts to climb the fierce central mass of Carn Dearg Buttress. One such attempt on the 6th June, 1944 is described here by Robin Plackett: "Brian took us along to Carn Dearg Buttress to see whether any further progress could be made on a climb which he had already prospected.

The first part was a very steep wall at right angles to the main face, about 50 feet high. This finished on a sloping ledge with a large boulder, secure enough for the next stretch. Brian now wanted his jacket so my wife Carol who was in the party, went back for it to the hut. The climb offered a gangway and a crack with few holds. We disliked the start of the gangway but explored the crack above the ledge (finding a line loop) and found a higher traverse impossible. Carol returned to find us in retreat. I was lowered and Brian abseiled for the first time under Carol's tuition. We returned to the hut for sun and supper."

The line they tried is undoubtably the first pitch of Centurion, climbed twelve years later by Whillans and Downes. It is interesting to note the evidence of the old sling, suggesting that someone else had been up this pitch before Kellett. He later returned to Centurion Corner and effected a breakthrough rightwards across some slabs in an attempt to reach the prominent chimney feature. His effort failed, but the line was eventually forced in 1954 by Brown and Whillans, who used a direct start and named the climb — ‘Sassenach’. Kellett had designs on this line as early as the summer of 1943 and mentioned his intention to Bell who doubted its feasibility. After his unsuccessful foray he heeded Bell's advice and left the proposed route to another generation. It was Kellett who named Point Five, Minus One, Minus Two and Minus Three Gullies — he contemplated Point Five Gully as a summer climb, but never got round to it. Alex Small, who was secretary of the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland during these years, recalls some memories of Kellett:

"He was a reserved, undemonstrative fellow, who didn't enter the hut unless invited (unlike many nowadays) and was grateful for any hospitality we offered him. Powerfully built, we still remember his massive legs. At the time he was examining routes up the Douglas Boulder, walked up from Torlundy after his Forestry work was over, returned to the hut to note his routes in one of his famous notebooks, using his preferred system of Cartesian coordinates to mark the features and after his final cup of tea, murmured his thanks and disappeared into the dusk down the track.’

Kellett soon afterwards joined the J.M.C.S. which gave him ready access to the C.I.C. hut and occasionally, partners to climb with. The famous notebooks mentioned by Alex Small which were a model of accuracy and precision were published in total in the 1943/44 S.M.C. Journals and it is sad to relate that the latter publication also contained a short note recording Kellett's death; future climbing historians may look at his achievements and question why a worthwhile obituary was never printed. I think Kellett's climbing career was so fleeting and transitory that few mountaineers, if any, had a long enough acquaintance with him to feel qualified to write an appreciation of him. If that is so, then this tribute to him is long overdue! Alex Small probably puts it into perspective when he said: "His appearance and deeds caused little acclaim at the time; there were few climbers about to appreciate his exploits. His fame was very much muted and posthumous."

On the 11th September, 1944, Brian Kellett at the age of thirty, a confirmed atheist, was buried in the small cemetery at Glen Nevis, overlooked by the mountain that meant so much to him in his later life and which helped to crystallise his freedom of expression. Although his grave is now distinguished by a granite headstone to bear testimony to his passing, he left a more tangible proof of his vitality for life on the steep ramparts of the North-face of Ben Nevis.

Ken Smith:First published in Climber and Rambler July 1981

Derek Hersey:Photo Gary Thornhill

Intimacy with the planet keeps us wild, undomesticated, unwilling to submit to social conditioning. Lash.

As a self-professed outsider in the outside arena it may come as no surprise when I view this culture as absurdly obsessive.Yes, I am at odds. As a climber has it always been so? I guess so, to an extent, but those obsessive climbers that I remember were never taken seriously and mostly ridiculed. Top activists these days are creating awesome problems and their goals, achievements, breakfasts and hair styles reported with such serious liberal yawn –where is the scornful, difficult but untroubled nature not chocolate-boxed by the mass media? The channel is switched to celebs, politics, sport, celebs, politics, sport… Who ‘literally’ is tying the rope to their balls out there…? Who gets bummed by a BMC employee…? Who breaks his opponents leg in a fight…? Who abuses sponsorship, robs banks, attempts to drive a scooter up to Dinas Cromlech…? Who puts another top climber in a headlock until he goes blue…? Who puts kettles into cracks…? What climber has had the most road accidents on-route from Llanberis to Chamonix…? Answers to come!

I know this is gender biased, but women tend to be more sensible. These people cannot represent anything but themselves. They cannot hold down jobs! Their climbing was alive and not staged and in my view preserved the way of nature. When I see the gob-smacked-talented bold ‘n’ young, I cant help feeling like there has been a ‘cover-up’… they behave like scouts and girl guides collecting their efficiency badges from the ministry of good behavior at the BMC. The cover up conceals the energy that climbing is grounded in, the right to say ‘fuck off’ to insurance and a paid job.

Nick Bullock has lately said that the present day climbing world is no longer as replete with ‘characters’ as it once was. He blames this shallowness of the younger generation being spoon fed on climbing walls, sport and consumerism…

Of course there are many characters still out there in climbing, but hey ho, everyone can’t be Stevie Haston, ‘cos there aren’t enough six inch nails to bend and there would be no peace for any geezer. It seems crazy to say everyone used to be a character, but perhaps characters breed characters in the culture they find themselves in. Perhaps there were more people with mental health issues? That can’t be correct. But where are the insouciant Gary Gibsons, boldly claiming routes they never climbed? The more enthusiastic climbers lived their lives through climbing and operated more like computer geeks, and kept notes and guidebooks. I don’t remember their names! These geeks are now widespread and are ace, civilized, beta-gathering, hummus and halva eating folk on bouldering circuits, counting calories and cleaning a range of toothbrushes with Ecover products.

Back in the day, a young Geraldine Taylor was ‘mad for it’ a precursor model of the femme sportive, but widely seen as chic-eccentric. She was not subdued. Not so these days. They have multiplied and instead of help-support groups that take the piss, there are competitions and Pilates and a super range of clothing. Where is ‘dirty’ Derek Hershey with his plums hanging out…dead of course. Where is Neil ‘Noddy’ Molnar with a reefer high up soloing…dead of course. Where is Al ‘playboy’ Harris, speeding up Fachwen…dead of course. Where is ‘big’ Jimmy Jewell, hanging on holds all day…dead of course. And then there was my friend Paul Williams, a self-confessed obsessive with monstrous enthusiasm, that motivated many a climber including Ron Fawcett, Andy Pollitt and myself. If you ‘hung out’ with Paul you did epic new routes because he knew where they where, would take you there, hold your ropes and entertain you! Through obsession…dead of course.

Paul Williams: Photo Ian Smith
There were cleaner, more ‘sporty’ types, but the idea of a sport never entered the equation. Life was too funny, random, still a dirty business with side-stalls of anarchy and nonsense, when rock was more a guide to thought. The repression I feel in the climbing world is a manipulation of the human spirit, is corporate and in essence, religious. I am an artist, an outsider artist of course, and quite frankly I don’t give a flying fuck!

I know that anarchy doesn’t sell. And characters die. And that sport is seen as ‘clean’ and a cash crop goes without saying.

Whooooo, hang on, calm down, this article was never meant to be about personalities and sport, the synonymous duo. I was just using up a few leftover words from my last rant against sport. How vulnerable am I? I will now, I believe, succinctly tie in all of the above in relevance to the below. As above so below.

For those who frantically lose themselves searching for a hard-move, in fitness, adventure and sport I offer some alternative medicine… My article was supposed to start here… I flick the coin.

I open my door onto a street, and I am lost in awe at the safari before my senses. I have taken no twelve-hour flight to get here. I am not on holiday. No travel arrangements have been made. No fees paid. No apps or maps or guides are needed. My heartbeat is not monitored. No fitness necessary. No special clothes are needed. I am not chasing anything that improves my health or fitness. I am neither retreating or recoiling into myself nor escaping anything. I am not actively seeking anything. I am not self-observing. I am just being in a place where I live. I am. As I said, I am in awe at the world before me. I have only to step out and walk a short way for my senses to chatter away to each other and enable the unique imprint of place into my being. This is not ‘I could be anywhere’ state of mind, but specifically somewhere. This is not sitting back and looking at the panorama of life before me like a tourist brochure. Neither is it an examination of why I view the world as I do.

This is an active engagement with experience. This engagement creates a connection and one enters a vision. This vision already exists. It animates with soul, generates a voracious awakening to the pleasure of seeing, touching, feeling and vital inspiration and to strange creatures that do not scorn ceremonial life. Perhaps this is what Arne Naess calls ecosophy – planetary wisdom? It can seem that all else that evokes the nonsense of losing oneself in everyday tasks has been abandoned…

I am on ‘forensic’ safari from my house and it costs nothing but imagination…

Remain true to the earth – Nietzsche

Two meters out from my door and the heat of the sun hits me. I am on my knees in the lane facing a thin, sticky coating of tarmac that has melted, ground-up and bared with use by hot, rubber tyres to the coarse sand beneath. This is the material of the original lane, a piste, when donkeys did their stuff. This quartzy metamorphic rock is the substructure of my house, the foundations of which were cut and fashioned from it by craftsmen who knew its character, structure and strength. I know that five feet underneath my knees is a cold tunnel that connects to my cave in the basement. It is blocked half way but locals tell of a huge network of passages used to smuggle all kinds of contraband including people. I ponder the Retirada, the traumatic exodus of Republican Catalans escaping Franco’s persecution and regime…into the clutches of Vichy France…to concentration camps and a different death and to tunnels and walls within walls and families fighting within themselves and within their own walls a battle of allegiances, subterfuge and espionage.

I had recently been privy to a Lama, a spiritual healer, who had been commissioned to exorcise my friend’s house on the border with Spain. He detected the energy that my friend felt in her cave-atelier and told of what he ‘saw’. A terrified woman with three children was hiding there after crossing the border and escaping persecution. She was awaiting the ‘passeur’, a person paid to facilitate your passage from danger. He raped her and cut her throat in front of the children. The three children fled and were lost in the woods. He turned away from his internal screen to face us and said, ‘Perdu – lost’. The Lama did his stuff, said a prayer and we left.

Perillos work: John Redhead
I ponder the horror of the Lama’s psychic vision with an ironic smile as Maricka, my neighbour, starts her rendition of ‘musette en liberte’, on the accordion, behind the bars of what was once the village jail, screaming from her open window something about hell and her Mother…! Like the anthem of an alienated, wailing demiurge, the ‘regarde moi’ score resonates the rue with melancholy and incarcerated souls.

I move from the Gneissose-scar, pocked on the tarmac three meters to Placa Sant Antoni and sit down on a granite bench under the Horse Chestnut tree. St Anthony is the patron saint of lost people and finding things. He is noted for having a vision of the Christ’s child whilst reading a book. In a niche on Maricka’s house there is an odd statue of St Anthony holding the Christ’s child in one hand outstretched from Christ’s buttocks. The alarming figurative has replaced some meaningful symbolism for the Saint, as there is no book. I ponder the surreal world of Saints and visions, of Paul, John and Jerome et al. Is it not the case that these Saints enter the world of a vision when the ‘will’ decides to intercede into more than can be seen, ’what the fuck is all this man, all this shit that is of monstrous crazy chaos, this unseen world that is part of me and in me…must be God yeah’. The poverty of the desert fathers and the poverty of their desert souls absorb the poverty of a dead land, frantic for a fresh world matrix. It continues to saturate the minds of man with stupidity and a nature-rejecting abstract.

Under the Horse Chestnut tree I am with the treescape. Strangely, I have seen its down-there business as its finer, tangled roots dangle Pan-esque in the tunnel of my cave. I am left to feel and what I feel is that what I see, including my own body is the part that doesn’t exist. Of course there is more and you move to it in stillness. You move to it by recognizing a negative compulsion to the physical. It is an empathic connection of belonging, with no self-reflection.

‘Outer world and inner world are interdependent at every moment’ Ted Hughes

I also ponder ‘the miracle of the jealous husband’, St Tony’s finest hour, when a husband cuts the throat of his wife believing her to be an adulteress. He is mistaken but all is well after our hero in Placa de Sant Antoni, gives her the kiss of life. He cannot kiss his own life however for he dies of ergot poisoning, his skin looking like a mess of Guignaria leaf blotch that afflicts the Chestnut tree in autumn. My fingers are also blotched with cobalt, cadmium and black pastel from my sketch, waiting to assert itself on my return.

Maricka finishes her serenade with ‘la boite a musette’. A barking dog adds vigour to the drone. Bravo. Is her flamboyant ‘rapture’ any less meaningful than Tony’s visions, because they both ‘belong’ to this moment? Is one influenced by the divine-demonic and the other by mental illness? Is it just the culture that decides an experience is divine or pathological? I feel that neither is of knowing. I catch her eye, and the contact drifts on a whim. I realize she could be anywhere. Adversely I feel that the Catalans seem to ‘grow’ here, like plants, embedded in a pact with the land. They inhabit. In deep-ecology it is understood that this bond is essential to sanity.

So, wandering on in my mind, I realize that the tree is itself a droning musical instrument. Thousands of honeybees gather in the rich source of nectar and tits of all variety chomp up the insects. It is alive and in bliss with abundant life forms. I listen. Not so my neighbour who is defined by isolation, not realizing the music she offers is not of this world, but a victorious battle of her will to be. No matter. The sensory nature of the collective drones is a mystery of collected differences. The altruistic bees seem indifferent to the melody, seem indifferent to pollination and pathology as we know it, the conker and being busy… with the moment, eyes lost in the engine of honey-ecstasy.

The horse chestnut leaf is used for eczema, menstrual pain, coughs and joint pain, but not ‘St Anthony’s fire’, which is ergotism. As if to scoff ridicule at man and his diseases and personalities a black scorpion squares up to me at the base of the tree. Challenging. Pincers out, tail up, as if demanding an explanation. Only three possibilities come to mind – I am in a vital period of inspiration and you are part of it – I am in a metaphysical state and you are my friend – I am about to get stung. The latter wins as I shuffle away believing that it is the scorpion that is the poetic mouthpiece to some supernatural power.

The tree is a native of Turkey and its name in English may be from the fact that when the leaf stalks snap off they leave the indentation of an upside down horseshoe on the branch. Etymologically not so in France where it is called, ‘marronnier’. Each culture has its folklore and naming and the locals here tell of collecting the marrons to give to horses to alleviate coughs. I hear no one talk of or indeed play, marrons, the game. Too rough I guess!

When I first moved here, at noon every day, an old boy used to sit where I am sat. It is a cool place and welcoming. He propped his walking stick against the tree, the handle of which had been fashioned into a penis and painted red. He reached into a crack in the tree and pulled out a toothpick and proceeded to take off his shoes and flick the soil out of the tread of the soles. It was an obsession not a ritual. I engaged this happy man many times in strange conversation, thinking it good for my socializing and vocabulary, until I realized his French was utter gibberish. However, who knows what knowledge a madman imparts when words fail? Who cares about failing words when spoken by a happy soul? Perhaps the red penis was a clue?

The Eight-sided hydrangea tub sits opposite with an abundance of pink petals, symbolically noted for its heartfelt sincerity, grace and beauty. A small gecko emerges like a clockwork toy from the deep, cool interior to soak some sun, hard-wired and mindful of pleasure and intent, no doubt. No challenge.

My safari has taken me the grand distance of five meters so far.

Uncharted land…Terra Pericolosa, speak, why are you here?

‘To understand what it is to be part of the world and not an enemy of it’. Persig

On a previous ‘forensic’ in Liverpool I wrote – ‘I had always been interested in the family of idolatry, addiction, habits and neglect. Even though heavy words they float through all walks of life. They squeeze out from the squeaky-clean duty of attempted order and roll headlong from the leafy-ocean of suburbia, shopping for bric a brac, domicile to domicile, and wash up on the rocky-shoreline of inner-city streets where raw and naked chaos seems awakened. I feel this chaos… I am receptive…this abstract structure, this island of concrete, this heart… radiating and revealing some deep-ecological pulse as if the heart of the jungle’.

This jungle on my Placa is no different, just a little more contained, calmer and secretive. The bags of sardines or hash still move slowly over the border. The wary locals still check car number-plates. They know where all the mushrooms are. They wonder what the hell I do. They must read my mind. Through strobes of luminous green, I see the distant vapor trails from Ryanair jets en-route from Liverpool to Girona. Here, there, no matter. The village tree holds the distance. I face the granite wall by the font of 1888, and pick a few leaves of Pennywort (Venus’s Navel) for a little snack. Associated with lovemaking, it grows in profusion in the fissures along with its mates Toadflax and Herb Robert. I guess that these dark fissures contain all the sexy-life of the Cosmos, rooted in the Earth. It is a sensuous revelation.

‘The solid Earth but ever the sky’.

Liverpool
After five meters of moving ‘stillness’, I must return to my pastel sketch, ‘The moving of slimes and slops of birth and life to its end’.

To be continued.

John Redhead, May 2016

www.johnredhead.org

Oliver Balch’s ‘Under the Tump’- the tump in question being the mound in Hay on Wye, upon which sits a fortification-is a lyrical tour of that quiet land twixt England and Wales...The Marches. A pastoral ribbon of border country which straddles English Shropshire and Herefordshire to the East, and Welsh Powys and Monmouthshire to the west. Within this nebulous lost domain of Princes and Lords lies the former county of Radnorshire- formally the smallest and least populated county in Wales- and almost tipping out of Wales into England, at its very fringes is the market town of Hay on Wye and the neighbouring village of Clyro.

Today, Hay is feted as the world first book town. The Hay on Wye book festival began in the 1980‘s and continues to go from strength to strength, attracting international figures from President Clinton to Mario Vargas Llosa.(In fact,with remarkably good timing I discover that the festival actually begins today) The town's cerebral reputation beginning in the early 1960‘s when Richard Booth opened the first of Hay’s many book shops and sowed the literary seed which flowered into the Hay we know today.

However, The Hay Festival is but a small part of Oliver Balch’s work. Essentially, the author offers a socio/cultural investigation into areas’ evolution from a virtually unknown small market town and farming community up until the 1960‘s, into the rather upmarket bohemian idyll it has become today. A place where the past struggles to keep its identity and values against the increasing tide of wealthy incomers from the cities who apart from snapping up properties and thus pricing locals out of the market, bring with them a swaggering self confidence and an urban mindset which to the chagrin of the areas’s indigenous population,threatens to overwhelm the town’s quiet rural character.

One of the areas most famous residents,the curate and rural diarist Francis Kilvert whose roseate observations of the area and people written in the mid 19th century has never been out of print since it was first published by Jonathan Cape in the 1930‘s; and it is to Kilvert that Oliver Balch looks to to guide his journey through a land which is ‘Not quite England, not quite Wales’. Using Kilvert’s zealous thirst to explore both the land and its people, the author adopts a forensic approach to uncovering the real Hay and its environs. A search not made easy by virtue of the areas’ multi layered character.

Oliver Balch’s arrives in nearby Clyro via London and Buenos Aires with his family and immediately seeks to discover if he and his kin can truly belong to an area to which-apart from childhood holidays-he has no connection? With a dogged determination, he latches onto just about anyone who will tolerate his investigative presence. Given the highly detailed references and observations of the people he meets, I have an image of him whipping out a notebook every few minutes and saying..’So that was 1963 you married your second cousin then’? Whatever the author’s methods, it provides a highly readable and fascinating account which manages to filter in some Kilvertian prose to compliment to publisher’s advised ‘reportage style’ of writing.

Young farmers, old hippies, parish pump politicians, trendy young entrepreneurs,pub landlords, all get the OB shake down. Surprisingly, everyone he meets seems only too willing to lay their life bare and reveal their personal triumphs and tragedies. Some readers might find the author’s microscopic descriptions of insignificant details like a gaudy painting in a cafe or some ancient pork scratchings hanging a bar, rather OTT in the information stakes, but gradually,like a painting which takes shape with every brush stroke,it is these finite details which make Under the Tump so readable and evocative of the land and the people.

People like Rob and Layla who I believe featured in C4‘s Amazing Spaces programme presented by George Clarke. Rob and Layla are like many ‘off comers’ are fairly recent arrivals who in common with most of their New Age tribe are not as the media would have it, ‘benefit scroungers’, but hard working individuals who can and will turn their hand to anything to make ends meet. In this instance, the Amazing Spaces connection saw the couple convert a 1960‘s coach into a bijou accommodation for holiday makers. Then there’s Woko, the young farmer who exists in the old country and in old times. When you could walk through Hay and bump into Evans the farrier or old Ned from the Bwlch. These days you are more likely to bump into Will Self or Martin Amis!

Of course no book about Hay and its people would be complete without ‘The self styled ‘King of Hay’, the aforementioned Richard Booth who on April Fool’s Day in 1977 proclaimed Hay an independent kingdom with himself as King Richard and his horse as Prime Minister. The publicity gained world wide coverage including slots in The New York Times and El Pais.

Hay’s ‘monarch’ was actually born in the town and after inheriting his uncles estate, began to ship books back from America in containers to furnish his burgeoning book shop sited in the town’s old fire station. His original book shop is now owned by a rich American incomer-Elizabeth Haycock- who has poured a considerable amount of investment into refurbishing the outlet.

The author offers a surreal description of a open meeting with Booth holding court. An event where a common usurper threatened Hay’s independence by successfully mounting a referendum on Hay and the King’s status. The people of the town obviously content with their liege voted to maintain the status quo.

The Hay book festival arrives late on in the book in keeping with the author’s style, is more concerned with the logistical side of the festival and the ordinary people who make it work year after year rather than waffle on about celebrity writers and politicians. With an estimated half a million people visiting a town with a population under 2000 during the festival period then although its not quite Glastonbury then it’s still a huge logistical task for the mainly local organisers.

Like Francis Kilvert before him, in his Under the Tump, Oliver Balch has certainly brought his adopted homeland to life and gone a long way towards unravelling the rapidly changing character of Hay and the surrounding farms, hamlets and villages. His vivid descriptions of the lonely bald hills and jackdaw haunted ruins remain long in the memory. Certainly within the genre, Under the Tump offers itself as a fine example of how a community and the land they share can be vividly brought to life by a writer who is not backward in coming forward. Sympathetically coaxing his cast into the spotlight yet maintaining a healthy respect for all concerned. I’m sure it is the author’s personable approach which has unearthed a rich seam of social and cultural history in an area where a more remote and objective writer would have failed.

Author,Oliver Balch: Photo OB

For this writer, domiciled in the more rugged north of the country, it has certainly inspired me to visit this summer. Google Earth has been perused and a wild camping spot for my camper pencilled in. You could say, I intend to make Hay while the sun shines !

Under the Tump is published by and available from Faber and Faber

Oliver Balch website

Hay Festival

John Appleby:2016

There’s nothing quite like being on the sea at night in a wee boat,” said Graham. “Nothing lies ahead of us now except the Outer Hebrides. We should be there in another five hours.”

The trim little craft rising and falling in the oily swell was the Mysie, a 36-ft. long “Fifer” ketch with twin Perkins diesel engines which we had fuelled at Oban five hours earlier. Aboard we were three—Graham Tiso, the master; Brian Mahoney, the mate ; and myself, very much the passenger.

I am not a sailor, but a year ago when we went to Scalpay and made landings on the Shiants and Uist (you can read about the voyage here) I had surprised myself by enjoying it all. This time we had a more ambitious ploy to land on Barra Head on the Isle of Berneray and to explore the cliffs of Mingulay.

Seated in the stern, we looked with satisfaction on the dark headland of Ardnamurchan point behind us, while on the port bow the orange ball of a rising moon cast soup-plate reflections on the rippling water. In the west the sky still held a flush of pink, and around us shearwaters skimmed and guillemots scuttered out of our path.

The shipping forecast had spoken of mist in the Hebrides. It had come true by the time I bunked down, leaving the sailors to sort out the landfall. I had no doubt of their ability, and slept well. Above me, had I known it, they were having an anxious time trying to identify shapes in the mist and figure out a light that was flashing in the distance.

They were baffled, and for safety turned south with engines throttled back. I was awake now, and could detect the notes of concern in their voices as they tried to fix the position of another light. “We thought this was Castlebay but it never looked like this,” grinned Graham as I came to the wheel- house. What I saw was something which had the rough shape of a bay, dimmed by mist, and high above its right edge the searchlight beam of a lighthouse.

“It can only be Barra Mead, so how’s that for navigation when you’re trying to find Castlebay? We’re in luck!”

From the land I could hear a thrush singing as we dropped anchor in a tiny bay by the jetty on Berneray which is used for lighthouse supplies.

Graham and Brian were tired and ready for sleep. Nor was there any stirring until 10 a.m. when the galley got going for a ham and eggs breakfast, then into the dinghy to an island that looked green and inviting in simple plan, a high green ridge sloping to the sea with the ruins of houses and signs of former cultivation in an incipient hollow at mid-height. Incised above the landing, the distance to the lighthouse was marked, one and a quarter miles.

Canna Life...1930's
It was great to be on dry land again and walking in the sunshine under a great singing of skylarks, following the road to the lighthouse, but breaking off to climb the ridge and look down the other side. What a transition, where the grass ends as if with a knife-slice cleaving the island vertically, 600 feet to the breaking sea. The effect was heightened by a thin mist steaming up the ridges and buttresses of the dark crags.

Then, when the first shock had registered, you became aware of the birds whisking back and fore like bees round hives : puffins, their red legs out like rudders, razorbills whirling along in the updraughts, and settling down on airy ledges to perch and look out on the world. Fulmars glided at eye-level with us, and far below, above smooth overhangs polished black by the Atlantic rollers, kittiewakes bugled, mingling their neurotic chorus with the growing “Arr-nr-arr “ of hundreds of guillemots.

Outside of St Kilda I had never seen more puffins, and the razorbills ran them a close second. Two of the keepers were painting the outside top of the lighthouse when we got there. They were James Hunter from Stonehaven, the principal light- keeper, and Alan Chamberlain from Manchester, cheery men both who enjoy their job and are sorry that Barra Head is to go automatic, and that this could be the last season.

Joe Toner from Glasgow, the third keeper, was on cook duty and invited us for coffee.

“We do a month on the light here, and a month in Oban, so we have six months at Barra Head in the year. I like to see the birds. Sometimes we get ones that are strange to me.”

None of the keepers knew very much about the families who had crofted and fished here until 1931, when the island population had fallen to six. That remote population had hung on remarkably well, perhaps because of their neighbours manning the light and the little bit of extra service provided by visiting ships. Nowadays the main link is by helicopter, as crews are exchanged every month, but, weather permitting, the light keepers make a recreation trip to Castlebay by boat once a fortnight.

Pabbay

From Barra Head across the Sound of Berneray to Mingulay seemed a very short distance. I knew the view, having seen it in the opposite direction two years ago, but I had been frustrated then by lack of time to see all of Mingulay’s cliffs. Here was a chance now if Graham was prepared to take the boat in a clockwise circuit round Barra Head and up the west side of Mingulay.

Before doing so, however, we set out east from the lighthouse along the spine of the island to get an idea of its birds. Here is the list I made—buzzard, peregrine, meadow pipit, rock pipit, wren, wheatear, starling, songthrush, collared dove, twite, snipe, skvlark, raven, greater blackbacked gull, kittiwake, razorbill, puffin, guillemot, fulmar.

Back at the boat we had a snack, and I swallowed a couple of seasickness tablets, remembering the rough water I had seen on the American side of Barra Head. Never was any precaution more necessary, for the moment we became exposed to the Atlantic swell the boat began to emulate the Big Dipper. Brian shouted a warning as the boat cork-screwed at a steep angle sideways before diving into the rough and shooting up with a shuddering motion.

The rocks were all too near, contorted masses of grey gneiss, veined with pink and holed in places by the cannon-action of mighty seas. Atlantic seals playing in a boil of white water and crashing waves lifted my spirits with their supreme mastery of their element.

The lighthouse on Barra Head loomed above us at the head of the gully, and I remembered the head keeper telling us of the spray that is thrown up over 600 feet in a tumultuous sea.

I can’t say I felt any fear at that point. But I did feel it as we came into the heaving turmoil of lifting sea hurling itself white against the cliffs and churning back on us. Brian’s stomach had rebelled at the motion. His face was grey as he hung his head over the side, but my pills seemed to be doing their stuff. Graham’s enjoyment of the violent motion, and delight in the wonderfully textured Lewisean gneiss carved into holes and pinnacled into rock-stacks was reassuring. Privately I wondered if the engines of the boat were powerful enough to keep pushing at right angles to the power of the waves surging to the rocks.

Graham took my arm. “Last summer when I was here in the heatwave it was so calm that I sailed right behind the stack on Mingulay. It was marvellous. I landed on Pabbay. We’ll go and look at The Hoe —wonderful pink rock, and what must be the biggest overhang in Scotland.”

It was all he said it was, but I was glad when he did an about turn and we came into the marvellous calm of the sheltered eastern side of Pabbay. On this green side, with its deep bay, are the ruins of houses and signs of cultivation dating from the beginning of the century. The people left, I understand, when an island fishing boat and its crew failed to return.

There is not room here to write of our visits to Yatersay and Barra. I have to jump ahead now to the point where we sailed into the superb natural anchorage on the east side of Eriskay, now with only one engine working.

For me it was like coming home, since I have walked every corner of this rocky island blessed by two of the finest shell-sand bays in all the Hebrides.

“I love it,” said Brian, smiling the peat reek appreciatively and looking at the lazybeds of potatoes and wet places yellow with flowers. The road climbs gently over the Hanks of Ben Scrien to the settlement where most of the 200 of a population live facing South Uist.

How bright and well-kept the houses looked in their coats of fresh paint! Laughing children answered me in English when I tried out my Gaelic. It was their joke, for everybody uses Gaelic here as a first language. The island priest, Father McNeil, invited us in for coffee and expressed his concern that crofters who leave Eriskav are hanging on to their land when they should be giving it up to those who want to live and work in Eriskay.

“Let them keep the crofthouse as a holiday home. But the land is needed. We have up and coming young fishermen, and we’ll soon be able to crew two more boats. The four boats we have give a living to 24 families. But the young men must have land to build a house and grow potatoes—this is vital.”

I was pleased to hear that the Eriskay pony, which was threatened with extinction a few years ago, is now doing well, and that the island is likely to have a new shop, perhaps with a licence, if a couple can be found to manage it. As yet there is no hotel, but the priest would like to sec one as there is a demand for accommodation.

“We have a wonderful community spirit here,” he said. “Give them an excuse for a gathering and they’ll come.”

I imagine Eriskay is like what Mingulay used to be. We asked him if he knew what it was that drove the Mingulay people to up-sticks and abandon their island.

"It was tobacco' he said." Often they couldn't get it.And they hadn't the money to buy it in quantity'.

Tom Weir:The Scots Magazine:1977

I first perceived the fear barrier on my first VS climb — the Barbican on the Castle Rock of Triermain.Four of us,on separate ropes,went for it on a damp March day in 1975. Big black boots; a stiffish nylon rope; not much experience (on my part). The book's relentless phrases had shelved themselves in a dark layer of my brain: "exposed and sensational in the upper part"— I would rather not have known that. "Particularly for the last man"— I couldn't understand that, which made it the more unnerving. We huddled beside the ash tree above the seeping vegetable life of the lower pitches and stared at the corner which bent round into space. It was undercut and it looked holdless. Below there was nothing but the crowns of tall trees and the backs of flying wood-pigeons.

Pete led off round the corner, hands on invisible holds, toes on derisory edges, moving fluently. A few years after he was to help pat up an E4 on Kilnsey; today he was in a state that he later called "blind fear". One of the party, an experienced climber but years out of practice, leaned her head against the rock beside the ash with her eyes shut. When I followed Pete, it felt like treading a wire-thin line of rock stretched in mid-air. At the corner lay the fear barrier, a zone of menace, of impossibility. As I neared it, it shrank, became transparent, turned out to be impalpable. I rounded the corner and there it was again, part way along the seemingly impossible wall. As though in a dream, pulled by the magnet of sheer necessity (and pushed by the impossibility of going back), I kept fitting the hefty Vibrams to the little edges, advancing on the fear barrier — until it disappeared, and we both felt fully human again, tethered to the rusty but solid peg (Drasdo' s from the first ascent in 1951?), and beginning to glow with the realisation that the barrier could be nullified.

Jim Birkett in Langdale
But still it lurked,ready to materialise on any crag, and for me it still has the character of that great wall on Castle Rock. A character made of the bottomless drop below an overhang, the vacancy that yawns behind you as you climb only just in balance, the silent obdurate resistance of any big steep mass, of stone. There it was again on Gimmer, on the steep rib above and to the right of the chimney stance on Kipling but not at its crux (though I fell off that twice); and at the apex of the flake on the traverse of Haste Not, Birkett's most spectacular line in White Ghyll, where you cling on with strained forearms and frictioning toes, trying to drape a sling; and on the incredibly undercut crux a hundred metres up the VI — on the Punta della Disperazione above the Canali but in the Pala Dolomites, where I only made the fear barrier vanish by deciding in advance that I would aid along on a sling clipped into one of Renzo Timillero's solid wedges.

It is an invisible obstacle —the point where your arms and your nerve will buckle and fail — the divide where impossibility begins, where everything is too much, the steepness, the sheerness, the not yet-known — a kind of break in the world, a space-warp, where the laws favouring your survival will stop applying and pure gravity will take over.

You can best it — or should I say disprove it? or exorcise it? —only by pushing on into it and through it, as I did in those novice days of big black boots and nylon rope. In that same March, when the mist verged on drizzle, we went at White Ghyll Chimney, and on the thinnish crux where you leave the sheltering security of the corner and step out onto a wall which is all downward-sloping ribs and fitigery edges, I met the fear barrier when I wasn't expecting it, I felt suddenly club-footed, all friction seemed to cease, the rock turned blank and dark, the mental steps afforded by runners ran out and I perched there fearfully, face to face with the barrier, willing it to cease — it didn't — calling out excuses to the other two in the party — they said nothing . . . the barrier consists also of loneliness: you are on your own, as helplessly solitary as though you were hovering in mid air, trying to invent the glider,or evolve wings.

With help from equipment and from people, and with experience, the fear barrier does lose its power. That May we went back to White Ghyll Chimney, I in squashy pumps, and of course I swarmed across and up that wall, and as Chris finally joined me at the top, he said, "Loony tunesville! You failed on that six weeks ago — in proper footgear" (his quaint name for hulking Vibrams). Six weeks later again I made a hash of Kipling, feeling the pumps splurge and wobble on the smaller holds, and by the autumn as the rains came on I had graduated to PA's and my feet felt elegant as an okapi's, unerring as an orang' s. But the fear barrier hadn't lost its power, it had only moved, to a perhaps diminishing but still vast number of locations around the crags the world.

Perhaps it has lost some power in this respect, that I barely notice it when I'm seconding (which for me means on anything harder than 5a). If you fall as a second you can usually swing about airily, like some clumsy trapeze artiste, and the wild free arcing through mid-air helps to make up for the ignominy of failing to surmount the crag by your own powers — I used this compensation heavily when I failed to mantel up the crux of Kipling, tried too late to traverse right, my arms turned to candlewax and I took off on a pendule, facing outwards, Horse Crags, Pike of Blisco, Crinkle Crags, Bowfell all swimming past in a slow-motion arc — crunch as my right hip hits rock and the arc reverses itself, majestic, as exhilarating as flying, the best way to see the Lake District.

Even if there is the comfort of a rope above you, some of the usual fear symptoms still flicker. The sinking gut as the impossible move looms just beyond you, the inefficient scrabbling with fingerends that just aren't up to it. But all this is far less formidable than the barrier itself — that zone of pure ill being or unbeing where your imagination balks — across which it can't throw any Bailey-bridge of conceivable moves into which it implodes like matter into a black hole.

At times the fear barrier locks itself onto a piece of rock and stays there with all the illusory deadliness of the Bermuda Triangle. The only way to prove it doesn't exist is to fly through it and come out alive and well at the other side. For me it was locked for six years (until June 29, 1984) onto the overhung corner and rib on Castle Rock where Triermain Eliminate goes straight up and Harlot Face veers out onto the rib, then round and up it out of sight. The book promises "a good resting place", but you can't see it, and this invisibility helps the fear barrier to form out of the steepness all around. On the Eliminate, in 1978, I tried to follow Pete up the corner, got past the in-situ nut, and faced with more overhang and diminishing help from the crack in the joint before I could even reach the high step onto the doubtful perch on the downward-sloping block, the scale of the overhangs and the colossal outward shove of the great face overcame me — I had reached the fear barrier — it had continued to exert power invisibly, like negative magnetism, and I had to downclimb rapidly (to put it politely) and abseil off the ash-tree.

I hadn’t even tried the move and failed...pathetic! And this mental defeat is what potentiates the fear barrier like nothing else. In this case I’d made it spread and permeate the crux stride out of the corner onto the rib of The Harlot’s Face. Like a fool I let this move become a rite of passage. It was the great thing that I must do to prove my courage, among the thousands of other commitment-points that I might as well have built up into ‘The One’. On a day of cold rushing wind early in June 1983, after retreating off the Raven Traverse with Bill Peascod and Neil because we were too numb and shuddering to climb, Neil and I went over to the Castle for my first epic tilt at the barrier on The One. Seconding it would be worse than useless. The One must be led. I climbed up to the ledge much too quickly, putting on no runners, and belayed to the ash-tree with my guts feeling thin and quaky like watery porridge.

Neil settles himself down for the siege. I put on an original Moac, absurdly low down, and pull clumsily up the corner towards a blur or two of chalk. The crack takes a No. 6 hex, and as my forearms tire I eye the fateful step, the tiny abyss, one stride through air to fix my right foot on the side of the rib and then — the moment I make as if to move, the fear barrier rears —almost visible, almost palpable — a kind of tough formation of the air which my will and my imagination can't win through. No, not my imagination — I can conceive of the move all right: find the best lodgement for the left foot on the pockety wall — right hand onto the first small sweat-blackened spike on the rib — swing out — go for the almost juggy flake three feet up — transfer the left hand — but from what? It's feet away, clung on by its fingerends to a little saw-edged pocket — and if I can't bring it across double-quick to some sharp hold on the rib, or a jam in the corner-crack . . . The half-chances and fantasy-moves flick through almost subliminally, frames in a horror film. My faith in myself has now sucked out into the black hole, and I half-lower off the hex feeling witless and craven and defeated. Five or six minutes on the ledge, shaking out, analysing the moves to Neil — over-analysing them, letting the mental tension build far beyond the point of a useful surge.

Neil is phlegmatic, sceptical. He has a motto for this situation now: "You're your own worst enemy, Dave." He adds helpfully, -It's just one move." I now have a plan: climb higher up the corner; from there I can launch across to a point where the rib is less steep. It turns out that this takes me too high to use the black spike, to reach the juggy flake I would have to fly or something, and anyway at that height the corner impend's, demolishing my strength. I slither back down from nut to nut and stand on the ledge speechless with chagrin, fingertips numb, then starting to throb. Three more deranged efforts make no impression on the Harlot, or on the fear barrier, which remains in place. During the last one I find myself absurdly crouched ten feet up the corner, like a slug impaled on a cactus, craning rightwards, eyeing the gap and that taunting rib beyond it, urging my inner self to go for it, feeling my inner self quail as the fear barrier toughens into a thick glass presence against which my mind scrabbles and fizzes like a trapped bee.

Then I spent a year rescreening the moves. The barrier was never more precise: six inches out from the rib. At that point the exact grasping of the fingers must begin, the centre of gravity shift smoothly across, the feet pick the perfect friction points, the will remain intact. At the barrier the will may crumple like plastic in a fire, or it may hold and then the barrier is a nothing. I do the climb most weeks — in my head — and in a bad week six or seven times. Maybe I should do more on snow and ice, to reduce the pressure, since it hardens and thickens the fear barrier still more.

The Return Match Just after the anniversary of the epic siege we are up there again. A fine drizzle has made the Castle the obvious place to go. Neil has designs on Rigor Mortis, whose second pitch he fell off several times when he was 16. For me, of course, it has to be The One. "Here it comes at last, the great grey distinguished thing," as Henry James said on his death-bed, and no-one knew whether he meant death or the Order of Merit? Such banter makes me forget the fear barrier, for a minute or two. And then we're there again, Neil steady on the ledge, amused at me but helpful, me staring at the corner and running my eye across the void to the rib. Original Moac, move up, lean out, sketch a sally with the right foot through space, downclimb in good order, five minutes to let the fingertips recover, back up to put on the hex and take a last reconnaissance.

I lean way out, bridging to the utmost, get my right hand on the black spike — then the fear barrier repels my right foot, the lodgement for it under the rib is useless, a greenish slip of cracked rock, I change hands and reach for the juggy flake with my right but the barrier is still working, the flake top runs out, how can I use so poor a hold to haul my full weight up an angle beyond the vertical? Again I retreat, as deliberately as a technician winding back a film (after all, I've done it six or seven times). "This time," I tell Neil, "I'll go for it — no more waste of glycogen - if I fall, I fall." He puts up both thumbs and blows out lips and cheeks in his inimitable mime of jollying and confirming. And as I swing across this time, the barrier shatters and scatters around me. It almost takes me with it, I don't climb well — "I can't do this, Neil!" I remember squawking as my left fingers just clenched my weight inwards and my right just curled hard enough over the flake-top to power me up round into that resting-place I have been trying to visualise for six years — which has become for me the embodiment of whatever lies beyond the fear barrier. It's a flat ledge about the size of a dinnermat, and as I stand on it for minutes, matching little nuts to the crack above, I feel as ensconced in mid-air as a kestrel or a helicopter.

No doubt Jim Birkett, climbing the route without runners 35 years before, made those crux moves at the first attempt. "When I got my hands on something, the rest of me generally followed," was his sublime motto. The fear barrier will have been so much less hard and deep for him, and locked onto fewer places, although he clearly saw it one winter, climbing Engineer's Chimney on Gable (grade IV/V) in nailed boots with one long-shafted ice-axe, since Len Muscroft (his second also on Harlot Face) heard him give a short rasping cough as he moved across the hard wall on verglas: "When he did this I knew it was going to be desperate." (Bill Birkett, Lakeland's Greatest Pioneers, 1983, p. 122).

I now see that the image of a barrier which is there, as though solid, is not true enough. The fear barrier is a zone of nothing, where you cannot be. As you move up closer to it, it may enter into you —you become nothing, your strength is cancelled, weakness hollows out your arms, your feet can't be trusted, your brain ceases to screen clear images, your balance shakes out of true, your imagination can't conceive of a way beyond. But if the fear barrier fails to invade you, it cancels itself, and you remain yourself, strong, limber, and collected, in a fit state to savour the lovely jubilation that floods through you as you move on and up, unscathed.

David Craig:First published in Climber and Rambler May 1985

L to R; Paul Trower.Al Alvarez and Mo Anthoine: Photo G Band
Most of us city dwelling climbers lead split lives; five days a week in the office or factory, occasional weekends and holidays in the hills. Rarely can the two interests be merged; when the chance occurs it must be seized. One such opportunity arose last February 1985. It was the most prestigious oil industry dinner of the year, still some months before the oil price collapse. The UK's 212 million barrels per day of production was earning over £20 per barrel. Even while we ate, royalty and tax revenue was accruing to the Government at £1 million every 44 minutes. The Prime Minister had just delivered a stirring and congratulatory speech. In the Great Room of London's Grosvenor Hotel, eighteen hundred well fed guests unbuttoned their dinner jackets, lit up cigars and recirculated the port and brandy.

Conversation became completely relaxed. My host was the chairman of the company which operates the Paper and Claymore North Sea oil fields and their onshore pipeline and storage terminal at Flotta in the Orkneys. It was a prize-winning plant constructed with great care to minimise its impact on the environment. Learning that I had never yet visited it, he immediately invited me to do so. 'That must be quite close to the Old Man of Hoy', I volunteered. 'I've never been there either'. 'Then you must do them both', he said. And so the idea was born. I recalled a much earlier occasion in the Pen-y-Gwyrd Hotel below Snowdon. It was 1966 and in came the late Doctor Tom Patey, who, in between treating his patients at Ullapool, was famed for seeking out hard new routes on remote Scottish crags. He fanned out a sheaf of large photographs of an incredibly spectacular sandstone sea stack.

It stood like a stubby pencil on a granite plinth, vertical on all sides for 450ft, and separated from the equally sheer line of sea cliffs by a jumble of rocks just clear of the breaking waves. Rusty Baillie, Chris Bonington, and I have just made the first ascent', said Tom; 'there was one really hard pitch’ a third of the way up the East face; a thin traverse to the base of this long vertical crack which Rusty led using several slings and wooden wedges where it overhung: I've come to show the pictures to Joe Brown. What a TV spectacular it would make'. Tom's words were right. Both in 1967 and more recently in 1984 live TV broadcasts of the ascent by several different routes had fascinated and gripped millions of viewers. Climbing standards had also shot up in the intervening period, not only due to sheer fitness and intensive training but helped enormously by the invention and development of modern safety gear: the whole range of 'nuts' and 'Friends', and sticky soles.

It meant that climbers of my age who had still kept reasonably fit were uniquely still able to lead routes as hard as they were doing in their twenties, even though these fall far short of the more desperate present day routes. It is a rare privilege accorded to our climbing generation which will probably never occur again.

Having accepted my host's generous invitation, I soon began to have misgivings. I could manage to fly up to Flotta but was less sure about the Old Man. After years of festering in the Tropics, I was no longer leading hard routes and would need to assemble a strong party to get me up. I contacted two equally mature friends: Dick Sykes, who had recently introduced me to ski touring and was still rock climbing well; he had celebrated his fiftieth birthday by leading Cenotaph Corner, and Al Alvarez, poet, poker player and author of several books including a recent one `Offshore; the story of North Sea oil. Both were enthusiastic but we needed younger blood. Al suggested Mo Antoine with whom he had climbed in the Dolomites. Mo ran a small company, Snowdon Mouldings, making and selling climbing equipment but had a profitable sideline as a 'safety officer' to the cameramen in stunt films requiring climbing skills.

He was currently involved in the shooting of 'The Highlander' starring Sean Connery. More important he had assisted in the TV programmes of the Old Man, and had done the climb. He suggested we should have at least one more strong climber. I enrolled the youngster of the party, Peter Evans, who I had last seen wandering off to try Suicide Wall alone with a fixed top rope. He was the son of Sir Charles Evans with whom I had climbed Everest and Kangchenjunga 30 years ago.

It was not until the end of the summer — Friday, September 13th, to be exact — that we could fix a mutually convenient date. The weather then would be less reliable but it would give us veteran pen pushers the summer to improve our fitness and finger strength. Dick and I climbed a few days together on the seacliffs of Cornwall and Pembroke. Al rehearsed his favourite routes at Harrisons Rocks near Tunbridge Wells, and I practised on a rough brick wall at home. Mo returned from filming 'The Mission' in the Argentine. Over the phone he said What if the weather's really poor? We, need a hard man at the sharp end who can get up in the rain, if necessary. With six in the party we can fix the Old Man with one long rope from top to bottom'. He produced his secret weapon, Paul Trower, a plumbing and heating engineer, who like many top climbers had chosen to live in the heart of the Welsh mountains at Llanberis. With a permanent stubble and single earring he added not only strength but a slightly piratical image to our party.

Surprisingly, we all arrived in time at the southside of Heathrow airport on Friday 13th, for the specially chartered flight to Orkney. We were joined by Alex Blake-Milton, Occidental's public affairs manager who was adept at handling unusual assignments with his customary good humour. Expecting some spectacular moments, he had I commissioned a professional I photographer, Chris Mikami, to come along with us. I began to worry that with all our climbing ropes and equipment our increasingly large party would no longer be able to fit into the compact HS-125 executive jet which was to whisk us up to Kirkwall.

Happy wanderer: Author George Band
It was drizzling on Saturday morning as we boarded the ferry for Hoy. The weather forecast promised sunshine and showers with even a little hail and S.W. winds of 25-30 knots gusting to 40 knots later in the day. We were rather subdued about our chances; but with most of the climb on the East Face we ought to be sheltered from the wind. It's nearly an hour's walk over the moorland from the hamlet of Rackwick towards the Old Man. Halfway there, the summit appears 50ft above the level heather. Only as one teetered at the cliff edge and peered over did the immensity of the 450ft pinnacle appal one. Powerful gusts blew in from the sea and angry waves surged around its foot. We changed into our climbing footwear and waist harnesses and, shouldering one or two ropes each, scrambled warily down the steep and soggy grass slopes and scree, to the base of the pinnacle. Alex, who had already muddied his fine hand-stitched brogues, wisely stopped halfway.

We planned that Paul should lead the climb; Mo going second would then remove surplus gear, Next the three veterans with 167 years between us: Al, myself and Dick: all of us doubly protected on the tricky traverse by rope ahead and behind. Finally, Peter would patiently bring up the rear. The first pitch of 70ft led to a convenient ledge at the top of a buttress on the South East corner. From there one descended a few feet onto the slightly overhanging East Face where an irregular ledge, but an acute absence of handholds, enabled one to traverse gingerly across to the foot of the vertical crack. Paul swarmed up confidently and was soon out of sight over the overhangs, the rest of us silently hoping to make it look as easy but knowing that it would be a lonely struggle. It was my turn to climb up to the ledge at the top of the first pitch, where the wind still buffeted unless one could sit right back in the corner.

On the second pitch Mo had left a sling dangling as an extra foothold but Al didn't need it and crack widened above until one was straddled inside as in a chimney. Above, it was blocked by a roof, but the rope snaked up through a diminishing slit on to the outer wall which overhung. I could hardly believe that was the only way. Fortunately for me, previous parties had left slings or wooden wedges in place here and there and I had no scruples about using them for extra handholds to conserve my strength. Leaning right out on the arms over the void, one had to commit and lever upwards on the right foot to gain an inch wide ledge for the left toe at the extreme point of reach. Comfortingly, the rope eased tight to reassure me after the move. The crack continued up a vertical corner with the natural jointing of the sandstone providing occasional horizontal creases giving rounded handholds and adequate bridging for the feet.There was no point in dallying and I soon thankfully joined Al — my guardian angel — crouched in a niche amid coils of rope. We had climbed the crux. Two more pitches followed at a distinctly easier standard continuing upwards but easing to the right in a depression. The ledges became wider and more frequent but the rock was also more suspect, slippery with sand grains, or coated with a slimy green lichen. Finally a vertical 50ft corner led to the top.

We waited for what seemed an age as the rope eased out foot by foot and then stopped. We shivered to keep warm and watched the passage of the heavy clouds breaking and reforming, infused by shafts of sunlight. With the wind distorting our voices, communication round the corner was difficult and Chris, in between taking photographs from the opposite slope, helped to relay our requests to pull in the rope.

In the back was a crack with daylight filtering through here and there as the summit block almost became split into two fingers.The wind howled through the gaps and made us realise how lucky we had been sheltered on the East face. We were also largely protected from sheets of rain enveloping the mainland cliffs and a splatter of hail which now suddenly surprised us. It made us keen to finish as quickly as possible. We had been slow; there as no question of lingering as a group on the summit. Paul and Mo were already descending past us, abseiling down and busy fixing further doubled ropes below. Al brought me up to just below the summit where he was squeezed in the corner sheltering from the wind.

I climbed the last few feet and the blast hit me as I raised my head above the parapet. It was four minutes to four. I stood bracing myself momentarily on the summit in case Chris was taking pictures from the opposite clifftop but I could only see a dim figure running for shelter. Peter now led Dick up the crack as Al and I prepared to descend. Al was soon out of sight, and at the third abseil I began to feel very lonely. How was I to know that the rope below ended at a convenient ledge? One might end hanging like a spider over space or simply slide accidentally off the end.

To avoid this at the overhanging second pitch it was essential to leave a fixed rope on the way up so that the first person descending could haul himself back in to the cliff at the beginning of the traverse and then tie in the end of the abseil rope for the others. When it was Al's turn to haul himself in he had an anxious moment finding himself slipping precariously upside down out of his harness which had become too loose. Dick and Peter had the tedious task of retrieving and coiling the numerous abseil ropes. Finally Peter was halfway down the last abseil laden with three coils of rope over his shoulders. A sudden extra strong gust of wind blew him sideways and the twanging of the taut abseil rope flipped a loose block of rock from above on to his head. Fortunately his climbing helmet protected him. We all breathed a sigh of relief when he joined us at the bottom.
A couple of hours later, tensions released, we were laughing and joking and downing our first pints at the bar of the Ferry Inn, Stromness.

Chris Bonington's 80th birthday ascent of TOMOH

George Band: First published in High-May 1987.

It is all too easy in these days of Crags, Hard Rock, Mountain and Climbing to assume that the state of mountaineering photography has never been better. The recent entries of still photos for the Kendal Film Festival displayed a breadth of ability and enthusiasm which would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Fed by inspirational books and magazines, and armed with the excellent new cameras that have become cheaply available in the last few years, climbers can, and are, taking photographs of their activities that are infinitely superior to those of a decade earlier.

The broad plateau of competence in this field is doubtless due to a number of factors. Apart from those already mentioned, one could also note the increasing demand for good pictures for magazines, books and adverts. Moreover, the increased expedition activity with its attendant sponsorship and book and lecture possibilities has also encouraged climbers to produce better results. Thus in all these fields—action photos, alpine views and expedition narratives—the state of the photographic art in mountaineering is in good shape and we can feel confident that this can only improve. It is in an altogether different field that I fear we are in danger of neglecting; for the amateur, the impromptu snapshot, or for the keener photographer, the telling observational photo that illustrates the world of the climber in a more human way.

Original Caption ' Example of the work of Jed Storah,a young photographer who shows particular talent in capturing the unusual in climbing situations: Image- Extra runners being thrown up to Gabrial Regan on 'The Swan' Roaches.

Recent lectures and illustrated articles have left me bored, despite excellent photographic material, by the inhumanity of it all; an endless procession of bronzed athletes caught in mind-boggling situations doing stupefying moves on routes of tediously repetitive excellence and in permanently magnificent weather. Yet we learn nothing of them as people, nothing of their epics and tribulations, nothing of their lifestyles.

These days people never fail, use camps merely for a few hours sleep, only climb in the sun, never fall out with one another, never lose the route, never get overtaken by storm, never injure themselves, never wobble and never get frightened. The only preoccupation is increasing ones fitness for the next very clinical, very physical confrontation with the latest super-route. The scene has become ever so slightly boring in its technical brilliance. Characters and events have been suppressed by an endless procession of technical successes.

Somehow the photography has begun to reflect this too—we risk being bored by photographs which a few years ago would have had us gasping with amazement for weeks after their publication. At this point I begin to ask myself whether it is me. Whether after half a lifetime of climbing and climbing photography I have seen it all and become too familiar with images and situations that still impress younger climbers. I think not however. The declining attendances at lectures, the increasing tedium of climbing writing, the growing uniformity of photographic features in magazines—all tend to support my basic complaint. But if this article is about photography, what value is there in digressing into a personal diatribe about the decaying fibre of the sport? Namely this: By their efforts, photographers can direct climbers' attentions to new interests in the sport.

In the past I have quite cynically encouraged activity on certain crags or in certain climbing areas by publishing some good photos. Usually the cliffs badly needed traffic to establish newly discovered routes— Lundy is a good example. If photographers were to begin to concentrate on different aspects the personalities involved- the campsite life, the extra-mural adventures, peripheral activities like sea level girdling, club dinners, booze ups and the like- editors, confronted by rich new stocks of interesting pictures would soon respond.

It should therefore be possible to encourage in visual terms a move away from the more soulless attitudes to the sport. Of course not everyone is taking pictures for magazines, books and lectures. Many are shooting for personal pleasure and record. In many ways using a camera as a personal diary is its most valuable function. But I suspect the ordinary fun photographer, influenced by the magazines and the possession of better equipment, has begun to elevate his ambitions.

I can imagine countless dusty cupboard-fulls of slide boxes full of tedious action sequences on ordinary climbs, and half-baked landscapes imitating some vaguely remembered painter or photographer. Such "amateurs" (and I use the word hesitatingly for it is they who are truly in touch with the real roots of the sport) would be far better occupied in following the traditional amateur pursuit of the snapshot of the sport, the personalities involved, the campsite life, the extra-mural adventures, peripheral activities like sea level girdling, club dinners, booze ups and the like, editors, confronted by rich new stocks of interesting pictures would soon respond.

It should therefore be possible to encourage in visual terms a move away from the more soulless attitudes to the sport. Of course not everyone is taking pictures for magazines, books and lectures. Many are shooting for personal pleasure and record. In many ways using a camera as a personal diary is its most valuable function. But I suspect the ordinary fun photographer, influenced by the magazines and the possession of better equipment, has begun to elevate his ambitions.

While searching through the unpretentious photo collections of some of our folk hero climbers, I have been constantly impressed by the historical value of pictures that were originally conceived as mere snapshots. John Cunningham's superb picture of the Creag Dhu at Jacksonville (in Games Climbers Play) is one memorable image that comes to mind, and another is Geoffrey Bartrum's lyrical portrait snapshot of Menlove Edwards at the foot of the Milestone Buttress (opposite page 87 in Samson, or Mountain 18). I tore my hair when The Black Cliff was published because of the poor reproduction of the photographs.

Yet people didn't seem to mind and still don't. They valued a certain sense of period, a realness in the pictures that a slicker book might have destroyed. Of course, by their nature snapshots cannot be achieved by careful professional planning. They are photographic records of fleeting moments, sometimes technically awful (early pictures in The Black Cliff for example), sometimes approaching perfection such as the work of the professional snapshots hunters— photo-journalists like Cartier Bresson or Donald McCullin.

I suppose I am saying that in pursuing the fickle goal of sports and landscape photography in mountaineering, we have sadly neglected the photo-journalistic side. In the past this was naively achieved by unpretentious wielders of Brownie Box cameras. Today we need to consciously seek such pictures so that our period can be faithfully reflected by more than a catalogue of athletic action shots. Finally I would like to say a word in defence of the photo album. I have always kept one, not for my best professional work, but for pictures that are, in effect, personal diary entries. Looking back at ones first Alpine season or ones early trips to Wales, remembering half-forgotten friends, rekindling nostalgic memories, is always entertaining.

From the same era: John Cleare's classic 'Rock Climbers in Action in Snowdonia' cover shot.Photo-John Cleare Mountain Picture Library.

As the years go by such collections gain in historical and retrospective value. Photo albums are difficult to keep in these days of the colour slide, but I advise anyone who is taking pictures solely for personal pleasure to forget the colour slide and opt for the black and white or colour snapshot. By careful selection and notation a photo album of real value can be assembled. Trade postcards can always be used to illustrate the mountains, huts or places one has visited, but the really valuable contribution that the photographer can make to himself and to posterity is to try and make a really good record of the nature of his activities and his friends. Therein lies the true enjoyment and value from the cameras we all lug around these days.

Ken Wilson:First published in Crags Dec/Jan 1981

Ken Wilson: Photo John Cleare-Mountain Picture Library

‘It’s an old Ken Wilson maxim, a picture is worth a thousand words, so snap away, snap away, snap away!’

(From a song by the author)

Not many sports can have spawned a character like Ken Wilson. A photographer and publisher of outstanding talent with an unequalled track record in producing high quality work, but a climber who is always at the centre of controversy.

On a book shelf in my home is a full set of Mountain magazines (at least there was until I lent out a couple of none returned copies), and just a quick review of these illustrate what Wizz is about. Opinionated, hard hitting, tight editing, first class graphics and photography, with in depth interviews, and no dodging of the issues .As Tom Patey observed, ‘Mountain was the magazine that all climbers were seething about!’

Ken took over the old house magazine Mountaincraft of the Mountaineering Association in 1968, and turned it into a highly respected, bimonthly review that was widely acknowledged as the number one mountaineering magazine in the UK.

My own first meeting with Wizz was when I gave a lecture, in the winter of 1964/5 on the Gauri Sankar expedition, at the Westminster Hall in London. After which the Chairman, Raymond Japhet invited questions. Enter Wizz, and he subjected me to a barrage of questions from the back of the hall; ‘Why had we failed to reach our summit? Why were we so badly funded? Why had we needed to drive overland etc?’ From the stage, this young guy with dark hair, and of medium height, a loud strident voice and flashing eyes and teeth seemed to me to be some new kind of nutter. I had never then been subjected to such a cross- examination and Raymond who could have doubled for Mr Magoo, was too kind and polite to close him down. We simply ran out of time, the caretaker threatening to put out the lights, and so we continued with a shouting match in the pub.

My next meeting with Ken was to be even more dramatic, and it occurred during that summer. I was climbing on Cloggy with Harry ‘The Kid’ Smith and we were attempting an early repeat of Taurus on the Pinnacle when there was the sound of a huge rock fall from the West Buttress. A guy came rushing to the foot of the East Buttress to shout up that there had been an accident on the Great Slab and could we go to the aid of the stricken climbers.

Harry and I descended and rushed over to the West Buttress, where we could see a team at the bottom of the 40 feet Corner who were obviously in distress. Smith shot up a full rope length, without placing any protection and I joined him and then led through to reach the injured party. On meeting them I was surprised to find two fellow Rock and Ice members, Ray Greenall and Don Roscoe tending an unconscious Steve Glass, lying at the base of the Corner. Steve like the other two was then an instructor at Plas y Brenin. Above our heads was another party, and the second on a top rope held by his leader, was shouting down excitedly.

‘Crikey’ I realised it was Wizz. It transpired that Ken following Graham Gilbert, in order to avoid the crowded 40 feet Corner had decided to climb up the wall out to the right, which is actually an alternative in the guidebook description of the West Buttress Girdle, the climb they were following. Wizz had mantled onto a large basalt block, which then collapsed under him, and it had fallen away raking a large portion of the cliff. It was a miracle that only Steve had been hit and by the time Harry joined me he was regaining consciousness, but was obviously injured.

Although it must have taken quite some time, eventually a rescue party arrived with a stretcher and we pulled it up, set up some belays, then between us we lowered Steve down the cliff. He was then carried off to Bangor Royal, and happily he made a complete recovery from this accident.

Ken was born in Birmingham in 1941, and originally began to train as an architect but found he was better suited to Photography, and after following a three-year course in that subject at the Birmingham College of Art, he fetched up in London working as an Architectural Photographer. Anyone who studies Ken’s photographs, particularly of crags will note these influences in his work. And it was whilst he was engaged in this arena that he took the bold step to set up Mountain Magazine. Unless you were active in that era, it is hard now to understand the impact this organ then had on British climbing, and to a lesser extent on similar activities in the USA, for Ken using his contact with American climbers, particularly Royal Robbins built up a large circulation base there.

Initially Mountain was on a knife-edge financially and Wilson took a serious personal risk, giving up a safe position to take over Mountaincraft. He produced only one issue under that title, dedicated to developments in Patagonia, which to publish he had to double the cover price to meet his costs, but it worked and at this his first attempt at editing the issue sold out. He then launched Mountain and for the next decade he lived, ate and slept the magazine for 24 hours a day establishing its reputation as the outstanding British climbing magazine.

By the time I joined the BMC, as its first ever professional officer at the end of 1971, Ken had also established a reputation as a climbing politician, referred to rather impolitely on occasion as ‘The London Lip’ (shades of Cassius Clay?) And I immediately began to find out why, for he seemed to spend a large proportion of his time ‘phoning people at home and abroad, discussing what he saw as the key climbing issue of the day. Trying to cajole and persuade the listener around to his point of view, myself included. But he was always good value and an important sounding board, and so he was invited to take part in the first BMC Future Policy Exercise in 1973/4 under Alan Blackshaw’s chairmanship. And as a matter of historic record, Wizz is the only committee member to have taken part in all three such exercises that have taken place over the last 30 years.

This in retrospect was the initiative that set the Council on its modernisation phase, and when the BMC moved from London, it was Ken who because of a contact with a group of Manchester University climbers, suggested we locate ourselves in the Precinct Centre of that body. Tiring of London and wishing to move himself, a few years later Ken transferred his publishing activities to the north, first basing himself in Altrincham, then Macclesfield where he is still living.

Being a realist he realised he could not edit and publish Mountain magazine for ever and so in 1978 he sold out to a group based in Sheffield, headed by Tim Lewis, his wife Pat and Paul Nunn.

Wizz then set up the first of his book publishing enterprises with Ken Vickers as his partner, and this new imprint, Diadem, quickly made its mark. He had already edited The Black Cliff (1971 jointly with Pete Crew and Jack Soper), Hard Rock (1975) and Classic Rock (1978) whilst working with other mainstream publishers, but now he took on the whole of the publishing process for himself. In quick succession he produced further titles in the ‘Classic’ format: Cold Climbs, Extreme Rock and Classic Walks. But there were also some other groundbreaking titles such as, The Games Climber’s Play, Mirrors in the Cliffs and Irvine Butterfield’s ‘The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland’. This latter being referred to as the bible of the native Peak bagger, and several reissues of out of print classics and omnibus editions of such as Shipton’s and Tilman’s classic books.

There is a long tradition of national publishers having an interest in producing mountaineering books, although this seems to depend on who is running a company at any particular time. It was Longman’s who sent Edward Whymper, a young wood block engraver to the Alps for the first time in order to prepare a series of Alpine sketches for them. Another Company with a long history of publishing climbing books was Hodder and Stoughton, and in 1989, aware of a dynamic presence in this field, they made a bid for and took over Diadem keeping Ken as the Managing Editor. Initially this worked well with two outstanding coffee table picture books being produced, Chris Bonington ‘Mountaineer’ and Doug Scott ‘Himalayan Climber’, both of which were best sellers. But then with the onward march of globalisation, and the swallowing up of smaller fish by bigger ones, Hodder’s was taken over by Headline, and Diadem was decided by them to be surplus to requirements. And so Ken struck out on his own and formed a new publishing company in 1993,called ‘Baton Wicks’

This has continued where Diadem left off, in 1994 Dermot Somers’ ‘At the Rising of the Moon’ and in 1997 Paul Pritchard’s ‘Deep Play’ were both Boardman/Tasker Literature Prize, winners. In 2002 W.H.Murray’s autobiography, ‘The evidence of things not seen’ won the Grand Jury Prize at Banff. Ken’s latest project is a complete re-vamp of Classic Rock with new photographs and up to date graphics. This will be something like his 60th publication!

When Wizz moved north to live in Altrincham he was soon drawn in to attending Tuesday night climbing meets of the All Stars. This group formed from Manchester/Peak based climbers and included such as Martin Boysen, Trevor Jones, Dave Pearce, Malcolm Howells, Chris Bonington, Mark Vallance etc. Apart from Boysen, Howells and Pearce they were more alpinists than top rock jocks, but when they zoned in on a crag on the appointed mid-week evening, they were good value for an exciting evening. Ken fitted in well as the group’s publicist and a journeyman climber.

On several occasions the All Stars visited our local West Yorkshire outcrops. And sometimes they experienced difficulties. The first indication we Tykes had that they would visit was a warning phone call from Wizz. On one occasion I met them at Almscliff and was invited by Ken to be his local expert. I pointed Wilson and a youthful partner at the Traditional Climb (VS), and the kid was sent forth to lead this. He managed about ten feet of ascent, then winged in a large Hex into the crack, the next moment he was pulling on this, and then gasping he persuaded his second to first hold his weight then to lower him back down to the ground.

Ken whispered to me, ‘I can’t understand it, he led Slanting Slab on Cloggy at the weekend’. ‘Maybe he is still tired out from that effort?’ I suggested. Snorting like a bull Wizz pulled the rope through and then set off to lead the route himself. It was a case from thereon of hands, knees and bumps a daisy, but using the friction from off his moleskin breeches and Helly Polar jacket to the full he wobbled his way to the top of the route. ‘Bloody fantastic’, ‘Frankland (who made the first ascent circa 1920) must have been a great climber’ ‘Incredible jams’ etc, was then shouted out at full volume around the Crag.

You always know when Ken is on a crag and he is always up front with his comments. Instance his turning up at Almscliff on another occasion and seeing a young climber soloing such routes as The Wall of Horrors and Western Front shouted up at him, ‘Oy…… are you that guy Ron Fawcett?’ ‘Am I climbing that bloody bad?’ was the laconic reply from one Mike Hamill, who at that date could fairly have been seen as a rival to fellow local boy Ron.

On other West Yorkshire visits members of the All Stars were to find our climbs even more unforgiving. On one occasion at Caley Crags they were falling like the Autumnal leaves, and the result was a dislocated shoulder and a sprained ankle and on another occasion a badly fractured leg at Greetland Quarry. Mike Browell who unfortunately was the victim on that occasion has written that these meets were testosterone fuelled, solo, fests!

One of my own keenest memories of Wizz was when he and I were the BMC representatives on the Plas y Brenin Management Committee, and we met to appoint a new Director of the Centre. Ken a great devotee of the novels of C P Snow loves the cut and thrust of such gatherings, and thus it was that he earned the sobriquet of ‘The BMC’s tame rottweiler’.

In a committee meeting he is a tireless debater, and a handful for any Chairman to deal with. However on that occasion, Jack Longland who had been in the Chair for a very long day, when I apologised if in our enthusiasm to get our candidate, John Barry, into position, Wizz had overplayed our hand, responded with an ‘Oh no!’ ‘ Ken is actually a real sweetie!’

Without reference to me Ken challenged two young hot shots of the Welsh scene at that time to a ‘race’ up Dinas Mot as soon as the meeting had finished. And when we arrived at the base of the crag they were waiting. It was agreed that Billy Wayman and Nigel Shepherd would climb up West Rib (HVS), whilst Ken and I would tackle Western Slabs (VS). We set off climbing when Wizz shouted out ‘OFF!’

I had not climbed the route before, but in the lead I was levitated up the cliff by Ken urging me on in full voice. ‘I had not realised how good you were!’ ‘Faster, they are catching you.’

I had never previously been keen on such an idea as racing up cliffs, and when I had seen the Russian climbers at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 give an exhibition of their speed climbing, I found this both hilarious and worthless. However with Ken’s enthusiasm driving me on I ran out about 140 feet of rope at speed. Ken then came running up the cliff, and shot into the lead to climb a steep groove above our heads. I then seconded this and led another short groove and we were on the top, well ahead of the local experts. The losers had to buy the drinks and we repaired to the bar of the PYG, where news of the appointment of Captain John Barry as the new Director of Plas y Brenin had preceded us. For some reason Chris Briggs then the landlord of the PYG and his wife were not best pleased about this. I guess it might have been because they were friends with some of the other candidates and I was subjected to some harsh criticism as this was seen as a BMC organised coup. For once Ken kept his head down, and enjoyed watching me take the flak, while nodding serenely in agreement as if he was a total innocent in the whole matter.

PyB
Ken’s love of climbing is still as keen as it ever was, and although he is now travelling on a Bus Pass, his enthusiasm for traditional British rock routes is undiminished. The new edition of Classic Rock will testify to this, as will his continued campaigning to preserve all that is best in this area of our sport. His contempt for bolts and particularly retro-bolting are so well known that the message does not need repeating here. He does on occasion to cement his arguments over egg his pudding, but it is good that such a vigorous and outspoken character is always ready to defend our tradition of bold and self protected climbs. And long may it be so!

Dennis Gray:Loose Scree March 2007

Idwal Slabs: Artist Aled Prichard Jones

Editor's Introduction *: The climbing world of thirty years ago seems a very innocent place viewed in retrospect. The days of Wall End Barn or Scotty Dwyer's annexe when climbing, boozing and laughing all seemed part of the same game, seems a million miles away from our competitive modern scene. Most of our songs then were culled from rugby clubs and therefore by definition dirty— but we did have our own 'poem': a doggerel verse by Showell Styles. It was recited and even acted at club dinners. I mean of course The Ballad of ldwal Slabs. It was published in The Mountaineer's Weekend Book, but that has been out of print for many years now— a pity, because the Ballad forms a distinctive footnote in our climbing heritage and shouldn't be lost. Others evidently feel the same, for it was revived at a couple of dinners this year, so I make no excuse for reprinting it here. I asked Pip Styles how it came about, and this is what he says:

"1947. Hemp climbing-ropes, clinkers and tricounis, crampons a bit of a snigger and piton a dirty word. Christmas at Glan Dena, the M.A.M.'s North Wales hut.Plucking and drawing of the Christmas dinner goose achieved with the aid of two medical students who insisted on dissecting its ear. Ears,eyes and nose full of goose down,muscles comfortably slack after leading Zigzag and Home Climb on Griben Facet.

Voice from the kitchen 'What about something to get the fun started after the dinner?. Ejecting goose down,collecting pencil and paper,invoked the muse of doggeral and 'The Ballad' was produced at a sitting.SS

* WU-1981

THE BALLAD OF IDWAL SLABS (To be spoken dramatically in costume: deerstalker hat, side-whiskers, and with alpenstock)

I'll tell you the tale of a climber; a drama of love on the crags; A story to pluck at your heart-strings, and tear your emotions to rags. He was tall, he was fair, he was handsome; John Christopher Brown was his name; The Very Severes nearly bored him to tears — and he felt about girls much the same.

Till one day, while climbing at Ogwen, he fell (just a figure of speech) For the President's beautiful daughter, named Mary Jane Smith — what a peach! Her figure was slim as Napes Needle, her lips were as red as Red Wall; A regular tiger, she's been up the Eiger North Wall, with no pitons at all!

Now Mary had several suitors, but never a one would she take, Though it seemed that she favoured one fellow, a villain named Reginald Hake; This Hake was a Cad who used pitons, and wore a long silken moustache, Which he used, so they say, as an extra belay — but perhaps we are being too harsh.

John took Mary climbing on Lliwedd, and proposed while on Mallory's Slab; It took him three pitches to do it, for he hadn't much gift of the gab. He said: "Just belay for a moment — there's a little spike close to your knee—And tell me, fair maid, when you're properly belayed, would you care to hitch up with me?"

Said Mary, "It's only a toss-up between you and Reginald Hake, And the man I am going to marry must perform some great deed for my sake. I will marry whichever bold climber shall excel at the following feat—To climb headfirst down Hope, with no rubbers or rope, At our very next climbing club meet!"

Now when Mary told the Committee, she had little occasion to plead, For she was as fair as a jug-handle at the top of a hundred-foot lead. The Club ratified her proposal, and the President had to agree; He was fond of his daughter, but felt that she oughter Get married, between you and me.

There was quite a big crowd for the contest, lined up at the foot of the Slabs; The Mobs came from Bangor in Buses, and the Nob's came from Capel in Cabs. There were Fell and Rock, Climbers and Rucksack and Ramblers and the Pinnacle Club (in new hats) And a sight to remember, an Alpine Club Member, in very large crampons and spats!

The weather was fine for a wonder; the rocks were as dry as a bone. Hake arrived with a crowd of his backers, but John Brown strode up quite alone; A rousing cheer greeted the rivals; a coin was produced, and they tossed. "Have I won?" cried John Brown as the penny came down. "No, you fool!" hissed his rival. "You've lost!"

So Hake had first go at the contest; he went up by the Ordinary Route, And only the closest observer would have noticed a bulge in each boot. Head first he came down the top pitches, applying his moustache as brake; He didn't relax till he'd passed the Twin Cracks, and the crowd shouted, "Attaboy, Hake!"

At the foot of the Slabs Hake stood sneering, and draining a bottle of Scotch; "Your time was ten seconds," the President said, consulting the Treasurer's watch. "Now, Brown, if you'd win, you must beat that." Our hero's sang froid was sublime; He took one look at Mary, and light as a fairy, run up to the top of the climb.

Now though Hake had made such good going, John wasn't discouraged a bit, For that he was the speedier climber even Hake would have had to admit. So, smiling as though for a snapshot, not a hair of his head out of place, Our hero John Brown started wriggling down — but look! what a change on his face!

Prepare for a shock, gentle ladies; gentlemen, check the blasphemous word; For the villainy I am to speak of is such as you never have heard! Hake had cut holes in the toes of his boots, and filled up each boot with soft soap! As he slid down the climb, he had covered with slime every handhold and foothold on Hope!

Conceive (if you can) the tense horror that gripped the vast concourse below, When they saw Mary's lover slip downwards like an arrow that's shot from a bow! "He's done for!" gasped twenty score voices. "Stand from under!" roared John from above. As he shot down the slope, he was steering down Hope —still fighting for life and for love!

Like lightning he flew past the Traverse — in a flash he had reached the Twin Cracks — The friction was something terrific —there was smoke coming out of his slacks —He bounced on the shelf at the top of Pitch Two, and bounded clean over its edge! A shout of "He's gone!" came from all — except one; and that one, of course, was our Reg.

But it's not the expected that happens — in this sort of story, at least; And just as John thought he was finished, he found that his motion had ceased! His braces (pre-war and elastic) had caught on a small rocky knob, And so, safe and sound, he came gently to ground 'mid the deafening cheers of the mob!

"Your time was five seconds!" the President cried. "She's yours, my boy — take her you win!""My hero!" breathed Mary, and kissed him, while Hake gulped a bottle of gin, And tugged his moustache as he whispered, "Aha! my advances you spurn! Curse a chap that wins races by using his braces!" and he slunk away, ne'er to return.

They were wed at the Church of St. Gabbro, and the Vicar, quite carried away, Did a hand-traverse into his pulpit, and shouted out "Let us belay!" John put the ring on Mary's finger — a snap-link it was, made of steel, And they walked to the taxis 'neath an arch of ice-axes, while all the bells started to peal.

The Morals we draw from this story are several, I'm happy to say; It's Virtue that wins at the end of the day- long silken moustaches don't pay; Keep the head uppermost when you're climbing; if you must slither, be on a rope; Steer clear of the places that sell you cheap braces — and the fellow that uses Soft Soap!

Showell Styles

Original Cartoons: Ivan Cumberpatch

Republished in Climber and Rambler July 1981

Author, Dan Richards in the words of the publisher’s blurb, ‘is on the trail of his great,great aunt, Dorothy Pilley, a prominent and pioneering mountaineer of the early twentieth century’. For reasons I’m not quite clear about, Dan recycles the original book title used by his subject. Is this an attempt at creating familial and literary synchronicity....not sure? However,‘Climbing Days’ -version two- it is, and most would argue that if an author spends years of his time,effort and fundsresearching and writing a fairly substantial book, then they can title it as they please!

Dorothy Pilley’s contribution to mountaineering obviously warrants a fresh take on her life and times and if its a family member who undertakes the role then at least they will probably be able to open doors which might have remained shut to an outsider.

For those perhaps unfamiliar with the subject-and outside of a dwindling number of traditional climbing anoraks that must represent probably the majority of climbers under 30 or even 40-then its fair to say, her contribition to and impact on what was an overwhelmingly male dominated sport was pretty unique for its time.It would probably be easier to just borrow the Mountain Heritage Trust’s potted biography at this point....

Pilley was one of the scarce band of female all-round climbers operating during the 20s and 30s, ranging throughout the Alps as well as the crags of Britain. But even more prescient, she actually sought the company of other women to climb with in preference to men, and was one of the leading lights in instigating the formation of the World’s first all-women climbing clubs, The Pinnacle Club. As well as these robust feminist credentials (or ‘feminine’ as she quaintly preferred to characterise her philosophy), Pilley is widely known for her famous semi-autobiographical book, Climbing Days, in which she recounts her splendid adventures in Wales and the Lakes, through to Scotland to the Alps. It all sounded like one long glorious summer of climbing fun, all washed down with lashings and lashings of ginger beer.

Further reading: Climbing Days, Dorothey Pilley. Secker & Warburg, (1935)

Pilley, despite her close links to the all female Pinnacle Club and frequently sharing a rope with fellow female climbers, created her most memorable routes with her husband and lifetime partner Ivor (IA) Richards. A respected and renowned English Educator, literary critic,rhetorician and all round Clever Clogs! With Richards she recorded what is probably her most significent and well regarded first ascent, that of the north ridge of the Dent Blanche,in the Alps with Joseph Georges and Antoine Georges. However, UK activists will more more familiar with Idwal Slabs perennial favourite 'The Ordinary Route'.

But that enough about her place within the mountaineering firmament, what about her Great Great Nephew’s account of her life and times and his personal pilgrimage across Europe to retrace her clinkered steps? Well, there is no doubt that Richards is a fine writer who has meticulously investigated every element of Dorothy Pilley’s life and laid it out on the page in fine detail. After saying that, I would have to say from the start that at nearly 400 pages long it would have certainly benefitted by some rigorousediting to cut out the padding andwhittle it down to a more coherent and hence more readable 200+ pages.

As something of a hybrid-part biography,part travelogue, part personal musings-coming at the book from a climbers’ perspective, I found- as others will I’m sure- the rather wandering structure of the book, hard to follow at times. The author’s early steps literally learning the ropes in Wales and at Glenmore Lodge; commenting on the architecture in Barcelona; describing a meal in an Alpine hut. You might think that it’s the tiny details that add to the narrative and help build the bigger picture but in this instance,for me at least,it becomes a wee bit ‘off piste’ for my liking and somewhat undermines what the author is trying to achieve.Given the significance within climbing of the subject and wide palette to draw from, a little less superfluous detail and a greater degree of concentrated focus would have created a more rounded and definitive work I feel..

I will freely admit though, that perhaps I suffered from a form of inverted snobbery, for I found it hard to warm to the subject herself. There is no getting away from the fact that Pilley and Richards were products of their age and class. Despite being portrayed as some sort of proto feminist, daringly changing from long skirts into knickerbockers at the crag and encouraging 'sisters to do it for themselves', Pilley was very much someone from that privileged class. Those fortunate enough to be able to indulge their passions without having to worry about trifling things like having to work. I certainly didn’t pick it up from the book any mention of her ever having held a job or pursued a career? Swanning around Europe and climbing mountains with guides while staying at comfortable hotels, does somewhat undermine any attempt to present her as some sort of enlightened mountaineering revolutionary.

Of course that was how society was structured in the early 20th century and at least credit Pilley for having the tenacity and drive to make her mark in a man's world. Being a social butterfly within London's cafe culture would have been the easier option for a middle class gel in those socially stifling times.

Despite my reservations, there is still enough material in Climbing Days to enjoy and which will further enlighten our knowledge and understanding of an interesting figure in 20th century British climbing. Not a book which will draw in a wide number of readers from outside the climbing/mountaineering fraternity-unless they are drawn in by IA Richards role in Pilley's story - but certainly a book which will appeal to students of mountaineering history .

John Appleby:2016

Joe Brown: Painting by Keith Bowen:Image KB

I prefer to look forward and not back, but occasionally it is good to sit and remember. I do hope however, that climbing never becomes anything more than a pastime for idlers.

‘Vroom’ a boulder the size of a human head smashed into the scree landing near to Joe ‘Morty’ Smith, Joe Brown and myself. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ we chorused, craning our necks and looking up the East Gully Wall. Peering through the gloom and the light snow that was falling. It was March 1958, and our day had started many hours before. We had left our tents at the Grochan field early that morning, four of us- for besides the three now straddled across the foot of the wall- Don Whillans had been with us when we set off.

We had driven to Hafod Newedd, walked up past a deserted half-way house, then across the main Du’r Arddu. We had been shocked by the amount of snow around and there had been a disagreement about objectives. Joe was fixated on trying the steep wall rising out of the East Gully which he later ascended as Shrike. Whilst Whillans had suggested another possible line, somewhere over on the Far East of the cliff, but as we had skirted above the Llyn, tempers had flared as Don declared that the whole outing was now ‘bloody mad’.

It ended with him stalking off. In those days there was no reasoning with him. Joe as always was phlegmatic in such situations and Morty and I were too young, and too inexperienced to interfere. Joe was the senior, and both Morty and I used to defer to him on all matters to do with climbing. He was just so much better, older and wiser about mountaineering than we were so we were happy to follow him wherever he led.

Soloing up the first part of the East Gully had been no joke, covered in a light dusting of powder snow it had been a frightening experience, at least for me! In such situations I never knew whether it was only I, or if the others were also gripped, but if they were they never showed it. Normally the East Gully is a scramble except for the last hundred feet or so, but a covering of snow can transform anything, especially easy angled rock. The East Gully in winter is an impressive place, a natural amphitheatre it is flanked on all sides with steep rock walls. Easy rock lead in summer up into this bowl, which has only one straightforward exit, the Gully climb itself, graded Very Difficult.

At the base of the wall, we had roped up onto over-weight single nylon ropes; two 150 feet lengths of hawser-laid which had become like wire as we struggled to retreat. Joe had led us up the first pitch of the East Gully Wall and Morty and I had then spent a couple of hours on a cramped belay while he battled with the unclimbed rock face above. But the cold, and then the snow which had started to fall had made it difficult going. In the end somewhere out on the edge of even his abilities he had decided it had become too much. The retreat had been orderly and we had assembled at the bottom of the Wall, still in good spirits. We knew we had to get off quickly for there was not much daylight left, but the thought of trying to climb back down the easy slabs in the falling snow, frightened me in no small measure.

Joe traversed to the bottom of the final pitches of the East Gully climb. ‘We’ll go up there!’ he decided pointing up to where at about 30 feet there was a bulge covered with ice. ‘Up you go Morty’. Grumbling, swearing, Morty set off whilst I belayed him and Joe sat on a nearby rock, smoking, like a reclining Buddha. ‘Vroom’ another boulder, this time the size of a football hit the rock above Morty and then shot off into space. ‘Bloody Hell’ Morty cried, whilst I jumped sideways, only Brown was unmoved. ‘Must be a goat or sheep up there’ he declared.

Rock and Ice icons gather in The Peak, 1957. Back Row left to right...Nat Allen,Don Roscoe,Ron Cummaford. Second Row...Les Wright,Joe Smith, Ray Greenall,Eric Price, Don Whillans. Front..Dennis Gray, Joe Brown.Photo Doug Verity

‘Look Joe, this is bloody desperate’ our leader advised. ‘Oh get up it you little ninnie’. After such a statement, Morty had no option but to continue, however at the ice bulge he was stuck. The snow increased, the wind began to whip it into the gully and holding the rope I was uncontrollably shaking from the cold.
‘I can’t do it, its just too bloody desperate today’ Morty shouted down.
Fortunately, he had managed to get a sling on above his head to protect him, a full weight one over a large spike. So at least he looked safe. ‘Get on with it!’ shouted Joe, but the next minute Morty had to grab hold of the sling as he slipped into space, his feet shooting off the ice. The spike held his weight, so it was sound. ‘Let me down! Let me down!’ cried Morty and this time I obeyed. He arrived, swinging in and as usual was full of good humour. We were climbing in boots as we had been all day, with vibram soles. ‘Did you see the rubber on ice moves?’ he laughingly demanded.

‘Vroom’ another boulder came whining, down the face, to land once again some distance from Brown, Morty and myself, ‘Bloody hell! That goat ought to be fielding for Yorkshire, it can throw so accurately’ I advised. ‘Often happens, there are many sheep and goats always wandering around up there’ advised Joe. The dreaded thing then happened, Brown offered me the lead. ‘You do it’.
I pleaded, but to no avail. ‘No he told me, Morty has been fined a brew for his failure and if you don’t get up it your fine will be worse’. Joe had evolved a system of incentives to improve our climbing, if we failed we were fined a number of brews (making communal cups of tea), if we succeeded then good scores were given to knock off our cumulative totals.

We never managed to get into credit and Morty was such a staggering number of brews in arrears that we had lost count….. Joe had not! I set off feeling determined and gritted my teeth. I had a tight top rope for the first thirty feet for Morty was giving me G sharp. To my surprise I then managed to climb up and over the ice bulge. It was very hard, but I felt in control until ‘vroom’ another rock smashed into the wall on the left-hand side of me. The noise as it came screaming down the gully filled me with absolute dread, and in the next instant I found myself, hanging by both hands to the sling Morty had fixed up on the good rock spike. Somehow I had climbed back down and then grabbed hold of the sling as I descended.

‘Let me down, let me down’ for now I was choking, having let go of the sling, and hanging off my waist. Joe grabbed the rope, and insisted I give it another try, ‘You had it cracked’ he yelled up. ‘No, No I am too gripped’ I insisted gasping for breath, with my ribs constricted by the rope biting into my body. So in the end they lowered me back down. Morty and I were now both scared, for the barrage of falling stones had completely unnerved us. ‘Joe, come on, you lead it’ we both pleaded.

For some reason and though I believe we were reasonably articulate, when we were climbing we always addressed each other in a mono-syllabic fashion. No long discourses communing with nature or even about the ever rising price of tea! ‘I’ll lead it for a brew each…….’ he offered. ‘No way, No way’ we both objected, but just then ‘vroom’ down came another boulder to land in the snow to the side of us. It was the largest so far, and the noise it had made as it roared down on us, hurtling through space had been awesome. ‘Bloody hell….. O.K’, ‘O.K’ we both quickly changed our minds.

I belayed as Joe set forth and up he went. Through the snow and gloom easily over the ice bulge, and up into the far reaches of the gully, mysteriously no rocks fell whilst he was climbing! It was this ability that above all others which stamped Joe out as our supreme master, this command of being able to climb in bad conditions. He was in a word a phenomenon. He belayed in the Gully near its head. Sheltered, from the wind and falling snow in a deep recess.

First, he brought Morty up and then myself. In truth, it was not too bad on the end of a tight rope. Morty and I should have been able to lead it, and Joe had been right about that, but just as I had once again pulled over the ice bulge, ‘vroom’ it happened yet again, a rock the size of my fist smashed into the rock wall nearby. ‘Tight, Tight’ I screamed and I literally then ran up the rest of the route to join Joe and Morty in the recess. ‘You can finish it off ‘ Joe then told me, and on this occasion I did just that. It was not too hard and after I had pulled out over the top of the cliff, and started to set up a belay in what was quickly becoming the darkness of night, I was startled by a figure emerging from out of a nearby cleft in the rocks. Flat cap pulled down; hands set deep in pockets, short, squat and powerful.

I was relieved to recognise Don Whillans through that gloom. Scared Yer didn’t a?’ he chuckled. ‘Bloody hell, Don, those boulders were close’ ‘They were meant to be!’ was the laconic reply. (In all truth they were probably a long way out from us, but the noise they made, flying down through the
air was frightening and enough to scare most climbers?)

That summer occurred an incident that I have kept buried until now and not talked about much, for it revealed something about myself I do not like. I have always professed to be a pacifist, and when I had to do National Service, I served as a non-combatant, but on two occasions my pacifism evaporated. Once when in a fracas I lashed out and unfortunately hit a police sergeant and the other is the occasion I have in mind now. That was the day we fought Joe Brown, we being Morty and I.

It started like so many of the Rock and Ice stories in good humour, as a joke, but developed. Morty had been behaving particularly badly in Joe’s eyes, failing on the odd route, crashing motor bikes, doing untold physical damage in many of the Club’s rough games to the other participants. And so by the summer of 1958 he had run up a spectacular deficit in brews to be made, and because of this he decided to go on strike and refused to make any more cups of tea.

This could only lead on to one thing: a physical challenge. I talked this over with Morty and he felt the time had come to challenge the master! I was incredulous at first, Joe was quite a wrestler and he loved to tackle such as Slim Sorrell (his original climbing partner) in a friendly bout on occasion. But what Morty was suggesting was something different, in trying to wrestle with Joe, he would easily beat him in a real set to. ‘No he won’t’ declared Morty grinning ‘because you are going to help me’ ‘You have got to be kidding’ was my reaction. ‘I am not a fighter, I have never physically been in such a set too in my life’ I advised.

‘You bloody big girl!’ Morty responded. ‘Alright I’ll take him on by myself!’
This put me on the spot. I knew Morty would have no chance against Joe, although pound for pound he was the strongest physically amongst us, but he was also the smallest. He was no match for a hardened street fighter like Joe, who had grown up in Ardwick and Longsight, and of necessity had been dealing with the local heavies in those deprived areas of Manchester from an early age. Morty then was in reality still a boy, and on his own he had no real chance of besting Joe. This for me was a moral dilemma, rather like the last war.

‘O.K, I’ll help, but we need a fighting strategy’. This was hammered out between us, and we agreed that Morty would face up to Joe head on, whilst I crept around behind him. I consulted with Slim Sorrel beforehand, who was something of an expert in unarmed combat because of his position in the police, and he taught me an unbreakable strangle-hold, which if I could affix around an opponents neck, meant certain surrender. After which Morty and I decided we were ready for the fray. Morty then duly refused to carry out his task of making brews and offered to wrestle Joe instead. I was present when this happened, and I was included in the challenge. The master laughingly accepted our challenge.

'Joe limbering up before our wrestle' DG: Grochan Field, Llanberis Pass. In the background,Dennis Gray's A 40 van.Photo-Doug Verity

We were camping under Clogwyn y Grochan in the Llanberis Pass. This was in an age of wild camping……. anywhere. A beautiful green sward, it served as a campsite, a cricket and football pitch and now it was to have a wrestling ring. Gleefully the rest of the Rock and Ice present marked out a ring with stones. There was a referee, Les Wright, a genial giant who could have physically sorted out any other member of the club if he had been so inclined, and it was agreed that it was to be a no holds barred contest! This meant it was no use crying about a spot of blood or even such as the odd fracture. These lads were tough and played it hard. I realised we had to be absolutely ruthless; otherwise we would get short shrift from Joe.

As I lined up with Morty I was shaking with fright, but my younger companion seemed to be not so concerned. Les clapped his hands and the action started, and Morty closed in punching out like an automaton. It was all that Joe could do to hold him off, and I realised that our agreed tactics were working, so I danced round behind our adversary, but he then realised the danger and lashed out at me with his feet. But Morty kept on advancing forward in a flurry of punches, oblivious to Joe’s counter blows. It was again as much as the latter could do to hold him off, and though if he been on his own Morty would soon have had to give it best, it enabled me to get in behind Brown and the next minute I had him by the throat, and began to apply pressure using the stranglehold Slim had taught me.

He thrashed about wildly, but could not shake me off, and Morty just kept on coming forward at him. I put on more and more pressure, and at that moment I should have stopped, but something I have never been able to explain just kept me on squeezing. Suddenly we both fell down, with Joe on top of me, his back pinning me to the ground, unable to see anything, I just kept squeezing with all my might. He thrashed around, and tried to break loose, and then Morty was on top of him and both of them were lashing out at each other. ‘Let go, let go’ my inner voice was commanding, but I felt I could not and just kept applying pressure. Suddenly I felt Joe go, limp and then I did let go.

He had lapsed into unconsciousness, and fear welled up inside me about what had happened. I was by then so sorry for our actions, Joe was the greatest man either of us had ever known, we were truly fond of him but that was not the kind of sentiment working class lads ever let themselves show to one another, and now we had killed him! Or so I thought. Les and the rest of the Club then broke it up and pulled Morty and I off of Joe, who was lying comatose with a purple face, and a bruised neck.

We were all of us very concerned and relieved when a few minutes later he sat up gasping and choking. ‘You bloody little swine’ was all he could gasp out, but there was a tinge of admiration in his rasping voice. A strong arm then grabbed my shoulder and at the same time the same thing happened to Morty. It was Whillans! ‘What’s wrong Don?’ I stuttered. ‘Just hang on a tick’ he told us, ‘I’ll lace up me boots’ then he bent down to do this. ‘Why?’ we wanted to know.

Joe under Cloggy: Painting Keith Bowen.Image KB

‘Tha’s done for him’ he told us, ‘Tha better have a doo at me next!’ he said. ‘No way’ we both chorused. I began to run away, but became conscious that the Villain was on my heels, and trying to catch me. Why had he not gone after Morty, I wondered as I ran off up the Pass? He was not as good a runner as I, but I realise now he had seen something that he understood, someone had acted in an unreasonably aggressive manner, and that I was the culprit. And I needed teaching a lesson. Fortunately, for me, I was a faster runner than Don, and he could not catch me, but his voice is still with me now as I write this, for he stopped and hurled after me the following epithet. ‘You’re a bloody Slippery Jim’ ‘A bloody Slippery Jim’ he cried.

Dennis Gray

An abridged version of this article first appeared in High

Keith Bowen Artist website

Ashes. Now there are only ashes. Scattered on the wind. Falling far and free.

Who was he? When I first met him, he was struggling to stand in a sling on the bolt of Darius. He’d never made an aid move before. What a place to begin! His face, normally pale and thin, was red and beefy with effort. There was far more slack in the rope than I’d have liked. He seemed indifferent.

We met again soon afterwards on the wall in Endcliffe Park. His gentle ribbing of my own risqué tactics at High Tor showed an unexpected sensitivity in one so young. He had a slight, almost girlish frame. His face was ingenuous to the point of pity.

He came sailing along the low-level traverse, only to skid wildly off the crux. Muddy boots he explained, abashed, then confided he’d soloed Great Slab earlier that afternoon. “Hope your boots weren’t muddy then,” I jested, inwardly appalled.

After that, he was everywhere. For a time, he seemed inseparable from Jerry. And yet he never struck me as sorcerer’s apprentice, Jerry’s clone. They were both fuelled with energy, eager to get out on the rock and make it happen. Shared dreams; different realities.

Other times he would be out on his own, soloing. Rumour had it that, come ten to eight each morning, he’d be at the bus stop at Hunter’s Bar, punctual as any commuter, never mind the weather. He’d be out in the Peak all day every day. Dedication he had. Naturally, inevitably, 5b became 6b.

I always thought him an odd, quixotic figure. Even in an impoverished existence, respectability clung to him like rags. This was no child of the streets. Somewhere there was a loving family, the warmth of acceptance. And, somewhere else, rebellion, a necessary battle for identity. We all struggle with our demons. Perhaps his struggle was harder than most.

So many come into climbing, young and foolish, to pay dearly for their maturity. Only perhaps in combat is experience so hardly earned. Through the long, long litany of faces I have known, his was the most fragile, the most innocent, the most vulnerable. In life, it earned him the cruel nickname which he bore with pride.

Once, in Stoney caff, I remember him sitting with Kim and Ron and Gill. Company indeed. And making some ill-favoured remark about lazy Aussie climbers. Kim’s acid riposte – “Well, I wouldn’t exactly term all those mega-routes at Arapiles the products of indolence…” He blushed furiously, nodded spasmodically.

If, by his own admission, he lacked talent at climbing, it was elsewhere in abundance. Absence of guile came from a mind which was too open, too questioning, where other, lesser ones were narrow, closed. All the while he was learning the bitter lesson that possession of intellect is more apt to be curse than blessing.

We’d meet out on grit or lime, exchange banter, solo together. I liked his company. Mutual reticence precluded a deeper understanding. This I now regret.

What he did when he wasn’t climbing, I never know. He once said that you could have real fun in the Poly television room. I wondered at that. What kind of life was it where you could have real fun in the Poly television room?

The last time we climbed together was at Stoney. Unfit from exams, I’d gone there to do Kingdom Come, only to discover that the crucial protection bolt was missing.

He offered to clip the peg above the crux. In momentary weakness, I acquiesced. My relief ebbed, then abruptly died as he started to forcefully undercut creaking, unprotected flakes out to the right of the normal route and harder. Suddenly losing the sequence. Twitching and gibbering above the void.

Instinctively I grabbed the ropes to belay him, then realised there was no belay, he’d simply take me with him. As quickly, I let go, before shamefacedly wrapping the ropes around me again. Some things you can’t do.

Above his juddering body lunged, dark against brutal overhangs. Taut fingers scrabbled at the crucial layaway. The harsh click of metal against metal as he clipped the peg. Against all odds, we were still alive.

We finished the route, then drifted down to Rheinstor, in deference to my unfitness, played around on easier routes all afternoon. I never saw him again.

The first accident happened that summer, in Pembroke. A hold broke. He fell, from high up, and hit the ground. They said it wasn’t his fault, it was the sort of accident that could have happened to anyone. Except that it happened to him.

At first he was in a coma. He left hospital with brain damage. An ironic, bitter handicap to such a mind. The childlike prettiness of his face disfigured.

I meant to see him but didn’t, maybe couldn’t. Soon he was climbing again, not well but strong. Four hundred pull-ups a day. Not lazy at all, you see, he was never lazy. But life… what was life? He wanted, they said, to die in the hills.

He did. He died on the Wastad, soloing a pokey, nasty little route that anybody could have failed on. A terrible, searing, bloody landing. No more.

Gail told me, in a back-street pub in Sheffield. One more death in a litany of deaths. But this one, I knew instantly, was the one from which I would never recover. For his face was the most fragile, the most innocent, the most vulnerable. Gently she led me, uncontrollable with grief, out of the pub, past the sniggers and the uncomprehending stares.

His funeral; I’d missed it. But at least others came. For an awful moment, I feared there would have been next to no-one.

They scattered his ashes at Stoney, which truly had been his home. Even now, years later, as I drive along the dale, I glance up, quickly, instinctively, half-expecting to see him bouldering above Windy Ledge. No more.

When they scattered his ashes, a certain notable was bouldering in the bays. Some of the ashes swirled past on the wind, drifted onto a crucial hold. Our notable thus bounced up his problem, ironically commenting, “I always knew the little bugger would be good for something, after all.”

Some people can inspire hatred. This was one such.

So, even after death, ignominy continued. A magazine article blatantly disparaged when there was no need. What further misery may his mother have endured?

But now he is gone. Long gone. The ignominy and the loneliness far behind him. And the soloing… a harsh medium indeed in which to decipher one’s troubled image.

Talent there was in plenty. But talent bloodily uprooted before ever it had a chance to nurture, to bear testimony.

Ashes. Now there are only ashes.

Postscript.

Noddy (Neil Molnar) was a member of the early 1980s Stoney coterie. He was a friend of Jerry Moffatt and is mentioned in Jerry’s autobiography, ‘Revelations’. Although it’s more than 30 years since he died, he’s still remembered.

Micheal Ward: 2016

The following article announced the imminent arrival of a book which has become an iconic coffee table climbing tome...Ken Wilson's Classic Rock. A sequel to the equally lauded Hard Rock.The concept was simple. Bring together many of the UK's best climbing writers and outdoor photographers who will each be given licence to produce their own unique photo essay around a classic outing selected from one of the main climbing areas within the British Isles.At the eve of the books launch in October 1978, Ken outlined his reasons why these old routes from what were then described as 'the middle grades' were worth celebrating in words and pictures.

One of the reasons why Britain has so many fine classic rock-climbs in the easier grades has to be the length of British climbing history. Look at Tremadog — recently developed, it has very few decent easy climbs— half a dozen at most. Yet if it had been discovered for climbing fifty years earlier, Bwlch y Moch would surely be criss-crossed with easy lines, linking gullies and ledges in complex permutations, on ground at present overgrown or slashed vertically by difficult climbs. It might have been possible, if one had been a pioneer of yesteryear, to have worked out a classic diff in the area near Shadrach or near the gullies below the Neb. Certainly nobody is going to bother now —today's pioneers operate at altogether more exalted levels and the classic climbs that Archer Thomson or George Abraham might have raved about, will stay hidden for ever. The point I am making is, that with few exceptions, easy routes tend to be the product of their time. In compiling Classic Rock, the forthcoming sequel to Hard Rock, this fact emerged above all others. Somehow the older routes had power, despite their lowly grades (the book includes routes up to Hard Severe).

The reason for this may be that at the time they were first done, the climbs had real pioneering importance. Take Avalanche on Lliwedd for example. It is hardly a push-over in damp conditions even today, but to Archer Thomson and his friends embarking onto the uncharted tracts of the East Buttress seventy years ago, it must have seemed a formidable project. The route beetles upwards, every twist and turn caked in history. So too, Jones's Direct Route from Lord's Rake on Scafell or the gullies Great on, Craig yr Ysfa, the Chasm on the Bauchaille or the celebrated and eventful Clachaig — all have pitches that have been grappled with, and written about, by countless generations of British climbers. The routes seem ingrained with history, like ancient carvings on the wall of a cathedral or in the depths of some castle dungeon they attest to the efforts and traumas of our predecessors.

The Direct Route on Milestone Buttress: N Wales
Most of the routes that were eventually chosen for the book come into this truly 'classic' category. Their history is well-known, though in some cases some extra appreciation of their importance emerged as the book was being assembled. A good example of this being the remarkable Direct Route on Glyder Fach, which, as David Cox points out, was initially underrated, yet represented very hard climbing for 1907. The great classics of the old days are generally well known, but the real revelation to me in compiling the book was the discovery of more recent climbs of quality in the lower grades.

These routes also seem to have the stamp of meaning and relevance about them, despite being discovered by climbers whose normal level of operation is a far higher standard. The supreme example of this must surely be Ardverikie Wall, a truly marvellous severe in the depths of Scotland, which Patey once described as the finest route (then unclimbed) that he ever walked past. It is a five pitch slab climb, on splendid rock with a simple and growing exposure. One can just imagine the S.M.C. men Hunter and Lang leaping around in delirious pleasure on the summit after their first ascent in 1967. Who would have expected such a gem to be so late in discovery? Hell's Lum Crag in the Cairngorms was another revelation — replete with "challenging" severe slab climbs it has much to offer the middle grade climber.

The crux Red Wall on Lliwedd's Avalanche

The chosen route for the book — Clean Sweep—was first climbed in 1961 by no less a pioneer than the late, great, Robin Smith, accompanied by feisty, beasty Graham Tiso, the Laird of Leith — certainly a route of considerable pedigree in its antecedents as well as its climbing quality. Tom Patey discovered a number of classic routes of recent origin. Patey's tastes in climbing rarely included anything that could be described as overly technical. He liked to keep it simple; not too much gear, sometimes hardly any — a swashbuckling approach. Many of the climbs achieved in this idiom were hard, of course — the Meggy Crab Crawl comes to mind — but his two contributions to Classic Rock, the Cioch Nose in Applecross and the elegant Squareface in the Cairngorms, are climbs of distinction free from undue difficulty. Enough of this talk of Scotland, that untapped tourist paradise for the classic climber, too jealously guarded by the locals and difficult to penetrate. What of the climbing further south? To my mind the Classic Climbs in the Lakes are, in general, better than the harder ones. The main reason is that they seem longer, more sustained and are often better positioned. Imagine a classic severe up the middle of Cloggy for example — wouldn't that be worth savouring?

What else is Moss Ghyll Grooves to Scafell — though some have thought its grand situation demands its honorary entry into the lower VSs to give it, and the cliff, some spurious respectability—long may it remain a Severe on a big cliff. It is a climb only matched in Wales by the superb Main Wall. Wales— perhaps not as rich in classic climbs as the Lakes has three big advantages: Lliwedd, the East Face of Tryfan and the Idwal Slabs. The austere attractions of Lliwedd are not easily appreciated nut once a Lliwedd addict, always a Lliwedd addict. As far as Tryfan and Idwal are concerned, how lucky can I count myself having these two stamping grounds on my patch. I learned on them,wrote a guide about one of them and now I am able to fete them. Both areas had the advantages of being blessed with superb guidebooks-those of Menlove Edwards of course-not any latter day pastiche.

To Edwards we owe so much: his fine climbs (several are in the book), his skillfully honed essays and his tortuous and glorious guidebook writing. His Tryfan guide contains many a gem,e.g. Yew Buttress..A short severe and a good little route,harder than one would expect,more difficult than Cheek,with which it is not comparable.

Of Idwal Slabs he said....The climbing is much of the stepping up type,It favours delicacy of technique and makes excellent practice for beginners learning the balance and strategy that makes the best additions to the climber’s progress. Nowadays the routes are not so select and scratches both short and long cover the face with the strenuous abandon of the times. It is perhaps well that rubbers are more discreet.First and last the slabs are a matter of Faith, Hope and Charity.

This epithet might easily be applied to all classic climbing. In Britain we are lucky. The faith, the hope and the charity of climbers over the past 100 years has left us a marvellous legacy of classic climbs, all too easy to overlook in these days of athletic and technical preoccupation. Perhaps the ‘boots and sacks’ day is due for a revival,with packed lunches and thermos flasks and a trek to the summits after the route is completed.

That is certainly one way to lost the crowds that one now finds at every level of difficulty on the lower crags.

Ken Wilson: First Published in Climber and Rambler, September 1978

Climbing now seems to be at a crossroads, will it continue to be a free- wheeling activity, attracting adventurous souls, with a canvas much wider than organised sports or will it succumb to being a rule orientated safe consumerist pastime? Those who are pushing it down that road might stop to read ‘The Bond’. Although this describes a series of stand-out ascents which took place more than thirty years ago, the message they impart for me is an illustration of the trust and bond between rope mates engaged in pioneering difficult new routes on the highest, remotest mountain faces, and the selfless willingness of other mountaineers to risk their own lives to help their fellow climbers in distress. A part of an unwritten credo subscribed to by those involved in making such ascents and a sacrifice which can often inspire none participants, perhaps because it rarely if ever occurs in any other sport?

Simon McCartney grew up in London but began to climb as a teenager in the 1970’s and he was, like so many of his generation enamoured by the lure of alpine climbing. He soon moved through the grades, and after meeting Dave ‘Wilco’ Wilkinson in Wales, an older more experienced alpinist they were quickly in the 1977 season into ‘major’ alpine ascents, with a first ascent in the Oberland, an attempt on the Eigerwand, success on the North Face of Les Droites and the second ascent of the central pillar of Brouillard on Mont Blanc, but after which because ‘Wilco’ had to return home to work, leaving Simon on his own in Chamonix, there occurred a chance meeting in the Bar National with Californian ‘stonemaster’ climber Jack Roberts, an event that would change McCartney’s life. He invited him to go to Alaska with him to attempt alpine style, inspired by a photograph by Bradford Washburn which had appeared in Mountain magazine, the 5,500-foot north face of Mount Huntington.

To understand how ground breaking this was in 1978, one must realise that most such ascents on high mountains were still usually climbed as expeditions and for two climbers totally unsupported in such a wilderness area it was pushing the envelope. Before they took this on, they stopped off in Yosemite, made some climbs together and undertook some ‘travelling’ USA style. But it is remarkable that on such a short acquaintance they gelled so well together, and their successful climb on Mount Huntington which took ten days to achieve, up and down was really something, for over such a period in Alaska the weather was inevitably bad on some of the days, but somehow they had kept on climbing. However they only narrowly escaped on the descent by the West Face route of the mountain when their rope became so snagged whilst abseiling they had to cut it into pieces. Their food ran low and Roberts suffered from frost bitten big toes. For some years there was doubt cast about their successful ascent for it was obviously such a hard and serious route, but a later party on the West Face (Harvard Route) they had descended discovered the bits of jammed rope they had abandoned, and today their route is still unrepeated. This was an impressive feat of stamina by Simon, who was only 22 years old during this ten day marathon. His American partner Jack Roberts was 28.

Back in the UK McCartney began to plan his next climb, deciding to return to the Eiger’s North Wall but in winter. Initially he wished to attempt this with just Dave ‘Smiler’ Cuthbertson but as word spilt out about his plans the party grew and grew, until finally six climbers set out on the climb. Besides Simon and Smiler, there was Howard Lancashire, Stevie Haston, Vic Saunders, and Bill Barker. Their first foray was repulsed by poor conditions and planning, but a second attempt found them high and committed and in difficulties. The cold was extreme and moving as a twosome and a foursome they were moving too slow, but what caused their most serious problem was that some of their ice tools were breaking due to the unusually low temperatures. They finally reached The White Spider, but Simon who had needed to take off his gloves to lead one of the rock pitches suffered frostbitten finger tips. Reluctantly they signalled their need to be rescued, which eventually they were by the Swiss helicopter service which literally plucked them, one by one off the wall.

This whole episode rankled with McCartney, and despite still suffering with his highly sensitive to the touch fingers, he returned just a few weeks later still in the winter of 1979 but only with Chris Hoyland, and successfully climbed the Eiger’s North Face. Simon led the ice and mixed climbing but he relied on Chris to lead such as the Difficult and Brittle Crack pitches where it was necessary to remove ones gloves. Although this was really an achievement climb in that era (and still would be), McCartney started thinking about and comparing Alpine climbing to greater range ascents. Feeling that he wanted to experience another adventure similar to his Alaskan climb of the year before, and understanding for the first time what had driven Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman to follow the path they were then taking in their mountain endeavours. And so he wrote Jack Roberts enquiring if he had any plans for 1980 in Alaska? He was surprised by a quick return phone call from him in the USA suggesting they team up again to attempt the unclimbed South West face of Denali. To which Simon readily agreed.

If you have read so far, then stay with it, for here the action really begins. Think ‘Touching the Void’, ‘The Last Blue Mountain’ and into ‘Thin Air’. To understand the enormity of what they were taking on, one must realise that this climb was twice the height of the North Face of Huntington, and that Denali is 20,310 feet (6144m), and from its base to summit it has the largest peak rise in the world.

All went well with the ascent for several days of rock and mixed climbing at a high technical standard, some of the time they could set up their small bivouac tent, other nights were spent sitting out in the open. But by day eight at around 17,000 feet Simon’s condition became worrying, he became uncoordinated and was slurring his words, but somehow on day nine they made a junction with the Cassin ridge route at 18,400 feet, and then tried to keep climbing through the night hoping to reach the summit of the mountain. But McCartney’s condition was continually worsening as they gained altitude. Somewhere above 19,000feet they were forced to stop. Roberts managed to cut out a ledge in the ice for their bivvy tent, but by then they were out of food. They still had some fuel left for their stove and they could make a drink but the following day, their tenth, the weather was too bad to move. On day eleven the weather was bad again and Roberts had to keep digging their tent out whilst Simon was by then completely helpless, suffering from oedema. At that date not as much was known about acclimatisation as subsequently, and being high for so long in such a condition, truly McCartney was lucky to survive.

Naked Jack
On day twelve the weather finally improved, but they had no way of signalling for a rescue, and in any case they were too high for a helicopter lift off. Roberts began to realise his feet were frostbitten, and decided their only hope of rescue was for him to climb solo over the summit and down the west flank and hope for a meeting with a party on this, the normal route up the mountain. He realised Simon’s chances of survival were almost nil, and made a list of his immediate family and friends to contact, for him to say his goodbyes. He packed and prepared ready to go, but stopped outside the tent unable to take the first step and leave his stricken comrade.

Then a crucial meeting occurred when two American climbers, Mike Helms and Bob Kandiko who had been following the Cassin ridge route arrived on the scene. They too were running short of food, but they cooked up one of their last two meals for Roberts and McCartney who by then had not eaten for four days. After discussing the situation it was decided that Kandiko would stay with Simon whilst Helms, who knew the West Buttress descent route would accompany Roberts to go and seek help.

Stay with it for the story is just beginning. The weather turns bad, and Kandiko and McCartney run out of food and fuel, and after three days of waiting Bob decides their only hope of survival is to descend back down the Cassin ridge. He knows that on the way up the climb they had discovered a cache of fuel, and if they can reach this they will be able to have plenty to drink. Meanwhile Roberts and Helms after being held up by bad weather have managed to climb down to reach a party on the West flank with a radio. They alert the rescue services to Bob and Simon’s desperate situation, but they are too high to be rescued by helicopter and in any case the weather is too bad to fly. Somehow belaying him down, Kandiko managed to begin lowering McCartney rope length by rope length and he also has some medicine with him and after taking this Simon feels a little better. On day four since Kandiko took over at Roberts departure, they reached the spot where the can of white spirit was cached and from there on they had hot water and heat in their bivvy tent.

Slowly as they descended and lost altitude Simon began to recover and could begin to look after himself abseiling and belaying. As he became coherent he learned from Bob the intimate details of just how ill he had been, even urinating over Kandiko and the tent. He tried to apologise, but his partner told him there was no need and if they get down alive he can buy the beers!

Six days had gone by without eating a meal, and Simon had endured four days of starvation before that. A highlight for them was finding some used tea bags, and Kandiko was to write that ‘the subsequent tea, lukewarm and barely coloured was the best they had ever tasted’. By this date they were still at 17,000feet, but once again they were pinned down by high winds. Mercifully the weather improved and they started to descend again and miraculously met up with a party of four other climbers from Pennsylvania ascending the Cassin route, and who were resting inside a large Whillan’s box type shelter set on a prepared ledge. They took them in and prepare a meal. This was Simon’s and Kandiko’s first in a week.

The next day all six climbers after a breakfast of porridge and tea started down, for the other four decided to abandon their ascent, for they too were running out of food delayed by the bad weather. Once again by serendipity they met on this descent a party of three Japanese who had a radio, and they managed to get a message out to arrange an air drop of fuel and food. Jack Roberts is by then down and in touch with the rescue services, a helicopter is organised and a successful supply drop was carried out. By this date they were at around 14,000 feet and after gorging on the food and resting, Simon took his inner boots off for the first time in many days. This lead on to them swelling and for him to suffer in agony for the rest of the descent, which is aided by some fixed ropes set up by the Japanese climbers.

Finally, finally after Simon had been three weeks on the mountain they reached the foot of the Cassin ridge and set up a camp on the Kahiltna glacier. But still stay with it for it is not all over! After a nights rest, and despite still suffering pain from his injured feet, McCartney and Kandiko set out, roped up to descend the glacier and its ice fall. With regard to all he has been through Simon was remarkably in a capable state, but their progress is hampered by increasing white out conditions. Unfortunately Kandiko missed the route they were following and he fell over a small ice cliff, luckily landing in deep snow. McCartney on the other end of the rope was pulled by this like a cork out of a bottle, and he shot passed his leader and landed upside down into a crevasse, suffering a badly fractured left wrist and was unconscious.

Once again they were fortunate for four climbers from Minnesota (who later disappeared on the mountain) and the three Japanese who they had been following arrived on the scene as Kandiko was being pulled inexorably also towards the crevasse weighted by Simon’s swinging body. And working together they managed to rescue them. A camp was set up nearby and slowly Simon regained consciousness, his injured arm was put in a sling and Bob who was also bruised and battered needed to explain to McCartney where they are and what had happened.

Finally it is all over, the Park service had organised a voluntary rescue party made up of climbers who were in the area led by Dave Buchanan one of the Rangers. Three Swiss guides joined the rescue and skied out with Simon tied down on a litter, then once down through the crevassed area he was carried out by the volunteers to the Park base at Kahiltna. From there he was flown out to Anchorage hospital and on arriving he finally met up again with Jack Roberts, already in situ receiving treatment for his frostbitten feet. I am pleased to report I made a slight contribution to Simon’s recovery and well being, for he was insured with the BMC. The insurance scheme was set up when I was its General Secretary by Fred Smith and I!

After such a tryst with fate Simon never climbed again. He did meet Jack Roberts once more in the UK in 1981, but after that with his Australian girl friend Judi he migrated to Sydney. He took up cave diving in the Blue Mountains, but earned his living in a business he set up jointly in Hong Kong, commuting between the two places. He totally lost contact with climbers and climbing, until one day in 2011 someone he did not know sent out an e-mail, noting the two standout climbs he had made over thirty years earlier in Alaska and querying if ‘he was still alive’. After much soul searching he decided to reply, and started trying to find out what had happened to those with whom he had shared such life and death experiences; Jack Roberts and Bob Kandiko. With no real mode of contact other than internet searches, it took some time. He finally reached Roberts wife Pam in 2012, just too late for Jack had died one month earlier due to a fall whist ice climbing on the Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, but Bob Kandiko was alive and very much kicking. They and their wives subsequently enjoyed a reunion and a glacier flight to both Denali and Huntington, and this persuaded McCartney to write up the story of those two ground breaking ascents made so many years before, when he was in all truth so young.

So what can one make of Simon McCartney’s book ‘The Bond?’ For me it was a life affirming experience, because of the fact that so many climbers were willing to do so much to aid another climber in need, who they did not even know. Bob Kandiko in particular put his very existence on the line to do this. The story is told in a searing honest way, McCartney does not hide the fact that it was only by a string of unbelievable coincidences that he did survive, but we must also acknowledge that few of us would have, for cerebral oedema is a killer and statistically not many recover from its onset. I guess he must have been an unusually strong willed and fit individual.

So if you read just one climbing book this year, make it ‘The Bond’. I am sure it will become a classic of exploration mountain literature. It is well produced, with excellent photographs and layout. To finish with the words of the late Ken Wilson, who never at a loss with an opinion, phoned me when ‘Touching the Void’ won the Boardman Tasker prize (of which I am a Trustee) for mountain literature .He reported that, ‘reading that book had made him proud to call himself a climber!’ and the same is true of myself about ‘The Bond’.

Dennis Gray: 2016

The Bond is available from Vertebrate Publishing

“And now that I have climbed and won this height,
            I must tread downward through the sloping shade,
                 And travel the bewildered tracks till night;
                 Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed,
               And see the golden air and the silver fade,
                     And the last bird fly into the last light”.
                                           Dante G Rossetti

Anger, hate, confusion, bewilderment, anxiety, euphoria, fear, regret and pleasure. How can I be feeling all these emotions at once? What is happening to me? Why am I slipping? Why is my head full of this crap? I sense my head telling to relax, clear my mind, say a quick prayer if I must, even accept the inevitable outcome of the downwards motion but get on and do something. I accept and acknowledge in this split second, that I have probably outreached myself this time. Too arrogant by half. This time I have to pay the ferryman, there is no escape as he waits for me at the bottom. Who will cry for me? Who will miss me? Who will even care when they pick my broken mangled frozen body from among the rocks below. No answer was forthcoming. The silence of ensuing death was all that could be heard.

The winter of 1977 was turning out to be a reasonably good one for early climbing routes and I was keen to get out and do as much as I could. Although Sandy and I had only been married for a year, we had agreed from the outset that we should not lose any of our individuality or who we were before we were fortunate to meet, and so whenever it was possible and appropriate, I would go climbing somewhere.

It all started one Friday night as I was sitting in the Golden Rule in Ambleside, having a quiet pint before driving back to Carlisle after climbing alone on Dow Crag where Easy Gully and Easy Gully Ridge Branch gave excellent satisfaction, when my world was rudely intruded upon. “What’s to do Frankie boy” inquired Mick loudly as he danced a jig in my direction, arms swaying to and fro like some mad monk with his habit on fire. This was Mick’s usual entrance when he was trying to impress somebody and in this case it was the new barmaid despite her being nearly twice his age, but then he always fancied himself as a lady’s man and this was to be no exception and so Mick thought he stood as good a chance as anyone else. He was, believe me, full of rampant optimism that night!

I looked up from the book I was busy trying to read and replied as quietly as I could, in the hope that he would steer himself towards someone else in the pub that he knew, but it was patently obvious that this did not have the desired effect as he came over, sat down and helped himself to some of my crisps. I gripped my pint glass tightly. “Not a lot Mick, what’s to do yourself?”

As he tried unsuccessfully to get some more crisps from the packet I was now holding tightly with the other hand, he replied in a loud voice, no doubt hoping to impress the new barmaid who was paying him no attention whatsoever, “I’m off to the Cairngorms for some winter routes with Charlie, fancy coming along for the ride?” My reply was quick, precise and to the point and left no words to be misconstrued. “No thanks Mick, I’ve got other plans”.

Now it wasn’t that I didn’t like climbing with Mick, he was precise in his movements, strong as they come and level headed in dodgy situations, it was the thought of going with Charlie that put me off. Charlie was as they say, ‘another kettle of fish’. Charlie found it impossible to be quiet when climbing and was devoid of any degree of decorum when leading any climb.

His party trick was to see how many times he could belch and break wind which he always tried to do when he was on the front end of the rope, and thought it hilarious to suddenly stop and relieve himself irrespective of who was below him, which was usually his climbing partner. I had been there twice and was determined that there was not going to be a third time.

I well remember the last time when Charlie and I last climbed together in the winter. Whilst Mick’s idea was to eat as much cheese as he could so that it would bung him up, negating him having to bare his backside to the cold. Charlie for his part was the exact opposite. He would eat as much curry as he could, followed by tins of cold beans. His reasoning was that if your crap was like water, then it was over quicker in which case your bum was not exposed too long to the cold. I suppose they both had fair points although in reality terms, we all know that when you’ve got to go you’ve got to go and the cold will have its affect no matter how long, or short, you expose your nether regions.

So there we were, Charlie and I, climbing Central Buttress - Original Route on Lochnagar in Scotland, a route I had wanted to do since doing Parallel ‘A’ Gully solo several years before.

We were going to lead alternately with Charlie climbing the first pitch and I the second and so on. On the third pitch which Charlie was leading and I was tied on and belaying him from a narrow part of the gully lower down, he decided the curry and beans for breakfast just had to go, so without warning, he wedged himself below a bulge, dropped his trousers to relieve his heaving belly of its contents.

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that in any gully, there is only one direction for anything to travel (according to Issac Newton that is), and that’s downwards and if your’ standing beneath whatever is coming down and you can’t get out of the way, there is a high probability that it will hit you on its way down at 32 foot per second per second.

Up above, Charlie was wetting himself with laughter at the sight of me trying desperately to avoid the downward contents of his bowels. Believe me, I did not see any funny side to his antics and promised myself that I would never be in a similar position again. I knew therefore, that Mick’s attempts to persuade me to accompany them on this occasion, would be fruitless, and it was.

However, Mick was never a one to let sleeping dogs lie so as he was striding to the bar with his usual swagger, he turned his head and asked what it was that I had in mind. As it happened I had nothing in mind, but I was not going to give him an opportunity to try to talk me into going with him and Charlie. I therefore convinced myself that in such situations a little white lie was acceptable. “I’ve had my eye on a route for some time now which hasn’t had a winter’s ascent to my knowledge” came my curt reply. Just as Mick was about to press me for more information, the barmaid who was wearing a tight low neck sweat shirt, leaned over the bar to wipe some of Mick’s beer that spilled out of his glass when he tried to grab it to capture the froth that was still spewing over the top. Fortunately for me, a part of her anatomy was also spewing over the top of her T shirt, which thankfully distracted him long enough to allow me to drink up and leave unseen.

As I drove home to Carlisle, I started to ponder on the little white lie I had told Mick, thinking that this was not such a bad idea after all. After I had given it some more thought, I eventually decided to go to Glen Coe for a brief foray calling into Ben Ledi [north of Callander] and on my return to try a winter ascent of the central gully that can be seen from the car park and roadside and which had not had a winter ascent for many a year if at all, which I hoped to address.

Sandy was already in bed reading when I got in so after some discussion about my ideas for the weekend, I settled down to get some well-earned sleep. As is always the case, sods law came visiting in the guise of a bout of insomnia which clearly had returned with a vengeance. I kept thumping the pillows as if this would somehow bring sleep to my tired eyes but it didn’t so I just got up at 3.30am and had a brew.

By 4.30am I was sitting in the freezing car trying to get the damn thing to start. I did my ‘Basil Fawlty’ routine but from the inside, thumping the dashboard, screaming at it that it was going to a scrap yard if it didn’t start, but this had no effect. I got out of the car and repeated my poor John Cleese impersonation by kicking the wheels and threatening to carry out my threats if it didn’t start the very next time. It did and after patting the dashboard and calling it some nice names I set off northwards up the A74.

The car spluttered and coughed all the way to Stirling where I stopped at a transport café for a hearty but greasy breakfast. Once I was sated with my eggs, bacon, beans and toast, using the last piece of toast to wipe the plate clean, I became conscious of someone standing over me, blocking out what little light there was emitting from a 40-watt grubby looking bulb above the table I was sat at.

I looked up to see a gangly youth, unshaven, long matted hair, wearing a baggy jumper that had more holes than a pound of Swiss cheese, and a rather thin hungry looking roll up fag hanging from the corner of his mouth. On his jumper were what was left of the words ‘I’m a fuken Gls’wgian’ so I knew that whatever he wanted, it was not to offer me a cup of tea and hoped it was not to ask which football club I supported, Celtic or Rangers!

“Pardon, I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Did you say something?” “Aye” he said in gutteral Glaswegian as he took the half smoked fag from his lips. “och, I dinny ken youse waa an Englishman, but I asked if yoose wa gooing ta tha Coe”. Before I could stop myself I replied rather quickly, “yes as a matter of fact I am, do you want a lift?” regretting it instantly once it was said.

The gangly youth sat down shouted for “two laarge brews hen”, [ok so I was wrong!] threw me his baccy tin offering me a rollup. Sliding the tin back in his direction, I said no thanks as I had given it up. As he reached out for his baccy tin I noticed his tattoos, love and hate across both knuckles accompanied with the usual gang related dots on the skin between thumb and forefinger. On his forehead he had a star which was repeated on the left ear lobe.

I refrained from asking him about his tattoos as I knew such questions were unwelcome at the best of times. He sat there watching me, his eyes staring, unblinking, which was both off putting and disconcerting. However, as I had done some basic psychology at University, I knew that silence and giving the ‘eye’ is sometimes used as a means of testing out someone else’s mettle.

After a while, he asked, almost demanded to know “whit youse aftee pal”. Not quite sure whether he was referring to the fact that he thought that I was staring at him or not, or he was challenging me to a fight, I asked him what he meant, standing up to take off my denim jacket to expose my tattooed arms as I did so. This caught his attention. I had him thinking now. It appeared I had turned the tables and waited for his next move which came almost instantly, “Whit youse gooing to da in tha Coe then laddie”. The penny dropped so I told him that I was not going to do anything specific just going to see what the conditions were like before making up my mind. “Nort veery talketive are yous paaal” with the emphasis on the word pal.

In an instant, memories came flooding back of the two years as a twelve-year-old that I spent living on the outskirts of Glasgow in 1956/57. Gangs were all the rage back in the 1950’s, teddy boys ruled in most towns and cities but there was also those who were not teddy boys who made up a wide variety of gangs, usually comprising of lads from either a long street or a council estate.

The daily behaviour of such gangs were two fold – first to shop lift for kicks rather than for profit (apart from when it was sweets or cigarettes), second to commit minor acts of vandalism, scrumping fruit from orchards, and generally being a nuisance to their local community and society in general, and third, to protect your territory from other gangs.

It was generally accepted that boys were expected to join a gang and I was no different, and as I knew that once you were a gang member, you had the protection of your own gang member friends, it was a no-brainer, so when told to join the gang by lads on the estate, I readily agreed.

Fraser was the street boss and his word was never questioned. In the greater scheme of things, all the street gangs in Greenock (where we lived), were called ‘Wasters’ by those who lived in the city and each had its own preferred ‘weapon’ – flick knives, chains, catapults, bats, and knuckle dusters. The gang on my estate was called the Hatchet Warriors and it does not take Dixon of Dock Green to know what our gang’s preferred ‘weapon’ was!

I could see that my new found Glaswegian friend was getting impatient for an answer to his “Nort veery talketive are yous paaal” statement, so I shook the memories away and said without giving it a second thought “It’s just that I’m tired of driving, you must know how it is paaaaaal”.

He appeared to flinch at my seemingly challenging response and asked me where I was from, what did I do, how old was I, and more to the point, “whit does yon tattoo mean laddie”, as he jabbed a tobacco stained finger to my right forearm, but I was elsewhere. My mind had switched to that time in 1957 when I went with my gang and eight other ‘Waster’ gangs to do as Fraser put it, “haaav a feeecken geed ruck with tha tooonie wankers”, names given to gangs from the city of Glasgow. I recalled the splattered blood, the roar of the gangs as they set into each other, I heard the yells of triumph, the yells of pain and the clanging of the police cars as they rushed to end such ridiculous carnage. I know my hatchet hit something or someone and I was pleased that within two days, my father came home to tell us he was posted to Northern Ireland (he was in the Armed Forces) and we were to leave in two days-time. I was relieved that I would not be around when the townie gangs came to take their revenge.

Thinking rather foolishly that he may well have been one of the gang that I and my other pals wreaked havoc on in Glasgow all those years ago, I was paranoid that he had recognized me. Once I realized that this was impossible as that was some twenty years ago and I had improved with age! I just said that it was the mark of a group of RAF lads who had formed an elite club consisting of those airman who had cheated death whilst carrying out their duties.

He was hooked now, I just reeled him in with the knowledge that I was in control and he needed to know more. I explained what had happened many years earlier, when stationed in Germany and I was working inside a confined space of a Canberra aircraft and the ejection seats went off accidentally, but I managed to do the impossible, crouch down between the two front seats which even a stick of rhubarb would find difficult, and I lived to tell the tale.

Sitting there with his mouth open wide, he just leaned forward stuck out his right hand and said, “I like yoouse pal, yoor no feart bastad reet enough”. He shouted for two more brews and we started to have a decent conversation. We discussed my time in Greenock, my Scottish ancestry, my love for all things Scottish, and by the end of twenty minutes’ conversation I had been told his life story, given the names of all his family and we had agreed that not all “bloody Englishmen were wankers”.

He said his name was Tommy Scott, although his family referred to him as Tam and his friends referred to him as Scotty. As I knew there was no chance we were related and that as we had only just met, there was no way he would consider me his friend, I erred on caution by not calling him by any name at all, this way I would be on safe ground, hopefully.

He wanted to know where I lived in Greenock, what school I went to, what gang I was in. This was it I thought, the bugger has recognized me and is just toying with me. I knew in my heart that it would have been impossible for him to recognize me even if he was a member of any gang that we fought with but even if he didn’t recognize me, finding out I was a member of ‘that’ gang, might just be enough for him to exact some revenge right there, right now.

I clenched my fists under the table and told him I was a member of the hatchet warriors. I waited for him to make the first move, but did not expect him to stand up so quick whilst I was still seated, catching me off guard. He leaned across the table “Fack ma ald boots pal, whit a fucken heed banger yous arr” was all he said with a grin that put any Cheshire cat to shame.

He held out an outstretched scrawny hand “poot it thar pal, whit a fucken heed banger”. I assumed, hopefully, that he wanted to shake my hand so stood keeping the left fist clenched, just in case, and took his hand. He clasped his other hand over the handshake and shook it until I thought one of my false teeth was going to drop out.

It would appear that the incident went around Glasgow gangs like proverbial wild fire – blood curdling roars as youths tore into each other – police cars racing to the scene to investigate calls from the public, a by-stander taken to hospital with shock, three young lads accompanied him but for different reasons, and four were seen running off screaming for their mums, some wiping the blood away as they tried to evade the onslaught. All in all, the hatchet warriors had gained a reputation and as such, three months after we left to go to Northern Ireland, they were involved in a gang fight in the city centre when one of the hatchet gang was killed, knifed through the heart.

My new found Glaswegian friend did not recall the name of the poor sod who met his untimely death so whether or not it was Fraser, I’ll never know.

For his part, my enthusiastic new found traveling companion, was a member of the Easterhouse putty gang. Don’t ask me where putty comes in as I dread to think so did not bother to ask him, I just took his word for it that his gang were well known for things they did with putty and left it at that.

Cleary I had risen dramatically in Tam’s estimation and was someone he wanted to be friends with, why I don’t know because if he knew the truth, in reality I am a pacifist by nature, he would no doubt rate me a ‘soft pussy’. However, he was fine with what he knew so I was not going to deprive him of any excitement he was feeling at being in the company of one of the ‘hatchet warriors’, anyway I was relishing the status he was according me as well as the free flow of tea coming my way.

He said he was a shipyard worker who spent every weekend with his mates climbing in the hills and mountains around the Trossachs, but this weekend they were going to visit the Coe as he so eloquently put it, “weeve goot unfinished busniss oop theer pal, and this weeken is when weer gaing to seetle it”. I had no idea what he was talking about but I was sure it had nothing to do with any business proposition.

We left the café and as I opened the car door for him to throw his tattered rucksack onto the back seat, he held out his hand again and said, “caal me Tam”. I had made a new friend!

When he got in my battered old car, he delighted me by taking off his boots, which resulted in the car being filled with an aromatic smell that would make a Turkish whore house smell sweet, not that I would know what one smelled like as when I went to Turkey, it was for climbing rock, honestly.

He put his feet onto the dashboard and fell asleep. There was no way I was going to wake him to ask him to take his smelly feet down from the dash so just sighed and drove off. As we drove down the main street of Callander, he woke and started to sing. I ignored his singing and allowed my thoughts to dwell on the gully on Ben Ledi as we rounded the bend which brought it into view on our left. It appeared to be in good condition and not wanting to bring Tam’s attention to it, I tried to not make it obvious that I was looking past him to the gully.

He must have caught me looking side wards and thought I was looking at him so he stopped singing whatever song he was well into. “Eh pal, sorry aboot the sang, I ken forgoot youse was a bloody Englishman”. “Oh don’t worry”, came my swift reply a little embarrassingly as he should think himself so lucky that I would want to look at him! “It’s just that I wondered what you were singing that’s all” came my reply, quick as a flash to dispel any thoughts he might be harbouring.

Small chit chat ensued for another hour as we drove towards Rannoch Moor and at one point, he looked as if he was going to start singing again so I distracted him by asking where his mates were if they were all going to the Coe, and why had he not gone with them? His answer was to say the least, not surprising given my evaluation of his lifestyle back in Glasgow.

Apparently on the Thursday night he and his mates had gone out for a drink or two which resulted in him getting into a fight around 2.30am with a bouncer who refused to let him into a night club, because as Tam said, he was not drunk enough. Tam took a dislike to this discrimination and showed the bouncer what he thought of him. The rest of the morning was spent in the police cells sobering up. When he was released around 8am because the custody sergeant could not be bothered to do any paperwork as he was about to go off duty, Tam found out that his mates had left without him. He had hitchhiked to Stirling which confused me a little as the more direct route for him was a straight north from Glasgow. This conundrum however, was soon settled when he said the only wagon that stopped for him was going to Stirling so he just had to take it.

Conversation turned to climbing which was fine for me as my eyelids were getting heavy and I was losing the battle to keep them open. Tam never offered to do any of the driving so I assumed that he either couldn’t or wouldn’t, so kept quiet about it and just continued with a window open from time to time and the occasional sharp slap across the face to keep my attention especially when Tam fell asleep, which was often. He asked me if I knew any Scottish climbers to which I replied several but have only climbed with one particular Scotsman, a Jock McGowen who I served with in the RAF in Germany. He had a broken nose, a legacy from his youth and as it had set at an angle, which made a lasting impression on you.

He asked where Jock came from and when I said I think it was Paisley, he slapped his left knee and said, “Weel, shag ma auld boots pal, I ken wee Jock, he lives in ma ma’s street”. A further descriptive input from us both confirmed that his Jock and my Jock were one and the same. I asked how he was getting on and was sorry to hear that Jock had cancer and that he had been given a medical discharge from the RAF and was counting his days.

Before I knew it, we were driving down the road into the Glen, past the Buchaille wearing her white mantle, round a few curves and then turning off right to the Clachaig Inn where he said his mates would be. As we pulled up, he said his mates were there already. I asked him how he knew and he pointed to a van parked in the corner. There staring out of the back window was a blow up doll with gaping mouth surrounded by ruby rich lips. Around her neck was a sign which said, ‘Hurry up darling, ma lips await your manhood’. “Ay, that’s Billy’s van aright” Tam said with a smile.

Frank Grant:2016

Part Two of The Gully- Next Week

Sinking like a Stone

The Rock

John Muir- The Wildest, Highest Places

Mountain Characters: Spirits in the Sky

Lone Star..... 'Trespassing Across America'.....review

Two Short Summers: A profile of Brian Kellett.

Terra Pericilosa: Speak, why are you here?

Hay Dream Believer: Under the Tump....Review

Three men in a boat

The Fear Barrier

The Old Men of Hoy

Snapshot

Wizz

The Ballad of Idwal Slabs

Climbing Days....Reviewed

Slippery Jim

Ashes

Classic Rock: A fanfare for the common man

Simon McCartney's 'The Bond'...reviewed

The Gully....Part One