In reply to heavy:
It’s a slow day at work and since I've bailed from going to Scotland for the weekend I thought I’d recount the epic that resulted in the second photo in the article. It wasn’t a huge epic by many's standards and I’ve since graduated to bigger better feats of incompetence but it was my first and as such holds a special place in my memory.
It was our first expedition (summer 2005) and we were all suitably incompetent, I remember getting the bus out of La Paz at the end and being genuinely surprised the 4 of us had made it (relatively) unscathed.
The photo was taken half way through the trip, we had completed our main objectives (some new routes on some obscure peaks in the Bolivian Apolobamba) so were feeling pretty cocky. We’d gone over to the north side of the range to do some exploring/repeating of existing routes and me and Sam had picked one of the larger peaks – I think it was called Collo, although I’d have to check the guide book. We summited by 11-12ish, up a grade D snowy icy ridge, pretty easily after a long slog in from basecamp early that morning. We’d has to cross through a particularly horrible glacier which required vertical limit style jumping to cross (this is almost certainly bollocks but that’s how I remember it) – an important point for later in the story.
We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves and after finding the ascent route so straightforward and thought let’s go for an aesthetic full traverse of the mountain. This was our first mistake – the guidebook described our new proposed decent route as ‘traversing tottering piles of choss’ but we thought, hey were gnarly mountaineers how bad can it be? After a few hours it turned out it was very bad, we were going very slowly, abseiling down and then climbing up towers of horribly loose rock on the ridge. At this rate we realised we were going to get benighted – a scary prospect since we had, being super hardcore, gone quite lightweight with no stove or shelter, a litre of water each, which we had mostly drunk, and a few horrible Bolivian nut bars. So mistake number two was embarked upon – we decided that the face looked ok and we may be able to down climb/ abseil it. We got a good anchor and got one ab in, just to get nicely committed. We then found the rock was both loose and compact, if you can imagine such a thing, so no more anchors could be found, but the ground wasn’t too hard, so we started simul climbing down – sharp intake of breath and cue dramatic music.
Retrospectively small down climbing a loose unknown 500m rock face at nearly 6000m was a pretty stupid thing to do. We managed a few more pitches before the inevitable – a brick sized rock came off and landed square on my head before bouncing onto my leg. This smashed my helmet up, (an old school ecrin rock – no mean feat) concussing me and badly bruised my leg, but somehow I managed to hold and on didn’t come off the face – I remember trying to get some gear in and tie on but I could for the life of me tie any knots. Sam climbed down, sorted me out and we regrouped on a ledge. Down now seemingly like a bad option we started traversing until we eventually hit the shoulder of the mountain, some more truly horrible down climbing past rock with the constancy of cheese (Philadelphia not a mature cheddar) where you could literally dig holds out followed before we made it to the glacier – just in time to see the sun set!
Now the real fun began – it was about a 3-4 hour walk to basecamp but in the dark there was no way we could find out way back through the heavily crevassed glacier. We tried for a few hours before giving up. By this time it was pitch black – there was no moon but a very clear sky so it was pretty cold and the batteries in both our head touches had died. We first tried walking across the glacier to the next valley, just to get lower where it would be warmer and sheltered, but that way was blocked by another horrible glacier. On the way back I then managed to fall up to my waste in a crevasse, fortunately I managed to get my axe in the other side and scrambled out in a panic. We then sat down for a bit thinking maybe we could wait till morning, but after 15 minutes or so decided it was too cold – our remaining water had frozen and we were down to one horrible nut bar each – which were too rank to contemplate. Neither of us could feel our feet, we only had thin leather boots on. I had a bit of a paddy at this point and spent some time having a jolly good shout at the surrounding mountains. This didn’t help our predicament however so plan C was formed – we knew the peak that split the two glaciers we had tried to descend ended in a ridge above basecamp which we wasn’t glaciated. So we managed to climb this smaller peak (the rest of the group cruelly never let me record this as a new route as apparently things climbed due to gross incompetence don’t count). Which took us finally down to basecamp the other side though a horrible penitenta field, which is no fun in the dark with an injured leg, our friends in camp said they could hear my winging a long time before the saw us. We got to the tent 24 hours after setting out just as out two very unimpressed friends, who had done a much harder climb that day, and had their own mini epic, were about to set off and try to rescue us. The photo was taken by Sam just after we crawled into the tent.
As winter continues to grip the hills MCofS Mountain Safety Advisor Heather Morning looks at the risk factors and symptoms of hypothermia, and offers some advice on how to avoid it.
