Chapter One

Background to it all

Alan Rouse gives direction – my early climbing – the great alpine classics – ice climbing trips to Scotland – early Himalayan ventures – The Mountaineers’ Mountaineer – photoshoot at Harrison’s Rocks

One day, back in 1981, at a drunken climbing party in Sheffield, a twenty five-year-old taxman found himself talking to Alan Rouse, then one of Britain’s most talented and forward-looking mountaineers.

I felt a little uncomfortable and awestruck. Al Rouse was very much a leading light of his generation with achievements ranging from first ascents in the Himalaya to reputedly drinking vomit from Noel Odell’s pre-war Everest boot at a Cambridge University Mountaineering Club dinner. The London-based group that I was part of felt that such achievements were to be admired if not repeated. To me he was very much a contemporary hero. I felt slightly honoured that he was talking to me and listened awkwardly whilst he enthused about South America.

I was of course aware of various possibilities but my civil service job came with a limited holiday entitlement and I was very wary of the time commitment of greater range climbing trips and the health problems posed by high altitude. That said, I had just climbed the North Face of the Eiger and was close to completing my tick list of alpine classics. I was ready to try somewhere new and exploratory. Al Rouse caught me at just the right time. His enthusiasm for the potential for short trips to Peru was infectious and led directly to Chris Watts and me making the first ascent of the South Buttress of Taulliraju in 1982.

At that time I was obsessed. I tended to regard any day off work, which was not spent climbing, as a day wasted. I often wonder whether failure would have prompted me to drop the idea of greater range climbs as an inefficient use of my limited holiday entitlement. But, as it turned out, we had completed the climb and were ready to return home after just two weeks away. A realisation of what could be achieved, whilst holding down a full-time job, dawned on me. And success gave me my first taste of an enduring sense of euphoria which, combined with the eye-opening, mind-expanding experience of operating in the developing world, ensured that I was hooked. A way of life had been born.

But, going back farther, it was my father George’s fault really. I can thank him for introducing me to the pleasures of the outdoors, firstly via walking trips in North Wales and the Lakes and then to rock-climbing at the sandstone outcrops of the Weald – nearer our London home.

I would not pretend today that I was exactly enthusiastic about all of those early trips but they must have had some long-lasting effect. In fact, I now find myself repeating the process and introducing my own children Tess (thirteen) and Alec (ten), to the rigours of outdoor action. George had limited experience of the outdoors and to a certain extent we were learning together, progressing from hill-walking to scrambling and then on to rock climbs where we peaked at around the Very Difficult grade.

By 1969 I was thirteen, and George was now keen to get involved in alpine mountaineering. Up till then we had sort of just found our way – but George was more hesitant on the mountaineering front. Twenty years before he had accumulated some unwelcome experience of alpine crevasses and benightment. Such memories led him to book us in for a week’s course run by the Austrian Alpine Club in the Tyrol’s Stubai Alps. I was too young but he persuaded them to take me anyway.

The whole experience was something of an eye-opener. Not only were the mountains monstrously huge and spectacular compared to those back home, but dangers such as rockfall and gaping crevasses were memorably new experiences. At one point it was decided that the group should practise crevasse rescue and I have an enduring memory of an extremely refined young man called Ignatius smiling grimly whilst walking boldly over the edge of an open crevasse. The idea was that another member of the course would arrest his fall and Ignatius would then demonstrate self-rescue by prusiking up the rope. This somehow didn’t happen and the rope-holder was soon skidding rapidly towards the edge. The guide was next on the rope but the bare ice of the nearly snow-free glacier gave no ready purchase. Ignatius fell heavily onto a convenient snow bridge whilst the guide stopped the second man two feet from the edge. This crevasse rescue business looked all very exciting. I have treated them with great respect ever since.

But George was not to be deterred. With the course completed he set about using our new found experience to the full. The next few summers were spent ticking off the easier routes up the 4000-metre peaks of Switzerland until, after a few years off (teenage revolt), I was suddenly motivated to tackle some of the famous alpine climbs I had seen.

By this stage I had been visiting the southern sandstone outcrops under my own steam for some years and the friends I made there were obvious climbing partners for a first foray onto harder alpine climb