: Mick Fowler
: Vertical Pleasure Early climbs in Britain, the Alps, the Andes and the Himalaya/The secret life of a taxman
: Vertebrate Digital
: 9781906148737
: 1
: CHF 5.30
:
: Sonstige Sportarten
: English
: 300
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Vertical Pleasure is the first set of climbing memoirs from Mick Fowler - Britain's hardest-climbing tax inspector, the 'Mountaineer's Mountaineer' and recipient of the Piolet d'Or. Vertical Pleasure begins with Fowler's early teenage years on easy British rock and Swiss 4000m peaks under the guidance of his father. A frenzied spell follows, with climbing worked in around jobs, discos and girlfriends before Fowler takes a job at the tax office and settles in London. Long-distance drives in clapped out mini-vans see him tackle new winter routes in the Scottish Highlands, always managing to return for work on Monday mornings. He dodges vomiting fulmars, sinking boats and over-enthusiastic policemen in the pursuit of first-ascents on remote sea-stacks and crumbling coastal cliffs, and tackles Alpine testpieces as he develops into one of Britain's finest mountaineers. Along the way, the sport of chalk-climbing is born on the White Cliffs of Dover and a burst and frozen water pipe allows the first winter ascent of St Pancras station in London. It is when he moves in to the Greater Ranges that Fowler really begins to shine. With climbers such as Victor Saunders and Steve Sustad he begins a run of first ascents on peaks like Taulliraju, Spantik and Cerro Kishtwar. Written with a dry sense of humour, Vertical Pleasure is a must read for the enthusiastic rock, winter and Alpine climber - a classic of the genre.

Chapter 2


Laying the Foundations


North Wales trips in the minivan – first Tremadoc climbs: Plumb, Meshach, Stromboli, Tensor – the Padarn Lake and Joe Brown – early climbs on Cloggy and in the Pass – a free attempt on Zukator

I got my driving experience driving fourteen miles a day between George’s house in Wembley and Harrow Council where I had drifted into a job when I gave up on being a trainee quantity surveyor. This latter had involved four evenings a week at college, an effort that I decided was disproportionate to my enthusiasm for quantity surveying. Working for Harrow Council required no commitment and nurtured no enthusiasm, but it funded the disco scene and put petrol in the van, and by Christmas I had ten drives to work under my belt and felt ready for a week in North Wales with Mike and Jon.

The tedious 65 mph grinds (my top speed) up the M1 and M6 on a Friday came to be enlivened by vigorous arguments about the routes we should be aiming for on arrival and ferocious quiz sessions based on our devouring of the climbing guides. As a result of these I am still able to quote the order of difficulty of the Extremely Severe climbs listed in the back of the 1970 Crew/Harris guide to Tremadoc, a particularly useless talent which has attracted much derision at parties over the years. A stop at Hollies transport cafe near the junction of the M6 and A5 became the key to Friday night manoeuvres and a focal point for many carloads of climbers travelling to Wales from London and the South Midlands. What the regular lorry-driver clientele made of our flowery arm movements as we sought to impress each other with climbing tales can only be imagined. But a resilient team of serving ladies coped with us all. The Hollies was and still is an interesting microculture. Before visiting this fine establishment I would never have considered a transport cafe as a venue for a romantic evening out. But one frequently sees couples enjoying just that at the Hollies.

Beyond Hollies the A5 is, of course, now much improved but in those days the winding road responded to those who knew it well and, with rapidly increasing confidence behind the wheel, it was possible to make up some of the time lost to faster vehicles on the motorway. Even so it was still five to six hours’ driving from Wembley to Llanberis. Rarely did we arrive before midnight. Mike Morrison would take a lift up with Bob Gookey of the Croydon Club and meet us at Humphrey’s Barn. His stories of driving with Bob went a long way towards restoring my battered driving ego. It seemed that on one occasion Bob had missed the M6 turn-off from the M1 and simply reversed his ancient Ford back down the hard shoulder until he could start off again in the fast lane of the M6. On another occasion he had a brush with a crash barrier and careered across the M1 towards a concrete bridge strut. A fine piece of corrective steering saw the front end preserved but the back of the van swung round hard into the strut. In the back two newcomers were snoozing contentedly in their sleeping-bags until the force of the impact burst the back doors open and two cocooned bodies spewed forth to bump uncomfortably along the hard shoulder.

Humphrey’s Barn in the Llanberis Pass was a favourite North Wales haunt in the early 1970s. It was not quite as basic as it sounds, containing twenty or so bunkbeds arranged around the walls, and boasting rudimentary washing facilities. Certainly on a wet and windy winter weekend it was distinctly more comfortable than the traditional Llanberis Pass campsites. Like most establishments, the barn has fallen in and out of favour over the years but at Christmas 1974 when we first went there it was definitely the ‘in’ place to be – so much so that overcrowding was a serious problem. I knew very few of the people there when we arrived but a healthy scene of after-pub banter and robust debate over who would get the beds as opposed to the floor guaranteed that my cir