The two trucks rattled and bounced over the rough dirt road in a swirl of dust that was instantly whipped away by the blast of the wind. On either side of the road was a forest of dead trees, a graveyard of whitened skeletons with limbs twisted by incessant wind and bleached by sun and weather; a sky filled with a fleet of great sausage-like clouds, brown-grey zeppelins driven in from the Pacific by the constant fury of the Roaring Forties. In the distance, just visible above the petrified forest, were the mountains – jagged dark shapes that seemed dwarfed by the high vault of the sky.
It was the 28th November 1962 and we were on the last leg of our journey to climb the Central Tower of Paine. It didn’t matter that we were cold and uncomfortable in the back of the lorry, sandwiched between packing cases and the canvas roof, for we were very nearly at the end of our journey, soon to see the mountain we had to climb. This first glimpse of the objective is one of the most exciting moments of any expedition. Up to that point there is always a feeling of unreality about the entire enterprise. It is difficult to believe that one will ever overcome all the mundane problems of raising money, begging equipment; it is even more difficult to imagine the jump from England to mountains in some distant corner of the earth.
We had spent over three weeks travelling from England, firstly by passenger liner to Valparaiso in Chile, then on an exhilarating flight down the spine of the Andes to Punta Arenas, a small windswept town on the Straits of Magellan, and now we were driving north, across the pampas, towards our objective.
The truck pulled up a small hill and round a shoulder; the ground, grass clad, with only the occasional lonely finger of a dead tree, stretched down into a shallow valley, rising gently on the other side to a low ridge. The pampas was like an Atlantic swell, rolling away into the foothills of the Paine Massif, dusty green, and yet the air was so clear that you could pick out each windswept shrub and protruding spine of rock. And there, some twenty miles away, was the Central Tower of Paine – a slender blade of rock that at this distance seemed dominated by the squat mass of the mountains round it.
It was this peak that had triggered my resolve to abandon a conventional career and make a living around climbing, but at that instant, as we gazed at the distant nobble of rock which was to be the focus of our lives for the next few weeks, I was filled with a simple excitement at the prospect of tackling it. One of the features of climbing is the intensity of concentration it exacts. In its basic form, if you are poised on a rock wall a hundred feet above the ground, all other thoughts and problems are engulfed by the need for absolute concentration. There is no room for anything other than the problems of staying in contact with the rock and negotiating the next few moves. In this respect, climbing offers an escape, or perhaps it would be better to describe it as a relaxation from everyday worries of human relationships, money or jobs. This relaxation lasts for longer than just those moments when you are actually climbing and life is in jeopardy.
Sitting on a ledge, belaying one’s partner, senses are extra acute; the feel of the rock under hand, of
