WELL, as I remember it, Phil was downtown and I was noshing this amazingly gruesome Camembert and getting traces of it on all the best pages in the guidebook. I like guidebooks – know all the routes back to front – but you’re not supposed to ask how many I’ve done. And my maps, too, are impressively torn considering how rarely they’ve been opened above the ale-line.
The day before we’d spent many happy hours on the Obergabelhorn and had returned older, wiser, and knowing one thing for sure – that snow and ice routes just weren’t in condition. So it was the rock routes I was pondering as I lay there in the sun, and soon my thoughts turned to the Weisshorn, an old score. Of course, thought I, the Schaligrat faces south – shouldn’t be too bad – and after that the snow should have disappeared from the Zmutt...
The Bahnhof next morning was all hustle and bustle. No time to buy tickets – a train was just leaving. So we ploughed our way through a sea of flower-bedecked paunches, leapt aboard, and slammed the door on that unique mixture of German gutterals and American drawls that is Zermatt.
Now Randa is only two stops, so we reckoned on a free ride with any luck. But just as the village came into sight a door slid back and in strode this individual with a threatening tool clutched in his hand.
"No tickets! Where do you go?"
"Randa."
"Randa not good. Next stop St. Niklaus."
The dismayed silence was broken only by the rattle of the train. Then Phil started asking if we could get back from St. Niklaus without extra charge, but having bitter experience of the Swiss I was summing astronomical figures to see how much we were going to be out of pocket.
The collector. however, was grappling with the door. "Quick!" he urged – francs changed hands rapidly and then we jumped. drawing amazed looks from other passengers. The train had stopped at a signal outside Randa – a lucky break.
Up and up and up we went but the Taschhorn and Dom went up faster; the sun was high enough up already and just beamed down on us, hot and sticky. Phil’s secret hoard of Dextrosol must have taken a beating that day, because he was really moving. Floundering along behind, I just cursed and cursed and sweated gallon after gallon.
Well, at last the hut was reached; we brewed up and spent an hour or so chewing schwarzbrot. You could die of exhaustion eating that stuff, but it does keep (some people use the same loaf two seasons running). Anyway, stomachs satisfied, we went up to the glacier and took a look at the route to the Schalijoch. We didn’t like what we saw – one could get really lost trying to find a way through that choss in the dark.
Evening, and the oil lamp flickered around the cosy hut. Our prayers had been answered: across the table an old guide was attacking a huge steak like a grizzly bear. He had apparently done the route over twenty times, so we were feeling far more confident – the tricky routefinding to the Schalijoch would be no problem now. On our left were his clients, two stalwarts of the L.A.C. fresh from an icy ascent of the Peuterey. We were quite impressed and tried not to eat our spaghetti in too revolting a manner.
At 1.30 the next morning a long string of lights wound its way across the névés and onto the lowest bay of the Schali glacier – no less than three guided parties now, if you please, and there at the end Phil and myself trying to assume an air of independence...
"Don’t they go slowly!" whispers Phil.
"Yes," I grunt, but my attention is focused on the Schalihorn where I can just discern a lurking cloud – an unhealthy sign as the sky was clear earlier.
Suddenly the guided parties stop. To maintain a discreet distance we are forced to do the same. What can be happening – surely they aren’t turning back already? It is some time before we realise that they are merely roping up.
The first hints of dawn And us strapping on crampons at the top of the 700 ft. rock wall which separates the central and upper bay of the glacier. Here the rock crumbles away like gravel beneath your boots, and safety considerations force the little procession of parties to close right up.
It is not a good dawn. I look round at the grey light and shredded clouds and shiver apprehensively.
"Now young men." the old guide interrupts my thoughts, "would you like to go ahead for a while?"
I can see us forging ahead into the cloud, never to be seen again like Mallory and Irvine. Not being a hero. I delay the decision by asking "How do you like the weather?"
"At the moment it does not look good." comes the reply, "but we can lose nothing by going to the Schalijoch."
I shrug my shoulders and we start up the glacier.
And so at last we reached the joch, finding the final approach across slopes of steep rubble extremely trying. Shortly after six o’clock we left the other parties eating their second breakfasts and started up the ridge. We had just climbed the first and most difficult step when suddenly the clouds rolled back and we could see tower after tower of red rock rising before us, light clouds tugging at their narrow crests. And although the ridge was barely started, the position was already tremendous.
The climbing was interesting, but nowhere difficult. The sheer length of the ridge, however. was astounding. I think we were drugged by it all, aware of nothing but the immediate problems of. the climbing and the need to keep moving. I have impressions of firm sun-warmed rock, all reds and yellows, of sunshine and still air, and of a sort of machine-like motion through all this, moving together mostly but snapping on belays for the steeper sections. And behind us the serrated edge fell away, ever lengthening.
On the last section of the ridge we enter the cloud again and the atmosphere is more forbidding. The guidebook speaks of five gendarmes before the summit, but we must have climbed at least seven or eight and still they keep coming, weird shapes looming through the mist: each time we pray it will be the top. Then I clamber up a little rocky corner and we are there. It is a great relief – with only one short rest in over four hours it has become a definite effort to keep going. The time is 10.30, our time from the but nine hours.
Four thousand five hundred metres and you can’t see a thing! All that exist in the world are two people, a cone of snow, and a thick mist. It is remarkably still; no sound and not a breath of wind. Summit photos show figures floating in a veil of white. We spend an hour on the summit and the only other party to arrive is from the East ridge. We feel quite pleased, but we’ve yet to descend.
You know, we were quite right about these snow routes – they just aren’t in condition. Take this East ridge for example; on the more level sections the snow is soft and knee deep, and here where it’s quite steep there’s just ice covered by a layer of tinkling ice granules. We’ve been descending on our front points for several hundred feet now, tiring on the ankles but the only way to get a safe purchase. When I look between my stabbing feet I can see Phil some twenty feet below kicking rhythmically. Make those points bite. boy!
The snow ridge levels off, but becomes narrow and very exposed. In places the hot weather of recent weeks has rotted its very foundations, and great sections seem poised for a topple into space.
Just here the crest is divided into two thin flanges by a narrow track about two feet deep. and the flange on the right leans out- wards and is obviously unstable. almost a small cornice in fact. I am following the line of footsteps when suddenly my right foot shoots through into space and I subside into the trench. My weight is supported over the drop mainly by the rotten right wall. Panic! How can I get up again without dislodging both the cornice and myself? Phil gets ready for the sensational jump and I start easing myself up. For a horrible moment I am leaning heavily on the unstable snow – but it holds.
The ridge turns rocky, the going is easy and the mind wanders ... It’s hard to decide whether all this effort is worth it. Of course if there was a luxurious bed waiting in the valley things wouldn’t be so bad. A good bed can make all other hardships seem bearable – not so a soggy pit and punctured lilo which serve only to induce traumatic visions of tantalising women and great heaps of goodies...
The need for a decision interrupts my thoughts. We can either descend a couloir or continue down the ridge to the head of the glacier, which will be longer but safer. Through a break in the cloud Phil spots a nasty bergschrund on the glacier. We have already had quite enough fun with bergschrunds for one season so we plunge down the couloir.
It is a bad decision. The couloir is long, steep, and atrociously loose. In the upper part a fusilade of stones whines over our heads. and from that point on I can feel the nerves standing out like pin-pricks all over me. We are sending down a stream of boulders, unavoidably. If the East ridge party enters the couloir above us our position will not be enviable.
It takes an hour to descend the couloir, and the last few hundred feet are just a frantic rush for safety. Then at last we are out on the glacier and the tension is off. Half-glissading and half falling, half- running and half-stumbling, we tumble down the snowy slopes thinking only of the hut and a brew.
But when we get there, at 3.30, the warden is nowhere to be seen and the stove isn’t even alight...
Evening fell as we approached Randa and the rain slanted down from a murky sky. Phil thought he saw a train so we forced unwilling legs into a run and reached the station panting, condensation dripping from our cagoules. But Phil was wrong.
Three hours later we were still waiting. Night had fallen, and the little group of people on the platform was beginning to realise that for some reason the trains weren’t running. It was too much effort to dig duvets from the depths of rucksacks so we were cold, and having hardly eaten all day we felt miserably hungry. Above all what we wanted was kip. As it is a two hour walk from Randa to Zermatt, we were pretty angry.
We got back in the end by hitching lifts along the cart track which the inhabitants use as a road – and next day I actually managed to get some money back off the Swiss for the tickets we hadn’t used. In Zermatt it had been raining heavily and the campsite was a sea of mud. We squelched over to the tent, threw down our gear, and slept.