The Next Horizon Read online

  THE NEXT HORIZON

  THE NEXT HORIZON

  Chris Bonington

  www.v-publishing.co.uk

  – CONTENTS –

  Dedication

  Chapter One – Chilean Expedition

  Chapter Two – Christmas In Patagonia

  Chapter Three – The Central Tower of Paine

  Chapter Four – Woodland

  Chapter Five – Alpine Summer

  Chapter Six – Home Ground

  Chapter Seven – Hogmanay

  Chapter Eight – Tele-Climbing At Cheddar

  Chapter Nine – Rassemblement International

  Chapter Ten – The Right-Hand Pillar of Brouillard

  Chapter Eleven – Eiger Direct: Preparations

  Chapter Twelve – Eiger Direct: The Climb

  Chapter Thirteen – Eiger Direct: The Summit

  Chapter Fourteen – Sangay From The East

  Chapter Fifteen – Sangay From The West

  Chapter Sixteen – The Old Man of Hoy

  Chapter Seventeen – Eskimoes

  Chapter Eighteen – The Valley of The Hunza

  Chapter Nineteen – The Blue Nile

  Chapter Twenty – Annapurna: Preparation

  Chapter Twenty-One – Annapurna: The Climb

  Chapter Twenty-Two – What Next?

  Maps and Diagrams

  Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  To Conrad, Daniel and Rupert

  – CHAPTER ONE –

  CHILEAN EXPEDITION

  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 the wind and sun, the shape of the hills – all these are perceived with an extra intensity. Absorption in immediate surroundings once again excludes one’s everyday life. On an expedition the same withdrawal from everyday affairs takes place, but here the expedition becomes a tiny little world of its own with, in microcosm, between its members, all the tensions and conflict that can take place in the larger world. The all-consuming aim is to climb the mountain of one’s choice and this transcends in importance anything that might be happening beyond it.

  For the next few weeks nothing mattered to me but this distant tower of rock and the small group of people who were concerned in climbing it.

  There were nine of us altogether, seven climbers, two wives (one of them my own), and a three-year-old child. Wendy, Elaine and young Martin were not part of the expedition but inevitably filled part of the story. Barrie Page, the leader of the expedition, was a geologist and had visited the Paine Group two years before as a member of a scientific expedition. With him had been two other members of our group, Derek Walker and Vic Bray. They had made a map of the area and carried out a geological survey, but they had been enthralled by the Towers of Paine: three magnificent granite spires, set in the midst of some of the most exciting rock scenery in South America. The smallest, the Northern Tower, had been climbed by an Italian expedition in 1958, but the Central and Southern Towers were unclimbed. The Central Tower was especially attractive, forming a perfect rock spire, sheer on every side. They didn’t have the equipment to tackle it but resolved to return. Barrie had invited Don Whillans and myself. I had at first refused because of my new job with Unilever, but had then realised that I could not resist the opportunity. The sixth member of the team was John Streetley, who had had a mercurial climbing career in the mid-fifties while studying at Cambridge, and had then returned to his native Trinidad to build up a successful business. He was going to join us later in the expedition. Ian Clough, with whom I had climbed the North Wall of the Eiger that summer, had joined us at the last minute, giving up a place he had at a teachers’ training college, and paying his own fare out.

  Our little convoy came to a halt at a police check-post – it was like a small Customs point, with a hut by the road and a red and white drop-bar barring our way. There were two carabineros in neat grey uniforms with pistols at their sides. They seemed almost to expect us. The chief, lean, tough-looking and very tanned, asked Barrie something in Spanish. He got out some papers; the carabinero looked at them but didn’t seem satisfied and started to grill Barrie. The other carabinero, a great slob of a man who reminded me of pictures I had seen of Hermann Goering, just looked bored.

  At first the rest of us had taken no notice, thinking that our passage through the checkpoint would be a routine matter, but we could quickly sense Barrie’s growing excitement and the hostility of the carabineros. We gathered round, tensed and anxious.

  ‘What’s up, Barrie?’ asked Don.

  ‘Oh, just a bit of bureaucracy,’ said Barrie, and kept arguing.

  ‘Seems to be more than that to me,’ said Don. ‘Why won’t the buggers let us through? We’ve got permission to climb the Tower, haven’t we?’

  ‘O
f course we have,’ said Barrie.

  ‘Well haven’t you got it with you in writing?’

  ‘We don’t need it. We’ve got blanket permission to go into the Paine Massif,’ said Barrie. ‘They’re just being awkward.’

  ‘Well they should bloody well know, shouldn’t they? Either you need permission or you don’t.’

  There was something about Barrie’s manner – he was a born salesman, effervescent, fast talking and very difficult to pin down – that was the very opposite to Don, who likes everything spelt out in black and white. The argument developed into a three-cornered battle between Barrie, Don and the carabineros, with very little communication between any of them. The post was at the Estancia Castillo, a big ranch managed, as many of the estancias are, by an Englishman. He eventually came to our rescue and talked us through the police post, calming our ragged nerves with a very English afternoon tea in his home. Set in the great empty space of the pampas, Mr Saunders’ house was what I imagine an English country house of forty years ago must have been like, with its array of servants, tea in a silver service and big soft armchairs nestling on a thick pile carpet. Our own appearance, modern-day climbers, must have seemed a little incongruous. We were still agitated by the brush with the police, the possibility that having come so close we could be stopped from reaching the Tower. We had already heard that an Italian climbing expedition was coming out later in the season. Don read Machiavellian plots into what had just happened.

  ‘The Italians could be behind this,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you asked for permission to climb the Tower, Barrie?’

  ‘Of course I did; it was all tied up in the general application. I was talking to the authorities in Santiago about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about having it down in black and white. Cut out the waffle, and let’s see your application.’

  ‘What on earth’s the point? I haven’t got it here anyway.’

  ‘Well, there you are, if you haven’t got permission in black and white I reckon those Itis are behind this. They’ll try to stop us any way they can; I’ve seen it before.’

  One obvious problem was the ambiguity of the title of our expedition. When Barrie, Vic and Derek had been to the area before, they had called themselves the South Patagonia Survey Expedition. To maximise on any goodwill gained by this earlier expedition, Barrie had named ours ‘The South Patagonia Survey Expedition II 1962/3’. Don, therefore, had grounds for his suspicion that Barrie could have failed to make a specific application to climb the Central Tower.

  And the argument went on and on; it had developed into a witchhunt against Barrie with, I suspect, very little justice; but we all wanted a scapegoat to ease our fears. The Saunders just looked bewildered and seemed quite relieved when we continued our journey.

  Another twenty miles over open grassland, with the massif of the Paine getting ever bigger on the horizon, and we reached Estancia Cerro Guido. This was run by another British family, the Neilsons. By European standards it was huge, with 100,000 head of sheep and covering 300 square miles. Both the Estancias, and indeed the bulk of Chilean Patagonia, were owned by a single company that had originally been under British control but had been turned over to the Chileans. The Chilean Government had then forced the British to sell off some of its lands, but it remained a landowner of immense power. Most of their farms were still managed by Britons, who lived at a high standard of living with practically no security. Their pay was not particularly high, yet they received their keep and a lavish entertainment allowance so that they could look after guests sent down by the company. In this way they were professional hosts as well as sheep farmers.

  Theo Neilson was a tall, distinguished-looking man, with an air of sadness, almost defeat, about him. His wife, Marie, bubbled with vitality and obviously loved plenty of people around. They gave us a wonderfully warm welcome, put us up for the night, and that evening we had a magnificent dinner; yet it seemed strange to be sitting around a formal dinner table, being waited on by uniformed waitresses, here in the middle of the pampas. I felt guilty about my impatience with the long-drawn-out meal and conversation; an impatience caused partly by the fact that I am shy about talking in a big group. But more than this was a longing to be beneath the open sky, close to the grass and earth, without the need to make polite conversation to one’s next-door neighbour.

  But the next morning we set out on the final leg of our journey to the base of the Paine. The rough dirt track curled through undulating hills, past little rock outcrops and the skeletons of dead trees. Pink flamingo rose laboriously from a small lake as our truck rattled past. Big woolly sheep browsed on the short coarse grass, and horses, temporarily free, gambolled over the pampas. I had a feeling of release and excited anticipation in the clear morning air, glimpsing, at each bend in the road, the mountain we had come so far to climb. As we drew closer, the spire of the Central Tower seemed as slender as ever, the rock compact, without any sign of weakness. I just prayed that Barrie was right and that there was a way up the other side.

  The site of our base camp was near a small estancia nestling immediately below the mountains. It reminded me of a Scottish hill-farm, with its little two-storied stone-built house, corrugated iron buildings and wooden sheep-pens. It seemed to blend into the landscape, becoming an integral part of this wild and lonely country. Our own camp was in a coppice of stunted trees and scrub, sheltered from the wind by a couple of low hummocks. As we unpacked boxes of gear and food, all the tension of the previous day was replaced with the excited anticipation of the climb to come. We had chosen Barrie as a scapegoat for our own uncertainty when it had seemed that we might be prevented from attempting the climb, but with the uncertainty removed these doubts were put aside. As leader of the expedition, Barrie was in an invidious position anyway, since Don, Ian and myself knew each other well and had considerably more climbing experience than he had. However, because of the compact size of the expedition, this barely mattered. A party of six on a comparatively small mountain can afford to come to decisions in a democratic way, allowing leaders to emerge through the natural process of personality and experience. Through the course of the expedition, decisions were reached through discussion with comparatively little argument.

  For the rest of that day we were immersed in the process of unpacking, and that evening were invited to a barbecue by Juan Radic, the owner of the neighbouring estancia. It was a magical experience, in complete contrast to the formal dinner party we had had the previous evening. It was held in a sheltered arbour of trees at the side of the house. Cows’ horns were nailed to the trunks; chairs were formed from tree stumps and in the centre of the glade was a smouldering wood fire, over which a spitted lamb, opened out on a frame, was turned from time to time. The aroma of the lamb mingled with the wood smoke, the scent of the trees and of the earth.

  Juan Radic was a big man, now going to fat with the hint of a pot belly. He was of Jugoslav stock and had started the farm from scratch, but now he was able to spend most of his time in Punta Arenas, leaving the day-to-day running of the farm to his brother, Pedro. One felt he was more a businessman than a farmer, but Pedro was everything that one imagined a gaucho to be: tall, lean and hard, with a face battered by the winds; strong yet lonely, with a strange tinge of melancholy. He could have stepped straight out of a cowboy movie, with his scarlet shirt, black baggy breeches and sombrero, and bristling black moustachio. That night it was Pedro who tended the meal, basting the sizzling meat with a sauce made from mint and garlic, passing round the skin sack of wine which we squeezed to send a fine jet into the backs of our throats. There were no glasses, no knives or forks. The only concessions to civilisation were some chipped plates and a big bowl of salad: the only available vegetable in that part of Patagonia, a form of coarse, pleasingly bitter-tasting lettuce.

  All the newcomers were initiated into Patagonian life by trying to squirt some wine down their throats from the wine sack – a knack which took some acquiring. Pedro then sprinkled a few myster
ious drops over each of our heads and made the sign of the cross. And then the feast began. We tore the meat from the carcase with our fingers, sat in the cool dark, warm-lit by the smouldering fire, and gorged ourselves on succulent tender meat; squirted wine down open throats. Next morning in my diary I wrote:

  The real thing about the night was the feel of it – the atmosphere. Eating because you want to eat, tearing the meat, held in greasy hands, with your teeth. Drinking when you want to, talking naturally, because you have something to say; listening because you are interested. This was a real enjoyment that went to the depth of my being.

  And next morning we had splitting hangovers, but we set out all the same for the Central Tower of Paine. The Towers were hidden from our base camp by the rounded bulk of the Paine Chico. To reach them we should have to follow a long valley to the back of the Towers, where Barrie assured us we should find a comparatively easy slope, leading up to the col between the Central and Northern Towers. It was about twelve miles to the foot of the Tower and we would have to carry up all the food, climbing gear and tentage we were going to need. This, obviously, was going to take several days. The weather was perfect and apparently had been so for the past fortnight.

  ‘That could be the whole season’s good weather gone,’ Don remarked dourly; but to me, on my first visit, it seemed difficult to believe that it could ever get really bad. We were all talking of climbing the Tower in the next few days.

  That morning we plodded slowly up the grass slopes that led up the side of a gorge leading out of the valley we were going to follow. It was stupefyingly hot without a breath of wind; flies buzzed round us, attracted by the sweat trickling down our faces, and every few yards we stopped for a rest, unfit, boozed-up from the night before. From the top of the rise, the valley was laid out before us, steep scree slopes leading down to dense scrub-like forest. There were no traces of paths or of anyone ever having been there before, though to our knowledge three expeditions had been this way.