A Long Road To The Most Beautiful Mountain in the World

Many moons ago I was a slightly more energetic version of a wannabe climber. (I emphasise the slightly!) Desperate to escape the football thuggery and skinhead culture that seemed to be the only thing happening in the town where I grew up, I was invited to “go climbing in Wales” by a pal at the town Carnival one September Saturday.
Having just started a 6th form Geology O-Level course, rocks, mountains and in particular a hill called Tryfan were on my mind. I managed to scrounge a pair of DMs, dug out an old parka and was dragged over the Carneddau in the clag. I absolutely loved it despite being completely knackered. That night I was introduced to beer without parents: messy!
The next day saw us up the N. Ridge of Tryfan and over to Bristly Ridge. Still claggy high up, but with a fairly vicious wind, I remember being sat on a big flat rock as we had something to eat and just feeling something inside me as cloud whistled upwards to envelope us and then disappear. I’d found my place. It wasn’t White Hart Lane anymore.

That was the point where the “old” boy who ran these trips made a sound mountaineering decision and turned us back down the hill. That “old boy”, as he seemed then, was Bob Maeslyn Jones: an out of place Welshman in an Essex village. He would later return to Wales – and for a long time was the main man with the Welsh arm of SARDA.
At Bob’s prodding I eventually discovered Chelmsford Mountaineering Club. This was at a time when there was still a debate about climbing in PAs or Super RDs! There were still hawserlaid ropes kicking about! We did more walking than climbing, but the lads and occasional ladies got me out of my Essex rat-trap. I discovered Mountain Magazine and my eyes widened like a kid at Christmas! I still can’t get those first pictures of Lotus Flower Tower out of my head 😉

A couple of years after hooking up with the Chelmsford gang, I went off to college in Durham and lost touch with them and Bob for several years. Contact with the Essex crew who mentored me so carefully was regained after a while, but sadly I never managed to reconnect with Bob before he passed away. He introduced a whole mob of Essex lads to the hills, but as far as I am aware I was the only one who really got the bug. Hats off to you sir.

Ambition and a Dash of Bullshit

But – with youth and ego comes ambition and bullshit. By the time the 80s arrived … I’d had my first foreign trips to the Wyoming peaks and the Alps after finishing my Outdoor Education course at Durham and a Science Education retraining course at York St. John’s: where the lads of York Mountaineering Club toughened up a few of my weedy edges.

The Graveyard Incident

Arriving back from the Alps (no pics – sorry) in September 1980 to start a teaching job in Carlisle, I spent my first Carlisle night in the graveyard of the old church that used to sit overlooking Caldewgate. That preserved my last few quid to pay a deposit on what turned out to be a squalid house share on St. Nicholas Street. I did get some funny looks from people cutting through!

The following year a more successful trip out to the Alps, with some of the Durham crew, saw us in the Bregaglia to start with. As we pulled up the final alpine pass on our way to the campsite at Bondo, in Rob Gregory’s overloaded Escort Estate, the pounding chorus of Grace Slick’s El Diablo blasted out at the exact moment the Bregaglia peaks hove into view. It was a spine-tingling moment!

Despite poor weather and a Gore-Tex bivvy bag test, in a thunderstorm, in the Albigna cirque; we got some climbing done with a diversion south to sunnier climes in the Val di Mello and the Allievi Cirque.

A week later we were heading up the Piz Badile via the North Ridge and then the Cassin route on the North Face. My only classic north face in the Alps. The Frendo Spur followed: accompanied by much gore and incident, as recounted in a previous article; to round off a very exciting summer. Sadly i didn’t get any photos and I have lost track of the copies of Andy Trull’s that he sent me recently.

International Jet Set Wannabe

Early in 1982, Dave Harries from my Durham group of friends started talking about going to Peru the following summer – and he had ambitious eyes on Alpamayo 5,947m and Nevado Cayesh 5,721m: with its unclimbed northwest face. (The word clueless springs to mind in hindsight 😉)
Sanity Note: On the peak’s first ascent in 1960, it took a New Zealand team of three, 21 days to climb and another 7 days to clear and descend the mountain. Their route of ascent… was the descent ridge we had “planned”. The mountain hadn’t received a second ascent at the time we were out there.
Summer arrived and we flew out to Peru with Viasa airlines.

Lounging in Lima and Huaraz

Memories of Lima that stick out were not pretty. 3 of us at a time, standing guard over our piles of gear, ice axe in one hand, in the central bus station as various gangs wandered in looking for easy pickings while lunch was eaten in 2 shifts.

Boy soldiers on most street corners with automatic rifles – as the Sendero Luminosi had just bombed a power station on the outskirts of the city at the start of their insurgency. It was a relief to finally get on the coach to Huaraz and leave the smog covered city behind.
We headed north on the Pan American Highway for hours as the country turned more and more desert, with the Pacific crashing against the barren shores below – obscured by the semi-permanent mist that seemed to hang over the land.

Eventually we turned off the Pan Americana and started to head inland gaining height and leaving the fret behind. As we wound our way up into the Andes, the first outliers were arid brown hills with mysterious looking valleys leading deeper into the mountains. Slowly we began to reach more alpine heights where there were llamas and guanacos (I think) roaming the greener pampas.

The Andes At Last!

Suddenly around a corner the snow-covered summits of the Cordillera Blanca swung into view. Gobsmacking! Our accommodation in Huaraz was less gobsmacking. Mick Fowler was a pal of one of the gang – Steve Tansey – and he’d told Steve about the cheap doss on the top floor of Chico’s hotel – effectively an unfinished building site of a floor. But it worked for us. He had been there earlier in the year, climbing a magnificent spur on Taulliraju, that immediately gained a reputation as a kind of Walker Spur of the Andes.

Pepe’s was rough.. but it certainly commanded some fine views from our higher level. To the north was Huascaran, the giant of the Cordillera Blanca.

A day shopping for supplies and arranging taxis followed; along with a night in a bar where we met a German lad, Thomas, who was also heading into the Quebrada Quillqayhuanca. He intended to have a solo plod up Nevado San Juan. We arranged to share a taxi and the six of us Rob, Dave H, Caroline, Steve, Gill and myself along with Thomas piled into a minivan the next day for a lift up to the hamlet of Pitec, to start our acclimatisation walk and to take a look-see at Cayesh.

Acclimatising in the Quilcayhuanca

Drop offs at Pitec came with a health warning in ’82: with stories of travellers being stoned by the locals. Despite some unfriendly shouting, we didn’t experience any direct problem and left the vicinity of the village as quickly as we could. The walk up the valley was beautiful, fairly level and for quite a way followed an easy track. After several hours we branched off to the right and looked for a spot to camp. No sign of the fabled Cayesh yet!

Next morning we headed further up the valley with a sky of glowering grey gradually covering more and more of our side of the valley. Thomas headed off on his way soon after we left the camp. I seem to remember that there was no real track but eventually we knew it was time to head up onto the glacier. Hundreds of feet of recently uncovered rock slabs scattered with boulders and rubble soon gave way to the edge of the ice and a view of the lower half of Cayesh’s West Face.

One look was enough to tell us that we would need considerably more “acclimatisation”, several bigger sets of balls and some real climbers in the team! A furtive glance round everyone else’s faces told me that the feeling in the pit of my stomach was similar to what the others were feeling. Down it was then! (The mountain would only receive it’s pretty epic second ascent two years later, from the east side. The face we had our eyes on wasn’t climbed until 1986 by Jerry Gore and Terry Moore.)

Another night in the tents and a wander back down the valley to Pitec, followed by a lucky encounter with another taxi dropping off another team saw us back in Huaraz to reassess what we’d do. We decided to carry on with Plan A. This was to climb Alpamayo by the SW face as our training climb.

After a couple of doss days, we were on the bus again, heading north to Caraz. This time the accommodation we found was somewhat plusher! Caroline and Gill set off to trek the Santa Cruz circuit the next day and it was a good fortnight before we caught up with their adventures.

It took a couple of days to get our food and transport sorted. On one of those we hopped on a bus to take a look at Yungay. This was pretty sobering. It was the site of a town of 18,000 people, which ceased to exist in the enormous Ancash earthquake of 1970.

The quake rattled the Andes so severely that an enormous mass of glacial ice and snow broke loose from the west side of Huascaran Norte. Impacting the glacier below. The mass surged downhill. Flowing down a massive valley, it was constrained by a high ridge that most people imagined would protect the town from the regular huaycos that are a feature of Andean geology. Not this time.

Part of the huayco surged over the barrier ridge, and in seconds obliterated the town, and the crowds attending its Sunday market. The only survivors were those close to the cemetery hill on the west side who were quick enough to run uphill far enough. The main flow carried on down into the Rio Santa Cruz wiping out another 12,000 people in villages as it swept down to the Pacific Ocean almost 100km away.

We wandered rather soberly over the featureless surface of the flow, with just a debris filled bus and the tower of the smashed cathedral showing there had once been a thriving down here. It was a quiet bus ride back to Caraz.

Eventually we secured a taxi to take us up to the jump off point: Cashapampa. Steve’s pal Fowler had told us to ask for Pedro and Chico – the arrieros who had carted their gear up the valley on their burros (donkeys). Next morning we were greeted by blanket wrapped kids selling eggs – much friendlier than the Pitec vibe.

Despite Pedro and Chico being away on another trek we found another father son team to get our gear up the valley.

It’s a beautiful trek up from Cashapampa but our arrieros turned out to be “relaxed” so we only got as far as the first of two lakes a spot that’s now known as Llama Corral. Another day ambling past another lake, avoiding shrapnel from farting donkeys and fighting off these horrible little biting flies saw us turning left and heading pretty steeply up into a cirque under the south ridge of Alpamayo. It was stunning! We unloaded – the arrieros wandered off with instructions to return in a fortnight and we set about building a basecamp.

After a night’s kip at 4,260m we were pretty lacking in energy, that first day so we just pottered about. Later on, I was desperate to explore, so rather foolishly I set off up the glacier to have a look around. It was gobsmacking. In the cold clear air, under a cloudless blue sky, the Rinrihirca and Pucahirca peaks stole the show. Alpamayo was just showing us her, still impressive, rump end where we were. Below my feet the glacier was obviously degenerating – even back in the eighties. There was a huge collapse pond in the middle of the glacier tongue on which I stood. Eyeballs satisfied, I picked my way over the ice and back to camp.

Next day we set off for the first of our Andean peaks. The route took us up on to the glacier and up towards a steep ridge flank and col between Alpamayo and Quitaraju. A steep broad couloir about 2 pitches long would have to be climbed, before setting off eastwards across the next glacier to the foot of the face where we planned to doss.

It was a long slow plod up the glacier with lots of switches and dead ends between the crevasses. So, we hadn’t even crossed the ridge as the light began to dim. We decided to dig in where we were, at the foot of the steep bit as Steve was suffering particularly badly from the altitude. This was the first time I had snowholed “in anger”. It was surprisingly comfortable. Dave was up and brewing early next morning but it was clear Steve wasn’t going anywhere. He decided he would just wait at the snowhole for the 2 or 3 days we anticipated being out.

Dave set off up the fairly steep ice slope which needed us to be in proper climbing mode, it was no womble! If memory serves me right, I think I had to lead a short second pitch to get over the ridge and into view of our objective. We just stood and stared at this amazing spectacle. Up till now the view we had been seeing of Alpamayo was definitely its arse end! Now we saw for the first time, the stunning face we had come to climb. Andean flutings and clearly snow swept gullies, overhung by monstrous Mr Whippy formations looked pretty challenging but drew the eye all the same.

We set off to traverse the glacier to the foot of the face – and immediately faced the first hurdle. There had been a bit of a storm while we were in Caraz. The glacier was chest deep in snow and in places almost bottomless it seemed. Dave sank in head deep at several points as he broke trail. After an hour I took over. Another hour went by, and Rob took his turn. After 4 hours we’d progressed little more than a few hundred metres and we were goosed. Even Dave, the strongest of us was struggling.

The “look” passed between us and almost without a word we turned round and ploughed back to the ridge and back to a very surprised Steve. Back at our base camp later that day we were a bit despondent. Beaten back from Cayesh by sensible wimpishness and beaten back from Alpamayo by a lack of snow-ploughing power! After lots of brewing and talking we decided to sleep on it.

To the right of Alpamayo a steep face had caught my eye. I suggested to the others that maybe that would be a good objective, it looked like a grandiose Creag Meaghaidh. As we recuperated through the day I watched as a line of tiny dots walked up the valley opposite the face. Suddenly a big avalanche cut loose from the top of it. It didn’t seem to quite reach the people we could see, but it was close! They just seemed to carry on plodding up to the slope towards the col above them. Committed to getting out of that particular death alley, I suppose.

That shut the door on my idea! We took another couple of rest days to give Steve a chance to get his breath back. I decided I would build a better cooking shelter. Gathering granite cobbles from round about the site I soon had a decent looking wall built. I went for a final armful of cobbles. And of course, this time they rolled out of my arms towards the wall. Like an idiot, I tried to catch the one that was going to wreck my project. Squelch!

Finger sandwich between cobble and wall top! That hurt… so I had my finger in the stream for the next hour. Once I was too cold to stay out any longer, I crawled in to join Rob in the tent. The finger was still working, but there was a very peculiar coloured fingernail! Discussions between the two tents led us to the conclusion that the snow would have consolidated a bit better on the upper glacier – so we’d have another crack at Alpamayo.

After a throbby night with poor sleep, we shouldered 3 sacks and set off. Steve just hadn’t acclimatised and was in mooch mode, and decided to stay put at camp. The three of us made much better progress up the glacier this time, our tracks still visible.

By late afternoon, we were back on the upper glacier.

We scratched about looking for that deep snow to dig another snowhole, but it was mysteriously absent. We had to make do with a snow grave that night. What a night that was. The sky was crystal clear, frigid and the stars barely sparkled. Again, the snow grave turned out to be surprisingly comfortable.

Another quick breakfast of Complan and porridge in our mugs and off we set. Our previous furrow sped us along to start with, but after that we were back to slightly easier, better acclimatised ploughing. And then we met some of the biggest yawning crevasses I have ever seen! 30 or 40 foot chasms across our path. No real chance to outflank them, so it was a case of “remember that glacier rope work you never really learned” and commit to some huge but far too long for comfort snow bridges. I was lightest so I seem to remember getting shunted across on the end of our bit of string to test them. As it happened, they seemed solid enough and the other two crossed without incident as well.

Soon we were flogging up the steep apron of glacial ice and snow towards the bergschrund. It never seemed to get any closer under the now fierce sun. But as with all of these labours they do eventually end. It was late afternoon, and we set to work to dig out another snowhole. For once it was me who had a bit of excess energy and after an hour of labour Rob and Dave crashed out in the last of the warm sun while I carried on digging. One of the lads stuck his head in later to see what progress I was making. He stood up a little early and demolished about a third of the roof!

Time to break out the eskimo skills! It took another hour to replace the broken section with snow blocks and that coincided with one of the most vivid cloudless sunsets I’ve ever experienced. I was happily taking photos as the other two snaffled the most comfy spots in the hole. I crawled in, sorted out mat and pit, slid in for kip, shuffled my bum for comfort… and touched the back wall of our shelter. A four-foot-long section of the back wall disappeared down into the depths of the bergschrund! I hadn’t realised how close to it was to where we were! So that was another nervous night’s kip!

We got up before dawn and breakfasted quickly. By the time we emerged and geared up, sunrise was imminent. Above us the headwall of the schrund was overhanging, so we sidled leftwards to a friendlier section. Dave led off up and over on pretty steep ice and snow and got back across to the main runnel that defines the Ferrari route that we had opted for. Well… Dave had opted for, as I had little clue what I was looking at till many years later.

I led through and followed the runnel up towards Mr Whippy land. Dave and I swapped leads for a pitch or two. I was at the end of my lead when something weird happened. I found myself looking at some kind of cold blue whiteness in front of me and for a second I had no clue where I was or what it was. And then I had the thought of an open air London bus…? WTF!

Reality kicked in quick sharp then. I tightened my grip on the ice tools and breathed deep and slow! It took me a minute or two to compose myself again. I shouted down to the others that I’d had some sort of wobble. Very carefully, I shuffled up and left to run all the rope out and set up a belay where there was an almost ready made step. I don’t know what happened but I suspect it was petit mal epilepsy induced by the altitude and my general cluelessness about what I was doing.

We were probably about 5 pitches in when Rob and Dave shouted down that I wasn’t to look up, which of course I did. One lower limb sticking upward out of the snow… there was a dead body, half buried in the snow. The dead climber we “sort of” knew about, wasn’t down on the glacier, but embedded in the candy floss in the side of the runnel, about 20 feet below where Dave had belayed. It would have been fair to say that the unfortunate soul’s peculiarly up-angled leg would have been the most secure anchor of the day. But I don’t think any of us would have contemplated such desecration. Even my brand new long, Chouinard, 4 toothed ice screw wasn’t much use in this ice and snow mix. Steve’s self-made snow stakes were the anchors we had to rely on most often.

The sight of another body so soon after the previous year’s Frendo experience was unsettling. A couple of pitches higher as Rob clipped into the belay, right in amongst the Mr Whippy snow ridges either side of the runnel, he turned to me and said. “F*cking hell, I’m out of my depth here!” Yet more unsettlement.

Another 2 or 3 gradually steepening pitches put us within reach of the summit ridge. I belayed on the last of the solid looking ice, the Chouinard screw finally doing what it was supposed to. The last 80 or so feet looked hideous. Like a ready to collapse pile of castor sugar!  Dave began his near vertical swim. postholing shoulder deep into the granular choss. We were swept by mini avalanches of granular snow. He didn’t quite have to dig a precarious trench, but it was near vertical postholing – with knobs on.

The flow of snow subsided, we looked up and Dave had disappeared over the crest. It took a while to find anything approaching a suitable anchor but as the sun lowered towards the horizon, Rob and I were on top too. The summit was a short half a rope length away and maybe 30 feet higher. I suggested we should quickly wade across to it, but I was overruled as sunset wasn’t far away and Dave wisely judged that trying to arrange the initial insecure abseils in the dark wasn’t worth the extra time and risk.

Nervously we set off down. I have no recollection of how we anchored the each of the abseils, but I suspect we were a few snow stakes and screws down by the time the last ab dropped us over the lip of the bergschrund and almost on top of our shelter.

We hadn’t had any time or capacity to do anything about the dead climber, but clearly the authorities already knew about him or her, as it had been mentioned in the climbing mags. We slept well that night. A leisurely start saw us heading back down the final thousand feet or so to the glacier, and towards a small encampment that belonged to some figures we had seen crossing the glacier in our tracks late the day before.

Their faces were a picture when we reached them after getting across the giant crevasses… when they asked us what we thought of the route on Quitaraju! It almost felt cruel telling them we had just climbed Alpamayo and Quitaraju was the opposite side of the glacier. They’d just blindly followed our tracks assuming we were doing the “tourist” route up their hill. After the “Oh bollocks!” looks and a few presumably choice words in German, we left them to get sorted and crossed the glacier easily.

A quick swoop down the steep slope from the ridge followed – past our first snowhole, and by mid-afternoon we were back in base camp with Steve for brews and proper grub. He’d been a bit concerned about how we’d get on as usually it’s him and Dave who were the strong partners out of the 4 of us. Rob, Dave and myself felt pretty knackered and Steve was more than a little bit bored after only having 4 passing German climbers to speak to in 4 days. Trouble was, our arriero wasn’t due back for 4 or 5 days. We just decided to somehow pack everything onto our backs and fronts and walk out the next day.

The next day it was crunch time. I have never walked with so much weight in my life! There were a couple of dodgy stream crossings where the thought of falling so heavily laden was frightening. But being idiots, we ploughed on. It took knee wrecking hours to get down to the main valley. Rest breaks turned into snooze breaks

We had been flogging along the valley for an hour or so when a team of American trekkers with their guide and a team of arrieros caught up with us. We had a great craic with them they had been doing one of the treks in the area and when we mentioned Caroline and Gill, they thought they’d actually bumped into them somewhere a couple of days previously. They even shared some of their rather more luxurious snacks with us. We must have looked a bit like the “Complan team” at that point.

Travelling light with burros doing the “donkey work” they soon left us behind. We continued flogging. Imagine our surprise when a guy with 2 burros reappeared further down the valley and when he reached us – invited us to load his beasts with our gear. What a relief! It was like walking on air – briefly!

When we reached the trekkers’ camp, we were ushered into the big tent to join the clients for a brew and then sent out to the cook’s tent at mealtime where we were fed the same tackle as the paying guests! Next day, they were able to take some of our extra bags but reinvigorated it made our still overloaded rucksacks much easier to cope with for the rest of the walk back to Cashapampa.

We arrived in the village as school was finishing and we learned that their school was a relatively recent addition to the village as the kids proudly showed us their exquisitely beautiful handwriting. They were also very keen for sweets. 😉

The next surprise was the trekking team ordering us to get on board their truck for the ride back to Caraz. As we headed off down the dusty track to civilisation with kids running behind for the first few minutes, we knew that that was the end of our adventures for the summer.

Caroline and Gill had already returned from their trek and reported having an amazing experience. I don’t think Dave was in any hurry to be separated from Caroline again. So, we lounged for a day or so before getting the bus back to Huaraz then returning to the coastal mists and Lima.

There was not going to be any Cayesh attempt. It was more a case of getting back to Lima to rebook flights as our original tickets were scheduled for well after the start of the new Autumn term. You remember I mentioned Viasa Airlines at the start of this bit of the tale? Their damned ground crew burst my rucksack as it went along the check in rollers and wouldn’t pull it back to close it securely. I even saw it in one of the luggage crates rolling across the tarmac to our plane… and that was the last I saw of it. Virtually all my gear and most of the pressies that I was bringing home disappeared!

Sadly – ten years later Dave and several other acquaintances and staffers from Plas y Brenin were on the ill-fated Pakistan International Airlines flight that flew into the side of a hill south of Kathmandu on their way to attempt a route on the Annapurna range. The only trace of Dave recovered was his credit card. He was developing into a bold and accomplished climber before his life was cut short. It was only at Dave’s memorial gathering at the Brenin that I realised we had been the first British team to climb Alpamayo by the Ferrari route. Not that that mattered. The important thing was that we had shared a proper adventure! Dave had inspired the rest of us to get right out of our comfort zones and to tackle a proper big hill. Often when I am lying awake at night, that vision of the sky looking up from the snow grave and the absolute clarity of the stars and the Milky Way return to my mind. Usually that is followed by the vision of Cayesh’s NW face along with the chill feeling of fear in my stomach and my gonads!