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Les MacDonald
From the 1962 Canadian Alpine Journal
I had never realized just what a chunk
of the North Arete we had omitted from the lower section when we'd made
the 1st ascent back in '62. But there it was sure enough. It was true that
it was somewhat concealed in its lower reaches, dropping as it does into
the near primaeval jungle around its base. But that was hardly an excuse,
for there were always the nagging reminders from Sinclair that it was
really only half a climb. Jim, the self-appointed warden-cum-historian of
the Squamish Chief. If he said it still had to be done all the way through
from top to bottom, "to kind of clean it up," then you can be sure it was
probably true. For with the critical eye of the museum curator that Jim
has in his self-appointed role of guardian. I suspect the incompleteness
of the North Arete was a source of some discomfort to him.
Incomplete and disjointed it was. Not
only had Beckey taken a stab at the bottom section one time, and climbed
some in the middle on another occasion, but Culbert and Woodsworth, like
thieves in the night, had sneaked across the path from the gully in 1961
and climbed the two beautiful pinnacles on the arete - the Acrophobes.
When Mather and I teamed up to climb the
arete with Fred in 1962 we reached this step on the wall at dusk on the
first day after having started some way up on the ridge by climbing in
from the gully.
I remember distinctly asking Fred if it
would be possible to traverse off the ridge into the gully. "Not a
chance," he said. We shrugged and slept the night, perched on a tiny
ledge, roped to a tree, and awoke the next day to finish off the top
section. It was some time later that I realized that he knew perfectly
well that all you had to do was walk around the corner and find yourself
in the wide spacious North Gully. After all he'd done just that only a few
weeks previously with Bjornstad. There was a cave, and still is, to sleep
40 thieves, let alone three, and water in abundance. Puritanical Fred had
us bivouac on the wall at night - I never understood that, perhaps he was
afraid we'd keep walking down the gully and go home if he told us there
was an exit!
So the North Arete needed to be
completed, and my annual penance was due - in the form of leading a trip
once a year. A small penance mind you, considering the sins you get to
commit in lieu of it! I would recommend it to those with pangs of
conscience...
I have always maintained that the level
of club trips should be elevated to give the more ambitious members a
crack at something more serious than the average weekend trek.
Psychological barriers can build up in climbers towards real, or imagined,
difficulties - barriers which bar them from some of the most satisfying
experiences in the mountaineering spectrum, and in many cases without good
reason.
So it was that early in the month a
group was gathered together that had had no previous experience on the
steeper walls, and some who had never climbed before. We agreed to train
as rigorously as time and energy permitted and then select a team by the
end of the month, based on performance. This group, with the help of some
more experienced leaders spotted here and there down the rope would try
for a complete North Arete as a 2 day climb and club trip.
And train we did. Fingers that normally
pushed pencils, or scratched the nape of the neck as their most energetic
exercise during the course of the average day, were soon reduced to tender
limp digits, aching in every pore with unaccustomed pain. As the original
shock wore off, the same fingers eventually felt their way up most of the
climbs at the Quarry and Point Atkinson, with routes on the Apron at Squamish
thrown in for good measure. We even made a new finish variation to
"Starfish" at Point Atkinson, which we promptly named "Holy Mackerel", in
keeping with the pescatorial flavour of the other practice routes there.
The week before the climb was scheduled
it rained without pause, and reluctantly we conceded that it would be
folly to proceed. Three of us went up on the Saturday night anyway, just
to look - to trace new lines with the eyes, to sleep in the cave, and
drink our Beaujolais anyway!
We had just nestled down out of the
rain, and were drifting off into troubled sleep, when we were awakened by
the return of the lad who had been to the oasis in Squamish. Alas the
Cacudemos cave resembled a loggers' boarding house Saturday nights! They
claimed to have been to the billiard hall, but didn't look steady enough
for that - a bout with the shuffle board more likely.
The flat monochrome morning was heralded
by every bird from Pemberton to Brittania, who seemed to have gathered in
the spacious cave entrance, and were shrieking with a racket that no poet
could ever wax lyrical about.
Once when camping with some French
climbers near a river, we found some real frogs, the kind whose legs you
can eat. We hastened to de-culotte them in the traditional way, dropping
the legs into the sizzling frying pan, and casting the remains away. Early
the next morning, we were awakened by the same kind of inhuman shrieking.
A ring of frogs surrounded our tents, all limbless, and seemingly cried
out to be united again with their by now long digested legs.
We hastened out of the cave in the
morning drizzle, enquiring en-route of an ill tempered and no longer
sleeping Tony Cousins if he would like to have a bash at the North Arete
after all. Alas, he was oblivious to the birds and rain and appeared to be
suffering from his hellish bout with the billiards still.
So the brushing wet jungle wal to the
foot of the arete committed us to the climb - too early to go home, too
late to sleep - and soon only the damp rock was all that mattered in the
world. David Turner, very fit, with all of a months serious rock climbing
experience; Jan Atlung, originally Norwegian, coach of the Indian-Eskimo
cross-country ski team from Innuvik, another 4 week veteran; and myself.
Jan had taken the bug seriously, and
during our training had plunged into it with characteristic frenzy. One
evening I got a call from his wife Charlotte, I hastened to the Quarry, to
find him pinned up on the highest part of the cliff in the pitch dark, all
alone, trying to figure out how to get down through the maze of ropes,
pitons, carabiners and slings.
Short apprenticeship over, it was now
Sunday morning, the rain was easing, and the sorely depleted but keen club
trip was off and climbing. The curving wide crack at the start which leans
outwards towards the ever-present gully was strenuous, and brought us up
above the gully proper. The gully noises are more frightening than its
looks - every dislodged stone argues and bickers its way down to the bed.
The arete is long for one day, so we
avoided the use of pegs wherever decency, common-sense or lack of ability
didn't make them necessary. Only time will tell how successful we were in
that respect. Time was important to us, we hurried slowly. I thought of
one of those childhood poems they drum into your head, about Jon's
carrying the good news to Ghent - "I climbed, he climbed, we climbed, all
three".
I admire the way in which climbers
describe long parts of a route in detail. I don't know how. For me the
passages go past, even the ones that take hours, like the gates in a
downhill ski race - the whole is always vivid, but the detail obtuse.
Crack, slab, undercut, wedge - and yet how the hands of the watch spin.
Why don't they move that way during the week at work?
The welcome sight of the Acrophobes
loomed into view above, the looked so different from underneath, they must
be heavy. We gazed for a long time at the most symmetrical chimney I've
ever seen. About 100' high, leaning back just a little, 2' wide perhaps,
with edges square and smooth to the top - only bongs as big as garbage
cans would fit that. Might it go free? The very thought sent one of those
shudders down into the stomach, and further, at the audacity of the very
idea. I meekly beat a slinking traverse around it, assuring my two
neophyte partners, who had begun by now to show interest that it was a
piece of cake, but not today as we were in a hurry...
By 6 p.m. we arrived at the escape ledge
and a bivouac site of times past, but this time with two beginners, and
we'd come almost twice as far. Beginners never complain and rarely notice
your errors. Nor do they ask for the lead, and then bitch when they can't
have it as Fred had 10 years before. We had told him he was a guest in our
country, be he hadn't bought that - at least it was one climb of a
thousand that he couldn't claim!
And those two bolts on the crack above
the ledge, how could you, whoever you are? David and Jan came through like
veterans, somewhat unnerved by the exposure that wells up and around as
one steps out across the wall there. Looking down past the circling ravens
we could make out a clutch of wives, kids and dogs on the road below
anxiously honking horns, then mercifully drifitng off, bored, for milk
shakes and home. Magnone once told me that when they were doing the 1st
ascent of the West Face of the Dru his mother heard about it on the radio
in Paris. She came to Chamonix next day with a basket of food, hoping to
pass it up to them on the climb. When will those mothers and wives ever
understand us? Or do they, all to well!
The final piton crack, around the corner
and over the gully again, was completed in total darkness, with Jan
unwilling to leave his chromolys behind in the crack. On the flat mattress
of black-berry bushes we loosened off laces, let the blood flow again to
the feet, and laughed, free again from the prisoning verticality of the
wall below. For David and Jan a baptism in the joy of the long route, not
terribly hard or tedious, and bound to be made a lot freerer and swifter
yet I hope. But 16 hours is still a long day. Which way down? With visions
of walking over the grand wall in the dark, I opted for the gully. It will
be quicker too. Every experience in life, and every book I had ever read
on climbing said it wasn't, and it wasn't!
We slipped, slithered, cursed and bumped
into each other all the way down. I commandeered the flashlight as leader
of the trip, and was the only one who fell badly - over a waterfall and
onto my head.
At midnight the clouds cleared briefly
and the moon shone dramatically against the white grey-granite of the
Zodiac Wall. The primaeval atmosphere which that section of the chief has
was very strong at that moment, as the three of us halted like men of that
era - wet, tired, engaged in an obscure struggle, said naught and stumbled
through the boulders.
Jan was killed shortly after, whilst
climbing in the Interior Ranges. We had planned so many things together,
including a new route on that moonlit wall. We even had the name - "The
Paris Commune", in honour of its 100th anniversary that summer of '71.
Like the "Peasants' Route" which Jim Baldwin and I had begun in distant
'58, the complete North Arete will serve as a memory, not just as another
day of fine climbing, but rather for another youth who found himself,
however briefly, in the mountains.
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