TO SCALE A MOUNTAIN

BY TIM MACARTNEY-SNAPE

Tim Macartney-Snape may be Australia’s best known mountaineer. In 1984, he and Greg Mortimer were the first Australians to summit Everest—which they did via a new route, without supplementary oxygen and in ski boots (after their mountaineering boots were lost in an avalanche). Tim is also the only person to have ever climbed Everest from sea to summit. Beginning with a dip in the Bay of Bengal, three months of hiking and climbing later he stood atop Everest for the second time. While the Everest ascents secured his fame, Tim has countless more notable climbs to his name.

But we all need to start somewhere. And Tim started in New Zealand, more than 45 years ago. This is his story of meeting the mountains.

Relativity of size when it comes to steep bits of the planet is starkly thrust home to Aussie climbers when we travel overseas. If you start off living in a flat land, you get so used to a flat landscape that any hill on the horizon seems like a mountain. Then when you visit a land that actually is hilly, your idea of a big hill gets readjusted. But when you progress from there to actual mountains that are so high that they are permanently cloaked by snow and ice—where the vertical distance from bottom to top is many, many times anything you’ve encountered before—the scale becomes impossible to put in perspective until you, well, scale it.

My first encounter with real mountains was in the Southern Alps of New Zealand around Aoraki/Mt Cook. Looking up from the valley floor for the first time was a wild sensation. The valley sides soared up so high that the sky seemed to have added depth. The cool mountain air, saturated with the sound of roaring water, sporadically punctuated by the distant clatter of falling debris or the muffled roar of a collapsing serac, carried in it some added element hinting that I was entering a new realm of excitement and danger. Awareness that more than a fair share of Australians had stepped into this realm never to return alive, tempered my usual enthusiasm. I felt like a deer stepping out into the open from the sheltering shadows of the forest.

So, prudently, my skiing and bushwalking friends and I had signed up to a mountaineering course. Our guides were like mountain gods, competence oozed from them as they nonchalantly negotiated the frightening looseness created by glaciers in retreat. In appearance, I shared one thing in common with them: shoulder length hair kept in check with a headband. But similarities ended there. My army surplus wool clothing, clunky ex-hire leather ski boots and roughly sewn home-made pack contrasted starkly with their neatly tailored chevron weave britches, deeply scuffed French mountain guide boots and well worn, overloaded Joe Brown packs.

The weather dictated that we were unable to put into practice all the theory we were learning. This fact amplified the realisation that there was much to learn and a mountain of demystification to overcome if I was ever to safely climb anything respectable.

Luckily, I found a partner in Lincoln Hall who had had some mentoring by other climbers to overcome this shortfall in experience and in an op shop I found a pair of chevron weave britches, sadly there wasn’t an easily found or affordable footwear replacement.

After a couple of initial, straightforward climbs, we decided that a proper initiation required a multi-day alpine excursion. The south ridge of Aoraki/Mount Cook via a rocky ridge (MacInnes Ridge) on the sub peak of Nazomi was a logical choice. All of it can be seen from down in the valley, with clean-looking rock starting almost at glacier level. By then had enough experience to appreciate that most alpine climbs involve long, grinding approaches, so the merit of a short approach hadn’t escaped us.

Evening found us around halfway up the MacInnes Ridge sitting in our sleeping bags on a spacious, though tilted, ledge feeling very pleased with ourselves; we’d managed to climb reasonably well weighed down by bivvy gear and three days’ worth of food and fuel.

The reassuring purr of my old brass primus stove, a design that hadn’t fundamentally changed since it was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, was suddenly and shockingly interrupted by the violent roar of an avalanche of ice and rock thundering down the gully right next to us. The sheer brutality of it was rather unnerving, even though we knew that despite having knocked a couple of rocks onto ourselves during the afternoon’s climbing, a ridge was less subject to this kind of catastrophe.

After a night punctuated by lesser avalanches, we continued upwards under a sky that became increasingly dulled by cloud. By midday, just as horizontal rain began pummelling us, we found a rib of snow that offered a likely site for a snow cave.

Hitherto digging a snow cave in temperatures above freezing would have guaranteed a thoroughly wet digger, but we had what turned out to be an amazing new technology. Our shell jackets and trousers, made from a new waterproof but breathable fabric called GoreTex, turned out to be something of a secret weapon. Queensland climber and gear manufacturer Rick White had imported a few rolls of the fabric and was keen to have it tested and we were the lucky guinea pigs.

After a couple of hours grovelling in cold wetness, we had a cave sufficiently spacious to spend the night in. Unbelievably the new-fangled fabric seemed to work, and our scratchy woollen undergarments stayed completely dry!

The nor-west storm was short and sharp, conveniently clearing later the next day, allowing us to sit on the terrace in front of the cave and dry our damp sleeping bags, while gazing out over the west coast. A clear night gave us a hard frost which was just as well because we decided to take a short-cut. Missing out on the summit of Nazomi, we instead made the most of the good ice conditions by climbing up the icy couloir that led to the col between Nazomi and Cook.

Once established on the South Ridge, I remember the route-finding became unexpectedly tricky, overhanging teetering blocks of friable rock, crusty snow in the shadows, alarming exposure and purely psychological anchors all made for slow, tentative progress. Just typical alpine climbing, I was later to realise. Given the clear and windless weather, and the fact that neither of us possessed a decent headlamp (it’s hard to imagine but functional ones were hard to get hold of back then), we decided to stop early and bivvy near the summit of Middle Peak. It was a magical evening, turning out to be one of those golden moments in time, still highlighted in full colour among the jumble of sepia tinted memories cluttering the brain.

Settling into our comfortable snow ledge, we were buzzed by a light plane which we later heard had been diverted to check on whether the Aussie novices had survived the storm—fair enough I suppose, given this was our fourth night out.

After an obligatory traverse to the summit, we began our descent— and possibly the start of our biggest alpine lesson yet. Since early in the day it was obvious that the weather was again taking a turn for the worse. It was an observation that didn’t overly worry us, after all we were just going down, how hard could it be?

However, once our impatience had caused us to make the error of opting for a more direct line towards our destination—the old Gardiner hut, where we’d left a stash of food that our now empty stomachs were craving—cloud enveloped us and we found ourselves rappelling down unknown terrain in thick fog. Fortunately we didn’t come across any huge overhangs, only sections of scarily loose rocks that threatened to sever our ropes and inconveniently and repeatedly snagged the ropes as we tried retrieving them. Eventually I found myself inside what appeared to be a massive bergschrund. Despite it being an indication that we were back down to some sort of glacier, it meant that I’d have to climb out with some difficulty as what snow there was, was rotten and the rock was slick with water. And it was starting to get dark. We then had a maze of crevasses to find a path around, into and out of. Dinner was still a long way off.

Learning the hard way isn’t really the smart way, but I tell you, it does drive the lesson home strongly. Ever since that long afternoon and evening, I’ve always tried to descend via a familiar route and, when not possible, I’ve made doubly sure I have a good topo, description and understanding of the topography.

Predictably, once safely in the hut we made the mistake of yielding to temptation by overloading our empty stomachs. Of course this ended in great discomfort, giving us a restless night far less comfortable than any we’d had on the climb. Another hard-learned lesson.

Back down in the valley, eating a tub of ice cream and gazing up at the retreating clouds, I was struck by how the “hills” around me suddenly seemed so small compared to the icy giants that we’d immersed ourselves in over the past few days. Relativity.