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A sideways look at for ty years in B r i t a i n’s m o u n t a i n s
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www.v-publishing.co.uk
THE LAST HILLWALKER
ÂŁ9.99
john d. burns
From
somewhere out in the vast whiteness of the blizzard we hear a cry for help. Instinctively the three of us turn and head across the mountainside. We find two men and a woman, huddled together in the snow, unable to descend the steep icy slope between them and safety. The woman asks if we are experienced in conditions like this. My friends and I have tackled a few winter hills in the Lake District and bumbled up easy rock climbs, but we have never been in a full Scottish winter snowstorm. I laugh and assure her that this is nothing to mountaineers like us. Soon our hills will be empty and one day the last hillwalker will disappear over the horizon. In the twenty-first century we are losing our connection with the wild, a connection that may never be regained. The Last Hillwalker by bestselling author John D. Burns is a personal story of falling in and out of love with the hills. More than that, it is about rediscovering a deeply felt need in all of us to connect with wild places.
THE LAST
J O H N D. B U R N S 22/07/2019 13:49
THE LAST HILLWALKER A sideways look at for ty years in B r i t a i n’s m o u n t a i n s
JOHN D. BURNS
Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffield www.v-publishing.co.uk
THE LAST HILLWALKER
John D. Burns
First published in 2017 by John D. Burns. This edition first published in 2019 by Vertebrate Publishing. VERTEBRATE PUBLISHING Omega Court, 352 Cemetery Road, Sheffield S11 8FT, United Kingdom. www.v-publishing.co.uk Copyright © John D. Burns 2017. Cover design by Mark Thomas. www.coverness.com Edited by Pinnacle Editorial. www.alexroddie.com/pinnacle-editorial John D. Burns has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life of John D. Burns. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of the book are true. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-912560-45-5 (Paperback) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanised, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition. Original design and layout by Mark Thomas. www.coverness.com Production by Vertebrate Publishing. www.v-publishing.co.uk Vertebrate Publishing is committed to printing on paper from sustainable sources.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
CONTENTS
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1 2 AMERICAN PIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3 HORIZONTAL EVEREST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4 THREE MEN IN A TENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 5 THE HIDDEN WORLD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 6 WINTER IN LANGDALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 7 THE WHITE GIANT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 8 NORTH AND SOUTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 9 DANGEROUS DAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 10 MEETING THE REAPER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 11 DEATH BY ARMCHAIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 12 THE BOTHY HUNTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 13 THE LAST HILLWALKER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 POSTSCRIPT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 ALSO BY JOHN D. BURNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 BOTHY TALES EXTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 PSYCHO KILLER
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1 PSYCHO KILLER I have climbed into a place where nothing works. The veneer of ice glazing the rock is too thin to allow me to drive in my ice axes, yet too thick to allow me to climb the rock. I’m high on the cliffs of Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain; it’s cold, it’s going dark, and I struggle to contain the rising panic. Once again I turn towards the louring wall, once more I summon all my determination. All my years of climbing experience tell me that the next few feet of rock are close to impossible – but there is no other way, so this is the route I have to follow. I curse myself for my stupidity in getting me and my climbing partner, Joe, into this position. I think about my two girls, my wife, and then take the only option there is: I keep moving. Hooking my ice tools over the top of the small overhang in front of me, I struggle for some kind of purchase with my feet. The snow is sugary and soft and offers little security for the steel talons of my tools. Scouring the rock walls above me for a crack to take a piton or a nut, anything to give me some defence against plunging into the abyss below, I find nothing but blank walls. Oh God, this is desperate. A few feet below me, Joe, whom I’ve known since I was a teenager and climbed with for almost twenty years, is shivering on a small ledge. Nervously, he watches me struggle from the insecure belay as I probe for angles on the rock, trying to find 1
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holds for my ice tools over and over again. The rope moves out a few inches only to slip back as I try repeatedly to make the move over the small overhanging bulge. He must know I’m in trouble. I’m more experienced in these conditions than he is, so I do the leading – but if I can’t climb it, he can’t take over. Stupidly, I hadn’t brought enough rope to allow us to retreat. “It’s only Green Gully,” I’d responded to Joe’s concerned questioning of the need for more than one rope. “How hard can it be?” I had climbed the route before and found it easy in perfect conditions. But today we are climbing a different Green Gully and this one is lean, mean and nasty. I should have known that when looking up at the route from its base, but somehow I hadn’t seen the obvious signs of a Scottish ice climb being out of condition, as it’s called in climbing circles, or unclimbable. I was so desperate to climb I had seen what I wanted to see: a thin white line of imagined ice, all the way up the route. Now I was about to find out how hard it could be. Suddenly both my ice tools break free and the crampon spikes on my right foot rip through the ice. Fear surges through me. I’m coming off! If the belay fails, the fall will kill us both; if it holds, I could smash a few bones and, trapped on that ice-wreathed face overnight, the cold might get the job done. Somehow, inexplicably, I don’t plunge to an icy grave. Moments later, I’m still there, trembling like a terrified spider, embracing the small overhang. Something is keeping me in that precarious position – I just can’t figure out what it is. Then I realise that one point of the crampon on my left foot is still holding in something. Between me and an early grave are five millimetres 2
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of jagged metal wedged into an icicle the size of a child’s lollipop. The laws of physics suggest that I should have fallen, but I’m lucky; perhaps gravity is having a day off. I hardly dare blink in case the fluttering of an eyelid is enough to disturb the strange equilibrium of my position. “Watch the rope,” I call down to Joe, as though he needs reminding that our fates are joined by a nine-millimetre nylon cord and the one thing that might save both our lives is prompt action on his part to control the rope should I fall. I think it unlikely that this has slipped his mind, but I feel the need to call to him – perhaps I just want the reassurance of human contact at that moment, to remind myself that I am not alone in that savage place. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home and sit with a beer by the fireside. Please let me get out of this. Joe’s voice drifts up to me: “Can you get some protection in?” He’s trying to sound calm but the anxiety is obvious. Just now my mind is focused on only two things – not falling off and finding protection. Joe knows that but can’t help reminding me as he watches helpless from the stance below. Green Gully and I slug it out. The leader’s mind is focused on what he is doing, sometimes even to the exclusion of fear, but it is the curse of the second man on the rope that his imagination has the time to torture him with endless permutations of disaster. I long to swing my picks into the snow above the overhang in some vain hope that I might find solid ice, but any violent movement could sever my fragile connection with the mountain. Working blind, unable to see my feet, I probe the rock below me for some kind of hold. My crampons bounce 3
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off rock every time I kick. I try over and over again, searching for some security, and eventually find the same tiny icicle that holds my left foot. It’s not much but it’s something. I begin to gingerly probe the snow above the bulge for something to hook into. At last my pick sticks. It feels loose, insubstantial, but it’s all there is. I don’t know if my tools will hold but it’s now or never. I take a deep breath and lunge for the overhang. * * * Mountains have been at the centre of my life for the twenty years that have led to this moment of terror. I had moved to Sheffield and spent my summer evenings learning to climb on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire and my weekends wandering the rolling hills of the Peak District. In winter my weekends were spent camped in Lake District snow, summer holidays backpacking across the wastes of the Scottish Highlands or in frantic attempts to climb in the Alps. I fell in love with the remoteness of Scotland and finally moved north and made my home there all so I could spend time in the mountains and, best of all, climb on Scottish ice. Climbing was my pressure valve, my release; it got me through bad days at work and the mundane dreary days. I didn’t think of it as an escape from real life. It was life, and everything else just got in the way. As the years passed, however, my priorities began to change. I married and, in what seemed a fraction of time, became a father. I found a new kind of fulfilment in my children and I loved being a family man. I got promoted at work and moved up the ladder as a local authority social worker. Gradually 4
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I spent less and less time in the hills, less time in the world that I loved. At first I thought that it didn’t matter; I had a new life with new challenges. My children brought me endless joy and I thought I did not need the mountains, I thought it was a chapter of my life I could close. Inevitably, as life moves on, pressures build and I needed my safety valve more than ever – but it wasn’t there. That weekend would be my only free time for most of the year. I didn’t want to climb, I had to. What keeps you alive in the mountains isn’t climbing skill, or fitness, or navigational skill, in the end it’s judgement – the ability to assess risks and to analyse situations. That day on Ben Nevis my judgement had failed. * * * High on the face, reality checks in to my head with a sudden jolt. I replay the steep, thinly iced pitches I have climbed to get to this point. My mind fills with images of iced rock, patches of soft powder snow and belay slings ten feet out of reach, hanging where snow should have been if this had been an average winter. When you are climbing at your limit the brain sometimes disengages the memory and focuses all its attention on what’s about to happen. History has little use in a survival situation: the last move doesn’t matter, it’s only the next that counts. Some sections of the climb are crystal clear to me, others I can only vaguely remember, if at all. Like waking from a dream, I realise the climb I thought I was on didn’t exist that day. I’m on the back of a very different monster. I take a deep breath and lunge for the overhang. For a moment my body sways in and out of balance, feet scratching for holds, 5
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pegs and ice screws jangling on my belt. Then, suddenly, I’m over the overhang and standing on a small platform. It’s perhaps only a foot wide, but after the insecurity of the last few moments, it feels like a football field. The little overhang holds a sting in its tail. From the small platform a smooth slab of ice-glazed rock leads up to an easy section of thick ice, a place where I will be able to use my ice tools, a place where I will be back on the kind of climbing I know. If I can make the ice, the battle will be over … if. The sight of that rock slab churns my stomach. It looks unclimbable, no holds for ice axes and the ice too thin for crampon points to hold. Oh God, I don’t want to be here, I can’t get up that. Then I make myself look at that slab again, really hard, harder than I’ve ever looked at any section of a climb before. As I look I begin to see, here and there, places where the ice thickens slightly – perhaps, just perhaps, thick enough to let me climb it. I step up on to the slab, expecting my crampons to shear through the ice and hurl me backwards over the overhang below. To my intense relief, they hold. Now I tiptoe up the slab, my ice axes sinking in only three or four millimetres, more points of balance than anchors. My crampon points do the same. I can see the thick ice above now – it feels very close, yet there are still a few heart-stopping moves left. With no runners and a lot of hard rock below me, one slip will bring disaster. Suddenly I’m close to the ice bulge. One lunge and I can drive a pick in and be safe, but if I lunge now my feet will slip and I’ll never make it to the ice. It’s a trap. Just keep doing what you are doing. Don’t fail now. 6
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One more teetering move and I am close enough to make my swing. I raise the axe gently and let its own weight carry it into the ice. Until I can drive the pick home, I’m not safe; close is not enough. The pick sinks into the ice with a reassuring thud and suddenly I’m in a world I understand. The ice is steep but feels easy and I can breathe again. Ten minutes later I swing my axe for the last time, and it shudders as it buries itself deep into the hard ice of Ben Nevis’s summit plateau. “I’m up,” I yell down to Joe. “Thank God,” his voice echoes in the darkening corrie. I silently respond in thought. Yes. Thank God. * * * A couple of days later, on the last day of my weekend of freedom, my friend Robert and I return to Ben Nevis with thoughts of climbing Tower Ridge. As we sit beside the Charles Inglis Clark Hut – the climber’s refuge on the mountain – an icy wind drives those ideas from our minds and we begin to think of excuses to go down. A bearded youth, swathed in blue fibre pile, emerges from the hut drinking tea. We discuss the climbing conditions and he declares, with all the solemn authority that only the young possess, that Green Gully is unclimbable. I delight in informing him that I climbed it a few days before, but agree that the climb is way out of condition and make the point that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. At first he doesn’t believe me, but then he decides I’m telling the truth and vanishes back into the ice-wreathed hut. Moments later he returns, still in silence, this time with half a dozen of his friends, who line up a respectful distance away and stand staring at me. At first I think 7
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that this must be out of respect for my climbing skills, but then I begin to realise they are looking at me like an exhibit in a zoo. They’ve come to see the lunatic who climbed the unclimbable. They are staring at a psycho killer.
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