Bad Day at Black Crag

Chris Bonington on Black Crag classic 'Prana'.Photo-Mountain Heritage

Black Crag, Borrowdale, at 4 o’clock on Saturday looks like market day in the high street. Brightly coloured groups gathered on ledges, at the top, eating and drinking at the crag-foot. Heaps of gear lie around among the birches. A mesh of ropes, green and purple, yellow and red, connects the stances. The sun reaches Troutdale Pinnacle around 2 o’clock, and a nearly freezing wind has driven everyone off the saturnine east-facing steeps of Goat across the dale - ourselves included, only we have been doing the Peeler while they have been doing things like Bitter Oasis and Alone in Space. 

We know this because they wear track-suit bottoms with twin white stripes and of course no helmets. On the whole crag only two helmets - ours. On the sheer left wall, where Grand Alliance, Vertigo, and Prana thread upwards from one invisible mini-hold to another, it looks like a gymkhana. Leggy athletes in T-shirts are spreadeagled all over it. As we start up the tortuous rearing corner systems of the Pinnacle face, aiming at Mortician, a handsome lad with a curly moustache, like an Edwardian advertisement for  liver pills, is fiddling in a wire or two to protect the crux of Grand Alliance. He’s been there a while. By the time I’ve led up the scratched slab and steep corner and taken a stance on a quaking mass of earth which supports three rowan saplings, he’s still there as I tie on, a shout of “Below!” echoes from above. 

I look up and see yellow and ochre rocks blossoming in the sunshine like fireworks. They spin past and I look down to see my mate, Neil, crouching with his hands on top of his head. luckily they miss him, and the dog and the flask. No sooner has Neil’s orange helmet surfaced below me than two track-suits start up the slabs towards us, soloing with ropes on shoulders, as track-suits will. Neil sets about ‘entering an obvious cleaned corner with difficulty’ , places a wire and rests, finds a high hidden hold, which also takes a wire, and rests again. Over on the left wall, Curly Moustache is crucified just below his crux, poised to move but doing nothing - that is, waiting for the adrenalin to flow. A pair to his right, talkative after finishing Prana in good style, are abbing volubly and leisurely past him, crossing his ropes, and are sharply advised to get on with it by Curly’s mates down beside the yew tree.

The Track-suits have reached us. They too are aiming at Mortician and we decide to let them past since we’re taking quite a while to enter the cleaned corner with difficulty. So do they. The leader (long black hair) clips into our runners in a devious way (he carries five wires on one krab), to the accompaniment of derisive ‘advice’ from his mate.....

“ What are you doing that for... Don’t you think you’ve got it twisted?”

Soon the rock bristles with gear like a bull’s shoulder full of banderillas just before the kill. Black-hair yo-yo’s for a while. Then, stung by frustration and more advice, he muscles up on the good hold and makes it into the corner, where he rests for a long time, breathing heavily like a torrid sequence in a blue movie. Chalk floats downwards.

The 140 feet above him will clearly take ages and we decide to deflect into Obituary Grooves instead. Presently Neil is calling down for yet another hearing of the book, as though its stuff about “Climb the groove above a little way” and “Go up and out to the right” will presently match the vertical maze in which he finds himself. I shout up to the pair who showered us with rock, but they are on a new route - extreme, no doubt, since the leader has been impaled on the same overhang for nearly an hour - and they can’t guide us.

Neil pokes about for protection and I chat with Track-suit Two. He’s thirsting to do Grand Alliance and is enviously watching his mates, Curly and company, disporting themselves on the wall. Curly moves delicately up.

His right leg shakes. His fingers reach, lodge, his leg steadies, he makes the move and then heads, still charily, for the sunlit beard of Heather at the top. As he ties on up there, Track-suit Two jeers pleasantly:

 “I liked your shakes,” and Curly calls back: “Nearly lost it there. I went for this better hold and it was really rounded. I was twenty feet above me wires and I thought I’d lost it. But I got control again and it was all right.” 

To his left a track-suit, who must be very strong, has been grappling with the overhang on Vertigo for more than half an hour, leaning out, reaching up, finding nothing, swearing. Below us, someone is leading up the first pitch of the Direct – a tall pretty girl with noticeable make-up, quite an apparition on this or any other crag.

When she gets to our height, she seems vague about route and protection but clambers cheerfully onwards, decorating the crag with runners from time to time. Neil has belayed, to put off the perplexities of route-finding, and I climb to join him, up a long corner on fine sharp Lakeland edges, just enough, always there when you reach up for them. The ‘belay’ is a one inch ledge, with the broken awkward groove of Mortician leering above our heads. The only way out, or along or up, is across an undercut wall to the left, quite a space-walk, making for an edge with the extreme pair’s stance just beyond it. As I eye this, psyching myself, the extreme leader finally falls and more ochre rock explodes around us. I step out, change feet, find a perfect incut slot, and reach for the ledge. It’s good and bevelled and I swing across securely enough.

This is the ‘swing lay-back’ which we thought was many feet below. The stance I now share with the Extremes, a Scotsman and his mate, is of course littered with sharp stones, trodden peaty earth, and piles of red and yellow rope. For a moment I feel the laws of nature  have come unstuck - I’m sinking – clods of earth have landslid, stopping just in time, and the Scotsman says, “Oh thanks! That was the stance!

I climb on. Trying to "move left" as the guidebook tersely puts it. Moving left means toeing precariously along a sloping waste of dihedrals and slabs and little triangular notches, looking for protection. There is none and sixty feet run out behind me. When I look back, I see my ropes have passed in front of the Extreme second and I suggest he gets in front of them in case I pendule and rive him off. You would think it has been snowing brown shit - earth cakes every hold, washed down from the evil looking gully which divides the Pinnacle from the Wall. Its cheesey. gaping innards remind me of a phrase from Apocalypse Now, “the ass-hole of the world”. Every friction hold has to be dusted off.

Insecurity reigns. It feels like Scottish climbing. Thankfully I find a peg. whose rusty solidity suggests it must have been banged home by Greenwood and Ross, the first humans to pass this way, a quarter of a century ago. Thirty dirty sloping feet beyond it I come to an oak in a corner, sturdy. Not yet quite ring-barked, with plenty yellow buds, and l tape onto it. The Scotsman has followed me now and clips into my runner on the peg, his finger pouring blood from his last explosion.

In a moment Black-hair arrives at the summit of his big corner, his nose clown-white with chalk. looking weary and remote. The bleeding Scotsman decides to abseil off the oak and protects himself with a yellow sling while he hovers over space. When he jumps off downwards. he leaves the sling on the tree, which is starting to look Christmassy. Track-suit Two arrives and climbs wordlessly past. Black-hair says, “What the hell  are you doing?" Two says. “ It's called ‘leading through’." speaking very distinctly as though to a deaf foreigner. But Black-hair has had enough and they agree resentfully to follow the abseil fashion.

Over on Vertigo the strong track-suit is doing the same. Neil arrives, and it is even more like Christmas for a while as Black- hair gives him back his wire from the bottom of the corner, where we were a day or two ago - sometime this week anyway - and I hang the bleeding Scotsman‘s yellow sling round Two‘s neck to take back down.

We follow the guide’s brief ambiguities for one more long pitch. still trusting its belief in hundred-foot run-outs round right-angles and sharp edges. Neil even believes that ‘exit right’ means you should move right and finds himself on an Extreme wall. Ten tantalizing feet below a plausible slanting finger-ledge. Balked, he retreats and belays. Being a tree-lover, I lead through past a small and well-worn holly and find a fleck or two of red and blue wool tracking upwards towards the heathery skyline. (Theseus must have felt like this in the labyrinth of Minos.) 

As we coil, Track-suit Two dances into view, jumping nimbly up the old classic, the Pinnacle itself. No rope trails behind him - he’s soloing with Curly. As they join me, I yawn, and Curly says kindly, “You must be tired," which makes me feel about 75. “I’m hungry“ I say, thinking that today everyone at Black Crag must be tired. 

David Craig:First published in Climber and Rambler-March 82

 

Castaways on Gritstone Island

Original Mountain Spread. Photo captioned 'Ron Fawcett on Joker's Wall at Brinham.Photo Jean Horsfall

Beyond the mainstream cliffs of Derbyshire gritstone swells the dirty grey-black sea of Yorkshire Industry. Cross the sinuous industrial fjords of the West Riding and you arrive abruptly at the heathered moors of the Yorkshire Dales. You won’t find the long lined gritstone tiers of the south here, but crags twinkling from a moorland setting, pinpoints of black light. The harsh weather, small crags and dour guides have never offered much encouragement to the Visitor.Coming here, one usually found the routes easier than one had imagined, although some gems of the dark days of Yorkshire climbing stood out. Austin’s Western Front and Wall of Horrors were morbid lures to Almscliffe aspirants more than likely struggling to capture the barely lesser jewels of Dolphin’s era - Birdlime Traverse or Demon Wall.

High Street at Ilkley, Heptonstall’s Forked Lightning Crack and Crookrise’s Shelf were all fine but rarely climbed XSs of the sixties. We’ve heard all this before, though.Austin’s nine sweaters, Whillans’s fists: we know more about them than the routes.But now, now the barriers are down. The five years that have passed since the publication of the guide have seen the internal aspect of Yorkshire climbing revolutionized; irreverent intellectuals vie with irrelevant non-intellectuals for revelationary routes. There’s a throbbing youth cult hammering away at the rock, with fingers, fists, feet, and even some head. The rock is climbed for the routes, for the moving, for the thrills: no one cares who adds what to the age-old defacements at Ilkley. Aestheticism is derived from the totally consuming difficulty of the routes, rather than from the surroundings. 

Older aspirant youth-culters try to alter their image, in order to belong once again. A fresh emergent rock group rehearses hard at Leeds University - all lead players in an innovatory band. Concrete backed brick edges wince at the bite of fingernails belonging to solid arms. Bodies revolve about those arms, gaining height with scant regard for traditional posture. The members of the band look alike: all Perrin’s skinny ape-armed type, embellished by pop-group looks. Concentrated competition drives them to perfect ever more ridiculous moves: hand-holds approach footholds as the distance to the next pair increases.

Kinaesthologists would marvel at the vertical awareness of these performers utilizing every inch of their movement sphere from two small central holds. New techniques,knee pressing, arm locking and two-dimensional movement emerge quickly in the competitive but sociable atmosphere; these are ‘friendlies’, soon to be played for real when the shrieking winter gales abate from those gritstone outcrops. On the other hand, it may be that the outcrops provide training for Leeds University’s ‘Wall’ groupie Bernard Newman- weight-trains, runs, and has even been seen climbing in the Alps- in preparation for his winter season on ‘The Wall’. Don Robinson is the man to blame; a sixty four year old lecturer at Leeds University, a skilled caver and a climber of moderate ability, he conceived the wall as an indoor teaching space for his students.

Pete Livesey:Photo Adrian Bailey.

Built for only a few pounds, its superiority over earlier and later architect-designed monstrosities was soon apparent. Today,as every day, it draws climbers from all overthe county to play on its ferociously gymnastic possibilities. The results that can be achieved on such  a training-ground first became apparent to the climbing world at large when John Syrett, non-climber, emerged from a year on the wall to tear about the country climbing everything from XS and up. His progression from nothing to a sight-lead of Wall of Horrors, inside twelve months, set the scene. The conditions of some of his ascents emphasized the inadequacies of the technical difficulties as tests for his ability.

New routes and new names soon followed, but Syrett, sober, was nigh on impossible to follow. His first ascents, often solo, were technically new, and they see little of the traffic that routes like Wall of Horrors now bear. Traditionally-trained climbers did not sit back and applaud this artificial effrontery. Old men with short hair, raggy sweaters and gnarled hands were heard panting and grunting in dimly lit corners of climbing walls. Ken Wood replied to the University challenge with two routes of his own: Chopper (XS) at Earl Crag, and True Grit (XS) at Brimham. Both are unrepeated; Chopper is off-width, and True Grit is a vicious finger-crack looking dispassionately north from the northern shores of Gritstone Island. Syrett also came north and added Joker’s Wall to the fiercely overhanging side of Brimham’s Cubic Block; you’re too high to jump off before you know it - then it gets mean.

Of all the crags offended by these forays into the impossible, none has received the continual battering nor nurtured and harnessed the energy so well as Almscliff. Almscliff  the friendly wart, no, more like a, Freudian nipple - a barometer of the state of the art. Syrett’s Big Greenie (XS) was a high bold problem on the nipple’s biggest blank, a good starter for a concentrated but prolonged attack by the University climbers. Al Manson, without doubt the first man to make the real breakthrough in climbing wall standards, brought his ability to Almscliff and linked two unrepeated problems to produce Rectum Rift (XS). The highly technical start and stretchy tenuous finish make this obscene route one of the hardest technical challenges on grit, a bold statement that someone has yet to refute. 

The weediest climber in Britain, Pete Kitson, soloed two boulder problems on Virgin Boulder. At HVS, the 35ft lengths of the Gypsy and the Virgin are shattering. In August 1973, when the inhabitants were sunning in Greece or voyeurging to the Calanques, Lancastrian Pasquill sailed in and poked out the Goblin’s Eyes. Climbing an 8ft. roof on eye-like pockets to a long, long finishing pull, he led what Syrett had failed to top-rope. Home teams could not answer. Livesey came with All Quiet (XS), a beautiful climber’s route, starting up Wall of Horrors and swinging from jug to jug across the wall to Western Front, then across again to Crack of Doom; 70ft of high quality climbing in a continuously overhanging situation.

One could almost see a tearful sorrow in the eyes of spectators at Almsclilf and other showgrounds, as they watched the passing of the Average Climber. They could see nothing familiar, nothing to identify with in the preparations of the Lean Men: the Spiny Normans with their chalky hands, deep breathing, vest and shorts, and quick-draw shortened runner racks. 

But come back after the show, you ordinary men, see when all’s quiet what they have done; look at the needle-straight cracks of Ilkley’s Wellington Crack or Heptonstall’s Hard Line; contemplate the audacity of Goblin’s Eyes or the technical beauty of Crookrise’s Small Brown. Attempts were made to strengthen the Western Ramparts: Heptonstall, first line of defence against the Invader, was fortified with Syrett’s desperate-looking Thunderclap (XS). Livesey came next with the similar Hard Line (XS). Both routes follow thin, relentless crack lines and are unrepeated. Peel and Rawlinson answered back for the invaders with Cream (XS) and Strange Brew (XS), two more steep lines.

John Syrett: Photo Gordon Stainforth

At Ilkley, the first new route for years appeared on a most unlikely blank wall in the quarry. Propeller Wall was given the joke grade of VS by Syrett. Repeated twice, it is said to be harder than the neighbouring High Street (XS). Syrett soloed it. Livesey followed with Waterloo (HVS), similar but better protected. Something bigger was brewing at Ilkley though. Someone had cleaned the rotting wedges from the painfully obvious Wellington Crack, a thin diagonal slash up an otherwise featureless 40ft. wall, slightly overhanging with an undercut base. It was going to be done soon, but by whom? Livesey stepped in,inspected it from jumars, then failed.

But still no one else came. Three months later, Livesey returned and got to within a foot of the top, where failing strength forced him to grab a nut to step down for a rest, but the route was completed. Never technically ridiculous, its relentlessness can only be compared with that of its American cousin,Butterballs.

Nineteen-year-old Ron Fawcett was quietly making his mark on the crags about his native Skipton. A narrow lad with a wide appreciation for climbing hard routes, Fawcett can stretch up and surely insert his club-like fists a foot higher than you or I. See him on Ilkley evenings; on a windy climbing wall - a wind that for some cools the heat of competition. Follow Fawcett solo round the routes; you can’t – you should have taken notice of those athlete’s shorts and vests. At eighteen he’d already done more, and harder, routes than Brown and Whillans put together. No one can repeat his free ascent of Small Brown at Crookrise, technical and strenuous in the extreme. 

The rise in standard is by no means ebbing as climbing-wall training gains  momentum. A new wall opens on Gritstone Island: at Rothwell it is bigger and better another Robinson-built effort that is already incredibly popular. Climbers perform unroped, a must for effective training; no meddling regulations here! What will it bring? Certainly routes like the Cow’s right-hand aréte and Milky Way (also at Ilkley). Too hard for now, but soon to become a reality. But then, who knows when to stop?

Note: Rectum Rift and Thunderclap have both recently been repeated; the latter especially was thought desperate.

Pete Livesey: First published in Mountain 42 March 1975

 

John Porter's- One Day as a Tiger- Review

John Porter’s One Day as a Tiger-(Alex Macintyre and the birth of lightweight and fast Alpinism) is an absorbing literary hybrid that is part biography and part autobiography. Ostensibly, the reader will get the impression that the book revolves around the eponymous doomed mountaineer whose star burned bright in climbing’s firmament for less than a decade before he was killed, aged just twenty eight on Annapurna. However this is just as much John Porter’s story; and why not... for the author’s achievements stand up in their own right and the Massachusetts  born, Lakeland dwelling mountaineer has his own fascinating tale to tell and that tale is skilfully woven into the life and times of his subject.

John Porter was Alex Macintyres’s friend and mountain partner for almost as long as Alex was active. From his early days with the infamous Leeds University Mountaineering Club until that final fatal day in 1982. John watched his friend graduate from the confident if limited crag rat, to the international respected mountaineer whose light weight ethic has been taken to the limit in modern times, by climbers like Ueli Steck.

‘Dirty Alex’ as he was known to his friends-which reflected his unkempt appearance and chaotic lifestyle rather than any unsavoury sexual predilections!- began his climbing life in the time honoured manner of his contemporaries. By working his way through the UK rock and ice classics before taking on the Alpine biggies. Porter describes Alex’s early days as unremarkable in that his talents at the time remained largely hidden. A solid if unspectacular performer who was happy enough to let better climbers take the lead on technical ground while he observed and developed his craft.

However, it wasn’t long before he had accelerated past most of these partners, bringing a fearlessness and almost fanatical drive to his armoury of technical skills. It was time to apply this potent force and passion to the challenges of the greater ranges of the Himalayas and the south American giants.

His achievements in this arena were extraordinary and his application of lightweight ‘hit and run’ Alpine techniques were revolutionary in an age when Himalayan climbing was defined by the vast scale of the enterprises. Throwing vast armies of mountaineers at a goal and almost battering the target into submission through weight of numbers, equipment and time. This was an anathema to Alex and his revolutionary approach harvested a rich reward . With equally committed partners he made eye-catching  Alpine-style first ascents and first attempts on, Changabang, Shishapangma and Makalu and with the author, took on some hair raising challenges in the Andes.

In train with his growing catalogue of achievements came a role with the BMC alongside Denis Gray. In many ways, his role as a climbing bureaucrat was in sharp contrast to his image as a mountaineering free spirit and trail blazer. Notwithstanding this apparent contradiction, he appears to have applied himself to the role with the same single mindedness and commitment as he applied to his mountain activities. At the same time, he followed on in Don Whillans’ footsteps and began to act as equipment consultant and designer for companies like UK based Karrimor ,who at the time was a respected player in the mountaineering equipment field, prior to it becoming just another arm of the Mike Ashley/Sports Direct empire and the importer of Chinese made goods which the company has evolved into today.

The ‘Alex Macintyre rucsack’ was amongst the more popular items he designed and which went into commercial production ( currently on my eBay watch out for list!) but seemingly as rare these days as hen’s teeth. Try looking for an image or info on Google.

As Alex entered the final period of his short life, friends including the author, had noticed a change in his previously determined but principled approach to climbing. His latter-day excursions into the mountains were marked by a ruthlessness and ambition which had no place for journeymen or 'tourists'. To say he didn’t suffer fools gladly would be an understatement. He put his bold climbing style- where he would often take on potentially life threatening sections on gnarly ground with non existent  protection- down to an ability to detach himself from reality and climb within a protective mind bubble. He also however, believed he could achieve astral projection and leave his body when he was in the Himalayas, to be with his partner in the Lakes. Not a gift you imagine someone like Don Whillans boasting about! 

This otherworldlyness allied to a ruthlessness in his latter day quests is most clearly defined  in a 1981 expedition he undertook to Shisha Pangma. An expedition led by Doug Scott. This ill tempered affair and the fractious nature of the campaign can be quite squarely attributed to Alex’s’ ambition and ego. As Doug Scott attempted to keep his team focused and united, Alex put personal ambition before anything else and appears to have offered nothing but contempt for a leader who was doing his best to accommodate everyone; not least the weaker members of the team. Alex was quite clear, he wanted to cut loose the weaker team members who were perceived as holding himself and partner Roger Baxter-Jones, back.  In this as in every campaign, success was everything. More so it would appear, than respecting and accommodating those climbers who were not in Alex’s league when it came to ability, drive and stamina.

It was during this period that he had announced to the author that ‘I want to be one of the world’s all time great mountaineers’. In this regard critics will say that to achieve that ambition a mountaineer needs to have more than drive, ambition and technical ability in their locker. Respect for others and respect for the environment have to come into the equation. There appears to be little doubt that Alex Macintyre-as one of an elite core of top end mountaineers- was single minded to the extent that his hit list of mountaineering targets became a holy grail to the detriment of relationships.

If he had lived through to his 60^th birthday in 2014, would he have made a great mountain leader? John Porter’s book suggests not, as he was certainly no Shackleton when it came to accommodating and respecting others. Did he respect the environment within which he lost his life? There is no doubt that he did although like all mountaineers at the sharp end, he was prepared to take risks and often though, risks which appeared disproportionately pointless and unnecessarily dangerous in relation to the end goal.

He was killed after being struck on the head by a rock on terrain which was notoriously loose and prone to rockfall, but then again, acting as a skittle in a bowling alley is not a unique role that Alex Macintyre played when pushing the envelope in the Himalayas. I’m left pondering what he would be doing today if he had lived? Would he have become a Bonington or Brown; a respected elder statesman within the community or would his ego and ambition mark him out as an outsider. I’ve already alluded to this above but I would guess from John Porter’s insider account that he certainly would have been respected but perhaps without becoming a popular personality within the community. Certainly you couldn't see him evolving into an avuncular Chris Bonington figure.

John Porter’s Banff winning  book, written from his unique perspective will, I’m sure, promote speculation and inspire debate  around Alex Macintyres’ place in the pantheon of mountaineering greats. At least his comment ‘I don’t want to play this game just to have a rucksack named after me’ hasn’t come to pass. His achievements will always speak for themselves and his influence continues to be recognized throughout the mountaineering world today.

Rating

John Appleby:2014