Ruining Niels' Birthday

I changed my cover photo on facebook to me half way up a mountain standing on a rock looking down into the valley. My sister asked if I was yawning and I told her, as if it wasn't obvious, "At that altitude the only way to get enough oxygen to survive is to yawn." Rory asked where I was and I told him, as if it wasn't obvious, the second highest mountain in the world: "K2". No one questioned it. What nice friends I have.

In reality I'm pretty sure Tryfan isn't even the second highest mountain in Wales. It might not even be a mountain, it might be a hill but according to the US geological survey there is no difference so for the sake of my own ego we will be calling it a mountain. A little research tells me it is in fact 917m tall, which, as way of reference, is barely taller than the world's tallest building. Even that is a very deceptive comparison since even climbing the stairs of the Burj Kalifa would be extremely difficult whereas, for anyone with any mountaineering skill, Tryfan would be a doddle.

However, I don't have any mountaineering skill. I'm unskilled. Completely unskilled and ill prepared for what lay ahead of me as we sat on the car park floor and my very skilled mountaineering friend Niels is asking me if I brought any walking boots with me. No I didn't bring those or anything waterproof or any gloves. No, no, no.

Fortunately for my mental health at that point I had no idea what terror lay in store for me. If I had known me and Luc would undoubtedly have called the whole thing off, jumped back into the nice warm car and caned it around the beautiful roads all day listening to reggae. But Niels, knowing us, didn't explain that we would be entering into a 'Touching the void/Vertical Limit' scenario. He described it as going for a walk.

I did wonder why I needed to borrow a helmet and why there was so much rope everywhere. I just assumed Niels was being his typically Bavarian, over-prepared self and treating the thing as a training exercise. Where Niels, Elli and Jess are fairly experienced with mountains and climbing etc Luc and I have a combined mountaineering knowledge of a beached whale. I would guess that before last weekend Luc would not know the difference between a carabiner and a strawberry ribena but by Saturday afternoon Luc would be confidently calling out commands such as "dyno from the mono to the jug", "pass the ice axe" and "help, help I can't feel my legs"

Jess drove us down the valley to the car park and just as I was feeling relaxed we got out of the car into the swirling wind and Niels pointed up a fucking huge hill and said we're going up there. I thought we'll be back in the car in an hour, whatever. So we started up this thing and i was basically knackered after about 5 minutes but no one else seemed to be bothered so I just pretended I was fine even though my calves and legs were killing me. I thought to myself next time I go to Wales to go walking I won't do an intense legs workout the day before.

Now, to be fair, Niels was frequently using words such as "perilous", "danger" and "lethal" but I honestly thought he was just overplaying everything to make it seem exciting. I didn't really realise that the point of mountaineering is to do things that are kind of dangerous just for fun. Most of my hobbies involve some element of danger but usually I at least have half a clue what I'm doing and I'm not completely at the mercy of the violent Welsh weather.

It was relaxed at first and there were other people about suggesting that what we were doing was kind of a normal thing to do. I don't know what the correct terminology is but in effect we went round the back of the mountain and round to what I believe is referred to as the East Face.

This is the point where the horrible whistling wind noise started. I tried to ignore it because the only times I've heard it before are in Vertical Limit and when we got stuck in the bog on Duke of Edinburgh when Alex Johnstone broke his ankle. If you somehow read this Alex; You know when we all kept saying, "watch out for the uneven ground" that meant not just to watch out for it but also to adjust your behaviour in accordance with it such that you don't break your ankle and leave us all fucked in a bog.

It got a lot colder all of sudden and the presence of snow everywhere became much more of a concern. This concern paled in insignificance compared to the overwhelming anxiety when Niels pointed up a vertical crack in the mountain face and gestured towards it as if we were going to climb it. We realised he must be joking because it was obviously impossible for a pair of novices one of which who had a bad back. To make matters worse two other climbers who looked pretty legit were on their way down and when Niels spoke to them they were very clear that they had bailed out of their attempt because it was obviously such a terrible idea and the weather was too bad. This seemed to only spur Niels on. This is exactly what happens in Touching the Void I thought, the only difference is we're not going to miraculously survive, we're going to get cold, give up and die.

The first bit was hard. I don't think Luc has ever had to pick his own foot up to put in position before and it's a very unnerving thing to have to do when if you fall you're probably going to smash your already injured back into some razor sharp protruding rock or maybe twist your ankle and end up like Alex fucking Johnstone. Because there was five of us we could only climb twenty metres at a time and then would have to untangle a clusterfuck of rope and huddle together for warmth. Little did anyone know I wasn't cuddling them for warmth, it was for comfort. I was scared. Scared like a kid in a supermarket who can't find his Mummy.

It only got harder but fortunately our lives were not in my hands since at the only point where I had any responsibility and had to gather up some equipment as I was going up last, I accidentally threw a vital, life saving piece of equipment off the side of the mountain into the swirling wind. Luckily Niels just went and got it like it was nothing because If I'd had to leave my precarious little perch I would have surely perished.

As we looked across to the neighbouring mountains we could see clouds coming in and that it was snowing quite heavily further up the mountain. This, coupled with the weather forecast, which had predicted exactly that, didn't fill me with pleasure. In fact it filled me with a horrible dread feeling previously reserved for visits to the barber. Our fearless leader seemed pretty relaxed about it but to me the idea of it snowing or having to go back down the way we came seemed, in both instances, to lead to certain death. It was already so cold and the wind was picking up. How was everyone so relaxed? Hadn't they seen Vertical Limit. I felt certain we were approaching the point where one of us was going to have to jump across a ravine and catch our full body weight on two ice axes. But we had only one ice axe. How much dex did we have? Was I contracting pulmonary aedema? All these thoughts swirled around my head in manic, terrified confusion.

Soon it became clear that we had gone up the wrong way and had climbed ourselves into a trap. A dead end. This was it I thought. Ok, brilliant. I've come to Wales for the weekend and now we're all going to die. At least in this trap we were sheltered from the wind and still below the level where it was snowing. Where previously there had been water, there was now ice and I was getting cold despite wearing all the clothes I had with me. I started to think that maybe instead of bringing a can of kronenbourg I should have brought a jacket.

Niels manned up and climbed up and out of our trap. There is literally no way in hell I would have climbed out of there. From where we were it looked like scaling this rock would lead to a 100 foot vertical drop and any slip would lead to certain death. In fact that was pretty much the case but when the rest of us did it we had the safety of being secure. This is what I was eagerly referring to as the crux and I had been saying, but not necessarily meaning, all day, that I wanted that feeling of. oh um err i don't really fancy this and then having to do it. That's what we had at this point and it was great that after this nervewracking move we had done all the rope climbing and it was a much more relaxing rope-free climb to the summit. Exhausted, cold and hungry I was hoping to plant a flag and feel like I was on top of the world and there was some feeling of accomplishment but it was somewhat tempered by the fact that there was a huge group of seventeen year old hippies up there looking relaxed as anything and jumping about on the rocks.