My husband is turning 50. I must really love him, because I booked an ice climbing holiday for his birthday. I slept for what felt like two hours before we left, lying there thinking of all the things that can go wrong.
We took a 6.40 am flight from Heathrow. Taking flights with children is much easier now that they are all over 5, but it was pretty annoying to find that booking an Uber XL to the airport for 6 people means I was not supposed to have any luggage at all. It’s not as if the taxi driver phoning me at 3.30 am for a 4.15 am booking endeared him to me either. “I’m here”. Well that’s nice for you, thanks for waking me up.
I’m not sure what about “XL” suggested to me that the size of the vehicle would permit luggage proportionate to the number of people, but according to Uber, it just means either “more space for four people and luggage” or “6 passengers”. Fixed it eventually with another cab, so then we also had to pay for fast track security. Thanks Uber.
Anyway, everything at the airport was reasonably straightforward, apart from some jobsworth suggesting I mustn’t forget my son, because he was walking maybe 10 metres behind me. It seems rather Hobson’s choice – either I walk at his pace and get even more frantic arm waving from the ground staff at the gate, or I hurry to the gate and wait for him – apparently these are both the wrong thing to do.
We arrived at 9.20 in Oslo, quite impressed with SAS. I think it was my first flight with them, unless possibly I flew SAS to Copenhagen many years ago. I have not come across any other airline that offers free coffee refills on short haul flights, which is a ridiculous reason to be pleased, but I was. The return flight is with Norwegian, which very annoyingly I didn’t notice charges for hold luggage – so I could have just booked SAS return for the same price. Still, if we never return I suppose at least I’ve not paid more than the minimum for a flight I won’t be on.
I don’t really have a low-risk attitude to life. I enjoy thrills, enjoy driving cars a little bit fast, enjoy bike rides, fun sport climbing holidays in Spain, France and Germany. We didn’t have a great result on our most recent trip to Pottenstein, because the whole crag was completely rammed with Spanish families presumably enjoying some climbing in more temperate weather before they return home to an autumn season on the best crags in Europe. I really want to book a nice autumn sport climbing holiday to the Costa Blanca, with a comfortable holiday house and enjoy some nice tapas after a hard day cranking out as many routes as possible. I love the lack of gear hassle involved in sport climbing. You’re only packing a rope, a harness, a tiny pair of climbing shoes, a bunch of quick draws and maybe a few loops to lower off. So that’s next year.
On this holiday, on the other hand, we have two sets of ice axes, two ropes, 14 ice screws and holders, crampons, gaiters, plastic boots, multiple pairs of gloves, balaclavas, dozens of different layers. And all of it needs to be carried to and from the random crazy waterfall that constitutes the day’s activity. The starting point looks like this:
After getting our gear on in the back of the rust-bucket van we rented from a company called Rent-a-Wreck (they really weren’t joking), we will walk for over an hour uphill with a 15 kilo pack, at the end of which I feel like my lungs are on fire and my legs are lead. Having arrived at the bottom of the crazy waterfall roasting hot, I will stand around faffing with crampons and ropes, gradually cooling off until my fingertips chill in my two pairs of gloves. I have new crampons, as the old ones have rusted away. The Grivel packet leaves a space to enter your blood group. Always encouraging when the gear packaging foreshadows serious injury.
As I pay out the rope, I realise I have got the belay device the wrong way around, and feel like an idiot, given I decided to reverse it in some confusion about the direction of the route. I don’t tell my climber this, I just focus a bit harder on the rope, which I am unsurprisingly finding quite sticky, since reversing the device increases the friction towards the climber, and decreases it downwards, which is not the best idea. When placing your life in the hands of nature and your wife, what’s a tiny bit of extra unnecessary risk; I couldn’t change it once he started climbing without hugely increasing the risk anyway. And the birthday boy looks as excited as a dog in a butcher’s shop:
I amuse myself at the cut-glass accents of the party of Brits next to us. “Milo, slow down, I’ve not quite got you. I think the route is to the right, Milo”. I assume the belayer was called Rupert. I forget about what I’m doing, just autopilot on the belay, watch Richard reach the top, and hope the belay doesn’t take too long to build. I had forgotten Milo’s party told us there were fixed anchors at the top, so I was quite pleased when he said “safe” almost immediately, and took him off belay. Then I looked at the ice axes I needed to clip the leashes to, and remembered we were not in Spain. I would have to second the route to remove the ice screws Richard placed quite nonchalantly on his rather swift ascent. I got there, after quite a lot of swearing and cursing the gloves that I blame for my lack of dexterity in removing the gear effectively. The lower part of the route was quite easy, the hardest part was at the top, right after this photo was taken, when I couldn’t find any good axe placements and my crampons kept slipping. So I flailed around like a dying fish, hacking randomly with the axes and hoping I could somehow knee-bar up. The state of my knees reminds me of this stupidity.
I retrieved all the ice screws eventually, and probably inelegantly, since I didn’t realise I could plant the axes and remove the leashes when extracting gear. The idea of losing the axes seemed too scary, but this meant that whilst unclipping each quickdraw from the rope and then winding the screws out, I had a big axe dangling on each wrist, getting in the way. It required a lot of patience I don’t have. The ice screws seem a bit pointless, because if the ice breaks off, it takes the climber and all the ice screws crashing to the ground.
Richard lowered me off, abseiled off himself and we skipped back down the road to the car park in what felt like no time. I remember no gear faff, no difficulty navigating the terrain, nothing but elation at it being over. That was the best bit.
It was my first real route, since I don’t think some messing around on a dry glacier in Chamonix counts. I think it’s more the implications I find difficult. The idea that we would orphan our children if anything went wrong. But then, it would have to go catastrophically wrong. It wouldn’t just involve the leader falling, it would have to involve a huge pillar of ice coming with him, and falling on top of the belayer – which, to be fair, it would be highly likely to do if it did come off, which is how we would orphan the children. But we didn’t climb a fully independent ice pillar, so that’s ok. The ice was over the rock, so if it broke, Richard would only break his back. I would be ok. We’d possibly get hypothermia before we were rescued, but Norway presumably has quite good emergency services. And anyway, there were other people around.
I’ve no idea; no idea what I’m doing, what I would do if any of it went wrong, or how I feel about the point of mortal danger. I kind of get that it gives you total perspective, maybe not quite in the way that most thrills do: because the worst case scenario is so awful, you cannot afford to let your mind wander to any of them, or anything at all, in the moment. You have to operate your body with absolutely no thought whatsoever. It’s like removing all higher functions from your brain, and just hacking at the ice like a zombie. No feelings, no interests, nothing between the ears except climbing.
I think it works for a particular mindset. They maybe tend to be more single-tracked in the way they focus on things, so they need a balancing focus that can consume everything. They are more zero-sum. Life has to have the balance that they can’t seem to naturally obtain. I don’t know. I just know I can’t quite handle it all. It was fine at the time, because I couldn’t think about it, but when I was driving back in the car, it felt overwhelming. By the time I was trying to sleep, I felt hideously guilty at putting myself in even that theoretical amount of danger. As I was saying to the guys on the other route, “I’ve not done much climbing since we had the kids, it feels too dangerous”. That’s it really, being a mother is subtly different to just being some random person that died having fun (well, enabling their husband’s fun, anyway). The former is a bad, selfish person, the latter was just unlucky.
The resting writer 
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