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LIFE REFINED: Fear and Freedom through the eyes of a very average mountaineer
For as long as he could remember, Joe Whittingham had dreamed of standing on the summit of a mountain, looking out across the world from a place few people ever reach. It sat quietly in the back of his mind for years.
But this year, equipped with Páramo clothing, Joe finally decided the time had come. With determination and his brother, Ollie, by his side, he set out to tackle the mountain he had always imagined climbing.
We crept into the mountain hut a couple minutes shy of midnight. My boots squelched as I prized them clumsily of my feet, glad to finally be free of them. A tiny red light broke the darkness of the top bunks and stared making its way down the ladder, freezing us. The red light reached the floor and paused, before talking to us in whispered German.
“Have you come from the mountain?”
“Yeah” we replied
“Oh”
“Yeah, it’s been a very long day”
“I see”
Four months earlier I sat in my box room in Spain, questioning whether my job was worth the mess it left my brain in every week. I needed an adventure.
In the end I messaged my brother and found we were in much the same place. For weeks we toiled over maps and blogs, Instagram posts and magazine articles, each one more outlandish than the next. Ober Gabelhorn via the south face.
Miraculously, he agreed.
3 months later we were off on a procession of trains, planes, busses, and after 22 hours of sleepless travel we began our final climb towards Zermatt. I will forever be entranced by the beauty of the mountains.
My Velez Jacket was one of the last items to go in, sitting atop our copious amounts of tuna and salami. That Páramo Jacket has been with me for nearly 5 years now, having been dragged across more mountains, moors, bogs and bad weather that I can count. To have a work-horse that light has been invaluable over the years, and is what earned it’s place on one last big adventure this summer. I am now lucky enough to own an Enduro Jacket that I given a true drowning in Wales over New Year, took down to -26°C in Norway and flailed against 60mph wind in Scotland the following January without a single complaint. However, in the name of space and weight my old Velez won out.
I tried to keep my complaining to myself as we saddled up and left the beautiful, but eye-wateringly expensive town of Zermatt an hour late. The day got better and better as we climbed further into the shadow of the Matterhorn which dominated the south side of the valley.
There was no way this was our mountain, with it’s “sun trap” south face that is “almost always” free of snow all summer. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find any excuse that we’d got the wrong mountain, that our beautiful, snow free face, would be lying just around the corner. It wasn’t.
At the hut, our base for the night, other climbers looked fresh, experienced, and a good few years older. We were beginning to feel quite young, and slightly out of our depth. That night we made two decisions, we’d take the Arbengrat which would be easier at AD, III+, and we’d let everyone else go first.
The snow began to steepen. Somewhere down there was where we had spent last night; a tiny stone hut no bigger than the boulders it hid behind, and where we’d started from at 5am that morning As the Matterhorn had begun to glow in the rising sun.
It was grey now. I grinned to myself, we were finally doing this! The dark blue of Ollie’s Páramo Alta III jacket appeared over the lip.
My axe slammed into the thin layer of icy snow above my head sending half of it showering back into my face.
Since we’d hauled ourselves onto the ridge everything had slowly begun to deteriorate. Our hope had been that the ridge, unlike the snow caked south-face, would be devoid of snow due to the strong winds and the route’s renown for clearing quickly after storms.
The rattling, freezing wind had held up it’s end of the bargain, the snow however was still out in force. It was a mixed climber’s dream… and our idea of hell.
Our rope billowed in the wind between us.
The sound of shattering ice cut through the eternal scream of the wind, a clump of ice crystals crashed down the wall to my right.
Normally after such efforts I feel exhilarated, reveling in my mind and body’s ability to overcome what my conscious self had doubted. My mind clear and life refined to the immediate world around me. Now I just felt exhausted, my mind worn out by the effort of keeping me alive and emotions suppressed. For the first time all day I wanted give up.
Two pitches later we decided to bail, it was only 11am, one hour before our planned turnaround time. We took in our surroundings, 3900m up, huddled bellow the Grand Gendarme.
We made good time in our retreat at first, the sun was shining again with a breathtaking view.
It all went downhill again after that. The savage wind resumed
Snow collapsed erratically under our feet. At the steepest section of the gully the snow collapsed completely, my boots punching through into the small stream running beneath. Then the sun set.
The rappel points seemed to get worse as we descended, Ollie going first with a backup sling, myself following after. Rinse and repeat into the night. Once again Ollie descended into the darkness, only to stop 10 meters down the rope with a yell of surprised expletives.
“I’m glad we found this rap, this path goes off a @#%$ing cliff!”
We’d got lost and hadn’t even known it.
One final rappel got us back onto the snow fields, where too tired to walk we slid on our backsides most of the way to the hut. A couple of minutes shy of midnight; fatigued, defeated, and 18 hours after our departure, I lifted the latch on the hut door and winced as it creaked painfully into the dark abyss of the hut.
