Tale OF WOAH

Climbing safety is everyone’s responsibility, and it’s something our editorial team are incredibly passionate about. Our Tale of Woah column is our continued commitment to creating a culture of safety within our community.

Alpine adventures bring with them new and different safety issues to rock climbing. Here, Lousie reflects on her experiences mountaineering and how she came to decide that perhaps it wasn’t her cup of tea, after all.

My brief fling with alpinism started when my friend Andrea suggested one day, “Would you like to come to New Zealand and do a mountaineering course with me?”

I was incredulous. “Are you serious? Mountains are cold, dangerous, and have too much bad weather.”

Several of my rock climbing friends had died mountaineering in their twenties: Keith Egerton, once my housemate in Richmond; Craig Nottle, a happy-go-lucky med student; and Mark Moorhead, one of Australia’s most talented rock climbers.

Andrea had been rock climbing for only a few years and didn’t know anyone who’d died in the mountains. But she was persuasive, and in the summer of 1985, we went to New Zealand, along with our friend John, who was our guide. John was younger than us, but at 25 he was already an accomplished mountaineer and an experienced rock climbing guide.

Our alpine course started with the basics: how to self-arrest if you start sliding down an icy slope, how to prusik out of a crevasse, and how to find free camping in Mount Cook Village.

We did a couple of small warm-up peaks, bailed off Malte Brun (bad weather), and trudged a long way up glaciers with heavy packs. After 10 days, John reckoned we were ready to tackle Aoraki/Mt Cook. Aoraki has three peaks, low, middle and high. Doing all three is called The Grand Traverse. John decided we should climb the low peak via the West Ridge, a technically easy rock climb on relatively solid rock.

We set off up the Hooker Valley. It was in one of the huts along the way that we bumped into Zac, a climber from the UK. Zac’s goal was to solo the West Ridge, do the Grand Traverse, and descend the North-west Couloir.

John decided we should bivvy on the Empress Shelf, close to the start of our route. This meant we could have a leisurely 6am start the next day and were spared a hideous 3am alpine start. Zac decided to join us, as he too was beginning with the West Ridge.

The next day, the weather was perfect for climbing: clear and sunny. John led each pitch. He trailed two skinny alpine ropes and belayed Andrea and me up together. At the top of the ridge, John short-roped us up a steep, slick cone of ice to Low Peak.

My crampons bit into the ice a mere centimetre; this felt entirely inadequate. I was comfortable on the rock pitches, but on the ice I felt horribly exposed. On the summit of Low Peak, we straddled the ridge, one leg on each side.

Out of nowhere, Zac appeared. He had already soloed the Grand Traverse and back again, and was on his way down. He offered to take some snaps of the three of us on the summit. As Zac peered through the camera viewfinder, he took a few steps backwards to fit us all in. I watched in fear and wonder at his confidence. Then Zac took off, and we prepared to descend the North-west Couloir.

By now, it was mid-afternoon, and the day's heat had softened the snow. Andrea and I rappelled down each pitch, and then John dropped our ropes and downclimbed. After some hours and multiple abseils, the angle of the couloir eased. We negotiated a treacherous-looking bergschrund and reached the Empress Shelf.

By now, it was quite late, but the sun sets late in the mountains in high summer. We noticed a figure some distance away, wandering along somewhat aimlessly. As we approached, it became clear that something wasn’t quite right.

“Hello, hello!” John called out.

The person turned to us in the fading light; it seemed we were seeing the face of the devil. His jaw and nose were broken and bleeding, his eyes were swollen shut, and his entire face was blotchy with dried blood.

It was Zac. He had fallen soloing down the couloir, smashing his face on the way down. John quickly fetched bivvy gear from our stash, packed some essential gear and headed to Empress Hut by headtorch to call a rescue helicopter.

Andrea and I zipped Zac into two of our sleeping bags to keep him warm, and we squeezed into the other. All night long, we could hear Zac’s laboured breath. The moon lit up the smooth expanse of Empress Shelf like a perfect white cover. The overpowering beauty of the scene belied my anguish.

How and where was John? Would a helicopter arrive? Would Zac survive?

After John left us around 9pm, he picked up tracks from a previous party. The night freeze had not yet begun, and the snow remained as mushy as a Mr Whippy soft serve. Under those conditions, crossing the Empress Shelf alone was a perilous game. John fell into 13 crevasses. He managed to climb out of them all and continue.

Arriving at Empress Hut two hours later, he discovered the emergency radio set was not functioning. He teamed up with another climber, and they set off for Gardiner Hut, roped together for safer crevasse travel. Hours later, they arrived and John made the emergency radio call.

At first light, we heard the sweet sound of a helicopter. A flood of relief surged over me as the tension of the previous 24 hours dissipated. In three separate trips, the chopper plucked us off the mountain.

A few days after the rescue, John and I returned to the Hooker Valley to do the technically easy Copland Pass. Inside the old corrugated shelter just below the pass, a disgruntled climber had scrawled the immortal words “Alpine Climbing Sucks”.

I reflected on the trade-off between pain, risk and reward. My experience on Aoraki had been one of the most nerve-wracking in my life. I had been on high alert for 15 hours non-stop. The flood of endorphins I experienced when finally safe in Mount Cook Village was commensurately high. I finally grasped why mountaineering, despite the pain and the risk, becomes as addictive to some people as rock climbing is to me.

I never saw Zac again, but I heard he made a full recovery. Andrea went overseas to pursue a career, gave up climbing and took up running. John went on to climb Mount Everest, amongst many other outstanding endurance events. I had one last fling with the mountains when I went to the Himalayas in 1986. Caught out in a storm, I was avalanched and narrowly escaped permanent entombment in a bottomless crevasse.

The balance of risk and reward shifted for me. I gave up mountaineering, took up remote off-track bushwalking, and continued to climb rocks.

About the writer:

LOUISE SHEPHERD | Louise (also known as Lou, she/her) has been climbing for 40 years and guiding for 35 years. Back in the 70s, there was no trad or sport, it was all just climbing and the culture was to toss beginners in at the deep end. Louise survived this brutal baptism and now teaches trad lead climbing rather differently than the way she learned. She works with The Climbing Company in Dyurrite.