Learning to Fly on the Frendo Spur - Part 1

"Well the good old days may not return,

And the rocks might melt,

And the sea might burn..." - Tom Petty

Above: L, the Frendo Spur, seen from the telepherique at Plan de l'Aiguille as we set off on our acclimatisation climb on day one.  An intimidating 800m spur of rock is capped by around 400m of ice slopes which meet the skyline to the left of the Aiguille du Midi summit, visible in sunshine.  R, starting the walk-in the following day at around 9am, the majority of the route in shadow beyond the rubble and ice of the lower glacier. 

A coincidental encounter on a train - that was where this all began.  Now, as I stood shivering on yet another snowy belay ledge, three pitches of awkward granite slabs and chimneys out of sight below me, as if the clawing, painful progress had been merely imagined, I recalled that chance conversation with Stefan which had led me to come here and climb on the Frendo Spur in autumn.  He would have laughed generously upon finding that his comment about the English and bivouacs (see earlier post: A Good Man is Hard to Find) was coming true for us on this route (although we had planned it, rather than been forced into it like many other English climbers I had read about).  I also recalled Stefan's gripping account of his climb, with a partner he had met in his local German Alpine Club.  Upon arriving in Chamonix for a spell of alpinism, his partner, whose abilities and ambitions were perhaps not as well matched in the act of climbing as in the envisaging of it, had insisted they climb the North Face of Les Droites. 

Above: A foreshortened view of the entire route, as we approach the base.  The initial 'ramp' is clearly visible angling up from the bergschrund, as is the enormous serac barrier blocking the left-hand side of the Spur at three-quarters height.   

Stefan, no doubt underlining his reluctance to embark on this, with a little of his tangible physical presence (he once arrested two people who had pickpocketed him in Vienna) eventually reached a consensus with Helmut (or whatever his name!) and they settled on the Frendo, with Helmut still insisting to 'lead every pitch'.  This situation may have lasted the length of the approach from Plan de l'Aiguille, over the crumbling glacial moraines exposed by summer to the pale sun and replete with a debris of treasure, such as the aluminium bones of light aircraft which had crash-landed there, rusting telepherique cables and occasional relics of equipment and ropes.  But upon cramponing up the ice slopes below the Spur, overhung on the left by the blue ice cliffs that clung to the upper Frendo glacier some 600 metres above their approach, roping up and crossing the pale crevasse of the bergschrund, and ascending the broken, shattered ramp which marks the start of the 'proper' route, Helmut's nerve began to melt away.  Having grabbed the rack from Stefan and advanced a few moves into the first rock pitch, Helmut abruptly backed down to the belay. 

Above: A view of the bergschrund from the 'ramp' reveals the awkward truth - in this case, that there is a large amount of snow still unmelted from the previous weekend's storm (which resulted in the cancellation of the annual Mont Blanc ultra-marathon to the secret glee of Chamonix hoteliers and restauranteurs).

After this moment of self-realisation, Stefan recalled: 'I had to lead every pitch after that, including the ice. And it was pretty steep, and hard all the way.  Naturally, I never climbed with him again,' he shrugged, downing his second espresso of the short train ride with a glint in his eye.  I half expected that Rob or I would find Helmut's corpse jammed deep into one of the many man-sized off-width cracks that we encountered in the lower third of the route.

Above: Rob pauses to take in an unscheduled off-width crack in the 'easy scrambling' section of the Spur, the first of several indications that the guide book description may have been an 'Italian-style' sandbag (see: Aladaglar posts, Kazikli Cragging article August 2010).  Note the rope beginning to crimp into 'piano wire' from the combination of frequent transitions from scrambling to pitching and the snow and low temperatures. 

Now, as we entered the 'real' climbing, we could hear voices from above and as we reached the base of a vertical section of the Spur, split by steep grooves and slabs, we came upon a Scottish couple who in contast to our rather dull tones, were equipped with a bright green rope - possibly the brightest I had ever seen deployed in an alpine context.  Perhaps they hoped to get some kind of luminous glow from it in the event they were forced to climb late into the day.  As we climbed past them, and the following pitches became harder still (mainly from the weight of the rucksack and the slippery rock), I wondered if they would make it to the top; at least it distracted me from thinking about how to haul myself through the next chimney.    

Above: Correct route-finding in the complex lower half of the rock butress is the difference between a hard day and an epic adventure - or, worse, a defeated abseil on jammed ropes back to the Plan.

  Above: Rob constructing a belay on the first of many snow-over-rock pitches leading initially straight up through a series of grooves and chimneys, and then left to a position level with the ice cliffs, from where we were able to scramble along the crest of the Spur in the afternoon sunlight. 

From a snow-filled ledge, with sporadic yells emanating from below, I blindly paid out what remained of Rob's famous blue rope as he climbed invisibly above - possibly the same one we had first climbed with on Aonoch Mor two years ago, when I had stepped fearfully into the realm of mixed and winter climbing for the first time on a route called Tunnel Vision.  Fittingly, due to the succession of steep chimneys in which we were now climbing, I could see no further ahead today on the Frendo than in the mists of the western Highlands, and obtain no clue to what lay waiting above as we climbed toward the jagged pinnacles where we hoped to spend the night.  If the Highlands were perhaps a chapter from Kidnapped, where you vanished into the mists and woke up to 'porritch' on the flagstones the next day, then the Frendo was a cold blast of air from Edgar Allen Poe, a feeling that gained credence when a large black bird came to hover near us later in the day. 

Above: Top, ascending one of the initial pitches, already high above Chamonix but with much climbing still to be done; bottom, a typically exhausting chimney-exit with the pack pressed tight into my helmet.  Rob's advice at this point, delivered with the usual mixture of dry humour, was to 'use the snowy crimp' - a type of hold that the true summer climber does not have to worry about!

Rob, though, seemed to be enjoying himself through all of this, putting his mountain guide experience into the work of quickly leading the awkward path up the left of the Spur, and occasionally pulling out a small camera to film the increasingly spectacular views of the neighbouring Chamonix Aiguilles and valley panorama as we gained the crest of the Spur and made for the final crux section.  Perhaps because of a night-climbing epic many years ago on his first ascent of the route, Rob felt moved to make a small offering to the Frendo gods at the start of the 'difficulties' (ie, the ones mentioned in the guide book) and deposited a five-pence piece on the snow beside his carefully constructed belay.  'Turn right at the five pence piece,' he said, brimming with satisfaction at having eased the hardship of navigation, before adding:  'And if you were desperate, I suppose it could go towards the cost of a bin back down to Chamonix.' Setting aside the Eurozone fact for a moment, I wondered if Rob had been spending too much time in Scotland where five pence would have been quite a present for someone to give in a Christmas stocking.  Several metres into the pitch, I was astonished to notice a button lying on a slab.  'I saw that.  Someone else must have left it there,' came the reply when I enquired if Rob had decided to leave a trail behind to mark the way out of the labyrinth.  'Someone Scottish,' I thought, immediately drawn to the couple who were battling somewhere above us.  I wonder if they are still there - the couple and the tokens, that is, for I have seen no sign of any since. 

Above: Evening light illuminates the Aiguilles as we approach the bivouac.  I was feeling quite sentimental at this point as I thought about the early adventurers like Mummery who ventured up into this area carrying picnic baskets for the ladies - we had neither on our climb but perhaps will plan for it in the future.

Throughout the afternoon, I had begun to discover the limitations of having been persuaded to buy a Deuter 45 litre rucksack, as the high top (bulging now with my big mountain boots wedged on top of the bivvi gear and food) constantly kept knocking my helmet forward over my eyes.  Often I would lose sight of the rock above me as the helmet snapped down again like a visor, and I cursed my way up a gentle grade four crack that I should have been enjoying as we passed from the crest of the butress into the final steep pitches.  At this point, muttering obscenities in Turkish and occasionally removing cams, I heard Rob's voice drifting down the groove; he was in voice-over mode as the panned his small camera around the Aiguilles.  I arrived at the belay feeling frustrated with my kit and barely able to contain my mounting anger with the helmet issue.  Poor equipment was exactly the kind of thing that eroded the enjoyment of a climb, and coming here in the knowledge that my pack might prove an issue (as it had, in fact, in the Aladaglar) now felt like an error on my part - but, as usual, lack of time and options had led me to accept the burden. 

Despite my complaints and bad humour with the pack, and the sustained physicality of jamming and stemming these pitches, I noticed that the buttress was slowly yielding.  By now, we were level with the tremendous ice cliffs we had approached under several hours earlier.  They had a distinct blueish hue, within which the ghostly sockets of crevasses and folds in the ice stood out all distorted, as though sculpted in Dali's fridge.  We traversed above them on running belays, following the left side of the Spur until it ran out and we were on top of a narrow ridge which snaked horizontally towards another vertical tower which we hoped would provide the key to gaining the 'summit' of the rock buttress. 

Above: Approaching the ice cliffs after 600m of climbing.  The landscape of the Frendo is unsettling, cold and spectacularly isolated, but a route less travelled, pr perhaps less documented in alpine terms than other north faces like the Grandes Jorasses.   

What confronted us there, in the final wall can best be described as an 'aid' pitch.  From a cave undercutting a steep corner, split by a narrow crack, a line of pitons stretched upwards for seven or eight metres.  It might have been possible to 'free' it without the packs and with all the time in the world but by now it was getting late, and the alpenglow was begginning to fade into the crisp, clear tints of evening - and with this, the temperature began to fall, and I noticed my toes were beginning to get quite cold from standing in snow.  We hauled on quickdraws and entered an easier-angled scrambling section as daylight bled from the air around us.   

Above: On the last hard section, having climbed to the blurred but plainly visible crest of the Spur via chimneys on the right-hand side (ie the left-hand side viewed from below); unthinkably high now above the tiny tongue of glacier poking out toward the beach head of moraine. 

 

I heard a strong but completely unintelligible cry floating down the side of the buttress signalling that Rob had reached the ledge.  By now, there was a thick twilight all around, blurring the features of the final pitch into an amorphous gauze.  I fumbled around in the lid of my pack for the headtorch, but couldn't see to fix the headband through the slits in my helmet, and it kept popping off.  Finally, I managed to fixed it but not before a concerned but unintelligible question drifted down and prompted me to fire off a few expletives about the torch across the cold, impassive ice slopes which dropped away into nothingness a few metres to my left.  I stripped the belay, nearly losing a glove in the process and within the amber beam of torchlight attempted to climb my way back into sanity, sanctuary, and perhaps if I had measured the portions correctly, even a half-decent meal.

TO BE CONTINUED...