dragging himself, half hopping on his ice axes across the slope towards the end of the ridge. Simon moved ahead and kicked out a trench to make Joe’s job easier.
They inched themselves along for 180 m (600 ft) to the col. From here the West Face dropped away steeply in a giddy 900 m (3,000 ft) plunge of ice and rock. At the bottom, the fractured glacier led back to the base camp they had left five days before. It was four in the afternoon, it would be dark soon. It was getting colder; the men were losing feeling in their fingers. A storm was coming. They had no fuel or food. They had to keep descending.
Simon knotted their two ropes together. This gave them a length of 90 m (300 ft). By digging a seat in the snow, Simon could lower Joe straight down, slowing his descent with a belay plate. When the knot came to the belay plate, Simon would have to untie the rope to feed it through. Joe would be holding his own weight at that point.
Joe slid down the first 45 m (150 ft) quickly. Occasionally his crampon tips dug into the snow causing him to yell out in pain, but he felt amazingly positive – this was going to work!
Simon changed the rope over. If Joe fell now, he would tear Simon off the mountain too. Intense, nauseating bursts of pain wracked Joe as he was lowered. Night came and the snow howled around them, but they stuck to their routine. It was working.
With eight belays and two abseils under their belts, they had covered 825 m (2,700 ft) of the 900 m (3,000 ft) down to the glacier. They might only have two more lowers to go.
The slope had been easing, but now, as Simon paid out the rope he felt his friend rushing faster away from him. His harness bit on his flesh. What was happening?
‘Then, what I had waited for pounced on me. The stars went out and I fell.’
Joe knew: he was being lowered over a cliff. He tried to yell but his voice was swallowed by the thick snow clouds. Then in an avalanche of spindrift powder, he stopped, spinning on the end of the rope.
Joe looked up. The rope disappeared over the lip of an edge 4.5 m (15 ft) above. An ice wall was 2 m (6 ft) from his nose. He was dangling over the edge of an overhanging cliff that swept away from him all the way down to the glacier 30 m (100 ft) below. Directly beneath his feet was the yawning darkness of a crevasse.
There was no way Simon could pull him up. Even with a solid footing it would have required an incredible physical effort. With an unstable snow base it would be suicide. A couple of minutes of frantic yelling established that the men couldn’t hear each other.
Simon wouldn’t know what he had gone over. The other cliffs had been shorter. He might try to lower him further, but he would only jam when the knot reached the belay plate. Joe had to climb up – and fast.
He fished out a couple of loops of rope to tie onto the main rope with Prussik knots. These would grip the rope and enable him to climb up it. He got the first one on. But he needed two, and his fingers were now so cold they were immobile; the second loop fell tumbling into the darkness below. There was no way he could climb up now. He had been hanging for half an hour. In two more hours he would be dead; he could feel the cold was creeping over him.
‘Cold had long since won its battle. I accepted that I was to die. Sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death…’
Joe was jerked out of his contemplation of death. Up above, Simon was being dragged down the mountain. He had tried lowering Joe, hoping he might make it to the bottom, but there was no more rope to lower. The snow seat he was in was disintegrating. He couldn’t hold Joe’s weight indefinitely and he couldn’t release the rope or he would be ripped from the slope too. His fingertips were black with frostbite. If he didn’t fall he would freeze to death. He had to cut the rope.
It exploded at the first touch of the knife blade.
Glacier icefall in the high Andes, Cordillera Huayhuash, Peru.
Alive in the crevasse
In a heartbeart Joe was falling. In another he had the breath knocked from his lungs and his bones battered. There was the scuffle of falling snow then silence.
Joe looked round. He had fallen into the crevasse and landed on a ledge 15 m (50 ft) down. Blackness of hideous depth fell away from him. He hammered in an ice screw and hung on to the life that was still improbably his. He tried to climb the rough ice wall out but fell back agonizingly onto his broken leg.
Dizzy with pain he fell into a shattered sleep.
A new day
When the cold woke Joe, the sun was up and he could now see that he was on a kind of ice bridge across the top of the crevasse.
Meanwhile Simon had spent the night in a snow hole then descended to look for Joe. When he saw the ice cliff that Joe had gone over and the crevasse below, Simon knew his friend had gone. He headed numbly back to camp.
Joe had a big decision to make. He could either wait on the ice bridge for death to come or abseil down into the unknown. He hammered in his last ice screw. But the blackness below terrified him, and it was an age before he could bear to look down. When he did, he was amazed to see not a black void, but a snow floor.
Some ragged holes made him realize this wasn’t a true floor, but a ceiling above a greater abyss. At the end of his precarious cavern a slanting cone of snow rose up to the sunlight above. He would reach that sunbeam, Joe suddenly knew.
Terrified the fragile floor would give way, Joe inched his way to the ramp. It was 40 m (130 ft) high and angled at forty-five degrees rising to sixty-five degrees. Ten minutes’ climbing normally. Today it was five hours before his head popped out of the ice tomb like a gopher and he took in a stunning view of sun-kissed mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
But Joe was still 60 m (200 ft) above the glacier and 10 km (6 miles) from camp. He saw Simon’s rope and knew he had been left for dead. The crevasse had just been the start.
Waiting to leave
Back at the camp, Simon had dully told Richard the news. Simon then dosed himself with antibiotics and antiseptics and rested. He burnt Joe’s clothes and gathered together the possessions that he would pass on to his parents. Guilt drooped on him like a cape.
The long crawl
Joe was lying on his side and pulling himself along with his ice axes and a push of his good leg. Occasionally he stopped to eat snow. He found Simon’s footprints and for the rest of the day he hauled himself after his friend, tortured by dreams of water, of his favourite thatched pub in Sheffield, of his mother getting ready for his return.
‘The snow formed in patches between the rocks. It was dirty and full of grit but I ate it continually.’
And suddenly it was night and an avalanche was falling on him. Somehow spared again, he almost lay down and slept where he was, but kept going until he could dig a snow hole. Outside a storm raged as Joe blacked out to spend a second night alone in the snow.
Joe awoke in the light, painfully thirsty. Frostbite had seized more of his fingers. He knew the nearest water was in the area they had called Bomb Alley, still miles away. He would be lucky to reach that today.
But at least the storm was over. And, strangely, it seemed that his leg was hurting less. Maybe it was just a muscle tear. Perhaps he could walk on it now. He stood up and passed out with the agony. He was getting delirious.
Joe reached the moraines at the end of the crevasses and made a splint from his sleeping mat and crampon straps. But he couldn’t crawl on the rock, nor walk, so had to hop, a few inches at a time.