The day after Big Tower is Watching You

On reflection not as scarred as first believed. It was a hard day following a hard nights bivy on the glacier. We hadn’t really taken into account it was a North Face route so would inevitably have a fair share of loose rock and be in the shade most of the day. Luckily I had my down jacket on me for comfort belaying but poor Adam was climbing in shorts all day – freezing!!

The route was so long we couldn’t stop climbing even for a few minutes and turned around the belays super fast just stopping long enough to swap gear. The climbing itself was fairly unremarkable and scary with the amount of

choss rock around. Our cut off point was 3pm which we believed gave us plenty of daylight to abseil off the route so we decided that wherever we were we would start to head down at that time. We topped out at 3:09 – perfect and thought we might even make a beer at the refuge before it shut. However we still had 19 abseils and 3 traversing pitches between us and the glacier floor.

Well as expected on the way up, there was plenty of rock spikes to get the rope stuck on the way down. The tails were constantly getting jammed and stuck. We had to climb up no less than 5 times to retrieve rope tails. About 3 abseils from the ground I was losing the will to live – well not to live but certainly ever climb routes like this again with horrific abseils! When the rope got stuck this time right near the belay at the top of the pitch I quickly led up again to free the rope greatful for a chance to do anything but abseil and because I thought I was going to cry with sheer frustration. Some 6 hours later, yes 6 hours hanging in our harnesses, abseiling and pulling through ropes we reached the bottom of the route just before 9pm. Only just enough daylight to get over the worst of the galcier and back on the good path down. Finally we made it back to the van at 11pm and chilled out with some nice food and wine, mission complete.

The next day we awoke like zombies and I knew I was broken when I couldn’t even face sorting out ropes and gear, didn’t want to think about climbing!! It was a pleasure to sit in the van all day taking Adam back to the airport. Anything but climbing – truly broken.