Many thanks to John Carney for this entertaining and evocative account of our ascent of the Frendo Spur in September 2010. You can read more about John's adventures in his own blog (Vertical Turkey) which includes accounts of some adventurous first ascents in the mountains of Turkey....."Where others fear to tread, we climb Trad"...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frendo Spur (D+ / III 4 1200m) North Face Aiguille du Midi

John at the Plan en route to the Midi North Face

Early section of the Frendo Spur

Aiguille du Midi North Face