What’s scram-packing?!
To celebrate Trail’s 30th year we’re dusting off our archives each month to resurface a favourite mountain adventure from the past three decades. The latest instalment takes us back to 2009, when iconic British climber and author Andy Kirkpatrick led us o
A classic archive adventure from 2009, when Psycho Vertical author Andy Kirkpatrick tackled Snowdonia with us
Andy Kirkpatrick is standing on the tips of his boots above a 1000ft drop. His hands are clasped around a wobbly spike, the rope clipped into a piece of protection over 90ft below. If he slips, he’s looking at a probably fatal 200ft fall. Yawn. How utterly pedestrian.
For most of us, standing near the top of one of north Wales’ biggest cliffs would in itself be a defining moment, but for Andy Kirkpatrick, Snowdon’s Y Lliwedd isn’t even breakfast. This is because Andy is one of the most outrageous figures to come out of British mountaineering in decades, a man who thinks winter is the time to go climbing in Patagonia, and that soloing is a reasonable strategy on the world’s hardest and most dangerous big wall routes. Andy is not entirely normal, you see, and so standing on his toes at the top of Y Lliwedd isn’t the sort of thing he’d bother waking his adrenal gland for.
But here we are, pinned to the side of an enormous rock face with a withering drop below and darkness no more than an hour away. Andy has climbed this before – at night, in winter, without a guidebook – but our plan is not to sleep out. We did that last night, holed up in a wet cave with 50mph winds on the summit of Glyder Fach and… well, I’ll come back to that. Because right now Andy has attached himself to the rock and is calling me up. I unhook the rope from the karabiner, throw the sling over my shoulder and set off to follow.
“Scram-packing?” Andy had said over breakfast in the Pen-y-Pass Youth Hostel two days earlier. “Sounds like something dirty to do with sex and eggs!” Quite. But scram-packing, I explained hesitantly, is more the conceptual offspring of scrambling and backpacking than some kinky new perversion. It was also our plan for the weekend: linking together some of Snowdonia’s finest scrambling routes with a bivvy somewhere wild. We would attempt one route on each of the Carneddau, Glyderau and Snowdon massifs, drawing them together in a spectacular expedition that traversed the northern part of the Snowdonia National Park. “So we’re going to combine the worst of climbing with the worst of backpacking?” Andy said as I traced out a possible route across the map. “That sounds just like alpine mountaineering…”
This was exactly the point. Andy is most famous for his exploits as an alpine mountaineer, and
we wanted to recreate an alpine-sized adventure in Snowdonia: it seemed an appropriate way to get to know the man. I wanted to know why he chooses to climb some of the hardest big walls on Earth entirely on his own.
The time to ask would have been the morning the rain was slamming into the Youth Hostel window, but the irony right then was too sharp: going out at all was for the patently mad. Coffee mugs steamed as the wind howled across the pass and we pored over the guidebook for some suitable ascent. I had just vetoed Andy’s suggestion of Great Gully on Craig yr Ysfa as not quite scrambling (a nine-pitch V Diff of the ‘traditional’ variety: ie wet, mossy and capable of defeating accomplished modern climbers) and the high winds meant exposed ridges were out. In the end we settled on the Craig Lloer Spur, a route which climbs up the back of Pen Yr Ole Wen at Grade 2/3 and gets a star. It would be a warm-up.
We set off into the rain accompanied by Andy’s dad, Pete, who I supposed was in some way genetically responsible for his son’s crazy ascents. “No, no,” he insisted, grinning: “That’s entirely his own thing.” Perhaps that’s why we let Andy lead us up the Craig Lloer Spur, and why we left it to Andy to call the shots about ropes and stuff. I had expected a bold and possibly gung-ho approach from a man who had soloed the North-East Spur of the Droites in winter, but Andy was adamant we tie in. “Scrambling’s lethal on a route like this,” he said as he set off up the wet slab in the rain. I couldn’t say if he was kidding; this is a man who undertakes tough climbs in Patagonia in August – winter in the southern hemisphere – when the rest of the mountaineering fraternity are heading to the summer Alps. His logic for this is simple. “The reason I like going to Patagonia in winter is that you get the place to yourself,” he says as we tie in and get ready for the route.
The scrambling on Craig Lloer was by turns engaging, slippery and exposed, reiterating nothing so well as that this sport is much better in the dry and that, here at least, Andy was right about it being lethal. The ropes were a good call as the crux was horrifically exposed, but I’m not sure Andy noticed: he seemed too busy chatting. In fact, the relentless conversation between father and son suggested it was only me who was concerned by the Wile E Coyote drop. Andy kept up a narrative interrupted only by the occasional call of: “All right, safe!” and when not clenching muscles-which-should-not-be-mentioned
in fear, it was all I could do to stop laughing. With company this diverting, I thought, the weather and route really don’t matter so much.
It’s this astonishing capacity to entertain that has made Andy one of the most popular writers and speakers on the British outdoor scene. He has a natural ability for storytelling, a keen eye for the absurd, and a talent for piercing introspection, but perhaps his most endearing aspect is that none of his talents goes to his head. He’s an exceptional climber, but also quite aware of his demons. And if you get him talking about his solo of Reticent Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite – one of the hardest big wall aid routes in the world – you’ll hear less about twelve macho days of bravery than you will of a very human struggle against rock, loneliness, self-doubt and fear. And this isn’t just British mountaineering’s trademark selfdepreciation either, since the Reticent story is made honest with a quiet and proportional sense of pride.
The story of this climb forms the backbone of Psychovertical, the autobiography that won the 2008 Boardman Tasker prize. It’s a remarkable book, which recounts Andy’s rise from an impoverished childhood in Hull’s council estates to become one of Britain’s most audacious mountaineers. Being acutely dyslexic – which back then was thought to mean thick – he was unable to get into university, so he moved to Sheffield and cycled every day to work in Peak District outdoor shops. There his ambitions formed and slowly, over a series of truly hair-raising adventures in the Alps, his ability grew. In time he began to make a name for himself with crazy winter ascents.
Whatever your ability in the mountains, though, Snowdonia rain is a great leveller: the Kirkpatricks and I returned from Craig Lloer uniformly soaked. The plan had then been to set off up Tryfan and onto the summit of Glyder Fach for the night, but no-one seemed to object when I suggested a quick coffee in Bethesda instead. It was still early. What could be the point in sitting on a rain-lashed summit bivvy until it got dark enough to sleep?
Perhaps this wasn’t quite the spirit of adventure we had come to explore, but as we sat before fat slices of cake, we were unusually well-placed to take a long, deep and considered look into our cappuccinos... er, sorry, motivation.
I mean, who in their right mind would leave this warm room and go back into the maelstrom for a further soaking? Who would subject themselves to a cold, lumpy, uncomfortable and, in all likelihood, sleepless summit bivvy?
Andy’s no stranger to tough nights out. “In Patagonia we spent six days in a snowhole waiting for the weather to clear before we ran out of food. The storm was still raging but we didn’t have any choice so we packed up and left the hole. After a while in this terrible weather I knew we couldn’t continue and we had to get back to our shelter. I told my climbing partner, Rich, but he told me that we couldn’t go back because he’d crapped in the hole before we left.” Marvellous.
With coffees finished, we had to decide what to do next. The weather was still miserable and I offered Andy a way out. “We don’t have to bivvy on the summit,” I suggested. “It’s disgusting out there...” But Andy didn’t mind. Really, he didn’t. But that was the point at which I realised that Andy is slightly different from normal people.
The scramble up Little and North Gullies on the side of Tryfan was wet and characterised primarily by cloud. It wasn’t hard and so we climbed
“‘WE COULDN’T GO BACK BECAUSE HE’D CRAPPED IN THE HOLE BEFORE WE LEFT.’ MARVELLOUS”
quickly without ropes, soon reaching the summit in a darkening gloom. Father and son were chatting as if the wind and rain were no more troubling than the twitter of evening blackbirds, whereas I was beginning to feel miserable. This was damp and very daft. It was also mostly my stupid idea.
Pete left for civilisation at the col between Tryfan and Glyder Fach. Andy and I set out to battle strong gusts on Bristly Ridge. I was feeling ever more sorry for myself, but every time I opened my mouth to complain I realised that this was Andy Kirkpatrick I was climbing with, and he was banging on about Patagonia in winter. So instead I kept my head down, my hood done up tight, and picked my way carefully along the crest. The wind was buffeting us hard, threatening to knock us off. “Is this like Patagonia?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Of course this was nothing at all like Patagonia. This was like Snowdonia in summer. It was grim.
It was grimmer on the summit, because there we had to seek out a cave for the night. I had originally thought the bivvy would in some small way recreate the kind of adventures Andy is used to, but there in the rain and the 50mph winds, cold, wet and very hungry, I realised that without any notable goal to be aiming for, or any glory to celebrate, the only similarity was the discomfort. We did find a cave and made it vaguely habitable with half an hour rearranging rocks into something slimy and not very flat.
That night as we lay in our bags we discussed the absurdity of our position, reflecting that regular folk just don’t do this kind of thing. We’d remember this bivvy for its idiocy alone. Our chatter faded to the sound of the wind and dripping rain, but just before I fell into a disturbed sleep I heard Andy mumble: “Life’s too short to have fun.”
Next morning we stumbled sleepdeprived down the hill. The weather was still shocking and I spent the descent trying to find an excuse to avoid our planned ascent of Y Lliwedd, a 1000ft Grade 3 route billed as the most serious scramble in the guidebook. Was this what it feels like on expedition when things get tough? Apparently, it was nowhere near...
“Trying to climb a route called Tangerine Trip on El Capitan was one of the nearest times I came to not making it,” said Andy, in answer to my question. “I was trying a one-day speed ascent with Matt Dickinson, so we went lightweight without a Portaledge and with hardly any food. On day three we got caught in a storm and very nearly died of hypothermia.”
Commitment is one of the critical differences between climbing big foreign mountains and traversing northern Snowdonia, for if you get bored, wet or fed up in Snowdonia you can call it a day. Thus we pulled in at the Pen-y-Pass Hostel, checked our sodden kit into the drying room, had a decent breakfast and, in the spirit of indefatigable heroes, crashed out flat. Four hours later our enthusiasm was back, our clothes were dry and the weather was improving. Y Lliwedd wasn’t looking like such a daft idea any more.
And as we approached the top of the most imposing north face in Snowdonia, that daft idea paid off. The scramble had been difficult in places and dirty in others, and right now we were looking for a final weakness in the upper slopes that would lead us to the summit. When we found it, Snowdonia lay spread out below with rags of clouds streaming off the hills. The wind had died and suddenly everything was beautiful. We’d succeeded in a ridiculous trip and this moment was our reward.
I wanted to ask what it is that drives Andy back to the mountains, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. We were feeling very alive – after two days of questionable merit in Snowdonia, this evening was one of absolute beauty. The bad memories were already looking good by the fact of their passing, and a distinct sense of achievement was starting to replace weather-lashed frustration. But maybe it wasn’t achievement. Perhaps it was just relief and a cracking view.