Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

Trying to stay awake during the long drive back to London—just to keep the Deacon company as he drove, so he’d stay awake—my tired mind kept going over and over the French terms that J.C. had tried to drill into us about this new type of glacier and ice climbing.

Pied marche —just marching across flat ice or a shallow slope up to 15 degrees, as if across a glacier—we’d all done that together on regular 10-point crampons many times before.

Pied en canard —“duck walk”—a careful 12-point cramponing on slopes up to 30 degrees. It looked and felt as silly as it sounded, but we could use our old, longer ice axes for that.

Pied à plat— literally “flat-footed,” with the bottom 10 points on each crampon holding your body upright on slopes up to 65 degrees or so, with your ice axe dug in uphill. A good way to rest.

Then there were the regular ice axe moves themselves: piolet ramasse (cross-body) on slopes from 35 to 50 degrees (an elegant way to cut steps in a steep slope) and piolet ancre, the anchored way one could cut steps or do hand work (such as sinking ice screws with one’s free hand) on steep slopes, 45 to 60 degrees and steeper.

The ice hammers had their own vocabularies—angle of pick entrance, whether to hold the tools high or low while climbing, etc.—and the ones I remember from that first day were piolet panne (low dagger) for steep slopes 45 to 55 degrees; piolet poignard (high dagger), which we used on steeper slopes of 50 to 60 degrees; and the most common one we used that day, piolet traction (traction), on 60 degrees to vertical to overhanging.

Since these last techniques were all used with the “front-pointing” crampons, techniques which I was sure Jean-Claude had said he’d learned from the Germans and Austrians while ice climbing with them the previous December, I was a little confused as to why there weren’t any terms in German. The answer was simple: the Germans and Austrians had kept using the old French 10-point crampon and long ice axe terms and simply added more in French. Ahh, Europe.

What we began learning on shallower—but still deadly slick—ice slopes around Llyn Idwal that Sunday afternoon is what I think of (to this day, after using them thousands of times since) as the “dance steps”: pied à plat–piolet ramasse, for instance—flat-footing upslope while simultaneously using the short ice axe in a graceful cross-body position to find the next anchor. J.C. did this so beautifully on a steep but less-than-vertical slope that it was a delight to watch—left leg bent inward until he was slightly knock-kneed, short ice axe held in both hands and pressing down higher up the slope, then the right leg crossing over the left as if in a tricky dance step, and then, when the tip of the ice axe and 10 of the 12-point crampon steel teeth on the right boot were all pressing down into the ice again, swinging the left leg higher upslope until 10 crampons on the bottom of that foot got a solid bite.

And then starting the dance all over again.

Jean-Claude showed us various ways to rest on such an exhaustingly steep slope, but my favorite was the simple pied assis— leaning back on the slope until your butt almost (but not quite) touched the ice, left leg bent and left foot under you with all crampons pressing down, right leg further outward with ankle turned so the right boot and its crampons were at almost a 90-degree angle from the direction one’s right knee was pointing. You didn’t need your ice axe or ice hammers to hold this position, and the result was that, as long as the muscles in your legs and thighs didn’t start cramping, you could hold this position for an extended time, ice axe in both hands, giving yourself plenty of time to look out over the slope and up and out at the landscape below.

But the bulk of the afternoon into the lovely Welsh sunset was spent learning how to use the shortest ice axe and the ice hammers in basic low-dagger and high-dagger positions, front-pointing (using only the forward two crampons of the twelve) in anchor positions, front-pointing in traction positions, front-pointing in high-dagger position (the way we’d climbed the vertical ice wall), the three-o’clock position using both ice hammers ahead of you on a steep slope with the right leg curved and slammed down behind you, front-pointing on a terribly steep slope so that your weight was over the ice hammers with picks down in a low-dagger position (climbing with both at once, essentially under you), and so forth.

Traverse and descent techniques on the ice—especially the rapid descent (I’d always loved glissading down a steep snowfield, using only my regular ice axe as a rudder and then for self-arrest near the bottom, and J.C. showed us how we could flat-foot down on crampons, using the cross-body position with the short axe or trailing the axe behind us in anchor position, almost as quickly and on much more dramatic inclines)—took most of the rest of the afternoon.

Later that afternoon, on a steep snowy slope below a rock face, Jean-Claude showed us his last technological tour de force.

It was a small and relatively light metal wedge-shaped device that had steel springs—released by hand pressure, tightening automatically when you exerted no pressure—that could slide along a fixed rope. J.C. had laboriously climbed the slope in his new 12-point crampons, attached the Deacon’s Miracle Rope to a long ice axe driven deep into the ice under the boulders some 150 meters above us, reinforced that belay with several ice screws, and then removed his crampons and expertly glissaded down the steep slope to us. The rope lay like a long black fault line on the blindingly white snow.

Then J.C. showed that he had one of these hand clamps for the rope for each of us.

“It is simple, non? ” he said. “Release the hand pressure completely, and it locks tight to the rope. One could dangle if one chose. Squeeze ever so slightly with one hand, and the mechanism glides along the rope as if the rope were a guide. Squeeze hard, and the mechanism—and you—no longer has…how do you pronounce it? Fric tion? Fric tion on the rope.”

“What do you suggest we use this gadget for?” I asked, but I saw that the Deacon had grasped the idea.

“It would be best if it were attached to some light climbing harness,” said the Deacon. “So that one could have both hands free while staying attached to the fixed rope.”

“Exactement!” cried Jean-Claude. “I am working on precisely such light leather and canvas harnesses. For today, though, we try the one hand, no?”

And with that J.C. clamped his little device onto the fixed rope and began sliding it up as he climbed steadily, even without crampons. The Deacon went next, getting the hang of when to apply pressure, when to release it, within a few paces. It took me longer, but soon I realized the added security of climbing with this silly little spring-driven device gripping the fixed rope harder than one’s heavily mittened hand ever could. It would give even more assurance if it were attached, say, by a line and carabiner, to the climbing harness that he and the Deacon had been talking about.

At the top of our 150-meter 50-degree slope, we huddled together as a cold wind rose. The sun was setting behind peaks to the west. The moon was rising in the east.

“Now we use it for a controlled descent,” said Jean-Claude. “You will see, I believe, that one could use this device even on vertical fixed ropes. It is, how do you say it? Proof for fools?”

“Foolproof,” said the Deacon. “Show us the fast descent.”

So J.C. unclamped his device from the double line of fixed rope—double so we could retrieve the rope after our rappel down the slope—retrieved the ice axe so that only the deep screws held the doubled line on belay, re-clamped onto the line below me, and began a rapid, no-crampon glissade that he controlled only by the spring pressure of the device in his hand.