Ice Magic

The stories a climb never tells

The author on Nuit Blanche (WI6) sometime in 1999 (I think).

Something popped up on my Instagram this week: two climbers on Nuit Blanche (WI6) above the Argentière Glacier, also known as Rive Gauche d’Argentière (Left Bank of the Argentière Glacier), a beautiful, steep, classic two-pitch ice route up a black wall. Photos of ice routes are like photos of babies, or waves—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all—but these photos brought back a rush of long-dormant icy memories from when I was an ice climber.

Nuit Blanche (Sleepless Night) was never an average climb or a natural line. It was the product of a cultural shift in ice climbing—and of water leaking from pipes along the top of the cliff, which froze into the route. Where that water came from, I don’t know. I always assumed it had something to do with the piste cannons at the nearby Les Grands Montets ski area, but the flow could be considerable—maybe some kind of hydro overflow. Either way, it’s not a natural climb like the routes on the other side of the glacier. As for the cultural shift, read on.

The first ascent of Nuit Blanche was made by Stevie Haston in the 1990s, but it was later claimed by Jean-Christophe Lafaille, who was unaware that Stevie had already done it. Stevie and JC had a combative relationship. JC was Stevie’s nemesis, though I doubt the feeling was fully returned. Stevie wanted to be the best all-around climber on the planet, but that place was already taken by JC, a position he held until he disappeared during a solo winter ascent of Makalu in 2006. Like the Romans needing the Carthaginians to be great, only to decline after destroying them, I think JC made Stevie greater than he would otherwise have been.

I expect Nuit Blanche, as Stevie climbed it, was one of the early WI7s, or M8 or whatever, although M grades weren’t a thing then, but it was very hard, and probably dangerous (at the time, Stevie was a few inches shorter after taking a big ground fall off an ice route, whe a free standing pillar broke as he climbed it, so death was rarly an impedament to Stevie). I get the impression the route Stevie climbed on the first ascent was thin and steep and hard to protect, and Andy Parkin, and other local legends, told me about trying to climb it without using bolts, as bolts seemed necessary, by taking belays on RURP instead. Much to Stevie’s outward chagrin, but inner pleasure, Lafaile would end up placing a bolt on the crux on the second ascent, which might make him seem like a wimp, but seeing as he was the first person to free solo 7c+ (and climb the first 8c), it maybe shows just how ballsy Haston was.

In order to understand Nuit Blanche, Stevie, and ice climbing in the 90s, it’s worth setting out the times they existed in.

For various reasons, ice climbing had lagged behind rock climbing in terms of what people climbed: in the 70s, if you climbed Scottish VI (WI4) and HVS (5.8), you were a solid climber, while in the early 90s, you’d have to be climbing E5, but VI (WI4) would still do. One reason for this was that no one had invented an ice climbing equivalent to the camming device for ice climbers, or even nuts, micros equivants, etc, meaning it was still as dangerous in the early 90s as it was in the early 60s.

I know an old school climber who watched a younger climber take two whippers off a WI5 ice route beside him in the mid 90s, and told him afterwards he’d just taken twice the number of falls on one pitch than he himself had in his entire life, and close to a thousand ice routes. He advised him that he needed to pull his neck in a bit, or he was going to end up killing himself (unfortunately, this young French climber died in a fall not long afterwards, while thirty years later, that old climber is still climbing).

For someone like Stevie, hungry like a wolf (that eats wolves), and with the kind of ambition (and competitiveness) that would have made Napoleon blush, ice climbing was ripe for revolutionary change, especially for an outsider ( Stevie’s wife, Laurence Goualt, was the manager of the Chamonix Patagonia shop). This was doubly so as Stevie, being a Brit, came from a trad, onsight, ground up ethic (Google Isis in Angry E7 6c). In terms of trad climbing, Stevie had a walk-on part, but here, on the ice, he could get star billing (and he did).

Stevie was also the right man at the right time, with the right strength, fitness, neck, and vision, but also at the cusp of a great evolution in equipment, an evolution that was also, in some ways, symbiotic with the change it created.

Simond Pyrania, the definition of cutting edge in the early 90s.

This gear revolution marked the end of the long, slow pre-modern period of ice climbing, which followed the prehistoric period—the time when vertical ice was nearly impossible and step-cutting was the only way up. My dad once told me about spending an entire day chopping steps in the 1960s on a route that’s now considered a descent.

The pre-modern period began with drop-pick “Terror” axes (MacInnes Terodactyl) and the first reverse-curved, or banana, picks (Simond Chacal). These were invented by mistake—placing a curved alpine pick upside down on the axe—finally allowing climbers to make proper use of their front points and tackle vertical ice (see A Brief History of the Mountaineering Axe).

The steeper the ice people climbed—or aided with ice tools, as in the first ascent of Polar Circus—the more they figured out what they needed to climb harder and safer. But progress was slow: decade by decade, not season by season. You might still be using the same axe in 1983 that you had in 1963. In the 1990s, by contrast, a better, improved axe could appear year after year: Charlet Moser/Petzl Pulsar, Axar, Quasar, Quark, Nomic. I suspect one reason for the slow pace was that ice climbing was like caving to fell walking: there was no money in it.

Still, evolution came. Climbers worked out what was needed for harder, steeper routes, giving rise to gear like rigid crampons, first Chouinards, then Lowe Footfangs, and new ways of protecting ice pitches—if not always effectively—like ice pitons (Snargs, Scrubs, Warhogs) and ice screws (Chouinard, Lowe, mysterious titanium). A lot of this gear shared names with modern equivalents, but don’t confuse them: a Chouinard screw is not a Black Diamond screw, just as a wooden chock is not a Totem cam. Gear had improved—but it was not yet great.

Stevie, like me, was born into this pre-modern period. His early climbs were done with museum-quality kit: straight-shafted axes, not far removed from the MacInnes Terodactyl (probably Clog Vultures or Vampires), wrist leashes, heavy plastic boots, useless screws, and dry ropes that were never really dry. I think Stevie climbed the first grade VII in North Wales in the 1980s. Seeing that he was climbing E7 at the time, he should have been climbing X. But soon, these shackles would come off.

Back to Nuit Blanche.

The route had been a futuristic project for years, eyed by Chamonix’s best ice climbers—some of the best in the world. Thierry Renault, a local legend, was among them. Stevie’s ascent was cutting-edge, but just barely; times were about to change. Not that anyone noticed much.

This was all before the Internet. Even the first ascent of Indian Face (E9) got only a postage-stamp–sized photo and a short paragraph in a magazine’s area notes. Thirty years later, even the upteenth ascent would get a front cover and a full-page spread—if magazines still existed. The news of Nuit Blanche’s first ascent spread mostly by word of mouth, maybe a single line somewhere, almost as ephemeral as the climb itself. I suspect fewer than a few hundred people even cared, though those who needed to know did.

Andy Parkin once told me something relevant to Nuit Blanche: in the Mont Blanc massif, you often waited decades for a line to come into condition. But once a first ascent was made, the line would fatten and grow easier every year. A climb at the bleeding edge—like Beyond Good & Evil—could be a huge leap one day, a trade route the next, as every Chamonix climber ticked it off, usually after a long wait for the second ascent.

Nuit Blanche didn’t quite follow that fate. Man intervened. Soon after, someone diverted the water, transforming it into a wholly different climb: fat, steep, maybe overhanging in places—but no longer WI7. Just easy WI6. Safe, accessible, and open to anyone who wanted the tick.

This is where I came in.

Although I’m viewed as a big wall climber, in my head I’ve always been a Chamonaird at heart, a winter alpinist and ice climber, with all the big wall stuff just one of the skills I thought you needed to be an alpinist like my heroes, like Silva Karo, Alex Lowe, Bridwell etc. Really, if I’m honest, I’ve always been a Haston fan boy since I saw him talk at the Foundy climbing wall around 1992. Stevie was the man. But like Stevie, I served my apprenticeship in that premodern period, with the added problem of only having 1% of the talent (but perhaps equal in ambition).

State of the art!

Coming to ice climbing as a novice in this period—without YouTube or climbing forums—was like getting into cave diving. You had to find someone who would take you, but much of what you did, you figured out yourself. (Reading Cold Climbs on the toilet did not help.)

The first tools I ever used were borrowed Clog Vultures. The first tools I owned were a Snowdon Mouldings Curver axe and Teridactyle hammer combo. A 40 cm hammer and 65 cm axe is not exactly high-speed. That was followed by a pair of Mountain Technology Vertiges, all the rage in the UK at the time—ideal for ice climbing on rock and turf, but not actual ice. (“In the UK you ice climb on the rock and ski on the grass.”)

As for crampons, I started with a pair of articulated Desmaison crampons—wind-up crampons—then Grivel 2Fs, also fashionable, though I’m not sure why. They seemed a death trap for many. Protection was a different story: I had none, just rock gear, as did most UK winter climbers. Later, titanium screws became popular, but only if you didn’t want to place them more than once—or fall on them. People really didn’t fall back then. Black Diamond ice screws existed, but a single one cost about a week’s wages in the UK—around £79. That was the same price as ten cheap Russian screws, so we went Soviet. Who wants to drop a £79 screw?

My apprenticeship was slow and came in fits and starts. Some of it was purely seat-of-the-pants, especially since limited access to ice meant you had to push it when you had it. Luckily, ice climbing is easy in reality, so big jumps—like from grade III to V—aren’t like going from VD to E4, though failure is probably more costly.

I look back at some climbs I did early on and can see I was clueless, out of my depth. Most often, we were just soloing up there, with no real gear, no proper belays, often pumped out of our heads, surviving by sheer force of will. It’s amazing how hard you can try when failure equals death.

I’ve never been a great rock climber. I put that down to an early realisation that being “better” required total dedication—utterly selfish, obsessed—but the sort of obsession that only makes you miserable, with just fleeting moments of joy. I spent much of my early life around great climbers, and more recently around farmers. What they have in common is that neither is very happy most of the time. Worse, I realised rock climbing was like dedicating your life to filling a leaky bucket: all the time, effort, and investment leaked away the moment you stopped. It didn’t make me happy, so I came to terms with forever climbing at the same grade—about HVS, or E3/5.10c if I dedicated a few months to it.

Ice climbing was different. Maybe it was a tool thing, maybe something in my DNA. Although I couldn’t climb E5, I could climb WI6, where E5 climbers would often struggle. It came naturally. Once you learned how to do it, and used your head less than your biceps, learned the full rules, it was easy to reproduce a good performance—even after years away from ice. This is probably why I drifted toward big wall climbing: you can be fat, over-the-hill, and still climb challenging things (and convince yourself you’re not). Up to a certain grade, most winter climbing is HVS, all jugs—it’s all in your head.

The more I ice climbed—initially on two- or four-week trips to the Alps, later in shorter trips as low-cost airlines made flying possible in the late ’90s—the more I went through the process of improving my kit. Often, this required adapting or modifying it myself, squeezing every last bit of performance from pretty unsophisticated gear.

Now, a gear nerd aside:

Just as everyone has their first girlfriend or boyfriend, first pair of great rock boots, or first bike, the same is true of ice tools. There’s only one that comes before all others. For me, that was the DMM Predator (50 cm version). This axe marked the shift from pre-modern to modern ice climbing. Up until then, no item of climbing kit could be called “sexy.” The Predator changed that.

I think the Predators and I were meant to be together. I met the designers—Phil Waters—at a trade show around 1992. Phil carried the oddest ice tool I’d ever seen: more like a prop from Alien or Highlander than an ice tool. Maybe at that moment I decided ice climbing was the future, just so I could have an excuse to buy some. Buy some I did, through the late Paul Williams, the DMM rep, before he died soloing at Curbur.

Oh, and Stevie used Predators too.

What were Predators like to climb with? Well, what’s it like to wield Thor’s hammer? The same. People now call them heavy—over 800 g each—but they were solid, overbuilt, with parts like the adze, hammer, and spike crafted like works of art. Indestructible. I doubt any manufacturer today would invest that amount of time and money into an axe like DMM did back then.

Climbing with Predators made you climb harder. Partly psychological, partly mechanical: the revolutionary curved shaft and the way your hand rested above the spike gave a real advantage. Yes, the picks were old-school, big and chunky—and they broke—but so did most tools of the time. When I soloed the North Face of the Droites, I carried a spare axe on my harness in case I broke a pick. And you generally always carried a spare pick on a big route, which, along with flat Durcel headtorch batteries, probably added 500 g of ballast to your ambition.

The Predator hammer had a hex-shaped head for “nut on a stick” moves (though a nut-shaped hammer worked better) and an indestructible adze—great for chopping ice ledges—that even featured a bottle opener (never used). In those days, ice climbers didn’t have the kit they needed for alpine climbing, so it was common to swap out the DMM adze for a Simond adze, angled down like a shovel, better for alpine work. Later, when I was sponsored by Petzl and using tools like Quarks, I found hammering nuts with the adze wasn’t ideal anyway.

We also did things like cut off all the rubber on the shaft to make the axe lighter and easier to grip, and glued on thinner, grippier material, like skateboard grip tape instead.

Looking back, there was a lot of gear modification. My fellow climbers, like Rich Cross and Al Powell, were always coming up with new ways to do things, which we’d all copy. Luckily for me, being a dead-ender—not at university like everyone else—and working in a climbing shop, I had plenty of time to tinker. Probably my biggest “killer app” for ice climbing was when I took a pair of dual-point Charlet Moser Grade 8 crampons—the best crampons at the time, as Grivel Rambos wore out too fast—and removed the outside point, giving me an asymmetric mono point long before that was a thing. (The DMM Terminator, which applied a rock-boot concept to a rigid crampon, hadn’t yet arrived.)

I also experimented with odd stuff, like wearing a chest harness tied into my sit harness and running a cord from it to my leashes, so I could leave them open and not worry about dropping them—a trick I copied from Robert Jasper. This gave a huge boost in confidence on steep ice and soloing, and was in a way a precursor to going leashless, though tethered.

Back to the adze: eventually, the Simond adze was replaced by an even better DMM adze, designed for mixed climbing: Christmas-tree shaped, flat, and immensely strong. Its long, flat design let you insert it into cracks vertically and torque it down like a Leeper cam hook. On Magic Crack (VII 7), the crux became a cakewalk: insert the adze, shaft at 90 degrees to the crack, crank down, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Place the hammer, move up my feet, move up my adze, repeat.

I loved these axes. I used them on all my early ice and mountain routes, giving me the confidence to move and learn by doing—while knowing that somewhere, Stevie was using them too.

So, back to Nuit Blanche.

The idea that someone like me could climb a Stevie Haston route was unimaginable when I first saw him in Sheffield. But in the intervening years, I’d put in the time to safely climb WI6 with some certainty I wouldn’t die. Black Diamond screws had become cheap enough for people with a staff discount to buy. Plus, with my Predators, asymmetric Grade 8s, and lightweight, sportif-style winter clothing (like Stevie wore) rather than a suit of Gore-Tex armour, maybe I could climb it too. And, of course, it was now WI6, not 7.

Who’d have imagined wearing Powerstretch tights on an ice route would be a revolutionary act!? It seems so obvious now, but Stevie brought a rock climbing mentality to ice climbing, as well as amazing originality and creativity. And people took notice.

My partner for the climb was another shop climbing assistant, a friend of my lodger John: a young guy called Tim Emmet. Although climbing E8 and soloing routes like Right Wall, he had very little ice experience. Perfect. Funny, I was probably less than five years older than Tim, but I felt like an old man—though Tim has a habit of making most people feel that way.

As for the climb, there’s not much to say. Ice is ice: bang, crash, wollop, kick, kick, pull. I think I led the first overhanging bit—you could just bridge it—and Tim led the top vertical section.

What I remember most was the water running under the top pitch, reminding you that you weren’t climbing a solid pillar of ice, just a thin skin.

Talking of ambition, we’d intended to tick Nuit Blanche, then rap down, cross the gladier, and climb Icelander (WI6) in a day, but after climbing the route, and rapping down, I ended up leaving a knot in the end of the rope, meaning it would not pull, leaving us half way up the route with one rope. Neither of us wanted to re-climb the last pitch again, so we rappelled down on one rope, using retrievable ice screws (we didn’t have a threader), and climbed a route to the side back to the top. Tim, being Tim, didn’t view this as a fuck up on my part, but just a demonstration of my mastery of the tricks of the trade (God bless him).

Actually, what I do remember about Nuit Blanche was marvelling at the fact we were climbing Nuit Blanche—Stevie’s route, even if it technically wasn’t anymore. I wonder if climbers still feel the same? Probably not, as this ice and mixed revolution has made all such - once hard - routes pretty tame. That’s progress.

But for me, Nuit Blamche was a benchmark, like marking your child’s height on a door frame to see how far they’ve grown. In reality, I don’t think I ever grew taller than that. I moved on to other things, as did ice climbing—the sport going mainstream, Stevie the very model of the modern mixed climber, a sponsored superstar, Number one, getting a small slice of what he deserved. And Tim? He went on to better things, unburdened by the limitations of the past, or knotted rappel ropes — the prehistoric, the postmodern, the future unlimited in both vision and steepness.

It’s funny to write so many words about a dribble of ice down a rocky wall, but I suppose, just as football is more than kicking a ball from one end of a pitch to another, so is a climb. Everything that makes it magic so much more than the climb itself.