P is for Parnell

Ian Parnell rang me up this morning to tell me he was home from India. Maybe that sounds odd? But I suppose that’s what old climbing partners do when they get back from trips.

They check in.

I do worry you know.

After I put down the phone I thought about how strange climbing relationships are and about our own friendship.

Ian once said that: “You may climb with someone, but that doesn’t mean you would socialize with them.” I thought back to when we first met.

I was standing behind the rock counter in the old Outside in Llanberis. I was probably drinking tea and reading a guidebook. It must have been 1997. He came in to buy skyhooks for a trip to Yosemite, looking sort of cool and artistic ... well in a sort of geeky way in his National Health specs. I recognized him and he recognized me and, being that sort of person, he introduced himself. He sounded sort of posh and so I guess I didn’t like him straight away - which is sort of daft as most people I used to meet sounded posher than me. You could tell he’d developed as a climber outside of the Yorkshire, Derbyshire or North Wales scenes, coming across as a bit of an outsider.

He’d obviously never done anything on Stanage.

Having climbed El Cap three times I thought I was God’s gift to big walling, so offered him the benefit of my wealth of knowledge on hooks. It turned out he and Jerry Gore were planning on having a go at Zenyatta Mondatta, a loose and dangerous route that had claimed the life of a climber that very month. It was the last route I’d tried before leaving the Valley the summer before - and I’d failed on it. This, of course, only got my back up.

There was no way he’d be able to do it.

I said it was pretty scary, with lots of creaking flakes waiting to snap, but he told me he liked loose rock, which sounded a bit pretentious at the time, in a climbing sort of way. I didn’t know he’d made a name for himself climbing routes that aspired to be described as simply ‘loose’, and lan’s still the only climber I’ve met who has climbed an E6 5c.

Still, I remember at the time thinking that this guy was obviously just another shop floor bullshitter, or maybe totally mad - after all he did look the type. ZM was tough and it seemed Ian had virtually no experience, being just another of those good South West rock-climbers who’d managed to squeeze their name into a postage stamp section of On The Edge. The only reason I knew about Ian was I’d read a profile of him where he said his favorite group was the punk band Big Black - which sort of added an extra dimension to a two dimensional magazine profile. It made a change from bouncy house.

Back then I used to consider myself someone who wasn’t afraid to bite off more than he could chew, and although I didn’t know it, I was very ambitious. But standing there listening to Ian it sounded like he thought he could swallow the lot. He wasn’t just into climbing big walls, but he wanted to get into Alpine climbing as well, reeling off future objectives that would make most Alpinists’ hair stand on end. I just thought he didn’t know what he was talking about and that it was easy talking tough with your feet safely on the carpet. I remembered Airlie Anderson telling me Ian was a: “HVS climber who climbed E6s,” and I thought he wouldn’t live long if he applied this to Alpine routes.

Ian chose two flat Leeper hooks and I hung the rest back on the display, then rang them through the till. I can’t remember if I gave him a discount or if he paid full price, which is a shame: 10% would have meant I thought he was wasting his money as he was a bullshitter; 20% he didn’t know any better and would never get high enough to use the hooks; and no discount at all? Well maybe I’d seen the fire inside was true and I’d have been jealous enough to make some excuses about not being able to discount skyhooks or something.

After he paid I watched him leave and wondered if he was either deluded or just plain crazy, or maybe both.

He climbed Zenyatta Mondatta, of course, proving me half wrong.

That was nearly 10 years ago. This is what I love about friendships, especially climbing ones. You never know where they might lead. One day someone’s a stranger, another they hold your life in their hands.

We’ve been through hard times Ian and me, but through climbing, and the times in between, we managed to make that jump from being partners to friends and perhaps that’s why I’m always sad when he goes and glad to hear his voice when once again he proves me wrong.

And that’s why he rang.