U is for Unknown Pleasures

A journalist asked me the other day what I got out of climbing. After talking to me and looking at my pictures, she felt that what I did mostly involved wishing I was somewhere – or someone – else.

It’s a good question, and one that most non-climbers assume is answered by “the view.” Well, the views are often nice, but you’d be pretty stupid to climb the Frêney Pillar just to watch clouds scudding over distant mountains. That’s what paths, mountain railways, and téléphériques are for. Views are best enjoyed sitting in your car with a flask, or on a picnic blanket — not while glancing between your partner’s discoing legs and a belay you wouldn’t trust to hold a dog outside Tesco.

In my book, views are best bought afterwards, in postcards, and sent to non-climbing friends to reinforce the idea that it’s all about sunsets and pink clouds.

The real rewards for risking your neck, all that travel and disappointment, and a mortgage’s worth of climbing kit, are many, unexpected, and deeply personal.

• It’s an expensive cup of crap tea and a stale cheese baguette in the Montenvers café.
• It’s sitting on a chalet balcony sorting out what’s left on the rack, feeling the sun sink back into your cold bones.
• It’s a glass of water, a roof, a door, a bed, a tap, a smile.
• It’s the pain of frost-nipped fingernails finally warming.
• It’s coiling the ropes and putting them away.
• It’s finding the first rap anchor and hearing the soft tumbling sound of the rope end pulling down around you.
• It’s sore shoulders and knees, and rucksacks cast down in doorways for the very last time.
• It’s getting away from your stinking partner and your stinking socks.
• It’s forcing open the frozen hut door and wrapping yourself in filthy blankets while you wait for the unlimited gas to melt your first brew in a week.
• It’s writing it up in the book.
• It’s a warm toilet, chocolate Hobnobs, Coke, and cheap Argentine steaks.
• It’s not caring about the big things and understanding the value of the small.
• It’s seeing the magic. It’s doing the impossible safely.
• It’s lying in bed the day after, hearing the storm batter the window a day too late.
• It’s being on top. Better still, it’s being safely back at the bottom.
• It’s telling someone you’re safe and they don’t need to worry any more.
• It’s a handshake at the top.
• It’s saying you did it when you walk into the bar — or having a great story why you didn’t.
• It’s kissing your child. It’s lifting them up. It’s putting them to bed every day for a month in recompense.
• It’s stepping from ice to concrete.
• It’s taking off your crampons for the first time in days and feeling like your feet are full of helium.

• It’s the sound of the ignition and the burst of light from the car’s headlamps in an empty car park.
• It’s putting on your sandals.
• It’s lying in the meadow.
• It’s my wife letting me fall asleep at 4 pm on the settee with jet lag.
• It’s awkward hugs with strangers and excited, babbling conversations in the dark while walking down from a climb.
• It’s putting on cotton jeans, socks and a T-shirt, and going out to celebrate — whether you succeeded or not. Just because you can.
• It’s having an answer when someone asks what you’ve been up to.
• It’s saying “not much” and letting them find out later.
• It’s scanning your slides and seeing them appear good or bad on the computer screen.
• It’s lying down at the roadhead and knowing it’s over. It’s not having to go any further.
• It’s deep French baths where you can sit until the water goes cold, then fill them up again.
• It’s having a story to tell.
• It’s feeling just like the hobbits in the final scene of The Lord of the Rings, when they all return from their epic journey and sit quietly in the pub, smiling, while the whole world around them remains unaware of what they’ve done.

It’s coming home.

For me, it’s about endings — which some may think is a good reason for not setting out in the first place. But I relish the end of the journey because my world has changed, at least for a little while.

These reasons are many, strange, and deeply personal. They are honest answers that can betray the simplicity — even the stupidity — of what we do. How can you risk so much to find the worth of something so apparently worthless? Well, like all unknown pleasures, only those who have experienced them truly know why.

These are only a few of the reasons. None of them are suitable for grabbing headlines in The Times. But for me, they are reason enough.