Mountain Article and Photographic Competition 2010

Winning Entries

MCofS Article Competition Winners:

By Ania Kociolek (MAC Coordinator)

The competition was given a boost this year with 22 prose and 12 poetry entries; the best for some time. There was quite a range of styles, but strangely quite a few using dialect and building in an attendant use of profanity! This was not always to the judges liking, although there were some entries for which it did work.

Judges this year were Jayne Glass (Scottish Mountaineer Sub Editor), Kevin Howett (Editor), Stevie Christie (Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival), John Donohoe (Ex- MCofS president), Mike Merchant (last year’s Winner) and Ingrid Parker (English Teacher). This years’ judging was not an easy task with many entries bringing out extreme opposites of opinion.

In the Prose Category, one such was Andrew Moffat’s ‘Walkers’, a dialogue from two men escaping town for the first time with their more experienced hillgoing friend, which some found humorous , others not. Another was Jack Reilly’s Ben Wyvis, one of the aforementioned examples using profanity and dialect, was either hated or felt to be a good attempt at something different. However, there were a few which were unanimously enjoyed and came out on top.

Moira McPartlin won 3^rd with her ‘Twenty Five Feet Behind’ story of a woman climber breaking free from her boyfriend’s leadership on Alpine climbs. Judges commented, “Vivid with lots of interesting observation and detail”, “Good imagery, well written…”, “...gets more and more caught up in the story as it develops.”

Second place went to Hamish Brown’s ‘Aonach Eagach’; a tragedy leads to a renewal love story, which then turns into a murder mystery, but with a final twist. This was “effective black humour bringing a smile”, “A great bit of noir storytelling” and “...thought provoking”.

The winning entry described “A great expedition through a year of Alpine climbing that climbers can relate to” and was considered “Masterly” with “…precise, vivid recollections swim(ing) out of a perfectly paced, dream-like narrative”. One judge considered it “full of energy”. It was entitled ‘When we passed through the Alps’ - a recollection of a first Alpine season from Tom Povey. “It may be prose, but it’s poetry as well”.

In the poetry category itself, there were three entries clearly enjoyed more than the rest, with just a few points between them. However, judges had great things to say about some of the others with Thomas Eagle’s un-named piece considered to have “delightful images”, “good rhythm” and “A good mix of human and natural observations”, and Roderick Manson’s ‘Instincts on Rising’ which had a “nice touch of humour” as well as “a very nice description of a sunrise”.

But, in third place was Mike Blood’s ‘Slip and Fall’ which was a “perceptive recollection of a fall” which had “a pace matching the mood being built, building a sense of suspense”. In second place was Sarah Flints ‘Winter Playground’ which was considered a “powerful poem with tremendous images”, including that of “light struggling through powder snow as ‘winter jewels’”.

The winner was another poem by Mike Blood: ‘Falzarago Pass’. Almost all the judges were taken by its “lively and concise way of capturing an unsettling moment”, whilst it also “builds a sombre, reflective and respectful mood”.

Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival Photo Competition

There were two categories as usual and the acclaimed photographer featured in Scottish Mountaineer, May edition, Lukasz Warzecha, judged this year’s photo entries.

When we passed through the Alps

By Tom Povey

This article featured in Scottish Mountaineer Issue 49 (November 2010)

We reached upwards, looking for something to hold on to. That first time we were lifted up by dreams, until we stood on the summit of that giant among mountains: the Matterhorn. We knew the history of these precipitous rocks but were invincible, poised, unfaltering, young. Our safety was not in skill – we had none – but in grit. And when we descended, the guides who had laughed in the darkness of that previous night broke open the door of the Carrel hut and welcomed us in, relieved they would not have to pick our bodies from the slopes the next day. Drinking their tea, we said we would never come back. And we believed it.

But as winter turned into spring we felt a distant pull, the gravity of some titanic landmass. With snowdrops fading we crunched in summer boots over late winter snow, out of Llanberis and up the railway line under slate-grey skies. Snowdon was the second mountain we climbed. An odd apprenticeship.

By late spring we had worn through our boots and had discarded our tattered maps. Lean limbed we had scouted Llyn Idwal, to climb the Slabs three times in a day, and had clambered through the green gut of Devil’s Kitchen to grope through the perpetual mist of the Glyders, and on to the south ridge of Tryfan. We sat on our ropes in the silence of the small ledge beneath the twin monoliths of Adam and Eve in the fading light. The thick smell of moss and chalk and sweat. On a July day we had enchained Horned Crag on Lliwedd, the Snowdon Horseshoe and Grooved Arête on Tryfan and were back by mid-afternoon to drink fresh coffee by Llyn Ogwen, bare-chested in the cool breeze of early summer. To be still. For the first time. To be awake.

Cut through by cold, head down against the spindrift we edged along the highest crest in Europe, towards the summit of Mt Blanc. We were projected by a rising sun onto the seas of cloud in Italy and France. Thumping each other hard on the back beneath our duvet jackets, we quickly turned to begin the long descent before the sun was fully up, shaking hands with strangers as we went. Then by car to Switzerland and up the Gornergrat to see the mighty Gornergletscher. That climb was the coldest I can remember. Sharp as knives through our thick leather boots till all we could think of was the pain of frost-nipped toes and blistered and bleeding heels. In inadequate footwear, we stood two days’ walk in and one hundred feet from the summit of Dufourspitze. Despite the struggle, this day would not be ours. Descending again, to relax in meadows through those warm long days of summer, letting romantic names of glaciers drift through one’s mind.

That winter, pressing on past ice-encrusted ropes of climbers beaten back by the blizzard, I floundered alone in waist-deep snow on the Glyders, knowing that beneath the powder were silent pools. Water, inky deep, that would draw me down if I faltered. I followed a compass bearing until I grasped with both hands the top of a fence post I knew could lead me out; down to safety and to reflect on the day I learnt the meaning of luck.

Then winter trips to the Cairngorms, Gressoney, and Rjukan, with the smell of sharpened crampons and wet rope. We spent weeks in deep cut gorges frozen thick. To the steady cut of pick on ice, and clinking of the screws, we climbed until our bodies knew the flow of movement, the axes an extension of our arms, the crampons natural on our feet. One day we climbed three thousand feet of ice, by night drawn up by a curious light. Fitfully through the high pines. We thought it was the warm glow of a high cabin, or car lights reflected off a road sign. It was a slender moon creeping low along the crest of the Hardangervidda plateau. At 2 am, after eleven hours of darkness, we reached the top, and a road out of the forest. By luck a Swedish bus driver passed and picked us up. Crashed out on the floor of the bus in a jumble of limbs and axes, ropes and harnesses, and caked in snow, unbelievably we fell asleep on the fifteen minute drive back down. With the numbing low moan of the engine rumbling through us as we were swayed through turns.

We took a friend into the Bernese Oberland, and lived for days in an ice cave carved deep into the Ewigschneefeld – the eternal snow field - away from the chaos of the huts. By day we climbed the peaks around, carefully testing ourselves against the mountains. We returned to escape the blinding heat of the mountain bowl by crawling through an azure tube into the cool and churchlike quiet of the glacier. Where by night we talked by candlelight about the days’ events, until we drifted into impenetrable sleep.

In the Engadine we climbed the Piz Bernina, and put up a tent five hundred feet below the summit. When the storm came in we laughed at ourselves for having caught the last cable car instead of checking the weather forecast, and hunkered down despite the cracking of lightning all around. We woke early the next morning to a dim light and silence, unzipping the awning of the tent to a wall of heavy snow. Kicking through to where the storm still whipped and roared. Fresh snow was blasted into our sleeping bags. Our tent was now a gentle bump in a desert of white. Two days later our rations ended, but for two raw onions, a misguided choice made during hasty packing. We had used up the fuel and now had only snow to eat, so chose to chance a long walk out over heavy cloud-draped glaciers rather than endure another night, or more. We had no money, but in a hut en-route I traded the onions for a two litres of warm water, walking back into the whirlwind of the storm to where my friend was waiting out of sight, leaving the warden bemused but better off for soup. That night we booked into a hotel and ordered three courses, regretting our grandness when we could stomach less than half the soup.

We bivouacked under blood-red skies on the Zwischenberg pass. And watched a meteor storm strafe the Allalinjoch, to the cannonade of rock-fall. We camped in a tarpaulin high on the muscular shoulders of Dome du Goûter, suspended on the candy-floss clouds of Chamonix, and slept beneath the rectilinear perfection of the Lenzspitze, as a wall of cloud pulled in, with the slow inertia of a leaden tanker’s hull descending. We have dreamed in all these inaccessible places. After watching shooting stars burn streaks across the sky, and the slow procession of a satellite. Almost so close that we could touch them. Here friends without equipment were duct-taped into bin bags for the night, and allowed the luxury of the ropes as mattress and boots as pillow. When the stove was forgotten we collected drips in helmets and waterproof jackets, until we had enough to drink.

Only once did we see torches in the middle of the night. Deep snow had caused a couple to be benighted on the Rimpfischhorn. Two torches, several hours distant, intermittent on a ridge of snow. Night voices woke us, then the scratch of steel spikes on rock. They said the summit ridge was thick with snow. We were underequipped for poor conditions, and said we would join them at their lower bivouac in the morning. But instead they left their ropes and a rack of climbing equipment, then clambered down boulder fields under a full moon reflected in the tin-foil markers they had left. That day had been dog warm, and the night cold. Snow was still frozen hard as we retraced their steps along the airy summit ridge. And we were glad of the loaned equipment. Two days later we returned the ropes in the warm cigar-smoke fug of a Randa bar where we boasted through long sips of milky cocoa.

There were also days alone. The time I looked for bivouac spots on the soaring ridge of the Lagginhorn, surprised to find myself with camping gear and cooking equipment on the top, much sooner than expected. I contemplated a night in a wind-carved hollow just beneath the summit, before walking down by night to sleep beside a boulder at the glacier snout, snug wrapped inside a sleeping bag as the wind howled down the slopes.

Valley days passed in lethargic bliss, resting sore limbs in lakes and streams, and lying in the leafy shade of meadows. I wandered off alone and slept in a clump of grass beside a stream one day, to wake spreadeagled and with my hat askew, confronted by a group of wide-eyed men who had ventured from their cars to poke me with a stick. “We thought you were dead,” they said. “Not yet, my friends,” said I.

In these twelve years we have stood on top of almost forty of the four-thousand metre peaks. Through these long days they have been unchanging, passive yet indomitable. The mountains are a slow mirror in which we see ourselves through a speeding world.

AONACH EAGACH

By Hamish Brown

Glencoe. North Side. Man, traversing Aonach Eagach E to W slipped at the pinnacled section of the ridge and fell down S side for 200m. Body recovered by Glencoe MRT. (3 7 hours)

The very brevity of accident reports like this acts as a sort of palliative, recording nothing of the reality, the horror of the happening, the slow ebbing of heartbreak in the sorry afterwards but then neither the bereaved, those present, nor those who picked up the pieces want to expand the record and bring back the memory of the happening. Nobody goes to the hills with the idea of being a casualty statistic. Well, almost nobody.

Jean Brennan had had her share of accident statistics. Nearly two years

earlier she, her husband Tom, their young Andrew, had intended picking up the grandparents at Saline for a day at the zoo but Jean had all the symptoms of flu and said she was going to dope herself and go to bed. They would have to go without her. Under protest they did so. Tom took Andrew and they drove along the B914 to Saline, picked up Jean's parents and headed for the Forth Bridge. They were just running up out of Steelend en route to the motorway when two cars, racing each other, side by side, came belting round onto them. One youthful driver, who would be flat on his back for life, was the only survivor. Jean, not surprisingly, was shattered and it was many months, into years, before she began to pick up again what she considered the broken pieces of her own life. The process was accelerated by the kindly presence of the hills and the friendship of a man.

One day while she was driving over the Cleish Hills she had one of those stabbing reawakenings of her horrors; her throat closed up, she could hardly breathe and the tears flooded out. She pulled in off the road and sat hunched over the wheel while the "heeby jeebies" lasted. She then climbed out of the car and wearily wandered along the track neither knowing nor caring where it went.

Jean came out of the scented pines to find herself looking at a loch which lay golden in the evening light, backed by lumpy sunset hills, with a fisherman or two quietly casting from the shore. The singing silence of the scene was such a shocking contrast to her own inner turmoil that she stopped as if struck by a blow. Then she was beset by a run of hiccups. Jean held her breath tried touching her toes and so on, all to no avail. She actually laughed at herself (the first time since the fatal crash) and headed for the bank of the loch.

There was a fishermen's hut there and she read "Loch Glow" on a notice. Jean laughed aloud because this was so apposite with the sun reflecting off the water. She strode off round the gurgly rim into the dazzle and on up the first bump northwards (Park Hill she would discover later) where she sat on the rufous tussocks as the sun dipped away beyond the scarp of the Ochils.

A man came along, bearded and weathered, boots on his feet and a thumb stick in hand. He looked as if he belonged there as happily as the breeze itself.

"Aye" he greeted.

"Oh, hello," she replied, with a bit of a catch in her voice.

"Great; isn't it?"

"Why, yes."

"Come here often?"

"No. I've not been before. I ...." and. before she knew it, Jean was pouring out her sorrows as she had not done before. He sat beside her and scarce said a word. Just nodded now and then. Jean didn't burst into tears again at the end of her recital. They remained sitting in silence. The glowing sun met the horizon and flared up golden rays into the clouds, trembled and dipped out of sight.

"We'd better shift," the man said. He helped her up. "I once had to read a poem at a funeral. It was by the climber Winthrop Young. Let me give it to you." He spoke it clearly. Jean registered some of the words. "There is much comfort in high hills and a great easing of the heart ... I lose in them my instant of brief ills - There is great easing of the heart and cumulance of comfort on high hills."

"Cumulance of comfort on high hills," Jean whispered to herself that night. The Cleish Hills were hardly high, but they had comforted, and, for once, she fell asleep with a memory that smiled rather than screamed. There would be more hills and more of Erchie Russel, the manny who could recite poems like that.

A couple of years later Erchie Russel was driven to taking steps to murder Jean Brennan.

Erchie was a kindly soul really and had - at first - been quite happy to meet Jean on his regular evening walks on the Cleish Hills. He was a painter and lived in a cottage at Easter Cleish Farm with an old stable for studio-workshop. He was a solitary type but not lonely. He joked that he was married to his work and a wife would have been a fatal distraction. The hills were his relaxation and most nights he would clear his head of work by a stroll among the hills and lochans above the hamlet. He drew strength and inspiration from them and also went on trips all over Scotland with the Kinross Mountain Club. His work sold. He was that rarity, a really contented person, and felt he would need to live to be a hundred just to produce a fraction of the ideas that volcanoed out of his mind.

Erchie was quite happy to let Jean into the periphery of his self-contained world but that was not where she stayed. He, rather grimly, recalled a childhood story of the camel and the Bedouin tent. In the frozen desert nights the camel always felt grieved at being left outside while the people had the shelter of a tent. One particularly cold night the camel stuck its head in the door. Lovely warmth! The man was going to chase the beast away but the children pleaded on its behalf. But the children pleaded on its behalf. The face in the door was so funny. "All right then, but no further," their father conceded. A few nights later he noticed the camel had got its feet inside as well. He said nothing but then the animal pushed further in and rather cramped the space in the tent for the rest of them. He remonstrated but was over-ruled by the family. Inch by inch, night by night, the camel crept in till, eventually, there came the night when the camel's entire bulk filled the tent and the family cooked supper and slept outside under the cold stars.

Jean became the camel inching into the privacy of his life and he resented the insidious intrusion. There was the day a walk led down to Easter Cleish and he, all too innocently, suggested a cup of tea. Jean never seemed to be out the house after that he thought a few weeks later. She'd bring flowers and shift a vase to the windowsill for them, she brought a toaster (bought at a car-boot sale) to replace his half-working one, she sat and darned his hiking socks and, the cracking point, tried to "tidy" his studio-workshop.

She had also joined the KMC (Kinross Mountain Club) and the members tended to partner them together. Sharing a picnic she would sit close to Erchie, pressing against him. Walking, she was always one step behind. Once, when he paused to look at a hairy caterpillar in the heather, she stood on his heel. "Stop crowding me!" he had hissed.

I don't know whether Jean was conscious of what she was doing but she was not the first woman ever to metamorphose from mourning to man-hunting. A solitary maverick like Erchie was something of a challenge to female instincts. One night when Erchie had realised he had a camel well inside his tent he scrawled in his diary, "I could kill the bitch!", language that would have surprised and shocked Jean. She, poor soul, would never see there were pulsing depths in Erchie which she had no access to and he, having written those words, lay awake for a long time that night pondering them.

A week later there was an article in the Scotsman on "The Art of Perfecting Murder". While written for entertainment it made Erchie think. Forty percent of murderers were never caught and nobody could guess how many murders there were which remained undetected because they had been 'perfect' crimes. The same day an article in the Scots Magazine mentioned that there was something like sixty people who had gone missing in the Highlands over the last century and had never been found. That article was also written a bit tongue-in-cheek, the writer saying he walked in hope of finding a missing Victorian hillgoer who had had a pocketful of gold sovereigns on his person.

Erchie thought of Browning's My Last Duchess and the catalogue of little sins that led to Ferrara's finally acting, "This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together." Another literary memory (if you could term Agatha Christie 'literary') had a man simply pushing his wife off the cliffs at Dover and reporting she had just slipped. There was no way it could be proved as other than an accident. How easily something like that could be arranged in the hills. Erchie fantasized on these lines to such an extent his work began to suffer and he became unusually irascible. Something would have to be done before the camel had him out of the tent altogether.

The simple answer of course would have been for him to tell Jean to leave him alone, not to see him any more, not to visit the cottage or approach him in any way but the working of men's thoughts are seldom simple either. He couldn't be cruel to Jean. She had suffered enough after all. He couldn't hurt her with such a brutal rejection.

But he could kill her.

When the KMC meet's secretary proposed a visit to Glen Coe one weekend with the objectives of Bidean and the Aonach Eagach, Erchie's heart gave a bound. The latter would be the perfect place for an 'accident', especially as it would be quite a hard route for the relatively inexperienced Jean. If he proposed to traverse the ridge she, he smiled to himself, would insist on accompanying him. Which is exactly what happened as everyone on Michie of Muckharfs bus heard as she arranged it on the drive up the A82.

Half the bus passengers were after the Aonach Eagach so Erchie set a cracking pace up the steep flank to Am Bodach in order to be ahead of the others, alone with Jean. She puffed along behind him silently; anyone less infatuated would have yelled an adjectival "Slow down!" To Erchie this dogged following was the last confirmation he needed. By God! He would make sure she never reached the other end of the ridge.

They traversed from Am Bodach to the Munro, Meall Dearg. From there a path wends down to reach the narrow crest of the Aonach Eagach proper which undulates along for a couple of ragged kilometres (the skyline view that fills the north side of Glen Coe) before rising to Stob Coire Leith and on to Munro number two, Sgorr na Fiannaidh, On the ridge proper there are plenty of narrow places and brief problems, slippery slabs and wee pinnacles, all with considerable 'exposure' - that honeyed word meaning plenty of air below the boots.

Erchie felt remarkably calm about what he intended to do. He felt being rid of Jean would be like taking off a heavy rucksack at the end of a long hill day. A blessed relief. He had traversed the Aonach Eagach the year before and knew the perfect spot. A short black wall had to be scrambled up and it would be the easiest thing in the world to 'slip' there and let his flying feet knock Jean off the narrow crest into the void.

They picked their cautious way along the crest, Erchie being quite helpful at any difficulties and Jean proving quite competent. Only occasionally did she let her mind stray. Was Erchie being unusually kind? Might he, at last,…..? They came to the wee wall, its smooth holds damp and greasy, the cliffs sheer on either side. Agatha Christie couldn't have designed a better spot for murder.

Erchie made sure of his right handhold and began to turn. Now was the moment. A quick push of a foot - and that would be that. At that very moment Bill Binnie, the KMC club secretary, came into view and called out, "Hey. Erchie, whit's the hurry the day?"

The shock made Erchie lose his grip so he shot off down.

"No! No!" he screamed.

But he only slid a few feet. One flailing foot caught Jean, who had turned at the unexpected voice, and pitched her off the ridge. Bill and Erchie watched as the silent, limp figure curved through the air, seemingly in slow motion, to then thump onto the rocks and fly off again, a process repeated several times before Jean crashed onto the screes and lay still. The sight was almost unreal but the soft, repeated thuds would echo in the memory for a long time.

The leader of the Glen Coe Mountain Rescue Team put an arm round the white-faced Erchie outside the Clachaig. "Don't blame yourself, mate. It was an accident." He grinned, encouragingly, with an old joke, "You'd think you'd tried to push her off".

The coroner heard what Bill Binnie and Ronnie Hamilton, who had been a step behind Bill on the ridge, had seen and what Erchie described and recorded Yet another of those damn-fool mountain accidental deaths. They should ban the blighters. (He preferred hang gliding himself.)

Almost a year later Erchie Russel was in Edinburgh. Three of his paintings
were being hung at the RSA and there was a first London exhibition looming. He
popped into Tiso's in Rose Street for some mits. The new SMC Journal was on display and he quickly flipped through its pages to the long Scottish Mountain Accidents section. There it was.

Glencoe. North Side. Woman, traversing Aonach Eagach E to W fell at the pinnacled section of the ridge and went down S side for 190m. Body recovered by Glencoe MRT. (33 hours)

Erchie set off for the Haymarket and the train over the bridge to Dumf where he'd parked his car at the station. He returned home to Cleish as that rarity, a really contented person. There was still so much he wanted to do. He'd need to live to be a hundred to produce just a fraction of the ideas that volcanoed out of his mind.

Twenty Five Feet Behind

By Moira McPartlin (Ochils Mountaineering Club)

The sound of someone near the door untangling out of a sleeping bag teases Carrie from her dream. She wrinkles her nose at the stale air she shares with the twenty other bodies jumbled on the attic’s Double Decker platforms. Rows of bags are strewn like multicoloured slugs. Every now and then she sees the beam of a head torch dart across the ceiling as the early riser tries to pack his sack without disturbing anyone, shushing his rustling supermarket bags in vain.

Johnnie's steady sleep breathing lulls Carrie into a dwam, she secretly hopes for bad weather, then they could snuggle in for another couple of hours. He lies facing her, his breath warms her face with each exhalation.

A body, two or three down the platform, snores a quiet puttering interrupted by an intermittent snort. Another stirs by the shuttered window.

Carrie rubs her dry gritty eyes and becomes aware of her empty stomach. Murmurings stagger around the room like a Chinese whisper let loose. She shakes Johnnie.

'Come on, I think we should get up.'

He springs upright and begins to pull on the clothes he stores in the stuff sack he uses as a pillow. At home the snooze button would have been thumped twice before he rose, but not here. Carrie hustles her top over the bra she has slept in. She tops and tails with baby wipes and manages to pull her knickers and trousers on while still in her bag. By the time she is dressed at least half the occupants of the dorm have surfaced and someone dares to flick the light switch. The room ripples like a centipede flexing its legs.

Stepping outside, Carrie gasps as the cold night air seizes her throat. The short walk to the main hut gives her enough time to observe the forecast excellent weather conditions.

The black sky is salted with stars and a half moon plays on the sugar coated mountainside. She pulls a scarf over her mouth to protect sensitive teeth from the piercing cold. This is July in the high Alps. She checks her watch. 1:20.am.

Despite the queue loitering at the toilet block, Carrie decides to wait. She plans to visit twice before the off, she can’t afford to be caught out once her mountain clobber is on. The rank smell from Turkish style squats nips her nose. It’s always the same in the mountains, Carrie reckons the altitude has an adverse effect on the men's aim.

The main hut, ablaze with yellow welcoming lights, looks incongruous against the stark hostile backdrop of the mountain range. Every window drips with condensation where the heat from the wood burning stove inside collides with the outside temperature.

As Carrie approaches the door she sneaks a look towards the path they would soon be taking. Dots of lights from the earlier starts bob along in the darkness, like the seven dwarfs heading for the mines – hi ho!

The steamy heat of the room embraces her as she steps through the door. Johnnie pats the seat beside him and pushes a steaming mug of hot chocolate her way. Stale bread dabbed with jam and Nutella sticks in her craw but she forces it down anyway. Around the room sleepy eyes are rubbed and armpits scratched as people munch; no words required.

Chairs scrape across the tiled floor as thoughts and belongings are gathered and one by one the climbers head back to the dorm, banging the door in their wake.

Carrie visits the toilet one last time before donning her outdoor gear. She zips a waterproof jacket over black sallapottes and clamps the torch band around her itchy woollen balaclava. Johnnie helps Carrie wind the rope diagonally round her body, securing the loops to her climbing harness with a carabiner at her waist. Carrie helps Johnnie do the same. Soon they are bound together by a single rope length of about twenty five feet. Enough rope to give each of them warning to stop a fall with their ice axe if the other steps into a hidden crevasse. That is the theory, but Carrie remains dubious to the reality.

A sprinkling of clouds scuds across the moon, warning them that the wind has picked up. They check each other's gear again and, gripping their ice axes, follow the red and white paint splodges marking the path up to the glacier; Johnnie first then Carrie a rope length behind.

The early silence of the mountainside now rattles with the crunching of boots and the clinking of axes striking rock. A low rumble of voices at last waking to the day ahead.

After a few minutes the gravel path ends and Carrie joins Johnnie to strap twelve point crampons onto heavy boots, before stepping onto the snow. As she looks back at lights twinkling from the hut she tries to ignore her nervous bladder. Her stomach hollows as her gloved fingers fumble with the crampon straps, tug, tugging them tight. Cold hands throb. She pulls heavy mitts over gloves before hoisting her rucksack back on, noticing that Johnnie does the same. With the noise of the first sharp crunch of spikes on the hard snow Carrie forgets her discomfort and concentrates on keeping the rope between them above the snow but not too taut.

They work as a team, Johnnie in front, Carrie behind. They have been partners for six years and in that time she couldn't remember ever being at the front of an Alpine rope. And yet, when they rock climb together, they share the lead. Often she will take the crux pitch, proving she is just as capable as Johnnie. But Johnnie always walks in front. Even when he suggests she take the lead, he overtakes her again after a few minutes without realising. Like today, he assumed the lead and she succumbed in silence.

The cold from the metal ice axe creeps into Carrie's right mitt, chasing the blood from her fingertips. She wiggles each finger, then switches the axe into her other hand, curling and uncurling a fist to restore circulation.

Settling into her own rhythm and space Carrie switches off her head torch and lets the moon light the way. As the terrain steepens and the air thins, Johnnie stops now and then to allow them to catch their breath.

Time is running out for them, the frozen snow pack will soon soften under the sun's rays. They must reach the summit before daylight. Carrie looks to the east and glimpses on the horizon a thin line of crimson tint. The day is ripening. Even though she knows the urgency she takes a moment to look west. There, still in night shadow, lies the monstrous dome of Mont Blanc, an unmistakable profile from every angle, tempting her onto its slopes.

‘Soon,’ she whispers.

When they leave the glacier and move onto a snow field Carrie blows out a huge sigh. Johnnie suggests that for speed they remain tied and make a breenge for the summit.

Clouds begin to cover the moon but the creeping light dilutes the sky from black to charcoal to grey. Carrie's head bends as she pumps her arms to increase momentum. She is relieved when they meet climbers on their way down, there couldn't be much further to go.

She pulls on the rope and Johnnie turns.

'What?' he shouts

'I want to check my map,' she roars against the wind.

'What for?'

'To see how much longer.'

'About an hour.'

Carrie turns her torch back on, studies her map then checks her watch. Johnnie slashes at the snow with his ice axe.

'OK,' she shouts and they set off again.

Her chest tightens as she gulps air into her lungs desperately trying to absorb more oxygen. Her forehead is pounding and she can hear the thumping of her heart in her ears. Slow down you bastard. She plucks a small bottle out of her pocket and sips icy cold water while on the move but her bladder warns her not too much. She dare not ask for a stop, they are close but she fears still not fast enough. Then the rope slackens and Johnnie begins to slow. He stops and leans forward on his ice axe, coughing. He pisses onto the snow before leading off again, leaving a yellow splash for Carrie to step over.

The sky turns milky white with the promise of blue. Carrie sneaks a look behind at the valley below stretched out in the sun like a bolt of golden cloth. They remain in the shadow of the neighbouring peak.

Johnnie tugs the rope and grins.

'Come on Carrie, one last push.' He points. 'Look, the summit's there.'

Above them a trail of black figures snake up the white mountainside, ropes strung out, forming a continuous caravan. After Carrie scans the path zigzagging up a steep snow slope she drops her chin to her chest and begins to sing in her head. It is one of those repetitive pop tunes by a skinny manufactured girl band she hates and now can’t get the damn song out of her mind.

I'll have a rest at the zag she thinks. She toils up to the bend and notices a zig just a little further on. I'll keep going, keep going to the next. But the rope drags in the snow and Johnnie stops again. Carrie’s nose is streaming, she blows the snot out onto the ground to help ease her breathing. Off again! Breathe one out breathe two in and try to replace the oxygen.

Her head is still down when the rope slackens once more. She looks up into the grinning scruffy face of Johnnie. He swing his ice axe in an arc to the left, his breathing heavy, he coughs and spits behind him.

Fifty feet above them is an escarpment with a huge iron cross and a white statue of a Madonna, hundreds of colour splashed Alpinists litter her feet like pilgrims, their ropes lie tangled in a confused mass. Johnnie takes Carrie's hand and pulls her up onto the ridge beside him. When they reach the summit she wipes the snot off her nose with the back of her mitt before accepting Johnnie's kiss full on the mouth. His lips are cold and taste of salt and suntan cream, his stubble scratches her cheeks.

The sun that glints on the carabiners and axes shines on the full expanse of the snow capped mountains that impose for miles in all directions into France, Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Tongues of many nationalities babble in excitement. They have all beaten the sun and can make it back through the glacier before the hard snow turns to porridge.

Carrie licks her dry lips and tastes the cold beer waiting for her at the hut before the rope tugs her to leave the summit twenty five feet behind Johnnie. This time she tugs back, digs her crampons into the hard ice and holds firm. He turns with a question on his smile.

‘There,’ she points to her goddess Mont Blanc. ‘If we start up tomorrow we can be on her summit next day. And this time I lead – the whole way.’