What an unbelievable rush this was. I met up with my old supervisor from CERN in Geneva on friday night (James Gillies) and the following morning we gathered our gear and made our way to the south-east (for the geographically challenged we were essentially going from Geneva towards the Matterhorn). Along the way we stopped at a fantastic little cafe and had some of the best apricot cobbler that I have ever tasted.
On our arrival we threw on our packs and started our climb. The weather was fantastic and the trail very simple... no ice yet. We climbed for a couple of hours and eventually made our way to the mountain hut overlooking a vast valley glacier. Oddly enough the swiss army was everywhere. There were guys in military fatigues all over the area, and by the look of things they had been busy doing mountaineering activities all day. We stopped for a bit and had seasoned shedded potatoes with Rivella Rouge, a weird swiss soft drink made out of milk syrup. After our brief break we put aside all non-essential gear and climbed the next couple of kilometers to the shoulder of the Pigne where we got a chance to reconnoiter the glacier.
The glacier trail looked good, but it wrapped around the side of the mountain and without crampons and axes we couldn't look to see if there were any serious dangers further along the path. I was in a cold sweat, I am sure James was too... I can quote him as saying "mountain glaciers terrify me at the best of times". We broke away from the glacier trail and trudged our way through the snow to the Col (saddle) of the mountain where we got a really nice look at the surrounding area. According to James' mountaineering book there was a way up Pigne via the Col, and there was indeed a fellow coming down from the Pigne that way, but it looked really bloody steep. I climbed a bit higher to get a better look, but things looked nasty up that way so we turned around and went back to the hut for a bit of supper.
Supper would have been lovely had the first dish not had diced beans in it. It's funny, because after not having had a severe allergic response to anything in over four years I have forgotten just how allergic to beans I actually am. I had a lot of the soup before I realized what I was eating and it was actually the sudden sharp headache that led me to notice what I was doing. Very careless of me. The reaction scared the crap out of me actually, it started moving very quickly. And if I was an 8 on a the "scared scale" I think James was a 10. I was starting to suffer pain from surrounding light sources within just a few minutes and it was only at that time that I had finally given myself max dosages of every antihistamine and antigen that I have in my medkit. My adrenaline syringes were out and I was thinking there was no chance in hell that I was going to be able to avoid ruining the trip by drugging myself with them. And then I stabilized. I don't know if it was the massive amount of water that I was sitting there drinking or my meds, but something halted the whole response. And then I ambled upstairs and passed out. Although I do have a very odd memory of all the Swiss Army men singing at the top of their lungs in the main eating room... very strange.
The following morning I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a truck. We grapped our ice axes, ropes, crampons, and other gear and started the hour long trek to the base of the glacier just as the sun was beginning to send its warming rays over the horizon. It was a huge adrenaline rush. We were racing against time to make it back and forth across the glacier before it softened under the sun, and the seconds were ticking away. As we made our way across the ice plain in the shadows of the dawn my sweat ran cold as we crossed the crevasses. Only one had a visible opening that I could have actually fallen through, but the scary thing about crevasses is that they develop snow bridges from compacted snow that has fallen over the year. You never know how solid the stuff you are walking over actually is. And even though we were both roped together and armed with all of the gear needed to arrest a fall, there is always the small possibility that if one of us were to fall the other could be bracing himself on a bridge that would collapse under the tension created by the fall... leaving both of us dead. Anyhow, we followed the trail around the shoulder of the Pigne and shortened our rope as we began the steep section of our climb.
The snow path took us zig-zagging across crevasses on the slope and after twenty minutes of heart pounding terror we summitted the Pigne. The view was astounding. The Weisshorn, Zinalrothorn, Obergabelhorn, and Mt Besso surrounded us and the Matterhorn loomed in the distance. The sky was clear and the weather perfect. Time on the peak was short since the glacier was warming under the sun and the crevasses only becoming more perilous as the day drew on. After five minutes of glory we threw our pack back on and dropped back down the slope. An hour later we gratefully stepped back onto the solid stone of the lower peak and took a long rest as the ice on our crampons melted off. An overall outstanding experience. Apparently the Matterhorn is only one grade of difficulty higher than the Pigne to climb... tempting, but I think I'll pass for the moment.
So what the heck I was I doing on the night hike when I am supposed to be recovering from glandular fever and focusing all of my energies on getting a bloody job? Well, I happened to be in town and was free on the saturday of the night hike, so I though "why not". In retrospect there were a lot of reasons to "not" do this. Anyhow, the whole evening started when...
I arrive in the Imperial quad with seasonings and tortillas fresh from the US expressly for the purpose of introducing as many british as possible to the wonders of mexican food. Ned (annette), my checkpoint pal was supposed to meet me and somehow we ended up missing eachother for a good twenty minutes until I decided to ring her on her mobile. To my surprise she was standing just outside the door from me. So, to make a long intro short, we fought through our momentary confusion and bought the needed food for our checkpoint. Upon arrival at our site we started pitching our tent and were confronted with a farmer who wanted to know what the heck we were doing pitching a tent on his land. We explained the details of the night hike to him and I must say his mood did not improve when he discovered he was going to have well over fifty college students trekking across his property in the middle of the night to get to our checkpoint. However, seeing as our groups would be sticking to the footpaths and not technically tresspassing there was little he could do and he bit us a suprisingly warm farwell. I do recall him muttering something about dead sheep, but can't really place it into the context of the conversation.
So the evening wore on and we set to work with all of our cooking tasks. Ned had been thoughtful enough to chop up lots of onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and cheese before she left her appartment so the only difficult thing to deal with was the grill. And had my MSR grill been available this would have not been a problem, but seeing as my grill was on a shelf in my parents study Ned and I had to rely on the fellwanderers to supply us with one. The thing we were give was old, but it would have worked fine had the club's quartermaster managed to actually fill the damn thing with fuel! To add insult to injury, we couldn't even contact headquarters to tell them of our troubles since the radio they gave us had an effective range of about ten metres. It didn't help that Ned's mobile was also out of range in the Amersham area (a detail which I find inexcusable for British Telecom... I mean really people, the bloody country is smaller than Wisconsin and flat as a pancake, getting a signal accross it shouldn't be all that tough).
Anyhow, fuel eventually arrived and the taco fest got off to a wonderful start. It's a shame things didn't remain this way. Due to the way in which the night hike course was set up we experienced a deluge of trekkers within a single hour. At one point we had well over twenty people placing orders for tea, hot coco, tacos, crisps with guacamole, and biscuits. This would have been fine if Ned and I had opened a fast food restraunt with a staff to serve this kind of demand, but with a single grill and only two hypothermic servers a waiting list quickly developed. Even this would have been fine had people maintained a sense of pleasantness about them as they waited, but of course this didn't happen. Last year people were so delighted that Pete and I were cooking hamburgers they thought nothing of the fact that it took us fifteen minutes to grill up each individual batch. This year people came expecting to be served and there was very little tolerance for waiting. Of course this did not apply to all people, the fellwanderers' team for example was incredibly patient... I think they were with us for nearly an hour while we served up tacos to the masses.
There was one positive side to having a swarm of hikers pass through all at once though, we were the first outpost to finish for the night. If we had been smart we would have just hopped into our sleeping bags and slept for five hours until the hike completed, but we were stupid. It was cold and I didn't really have enough to keep me warm through the night (again, much was left in LA) so we sent a message out to HQ and requested a pick up... big mistake.
When Phil (the night hike head guy) arrived with Richard (fellwanderer president) to come an pick us up the chaos was only beginning. Rather than get dropped off at HQ to sleep through the rest of the night we ended up racing along the roads with Phil and Rich as they ran to pick up other outposts and walkers that were throwing in the towel. We picked up Lester and Beccy around 4am and then some really obnoxious walkers around 4:30. One of them kept refering to me as a Yank, I was on the verge of ripping out her vocal chords after just an hour of being in the same van as her. And that was when the fun began (no I didn't rip out her vocal chords). After we picked the walkers up we got a call to collect Phil's roomates who were running checkpoint 3. They had an enormous fire which they could not put out on their own. So Rich and I grabbed water from the van to put the damn thing out. Trouble was we didn't have enough. So Phil grabbed the leftover beer and started pouring it on the embers. Quite amusing in retrospect, but a really stupid situation at 5am. And as if that wasn't enough, our next pick up also had a fire that was totally out of control. To make matters even more interesting the checkpoint staff member "looking after" this fire was completely trolleyed... drunk as a skunk.
Many pickups later we rolled back into HQ to clean up and hand out prizes. Things generally went smoothly though this part of the event until people started to leave. Simon, who had been managing HQ all night decided to catch a non-stop train back to London and forgot that he was carrying the keys to the facility we were in. We of course didn't realise this until he had already boarded the non-stop train, which meant we had to wait for him to arrive in London and then catch a train back to Amersham at 9am on a Sunday morning when trains run less frequently. Sally, her boyfriend Matt, and I decided that it was lunacy to wait for him and caught a train of our own rather than wait two hours for the building to get locked up and the minibus to depart. All in all it was quite a night. I think I will walk it next year. Anyone interested in joining my team?