Review by Kevin Borman of the 17th International Festival of Mountaineering Literature from High, June 2004
Andy Kirkpatrick admitted to being nervous before
he read a piece commissioned especially for the festival. He had a
slide show running alongside, a changing sequence of images; snow runnels,
winter buttresses and swathed climbers in snowstorms interleaved with
Andy’s children, random
public signs and climbers in interminable valley dosses waiting for the
right weather.
His writing is quirky, direct yet thoughtful. “Alpine climbing
is like having your heart broken repeatedly,” he says. He had an
extended metaphor about climbing being like getting off with Madonna,
but the key issue was the dilemma of balancing being an obsessive climber
with being a father. He was honest, self-questioning, scary and funny.
Kathryn Bridge came from British Columbia to tell how she had pieced
together the story of Phyllis Munday, Canadian mountain woman extraordinaire.
As an archivist in Vancouver, Kathryn had come across 30 boxes of uncaptioned
pictures. Unassuming about the part she had played in subsequently working
out the story that these pictures told, she related an absorbing tale
of a woman driven to make a life in the outdoors in the early twentieth
century, stopped neither by the expectations of the day nor by the arrival
of her baby Edith. The decade-long obsession Phyll Munday shared with
her husband Don to climb the elusive Mount Waddington was only part of
the story. The black and white pictures were beautifully evocative, and
a heartfelt request was added: if you are a mountaineer and a photographer,
caption your pictures before you forget where they were taken.
To mark the publication of his Collected Short Stories, Dermot Somers
read ‘Patrick and the Freney Pillar’, confidently and strongly,
direct to the audience. His writing is assured and real; it’s believable
fiction, grounded in real lives. If you don’t already know his
work, it’s worth seeking out.
By now, it was apparent that the International Festival of Mountaineering
had come home. For 15 years the festival was in November then, due to
building work at its normal venue, it relocated, not entirely successfully,
to Leeds. Festival Director Terry Gifford decided to move it to a Spring
date so that, after 28 months, it was back, successfully, at Bretton.
The day had begun with Royal Robbins, who considered Brad Washburn and
David Brower in his overview of American climbing writing before 1950
but had excluded them from his top three. James Ramsay Ullman was in
third place on the basis of his history of climbing, High Conquest. Clarence
King he put second, despite his tendency to hyperbole, for his Mountaineering
in the Sierra Nevada.
Top dog was John Muir, not known primarily as a climber but as a “prophet
of preservation”. Muir, says Robbins, was “gifted and eloquent”,
he “spoke to climbers about how to think about the mountains and
how to treat them.”
After Robbins, Joe Fitschen pursued the theme, pondering on post-1950
American climbing writers. He had clearly researched widely and thought
hard but he was not always easy to hear and his delivery was at times
pedestrian. On his long list were Jon Krakauer, Dave Roberts, Rick Ridgeway,
Lito Tejada-Flores, Steve Roper, Yvon Chouinard, and the man who had
been on stage a few minutes earlier, Royal Robbins.
Joe Fitschen’s short list, which turned out to be anything but
short, featured Jeff Long, mentioned particularly for Angels of Light,
John Sherman, Doug Robinson, Pete Sinclair for We Aspired, Mark Jenkins,
Joe Kelsey and Chuck Pratt. There were brief quotes but no real explanation
as to why these writers made the higher echelons. Put on the spot by
a questioner at the end of his talk as to why he had mentioned no women,
Fitschen seemed momentarily non-plussed until others contributed the
names of Alison Osius, Miriam Underhill and Lynn Hill as possible contenders.
Jamie Andrew’s Life and Limb will no doubt be a strong contender
for the 2004 Boardman Tasker Award. He set the scene for three extracts
from his book, which describes his survival, albeit at the cost of his
hands and feet, and his subsequent rehabilitation, after being pinned
in the Alps for five days by a terrible storm which took the life of
his climbing partner Jamie Fisher. And what a tale: Jamie Andrew has
climbed again, been snowboarding and paragliding, is a better skier than
he was before the accident, and has even completed a London Marathon.
David Hopkins, chair of the 2003 Boardman Tasker judges, gave a re-run
of his adjudication speech from October last year. Something of a historical
item by now, it was nevertheless interesting to hear why the judges had
chosen Simon Mawer’s novel The Fall as the winner.
Lindsay Griffin announced the winner of this year’s High/Festival
writing competition. Stephen Venables had been his fellow judge, assessing
entries on the theme of people extricating themselves from tricky situations.
The winner, Tom Sinclair’s story ‘The Great Escape’,
which you may have seen in the May High, was read with characteristic
verve by Ian Smith.
Ken ‘Daffodils’ Wilson and Geoffrey Chaucer, cunningly disguised
as Gordon Stainforth, made unscheduled appearances on stage, reading
effective spoofs from the previously undiscovered and newly published
classic The Owl and the Cragrat.
Matching her careful delivery to an astonishing sequence of pictures,
both black and white and hand-coloured, from the archive of her father
Captain John Noel, Sandra Noel gave a fascinating presentation linked
to her new book Everest Pioneer.
The finale of the festival saw a reappearance by Royal Robbins talking
on ‘A Golden Age in the Range of Light’. This, of course,
was Yosemite in the 1950s and 60s. Robbins was on home territory; his
talk was sprinkled with insight and humour, for example: John Salathe
was his role-model regarding style; the first reason which put Robbins
off climbing the Face of Half Dome for some years was awe, the second
was dread. His tale was peppered with legendary names – Chuck Pratt,
Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard; and Warren Harding, with whom he had differences
of opinion regarding climbing style.
“Mountains are an anvil on which a climber forges his character,”
he said, musing on his 10-day solo of the John Muir Route on El Capitan
when, after seven days out, with 1,000ft still to go, he felt finished.
The ‘five feet at a time’ method got him near enough the
top in the next days that he knew he would make it. “I was reaching
into the rucksack of my soul.” Legendary climbers, stunning scenery,
well-known stories brought alive again; it was a fitting climax to an
excellent day.
Kevin Borman