Zeroes of Telemark (Long, rambling and libellous)

[Struan Gray]

Consider this a preemtive strike. Just because I criticised his
cooking, Stefan is threatening to reveal to the world the dark secrets
of our February trip to Norway (has the man *no* sense of humour?) so
I am forced to play the age old trick of taking piss out of myself
before anyone else can do it.

As ever, this has grown a bit from the original conception so I'm
chopping it up into bits and will post the others when I get round to
writing them. As ever, that probably means sometime in the next six
months.

If you don't like trip reports: tough luck, you should have read
the header.

Struan

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Zeroes of Telemark Part 1

Struan Gray, June '96.

For someone brought up in the deeply cynical milieu of middle class
England, one of the more perplexing aspects of Scandinavian culture is the
continuing popularity of the Eurovision Song Contest. These days the
competition has partly mutated into a bizarre conspiracy to bankrupt the
Irish national broadcasting company but the tradition of syrupy,
heartwarming songs and well scrubbed, grandmother-approved performers
continues much as in the good old days. I suppose that Sweden can be
forgiven for supporting the event that launched ABBA onto the world stage,
but the dedication of the Norwegians is more difficult to understand. One
recent win notwithstanding, their repeated failures to garner any points
whatsoever were and are legendary, to the extent that in the schools of my
youth 'Norvayg, nool pwunt!' was the standard, cod french playground
response to any sporting cock up.

Not unnaturally, a diet of Eurovision and Monty Python left me sated
as far as Norway was concerned and even when I began to look beyond the
Trondheim Hammer Dance and get seriously interested in mountains and ice
the astonishing price of local beer and a reputation for dismal weather
kept me at bay. Only the intervention of Her Majesty's Government and a
winter holiday in Lillehamer, Jontuheimen and Troms courtesy of the Royal
Marines broke the spell - so efficiently that like all good converts I
became an evangelical bore, extolling the beauty, clarity and empty
splendour of the Norwegian mountains to any of my climbing partners daft
enough to ask where I thought we should go this summer.

Much to my chagrin the same beer and weather considerations kept my
partners' navigation systems firmly targeted on the Alps or Scotland, and
it was only this winter, twelve years after my brief spell as a bootie,
that I finally got to go back to Norway with the equipment and experience
needed to do some real climbing. The required catalyst took the form of
Stefan Axelsson, a Göteborg-based rec.climber who, having allowed himself
to be persuaded to buy a helmet after a chance meeting in Colorado last
summer, found himself talked into splurging out on ice axes, crampons,
double boots, goretex mitts, a new car and, just as his bank manager's
despair looked like it could go no deeper, a complete set of snow tires.
After such a display of financial recklessness it hardly seemed fair to
point out that ice climbing is a nasty, cold, dangerous activity involving
much suffering and little joy, so I agreed to act as guide, mentor and
example not to be followed.

Thus I found myself kissing my girlfriend goodbye at five in the
morning and boarding a train to Trollhättan where Stefan met me with
winter-shod car, a boot full of food and a second sacrificial victim,
Magnus Strömhell. I was outvoted in the election of a trip language and
so got to swap experiences and get to know Magnus in my oh-so-basic
Swedish, whose execrable level was only matched by the coffee on the ferry
and the 'traditional Göteborg student food' Stefan rustled up for us once
we reached our destination. Still, it was easy enough to grasp that
Magnus was a bit of a rock and aid climbing star but that the sum total of
his and Stefan's ice experience was a few sessions top-roping a road cut
in Göteborg and many hours drooling over Jeff Lowe's video. This suited
me fine: not only could I bullshit about ice with no fear of contradiction
(at least for the first day or so) but if we found any difficult rock
steps or overhangs I could simply give the nod to Adam Smith and The
Division of Labour and hand over the lead to an expert.

Norway's ice climbing tends to be big and serious. Long walk ins are
followed by dark climbs at cryogenic temperatures with dodgy belays,
difficult retreats, worse descents and no prospect of help if anything
goes wrong. By a weird topographical fluke the walk in and the walk out
are usually both uphill and longer than each other, and more often than
not the weather contrives to fill your footsteps with snow so that you
break trail both ways. As a marine I'd spent many strenuous hours
ski-slogging across various frozen wastelands with a big pack and an acute
awareness of the need to depend only upon myself for ultimate survival,
and although I had many happy memories of that time it didn't seem the
best environment in which to introduce two ice novices to the peculiar
delights of winter climbing.

Fortunately a simple solution presented itself: Rjukan in Telemark.
Although this jewel of a valley offers traditional, suffer-for-your-art
climbing it also terminates in a deep-sided narrow gorge, easily
accessible from the road, into which a number of mountain streams
conveniently empty, freezing in winter to create a playground with
guaranteed climbing in all but the worst weather. Instead of heart-sapping
slogs across the windswept tundra one simply parks the car and abseils
from the power station bridge right to the base of the climbs. Instead of
huge routes with friable belays the icefalls tend to be two or three pitch
affairs with the backing rock scoured clean of any loose bits by the
thundering waters of the spring melt. Best of all, instead of spending
the whole climb worrying about how you are going to get down should you be
lucky enough to get up, you climb *out* of the gorge, so at the end of the
day you simply fall into the car and drive home. Norvayg, dooze pwunt!

Since for one reason or another all the party members were skint we
elected to stay in the Rjukan youth hostel - a Stalinist bunker of a
building which makes up for it's lack of architectural worth and decidedly
cramped and mankey kitchen by being just across the road from the world's
most helpful and welcoming outdoor equipment shop and having an
ice-climber friendly warden, immortalised in the naming of the route
'Tracy's Eyes' after serving one too many post-climb beers in her previous
incarnation as hotel barperson and bachelor's inspiration.

The hostel also had a suitably grubby and steaming population of fibre
pile clad men-with-beards, one of whom reassured us that we didn't really
need a guidebook since the climbs followed obvious lines and were simple
to spot from the road. He gave us detailed instructions of how to walk
the 500 metres to the abseil bridge, and the next morning we filled our
sacks and plodded off in the direction he had indicated. Thus began a
curious pantomime. We would walk for five minutes before one of us,
convinced that we must have covered 500 metres by now, would dash sideways
to peer over the edge of the gorge, mutter ominously that there didn't
seem to be a bridge there, or even much of a vertical drop, and then
rejoin the group for a spot of communal shall-we-shan't-we
shall-we-shan't-we-shall-we-shan't-we-shall-we-fetch-the-car? Our faith
in the innate ability of Norwegians to accurately judge distance usually
prompted us to go just a little bit further down the road and see what was
round the corner. Six or seven kilometres later we finally reached the
gorge proper. Norvayg nool pwunt!

Still, here we undoubtedly were: standing on a (gently swaying)
suspension bridge looking down into what was undeniably a spectacular
gorge out of which a number of irrefutably frozen waterfalls climbed. My
first thought was 'Whoops - bluff called!' as I looked at the most obvious
route, a looping triumphal monument of icy swags and banners directly
under one end of the bridge. Cowardice is the better part of survival and
my vast experience quickly told me that a little practice on something
easy would be a good way to start.

So we hacked our way up what can only be described as a one-pitch
hanging garden, which gave me a chance to remind myself how to use a pair
of ice axes and introduced Stefan and Magnus to the art of ice protection
with a nice mixture of drive-ins, screw-ins and tied-off hardy annuals.
Both of them commented on the fact that ice gear often seemed harder to
get out than to put in, and that although they'd expected leading to be
substantially different from top-roping they hadn't thought that seconding
would also be a new game. I strangely neglected to tell them that my
superannuated old gear and the curious fibre-doped composite structure of
the ice might have something to do with this and adopted my best
been-there-done-that wise old man of the hills look.

Despite the temperature of -20°C I was now warmed up and my swedish
belay team was keen to tackle something a little steeper than our frozen
garden. A number of lines - including the bridge buttress draperies -
presented themselves but most were a bit too vertical or thinly formed to
strike me as suitable. One route however looked ideal: a tight, peat
stained ribbon of off-white ice that snaked its way down a gulley below a
small group of houses close to the car park. It looked about two pitches
long and although the ice was hardly extensive it seemed deep enough to
take screws and there would probably be good rock protection on the
enclosing walls.

Thus it proved. The ice was thin in places, and because of the
temperature it dinner-plated with rather too much ease for total comfort,
but once I got into a rhythm and learned to spot likely chock placements
in the compact rock the first pitch turned out to be rather fun, with the
squeezing effect of the enclosing walls giving a comforting sense of
enclosure even though the climbing itself was really face-like, with few
bridging moves or much convoluted ice to hook on rather than peck at. The
only real problem was finding a good belay, and I eventually wrapped a
directional sling round a spindly bush that sprouted in the middle of the
ice and traversed off onto the right hand buttress to belay on a nearby
ledge.

Stefan and Magnus followed, making the climb look rather
straightforward, with Magnus actually dispensing with his hands and the
ice altogether at one point by bridging wide and stomping his feet up the
gulley sidewalls. I punished them by making them stay in the gulley,
bypassing my ledge and setting a new belay round a big, safe tree a few
metres above where I was. The 'lead' had a slight calming effect, but
they seemed more disconcerted by the strange smell that pervaded the new
belay. I had noticed this myself, and thought it was probably just
something wafting down from the village above, but once I joined them at
the tree I had to admit that it seemed to be coming from our immediate
area. There was a hint of pine essence about it, and for a short while I
thought that the rise in temperature that had accompanied our climb out of
the gorge might release a scent from the many fir and spruce trees at the
top of the cliff, but it was still below freezing and it would be highly
unusual for sap to rise in February.

Strangely, the smell got stronger as I moved away from the vegetated
buttress and back onto the bare ice. Up here the temperature was warm
enough for the surface of the ice to be a little damp, and had it not been
for the ever-stronger odour I would have revelled in the easily climbed
plastic ice. Often when I climb my mind fills with all sorts of unbidden
memories, usually tailored to the prevailing conditions, and as I snuck my
way up the easier second pitch I found myself musing on my early schoolboy
multi-pitch climbing. At first I couldn't place the references, but then
I remembered returning from soggy Golden-Age North Wales classics, put up
with hemp and hobnails as training for the Alps by Kirkus and his
double-barrelled companions, to cook communal supper in a cottage
belonging to the school chaplin before slumping near the fire with cheese
toasties and a vast collection of back issues of Australian Women's
Weekly. Why the cottage was so well stocked with this particular magazine
I never found out, but it fitted with the quirky decor and idiosyncratic
room layout, and the Charles-and-Di special issue beside the first floor
chemical toilet was and still is the best Royal Wedding souvenir I've ever
seen.

The first floor chemical toilet.

It all came flooding back in a bubbling stream of unwelcome
reminiscences. The drawing of lots, the frantic negotiations, the
attempts to bribe. The end of trip obeisance to the gods of sanitation
when I would always, inevitably, lose the draw, dig the distant hole,
carry the steaming bucket, and pour in the waste products of a week's
worth of teenage and mentorial indulgence, all accompanied by the jeering
ribaldry of my fellow climbers and the persistent all pervading smell of
Elsan Blue Fluid.

Now that I was thinking on the right lines, and had gained enough
height, the terminus of a pipe leading up to the nearby houses could
clearly be seen suspended above the top of the icefall. I became acutely
aware of the spray of ice chiplets and surface water that sprang back at
my face with each placement and tried to persuade myself that the many
brown inclusions in the ice really were from the vegetation: after all
there were plenty of other yellow-stained icefalls in the valley and they
couldn't all be composed of raw sewage. Abandoning ethics and style I
rapidly searched for an easy traverse off the climb, preferably one which
would allow me to protect myself in such a way that Stefan's rope remained
in contact with the ice while mine followed the (thankfully rocky) fall
line.

Stefan followed me up the last, dog-legged, pitch; Magnus displayed
superior judgement and rock climbing skills by soloing the buttress and
then staying strangely out of earshot when the time came to coil the
ropes. Trying hard not to think about how often we had cleared the cores
of the ice screws by blowing down them we headed back to the road,
collected our rucksacks and set out on the expanded '500m' back to the
youth hostel. Seven kilometres, a hot shower and a plate of pasta later
and we were a little more sanguine about our first climb - it was, after
all, a visually aesthetic route - but resolved that there was little point
in abandoning the thrills and dangers of Norwegian wilderness climbing if
we were going to indulge in long roadside walk-ins and unnecessary games
of dysentery roulette. Tomorrow morning we would buy a guidebook, as for
today, it was Stroowan: Nool Pwunt!

(to be continued.....)