corporal clegg and friends

When I came to work at the Outward Bound School of Hong Kong in January 1974, I’d been attracted by the statement that ‘there are miles and miles of unexplored sea cliffs’. At the time, the school’s rock-climbing program was inadequate, so there was an urgent need to develop a more demanding alternative. The first location I visited was Fat Tong Point, in the far southeast of the New Territories (see map), which overlooks the narrow channel—Fat Tong Mun—between the mainland and Tung Lung Island.

In those days, it was common to see Chinese sailing junks negotiating Fat Tong Mun (mun is Cantonese for ‘door’), and I was most impressed by the levels of seamanship on display, because it was often necessary to perform complicated manoeuvres if the wind was blowing from an unfavourable direction. Incidentally, the logo of the Hong Kong Tourist Association is a sailing junk, but I haven’t seen a real one in Hong Kong harbour for decades. There is a motorized junk that plies the waters of the harbour, but this is merely an attraction for tourists, much like the rickshaws that used to line up next to the Star Ferry piers in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island.

Fat Tong Point proved to be an ideal climbing venue for Outward Bound students, and we started using it a few months after I arrived in Hong Kong. We would go there with a group of twelve students for two days, camping overnight. On the first day, we tried to do as many easier climbs as we could on the section of cliff directly overlooking the narrowest part of the channel. The following photo is of a page from my records of the time. It shows four of these climbs, which range in length between 40 and 100 feet. The procedure was that I or my colleague for the exercise would lead a climb, and a student would then follow. They would then take the instructor’s place at the top and throw the rope down for the next student, a procedure that was repeated until everyone had done the climb.

The second day was a much tougher proposition. We identified four climbs graded VS (very severe, a respectable level of difficulty), and the challenge for the students was to climb all four. The next two photos show me leading the first of these climbs, Corporal Clegg. I had at the time a penchant for naming climbs after Pink Floyd songs, and this one is named after a track on the band’s second album, Saucerful of Secrets:

Corporal Clegg
Had a wooden leg.

Incidentally, the hardest climb at Fat Tong Point, Astronomy Domine, is named after a track on Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It would have been too dangerous for students to attempt.

The next climb is The Stoat, and the next two photos show my colleague David Lam leading the upper section. The lower section features a vicious finger-jamming crack that feels as if it’s trying to bite your fingers off, so I named it Weasel Crack. However, this climb continues up the easy section to the right of the climber, and I thought that the sloping ramp would make a better (i.e. harder) finish.

I don’t have any photos of the third climb, Right-Hand Wall, which was the only open wall climb among the four.

I named the fourth climb Cumbrian’s Chimney because I’m a native of Cumbria in the UK. Whenever I needed to get from the bottom to the top of a climb, I could go around the easy way, but I was always more likely to climb a route solo instead, as I’m seen doing in the next photo:

 Most of the climb succumbs to straightforward chimneying techniques, but in the photo, I’ve just reached the crux move. The chimney has closed to a narrow crack, so it is necessary to pull over an overhang. The conventional handholds are poor, but there are bomb-proof hand jams in the narrow crack.

I remember few specific incidents from the time we climbed here, but there is one that has remained lodged in my memory for more than 40 years. It was the second day, and as usual the target was for everyone to climb the four routes I’ve just described. A student came up to me:

“Sir! Sir!” he said. “I’m very tired.”

“How many climbs have you done James?” I asked.

“Two sir.”

“That means you have two more to do then!”

I don’t think this was the reply he wanted, but I never had any hesitation in taking advantage of aspects of Chinese culture—in this case that no Chinese will gainsay a teacher—in order to push students to step outside their personal comfort zones. And there is a postscript: James did climb the other two routes, and when we were being ferried back to school, the executive director, who was driving the school launch, asked who one of the students was. It was James, who now had a distinct swagger in his bearing.

We stopped going to Fat Tong Point for climbing in 1976, mainly because of the difficulty in extricating a party should there be a typhoon in the area. Now, the area has been taken over by the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club, and access to the climbing areas is much more difficult.

doomsday scenario

As a former student of geology, I’ve always known about the mass extinction events that have punctuated the Earth’s history, but I recently learned something completely new about the most devastating of these, the Permian–Triassic mass extinction. I was aware that around 96 percent of plant and animal species died out during this event, and I also knew that there were major volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia but was then part of the supercontinent of Pangaea. These eruptions were of basalt, which is far more fluid than acidic lavas and therefore flows greater distances, and they had been considered the primary cause of the extinction event because the extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by these eruptions resulted in dramatic increases in global temperatures, the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’.

However—and this was probably not known when I graduated 50 years ago—some of the extruded basalt flowed far enough to reach what was at the time the planet’s largest coal basin, and the combination of hot lava and huge quantities of organic matter released vast amounts of methane, which rose to the surface, where it exploded. You might think that this is a highly speculative scenario, but a Norwegian geologist recently discovered evidence of these explosions, the existence of which he must have already suspected in order to look. And the result of the explosions would have been dramatic increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a massive spike in temperatures around the world.

There is a worrying parallel with the present day here. The basalt that flowed into the coal basin during the Permian–Triassic event burned through organic matter that had been accumulating for many tens of millions of years in a relatively short period of time. And although the Industrial Revolution is barely 300 years old, humans have already burned through a significant proportion of the organic material—coal, petroleum and natural gas—that has accumulated since.

Yet we continue to extract and burn more, egged on by idiots like the current occupant of the White House and former British chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson, who has had the temerity to establish a think tank, the Global Warming Foundation, to promote his view that global warming is no big deal. In fact, Lawson’s argument is an economic one, that global warming—if it exists—is merely a by-product of raising developing countries to the level of developed countries. However, given that Trumplthinskin believes climate change to be some kind of hoax, and that Lawson is on record as saying that he ‘wouldn’t mind if the weather was a bit warmer’, we can deduce that neither man understands the science involved.

Unfortunately, neither do any of their supporters, which accounts for the frequency with which I have to respond to completely specious arguments about the subject. A classic example of such an argument concerns the recent levelling off of global air temperatures over a period of about a decade. This was seized on by climate change deniers as clear evidence that the planet wasn’t warming after all, but anyone who used this argument is clearly unaware that NASA has a network of satellites around the globe whose sole purpose is to monitor incoming and outgoing radiation. And, guess what! More energy is entering the Earth’s atmosphere than is being re-radiated back into space. So where did the surplus energy go if air temperatures remained static? We now know that it went into warming the oceans instead, an inconvenient fact that I expect will be ignored by those who deny the reality of global warming.

The problem is that the UN target of restricting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which is essentially a compromise given the impossibility of stabilizing global temperatures at their present levels, is probably unattainable, especially now that the United States—one of the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide—has decided to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and is in the process of eviscerating its Environmental Protection Agency. Temperatures during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction must have been insufferable, but unless humans stop burning coal, use their cars less often and stop clearing forests, they will soon know the meaning of ‘insufferable’. The planet’s sixth mass extinction will soon be underway, if it hasn’t already started. And the human race will not necessarily be spared.

from the archives: dolomite diversion

I travelled abroad for the first time in 1966, when I was still a teenager. My companions were two fellow students from Manchester—the same two students who had introduced me to rock climbing only a few months earlier, which I mention only because climbing was our reason for going abroad in the first place.

Our first intended destination was Innsbruck in Austria. We’d booked tickets for a train that had been organized by the Anglo-Austrian Alpine Club (AAAC), and we got off to a less than auspicious start by boarding the wrong train in Ostend! The carriages of this train were emblazoned with the AAAC logo, which misled us even though we did notice that the destination boards on the sides of the carriages read ‘Wien’. We had no idea at the time that this was the German word for Vienna.

Every seat on the train had been pre-booked, so without a booking for this specific train, we had no option but to sit on our rucksacks in the corridor. This was an overnight train, but sleeping on a train where you don’t even have a seat is not an option. We thought that it was merely our bad luck at first, but our tickets included a list of towns and cities that our train was meant to pass through, and it didn’t take us long to realize that we weren’t passing through any of them. Incidentally, our tickets were supposed to have our names on them, but I can still remember the name that the AAAC had given me. I often used to be complimented on the neatness of my handwriting, so how the club concluded that my name was ‘Downis Hoolison’ is a question to which I shall never find the answer.

Anyway, by the time we reached Nuremberg, we’d decided that our best option would be to leave this train, with all our gear, and catch a train to Munich, which our intended train was scheduled to pass through. So that’s what we did. No tickets. We didn’t think we needed them.

Of course, we did encounter a ticket inspector on this early-morning train. I’ve often wondered what he made of whatever feeble explanations we offered for being on his train without tickets.

“Stupid Englanders!” he probably thought.

Fortunately, he didn’t ask to check my ticket against my passport, or he might have spotted the discrepancy in names. And he did allow us to continue our journey without paying. And we did manage to join the train we should have caught in the first place in Munich. After all that, the remainder of the journey was utterly unmemorable.

However, Innsbruck turned out to be a mistake. We had thought of stopping off there for a few days to do some ‘mountaineering’ before continuing to our ultimate destination, the Dolomites in northern Italy, but we quickly realized that this was overly optimistic. You may detect a lack of planning on this excursion to date.

The following day, we caught the first available train to Bolzano and trekked up into a steeply rising valley flanked by towering walls of magnesian limestone. Conventional limestone consists of the mineral calcite (calcium carbonate), which is soluble in a weak solution of carbonic acid, another term for rainwater. Magnesian limestone, on the other hand, is made up of the mineral dolomite, which differs from calcite in that half the calcium atoms have been replaced by magnesium, and these are arranged in precisely alternating positions in the lattice. This makes dolomite more resistant to weathering than calcite, hence the towers and spires that I was seeing all around me. Our ‘plan’ was to reach a small rifugio (‘refuge’), or mountain hut, where we would spend the night before continuing. And this is what faced us the following morning:

The sunlit spire on the right is a profile of the three Vajolet Towers, which we aspired to climb. But first we had to reach the next rifugio, which is up to the left and out of sight but was ideally located for our ‘planned’ assault on the towers. I haven’t mentioned it before, but as a first-timer abroad, I hadn’t cottoned on to the need to travel light. In addition to my climber’s rucksack, which was a crude affair compared with what you can buy nowadays, I’d brought a holdall. As you can imagine, lugging all that up that hill was not pretty.

Anyway, this is what the towers look like from the rifugio:

We had intended to tackle the left-hand tower first, but we came under the watchful eye of an Austrian climber, several years older than me, who appeared to be alone. He noted that there were three of us, and a rope of three will take almost twice as long to complete a given climb than a rope of two. Would one of us like to climb with him? I was always going to be the odd man out here, because my friends had known each other before they knew me, so we arranged to meet the next morning to climb the central tower.

“Too many mousquetons!” said Max imperiously, as he watched me walk towards him.

I had half a dozen rope slings around my neck, each with a metal snaplink attached. I remember thinking at the time: how strange; someone whose native tongue is German (presumably) chooses to use a French word. Perhaps he thinks we won’t know what a karabiner is.

Anyway, we set off, and I quickly noticed that Max was using a ‘direct belay’ protection method, a primitive safety precaution that involves temporarily allowing the rope to run behind a flake or spike of rock, so that if Max, in this case, happened to slip, he wouldn’t fall as far as he would have done without the protection. There’s just one snag! Allowing the rope to run over potentially sharp edges is not a smart idea. When it was my turn to lead, if I came to a suitable spike or flake, I placed a sling over it and clipped the rope to the sling using the attached karabiner, which allowed the rope to run freely, away from those edges. Of course, a sharp edge can still cut through the sling if it comes under load, but all you lose is a sling. The rope remains intact. And Max did have the grace to confess, later, that he now understood why I carried so many mousquetons.

The ascent wasn’t particularly interesting. Rock climbing is only ever interesting when you have to think how to proceed (and if you’ve read Rigor Mortis, you’ll know that I once spent 45 minutes in one place on a climb trying to work out what to do next). And this climb wasn’t even hard.

But there was only one word to describe the descent: harrowing. I’m not sure whether I’d any previous experience of abseiling (American usage: rappelling), but it would have been sketchy at best. By the way, I purposely included the word ‘usage’ above because it points to another linguistic confusion in climbing terminology. While an American will rappel (a French word) down a steep cliff, his British counterpart will abseil (a German word) down the same cliff. Max abseiled too.

Not only do you need an anchor point to abseil from, you need to be able to retrieve the rope once you’ve descended. And the only suitable anchor point on the top of the tower was a groove less than an inch deep that had been chipped into the rock adjoining one edge of the tower. There were no friction devices in those days, so it would have been necessary to run the rope over my shoulder and across my back to generate the friction needed to control the descent, but all I can remember is how hard it was to get over the edge. I kept expecting the rope to lift out of its groove if I couldn’t keep my weight below it. The problem was starting with my weight above the anchor. The remainder of the descent was much less alarming. And we eventually made it back to the rifugio.

We decided to return to the lower hut the following morning, probably because the accommodation there was cheaper. The next photo is a view down towards that lower hut, which is out of sight in the picture:

And that was the end of the climbing. The weather deteriorated badly over the next few days, and after those few days, with no end in sight, my erstwhile companions decided to bugger off back to Blighty. I wanted to stay, but I was running short of cash. However, after my friends had left, I became friendly with a couple of students from Oxford who, amazingly, had a spare tent I could use. It was more like a bivouac, to be honest, but it did mean I could afford to hang around a while longer. And I did learn how to play contract bridge. The next photo shows a rescue helicopter and provides some idea of how bad the weather was (snow is a rarity in summer in the Dolomites).

The two Oxford students had driven from England in an Austin A35 van, and when we’d all finally had enough of the weather, they offered me a lift back home in exchange for a share of the fuel costs. There was just one final problem: the bad weather had triggered a landslide that had wiped out about 100 metres of the local access road, and we were on the uphill side. And the word was that the road would not be repaired until next season.

However, there were five or six other vehicles that had been trapped by the slide, 15–20 people altogether, and we decided to build a temporary roadway across the debris. I’ve no idea where we got all the timber (see following photo), but we spent most of the day shifting huge quantities of rubble, soil and boulders and then laying a narrow causeway across the slide. I’ve had some extreme endurance experiences during my life, but I don’t think I ever worked physically as hard as I did that day. When we were finally ready, we pushed the cars across one by one, not without considerable anxiety that one might suddenly career off downhill.

One of the Italians in the ad hoc labour gang brought out a bottle of wine. Just enough for a quick swig each, but a nice gesture—after all, we had achieved our objectice by working as a team. And then we were on our way home, nursing memories of huge bowls of spaghetti with tiny dollops of Bolognese sauce. I didn’t try spaghetti again for many years, and even now, the pasta:sauce ratio has to be close to 50:50.

Anyway, we reached England without further alarm or exertion. I said farewell to my two new friends and proceeded to hitch-hike north to Penrith. I can’t remember much about that journey north, but I can’t forget one encounter. I’ve no idea from where and to where the person giving me the lift was travelling, but at one point he slid his hand lightly down the top of my thigh.

“Nice material,” he said.

I used to wear corduroy climbing britches in those days, and I didn’t interpret this move as a sexual advance, because there was no squeezing or unseemly pressure. Mind you, his next remark should have left me in no doubt, but I took the question literally and merely thought that my questioner was a bit odd. It was 1966 after all, and homosexual acts were still illegal.

“Do you ever go looking for fairies?” he asked.

“There are no such things as fairies!” I replied.

Damn! Another poor fairy has just dropped down stone dead. It tends to happen, or so I’ve been led to believe. The driver didn’t say another word until he dropped me off where he’d said he would drop me off, and the rest of the journey home was uneventful.