The Kitchen

by Peter Hill

‘Probably the most notorious climb in North Wales… most of the rotten rock has gone, though care is still needed…. Usually wet.’

– The Guidebook

Boredom is the killer. And ambition and underpreparedness and all the textbook things, but behind it boredom that pushes you to push it too far. You have a friend who said, when I haven’t climbed anything hard for a week, when I haven’t been at my limit, I’ll go crazy fast driving on the back roads of North Yorkshire and make up for it that way. Frightening when he said that (he was driving at the time too), but you understand it, you’ve been there, you grow restless, you grow bored to that point and you’re not looking to grow old.

The day began well in the sun, you were going for a walk in the hills, with rock shoes and a helmet in the bag just for kicks. You got a lift up the Nant Ffrancon and soloed up Milestone Buttress onto the North Ridge of Tryfan, then over Adam and Eve and up Bristly Ridge to the fog-blown tops of the Glyders. Then the godawful scree-path that goes from Glyder Fawr down to the top of the Devil’s Kitchen. And here you think you’ve been sitting at home for too long, for weeks since the Alps, and Milestone Buttress was all very well but fundamentally you’re bored. And you turn to the guidebook.

The sun is out and the valley seems peaceful. You’ve been past it a lot but you’ve never been in there – the Kitchen that is, the gorge itself. V. Diff and first done a hundred years ago, you think it can’t be so hard; and the gorge will be impressive and it’s an adventure. Scrambling up the gully bed you come to the chockstone, and water swelling all over it – today’s the first dry day after a month of rain. An old sling on the left-hand side so you yard on it and boulder-hop up to the final Pit, the Black Hole, the pool beneath the capstone.

It’s an awesome place there. If you look back down the gorge you can see straight out across the valley to the Carnedds. Ahead of you the great falls over the capstone rushing down, thirty feet to the plunge-pool, on the right a soaring, bulging wall, all ferns and greenness and dripping wet. And the black cold in here and the sound and the smell of the water, but on the left a shorter wall that leans back to just off the vertical, and the route goes up there, and above that the sun.

Change shoes in precarity on a slimy ledge and glance at the guidebook, 1965 vintage and no topo: up two cracks it says, then right to a spike at the level of the capstone and traverse out. Stirrings of doubt now, the rock wringing-wet, you’re on your own, no-one knows you’re here, the phone doesn’t work in the bottom of the Pit, these things are hard to justify. Your red helmet seems a foolish concession to someone else’s idea of safety. V. Diff, you tell yourself and stuff the boots in the bag. Up the cracks to a muddy foothold and you can’t see a spike, you can’t see round to the capstone so you don’t know when to go right. Above you the cracks steepen, you see some tat, is that the way you think, take a guess it’s the way. On and up. Now you’re really not sure. Admit it, you are lonely and afraid, if you had a partner you’d shout for advice or encouragement, if you had a rope you’d put it on the manky tat and go down, but you have none of these things, only your two hands losing their heat and a pair of old shoes.

You were trained in the bold school: run it out and you’ll be right, so you tell yourself to get a grip, up is the way. Don’t want to get a grip, you don’t want to be here at all, but you pull through to the next move; this is too hard, even for the wet it’s not V. Diff, if you go up you won’t be able to reverse it. Stop looking up and look down. Few illusions now. If you come off here, at best you’ll be crawling down the gorge with a broken leg –how is this worth it, you think, die on the Eiger by all means but not here, this little wall of weeping rock, so close beneath the meadows and the warm Welsh sun. Down down, you don’t think or decide, you just start climbing down.

You start a bit shaky, yes, but each move you feel better. And then from above you spot the spike, it has to be, and a grassy ledge-line going right. You stand where you stood before, on the muddy foothold, and rub the chill out of your hands. Calm again. You felt a limit up there, a point you couldn’t go beyond. Now you know what you’re doing. A big swing right, you feel your frozen limbs but the spike is good and you’re onto the tip-toe traverse, don’t tread on a loose one, a slippy one, don’t slip. And you come round the corner level with the capstone and there’s the stream and the green grass and the laughing sun and you let out a great laugh, a laugh alone to yourself as it echoes to the sunny sky and down the dark cave and is lost in the rushing falls. You scramble up the gully bed without looking back and walk away over the hills beneath the big sky to Nant Peris, joyous and awed and fearful and ashamed: the little black wall has humbled you, you’ve seen what this restlessness, this boredom can do with the calmest and peacefullest day. Ashamed after all, you know why you did it but it’s impossible to justify and too hard to explain: you don’t talk about it for a month.

Originally published in the Oxford Mountaineering Journal