In great footsteps: a new series exploring the classic adventures of the past

Rosie Thomas with her guide, John Whittle, on Lion Rock

“Our destination”, Eric Newby wrote at the beginning of his 1958 adventure classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, “was an inn set in the wilds of Caernarvonshire”.

Newby and his friend Hugh Carless were heading for Afghanistan, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and an unclimbed 20,000ft peak called Mir Samir. In a four-day window before they left the country the two men planned to learn rock-climbing in Wales from scratch. Carless was a diplomat who had wangled a few months off for the trip, while Newby had given up his job as a salesman in his family’s Mayfair haute couture salon where he spent long, disaffected days sweating under the chandeliers.

No wonder the mountains called.

The last-minute excursion to pick up the basic skills on which their lives would depend is an emblem for the whole enterprise. Their planning was haphazard, their preparations hasty, yet still they believed they could make their way from Kabul north-eastwards to the remote regions of Nuristan and conquer a serious mountain when they got there.

This parade of hapless ignorance could have become irritating, and it’s Newby’s achievement in telling the tale that it never does so. Under a gloss of offhand wit, good spirits and casual erudition there is a toughness and determination in both men that makes it impossible not to be on their side.

Following in their footsteps, the Caernarvonshire inn, the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel, was my destination, too. This small inn at the foot of Snowdon has long been the resort of climbers. Mallory, Noyce, Shipton and Tilman all stayed here, as did Noel Odell who was the last man to see Mallory and Irvine alive. Many of these famous mountain men signed the ceiling of what became the Everest Room, still intact today, as I discovered.

Eric Newby (left) and Hugh Carless on Milestone Buttress, May 1956

Newby and Carless arrived here in benign early summer, having driven up overnight from London, and immediately set out for the crags with Dr Richardson, their gentlemanly volunteer instructor. Though I drove up from London the night before my expedition, I didn’t have the advantage of a lot more sleep. I grew up in the area, and attended a dismal local boarding school from which we were occasionally herded out on character-forming rock-climbing weekends. The combination of a narrow bed and the dripping of remote bathrooms brought back some very bad memories, and my night’s sleep passed fitfully.

The next morning, as I sat eating my porridge in the hotel dining room, I stared out at an expanse of gunmetal lake water riffled by a thin, freezing March wind and framed by brown turf flattened by recent snow. Snowdon’s gullies were still seamed with white. It was a relief when John Whittle, an old friend and mountain guide, came breezing in, looking fit and hard.

Whittle was to be my companion for the day. He has guided clients on all of the Seven Summits (the highest peak on each continent), so I felt confident he could lead me up the beginner’s routes on which Newby and Carless first ventured 50 years ago.

Outside in the car park the wind sliced into my chest. “Milestone Buttress”, Whittle decreed, identifying our first climb. When we reached it, I stared up at 200ft of slab and cracks. This was where our heroes had set out to become climbers.

Whittle leads up the ordinary route, I second. My own climbing skills could do with some work, but at least I’ve done this before. What’s more, I’m in the latest sticky rock shoes, a sit-harness, a helmet and a comforting windproof jacket. Newby wore hobnailed boots with a hemp rope tied round his waist.

As I shiver on the belays, I note how the rock is polished by the feet of countless other climbers. This sliver of a Welsh crag is relatively safe ground. It’s not Afghanistan.

Next I want to tackle Spiral Stairs, a more demanding route on Dinas Cromlech above the Llanberis Pass. Our heroes were gamely led up by a pair of magnificent waitresses from the hotel, who were working there simply to spend all their free hours out on the rock. My friendly Polish waitress had confided this morning that she didn’t climb at all. “I have only one and one half day off in a week. There is not time for this.”

Whittle squares powerful shoulders against the wind, looks at the Stairs and begins to roll a cigarette. “It’s too cold,” he says. We retire to the café for lunch instead. Newby, always worrying about where the next meal would come from, would have approved. Carless was usually uninterested in such basic comforts.

Next, we try Lion Rock, a just about lion-shaped outcrop offering a series of slabs on which Whittle tells me I can hone my leading techniques. He hands me his rack of technical hardware, and I start angling metal nuts into promising cracks. This is the big advance from the days of A Short Walk. Back then, a climber might carry a series of pebbles tucked into his hat to use as chockstones. Today, I have a jingling armoury of nuts in all sizes plus a graded set of camming devices.

“That last lot would probably hold a fall,” Whittle says. “Probably” is a weasel word, if ever I heard one.

I wouldn’t want to fall off Lion Rock with the latest gear between me and certain death, let alone risk all on a pebble 10,000ft up Mir Samir with a five-day walk out to the nearest inhabited shack.

By now Snowdon is shrouded in a grey blanket. We head back to the hotel, where log fires are blazing and the bar is full of outdoor faces fresh off the hill telling stories of the day’s adventures.

I’m thinking again about Newby and Carless. Knowing that in their four-day initiation they must have learnt just enough to alert them to the extent of their ignorance, I wonder how this tiny bulwark of experience could have been anything but a deterrent. Yet somehow, with bravery cloaked by comedy, they pulled it off.

In his preface to the book Evelyn Waugh wrote that the adventure and Newby’s account of it “exemplifies the essential traditional (some, not I, will say deplorable) amateurism of the English”.

I put this to Whittle, but he is dismissive. “They were upper-class twits. It’s not like that any more, is it?” As a professional mountaineer responsible for people’s lives every working day, he’s entitled to take a dim view. And he’s right. It isn’t anything like that any more.

I am much more in sympathy. The English gentleman dilettante may be a forgotten breed but sometimes, with men like Newby and Carless, amateurism can turn out to be highly professional.

Rosie Thomas’s latest book is ‘Lovers and Newcomers’ (HarperCollins)

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The details

GwyrPen-y-d, www.pyg.co.uk
‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’, Picador, £8.99