My own climb, when my time came, wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. The ice hammers and 12-point crampons with the deep-digging front points gave one a feeling almost of invincibility. Also, the Deacon had brought up an extra 100 feet of what J.C. called “the Deacon’s Miracle Rope” and tied on to his second line, so—counting the first fixed rope—I was essentially under double belay the whole way up.
This came in handy when twice I was a little too eager to remove my crampons before securing my next hold with three solid points and came unglued from the wall, but while it might have been a thrill to drop the 50 feet or so to arrest (or non-arrest) by the last ice screw below me, the second belay rope, tied to a massive tree somewhere out of sight above the overhang and physically belayed by the Deacon, caught me in five feet or so.
The overhang itself, which had so unnerved me while watching from below, was sort of fun. I was worried about my extra weight on the two ice screws that had held for the two lighter climbers before me, but the Deacon had taken time—while hanging horizontally under the ice-rock overhang—to secure a third and even longer screw in place, banging the hell out of it to get it the last five or six centimeters into the rock itself.
So I actually enjoyed swinging out wide, nothing beneath me at the outer arc of my swing but 200 feet of empty air to the rock below, and I successfully smashed both ice hammer picks into the outer, vertical section of the overhang on my first try. Those years of serious rock climbing, it turned out, were not wasted on ice: I pulled myself the last ten feet to the top using only the strength of my arms fiercely gripping the ice hammers. Once I was on top—the view of Llyn Idwal and Cwm Idwal and the peaks and lakes beyond was fantastic—Jean-Claude reprimanded me for not using my crampons on that last bit, but all I could do was grin at him.
We’d rappelled down one after the other, leaving the second belay rope in place, and then practiced for the rest of the day on the lower slopes. Only the Deacon’s new rope—a thicker-diameter blend of hemp, regular climbing rope, and some secret ingredient he wouldn’t reveal to us (but which gave the rope greater elasticity and a much higher breaking point)—gave us the confidence to rappel that way. In 1924–25, few alpine climbers trusted their ropes—what the Deacon now called “our old clothesline ropes”—for such long rappels.
Trying to stay awake during the long drive back to London—just to keep the Deacon company as he drove, so he’d stay awake—my tired mind kept going over and over the French terms that J.C. had tried to drill into us about this new type of glacier and ice climbing.
Pied marche—just marching across flat ice or a shallow slope up to 15 degrees, as if across a glacier—we’d all done that together on regular 10-point crampons many times before.
Pied en canard—“duck walk”—a careful 12-point cramponing on slopes up to 30 degrees. It looked and felt as silly as it sounded, but we could use our old, longer ice axes for that.
Pied à plat—literally “flat-footed,” with the bottom 10 points on each crampon holding your body upright on slopes up to 65 degrees or so, with your ice axe dug in uphill. A good way to rest.
Then there were the regular ice axe moves themselves: piolet ramasse (cross-body) on slopes from 35 to 50 degrees (an elegant way to cut steps in a steep slope) and piolet ancre, the anchored way one could cut steps or do hand work (such as sinking ice screws with one’s free hand) on steep slopes, 45 to 60 degrees and steeper.
The ice hammers had their own vocabularies—angle of pick entrance, whether to hold the tools high or low while climbing, etc.—and the ones I remember from that first day were piolet panne (low dagger) for steep slopes 45 to 55 degrees; piolet poignard (high dagger), which we used on steeper slopes of 50 to 60 degrees; and the most common one we used that day, piolet traction (traction), on 60 degrees to vertical to overhanging.
Since these last techniques were all used with the “front-pointing” crampons, techniques which I was sure Jean-Claude had said he’d learned from the Germans and Austrians while ice climbing with them the previous December, I was a little confused as to why there weren’t any terms in German. The answer was simple: the Germans and Austrians had kept using the old French 10-point crampon and long ice axe terms and simply added more in French. Ahh, Europe.
What we began learning on shallower—but still deadly slick—ice slopes around Llyn Idwal that Sunday afternoon is what I think of (to this day, after using them thousands of times since) as the “dance steps”: pied à plat–piolet ramasse, for instance—flat-footing upslope while simultaneously using the short ice axe in a graceful cross-body position to find the next anchor. J.C. did this so beautifully on a steep but less-than-vertical slope that it was a delight to watch—left leg bent inward until he was slightly knock-kneed, short ice axe held in both hands and pressing down higher up the slope, then the right leg crossing over the left as if in a tricky dance step, and then, when the tip of the ice axe and 10 of the 12-point crampon steel teeth on the right boot were all pressing down into the ice again, swinging the left leg higher upslope until 10 crampons on the bottom of that foot got a solid bite.
And then starting the dance all over again.
Jean-Claude showed us various ways to rest on such an exhaustingly steep slope, but my favorite was the simple pied assis—leaning back on the slope until your butt almost (but not quite) touched the ice, left leg bent and left foot under you with all crampons pressing down, right leg further outward with ankle turned so the right boot and its crampons were at almost a 90-degree angle from the direction one’s right knee was pointing. You didn’t need your ice axe or ice hammers to hold this position, and the result was that, as long as the muscles in your legs and thighs didn’t start cramping, you could hold this position for an extended time, ice axe in both hands, giving yourself plenty of time to look out over the slope and up and out at the landscape below.
But the bulk of the afternoon into the lovely Welsh sunset was spent learning how to use the shortest ice axe and the ice hammers in basic low-dagger and high-dagger positions, front-pointing (using only the forward two crampons of the twelve) in anchor positions, front-pointing in traction positions, front-pointing in high-dagger position (the way we’d climbed the vertical ice wall), the three-o’clock position using both ice hammers ahead of you on a steep slope with the right leg curved and slammed down behind you, front-pointing on a terribly steep slope so that your weight was over the ice hammers with picks down in a low-dagger position (climbing with both at once, essentially under you), and so forth.
Traverse and descent techniques on the ice—especially the rapid descent (I’d always loved glissading down a steep snowfield, using only my regular ice axe as a rudder and then for self-arrest near the bottom, and J.C. showed us how we could flat-foot down on crampons, using the cross-body position with the short axe or trailing the axe behind us in anchor position, almost as quickly and on much more dramatic inclines)—took most of the rest of the afternoon.