The Joy of High Places by Patti Miller

Author:Patti Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244587
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

In the morning it was bitterly cold and the sky was spitting sleety snow. We had to keep going, no-one was allowed to stay at the hostel except in blizzard conditions. I put all my layers on, but my hands were painful and within minutes my fingers felt as if they were burning. I remembered our fingerless host on the first night. I stopped in the lee of an abandoned stone barn at the bottom of the crag and rifled through my backpack until I found a pair of thick, dirty socks. I pulled them on my hands and felt immediate relief. They would soon be wet, but it was better than nothing.

There was a steep snow slope, straight down with scree at the bottom – a minor-injury crossing. Anthony plunged down in front of me, long strides, heels dug in, and I followed, crunching and sinking through the powder.

At the bottom, there was a glacial valley and a wall of moraine; above, a glacier that had retreated from the valley after crushing trees and rocks in its path. Now it didn’t look powerful; it was dirty and shrinking; it wouldn’t be there at all in another few years – in fact, at the current rate of global warming, all Alpine glaciers will have disappeared by the end of the century. Cataracts tumbled down the cliffs, milky green-grey against the dark rock, a nineteenth-century painting come to life. The floor of the valley was covered in lateral moraine, with torrents and pools threading through blackish tourbière. There were disturbing plants with succulent dark-red stems and alien-looking flowers, resembling desert plants, without woody stems or leaves, as if the response to harshness – snow and ice, or dryness and heat – is the same.

There were two paths to choose from. Continue down the valley to Courmayeur, or turn up to the right along the high path. The guidebook advised, ‘In the Himalaya, one would need to walk for many a long day to capture such a vision as you will see from this high path’. There was no question which path to take. I might never get to the Himalaya.

The path was narrow and steep and soon there were snow patches several hundred metres across, but I was resigned to them now. I strode across with care and some confidence. There were a few torrents to cross too, but I felt a rising sense of elation. I had done it yesterday – despite the after-trembles – and I was doing it today. The rain was gone, clouds swirled away leaving a brilliant sky. I slid the socks off my hands – all fingers intact. I bubbled with energy, my body was light. Anthony and I exchanged glances and smiled.

At an abandoned stone hut above a lake, we stopped for coffee. We were at 2303 metres, already higher than the highest mountain in Australia. I could see Mont Blanc, Aiguille du Combal, Glacier de Miage – I was up there with them. An eagle, two eagles, circled across the valley below me.

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