Many things make me shudder, but only one phobia...
Spiders, popsicles with wooden sticks, people who use scissors with their index fingers and flushing the toilet in the dark all give me the willies to one degree or another. The thing that blue-screens my brain though, is heights.

I couldn't watch the end bits of King-Kong; just knowing I'm high up in a building/on a cliff/up a tree is enough to make me dizzy and I don't even have to be that high to start feeling sick. My first floor balcony is uncomfortable enough, the space-spanning escalators in Selfridges are appalling.

So when a friend rang and said 'How would you like to climb Mt Blanc?', you'd be right to assume that I laughed jovially and planned a trip to the Dead Sea instead.

Wrong.

Death himself, with a scythe sharpened on the slowest of sunlight could not have created a time any shorter than that between the question and my gormless mind betraying me with a 'sure!'

Off I toddled to Snow+Rock and spent some hard earned happy paper, I borrowed some crampons, I packed my pack and off I went to Chamonix. Why oh why was I there? What the hell did I think I was doing? These and many questions like them were ones I was repeatedly failing to ask myself. Instead I was joyously swimming in Egypt; denial had rendered billions of tons of rock and ice rearing above the valley floor totally invisible.

Some of the party had spent several weeks in the Alps already doing some 'proper' climbing. Mt Blanc was little more than a walk to these alpinistes, appealing to them purely because it's Europe's highest peak. Two of us had joined them just for this stage, so we used the two days we had up our sleeve to 'acclimatise'. This involved heading straight up the cable car to the Aguile du'Midi and toddling off down the ridge toward the Vallee Blanche. When we headed out onto the ridge there was a howling gale blowing, and the low cloud and snow meant I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. It wasn't till we headed back up the same way the next evening in clear sunshine that it clicked in my mind that to my right was a vertical drop of a mile or more and I was standing on a foot-wide bit of snow.

Oh

my

god.

Those with vertigo will know that the overriding desire is to make the feeling go away, and illogically the best way to do that seems to be to jump off the offending ledge. (I was at King's Canyon in the Northern Territory and I got the urge. I had to sit a long way away with my back to the 300 foot drop and sing happy birthday to myself to try to block it out. It wasn't even my birthday, just the only thing I could think of.)

Luckily for me, the sheer terror overrode all thought, and I managed to crawl up the ridge and into the safety of the station. My climbing buddy thought this was hilarious - and took great pleasure in reminding me just how crap I'd been for the rest of the day.

Did I learn anything? Did I bollocks.

The next day found me on the train up from the valley to the start of the climb with the rest of the group. I had a wobble or two on some steeper sections, but it wasn't until halfway across the Grande Culoir that the thoroughly repressed gibberings of my normal self burst through the delusions that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. Somehow I managed to cross the last remaining yards, before clinging to the nearest rock, face down, and repeating the calming litany 'I'm going to die, get me down get me down get me down I'm going to die.'

A helicopter was called and the climb, and my nascent mountaineering career, ended there.

My brains are mostly made of teh stupid.
(InfiniteMonkey, Mon 14 Apr 2008, 20:57, Reply)