Stainforth - Fiva : an adventure that went wrong

Best Book, Mountain & Wilderness Literature, Banff Mountain Festival 2012

Finalist, Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature 2012

Praise for Fiva

A wonderful, nostalgic, gripping, classic yarn with great humour.

Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void

What a brilliant and refreshing read! Some of our best epics are those early ones when everything is fresh and new, our ambitions great, our experience thin. Gordon has captured all of this in his wonderful little book, that once started you just cant put down.

Sir Chris Bonington

Gordon does a great job of painting the Fiva Route and the Trollveggen in all their dark and dank glory Fiva captures the essence of an epic climb more than any book Ive ever read so much so I felt I had post-traumatic stress on reaching the last page!

Andy Kirkpatrick, author of Psychovertical and Cold Wars

The most intelligent disaster story to appear for years.

Stephen Venables, author of A Slender Thread

The breathless teenage voice that leaps off the first page never waivers. Not once. Rather, it becomes an unrelenting force, sweeping the reader ever higher on Norways Store Trolltind as events spiral out of control for two young, bold, and grossly inexperienced twins. An evocative period piece, Fiva is human, innocent, and unflinchingly believable. This little, unassuming book stands among the classic tales of climbing epics.

Bruce Kirkby, judges citation, Mountain & Wilderness Literature Award, 2012 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival

I found Fiva wholly absorbing, alive in every muscle and nerve, and with a wholeness of experience quite often lacking in extreme books [where] the writing doesnt quite match the intensity of the experience; in Fiva it does.

David Craig, author of Native Stones

Fiva by Gordon Stainforth falls squarely into the sticky book category a book so adhesive that no matter how hard you try, you simply cant put it down until youve finished it The pace is flat out from the very first page. A high octane read.

Gareth Hanson, Rock Climbing UK

What a story! As it becomes clear they have bitten off more than they can chew which is pretty serious hanging 3000 feet above certain death the fear is palpable Things get bad, and then they get worse. By a third of the way through the book, I was absorbed, finishing it in one sitting and worn out by the end A rollicking adventure story.

Daniel Neilson, The Great Outdoors

It is the flavour of laconic self-mockery that makes this book such a delight. Epics are standard fare of mountaineering narratives; what elevates Fiva is the manner of Gordon Stainforths telling of it. If there is any justice left in the publishing world it will be a best seller. Touching the Void? Move over!

Stephen Goodwin, editor of The Alpine Journal

Gordon achieves an immediacy and pace that keeps the reader turning the pages in anticipation of the next twist in the story He succeeds wonderfully in strapping the reader into the emotional roller coaster of the participants. For everyone, climber or non-climber, its a ripping yarn well told.

Nick Gregory, Climber

Once or twice in a lifetime a mountaineering story crosses the divide between pure mountaineering and human interest, bridging the gap and becoming a mainstream hit Fiva breaks the modern trend of psychoanalysing everything from why I climb to family relationships in being a pure adventure story in the best traditions of Boys Own, but in its own unique way it answers those questions like no other book.

Dave Mycroft, MyOutdoors

An Adventure That Went Wrong

FIVA

GORDON STAINFORTH

Mountaineers Books is the nonprofit publishing arm of The Mountaineers, an organization founded in 1906 and dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas. 1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201 Seattle, WA 98134 800.553.4453 www.mountaineersbooks.org

2013 by Gordon Stainforth

All rights reserved

Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Golden Arrow Books

First US edition, 2013

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover design: Karen Schober

Cover photograph: The dawn view from a bivvy in the main gully, 2.00 am

John Stainforth

Cover illustration: The Trollveggen, the highest wall in Europeand the scariest!

Andy Kirkpatrick

The Son of Hickory Hollers Tramp written by Dallas Frazier. 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Words from Runaway used with kind permission of Del Shannon Enterprises, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stainforth, Gordon, 1949

Fiva : an adventure that went wrong / Gordon Stainforth.

pages cm

Originally published: Great Britain : Golden Arrow Books, 2012.

ISBN 978-1-59485-846-8 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-59485-847-5 (ebook)

1. MountaineeringNorwayM?re og Romsdal fylke. 2. M?re og Romsdal fylke (Norway)Description and travel. I. Title.

GV199.42.N82M675 2013

796.522094839dc23

2013013148

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-59485-846-8

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-59485-847-5

To our father, Peter Stainforth, who gave us so much rope

John and Gordon about to leave their home in Hertfordshire for Norway on June 27, 1969. Photo: Peter Stainforth

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(All photographs, unless otherwise credited, by John Stainforth)

PREFACE

I have known all my adult life that one day I would write a book about the near-death experience I had in 1969 with my twin brother on Store Trolltind, the highest mountain in the Romsdal region of Norway. The name of the route, the four-letter word Fiva (pronounced Fever), has remained seared into my memory for all time like the secret code for a necessary rite of passage.

So when, in May 2009, my brother casually suggested that it would be fun to go on a 40th anniversary return trip to Romsdal, I jumped at the idea. We realised that if we got our act together we could be there in early July, in the very week of the anniversary.

Thus, forty years to the very day that we had become ensnared on the climb, we found ourselves peering over the mile-high abyss to gaze down on it once more. It did not disappoint: if anything it seemed more alien than ever. A few days later, we made the long and easy ascent of Nordre Trolltind, a northern subsidiary summit of Store Trolltind, in the hope of being able to look directly at the top half of the route. We had been told that the viewpoint was stupendous, but sadly, by the time we reached the top, we were in cloud. We waited several hours when, at last, with splendid theatricality, the savage pointed summit of Store Trolltind pierced the boiling cloud hundreds of feet above our heads, and a few minutes later the whole of the Troll Wall, the highest vertical rockwall in Europe, emerged directly opposite us. Finally, the cloud in the deep gully below the summit of Store Trolltind cleared and we were looking with a kind of Gods-eye view at the top two thousand feet of the Fiva Route, about a quarter of a mile away. We just stood and gaped at its inhospitality, feeling very fortunate to have had such interesting lives, which could so easily have been brought to an abrupt end in that grim chasm forty years before.