by Ed February
I was terrified, absolutely mind numbingly terrified. Twenty metres above Andrew [de Klerk] and Tinie [Versfeld], were lying on their backs looking up at me on the fourth pitch of North West Direct on Du Toit’s peak.
Thoughts flooded my mind: How the hell did I get myself into this position? What am I doing here?
I wasn’t a bloody hero. The only response to my gibbering was gales of laughter from below. This was really making me cross. The flake I was standing on was gently swaying from side to side directly above the intrepid duo below. I had warned them about this, but they hadn’t moved for the simple reason that there was nowhere to move to. The pitch was graded 21, but that wasn’t the issue. The rock wasn’t of the greatest of quality and I hadn’t managed to get out any protection between the stance and where I was. The prospects above didn’t look that great either.
“Why the hell did I always have to end up terrifying myself?” I asked myself under my breath, not really expecting an answer.
As usual, way back then, it always started with Greg Lacy. Of all of us it was he who had the vision, the ideas and the push. So, sometime, maybe a year before, he and I had lugged in some big sacks to the base of the Du Toit’s NW Wall, with the objective of doing a significant variation to North West Frontal. It couldn’t be classified as a stand-alone route, because it didn’t start at the bottom, and in those days, the rule was that a route had to start at the bottom and end at the top.
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