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Mountaineer With a Mission
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20130 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
1,744 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
Southport, England, is an unlikely breeding ground for mountain climbers. A small town verging on the Irish Sea, it is a place of salt marshes, quicksand, and low dunes, of docks and sloops, of gray skies that only occasionally open onto blue. Its province, Lancashire, gives birth to sailors, artisans, and merchants. For centuries on end, their attention has been fixed on the nearby ocean, not faraway hills.
For one native son, however, the mountains called at an early age. Dave Halton, now thirty-one, spent his boyhood scaling walls, climbing trees, and dreaming of bigger conquests. On a family vacation in Wales, eight-year-old Halton had his first opportunity, as he puts it, "to exploit my younger drives vertically." As his elders drank tea in a café atop Great Orme's Head, a granite promontory overlooking the sea far below, Halton slipped out for his first high-rock adventure, scaling the rugged face of an old quarry. Pointing out the window, his aunt remarked to his mother, "How could nay parent allow such a little boy to climb up so high?" It took them both a few moments to realize just who the adventurous lad was. Thereafter, Halton had to confine his escapades to times when his mother wasn't looking.
Like so many of his compatriots, Halton had been bitten by the alpinist's bug, but for years he had alpinist's bug, but for years he had few opportunities to face true climbing challenges. On leaving school at the age of sixteen, he dug worms in Southport Bay to sell for bait and eventually became a plumber's apprentice. Six years later, now a master craftsman, Halton set up shop as a construction engineer, which kept him cooped up in civilization, far from the high country.
It was while recovering from a difficult divorce that he rediscovered the wilds. A sympathetic climber friend, Neil Stewart, took Halton along to the Peak District of Derbyshire and pointed him to Stanage Edge and Millstone Quarry, where generations of British mountaineers had learned the tricks of the trade. "I spent many a weekend there," he recalls, "grinding my fingers to the bone on the grit stone, trying to master a skill in weeks rather than the years it should take."
First Accents
He did. In 1988, he also joined the fledgling Survival Club, a Southport conservation and outdoor recreation group, of which Stewart was a member. Among the club's primary activities was a program to clan up heavily visited destinations in the United Kingdom and,
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