I first met Bill Baker several years ago now on my first big trip, to rather over ambitiously try to climb the Troll Wall in Norway. Whilst we both try and failed on Troll Wall, but the alpine cragging we achieved was great. With the evenings being filled with many of Bill’s tails from mountaineering in the greater ranges and Wales.
Although he always has a story to tell, I found out a few things about Bill over the years that even he didn’t admit to face to face, not only had he made it up to 8000m on Everest without Oxygen, but a few days ago in Pete’s Eats I stumbled into an old High Magazine article on his first ever paragliding flight off the summit of Mt. McKinley. The guy is a legend, a salty sea dog of the mountaineering World.
I had one close encounter whilst on that trip with Bill, four of us had headed out on the wall and got to a bivi above the intro slabs. After spending a night up there, we decided that we were not up to the challenge so started the gripping abseil descent, in full line of fire of rockfall from the upper cliff.
We all arrived after some rather suspect belays, where Bill taught me the great skill of unclipping from the belay! ‘You Don’t want to follow them down if the belay fails, youth’. At the bottom I stayed and coiled the ropes with Bill, and as we started our journey across the long tongue of semi-glacial snow when an almighty crack came from above and an large block fell from high on the face, hitting the upper snow slopes where just hours before we had been abseiling.
From our position we could seen the large engine sized block careering towards us. I ran for cover and was amazed to see Bill, just standing there, watching that moment longer to see its final trajectory before he moved. It must have been only metres away from him, and Bill looked totally unshaken.
Dave Halton said this of Bill “I tried three times to get to the top [of Everest] in 1993. I lived thanks to Bill Barker for his wise words in a storm which would have killed me if i had ignored him.”