WORLD TREKS
TONY&DI C
They discovered the desert climbing of Wadi Rum and pioneered a 650 km long-distance trail through the deserts and canyons of Jordan. Meet explorers Tony Howard and Di Taylor.
hristmas 1983. Tony Howard was watching Lawrence of Arabia. Behind the flowing white robes, camels and derring-do of this World War I drama, he noticed huge sandstone towers. Reaching for another chocolate, Tony thought to himself, “I bet no-one has ever climbed those!” He would soon learn he was mistaken.
Tony was into desert climbing, but he’d had never heard anyone mention Jordan. Wadi Rum, where the film was made back in 1962, lay very close to the border with Saudi Arabia. Jordan is little bigger than Wales, but surrounded by Iraq, Israel and Syria as well as Saudi. To this day, it remains a peaceful eye in an Arab storm. Intrigued, Tony penned a letter to the Tourism Minister of Jordan,
to ask if he could climb there. Months later a letter arrived: “We would like to invite you and your team to assess the climbing potential at Wadi Rum.” When Tony – with his partner Di and their friends Alan Baker and Mick Shaw – finally got to Wadi Rum they found little more than a few Bedouin tents near an old border fort, accessed by a track. There was no electricity and water was piped to the village from the spring of Ain Shalaali, where TE Lawrence, the real-life hero behind the Lawrence of Arabia story, had bathed in 1916.
38 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
A young local came over to say hello. Quite unimpressed by the climbing gear that they pulled out to show him, the youngster told them airily: “Oh, we’ve climbed everything, we don’t need equipment. Come and talk to my father, the sheikh, in the desert, he’ll tell you.” Sheikh Atieq and his sons Defallah and Sabbah welcomed the team into their tents, and invited them to stay. Over the next few days, they travelled the desert, opening their eyes to the huge potential for climbing. It transpired that the local Zalabieh Bedouin tribe regularly climbed mountain routes (up to what we would consider VD or Severe level – even a few HVSs) without ropes, to hunt ibex and gather herbs. Some of the routes took two days and crossed mountains. They turned out to be world-class adventurous routes. At night, the myriad stars of the clear Jordanian sky would appear, and, as they dozed in their sleeping bags, shooting stars would sometimes arch across the sky. In the morning the sun would bring its welcome warmth – a warmth that would rapidly become almost too hot. The four of them spent a lot of time with the Bedouin exploring and, following their advice, tackled two or three of their hunting routes. They also made the first ascent of a summit, naming the route Vanishing Pillar (HVS), and tentatively explored the big wall behind
PHOTO: PHOTO: TONY HOWARD/DI TAYLOR.
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