To the high place

 

...so in despair I began lugging my stuff to the pavement while Patrick Kinross (2) stood in the middle of Warwick Avenue in his Persian silk dressing-gown imperiously waving and to some purpose. A taxi stopped at once.

I needn't have worried, as it drew up at Victoria Air Terminal at the same instant as Andrew's, (3) and we were the first arrivals. He was wearing a pink pullover and a white linen hat and both of us were clumping about already shod in our climbing boots, clutching ice-axes like tomahawks.

2 Lord Kinross, writer and historian
3 Duke of Devonshire MC 

From Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes (1991).

It was the summer of 1971. Victoria Air Terminal was one of the places Londoners could check in (the building is now the National Audit Office). From here the checked-in passengers and their baggage went on by train; there was a dedicated platform within Victoria Station. Leigh Fermor doesn't mention it, but by this date it must have been Gatwick where they boarded the plane chartered by the Andean Society.

*

I can't exaggerate the beauty of the empty whiteness stretching from height to height, or the brilliance of the snow in the sun, or the elliptical, magnesium-blue loops of shadow. The glitter of a frozen waterfall broke through the snow wherever the glacier took an abrupt upward tilt; and, under sudden juts of snow, horizontal clefts, barred with flashing icicles, opened like whales yawning. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor, describing a glacier in the Andes, somewhere near Cuzco. I can't actually work out where (Leigh Fermor's "three summits of Huanay" doesn't seem to help). The party weren't too sure themselves. 

Unlike the others, Patrick and Andrew weren't proper mountaineers. To be roped up and ascend a glacier to a col was a great thrill for them. 

After two hours of climbing and halts, we reached our goal. It was the windy col that formed the skyline from our camp, which now seemed as far below as the bottom of the Pacific. We followed Carl's and Andrew's footprints over the saddle, and slid down to the snowless ledge where they were lying on the dry shale on the other side. We pulled off our anoraks and sweaters and sprawled beside them, all our cramponed boots dangling in the blazing sunlight. We were just over 15,000 feet up. It was a moment of great euphoria, and, for us, near-intoxication: after all our misgivings, we'd actually crossed a glacier, roped up, shod with crampons and wielding ice-picks, 600 feet above the summit of Mont Blanc! The old hands, for whom this was a common routine, rejoiced for our sake. 

[Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote the three letters to his wife in 1971. Twenty years later he edited and published them as a book.]

All-metal ice axes were first produced in the 1960s

[Image source: https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2018/3/27/the-ice-axe .]