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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Winner Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature Winner Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature Winner Mountain & Adventure Narrative Award, New Zealand Mountain Film & Book Festival The golden age of Himalayan mountaineering, from the mid-1970s to the 1980s, brought forth a generation of radical young climbers. With tiny budgets and high ambitions they pioneered fast and light, alpine-style expeditions on mountains such as Jannu, Nuptse, Everest and K2. In High Risk, Brian Hall recalls the outrageous adventures of eleven of his climbing friends who risked – and often lost – their lives to stand on some of the world's highest peaks during a legendary period in mountaineering history.
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‘A major milestone in alpine literature.’
JOHN PORTER – MOUNTAINEER, AUTHOR AND FORMER ALPINE CLUB PRESIDENT
‘A riveting insight into the legendary characters of a remarkable climbing era.’
MICK FOWLER – AUTHOR AND MOUNTAINEER
‘Entertaining, revealing, breathtaking, heartbreaking and confessional.’
STEPHEN GOODWIN – KEKOO NAOROJI BOOK AWARD FOR MOUNTAIN LITERATURE
‘Big characters who loved life close to the edge.’
ED DOUGLAS – AUTHOR AND CLIMBER
‘An absolutely spellbinding read.’
ADELE PENNINGTON – MOUNTAINEER
‘A poignant tale of friendships, lofty climbing goals, and, ultimately, tremendous loss.’
CAMERON M. BURNS – AMERICAN ALPINE JOURNAL
Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffieldwww.adventurebooks.com
About the Author
Climbing exploits worldwide led Brian Hall to become an internationally certified mountain guide who provides extreme location safety and rigging for the film industry. His numerous credits include the BAFTA award-winning film Touching the Void, the dramatisation of Joe Simpson’s bestselling book. Between 1980 and 2008, he co-directed the Kendal Mountain Film Festival of which he is also a founder. Brian and his wife Louise divide their time between the UK’s Peak District and New Zealand’s Southern Alps. High Risk is his first book.
HIGH RISK BRIAN HALL
First published in 2022 by Sandstone Press. This edition first published in 2023 by Vertebrate Publishing. VERTEBRATE PUBLISHING Omega Court, 352 Cemetery Road, Sheffield S11 8FT, United Kingdom.www.adventurebooks.com
Copyright © 2023 Brian Hall. Foreword copyright © Joe Simpson 2023. Edited by Robert Davidson. Cover design by Ryder Design.
Front cover photograph: Roger Baxter-Jones climbing on Jannu. Photography by Brian Hall unless otherwise credited.
Brian Hall has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life of Brian Hall. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of the book are true.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-83981-215-6 (Paperback) ISBN: 978-1-83981-216-3 (Ebook)
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanised, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of the publisher.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
For Louise
and in memory of:
Sam Cochrane
John Syrett
Alex MacIntyre
Mike Geddes
John Whittle
Roger Baxter-Jones
Georges Bettembourg
Pete Thexton
Joe Tasker
Paul Nunn
Alan Rouse
and too many more.
‘Are you oblivious to the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness and death? There is no guarantee that you will survive, even past this very day! The time has come for you to develop perseverance in your practice. For, at this singular opportunity, you could attain the everlasting bliss of nirvāna. So now is certainly not the time to sit idly, but, starting with the reflection on death, you should bring your practice to completion!
‘The moments of our life are not expendable, And the possible circumstances of death are beyond imagination. If you do not achieve undaunted confident security now, what point is there in your being alive, O living creature?’
Padmasambhava, The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Contents
Foreword
There is a lot of death in Brian Hall’s book High Risk, but it is far from a grim read. There is also great joy in these pages. It is a wonderful portrait of a generation achieving great things in a very particular style. Brimful of excitement, ambition and fun, it is peopled by remarkable characters living constantly on the edge of disaster. Brian Hall has done them a great service, although he left me filled with nostalgia and an uneasy sense of loss, wondering whether it was all worth it.
The attrition was truly appalling. It has been said that the cream of British mountaineering was wiped out in the 1980s and, having lived through that period, I can attest to that. In his introduction, as lucid a credo as I have ever read, he outlines the devastation on K2 in terms of sheer numbers. He also suggests, correctly in my view, that his generation pushed the boat of risk out further than others, before or since, in pursuit of a purity of style that, in fact, changed everything.
To present this fact may have been Brian’s primary intention but High Risk is much more than an examination of death statistics. It is about characters, experiences, friendships and paths through life. It tells the story of an extraordinary group of mountaineers in the golden age of alpine style climbing in the Greater Ranges, when mountaineering radically changed, moving away from big beast, siege expeditions to answer Reinhold Messner’s clarion call for lightweight, small team climbing.
Doug Scott stepped away willingly, as did Chris Bonington, but it was the next generation that really forced the routes. Pete Boardman, Joe Tasker, Alex MacIntyre, Brian Hall, Rab Carrington, Roger-Baxter Jones, Georges Bettembourg and Al Rouse made iconic ascents on Kanchenjunga, Nuptse, Jannu, K2 and the West Ridge of Everest. The list of ascents, failures, epics and amazing adventures goes on and on.
It was a free-wheeling anarchic lifestyle of obsession, ambition, damaged relationships (and minds), hard partying and hard climbing, and my generation, a decade later, tumbled happily in its wake. My hopes and ambitions crashed and burned on my very first trip, but many others carried on, eventually reining back on altitude in favour of hard technical ascents in the 6,000 to 7,000-metre range. Here, Mick Fowler and Paul Ramsden carried the banner with a list of incredible first ascents.
Each chapter in High Risk acts as a standalone memorial to one of eleven climbers, but the book’s back-and-forth in time provides a wonderful insight into the way that generation lived and died. Brian, thankfully, survived, to gift us this lyrical, heartfelt commemoration of a mountaineering era and the climbers who changed their sport.
I’ve known Brian for nearly forty years: partied with him, worked with him and attended too many wakes with him. When I first came to Sheffield at the beginning of the 1980s he, along with Al Rouse, Paul Nunn and Rab Carrington, were inspirational mountaineers whose ascents I’d followed avidly. Suddenly, I found myself drinking with them in Sheffield pubs. There was a huge inclusivity in this climbing scene. At any party Paul Nunn could be found in deep conversation, dispensing wisdom to young rock stars like Andy Pollitt, Ben Moon or Jerry Moffatt, with Don Whillans in a corner, teaching Johnny Dawes hard lessons in etiquette.
There was no sense of separation, of arrogance or superiority. There were no generational boundaries, and advice was freely given. More information and vital contacts could be garnered in one night than could ever be gained from the Alpine Club library. Simon Yates and I did exactly that, gleaning all we needed from Rab, Al and Brian who pointed us in the direction of Siula Grande. ‘Watch out for the rockfall, it was bad,’ Rab warned. Off we went and the rest is history.
The loss of Paul Nunn stunned me. I think many of us made the mistake of thinking he was indestructible. Quite a few of us quietly braced ourselves when others departed, knowing the probability of some not returning was high, but never with Paul. He had been everywhere, done everything and seemed to know everything. His wily, shrewd judgements made him the safest of climbers, but he and Geoff Tier were overwhelmed by a massive icefall while descending from the summit of Haramosh II. At the age of fifty-two, halfway through his stint as president of the British Mountaineering Council, he was gone. If Paul could be wiped out so easily, any of us could.
Reading Brian’s account, I was astonished by his young age, as he seemed to have lived forever. Later in the book I was equally astonished to learn that his great friend and mentor, Tom Patey, was only thirty-eight when he died. Both these men packed so much into their years it seemed that they had been around for lifetimes.
Everyone had plans, expeditions organised, trips on the go. There was a constant churn of people setting off and returning, but sometimes not returning. We lived in a febrile atmosphere, full of nervous excitement, buzzing with energy. Pushing boundaries in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, we thought we could do anything. We were immortal, awash with youthful arrogance. This insane confidence was inherited from Brian’s generation, who had shown the way. Off we went to the mountains, but we also went to an awful lot of memorial services.
Each generation pushes on to new heights, advances in equipment raising technical standards year on year. Protection on ice climbs in their heyday was dubious at best, when to place three ice screws on a fifty-metre frozen waterfall required the energy to power a small city. Climbers today could happily put in ten. Heightened fitness, training and psychology all play their part and today the leading climbers put up ascents thought impossible barely a decade ago.
The 1970 British Annapurna South Face expedition was the first Himalayan climb to take a deliberately difficult route up the face of an 8,000-metre mountain. After fifty-eight days Don Whillans and Dougal Haston reached the summit of Annapurna I which, at 8,091 metres, is the highest peak in the Annapurna massif. It was a massive advance in Himalayan climbing, as was the South-West Face of Everest expedition five years later. Chris Bonington led the team, using advanced climbing techniques to put fixed ropes up the steep South Face. Apart from all else, such expeditions were difficult to finance.
By the 1980s though, speed and lightweight tactics had blown away the era of heavyweight siege expeditions. In 1986, Swiss climbers Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet climbed through the night, alone, up and down Everest’s North Face in an astounding forty-three hours. The next generation went even further with the young Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck soloing the South Face of Annapurna in 2013, completed in only twenty-eight hours. Brian Hall’s generation, the climbers so fondly remembered in this book, built the bridge between the old and the new.
As his narrative draws to a close Brian assesses the attraction of risk to the young, and how it diminishes with advancing age and increased responsibility. However, his accounting of such psychological factors as post-traumatic stress disorder is even more illuminating and worth the price of this book on its own, as is his assessment of the circularity of physical and technical improvement with increased risk-taking. The risks don’t reduce the more experienced you become. The fitter, faster and more skilled elite mountaineers simply become higher-level risk takers. It was, and remains, a vicious circle in which the benefits that greater fitness and skillsets create may, at any time, be overwhelmed by objective dangers such as avalanches, crevasses, falling rocks and storms.
Mountaineering has always been a risky proposition and for the reasons given above is unlikely to change. However, Brian Hall’s High Risk gives the clearest sense of the how and the why of this dangerous lifestyle and shows how his generation changed high-altitude mountaineering enormously but at a heinous price. It is a fascinating and poignant account of tumultuous times. As Syd Marty, the Canadian mountain poet, wrote in his poem ‘Abbot’:
Men fall off mountains because
They have no business being there
That’s why they go, that’s why they die
Joe Simpson
2022
Introduction
What Happened to All My Friends?
Brian Hall in the Yorkshire Dales, 1976.
Imagine putting one bullet into a six-shot revolver, spinning the chamber and putting the cold steel barrel on your temple. Breathe slowly and think your last thoughts and then, if you’re both brave and stupid, pull the trigger. You have a one in six chance of killing yourself.
During a dozen expeditions to the Himalaya between 1976 and 1986, I tied on a rope with twenty-four individuals of whom seven were killed in the mountains. A further four died of natural causes or by their own hand. In simple terms, I had roughly the same chance of dying while mountaineering as I would have had playing Russian roulette. As to why I continued climbing, death after death, I hope this account will answer that question.1
The 3 million soldiers who fought at the Somme in 1916, the bloodiest battle in history, suffered the terrible death rate of one in ten. British Bomber Command lost 44.4 per cent of its aircrew flying missions in the Second World War. Of the sixty-eight members of the English Fell and Rock Climbing Club who fought in the First World War, nineteen did not come back and many more were injured or maimed for life. However, those brave soldiers, sailors and airmen had little choice.
The death toll in the 1980s on each of the world’s fourteen highest peaks makes uncomfortable reading. For every three climbers who reached the avalanche-prone summit of Annapurna, one died. On the precipitous slopes of K2, it was approximately one in four. On Everest, one in seven. Mountains do not judge. We are not at war with them and, when we reach their summits, we have not conquered them. Their challenge is in our minds, and the risk is of our own making. If high-altitude mountaineering was a mainstream sport, it would surely be banned or heavily regulated.
Trawling the Himalayan Database,2 I became convinced that proportionately more of my generation of mountaineers died during the 1970s and 1980s than in the decades before and after.3 I wrote this book, at least partly, to understand why we suffered so many deaths proportionally. Were we a one-off blip on the graph of life or part of a cyclical pattern? More than likely it was a combination of factors including the style in which we climbed, what we climbed, our attitude and possible addiction to risk, our level of fitness and the amount of time we devoted to it. No doubt, some were simply terrible examples of bad luck.
A few years back, I gazed out of my upstairs office windowpane at a typical October day in the English Peak District. Gritstone-walled fields spread across the hills. Flocks of sheep grazed peacefully. On the moorlands above, the heather had lost its purple bloom.
I picked a photographic slide from a box marked ‘’70’s Various’ and slotted it into our digital scanner. An electronic clunk followed, and a whirring noise, before my computer screen slowly came to life and revealed an image. It was a group of mates from way back, all long-haired and wearing multicoloured flowered shirts and outrageously flared jeans. Slugging beer from pint glasses, suspiciously large cigarettes between their fingers, they could have been at a fancy dress party.
Another slide revealed a young man with a beard and long blond hair sprouting from beneath a top hat, standing one-legged on a pile of ropes while putting his boots on. It was me, and I was transported back to my coming of age in the post-hippy and punk era, part of a bunch of free-spirited and like-minded guys whose only aim in life was to go to remote places and climb. Always broke, we drank, partied and played music too loud. We slept on floors and hitch-hiked everywhere. Most of us were students but we wanted this laid-back lifestyle to continue rather than to ever settle down to a proper job.
‘Cup of tea?’ came a shout from Louise, my wife.
‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ but I was already thinking that it might be time to remember my eleven friends who are no longer alive. To put their stories down in writing before my recollections disappear. Who were they, and why were they so important to me, and to the history of mountaineering?
We are better at remembering the retelling of our experiences. Each time we talk about an event, we solidify that retelling as the memory itself.4 All those nights I spent in bars, chatting and reminiscing about past days, have no doubt resulted in a heavily edited memory. While researching this book, I’ve enjoyed a fantastic and revealing journey when talking to my contemporaries, delving into old diaries and looking at photographs. In writing it, I have tried to let the story tell itself.
As a youth, I avidly read about the exploits of famous mountaineers such as Chris Bonington, Riccardo Cassin and Walter Bonatti. Stories of surviving lightning storms while hanging off vertical walls above immense glaciers or stepping triumphantly on to a summit after many days of struggle. These paladins of the climbing world were gods to me, and their routes were unattainable dreams.
When visiting the Alps for the first time in 1970, I gained an inkling of what they had endured. I was just nineteen when I pitched my tent on a clean and peaceful campsite in the Bregaglia, in southern Switzerland. The following day, accompanied by John Stainforth, my Leeds University climbing partner, we left the manicured green valley, walking through conifers to the edge of an alabaster-coloured glacier to sleep under a huge boulder. As the dawn sun rose, we climbed up crisp snow, ice axes in hand, the view changing with every step. This was what we had come for, to reach a high summit, and it seemed remarkably simple, logical and enjoyable. The weather was perfect, nothing bad had happened, and I became hooked on alpine climbing.
After more routes, another friend from the university climbing club arrived, Roger Baxter-Jones (RBJ). He suggested we do a route together.
‘How about the North-East Face of the Badile?’
‘The Cassin route?’
‘Yep. It’s one of the six classic North Faces of the Alps.’
Stainforth agreed before I had a chance to say no. I spent a sleepless night, but we climbed the twenty-two-pitch climb graded Très Difficile in five hours, much faster than guidebook time, and straight after drove to Chamonix to meet up with more friends. I pitched my tent next to my mate and fellow student Alan (Al) Rouse, who sat idly amongst bottles from last night’s party. Mick Jagger’s voice blared from his cassette player, and the smell of weed drifted in the air. Ice axes and ropes lay ignored, but ready for the next climb. I looked around at the close-knit community and recognised the faces of famous climbers from photographs in magazines.
‘How about climbing the Dru?’ RBJ suggested.
‘Isn’t that hard?’ I replied, looking at the thousand-metre needle piercing the sky above the campsite.
‘It is, but let’s try the Bonatti Pillar. It’s the best route on the mountain.’
‘You must be joking … ’
He wasn’t, and the next day I toiled my way up to the Charpoua refuge, feeling out of my depth. We were preparing our bivouac among some nearby boulders when the warden shouted, ‘Come, sleep inside.’
‘We have no money.’
‘You climb Bonatti? C’est gratuit.’
It took three days up and down, bivouacing on tiny ledges, and an intense lightning storm drenched us on the glacier as we descended. I learnt a lot that season, particularly about the oxymoron of enjoyable danger.
At that time, in 1970, the British magazine Mountain was full of news from the Himalaya. A team led by Chris Bonington reached the summit of Annapurna I (8,091 metres) after climbing the massive South Face. The expedition included nine of Britain’s best mountaineers, a base camp manager, a doctor and a four-person film crew together with six high-altitude Sherpa porters. Three hundred and eighty porters carried tons of gear to Base Camp, with 5,500 metres of rope for fixing, forty cylinders of oxygen and six breathing sets. Here was a scale and complexity that I could hardly grasp, with a level of costs that requires commercial sponsorship.
It was apparent from the article that the lead climbers slowly pushed the route out over some of the most challenging climbing ever done at altitude. Ropes were fixed between six camps that were provisioned so the team could survive on the face. It was structured as a logistical pyramid and planned with military precision. The siege continued for fifty-eight days until Don Whillans and Dougal Haston reached the summit, but tragedy struck as the team evacuated the mountain. A serac collapsed, killing Ian Clough, further fuelling the newspapers, which treated the expedition as a triumph of British skill and bravery. I began to understand the big difference between alpine and Himalayan climbing.
That autumn, back from the Alps, the Leeds climbing club members were enjoying rock climbing on the local cliffs. The dedicated climbers were becoming stronger and more skilled by training on the university’s unique climbing wall, which enabled success on new ascents while eliminating the need for artificial aid like pitons and bolts. Using aid makes a climb easier and safer and the outcome more certain, but reduces the level of adventure. We viewed such ascents as inferior and done in a poorer style – even as cheating.
For us, the style by which we climbed was becoming more important than reaching the top, even though, at that time, the concept of style was hardly considered in the Alps and Greater Ranges5. For example, on our ascent of the Dru, we had pulled on every peg available to help with speed and efficiency. In the Himalaya, heavyweight expeditions used all manner of aid such as fixed ropes, supplementary oxygen and high-altitude porters.
A groundbreaking article, written by American Lito Tejada-Flores called ‘Games Climbers Play’ (Sierra Club Journal Ascent 1967), illuminated the different styles by dividing climbing into a series of games of escalating risk and complexity. He described the ‘bouldering’ game and worked his way through various ‘rock’ and ‘ice-climbing’ games before reaching the ‘alpine’ game. By the time I read this I had played all these games, and understood that a three-metre boulder was safer and needed a lot less equipment and organisation than, say, a long rock or ice route on Ben Nevis. Bigger and more serious again were the alpine routes, with crevassed glacial approaches, vicious storms and remote summits. The further and higher we went into the mountains, the more the activity’s complexity increased, with a corresponding rise in the number of things that could go wrong.
I was intrigued by the top two games on the list, where Tejada-Flores compared the ‘heavyweight (or traditional) expedition’ game to the ‘super alpine’ game. These last two games describe the style used when climbing in the Greater Ranges. I could easily understand how Bonington’s undertaking on Annapurna was categorised as heavyweight expedition style, but was interested to read that the style I had used during that first season in the Alps was now being seen in the Greater Ranges. This would obviously make expeditions easier to organise and save money.
Climbing and mountaineering differ from other sports in that there are no rules or referees, just a series of styles and ethics overseen by consensus. Honesty is key. At its heart, climbing is a culture rather than a competition.
Reinhold Messner, the most globally renowned mountaineer of that time and the first to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen, gave a succinct explanation: ‘Climbing and mountaineering have never been sports. They are adventures with a level of danger and an uncertain outcome.’ As the climbing style moves from the rock faces to the high mountains, there is an increase in the level of risk. Very few people die while climbing at the indoor gym, whereas there is a significant death toll in the Himalaya.
Fast forward to today, and the aim of most elite climbers is to make an ascent in the best style, using only the minimum of aid. Solo climbing is the purest and most dangerous style, reserved for a few individuals prepared to risk an ascent made alone, usually without a rope for protection. Predictably solo climbing has a high death rate.
Anatoli Boukreev, the acclaimed Kazakhstani mountaineer, echoed this ideal in his book Above the Clouds: ‘Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve; they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.’ Tragically his style was no defence, and Boukreev died in an avalanche on Annapurna in the winter of 1997.
The heavyweight expedition style served mountaineering well, with a tidal wave of first ascents from 1950 beginning with the French ascent of Annapurna, the first of the 8,000-metre summits to be scaled. By 1964 all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks had been climbed, including Everest by the British in 1953 and K2 by the Italians a year later. In 1975, a watershed between the demise of heavyweight style and the rise of alpine style was established when Chris Bonington led the successful bid to climb Everest’s South-West Face. This expedition was on an even grander scale than his Annapurna effort five years earlier.
One of the summiteers, Pete Boardman, observed, ‘For a mountaineer, surely a Bonington expedition is one of the last great imperial experiences life can offer.’
Nevertheless, these big, traditional expeditions were not immune to accidents. Most famously, Mallory and Irvine on the British Everest expedition in 1924, and the tragedy on Nanga Parbat in 1937 when nine Sherpas and seven Germans were engulfed in a single avalanche. More recent examples include the infamous Everest tragedy in 1996 when eight died in a vicious storm, albeit on a guided ascent (described in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air), and the 2008 K2 debacle when eleven perished because an ice cliff avalanched and wiped out their fixed ropes.
In my office, I opened a cardboard box lying in the corner. It was labelled ‘Expeditions’ and inside, packed tightly together, was a stack of files, each marked with an expedition dating from 1976 to 1986. When I began leafing through the papers, diaries and photos, memories flooded back from Jannu, Nuptse, Everest, K2 and more. With our passion and drive we attempted to raise the standards of climbing in the United Kingdom, before transferring our skills to the longer climbs of the Alps, which in turn would give us the confidence to progress to the Andes and Himalaya. Following that path, we hoped to change high-altitude mountaineering from heavyweight expeditions to alpine-style ascents.
Looking through those notes from my first trips to the Himalaya, I remembered how the older guard of expedition climbers formed a virtually impenetrable clique. Hence, as a new generation of alpinists, we had to go our own way. Staring at a picture with a bold red line drawn up the blank face of a distant snowy peak, my mind went back to a dimly lit room in Sheffield where we pored over images of the Himalaya, paper and pen at the ready, planning and dreaming of our next crazy objectives. We were having the time of our lives, and climbing was all we lived for.
In the mid-1970s, this adoption of the alpine style in the Greater Ranges was nothing less than a revolution. Speed and nimbleness over difficult ground opened new possibilities on the steep virgin walls of high peaks. As part of this new breed of mountaineers, I convinced myself that alpine was safer because the zones of avalanches and stonefall had to be negotiated just once and less time would be spent at high altitude. The bare numbers were persuasive. For example, two alpine-style climbers on a seven-day ascent were exposed to fourteen climber-days of the mountain’s dangers, while ten people on a heavyweight expedition over thirty days were exposed for 300 climber-days.
We rejected the use of oxygen bottles and fixed ropes on ethical grounds, which in any case were too heavy to carry in a single push. Fast and light was our mantra, and ascents could and had to be made in days rather than weeks as the weight of food and fuel that could be carried was limited. However, the term lightweight was a misnomer as most alpine climbers carried cripplingly heavy loads, even when the overall expedition was classed as small scale.
Because rescue was virtually impossible, ascents required a high measure of commitment, and typically the team would stick together in success or failure, significantly heightening the experience of the adventure. Small expeditions also had a much lower environmental impact than large expeditions which, sadly, often left their fixed ropes in place and abandoned their camps, littering the slopes.
Voytek Kurtyka, the Polish sage of this style, wrote, ‘It became clear to me that alpine style is a higher form of the mountaineering art, not only in its sporting aspect but also in human terms because through it you can experience the mountain world more intimately and deeply.’
Despite the growing popularity of alpine style, we accepted that heavyweight style had some advantages with a slow ascent allowing more time for altitude acclimatisation. It also permitted one group to rest or recuperate while another party pushed the route further up the mountain. In addition, the support of fixed ropes and the shelter of camps helped in poor weather and provided an escape route at the end of the expedition or in emergencies. Using supplementary oxygen is a considerable benefit above 8,000 metres but this can only be carried within the structure of a heavyweight expedition. To ensure success, it continues to be used on commercially guided expeditions, where long queues of bottle-carrying climbers can be seen near the summit of Everest.
From my office filing cabinet, I selected a blue folder marked ‘Magazine Articles’ and pulled out a faded photocopy of an obituary, then another, and another. Throughout the 1970s, our alpine-style ascents in the Greater Ranges had been successful and mostly without tragedy. Sadly, by the early 1980s, accidents started to happen with concerning frequency, demonstrating that our approach was not as safe as we had thought. So many of my friends had died, most in the mountains.
A line jumped out at me: ‘the generation that climbed themselves to extinction’. That was my generation, and I was one of the survivors. Forty years later, at home on that autumn day, I questioned: Why did we face the risks of mountaineering?
Answering this could be key to understanding the deaths of many of my friends. In the arrogance of our youth, buoyed and perhaps blinded by our triumphs, we had no sense of our own mortality. Ignoring the warning signs with a flippant, it will never happen to me. Genetically programmed to take risks, we had a sense of invincibility. One thing was clear: we were intoxicated and addicted to the feeling of going into the danger zone and coming out unscathed. That was at the heart of why we kept climbing. The mountains gave us no choice.
Staring at the moorland outside my office window, I remembered the words of my mate, Al Rouse, aged nineteen, after soloing a challenging rock climb called The Boldest, where the slightest slip would have plunged him to his death: ‘Fifteen minutes on the Thin Red Line is worth an awful lot of ordinary living.’
Mountaineering did not pass through this period in isolation. The 1970s were a time of rapid change in society, when it became acceptable to live the alternative life of a climber rather than have a normal job and family routine. I was raised in a post-war world of turmoil when prosperity was growing. Car ownership was increasing, and the jumbo jet heralded the start of foreign travel for the masses. Students, and youth in general, gained power, and the long-neglected equality of the sexes became a priority. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and racial unrest spread across the Atlantic to Paris and the rest of Europe. Music tastes changed from the Beatles and the Stones to Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols and disco. Beer and marijuana were supplemented by wine and pills. These cultural changes encouraged a pattern of anarchistic behaviour and counterculture tastes.
Not surprisingly, climbing changed too. The glue of climbing clubs whose members shared transport and hut accommodation began to dissolve, and climbers operated more independently. Before the mid-1970s, visiting the Greater Ranges was a complex process, and when expeditions ventured to India and Nepal travel was overland or by sea. Additionally, social and economic changes made it possible to climb globally, with geopolitics opening the borders to China and other mountain areas. In 1980, I could work for four months, save my earnings, jump on a plane with three mates and climb in the Himalaya.
Alpine-style climbing fitted perfectly into this new world.
Before one asks why we took such high risks, perhaps the question should be why we started in the first place. I can only answer for myself. Attracted by the landscape of the Lake District near my home town of Kendal, I enjoyed the beauty and peace of walking amongst the hills and lakes with a group of school friends. The mountain-tops were clothed in snow and ice in winter, so I had to learn how to use crampons and an ice axe. Before I knew it, I was using a rope to climb an icy gully and, soon after, I attempted my first rock climb. Hooked by the excitement, I swapped track running and kicking a ball around for the esoteric pastime of climbing, intrigued by the mental and physical challenges. I never made a conscious decision to climb.
Entering my seventieth year, I wonder if anything unites the eleven climbers portrayed in this book. Indeed, do their life stories do anything to explain why we risked our lives? I like to think we were part of a unique movement whose collective achievements encapsulate the spirit of that time. A generation who, all too often, drove themselves until the ultimate price was paid.
This is no history lesson. Instead, it is a joyous and sometimes sad account of adventures with my friends and how we changed the style of climbing together.
My risk-taking days as a high-level mountaineer are long gone and, with older eyes, I look back on many of our actions as idiotic and unjustifiable. But viewing those pictures and unpacking those old boxes in my office took me back to an exhilarating and happy part of my life. It was a significant time in climbing and mountaineering, and my dazzling and outrageously talented companions deserve to be remembered. They left a legacy on which many of today’s climbs are forged.
Before I share the wonderful adventures I had with my friends, I must first reflect on why my time as a high-altitude mountaineer came to an end.
1. To calculate the statistics, a population of forty-two climbers were involved because some people came on several of the expeditions. Seven died in the mountains, with one of those deaths occurring after 1986.
2. The Himalayan Database (Himalaya by the Numbers) is founded on the meticulous records kept over four decades by the late Kathmandu-based journalist Elizabeth Hawley. www.himalayandatabase.com
3. Figures in the database for members on Nepalese peaks over 6,000 metres climbing above Base Camp (not hired staff) 1950–1989: 12,480/324 deaths at 2.6%. 1990–2019: 41,945/418 deaths at 1%.
4. Seals, Corinne, ‘Language Matters: Most of what we remember is actually heavily edited’, Stuff (15 February 2021), https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/124228212/language-matters-most-of-what-we-remember-is-actually-heavily-edited
5. The Greater Ranges comprise the high mountain ranges of Asia, including the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Pamirs and Tien Shan. However, some people also include the Andes, Rockies and the Alaskan mountains in this definition.
1
The Tiger and the Lamb
Return to K2
Al Rouse after soloing The Boldest, 1969.
After a long day’s walk along the Godwin-Austen glacier, under the majestic Shining Wall of the West Face of Gasherbrum IV, past the giant mass of the 8,051-metre Broad Peak, we finally arrived at K2 Base Camp. It was Monday 17 July 2000; a day still etched in my memory. The Base Camp was a sprawling village of small tents on the grey, moraine-covered glacier. Above, the vast ramparts of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world at 8,611 metres, christened the Savage Mountain, rose with menace.
Our small team, here to make a documentary film, started unpacking the bags when a familiar figure appeared out of a nearby, large, drab and torn canvas kitchen tent. Tall, skinny, with a mop of unkempt hair, Voytek Kurtyka, the Polish mountaineer, stared at me through intense steel-blue eyes.
‘Ah, Brian, good to see you. It’s been a long time.’
Then his posture changed. Instead of his usual direct manner, he looked at his boots, obviously uncomfortable. Finally, he raised his head, ‘Brian … Brian, we found your friend Alan Rouse yesterday.’
I suddenly felt weak and tasted bile in the back of my throat. I just stared back, and there was an embarrassing silence, which Voytek finally interrupted in his Eastern European matter-of-fact manner: ‘We found him in avalanche debris on the way to Advance Base Camp. He must have been washed down from above the Bottleneck.’
Tears filled my eyes as I thought back to 1986 when I had last been with my close friend Al. I was already on my way home from the expedition, with an injured knee, when he made the first British ascent of the mountain, tragically disappearing in a storm as he descended from the summit.
‘We buried him … but I think you must identify him. Perhaps tomorrow.’
Voytek broke my silent stare.
‘We will dig him up in the morning.’
The acetazolamide (Diamox) pills I took to aid altitude acclimatisation also helped me get to sleep that night. Previously the side effects had been vivid and entertaining dreams, but tonight I had nightmares. Soon I was on a roller coaster of torment; half awake, half asleep. A skull, half covered in skin. Al’s eyes. Oh no. They were bulging behind his black, horn-rimmed glasses. Why are they bizarrely askew on his tattered nose? The skull again and again. I never saw the rest of his body, just this grotesque head. It kept repeating in a neverending loop. I tossed and turned in a cold sweat all night and woke up feeling spent. My head hurt, my face was puffed with altitude-induced oedema and my mouth felt like sandpaper.1
After a cup of sweet tea, I was just about capable of taking the short walk over to visit Voytek. But part of me was reliving this recurring horror. What would I see when we exhumed the body?
K2 had a reputation as the most challenging 8,000-metre peak to climb due to its steep, rocky slopes and the frequency of bad weather. Voytek, widely regarded as one of the world’s top mountaineers, had not climbed it yet, and was driven by an obsession to complete a new route on the East Face, which would become his ‘masterpiece on the planet’. I had met him first in his home country, Poland, back in the 1980s and our paths had crossed on several occasions since. This season he was giving K2 one more try, with married Japanese climbers Taeko and Yasushi Yamanoi. I opened the flap of their kitchen tent and let my eyes adjust to the half-light. There before me was an orderly and relaxed base camp breakfast scene. Steam poured from a blackened kettle spout, balanced on a large paraffin stove in the middle of the icy floor. Immediately I was offered porridge and tea. I gratefully accepted, though my mind was still in a daze as I sat down on a battered camping chair next to Voytek.
I tried to think logically. Al’s death had been years ago, but I still thought about him all the time. Now all the sad memories overwhelmed me. Whether it was pride or simply embarrassment, I could not confide my confused mental crisis. Sipping tea with Voytek, Yasushi and Taeko as though nothing had happened seemed to increase my anxiety. Was Alan Rouse just another name on a long list of mountaineers who had died on the Savage Mountain? For them it was just the start of another day at Base Camp, whereas for me, the news was devastating. I first met Al in 1969, and we had travelled the world’s mountains together till his death. He had been my closest friend.
It was Voytek who finally brought me back to reality: ‘Should we go?’
‘I suppose so,’ I whispered.
Should I take a picture? The thought guiltily entered my mind, but I then realised I had left my camera in the tent. I had not considered any of the practicalities. Should I take something back to Al’s partner, Deborah, and his family? Would people think it insensitive? As a mountaineer, I was not prepared for this situation.
We stood up, and Voytek waved dismissively to a small pile of dirty clothes and climbing gear in the corner of the tent.
‘We found all that on the body.’
I took a step back. But I had to look. Slowly I sifted through torn clothing. I did not recognise anything as Al’s. Then under the clothes, I spotted a large red expedition rucksack in remarkably good condition. I pensively noted the label ‘Berghaus’. They were one of our sponsors back in 1986, and we had worked closely with the company designing a range of gear for our expedition.
It must be Al, I thought.
I looked again. The pack did not look quite right. I had helped design our ‘Cyclops Expedition Pack’, and surely it wasn’t this model? I supposed that during the confusion of the horrendous epic of 1986 that had taken so many lives, packs could have been swapped between climbers and it could nonetheless be Al lying in the new grave dug into the glacial moraine.
I opened the zip lid, and a box of matches fell out. I was about to put them back when curiosity overtook, and I carefully examined the box. On it was printed the date of manufacture: 1994. I showed this to Voytek, and our eyes met. We both knew immediately; the body was not Al’s. The evidence proved that the climber who wore the rucksack must have died after the manufacture of the matches. Possibly it had been carried by one of the unfortunate three Ukrainian or five Spanish climbers who died during horrendous storms in 1994 or 1995.
I was on an emotional roller coaster. Soon I felt more at ease as I realised that I had avoided the gruesome exhumation. But another thought struck me: this was a body of a climber just like me. Someone who had arrived at Base Camp excited, full of life and anticipation of climbing K2, yet a tragic accident had destroyed their dreams. Somewhere in a house in Spain or Ukraine on a mantelpiece would be a picture of a climber on top of a peak, and every day his proud wife, children, mum or dad would glance at the image and remember.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The massive, wobbling fan on the ceiling only made the heat more unbearable. Three weeks earlier we had just arrived in Islamabad, and for the last three hours we had been in a meeting inside a Pakistani government office. The usually affable film producer, Mick, was sitting lathered in sweat with his shirt glued to his stocky frame. His pale face was glistening with beads of perspiration running from his receding hairline and down his high forehead. He had lost his patience. We had reached an impasse; they did not want us to film on K2. Sat opposite behind a large desk slouched the overweight Pakistani bureaucrat; with his jet-black, greased hair and weasel eyes he looked like a B-list actor who played the henchman of a mafia boss.
‘Let us meet tomorrow, and we can have another look at your proposal,’ he announced curtly while closing the file. An indication that the meeting was at an end.
‘What time should we come back?’ sighed Mick.
Keith, the third member of our team, was first to stand up. Tall and wiry, dressed in shorts, sandals and T-shirt, his dress code was at odds with the crisp white shirt of our officious host.
At the beginning of July 2000, I flew into Islamabad, accompanied by film producer Mick Conefrey, together with my long-time friend and cameraman Keith Partridge. My role was providing safety and logistics while they filmed for a TV programme on K2 as part of a BBC2 series called Mountain Men. It was fourteen years since I was last in Pakistan as a member of a British expedition to K2. Sadly thirteen climbers died in different incidents that season of 1986, including my close friend Al Rouse. Even before we reached the high Karakoram mountains, I was uneasy about returning as my last visit had ended so badly.
It was my fourth visit to Pakistan, and I was well aware of the endless bureaucracy necessary to gain a permit to visit the mountains. As K2 was close to the Indian and Chinese border, the Pakistanis were sensitive about people going there, particularly film crews from the BBC! Granting permission was aggravated by the high-altitude conflict being waged on the Siachen glacier between India and Pakistan. A war that started in 1984 and which still rumbles on today with both countries having a strong military presence on the mountain borders. Finally, on day three, Mick’s negotiating skills endured, and we set off on the two-week journey to Base Camp.
Bad weather cancelled our flight from Islamabad to Skardu, so we squeezed into a minibus, piled high with camera and camping kit, for a rough two-day ride up the Karakoram Highway, through the region that was later to become the home of terrorist Osama Bin Laden. We stopped for a couple of days in the cool mountain air of Skardu, the Baltistan capital that is the gateway to the Karakoram mountains. The town sits in a broad, fertile green valley formed by the Indus whose lazy, inky waters snake past the eighth-century fort. The haphazard streets were lined with white-walled Balti cafes and half-finished, breeze-block offices with iron rebar sprouting out of badly poured concrete. Corrugated iron and telephone wires prevailed while shocking green willow and poplar clung to the sides of polluted, litter-strewn irrigation ditches. It felt like a border town; though firmly Islam it was sprinkled with the salt of Tibetan Buddhists and the pepper of Kashmiri Sikhs.
As we drove to the roadhead in two battered open-top jeeps, we passed small villages that clung to the arid slopes. Apricot and almond groves surrounded the flat-roofed houses, creating a vivid emerald oasis irrigated by channels of cold water fed from the high glaciers. Eventually, we entered the gigantic Braldu gorge framed by bare ochre-coloured cliffs, its deep channel riven by the foaming milk waters of the river. In years past the only passage through was via a narrow and dangerous path precariously cut next to the torrent. Since my last visit, a dirt road had been bulldozed precariously on the steep slopes high above the canyon. As I looked down at a sheer drop of 500 metres from the back of the jeep, I wished I was on the footpath way below! I was primed and ready to jump out of the jeep as our wide-eyed driver wrestled with the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding the crumbling road edge as he manoeuvred across landslides partially blocking the road.
We spent the night below the small community of Askole. It was the last habitation before the mountains, and as it was at the limits of the crop and fruit tree growth, the inhabitants must have had a hard life surviving on their subsistence living. The local women, backs bent double, worked in groups, scything the rye in the small patchwork fields while their snotty-nosed kids dressed in tatters played happily around their feet. Men sat watching, smoking and idly chatting the day away.
Mohammed, the leader of the Balti porters, shouted and cajoled his fifteen locally recruited men with a one-toothed happy smile. He was dressed traditionally, in a shabby, earth-coloured shalwar kameez long shirt and baggy trousers. A Nating wool hat sat atop his swarthy face, skin creased like old leather. On his feet were a pair of shabby Converse baseball shoes, worn without socks and unsuitable for the ice and snow ahead. Wearing similar rags to their leader, these sturdy porters carried well over twenty-five kilos in hessian sacks slung on their backs, held by shoulder-cutting thin hemp cord, trying to earn a pittance for their family.
We set off walking through Askole. A maze of narrow trodden earth paths wound between crude buildings made of stone, wattle and daub. Half of each house was underground, designed for months of cold winter solitude, and the whole place looked like an archaeological dig. Grain and apricots dried on colourful cloths on the low, flat roofs. Women scurried into hiding behind veils, and wide eyes watched through small dark windows.
Gaining height, we left the fields behind and walked along small tracks through scrub and grass-covered glacial moraine. On the third afternoon, we arrived at Paiju and rested a day to acclimatise before the harsh, icy, barren glacier. It was a completely different place to the first time I passed through in 1980 when it was a pleasure to relax next to the small brook that fed the lush island of green-leaved trees and sweet-smelling grass. I was dismayed, as now there were only eroded terraces of sandy earth littered with abandoned charcoal fires, plastic bags and used toilet paper. It had become a squalid place due to overuse by trekking groups and climbing expeditions. We had only ourselves to blame, and it was the reason why the indigenous wildlife such as the ibex, bear and snow leopard struggled to survive.
I was looking forward to staying at Urdukas, our next stop. It was one of the most breathtaking campsites in the world, situated on a small verdant envelope above the lateral moraine wall of the Baltoro glacier. Opposite rose a pronounced silhouette of jagged peaks, the Trango Towers, like the turrets of a giant’s castle, sheer and bold, with the highest rock wall in the world. Drenched in early evening light the surrounding snow was painted the colour of fresh butter.
Since my last visit, the military had placed a camp nearby. An evening breeze carried a pungent air of mule and human ordure heavily laden with overexcited flies. In an earlier era, the granite boulders by the camp had been a serene place, the playground of climbing icons Walter Bonatti and Don Whillans. I walked behind the boulders to find an easy way to the top, to gain a better view, but gave up when a human cesspit confronted me. Our porters started bedding down for the night in the damp, squalid caves under the boulders. I was ashamed to watch these groups of hardy folk huddling around small fires made with twigs they had carried from Paiju, more like animals than men. Small, rough-woven, brown wool blankets were their only warmth. They were making dough balls of gritty flour, which they rolled flat to create chapatis cooked on a simple metal plate. A battered pan blackened by a lifetime of fires heated a weak vegetable broth. This was their dinner for the night – for every night.
‘Hee-Haw … Hee-Haw.’ The mountain silence was punctured by the nearby braying of pack donkeys as we arrived at Concordia, a remarkable confluence of glaciers. Their plaintive call came from the dishevelled military camp used as a staging post for carrying supplies to the battlefront. A small group of hollow-cheeked, malnourished young Pakistani squaddies huddled together outside a canvas tent, their heads bowed with high-altitude headaches. Were they dreaming of hot Punjab nights? Soon they would slog four days through the deep snow, up to the Conway Saddle, to fire on the Indian soldiers below. No doubt aware that frostbite, avalanches, bad weather and altitude-related illness had killed thousands of their comrades rather than enemy bullets! All this suffering while fighting an unknown war for an icy border that only politicians cared about?
At sunset, the clouds parted, revealing our first view of the distant and familiar outline of K2 in all its glory. Slowly the surrounding mountains changed, chameleon-like before our eyes. White to blue to yellow to orange then red. This raw evening theatre never ceased to amaze, but seeing K2 brought back memories and I had no appetite for dinner that evening. Later, in my tent, I had a splitting headache, and I could not sleep. I was tormented by the 1986 disaster, my mind full of questions with no answers. Somewhere on that lofty summit lay Al, entombed in ice, or so I thought.
Climbing in the Greater Ranges had given me so many good memories and close friends, and it still defined my life, but now the dangers seemed to outweigh the joy.
Do I really want to be here? I questioned.
It was mid-morning on the second day at Base Camp, and I was more relaxed knowing the mystery body that Voytek had discovered was not Al. Mightily relieved not to have exhumed the corpse, I left Voytek’s kitchen tent and strolled back to our small camp. I joined Keith and Mick who were busy getting their camera gear ready.
‘Can you help me carry the tripod and camera gear?’ Keith asked.
‘Sure. Where are we going?’
‘The Gilkey Memorial.’
I had forgotten we were doing this, and it was not exactly the most uplifting thing to do after trying to identify the dead climber’s possessions earlier that morning.
The air was loud with the sound of ravens as we scrambled up a rocky promontory to the memorial, a mile away from Base Camp. Originally it was built as a memorial for Art Gilkey who died on the unsuccessful 1953 American expedition. In a heroic rescue attempt he was being lowered, after suffering an altitude-induced thrombosis of the leg, when an avalanche hit and swept him away. The memorial was a large boulder obelisk, now shared with plaques and engraved tin mess plates commemorating all those who had died on K2’s unforgiving slopes. These included epitaphs for friends: Nick Estcourt, who died in 1978; Al Rouse and Julie Tullis, in 1986; and Alison Hargreaves, in 1995. A tinkling sound of memorabilia moving gently in the breeze provided a haunting soundtrack to this sombre place.
Had I not found the box of matches I would be here with a spade and ice axe to re-bury Al. The practicalities were so removed from reality that I cannot comprehend how I could have coped with the exhumation. In a trance, flashes of the dream returned: the skull, the eye and the horn-rimmed glasses. The images haunted me, but with a shiver, I came back to reality and noticed Keith filming. Although not religious, I felt affronted. It was a private place. Detached and withdrawn, I read Alison’s epitaph.
Alison Jane Hargreaves 17 February 1962–13 August 1995
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare she aspire
What the hand dare seize the fire.
W Blake
Everest 13.5.95 K2 13.8.95
The 1995 American/British K2 Expedition
While Keith continued filming, I looked up 4,000 metres towards the top of the mountain hidden by boiling dark clouds. Then lower to the vast talons of black rocks scarfed with snow stretching to the rubble moraine of the Godwin-Austen glacier speckled with the colourful dots of orange and yellow Base Camp tents. It would be no place for humanity up there today, yet Al, Nick, Alison and Julie were still resting up there, somewhere in their icy tombs.
The temperature plummeted as the sun disappeared behind storm clouds. We scrambled down the mound and inadvertently strayed from the path into a necropolis of rocks. It was a cold and grisly place as winter winds had uncovered body parts and we could occasionally glimpse a ripped climbing suit or an old boot. A sickly sweet, putrid smell of the dead filled the air.
We had only planned to be at Base Camp for three days. For me, that was too long; I was consumed with unhappy memories and wanted to get out of this miserable place. But Mick wanted to get to Camp 1 and film at the foot of the Abruzzi Ridge, the original ascent route of the Italians in 1954. So the next day we set off early, in menacing weather, over the glacier that skirts under the vast South Face. It was not a place to linger due to the threat of avalanches, and with trepidation we quickly picked our way over snow and ice blocks that had fallen from high on K2.
Over to the right, in the snow, we noticed an unfamiliar dark shape, and when we investigated, our worst fears were realised. It was a body; more a torso with no legs, one arm and no head. What clothing remained was tattered and torn roughly woven cloth, the type our Balti porters wore. The skin was desiccated and tanned like thin hide pulled over the rib cage. We guessed we were looking at the remains of a local high-altitude porter who had died many years ago, higher up the mountain and who had recently been washed down by an avalanche. We decided to leave the body and when we got back to Base Camp tell the local high-altitude porters about our discovery. Without much conviction we carried on towards Camp 1 and filmed as much as we could before cloud enveloped the slopes.
The next day we left Base Camp to start the long journey home. As I walked down the glacier, silently immersed in my thoughts, each step took me further from my life-defining passion of high-mountain climbing. I smiled when I took my last step off the ice; overwhelmed by the first whiff of rich earth and grass, familiar, like a forgotten friend. The valley stretched below cloaked in green.
I realised that since Al’s death in 1986 I had been in denial, but these last few grim days on K2 had been cathartic and confirmed that my risk-taking days in the high mountains were over. For the last fourteen years, I had lived in limbo, and a large part of me had wanted to quit high-altitude mountaineering. I was no longer a risk taker but could not admit it to myself. At home, I felt inspired and keen to continue, but as soon as I reached the high Himalayan peaks, my anguish began. Ironically, I still enjoyed climbing more than ever in the Alps as a mountain guide, visiting exotic locations working on film safety and sport climbing on sunny cliffs. As I strode off the Baltoro glacier, my defining moment had arrived, and I remembered William Blake’s words.
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
1. Oedema is a condition characterised by an excess of watery fluid collecting in the cavities or tissues of the body. Typically the symptoms of high-altitude sickness are life-threatening when it occurs in the lungs (pulmonary) or brain (cerebral).
