Nanga Parbat 1990
At Camp One on the Schell route on Nanga Parbat in July 1990. The T-shirt was a gift from my boy scout troop, and I’m sporting five weeks of facial hair. STEVE HOUSE COLLECTION
13,000 feet, Advanced Base Camp, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: July 5, 1990
AN HOUR AFTER WE DEPART from the rubbish pit of the Korean advanced base camp, I start to fall behind my five teammates: Tomi, Silvo, Robi, Jože, and Marija. Once behind them, I lose the benefit of group momentum and my footfalls drag ever slower. I see the endless loose brown dirt and rocks ahead of me. I draw deeply of the thinning air and often pause under the labor of doing so.
I am tired; not tired like I have no strength remaining, but tired like I have no will left. I can’t understand this after all the preclimb training. My mind drifts to all those pounding circuits on my bike out Steamboat Island Road, leaving campus just as the rain had started to pour down.
I plod on, resigned to my weakness. The afternoon sun drops behind the mountain, and my doubts start to boil over when suddenly I see the others. They’ve pitched the silver tent against a small cliff and are sitting among the rocks, sharing a pot of food.
“Oh, Štef! Welcome.” I plop down heavily near Robi who slaps me on the thigh as I lean back against the support of my pack, gasping for breath, and glance at my altimeter: 17, 200 feet. Jože, who was squatting near the tent door, stands and moves around behind me and starts to open my pack. I’m carrying the second tent.
“Wait, wait.” I lean forward and take the pack off.
“You okay Štef?” Marija asks, leaning forward from her seat on a nearby rock.
“Tired. I think just tired,” I say, exhaling sharply.
“Here, take some noodles. You can have the rest,” Marija offers.
I slurp down a few cold ramen noodles and drink the salty broth, but refuse the tinned mystery-meat Robi passes me. Jože has his down jacket off now and is moving rocks to build a small tent platform on this loose slope. Robi and Tomi stand to help him. Marija starts unrolling the tent. I lean forward, press my palms against my knees to get up. Slowly, I assemble the tent poles. At 6:30 I crawl in and fall asleep.
I wake panicked. I have to get outside to vomit. Badly. But I can’t get up. I can’t move. Summoning all my will, I sit up. As I do, my head screams like a locomotive blasting its whistle. I flop back down, panting. My desperation builds, and I sit up again, but it’s hard to do anything. I’m robbed of all my strength. I push my toes into my boot shells and stand up. Outside I teeter on the end of the small platform before taking a step down into the loose gravelly slope. Two steps down, I slip but catch myself, and then I throw up in the pallid pool of light cast by my headlamp.
With relief, my willpower waxes stronger; I crawl back through the blackness and back into the safety of my sleeping bag. Lying down I feel heavy and very tired. My head hurts terribly. I am very nauseous. I start to drift away as the night melts into a field of tall green grass coming up knee-high all around me. Then Anne, my girlfriend, is walking towards me. She’s wearing cut-off jeans and has her hair in two long braids. She says something I can’t quite understand, as if I’m too far away. She has a picnic basket. She kneels down next to me and opens it. Talking to me, she begins to unwrap a large sandwich.
I bolt upright and pull down the tent door with a single sweep of my arm. I get a half gasp of air, when suddenly, with a violence I’ve not known before, I am thrust forward, out of the tent door, and vomit onto the loose rocks. The liquid splashes off of the rocks and onto my hand. I collapse onto my elbow and am wracked by more powerful convulsions. I mutter an apology to Robi and Tomi who now have their lights on me and are sitting up. They talk hurriedly as I lie motionless in the doorway. Robi says something to me about tablets. I drag my body out of the tent, wearing only long underwear. A few feet away I lie with my head uphill in the rocks in a loose fetal position. The painful contractions return again and again. I shiver alone on the rocks, sticky with my own fluids.
Robi coaxes a foam pad under me, and blankets me with my sleeping bag. He offers me water; I sit up on my elbow and take a shallow sip. The convulsions immediately rumble low in my bowel before they mercilessly ram into my body, rolling over me again and again. I lie in the rocks, drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of hallucinations. Anne is a part of many of them, as is base camp, and fields of green grass.
Robi returns to squat next to me, wearing unlaced boots and a down coat. “Štef, come back to the tent.”
I sit up; Robi puts his hand under my arm and gently pulls me back to the tent. After a very, very long time, the sun strikes the tent. Good, I think, as I squint into the rays streaming around the mountain. I can go down now.
Tomi and Robi rise and exit the tent. I lie there, berating myself to get up, get my pack, and stuff my sleeping bag. The heat in the tent becomes unbearable. Still, I can’t will myself to move. I’m paralyzed. Marija, fully dressed for climbing, brings a pot with water. I am so thirsty. I sit up, take a sip, and seconds later throw up again. Like before, I can’t stop. Wasted, I collapse back into the tent, even more exhausted.
Tomi approaches with my rucksack, hands it to me, and starts to dismantle the tent with me still in it. I don’t manage to get out of the tent before it comes down. Jože has scouted a better location for Camp 1 a few hundred feet higher.
I lay out my sleeping bag where the tent had been and doze in the sun. A few short hours later they return. I push my unstuffed sleeping bag into my empty pack and start down, my mind avoiding the discomfort as I slowly make my way back to base camp, where I sleep for two days. During waking moments I think that I am done with this mountain, that I’ve been defeated. The self-pity helps me sleep.
Latoba Meadows Base Camp, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: July 4, 1990, (three days before)
The day before I foolishly rushed to 17,000 feet and got sick, I wrote in my journal, “I am glad to be here, it has been such a long journey. The summit looks so far, far away. The whole day we walked to base camp I tried not to think about it.” I look up, knowing that I do not know a fraction of what there is to know about myself. In the long silences between avalanches I wonder whether my unknown interior contains bravery or cowardice, strength or weakness.
With a rock for a pillow I stretch out and gaze at Nanga Parbat: the ice suspended thousands of feet above base camp blushes gray as the afternoon storms begin to clear. The clouds are lifting on the first thermals of the day, unveiling buttresses of dark stone. Skyscraper seracs show iridescent blue ice where they have calved off, cleansing the wall at random moments. When they go big they deposit iron-hard boulders of turquoise ice on the flat goat-shorn meadow.
Our expedition was organized from the Mountaineering Club Kozjak in Maribor by the fresh-faced engineering professor, Tone Golnar. It is Tone’s dream to open a new route on the Rupal Face. During the spring of 1989 he traveled across Slovenia canvassing the alpine clubs for willing expedition members.
Tone spread the large, crisp photographs of Nanga Parbat, all resplendent mountain and piercing blue sky, across the desk in the Mountaineering Club Kozjak’s basement meeting room. When I saw them I knew I must go. This moment would begin a 17-year obsession with the Rupal Face. This was the opportunity I craved: my chance to step into the pages of history, to climb in the big mountains. I saw those photographs one week before I returned home to Oregon from my year abroad. Immediately I started working to save money towards the $1,800 cost. I wrote Tone a letter expressing my interest in the expedition; to increase my chances of being accepted I lied, claiming to be 20 instead of 18 years of age.
A year later we are assembled in Nanga Parbat Base Camp in Pakistan: 18 Slovenes, a Bosnian, a Serbian, and me.
Since then, a new influence has emerged. Marija Frantar vibrates with the confidence of a driven woman. As a vegetarian among omnivores she lives on fried potatoes and dandelion salad. She is quick to smile, and often blushes at a joke. She is one of the most experienced among us, having climbed three 7,000-meter peaks. She has convinced Tone to abandon his pie-in-the-sky scheme of climbing the Rupal Face in favor of the less technical Schell route, the easiest route to the summit of Nanga Parbat from this side of the mountain.
“The first task of the expedition,” announces Tone as we finish a dinner of ramen soup, fried potatoes, and a few curried green beans, “is to establish Camp 1. To do this we will divide into teams of five or six. Who wants to be on the first team?” Everyone but me raises a hand.
“Štef,” whispers Robi, a fellow youngster on this expedition. “Those on the first team will be the first to try the summit!” Understanding this, I too raise my hand.
“The most experienced should go first. Jože and Marija, of course. Tomi, Robi and Silvo.” Tone pauses as he looks around. “And Štef.” I am surprised to hear my name. I am the youngest, the least experienced. But Tone is a close friend of Ljubo’s, and my suspicion that Ljubo has asked Tone to look out for me has just been confirmed.
A few people protest, but this time it is lanky Marija who speaks up, her square-shorn hair accentuates her gaunt, hollow-cheeked, uber-fit look. “If we make the camps good and have some luck with the weather,” she pauses to look at each of the members, “and we work well together, everyone will climb to the summit. It is early in the season. We all will have an opportunity to work.”
In the morning the six of us rise to warm and calm conditions. The top third of the mountain is shrouded in a singular cloudbank and a thin pane of cirrus cloud fans out across the southwestern sky. Wordlessly, Jože distributes the group gear: tents, stoves, fuel, and a bit of rope. I slip my assigned tent into my backpack and head across the green pasture that cradles base camp.
After three hours we arrive at what the last expedition, a group of Koreans, had used as their advanced base camp. Tone and Jože have started to prepare some soup in an aluminum pot perched on a tiny stove. A bit of water dribbles through the nearby boulders. The small flat area against the wall is stacked full of rubbish: plastic and foil wrappers, empty fuel canisters, most of it with an Asian script.
As we ascend higher and higher I feel weaker and slower. We set up Camp 1 on a barren rock field, and a few hours later I have my first experience with altitude sickness.
Latoba Meadows Base Camp, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: July 8, 1990
Weakly, I pick up my journal. “On the morning of the 5th we went up to establish and occupy Camp 1. It’s no coincidence that I haven’t written about it until two days after my return. It was a very harsh 48 hours. The kind of experience that you see in a person’s eyes years after the fact.”
As the days wear on, the rest of the team moves in and out of base camp, establishing a rhythm of work and rest. Watching them on the fourth morning after my bout with altitude sickness, I feel the desire to climb creeping back. I talk to Tone and we decide to work me back into the rotation. I will take up the end of the line by joining with the oldest expedition member, Željko from Bosnia.
The next morning I am awakened by the sound of rain on the tent. I immediately realize that we won’t be going up today. I am relieved. Seconds later I reproach myself for this feeling. I am anxious about what will happen my next trip up, frightened that I will get altitude illness again. Heavy clouds sag across the mountains like a wet dishrag. Somehow the fresh and cool morning brings honesty and rawness.
The following morning the weather is clear and Željko and I set off at dawn. I gladly fall in behind him, matching his pace, step for step, foot for foot. The familiar brown scree rolls by. My rucksack feels light. Hundreds of tiny wild-flowers pierce the brown dirt. By 3 o’clock we reach Camp 1 and I climb inside the narrow tent. The warmth of the sun on the tent relaxes me. The tent door frames clouds drifting gently past my view. I am hungry and nip into a can of tuna fish and then polish off a few granola bars. It has warmed enough that the dripping sound of melting snow has changed to the hollow gurgle of water percolating down through the boulders where a few days ago I knelt, sick and weakened.
At midnight we wake. Željko is already outside the tent, dressed in dark blue climbing pants and a button-down cotton flannel shirt befitting his occupation as a farmer. Standing, he shuts off the stove and hands me a thermos of tea. Pulling on my boots, I step into the lacquered darkness of a moonless night. While still fastening his helmet on over his hand-knit wool cap, Željko starts off toward the ropes that have been fixed above Camp 1.
I fall in behind, steadying my breathing as we work upwards, each slow step feels awkward until finally, we slip into a pattern. One crampon at a time bites the frozen snow. Step up, swing the other leg around and up, drop it just a bit higher. It is good to feel the crunch of the snow under the machine-like efficiency of my crampons. I lift the axe in my uphill hand, then plunge it back down, the tip striking the snow with a hollow twang.
On reaching the crest above camp we follow a faintly scuffed path toward the base of a rock tower, inked even blacker in silhouette against the sky. There, at the base, a piton is fixed with a carabiner which in turn holds a knotted white rope; the fixed line that will safeguard our passage across the most difficult sections of the climb.
Željko stops to attach his ascender to the rope. With a quick tug to assure himself it’s working, he resumes climbing. Taking advantage of the wisdom that we should never climb on the same section of rope at the same time, I remove my pack and sip some hot tea from my thermos. Once Željko is across the icy couloir and has moved his ascender past the next piton, I lightly shoulder my load of ramen, pasta, tea, sugar, powdered milk and stove fuel bound for Camp 2. The couloir passes under my crampons without event, and the route crosses onto another rib of icy rock.
The monotony of climbing starts to weigh on me as section after section passes. I move along the rope, every step secured by the fixed line. I soon realize that when confronted with a difficult section the quickest thing is to forego any climbing technique and simply pull on the fixed rope. In fact, this is the only way I can keep up with the plaid blur of Željko, whose robotic pace remains steady.
Camp 2 is perched on a house-size ice shelf formed by the confluence of the mountain’s south face and the smaller, but still several-thousand-foot wall, to the west. We unload our supplies into the empty tents. As I finish unpacking my load I catch a short, hoarse yodel on the wind. I look up; it’s Tone and Robi on their way back down from supplying Camp 3 several thousand feet above.
I hoot in reply and put on my parka to wait for my friends. Željko sits on his pack, dons a patched down parka, and pulls a stove from the tent to start preparing a drink for the descending pair.
“How is it?” I ask as Robi steps a cramponed foot onto the tent platform chopped into the ice. His faded yellow parka hangs loose and oversized on his gaunt steelworker’s frame.
“Good. It’s good. Glad to see you on the mountain again Štef. Hello Željko.”
“Hello, hello,” Željko says, muffled by the hiss of the stove working away at the ice.
I had not expected conditions to be so warm. At 19,000 feet I’m wearing only Midweight Capilene, and no gloves. This was my first time using fixed lines; the experience was not a positive one. STEVE HOUSE COLLECTION
“Maybe we will go down to base camp with you after a short rest. No?” Robi looks at Tone.
“Yes,” replies Tone, pulling out a sleeping pad to sit on. “It is better to sleep in base camp tonight, but we should start down soon, the sun will loosen the rocks. It will be too dangerous to cross the couloir in a few hours.” Tone ponders Željko with a professorial look. “Željko, leave the stove and start back with Štef. We will finish here and follow behind you. Go before it gets too warm.”
“Okay. I understand.” Željko stands and takes off his coat. “Lucky trails.” With that familiar mountaineers’ farewell, he shoulders his pack. I strip off my own parka. It’s too warm now for the down jacket, even at rest. When I look up from stuffing my jacket into my pack, Željko has already set off down the lines. I clip in with my locking carabiner and start down after him.
I chase Željko’s crampon marks down the ice ridge, where we switch to rappelling down the lines, and then down the mixed face of rock and ice. The ropes are starting to show a few nicks, signs of rock fall, that I didn’t notice as I came up by headlamp. I blast down the lines; Željko always just a bit ahead. I work harder to keep up, transitioning from one rappel to the next as fast as I can. When I almost catch up, he is across the final couloir and working down the slope above Camp 1.
At the start of the traverse I pause and look up the couloir to see if any stones are falling towards me. Nothing. I hold my breath to listen. A rush of wind lifts a cloud over the ridge crest revealing a sudden view of the peaks on the horizon. No other sound but the wind. I look down at my feet and start across.
Once on the other side, I pause to catch my breath. I’m losing strength now; I am hot and fatigued, and long since out of tea. It has taken us three hours to descend from Camp 2. From Camp 1 it is a simple hike down 5,000 feet of loose scree to base camp: a bitch to go up, but quick to descend. I turn and spy two dots of color a few hundred feet above. Robi, in yellow, is followed closely by Tone’s purple parka. They’re just 20 minutes behind me.
Five minutes later I step down and drop my pack near the biggest tent at Camp 1. “Good. No?” says Željko, as he glances at his watch. He already has his few things out of the tent and is packing to go to base camp.
“Yeah, three hours. I think that’s good for the first time down. I’m tired though.”
Just then, a large clatter of stones is followed by a sharp, distinct human shout. I spin around in time to see a barrage of loose stones fall past Robi and strafe the couloir below him. The sound is deafening as the rock fall passes 40 feet to the right of camp. Above us Tone is yelling. Robi is not moving.
“Shit.” I turn back to the pack I just took off. Željko is already on his feet, bounding up the hill. I shoulder my pack and trip over the guy-lines to the tent in my haste. I can’t tell what is going on above us. Raggedly I breathe and scramble upwards toward Robi and Tone. Faster and faster, until I have to stop, gasping for breath, lungs burning.
Željko flies ahead of me. I look up. Both Tone and Robi are in the middle of the snow couloir now. And both are moving off to the side toward us. Relief. Robi is okay, I think. “He’s okay. He’s okay.” I slow my pace but continue to climb toward the descending pair.
Leaning heavily against Tone, Robi walks towards me. He’s holding his left elbow and his left hand is curled into an unnatural snarl. Željko shadows them, eyeing Robi cautiously.
“It’s my arm,” he says, his face red. “It’s broken I think. Shit! I don’t believe it.” A rock rolls under his foot and he stumbles. Tone catches Robi before he topples over.
“Slowly,” Tone coaches softly. “Slowly now.”
“Give me your pack, Robi,” I say.
“No, no. At camp,” he replies. I turn around to retrace the hundred feet back to Camp 1.
Two days later a pair of small black dots noisily beat the sky as they make their cautious descent across the rock-strewn glacier and circle above our barren little meadow. A few moments later the first Pakistani Army helicopter dips towards our camp and lands a few hundred feet away. The second one lands a few hundred feet further down valley. The pilot waves us forward. Robi grasps his injured arm in its sling, and in a slouch, he jogs towards the waiting chopper. Taking a seat on the pilot’s left-hand side, he clumsily fixes his seat belt before returning the pilot’s curt nod. With a deafening rattle he is gone. No good-bye. No chance for hopeful words. Robi is lifted into the bosom of civilization and is on his way to a hospital in Islamabad where his arm will be X-rayed, the cracked bones set and cast.
Robi was one of our strongest climbers, and the mood of the expedition shifts down from one of youthful exuberance to measured stoicism. Željko and I continue to cycle loads up to camps 1 and 2. On the third trip we try to carry two sleeping bags to Camp 3 but are turned back by our slow progress in the recent heavy snows.
Latoba Meadows Base Camp, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: July 29, 1990
In base camp the radio handset buzzes to life. “Base camp, base camp. Speak up.” It’s Jože.
“Base camp.” repeats Tone.
“Yeah, Tone. The weather seems fine, so Marija and I will start for the summit tomorrow.” They’re attempting the summit? How can that happen so fast, I think.
“Good. You have everything?” Tone replies stiffly.
“Ya, Ya. The light tent and the one sleeping bag and the new rope that Štef brought.” My rope? I think. How did my rope get up there? But I know, it was the best one, the only new one, and part of the expedition gear. I just wish I was up there, using it.
“Lucky trails. Call us each night at 8 o’clock if possible.” Tone signs off.
“Thank you. Lucky trails. Tomorrow we will call.” The radio crackles and goes dead.
The next day the expedition is quiet. No one goes up on the mountain. In camp we all rest: reading in the tents, playing nervous games of cards, scanning the skies for approaching storms. Waiting. That night the radio is silent and the next day the card game doesn’t formulate.
“Tone, weren’t they supposed to call every night?” I ask.
“Ya, Štef. They are supposed to call. I am worried. It is again after the time they should call. This is not good.”
On the third day, our liaison officer, Assad, offers his assistance. He has access to army communications and there is an army camp just down valley. Perhaps Marija and Jože descended the opposite side of the mountain. In our imaginings this is certainly possible. So Assad contacts an army officer who is stationed in Chilas, on the mountain’s far side; this officer agrees to send two men up to the Diamir Base Camp to see if they descended the easier far side of the mountain.
Five days later and still no word from Marija and Jože. I am shaken from my sleep by visions of the bivouacked pair, thousands of feet above me, cold and freezing, while I lie here comfortably warm. Unable to get back to sleep, I write a long letter to Anne: “They haven’t called in for five days now… we’re all thinking that the worst has happened.”
At first light I head across the meadow to send it out with the Sierra Club trekking group that camped nearby last night. Just as I am returning to my tent, I hear something I haven’t heard in a long time.
“Base camp, base camp, speak up. Over.” It’s Jože!
Within seconds Tone is outside the tent and is quickly surrounded by the rest of the expedition, standing tiptoe on the dewy ground, half-dressed, and clamoring to hear the radio.
“Base camp here. How are you? Tell us everything!” Tone demands.
“Yeah. All is okay. On 31 July at five in afternoon we reached the summit. We are both tired. Both okay. Marija has little frostbite on her fingers, but it is fine. We are at Camp Three now. We come down to base camp today if possible.”
A great shout of group relief goes out. Tone looks like he might cry. Everyone is talking in fast breathless sentences. I run over to the trekkers, reclaim my letter, and quickly scrawl the good news on the outside of the envelope.
At dusk Marija and Jože walk into base camp. A few members have climbed up to them to help them with their packs. I watch the small, tight pack of climbers move down the valley toward base camp. At dinner we all excitedly fire questions at them: How were the conditions? Where did you bivouac? What took so much time? Why could they not call for five days? What did the summit look like?
At breakfast the next morning the conversation has shifted. “Tone,” Željko asks. “What now. Who is going up next?”
“No Željko, no one is going up. Only to clean the camps.”
“But we want a chance at the summit now!” Željko cries.
Tone’s reply is drowned in the din of reaction. Finally, Tone stands up to assert his voice, jabbing the air to make his points. “Twelve hours ago half of you thought Marija and Jože were dead!” His face flushes red with emotion. “Now you want to go up? No. It is too difficult. Too dangerous. This expedition is finished.” He sits down.
Two days later at Camp 1 Željko and I lift our massive packs. Of the 20, we were the only ones willing to come and clean out the camp and bring the tents down. I glance up, our fixed lines stretch off, we do not have the time or the willing manpower to clean those ropes off the mountain. I turn and plunge down the loose dirt and scree below me. Leaving the ropes fixed is inexcusable littering. My disappointment in my teammates propels me all the way to base camp.
Three weeks later I perch on a large white granite boulder peering up the Batura Glacier valley. I’ve traveled hundreds of miles by jeep, bus, tractor, and finally by foot. When the expedition dissolved I wanted to see more of this country, while the others elected to return to Islamabad for an early flight home. I pick up my journal, shifting uncomfortably on the rock. As far I as I can see there are unclimbed mountains of striking danger and uncommon beauty.
“What I have learned about myself on this expedition I will be assimilating for a long time,” I write. “There were many valuable lessons. I have been shown how much I did not know. Marija and Jože have also shown me how much can be done. Becoming an alpinist, an alpinist who can reach these summits, including Nanga Parbat. That is what I want to become.”
I pause, focusing on the tiny points of the summits piercing the horizon. I put the pen back to the paper. “Rereading what I just wrote, I realize that I’m not even sure exactly what that entails. I suppose I need to get more experience. I know that I need to improve my own climbing. And organize my own climbs. I need to get good enough not to need fixed ropes. What a disaster fixed ropes and camps are! I have to find a way to surround myself with good climbers. Good partners will make me a better climber. And that’s what I want to be, the best climber I can become. If I could climb the Rupal Face some day, that would be the ultimate. I can’t imagine ever becoming good enough for that.”