Here I go again. I lurched forward and fumbled with the zipper. I fought my way out through the tent door and launched vomit over the edge to watch it begin its thousand-foot spiral into the moonlight. Adam didn’t stir. This was my first night at the shoulder camp (5600m) and I felt wretched. I slumped back, delirious, and felt icy water travel down my gullet. Lonely in the silence, I began to mull over the lessons I had learned so far on this trip and the lessons I was about to learn. I took out my notebook and scribbled:
1 … on dealing with power crazed officials …
The 45-degree heat in Rawalpindi lent an intense and surreal feel to the whole business of dealing with the authorities. Todd Skinner and his team, also heading for Trango, had had their appointment with the Ministry of Tourism just a little while before us and they came out with horror stories. Due to the secretary losing an important piece of paper the team had been forced to stay in the city for days longer than planned. When Todd commented on how hot the day was the head of the mountaineering division asked him if he knew how hot was the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima? “7000 degrees. And do you know what happens to the body at that temperature? Eyes explode, skin melts, everybody dead!” With this in mind we entered uneasily into the office. But our briefing went a little differently. We were allowed to go quickly but only after an anti-American rant. Then he thumped his fist on the desk and disclosed that he didn’t just respect Britain, no, he loved it. We praised our luck and ran away to our hotel.
2 … on dealing with irritating reporters …
Again that damned reporter was waiting for us at the hotel. He wrote for a Pakistani national and hung around us for days. All he wanted to know about was 8000ers and how many had died on them. When he asked us about our climbing credentials we told him that Geraldine had made the first ascent of Lockwoods Chimney and that Adam had done a speed ascent of Mousetrap in two hours! He went away happy with his story and we headed for the mountains.
3 … on putting your life in the hands of others …
Driving the Braldu Gorge had more than a few moments of terror. What was described as the new road to Askole turned out to be little more than a footpath hairpinning its way across mud slides and deep canyons. We lost one jeep, because of an insane driver, luckily before we got to the really terrifying bit. The top-heavy jeeps skidded to a stop before a 200-yard scree chute. The porters dismounted, said some prayers and ran for it, stopping occasionally to dig out the road whilst being bombarded by falling rocks of all sizes. We joined in and afterwards the drivers put their feet down and went for it with the raging Braldu river a long way below. The key was to sit on the very top of the jeep (to ensure a quick escape) and to maintain complete faith in the inshallah factor.
4 … on the eradication of dangerous creatures …
Andy regaled us with the time when, up on the nearby Biafo Glacier, his team was plagued by a bear. It chewed all the cans, including gas canisters, and had to be fought off with fire. It was one of the last Himalayan brown bears in the area and over lunch Usup, a porter, told us proudly of how he had shot it dead. “Always eating trekker food and making trouble.” Before all these trekkers and expeditions the Balti people had no real reason to go into the bears’ habitat. But then came the tourists to create a bear problem. Andy and I looked at each other in disbelief.
5 … on local beliefs …
Many of the porters prostrate themselves toward Mecca and pray before undertaking anything they feel may be dangerous, such as passing before a loose hillside or climbing a gully. Watching a lone porter above the vastness of the Baltoro Glacier meditating in such a place of grandeur was a powerful scene which I will find hard to forget. I could equate with that need for a few moments’ tranquillity. Myself, agnostic at this time, can still respect the healing of such a ritual. It made me want to construct my own.
6 … on heroes and role models …
On seeing Trango for the first time, thirteen years of sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening stories and daydreams solidified. In ’83, when I was struggling with VS’s in the Lancashire quarries, two of my teachers in the arts of climbing and revelry, Ian Lonsdale and Dai Lampard, headed off to make the second ascent of a remote tower. We were all fired up by their enthusiasm. The guys got to within a couple of pitches of the top but then had to retreat in a storm after Lonsdale got his head stuck in a fat crack. Sometime after, I moved to North Wales, where I met Mo Anthoine who introduced me to mountaineering. He was on the first ascent of Trango with Boysen, Brown and Howells. That was in ’76. Again the stories stuck with me; the rock fall in Tin Can Alley, Boysen getting his knee stuck and having to hack at it with a sharpened piton. Trango had become a subconscious ambition. And now, stood like a matchstick amidst these minarets, I felt as though I was in a house of God – the Gothic shapes and those echoes. You didn’t want to make a sound. And over there, that one is even called the Cathedral, perhaps Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia but on an incomprehensible scale. Until we made out the blue dot of Greg Child’s abandoned portaledge on the Minamura route, that is. Then the whole place didn’t shrink but grew larger in our perception. The famous Pole Voytek Kurtyka made a great climb up there too. Ever since my initiation into the mountains I had always looked to these two climbers for inspiration. And what was Kurtyka’s comment after he had made it, with Erhard Loretan, to Trango’s summit? That it took a greater physical effort than any of the 8000-metre peaks he had ascended. An imaginary voice with a Polish accent repeated the words in my mind, again and again, as I strained my neck to gaze up at the rock.
7 … on choosing a suitable approach to the mountain …
We made a base camp on the Dunge Glacier. After twelve days load-carrying in the Gullies of Hell, where we climbed only at night, like vampires, avoiding the hazards which day brings, we had a visit from some of our American friends. They happened to let slip that there was absolutely no snow on the Trango Glacier side of the mountain. We sighed. With most of our kit a thousand metres up in the gully we decided to stick with it. The women’s team and Adam and Andy were trying to approach the Slovene route on the South Face and Noel and I were heading for a new line on the North Face. After almost two weeks of frying by day in our Gemini and gasping by night under pig loads of wall gear we were almost at the rock wall. Noel felt he needed some rest as the sun came up, but I thought I would continue with my load higher up the couloir. He told me to be safe and I assured him that I would be as I plodded off feeling angry that he was not strong enough to come with me. The ground was easy at first above our perched little camp on an exposed ridge above the Dunge Glacier. After a couple of hundred metres the ice became steeper and my bag of ironmongery was weighing me down. I wanted to turn back, but I’d got the bugger so high! I know, I would leave it hanging on an ice screw and collect it tonight. Towards the end of the day it stormed and we sat out the night in our claustrophobic tent. I irritated Noel with my ability to sleep for long periods of time, as if mocking his insomnia. Avalanches raked our gully but we were safe on our little ridge. I began to worry about my bag of crucial gear up on the avalanche slope and my worries were founded when the next day on our way to the col we couldn’t find it anywhere. What an idiot I had been, abandoning equipment in such an exposed place. I was amazed that Noel did not even begin to chastise me and felt guilty at my response the day before when he said he needed a rest.
We roped up and climbed in pitches up unstable snow and reached the Col Curran in the dark and, after tying our ropes together and making a long rappel, retreated to our little camp. At 5.30 a.m. we awoke to rain and wind and decided to run away to base camp and dahl. It should have been a simple descent but we had a little mishap. As I front-pointed down the slope for 500 metres Noel didn’t emerge into the gully. I heard Kevin Starr of the American North Face expedition, who were up on their ledges, shouting. “Are you OK? Do you need help?” What was going on? I didn’t understand. As I climbed back up the slope Noel’s head appeared and moaned. It continued to rain and, as Noel crawled and slithered slowly towards me, he was hit by a slush avalanche. He dug in both his axes and screamed as I looked on useless. The river of slush cascaded over him and, credit to Noel’s grip and determination, didn’t sweep him away. Eventually the torrent abated enough for Noel to escape out of his rut and begin crawling over to me.
When we met he just spluttered, “Crevasse. Ribs.”
“Don’t say anything else, Noel. Let’s just get you to camp.” I felt terribly guilty – I should have stayed closer to him in such a dangerous place but hindsight doesn’t appreciate the cold wet urge to hurry off that morning. We had no ropes with us, so I fielded him as he struggled down the steeper ice pitches. From his chest came a disturbing gurgling sound and I tried vainly to hurry him as heavy wet avalanches slid down the sides of the gully. Noel put a brave face on though, and after many hours we stumbled into camp. The whole team laughed when they saw Noel’s familiar bedraggled form, they had no inkling of what had happened that morning. Noel burst into tears with the relief of the stress and our friends became more concerned. Donna, our expedition veterinary surgeon, checked him out by asking him to stand on all fours (the stance of most of her other patients) while she moved her stethoscope over his back and that was the end of the trip for him. Three broken ribs and a punctured lung. Andy, who with Adam had already fixed to the shoulder at 5600 metres, escorted Noel out of the mountains and home safely. So with only two of us left and my wall rack (including forty-seven cams and fifty RPs) lost in an avalanche we decided to go around to the right side of the mountain.
8 … on building sand castles …
Chasing these granite spires around the world, which is what I’ve been doing for the last five years, can be a frustrating business. A little like building sand castles – like the ones we built as children at the sea’s edge. The tallest castles are very delicate structures and, like our best planned schemes, can topple before us. Sometimes you succeed and build a perfect castle but in time the tide always turns and your castle melts. Then it is time to build another.
9 … on dealing with military liaison officers …
“I will come with you on this mountain.”
“Sorry, Captain Jamal, but you have not the experience.”
“If a woman of forty-three can climb Trango then so can I.”
Geraldine looked dismayed and shook her head. Captain Jamal had begun the trip as quite a friendly young man. We even bridged the cultural gap briefly and got him raving on the glacier. A full moon night, blowing his whistle and grooving to Leftfield and Primal Scream. But as soon as even the more absurd rules were slightly bent his humour evaporated. Growing up in the Thatcher age some of us had come to distrust and often view the military with contempt and now we had to work with a soldier. Jamal found our liberal views and apparent lack of cohesiveness as difficult to cope with as we found his fatigues. That is not to say that he didn’t have our respect and friendship but there was always a wall up which our concepts could never climb and meet on top. Ali and Ismail, our cooks, were good guys. They had turned our base camp into a garden with windmills and flowers and they always kept us happy with fine food when the storms lasted a little too long. We had to ask Captain Jamal to stop his reprimands and ordering them around. As the trip progressed our irritation intensified so much that his physical appearance began to change before us. He slowly transformed from a handsome boy into a bullfrog. To be fair, it must have been hard for him – his first time in the mountains, with strangers and for so long. But a little later something happened that was to make our captain even less approachable.
10 … on the extraction of bodies from lakes …
Mr Saki had tried to swim across the lake at the American base camp on the moraines of the Trango Glacier. He was their assistant cook and it was the eighteen-year-old’s first time in the mountains. Out in the middle he had succumbed to cold and sank. He came up and shouted but everyone on the bank thought he was shouting for joy and waved back. When he went down again one of the Spanish expedition jumped in and tried to get to him but was repulsed by the freezing water. Three weeks later we had moved around to the American camp, from where the approach gully was wonderfully safe. One morning, when we emerged from our tents, we noticed that Mr Saki had surfaced so the LOs set about building a raft out of thermorests with which to go and fetch him in. They worked with childlike enthusiasm, like they were glad to have something ‘manly’ to do. Adnan, the Americans’ LO, being a major, gave the orders while Captain Jamal obeyed, along with the cooks. When the raft was completed and the grim job in hand was imminent the awful thing happened – Major Adnan pulled rank and ordered Jamal to go out there and lasso the corpse. We sat down and groaned. As Jamal tried again and again to paddle out the wind changed direction and Mr Saki turned around and headed out toward the centre of the lake. Jamal paddled frantically turning round and round and then capsized. The Japanese expedition were capturing all the action on the three video cameras. Jamal was dragged in on our hundred-metre static rope and the LOs scratched their heads. As one of the women had suggested earlier, they then decided to use the blue barrels as extra ballast. Out Jamal went again, paddling with a snow shovel and with Adnan shouting in an excited voice, “Left a bit “and “Right a little”, as if it were not obvious where the poor lad was floating. I remember a man in Llanberis lake who used to float up for just long enough to allow his rescuers to get near him and then, irritatingly, sink again to come up a few days later. Thankfully, Mr Saki stayed afloat long enough for Jamal to lasso and pull him in. With this ridiculous scene in our heads, and trying not to believe in bad omens, Adam and I set off up Tin Can Alley.
11 … on choosing optimum bad conditions …
We decided to go very light. Perhaps too light. We took one pair of plastic boots between us and one pair of rock shoes, one titanium ice axe and one pair of crampons. For a rack we had two sets of nuts and two sets of Friends, supplemented with huge Camalots. We had no pitons and no bivvy bags. Every item not absolutely essential was discarded. Todd and his team had very kindly let us jumar their ropes to the shoulder Adam had already climbed to. Here I spent the night vomiting and hating Adam for sleeping. For two days we took our time fixing four pitches above the shoulder, getting off on the feeling of climbing – something you don’t do much of on trips of this kind. We were on an apron of glittering orange granite. In cherub-bum cracks sculpted by the ice and finished off by the hands of the wind. As Adam led us up a verglassed off-width on tipped out Camalot 5s, we fixed our ropes and, as the sun dogs and high cirrus had prophesied, in came the next storm. Down we fled. After an age of playing Nintendo at base camp we were getting desperate. All we wanted was to get this thing over and done with. The women had run out of time now and were about to leave and we wanted the same. Captain Jamal said he couldn’t permit the team to split up but they had careers to rush back to and Adam and I were staying as long as it took.
“This is no way to conduct an expedition, Mr Paul. Things were going so well and now everything has fallen apart.”
The glittering orange was fading crimson in the back of my mind. I was in danger of losing the magic amidst all this bad feeling. But as one day dawned the storm clouds had scattered and the altimeter told us to go. We waded through fresh snow and jumared up icefalls to again sleep at the shoulder. The Americans were looking weary. They’d been on this ledge for thirty days without going down. We packed two days of potato powder and stuffing mix and minimal clothing and jumared to our highpoint. As the sun came onto the wall we realised our unavoidable fate. Ice began to crash down the wall all around us, chandeliers falling in slow motion, and easy looking cracks were choked with foot-thick water ice. The sky was still hazy and we knew we only had a small window. It was now or not at all. Progress was unbearably slow, like climbing hard Scottish mixed pitches with one toffee hammer. After our two days we were still 300 metres from the summit and very low on food. Adam made a terrible dinner of undissolved dried potato and my face was blooded after being hit by ice. We slept at the ‘good bivvy’ marked on the topo above a dark void. The third day dawned and illuminated eerie clouds. The wind had changed to a northerly, which we hadn’t seen before, and the temperature steadily dropped. I started to have some trouble breathing and my lungs began to rattle – I just thought I was a bit chesty. I led my hardest pitch of the route, an overhanging icefall with lots of sculpting. The weather continued to deteriorate and this snail-pace was frustrating.
12 … on choosing an able partner …
Adam had never been proper mountaineering before and he found moments of this trip quite harrowing. This storm he found particularly worrying and he had suggested that maybe we should retreat. We perched on a ledge and had a brief conference. I was having increasing difficulty getting air in but was loathe to bail out this close.
“If you can lead it, Adam, I can jug it.”
Adam is a master in the art of sloth and torpor but he surpassed everyone with his recent record-breaking speed ascents on El Capitan which prepared him well for this very situation. Now, on the sharp end, he slugged his way up corners and wide cracks with ease. When I arrived at the belay he would have tied-off the rope and be halfway up the next pitch. In this way we climbed hungry and reached a tormented summit which we could barely hang onto. It was 4.30 p.m. on August 13. A little later on the same day nine people, including friends, were blown off K2, just a few miles north, but we wouldn’t know this for ten more days. What we endured for three days took three hours to descend by rappel. Sometimes the ropes would be stuck for just long enough to get us worried and then, with a tug, come falling down. Back at the shoulder the Americans met us with hot brews and food and I collapsed, more ill than elated, into the tent. I kept Adam awake all night with my bubbling lungs which he said sounded like I was smoking a bong.
13 … on the collection of exotic ailments …
I had never had pulmonary oedema before. It wasn’t very pleasant at the time but it was definitely one for the collection. Now I have lots to talk about at dinner parties – of how, just before this trip, I had recovered from a very rare heart virus I’d picked up on Baffin Island, of how I’d got dysentery in Bolivia, cerebral oedema in Gangotri, hepatitis in Hampi and now a dreadful case of bubbles on Trango. The next day I just wanted to stay in my pit and deteriorate but, thankfully, Adam forced me to get on the ropes. That evening back at camp, safe and almost well, we could now afford the luxury of laughter as our anecdotes, that will last a lifetime, took shape.
14 … on luck and fate …
A few days later, as we sit in camp eating porridge full of weevils, a huge rockfall rakes our gully and a plume of dust rises a thousand feet. We could smell the cordite. Mohammed, a porter friend, has just come down half an hour earlier with my abandoned haulbag. He looks up at the dust and then down at me and says with a grin, “Acha. Good.”
15 … on getting banned from Pakistan …
“A Pakistani expedition would never abandon a leader who was dying from oedema. Perhaps these people you call your friends are not really so.”
The head of the mountaineering division seemed to be enjoying this debriefing. I’m sure he was relishing toying with us, that feeling of power he must have been getting.
“Why did you not stop them leaving? You are their leader.”
“Things are different where we come from. I cannot order people around, I can’t force them to do things against their will.”
“But the rules clearly state that an expedition must stay together at all times.”
I tried to reason by saying that lots of other trips split up in the same way without any problems at all.
“But you were in a war zone. How do we know that members of your team are not spies for the Indians? How do we know that they were not taking pictures of important military installations?”
I almost giggled as I tried to imagine how those ramshackled groups of army tents on the Baltoro or those falling down bridges, that hundreds of tourists see every day, could be classed as important military installations, but before I could compose myself and answer he jumped in with a self-satisfied request.
“Please can you give us $400 for your abandoned equipment.”
“But isn’t it bad enough that I’ve lost thousands of dollars of equipment in the avalanche without having to pay more?”
“The mountain is not interested in how much your equipment costs. Now please pay and sign here. And could you please give Captain Jamal $400 for food.”
“But the captain ate with us for the whole expedition. We fed him well.”
“That is irrelevant. You signed here your agreement. Look, please.”
The head of the mountaineering division held up a scrap of paper with my signature on it and smirked. He’d got us again. I couldn’t remember, but I had obviously signed our money away in the delirium of the 45-degree heat on the way in. I despondently handed over our last wad of notes and then this man, from whom I was now trying to hide my frustration, enthusiastically threw his final punch.
“I am sorry,” he smiled, “but you have left me no choice but to ban you and your team from Pakistan mountain climbing for four years.”
We arose, limply shook hands, and left the office feeling well and truly stitched up.