We projected the two-metre-square picture on to the wall of the living room and gazed and gazed – excited and then frightened. ‘There’s a line all right,’ said Martin, ‘but it’s bloody big.’ The South Face of Annapurna – I don’t think I remember seeing a mountain photograph that has given such an impression of huge size and steepness. It was like four different Alpine faces piled one on top of the other – but what a line! Hard, uncompromising, positive all the way up. A squat snow ridge, like the buttress of a Gothic cathedral, leaned against the lower part of the wall. That was the start all right; perhaps one could bypass it by sneaking along the glacier at its foot – but what about avalanche risk? The buttress led to an ice ridge; even at the distance from which the photograph had been taken one could see it was a genuine knife-edge. I had climbed something like it before, on the South Face of Nuptse, the third peak of the Everest range – in places we had been able to look straight through the ridge, thirty metres below its crest. That had been frightening; this would be worse. The knife-edge died below a band of ice cliffs.
‘I wonder how stable they are?’ asked Nick.
I wondered too and traced a line through them with only partial confidence. And that led to a rock band.
‘Must be at least a thousand feet.’
‘But what altitude is it? Could be at 23,000 feet. Do you fancy some hard climbing at that height?’
‘What about that groove?’ It split the crest of the ridge, a huge gash, inviting, but undoubtedly more difficult and sustained than anything that had ever been climbed at that altitude.
The rock band ended with what seemed to be a shoulder of snow that led to the 8,091-metre summit. It was difficult to tell just how high the face was, but you could have fitted the North Wall of the Eiger into it two, perhaps even three, times. The expedition was barely conceived, and I don’t think any of us fully realised then the significance of what we were trying to do. The South Face of Annapurna was considerably steeper, bigger and obviously more difficult than anything that had hitherto been attempted in the Himalaya. Our decision to tackle it, first arrived at in autumn 1968, was part of a natural evolution, not only on a personal level but also within the broad development of Himalayan climbing. It is significant that around the same time groups of German and Japanese climbers, without any contact with ourselves or each other, were planning similar expeditions – the Germans, under Dr Karl Herrligkoffer, to the huge Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, and the Japanese to the South-West Face of Everest.
I had been a member of two conventional Himalayan expeditions in 1960 and 1961, making the first ascents of Annapurna II (7,937 metres) and Nuptse (7,879 metres). This was very much part of the first wave of Himalayan climbing, when climbers were attempting first ascents of the myriad of unclimbed peaks. By 1969, however, the Himalaya was in the same state of development as the European Alps had been in the mid-nineteenth century, with most of the highest peaks achieved and climbers now turning their attention to the challenge of harder and harder routes. In the Alps there had been a gradual development of skills and techniques, enabling pioneers to climb successively more difficult ridges and then faces, slowly filling in all the gaps of unclimbed ground.
Inevitably, however, this gradual evolution was accelerated in the Himalaya where climbers had skills developed on the rock and ice of the Alps as a reference. For political reasons, the Himalaya had been closed to climbers from 1965 to 1969. Nick Estcourt, Martin Boysen and I had been talking about going off on an expedition somewhere – anywhere, probably to Alaska – when we heard that Nepal was going to open its frontiers once again. The selection of an objective was strongly influenced by my experience on Annapurna II and Nuptse. All the highest peaks in Nepal had been climbed, and although we could have gone for an unclimbed 7,500-metre one, I felt that this would have been a lesser experience than the peaks I had already climbed. A big unclimbed face, on the other hand, would give an altogether new dimension – the combination of a North Wall of the Eiger with all the problems of scale and altitude. At the time I did not stop to analyse my motives; it was more a gut feeling, a rejection of the familiar in favour of the new, unknown experience which, after all, is the very essence of adventure.
It was at this stage that I first saw a photo of the South Face of Annapurna and showed it to Martin Boysen and Nick Estcourt. During the following months the team grew as I began to put together the expedition. For me it was an adventure on two levels, both in terms of the mountain challenge and also grappling with the problems of organisation and leadership. I had never before led an expedition, had never considered myself to be the organising type. In fact, my lack of organisation was becoming a bad joke among my friends. I was unpunctual, forgetful and absent-minded. Although I had held a commission in the regular army, my military career was hardly distinguished. I had detested all the administrative jobs that I had been given as a junior officer and one commanding officer had even refused to recommend me for the almost automatic promotion to captain because of my poor personal administration – there were never enough lamp bulbs in the barrack room I was responsible for.
And now I was trying to organise and lead the largest and most complex expedition since the 1953 Everest expedition. Some of my antecedents might have been similar to those of John Hunt – we had at least both been to Sandhurst, but there is a vast difference between commanding a brigade in battle and misdirecting a troop of three tanks on army manoeuvres in North Germany. However, I did have the experience I had gained both on hard Alpine climbs and also in the past few years when I had earned a living as a freelance writer and photographer, joining projects like Blashford-Snell’s Blue Nile expedition and going off to Baffin Island in the middle of winter to hunt with the Eskimos. It had taught me to be more organised in myself and also to understand how the media worked, a thing that was essential if you wanted to finance an expedition.
There were many moments in the months of preparation when I knew a blank despair, either appalled by organisational mistakes I had made, by personality problems or, most of all, by the fear of the whole thing being a complete flop. After all, we had only seen a photograph of the face. We had been given the sponsorship of the Mount Everest Foundation, we would have a TV team with us, every move would be reported. What if the route proved impossibly dangerous, if it were swept by avalanche so that we could barely make a start on the face? Could I really control and co-ordinate this group of talented, strong and at times bloody-minded individuals?
I had finally settled on a team of eleven, of whom eight were hard climbers, each with the ability and drive to reach the summit, and three with more of a support role. Of the eleven I knew eight extremely well; we had climbed together, knew each other’s ways, strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, though, there were elements of stress within the make-up of the team, a factor that was perhaps inevitable and even useful as a spur and irritant that was to be important later on. Undoubtedly the most experienced member of the party was Don Whillans, the tough, stocky ex-plumber from Manchester who, with Joe Brown, had revolutionised British rock climbing in the early 1950s. I had had some of my best climbing with Don. Of all the people I have climbed with, Don had the best mountain judgement and, at his peak in the early 1960s, the greatest climbing ability. We had got on well in our two seasons in the Alps mainly, I suspect, because I had been prepared to yield to his judgement; it was Don who undoubtedly had the initiative in our relationship. Through the rest of the 1960s our paths rarely crossed. Don had seemed to have lost interest in rock climbing on his home crags, had little interest, even in the Alps. He had been on an expedition to Gauri Sankar in 1965 and had climbed in North America, but lack of exercise and a fondness for his pint while at home in Britain had given him an impressive gut. I had had serious reservations about inviting him to join the expedition; knew that there would be a tension between us but, at the same time, felt sure that once he got going he had a judgement and drive that would increase our chances of success.
The feeling was mutual, Don commented in an article after our return:
‘Chris has developed from an easy-going, generous, haphazard lieutenant in the army to a high-powered, materialistic photo-journalist, to all outward appearances motivated only by money. (Chris believes we must tell the truth about each other regardless of feelings, as long as he is doing the telling!) However, I knew him well enough to know that when the crunch point is reached his sense of proportion always returns to more normal standards, so I had no real decision to make about accepting his offer.’
The others were easier choices. The only other member of the team who had been to the Himalaya was Ian Clough, who had climbed the Central Pillar of Frêney with Don and myself and had been with me on the Eiger and with Don on Gauri Sankar. Warm-hearted, unselfish and easy-going, Ian was both a brilliant and a very safe climber, as well as being a perfect member of any team. Of the newcomers to the Himalaya, Dougal Haston was undoubtedly the strongest. A quiet, introverted Scot, he had a single-minded drive that had taken him to the top of the North Wall of the Eiger by its direct route and had already established him as Britain’s most outstanding young climber. Mick Burke from Wigan had a very similar background to Whillans, the same dry Lancashire humour, and a readiness to speak his mind. The two frequently clashed. Martin Boysen was a brilliant rock climber, easy-going, indolent but completely committed to climbing. He and I had had many delightful days’ climbing on British crags but had never been together further afield. I had also climbed a lot with Nick Estcourt, a steady rock climber and very experienced alpinist. He was a computer programmer by profession and, unlike many of his fellow climbers, understood the need for systematic planning. He always saw my problems in trying to organise an expedition and gave me a steady, loyal support throughout our expeditioning.
So far, I knew everyone well, but my choice of an eighth climber was influenced by commercial considerations. Our expedition agent, George Greenfield, with whom I had just started to work, suggested that perhaps we could have an American climber in the team. It would be such a help in selling American book rights. Today I don’t think I would agree to let such a consideration affect team selection, but back in 1970 none of us was particularly well known, and fundraising was a very much more serious problem. I did not know any American climbers personally, but both Don Whillans and Dougal Haston knew several. Finally, we settled on Tom Frost, a brilliant rock climber who had taken a leading part in the opening up of the great rock walls of Yosemite and who also had some Himalayan experience. It was only at a later date that I discovered he was a practising Mormon, a very strict religion that forbids drinking, smoking and swearing – vices pursued to a greater or lesser degree by almost everyone else in the team. In the event he proved to be very tolerant and, though he did not succeed in converting any of us, we co-existed happily.
I now had eight outstanding climbers in the team and it seemed essential to have someone whose sole function was to look after Base Camp and ensure that the right supplies started their passage up the mountain. In military parlance I wanted a combination of chief of staff and quartermaster general, who would look after headquarters, leaving me tree to get up into the front line to get the feel of the action. Who better for this role than a military man? I made enquiries through the Gurkhas, because it would obviously be a tremendous advantage to have a Nepali-speaker. As a result, Kelvin Kent, a captain in the Gurkha Signals, became our Base Camp manager. A dynamic hard worker, he took on all the organisational work in Nepal and was to fill a vital role on the expedition.
The final two members of our team were Dave Lambert, our doctor, and Mike Thompson, another ex-military man and one of my closest and oldest friends. A good steady performer, he was invited along as the other support climber, someone who would be happy to help in the vital chore of humping loads between intermediate camps without expecting to go out in front to make the route or have a chance of a summit bid.
We had our share of crises in putting together the expedition. Through inexperience, I had failed to delegate nearly enough, but my worst mistake was to send out all the expedition gear by sea to Bombay with an uncomfortably tight margin for error in a boat that broke down in Cape Town. Fortunately for us, a British Army expedition was attempting the North Face of Annapurna at the same time that we were trying the South. Generously, they agreed to loan us some of their rations and fly out enough gear for us to get started on the South Face while we waited for our own supplies to catch up with us.
We reached Base Camp on 27 March. The route to the South Face of Annapurna is guarded by outlying peaks; the beautiful Machapuchare, or ‘fish’s tail’, Hiunchuli and Modi Peak. At first glance they seem to form a continuous wall, but the Modi Khola, a deep and narrow gorge, winds sinuously between Hiunchuli and Machapuchare to reach the Annapurna Sanctuary, a great glacier basin at the head of which towers the South Face of Annapurna. Don Whillans, having gone ahead to make a reconnaissance, met us in the gorge of the Modi Khola.
‘Did you see the face?’ I asked.
‘Aye.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Steep. But after I’d been looking at it for a few hours, it seemed to lie back a bit. It’s going to be hard, but I think it’ll go all right.’
The following day we emerged from the confines of the gorge and were able to see the South Face for ourselves. It was certainly steep and difficult, but it did look climbable.
For the next two months we were to be involved in the complex, at times repetitive manoeuvres of a siege-style climb. For me, the juggling of logistics – devising a plan and then trying to make it work – was as fascinating as the climb itself, but for most of the team the exciting role was to be out in front, actually selecting, then climbing the route up the next few feet of snow, ice or rock. The very steepness and difficulty of the face made this all the more satisfying; but only one person of the team of eleven could be out in front at any one time. The rest were either humping loads up the fixed ropes or resting at Base Camp. We had six high-altitude porters with us – a very small number by standard custom, but I had felt that the Sherpas were unlikely to be able to cope with such steep ground. As there had not been any climbing expeditions in Nepal since 1965 they would be out of practice, and it was also most unlikely that they had ever been asked to use fixed ropes on anything as steep as the South Face of Annapurna.
Most of the inevitable tensions of a siege-style expedition are caused by the frustration of spending so much time in a support role, and in worrying about one’s prospects of personally getting to the top of the chosen peak. Back in England I had hoped to get over this by alternating the lead climbers so that everyone had a fair turn, but now reality was forcing me to adopt pragmatic courses, to abandon the notions of equality. The problem is that people’s talents are not the same, yet each person involved sees his abilities in a different perspective. Already, I felt that the two strongest climbers in their different ways were Don Whillans and Dougal Haston, even though Don, at the start of the expedition, was anything but fit. Don’s canniness and Dougal’s fitness, drive and climbing ability made a powerful combination but also created an imbalance, for the other pairings just did not have the same drive or experience – at any rate in my eyes. I was never quite as confident when one of the other pairs was out in front.
At times this lack of confidence was barely justified. Martin Boysen and Nick Estcourt forced the steepest and most difficult section of the ice ridge that guarded the middle part of the face. It was an incredible cock’s-comb of ice, to which clung great cornices of crumbling, aerated snow. Martin burrowed his way through a narrow tunnel which went right through the ridge and then climbed a stretch of vertical ice leading up into another cornice of soft snow. It was probably the most demanding lead of the entire climb.
Ian Clough and I took over from them. Perhaps through over-confidence in myself, a desire to be where the most vital part of the action was, I stayed out in front for what was probably much too long. The snow arête which linked the lower part of the face with its upper reaches proved to be a critical barrier. It just never seemed to end – fragile ice, little rock steps, endless traverses on insubstantial snow. I spent a week at Camp 4, the only place where the ridge relented into a small half-moon of angled snow. It would have been no good for an ordinary tent, but Don had designed a special box tent, based on our experience in Patagonia in 1963 where we had found that no normal tent would stand up to the savage winds. The Whillans Box, a framework of alloy tubing with a covering of proofed nylon, had the advantage of being a rigid structure that could be fitted into a slot cut into a snow slope and, unlike a conventional ridge tent, would not collapse under the weight of snow. Camp 4 was a spectacular but uncomfortable eyrie and the climbing each day was both exacting and wearing. Somehow we had to make a route up which we could ferry loads. This meant finding suitable anchor points for the fixed rope and, because our line traversed along the side of the ridge, these anchors had to be every metre or so. The weather did not help. It was bitterly cold and windy, with the cloud rolling in from below and engulfing us before mid-morning; with the cloud came snow and more wind.
In many ways I was in the wrong place, for out in the lead your entire concentration is taken up with the snow and ice in front of your nose. It was difficult to take a long-term view of the climb, to keep track of the flow of supplies and people up the mountain behind us. I had become obsessed with reaching the end of the arête. My partner, Ian Clough, who had stayed behind at Bombay to escort all our late-arriving baggage across India by truck, was barely acclimatised. He was forced to go down and Don, who was now running the lower part of the mountain, sent up Dougal Haston instead of Mick Burke or Tom Frost, whose turn it was to go out in front. Don felt that neither of them was going strongly enough.
Dougal certainly brought a fresh drive to our daily struggle, though we were still making little more than thirty metres or so progress each day. But at last, on 3 May, Dougal Haston and I reached the top of the ice ridge. Back in England we had allowed a mere three days for climbing it; after all, it was only forty-five and a bit metres of vertical height and had looked in the photograph like a fragile but elegant flying buttress between the lower and upper parts of the face. It had taken us three weeks. By now I had been out in front for just over a week. It doesn’t sound much, but I was desperately tired, as much, I suspect, a nervous tiredness from worrying about the climb as a whole, as the actual fatigue of the climbing. I had not yet learned how to pace myself while running an expedition.
When Dougal and I had arrived back at Camp 4, Don Whillans, with Mick Burke and Tom Frost were already there. They had dug out another notch for a box tent and were cosily installed. I dropped back down the ropes to Camp 3, hoping to stay there for a few days’ rest rather than go all the way back to Base Camp. This had been Whillans’ idea. Harder, more ruthless than I, he was worried by the amount of time being wasted by climbers moving up and down between camps to rest at Base Camp, and had decreed that none of the climbers should go below Camp 2. It had sounded a good idea at the time, and I was to be the first guinea pig. I spent two days lolling in my sleeping bag, and then set off for Camp 4, got about halfway up but felt the strength ooze out of me. I decided to go down, turned round and slid a few metres down the rope but the thought revolted me. How could I expect others to grind their guts out if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself! A spasm of coughing hit me, and I hung on the rope, amidst tears and coughs, trying to bolster my resolve.
I turned back up the rope and made a few steps. It had taken a matter of seconds to drop back nine metres on the rope. It took me a quarter of an hour to regain those few metres. The contrast was too much. My body was screaming to go down, my logic told me that I could do no good by going up, yet a sense of duty, mixed with pride, was trying to force me on. I felt torn apart by two conflicting impulses, weakened and degraded by my own indecision. There seemed no point in stopping at Camp 3. I felt I had learnt the hard way that if you get over-fatigued, rest at 6,000 metres does very little to help you recover. I therefore dropped all the way down to Base Camp.
It is interesting that on Everest in 1972 and 1975, I never went back below our Advanced Base, once it had been established. This meant staying there for periods of as much as six weeks, at a height of 6,615 metres, without any ill effects. On Annapurna South Face we undoubtedly pushed ourselves much harder than we ever did on the Everest, expeditions. Wracked by serious coughing, I spent very nearly a week at Base Camp, watching through binoculars the drama that was being enacted on the great wall opposite.
Don and Dougal were able to make fast, spectacular progress up the long, comparatively straightforward snow slopes above the ridge. On 6 May they established a camp just below the sheer ice cliffs that formed the next barrier but, on the following morning, Dougal found a gangway that led – dizzily but surprisingly easily – through them. Tom Frost and Mick Burke, impatient to have their turn in front, now went up to the foot of the Rock Band. We had always thought that this feature would prove to be the crux of the entire climb, steep rock and ice at an altitude of around 7,000 metres.
Don and Dougal shot down the ropes for a rest, leaving Nick and Martin at Camp 4 with the unenviable task of supporting Tom and Mick. I was lying, frustrated, on the sun-warmed grass at Base Camp. I had tried to go back up but had only reached Camp 2 at 5,335 metres, where Dave Lambert, our doctor, was staying. I had a stabbing pain in my chest every time I coughed and he diagnosed pleurisy. Clutching a bottle of antibiotics, I returned disconsolately. There was no way that you could lead or even effectively co-ordinate an expedition from down at Base. You had no feel for what it was like high up on the rock and ice of the face, even though you had been there just a few days before. On an expedition of this kind, undoubtedly the best place for the leader is in the camp immediately behind the lead climbers. In this way he maintains a direct contact with the people out in front and, being at the penultimate point in the line of supply, can feel how effectively this is working.
The carry from Camp 4 up the Ice Ridge and then up the endless snow slopes to the foot of the Rock Band was particularly savage. The ropes were too steep and difficult for our Sherpas, and anyway we needed them for the carries between the lower camps. We were now so short of manpower that we were using local Gurkha porters, who had never been on a mountain before, for ferrying loads from Base Camp, across the glacier to our bottom camp. We even ensnared casual visitors with the promise of a good view from the lower part of the face as a reward for ferrying a load up to Camp 1, 2 or even 3. One party of trekkers, two men and a couple of girls whom we named the London Sherpas, stayed for several weeks and became honorary members of the expedition. But it was the climbers doing the carry from Camp 4 to 5 who were becoming exhausted and it was at Camp 4 that I should have been at this stage.
The Whillans Box at Camp 5 was tucked into the bergschrund itself. This gave some protection from the spindrift avalanches that came pouring down the slopes from above but as it also blocked out the rays of the early morning sun, the interior rapidly became an icy coffin. The ice on its walls never melted, the spindrift that had poured down each afternoon and night covered everything that had been left outside. And the climbing was hard, much harder than anything we had encountered so far.
And while those at Base Camp theorised and criticised, out there in front Mick Burke did some of the most difficult climbing that had ever been carried out at such an altitude. Icy runnels led on to steep rock. He had to take off his crampons, balancing on a tiny foothold some thirty metres above Tom Frost, as he struggled ungloved with frozen straps on the almost holdless rock.
But we were running out of time. It was now mid-May; the monsoon was close upon us and we were barely a quarter of the way up the Rock Band. I was impatient to push the route out, fully confident only of Don and Dougal as a lead climbing pair. Everyone else was beginning to tire, largely because they had all been exhausting themselves on the long carry from Camp 4 to 5. I decided to push Don and Dougal into the front as quickly as possible, even though this meant upsetting the rotation of lead pairs. I put the plan across on the radio. And then all hell broke loose. It’s never easy having an argument by radio – Nick, at Camp 4, very rationally pointed out the appalling bottleneck that we now had at the start of the long carry to Camp 5. Mick Burke, at Camp 5, urged the need for Don and Dougal to make a carry from 4 to 5: ‘The thing is, Chris, you don’t realise what it’s like up here. It’s much easier to lead than to carry loads.’
Then Don came on the air.
‘Dougal and I left that place Camp 5 a week ago. Camp 5 isn’t even consolidated and the progress of all towards Camp 6 is so poor that it’s had me and Dougal depressed all the way up the mountain. I don’t know what Mick thinks he’s playing at, but Camp 5 is short and we want to get the route pushed out and unless they get their fingers out, push it out and establish 6 or at least find a site, they should make way for someone else to try. He’s had a week and progress seems very poor.’
The reaction from the two higher camps to this remark was violent. It was just as well, perhaps, that the various contenders in the argument were separated by several thousand metres of space! In fact, both parties were partly right. Ferrying loads up behind the lead climbers was a desperate problem, but if we had slowed down in an effort to build up our supplies I suspect we would have come to a grinding halt.
The following day Mick, who always responded to a challenge, particularly one set by Don, was determined to prove that he could do as much as – if not more than – any other pair on the mountain. Mick and Tom ran out 240 metres of rope up some of the steepest and most difficult climbing we had yet encountered. It was certainly the best bit of climbing that had been done on the expedition to date, but it was also their last fling, for they were now on their way back down to Base Camp for a rest. Martin Boysen helped Don and Dougal get established in Camp 6, halfway up the Rock Band, but he also was forced to retreat, exhausted by his long stint of carrying, his morale undoubtedly dented through being passed over by Don and Dougal.
I was now on my way back up the mountain, but our effort was like a rickety human pyramid: Don and Dougal at Camp 6 at around 7,300 metres, Nick Estcourt at Camp 5, Ian Clough and Dave Lambert at Camp 4, Mike Thompson and the Sherpas at Camp 2 and a growing number of exhausted climbers and Sherpas recuperating at Base Camp. I joined Nick Estcourt at Camp 5 on 15 May, finding it all I could do to struggle up those long slopes leading up to the Rock Band. Every time I coughed I had to hold my ribs to try to control the stabbing pain.
The carry from Camp 5 to 6 was the wildest and most exhausting so far. The ropes went diagonally across the face, over a series of ice fields and rocky walls. It was impossible to build up any kind of rhythm and the ropes stretched away, never seeming to come to an end. I did that carry, and most of the other carries I made in the next week, on my own. In spite of my exhaustion I could not help marvelling at the wild beauty of the scene. In the distance was the shapely pyramid of Annapurna II which I had climbed ten years before; to the south Machapuchare, now almost dwarfed as we looked down on to it, the great spread of the Annapurna Sanctuary, patterned with its crevasses into a crazy mosaic far below, and then round to the east the retaining walls of Hiunchuli, Modi Peak and the Fang. We were now almost level with their tops. But fatigue and altitude were taking their toll and it took me six hours to climb the 365 metres to just below Camp 6. I was so exhausted on getting within shouting distance of the camp that I dumped my load and yelled for Don to come down and pick it up; after all, he had had a rest that day.
I was at Camp 5 for a week. Nick, exhausted by his long stint in a support role, was finally forced to drop back down to Base. I had two lonely days by myself before Ian Clough came up to join me; exhausting carries in the teeth of the driving wind and swirling spindrift; moments of hope and elation, moments of utter despair. I still had dreams of reaching the summit, was warmed by Dougal’s invitation to join them after they had forced a way up a long snow gully that led to the top of the Rock Band. I even set out from Camp 5 with my personal gear plus the tent, rope, spare food and cine camera that we needed to make the summit push, and got only a few metres above the camp before realising that there was no way I could manage such a heavy load. In addition, I was using oxygen to reach them, while Don and Dougal were doing without. I could not possibly do it and so dropped back to the empty camp to dump my personal gear. In my despair I sat down and cried and then, ashamed at my weakness, shouted at the walls around me, ‘Get a grip on yourself, you bloody idiot,’ repacked the sack and set out once again.
In a way, it was much easier for me to suppress my own personal ambition to reach the top; after all, having conceived the idea of the expedition, having co-ordinated it and, for most of the time, held it together it was possible to sublimate my own desires in the success of the team as a whole. This was very different for the other team members. Nick Estcourt summed it up when he got back to Base Camp, saying: ‘It’s all very well talking about the satisfaction of contributing to the success of the team, but it’s a hell of a sight better if you manage to kick the winning goal.’
Don and Dougal stuck it out at Camp 6, surviving on the trickle of food and gear we were able to funnel up to them. The monsoon now seemed to be upon us – day after day of cloud and storm, of fierce winds and billowing spindrift. Don and Dougal had one abortive attempt at establishing Camp 7, but were unable to find anywhere to pitch a tent, very nearly failed to find the way back to the top of the fixed ropes and finally struggled down to Camp 6, where Ian Clough and I had moved up in support, hoping to have a go for the summit ourselves. The four of us spent a hideously uncomfortable night crammed into one small, two-man tent, pitched precariously on a tiny spur of snow. Next morning, there was no discussion about who should stay and who should go down – Don and Dougal were so much more fit than Ian and I. Tom Frost and Mick Burke were on their way back up, eager to have a go for the summit and prepared to support Don and Dougal up at the front, so Ian and I dropped back down to Camp 4. We knew that we had used up most of our reserves, but were determined to hang on until Don and Dougal had either made their bid for the summit, or had given up. Until that happened, somehow we all had to keep them supplied with just enough food to keep going.
On 27 May we were stormbound at Camp 4, the snow hammering at the box tent throughout the day. That evening I called Camp 5 and asked Dougal if they had managed to get out at all.
He replied: ‘Aye, we’ve just climbed Annapurna.’
Don and Dougal had set out that morning, hoping to establish a top camp. Higher up on the mountain it wasn’t quite so bad as it was on the lower slopes. They made fast progress on the fixed ropes up the gully, reached the top of the Rock Band where they had left the tent but, with hardly a word between them, they set out up the crest of the long ridge leading up towards the summit. They had reached a level of communication over the weeks on the mountain that hardly needed words. They were going for the top, Don out in front breaking trail and picking the route, Dougal behind carrying the rope and cine camera. They were both going superbly well; Dougal wrote: ‘The wonderful thing was that there was no breathing trouble. I had imagined great lung-gasping efforts at 26,000 feet [7,925 metres], but I was moving with no more difficulty than I had experienced 4,000 feet lower down.’
There was a steep wall of snow-plastered rock at the top but they climbed it unroped, and then Dougal filmed Don as he plodded those final metres to the summit of Annapurna, to stand where Herzog and Lachenal had been twenty years before. Their descent in a storm could easily have been more disastrous than that of their predecessors, but so superbly attuned were they to their environment that they picked their way back down the mountain, still unroped, through the gusting spindrift, down over icy steps and snow-plastered rocks to the haven of the top of the fixed ropes.
There was a moment of sheer, unrestrained joy throughout the expedition; there was no more recrimination, no envy for their achievement; but for me the euphoria was very short-lived, for the expedition was not yet over. Tom and Mick, up at Camp 5, naturally wanted a go at the summit and, the following day, moved up to the top camp. I was filled with foreboding. The pair in front were very much on their own. If anything were to happen to them none of us had the strength to go back up the face to help them. I listened to the radio all day; at midday Mick Burke came on the air. His feet had lost all feeling and he had dropped back to the tent, but Tom was going on by himself for the summit. I was even more worried. Then, at last, the radio came to life again. Tom, also, had returned.
Although sorry for their sakes that they had not made it to the top, I was even more relieved that they were down in one piece. I must confess here that the feeling was not entirely humanitarian. I was guilty of a feeling that I suspect is common to almost every leader of any enterprise – of wanting the expedition as a whole, as a projection of the leader’s ego, to be successful both in terms of achieving its objective and reaching a satisfactory conclusion.
Next morning it was with a profound sense of relief that I raced down to Base Camp to start the heady job of writing the expedition reports and co-ordinating our return to civilisation. I was sitting inside the tent, typewriter on an upturned box, when I heard someone rush up to the tent calling, ‘Chris, Chris!’ The rest of what he said was incomprehensible. I ran out and found Mike Thompson sitting on the grass, head between knees, sucking in the air in great hacking gasps. He looked up, face contorted with shock, grief and exhaustion.
‘It’s Ian. He’s dead. Killed in an ice avalanche below Camp 2.’
Everyone had run out of their tents on hearing Mike’s arrival; they just stood numbed in shocked, unbelieving silence as Mike gasped out his story.
Mike, Ian and Dave Lambert had decided not to wait for Mick Burke and Tom Frost, who were on their way down from the top camp, but set out from Camp 3 early that morning, hauling down as much gear as they could manage. They passed Camp 2, and carried on down the side of the glacier, on to a narrow shelf below an ice wall. This was a spot that we had always realised was dangerous, but the most obvious threat, an overhanging ice cliff, had collapsed earlier on. There was still an element of risk from some ice towers further up the glacier, but their threat was not so obvious and it seemed unlikely that these would collapse in the space of the few minutes it took to cross the danger zone. Even so, we all tended to hurry across this part of the glacier.
Ian was in front, Mike immediately behind. Dave Lambert was about five minutes behind them. There was practically no warning, just a thunderous roar and the impression of a huge, dark mass filling the sky above. Mike ducked back into the side of an ice wall, where a small trough was formed. He thought that Ian, slightly further out than he, had tried to run away from the avalanche, down the slope. But Ian hadn’t a hope and was engulfed by the fall.
‘It went completely dark,’ said Mike. ‘I thought I’d had it; just lay there and swore at the top of my voice. It seemed such a stupid way to die.’
When the cloud of ice particles had settled and the last grating rumble had died away into the silence of the glacier, Mike picked himself up and, with some Sherpas who had been on their way up to meet them, started searching through the debris, finding Ian’s body part-buried by blocks of ice. They carried Ian down and we buried him just above our Base Camp, on a grassy slope looking across at the face on which we had striven all those weeks. Shortly after the climb, I wrote:
‘I can’t attempt to evaluate the worth of our ascent balanced against its cost in terms of the loss of a man’s life, of the time devoted to it or the money spent on it. Climbing and the risks involved are part of my life and, I think, of those of most of the team – it was certainly a very large part of Ian’s life. It is difficult to justify the risks once one is married with a family and I think most of us have stopped trying. We love climbing, have let a large part of our lives be dominated by this passion, and this eventually led us to Annapurna.’
Although I had been climbing for nearly twenty years, Ian was the first close friend I had lost in the mountains, but the next ten years between 1970 and 1980 were to see a terrible toll. Mick Burke was killed on Everest in 1975 when he went for the summit on his own. Dougal Haston died in an avalanche near his home in Leysin, Switzerland, the day before I was due to meet him to go winter climbing. Nick Estcourt, the closest of all my friends, died on the West Ridge of K2, swept away by an avalanche, during our attempt on the mountain in 1978. Mike Thompson has compared the sadness of lost friends to being prematurely old; so many of one’s contemporaries have died that one knows the loneliness of an older generation. Of the eight lead climbers on the South Face of Annapurna, four have died in the mountains, a frightening statistic that is mirrored among almost any other group undertaking extreme climbing over a long period of time, particularly at high altitude.
The mountaineer is exposed to some level of risk at almost all times he is on the mountain, but it is fairly rare for a good climber to be killed because the climb is too hard, or even when caught out by bad weather or some other kind of emergency. Then, his concentration is complete, with every nerve stretched towards survival. It is on easy ground that accidents occur; that momentary lack of concentration, a slip where there happens to be a long drop; a hidden crevasse and, most dangerous of all, the risk of avalanche.
And yet we go on; it has certainly never occurred to me to give up climbing – I love it too much; the challenge and stimulus of playing a danger game, the beauty of the mountains in which there is so much peace alongside the lurking threat are all tied in with the gratification of ego, the enjoyment of success, of being good at something. I do worry about the responsibility I have to a family I love, but then the pull of the mountains is so great that perhaps selfishly, I could never give up climbing – I will always want to go back to the mountains.