12/8/2013 Srinagar News Report: In a direct fallout from Friday’s clashes in Kishtwar, all national highways leading to Jammu are now shut. Mobile and internet services were disconnected on Monday while schools and colleges remain shut.
The Shiva experience had been so pleasurable that I didn’t bother to try and engage with Chinese bureaucrats for the following year and by August 2013 the British Kishtwar Kailash expedition was as ready as it could be. There were four of us: Paul Ramsden, Mike Morrison, Rob Smith and me – the same team that had visited the Chinese Tien Shan in 2010. Our objective was the first ascent of what our map showed to be the highest peak in east Kishtwar, and excitement levels were high. The troubles in Kashmir that had caused access problems for the last twenty years appeared to have subsided and our permits were expected any day.
Then came the Indian news report.
The Indian home office put all permit applications on hold and a stressful month followed. At one point an interesting situation developed when I received an invitation to give a keynote address to an Indian government conference aimed at increasing the number of Himalayan tourists. Being as I was trying unsuccessfully to become a Himalayan tourist at the time the potential for awkwardness looked high. To add to stress levels, my father’s health took a sharp turn for the worse, challenges at the tax office and the Alpine Club made for an even heavier workload than usual and Mike and Rob started asking what would happen if the longed-for permits did not materialise. Working late into the night every evening was not going down well at home, the finances of cancelling were not at all clear and seldom have I wondered so much whether it is all worth it.
As ever – well, almost ever – somehow everything fell into place. My father’s health perked up. My response to the keynote-speaker invitation was copied to a number of senior officials who seemed responsive to my pleas for assistance and the all-important invitation letter arrived four working days before departure. Steve Burns was free to spend a whole day helping gather data and complete the visa application forms, the visa-processing centre was persuaded to overlook the fact that there were no appointments available until well beyond our intended departure date and Mike Morrison was able to make two visits to London and collect our all-important ‘X-mountaineering’ visas the day before we left. Phew!
The briefing session at the IMF was more memorable than most as it involved being told that our friend Victor Saunders had spent a night in prison for using a satellite telephone. Civilian use of satellite phones is banned in India, apparently as fallout from the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai in 2008. The briefing officer explained that infringement of this rule was taken very seriously; Victor had recently been caught and so he had spent a night in the cells.
‘Do you know him?’ the briefing officer asked.
I had climbed a lot with Victor when we both lived in London in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time he was notoriously difficult to pin down, thus earning himself fond nicknames such as ‘Slippery’ and ‘The Devious One’. A vivid image of him being interviewed and trying to slip out of any responsibility for making a call crossed my mind.
‘Er … yes.’
‘He is very bad,’ he said, waving his finger assertively.
‘Yes.’ I struggled hard to look serious while looking forward immensely to ribbing Victor.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, the satellite phone had enabled contact after an accident, such that I ended up feeling rather bad about making light of the incident. Victor and Andy Parkin had been part of an expedition to peaks north of Leh when an avalanche struck their tent in the night. They were bowled along the glacier and Andy ended up in a deep crevasse with an injured back. After a challenging rescue operation by his climbing friends he was brought back to the surface but it was clear that a helicopter should be summoned and Andy taken to hospital as soon as possible. The incident had a happy ending and the use of the satellite phone was obviously justified – but that still didn’t prevent a little altercation with the authorities.
But as we listened gleefully at the briefing session we knew nothing of all this and as soon as we were out I couldn’t resist texting Victor to tell him how terribly irresponsible he was and how he was clearly not suited to the role of vice president of the Alpine Club that he had recently been put forward for. My text was met with a dignified silence.
Briefing formalities complete, the next challenge was to deliver a lecture for the IMF. Such lectures are great for building contacts and goodwill but after a sleepless night flying from London to Delhi, the weariness levels tend to be high and it was a relief to eventually collapse into a vehicle that Kaushal, our agent, had arranged to take us from Delhi to the town of Manali in the Himalayan foothills. This was not exactly the quickest route, but the problems that had caused us so much stress with the permit also meant that we had to avoid the flashpoint town of Kishtwar and so take a wonderfully indirect route via the Rohtang La pass and down the Chenab gorge.
The first part of the journey replicated that of the previous year but the last fifty kilometres down the gorge to the small town of Gulabgarh were new ground and proved to be the most exciting that any of us had ever experienced. We were perhaps halfway into this section when a bang and a loud metallic scraping noise signalled a problem.
‘What the hell was that?’
Rob had not been to India before but, even if he had, his concern was understandable. Not long back our driver had stopped for us to look down at the carcass of a vehicle that had left the road the previous day.
‘Six dead,’ our liaison officer, Rinku, had solemnly announced as we all stared at the fresh scuff marks where it had gone over the edge.
With such thoughts fresh in mind, Rinku, who was sat on the river side of the vehicle, carefully opened his door and emerged on to the eighty-centimetre-wide strip of road between the vehicle and the huge drop into the Chenab river.
‘Roof rack is stuck,’ he reported.
The road was a sort of sideways ‘V’ cut out of a vertical rock wall. The road surface was fairly level but the height limit on the inside was less than that on the outside. Looking ahead I was seriously concerned about whether the vehicle itself would get through, let alone the roof rack. It also struck me that it had been a long time since we had seen any other vehicles and there was probably a very good reason for this to be a seldom-used piece of road. Soon Rinku was indicating strongly that the driver should move even closer to the edge. This presented the driver with a significant challenge. It should also have presented us with a decision on whether or not to abandon ship but the driver surged forward and that option appeared unavailable. We were all in this together.
At this point Paul felt it was a good time to start videoing.
‘Should be excellent footage,’ he announced enthusiastically as he started to try and interview Rob, who was hanging out the window in front of him.
‘What do you think Rob? How far down to the river?’
Gravel dislodged by the wheels fell vertically into the boiling grey waters below. Rob appeared unable to answer. Paul continued to video enthusiastically.
‘Oh my word. There’s a waterfall falling on to the road in front.’
I sat trapped in the middle seat contemplating that on the return journey a couple of jeeps would enable us to drive closer to the wall and might be preferable to our Force minibus. Mind you, like the Shiva trip, the minibus was proving to be a remarkable vehicle, covering ground that a normal British minibus would have failed dismally on. But gearing and four-wheel drive and other things aside, there was little that could be done about its physical size which meant that it could only get through by hugging the extreme outer edge of the road. With some trepidation and much wondering about the crumbling edge we carefully forged towards the waterfall.
‘Time for the camera to go inside,’ announced our fearless cameraman.
‘Agh! No!’ Water poured in through the window, drenching everything.
‘Window is stuck,’ announced Paul as the video ground to a wet, chaotic and hilarious halt.
Little did we know at the time but Paul’s three minutes of video would have over twelve and a half million views when posted on my Berghaus Facebook page.
At least all the action served to keep our driver awake. I sensed his perkiness level was dropping after fourteen hours or so behind the wheel but he looked significantly more alert after a good bit of roof rack scraping and a dousing in a waterfall.
Late in the evening, well after dark and seventeen hours or so after leaving Manali, we arrived at the town of Gulabgarh and crashed out on the floor of a large room that was apparently part of a hotel. This was where we joined the quicker approach from Delhi that would have taken us through the town of Kishtwar. I had last been here in 1993, en route to climb a mountain called Cerro Kishtwar. In those days the troubles were more evident and I clearly recall walking across the bridge at Gulabgarh and noticing a line of rifle barrels pointing at me from a wall of sandbags on the other side. This time all was calm, but torrential rain, rubbish and turd-ridden streets did little to endear us to the place. Even the cows sheltering in the shuttered shop fronts looked miserable. The next day we were unable to find any muleteers prepared to start the walk-in in such terrible weather. The delay was not exactly welcome but at least it gave us a chance to catch up on some sleep and get everything sorted and ready for an early start the following day.
Despite our day of sorting there seemed to be a bit of trouble brewing around the ten mules that we had hired to get our equipment to base camp.
‘It’s because we have hired Muslim muleteers,’ explained Rinku. We were slightly mystified, it not being at all clear to us what religion they were. As far as we were concerned they looked happy and ready to go and that was the important thing. But the problem soon became clear. They were owned by Muslims who had been dropping off loads carried from further down the valley and some of the local, predominantly Hindu, men wanted the work themselves and were less than happy.
This was not the first time that I had come across this kind of problem. On a trip to Pakistan in 1987 porters from five small villages had gathered looking to us for work. There were perhaps five applicants for every position and we had started our selection process by picking out the fittest looking ones. Ultimately though, we had to cave into local pressure and employ porters in strict proportion to the population of each village. As we had no idea of local village populations this was a challenging task. Here the problem was rather different: the mules were already loaded up, it was pretty clear that sharing the job was out of the question and there didn’t seem to be any easy compromise that could be struck. Heated exchanges resulted, during which we could only stand around and fret as the hours ticked by. At length a fair solution was agreed. Muslim muleteers would be employed for the walk-in and Hindu muleteers would be employed on our walk out. It struck me that as we didn’t know exactly where our base camp would be the Hindu muleteers would be entirely reliant on the Muslim muleteers, who had never been anywhere near the intended base camp site, for directions. There wasn’t much that could be done, but I was uncomfortably aware that this arrangement had the potential to not work out well.
The walk-in shared the first part of the once well-used Umasi La crossing from Gulabgarh to Zanskar. The troubles in Kashmir had hugely reduced the number of trekkers but conversely the Machail Yatra pilgrimage every August, which started only forty years ago, saw a remarkable 350,000 pilgrims covering the first two days of trekking to the small temple at Machail. The troubles in 2013 reduced that number by about half but even so that’s a huge number of people to cater for, particularly on mule tracks designed to link villages of no more than 200 inhabitants. By late September the only evidence of their passing was a very significant amount of rubbish and a laughably large number of well-used portable toilets. I sniffed warily. The track to Machail must be an outrageously busy and smelly place in August. I understood now why some might be attracted to a sign in Gulabgarh advertising helicopter transport to the pilgrimage site.
‘Which tent is ours?’ enquired Mike.
‘Er … the one you packed?’ I suggested blandly.
It was the first night of the walk-in. Bad weather could be seen moving up the valley and getting the tents pitched quickly looked to be a good idea. Soon it was clear that there was a problem. Mike and Rob had assumed that I had arranged for Kaushal to supply a base camp tent while I had assumed they would be bringing their own. Regardless of who was to blame the end result was a distinct lack of a base camp tent for Mike and Rob.
‘Just like the Tien Shan,’ commented Paul helpfully, recalling the previous trip the four of us had been on together. Oddly enough that was the only other time we had somehow ended up forgetting base camp tents. On that occasion though there was no doubt that the blame lay with our agent whereas on this occasion we could do nothing but blame poor communication between ourselves.
Rinku, clearly marvelling at how such experienced climbers could make such a basic mistake, stepped in to offer assistance.
‘You two can use my tent and I will sleep in the cook tent.’
Being as there were three weeks or so ahead it was an incredibly generous offer. It led to me think back to early Himalayan days when I regarded liaison officers as a hindrance dedicated to obstructing progress in every possible way. How times had changed. Liaison officers tend to be much more helpful nowadays but Rinku, Pritam our cook and Devraj our kitchen boy were an exceptional team. We had met them the previous year and had specifically asked if they could join us again for Kishtwar Kailash.
Rinku’s offer was typical of the man but Mike is proudly self-sufficient and had been scouring the hillside looking for alternative accommodation. Just as Rinku made his offer Mike returned to report that he had found an excellent cave that would be ideal for him and Rob.
‘How will we find you for morning tea?’ asked Pritam, clearly bemused by this behaviour and concerned at the prospect of Devraj wandering aimlessly predawn through the hillside forest.
Rob looked concerned but Mike was insistent. He and Rob headed off to their cave while the rest of us marvelled at their pleasingly eccentric behaviour, contemplated the amount of rubbish left by the pilgrims and caught up on events since we had waved goodbye eleven months earlier, after the Shiva trip.
Beyond Machail our route entered the Darlang Nullah, a seventy-kilometre-long valley at an altitude above 3,000 metres. It was immediately clear that we were on less-travelled terrain that had not been used by mules loaded with mountaineers’ equipment for many years. The muleteers had never been this way before, the guide that we tried to employ at the last village never materialised and general uncertainty prevailed about the best route. The muleteers were understandably concerned for their animals, several sections of trail had to be built up before the mules could pass and after many tense moments it was eight days after leaving the UK before we finally left the main valley and established a base camp at about 4,000 metres, a few hours short of Kishtwar Kailash. It was a relief to arrive and be faced with just the challenge of climbing the mountain.
We had seen no one for nearly three days and our research suggested that this valley had not been visited by anyone but locals since the British climber Andy MacNae and his liaison officer descended it about twenty-five years earlier after an exploratory trip over the Muni La pass at its head. They had enjoyed a good view of the west face of Kishtwar Kailash and described the mountain as ‘a very challenging objective’. Paul and I knew it to be an inspiring sight, having viewed it from Shiva the previous year, and I had also had a good view from Cerro Kishtwar in 1993. As we established our base camp the mountain dominated our view and I couldn’t help but think that those two words, ‘challenging’ and ‘inspiring’, summed things up pretty well.
‘Establishing a base camp’ is a rather grand way of putting it. We just pitched three tents. By now Mike had succumbed to Rinku’s offer so he and Rob squeezed into his tent, Paul and I were in another and Rinku, Pritam and Devraj slept in the cook tent.
The weather was indifferent but us restricted-holiday boys have to use every day to the full to stand a chance of success on a 6,400-metre peak in a thirty-day trip from the UK. With such thoughts in mind Paul and I left promptly to explore and acclimatise around Kishtwar Kailash while Mike and Rob decided to explore a side valley.
Even though the cloud was down it felt excitingly adventurous to be heading up towards the peak that had been the focus of our attention for so many months. It would have been better still if we had been able to see it and thereby choose our preferred climbing line. Instead a full day was spent clambering over moraine-covered glacier in the drizzle wondering where we were.
On our third day out from base camp we reached a col at about 5,700 metres, still without getting a good view of the mountain. The col had been spotted through clearings in the cloud and looked as if it would provide a suitable spot for acclimatising, with the possibility of ascending to a good viewpoint. It turned out to be a knife-edge crest that, once flattened, gave a comfortable camping spot but little else. Fortunately though, after over ten years of Himalayan climbing together, Paul and I are pretty well used to this acclimatising business and the fact that we spent the next two days pinned down in a small tent with just a small flattened area in front to walk about on was not a problem. We relaxed, read books, breathed in lots of thin air, discussed proposals to spend vast sums of money on the Alpine Club’s property, contemplated the parking problems outside Paul’s daughter’s primary school and at one point even had a good view of the mountain we had come to climb. We couldn’t see the face we planned to attempt but what we could see did at least convince us that our vague plan of descending the other side was a very bad one. If we were successful it was clear that we would have to descend our line of ascent.
After two nights sat in the tent we judged ourselves sufficiently acclimatised and prepared to descend to base camp. I was a little concerned about new snow in the couloir we had climbed up, but that aside, anticipated a straightforward day. So it was rather perturbing to find myself very frightened indeed after a few hours. We had decided to take a shortcut down a deep water-worn gully cutting through a huge moraine and leading down on to the main glacier. To be honest I was indifferent about it, but Paul was enthusiastic and I raised no objection. I recalled getting a glimpse of the gully on the way up and it looked to contain no great difficulties. And I reasoned that we had a rope and if necessary could always abseil over any uncomfortably steep bits.
At the bottom of the gully a huge rock was wedged such that it created a ten-metre overhanging drop. To one side was a very steep slope of grey mud and scree. Confident of my ability on such ground I launched out, digging the edges of the rigid soles of my boots hard into the slope to get a good purchase. After ten metres all was not going well. The ground was far less yielding than I had expected, my boot edges gave hardly any purchase and, worst of all, the slope narrowed to a thin diagonal ramp with a twenty-metre near-vertical drop below it. I ground to a worrying halt. I was tired and hot; to stay in my current position was wearing and it would be difficult to get back up. If I went for it then, all being well, in thirty seconds or so I would be on easy ground leading down to the glacier. I rated it seventy/thirty in favour of it all working out well. My natural tendency was to go for it but those odds made me dither badly for a moment before coming to my senses. It was obviously not worth the risk.
But getting back up posed a significant risk as well. I was perched precariously with the edges of my boots barely cutting into the slope. To return the way I had come I would need to cut steps in the slope. And that would involve using my ice axe, which was attached to the back of my sack. A careful manoeuvre followed which left me feeling so precarious that a top rope seemed a good idea.
‘Can you throw down an end,’ I shouted up to Paul who was watching my performance with some concern.
‘It’s in your sack,’ he announced.
This was not helpful. It also went some way to explaining his look of concern. There was nothing for it but for me to get on with the step cutting and be very careful. It perhaps says a lot that Paul, usually an enthusiastic photographer, just looked on quietly and took no shots at all.
‘Good to put your Hastings mud-cliff experience to good use,’ he commented in a relieved kind of way as I finally rejoined him.
I sat there contemplating that I had very nearly ‘gone for it’. It only struck me then that if I had then Paul would have had to follow me as I had the rope. We quickly arranged a straightforward abseil and walked down to base camp. I felt very silly.
Time was potentially tight but we allowed ourselves one day of resting and eating Pritam’s fine dishes. Then we were ready to go. Meanwhile Mike and Rob had returned and were fattening up in preparation for visiting the unexplored upper reaches of the glacier.
It was a surprise and relief to finally see clear skies on the morning of our departure. Although we hadn’t been able to have a really good look at the face, clearings in the weather had given us a good idea of where the best line might be. Our plan was to avoid icefall danger at the base of the face by climbing a couloir that led to a possible entry point above the danger. But first we had to cross the river, which posed a significant challenge. When acclimatising we had walked well up the valley and crossed on the surface of the glacier; but we reckoned it would be about three hours faster to wade the river. And for better or for worse the best crossing place looked to be very close to base camp.
Rob positioned himself for potentially memorable shots as Paul and I changed our mountain boots for our approach shoes, the plan being that we would wear them to cross the boulder-strewn river and leave them on the far side to be collected on our way down. The crossing failed to result in the shots that Rob had hoped for, but the river was deep and fast-flowing enough to make it feel distinctly insecure. I hoped that I would feel a bit more in control when we got on to the mountain.
Mind you, just getting there involved a fair degree of uncertainty. There was steep and loose ground to gain a glacier, an icefall and then a couloir of uncertain angle that led to what we hoped was the edge of the face. ‘Our sneaky approach,’ Paul called it, although as we couldn’t see for certain that it would be possible to gain the face from the top of the couloir we were both rather aware that it could be a sneaky approach to nowhere, which could prove slightly embarrassing.
The icefall had looked straightforward through binoculars from base camp. It was a ‘dry’ glacier as mountaineers say, meaning that there was no snow cover, just bare ice and rock. The combination tends not to be particularly slippery and I always find a great temptation not to bother to put crampons on. Paul clearly felt the same way as he persevered on increasingly tricky ground until a three-metre scraping slide drew blood and curses. Out came the axes and crampons, a move which was fully vindicated as the glacier we had dismissed as straightforward presented more and more difficulties, culminating in an overhanging section overcome by an acrobatic effort including a heel hook.
‘We thought this bit would be easy …’ commented Paul, gasping appropriately while wiping blood from his grazes.
After the trials of the icefall a perfect flat area beneath the couloir allowed us to catch up with reading and enjoy the evening sun. By the end of the second day the couloir had provided a memorably crumbly path to the edge of the face where we were relieved to see that our hunch was right and we could easily access the face above the dangerous-looking icefalls at its base.
It somehow feels more intimidating to step out on to a face and immediately be faced with exposure than it does to build up to the same position from the bottom. Here the climbing very soon became acutely atmospheric with smooth ice fields below us, huge monolithic walls above and no obvious way through. Our low-visibility reconnaissance had left us unclear on exactly what line we would try to follow, but from my photograph from the summit of Cerro Kishtwar in 1993 we knew that a fault line cleaved the walls, and our hope was that this would provide the key to the lower part of the face. Beyond this vague notion we were uncomfortably aware that if we were to stand a chance of success we would need to do a fair bit of sneaky route finding around wild-looking open rock faces.
Classic European north-face climbs like the Eiger tend to include sections of steep ice field that succumb to calf-wrenching teetering on the front points of crampons. The ground here was not dissimilar. As we gained height the ice became increasingly thin and the climbing increasingly precarious. By evening the ice field we had been climbing had thinned out completely and we were beneath a line of weakness splitting an intimidating band of walls stretching across the face. Pleasingly, we found a single spot to pitch our little tent on a small projecting prow. The weather remained glorious, the mountains beyond ‘our’ valley were increasingly coming into view and, as we snuggled down in the evening sun, it felt that we were climbing in a very special place.
‘Think I might have to come down.’
Paul had already been up and tried, removed his sack and tried again, and was now sounding uncharacteristically defeated.
‘Round the corner might be better,’ he offered.
I hung from my ice-screw belay sucking in the cold morning air and peering around. Round the corner to the right didn’t look any easier and to get there would require an abseil and a traverse that would take a couple of hours at least. I really didn’t want to do that. Losing upward momentum can so easily lead to dithering and retreat. It looked to me that if we could just gain five metres above Paul’s high point the difficulty would ease, for a few metres at least. Higher up I could clearly see an overhanging section of ice, but that was not the immediate problem. The section causing difficulty was a loose and thinly iced bulge in the fault line. It had looked to be standard Scottish grade V climbing before Paul had started up, but now he was actually trying to climb it I could see that it was much steeper than it looked and clearly loose and unprotected.
‘Shall I have a look?’
Somehow it seemed the right thing to say. There was a long silence.
‘I’ll have one more go.’
As he inched higher and higher I felt a slight pang of guilt, wondering if I had indirectly encouraged him to push on against his better judgement. This was no place to fall, there was no further protection and the climbing was obviously hard. I must have been almost as relieved as he was when he finally reached a belay and shouted for me to climb.
By the time I approached the belay he was looking far more relaxed than me and his usual positive demeanour was restored.
‘Hard pitch, that. Brilliant position,’ he enthused as I gasped my way through inelegantly upwards. It really was distressingly difficult.
‘A fine lead, Mr Ramsden.’
I didn’t have the energy to say anything more.
The climbing for the rest of the day was not unlike some of the harder Scottish gullies, with steep and sometimes thinly iced grooves interspersed with a couple of wild, overhanging sections.
It was while I was leading one of these that I started to feel an uncomfortable sensation around my buttocks. Everything else seemed fine and I couldn’t understand what was wrong. Soon, the level of discomfort was such that I was left with little alternative but to find a good ice axe placement, clip myself in and investigate. The discovery was a surprising one. My overtrousers were falling down, so much so that the waistline at the back was now just below the midpoint of my buttocks. This made me feel slightly silly. And there was no one but me that I could possibly blame.
The nice people at Berghaus had given me a medium and a large pair to choose from. My legs had been a bit cold on Shiva and so this year’s undergarments were a bit bulkier than usual. After much experimenting at home I had decided to abandon the size of a lifetime and go with the large overtrousers. They came with braces, but I have never been a braces fan and so left them at home. Surely, I reasoned, if there was any excess around the waist my climbing harness would hold everything together and so there was no need to clutter myself with unnecessary fiddly bits. That approach had always worked before and I’d had no reason to suspect it wouldn’t this time.
But as I hung there trying not to focus excessively on the distance down to my last protection, I had to admit that it wasn’t working. Quite why it had taken until midway through day four for the problem to become apparent I couldn’t work out. Perhaps I was losing weight or perhaps it was my exertions on this more technical ground that had prompted them to slip so far. Whatever the cause, movement was now restricted, my buttocks were cold and sorting out the problem while hanging from an ice tool was not going to be easy. With my harness weighted I could do little but jiggle carefully and hitch them up as much as I could.
‘Whatever’s going on?’ drifted up from below.
My explanation did not prompt an outpouring of sympathy for my predicament. Clearly this was not the kind of problem Paul’s climbing partners normally experience.
I decided not to continue the exchange and did my best to rearrange things and make progress up the steep, thinly iced ground ahead. After one more trouser-pulling-up stop, I emerged above the overhangs and gained a position where I could place a good rock belay and rearrange them properly. Warm buttocks had never felt so comforting.
The millions of tons of snow that must have poured down this couloir during the monsoon had compacted the snow such that our axes twanged in securely and climbing conditions were generally very good. Much pleasure was had and, as evening approached, another solitary projecting prow allowed us to pitch the tent. Life was good. Usually on such climbs we end up bivouacked with one person wrapped in the tent and another in a bivouac sack, or sometimes we cut a bum ledge and sit side by side inside the tent fabric. On this route we had managed to get the poles in the tent every night so far. That made such a difference. We had slept well and felt positive.
Above us now the vague fault line we had been following reared up in vertical and overhanging steps for a long, long way to reach the southern end of the summit crest. That looked hard and loose and was clearly not the way to go. Even before we left the UK, close inspection of the various photographs had made it clear that the highest point was at the opposite end of what looked to be a long and difficult summit ridge. With that in mind, our intended route now lay leftwards, following ice slopes under more huge, blank walls to a shallow groove that led up the headwall to the highest point.
We were above nearly all the surrounding peaks now and new horizons were opening. To the south the Prow of Shiva was visible, while the 7,000-metre peaks of Nun and Kun reared their heads above the ridge on the far side of our base camp valley.
That evening we ended up on two separate thirty-centimetre-wide ledges hacked out of an ice patch on the headwall. Sitting there high on an unclimbed peak and marvelling at the cloudless view was one of those ‘it’s great to be in the mountains’ moments. Paul had brought a sewing kit and in between marvelling at the view I took in the waist of my trousers by a couple of inches and we ended up discussing the final few months of my Alpine Club presidency.
Overall I felt things had gone well. Lots of people had pulled together, membership was up by over twenty per cent and the number of members under thirty had increased fourfold. But the changes had increased pressure on the office, and key committee members were very obviously overloaded. Committee meetings had been getting bogged down with heated exchanges about whether we should employ more paid assistance and, if so, how we should balance responsibilities with those of volunteers. And recently, a group that wanted to spend near on £2 million on the club’s premises in London had been pressing hard to focus more effort on proposals and costings. These issues had started to dominate despite the answers seeming obvious to me. More paid resource was affordable, would relieve workload pressures, enable five-day-per-week opening and enable the committee to focus more on membership benefits. Spending £2 million on the property would enrage the significant minority that wanted a move out of London, raise all sorts of financial uncertainties and completely distract from the important work that I felt was still necessary to build the membership and provide more focus for the British mountaineering community. Paul was not on the committee and so had not been involved in the debates, but he was a patient listener and sat quietly as I rambled on. As much as it was an unusual place to be discussing such issues, I found it useful to bounce thoughts and ideas off someone whose opinions I respected. With my mind uncluttered by the ups and downs of everyday living our discussion served to strengthen my feelings and as the last rays of sun left us I snuggled down in my sleeping bag, stared across the horizon at the striking outline of Hagshu and vowed to put these issues to a vote of the committee and try to resolve them before Lindsay Griffin, my likely successor, took over.
Back in the UK the committee voted as I had hoped, Lindsay’s appointment as president was approved and I felt that I had done all I could to facilitate a smooth takeover. In fact, though feelings continued to run high, members with new views joined the committee, debates continued and Lindsay was left to keep the waters calm and mediate acceptable conclusions to both property and employee issues. To add to his difficulties, a few months after he took over John Town stepped down as secretary and the treasurer, Mike Pinney, tragically died hillwalking in North Wales. I felt bad seeing the time-consuming challenges building for Lindsay, but on a personal level I must admit that I was relieved that three years of the most difficult time-juggling I had known was over.
But I digress. High on Kishtwar Kailash it seemed much warmer than at a similar altitude the previous year and Paul chose to shun the bivouac sack and sleep just in his sleeping bag. I seemed to be too excited to sleep but could hear his slow and heavy breathing through the still night air. Away to the south a thunderstorm was brewing and gradually it came our way. I lay there staring at the almost continuous lightning and wondered how close I should allow it to get before waking him and making sure we were prepared for its arrival. But then it was 4 a.m. and our alarms were beeping, so it was time to stir ourselves anyway.
The first action of a bivouac morning is to get the stove going, but on this particular morning there was a problem. I turned on the gas and nothing happened. This was bad news as we rely entirely on the stove to produce water for drinking and hydrating our freeze-dried food. Going without food for a few days is not so bad, but going without water is a different matter all together. Paul took a look at it. There was gas in the cylinder but none coming out when the valve was opened.
‘Perhaps there’s ice in the valve?’ I commented unhelpfully.
Paul is the sort of man who likes to ‘improve’ any piece of equipment you can imagine, but even he didn’t have anything more sensible to say. He peered at the burner unit in an appropriately quizzical manner and popped it down his trousers while we chatted away and got on with other aspects of the morning routine. Although we didn’t discuss it at the time, the uppermost thought in both of our minds was what to do if we couldn’t get the stove going.
All being well, I reckoned we were half a day from the summit, after which it would be perhaps two days before we reached any running water. We seemed to be reasonably well hydrated, so carrying on regardless didn’t seem too irresponsible a thing to do. Paul was doing similar calculations into which he factored that he had half a bottle of drinking water. After avoiding the subject for some time we compared thoughts, noted that the pee bottle was also half full (emergencies only!) and came to an easy decision to continue regardless of the outcome of the stove problem. That’s one of the great things about having a good climbing partner relationship. We both readily felt the same way, the decision was made and the issue relegated to something to be overcome as necessary.
Within half an hour though the stove had responded well to the down-the-trousers treatment, my recently sewn waistband felt pleasingly snug, happiness was fully restored and a cup of best quality Yorkshire Tea was going down very well indeed.
By the time we were ready to start climbing the thunderstorm had moved away, but a weather front was moving in. The way up the final section of headwall was not immediately obvious, but after an initial false line we gained a slanting fault that gave some fine climbing followed by a pitch of bottomless snow leading directly to the summit. And what a wonderful summit it was. As I arrived Paul was sat on a knife-edge crest with a leg on either side. The sun was shining and with good visibility we could soak up the splendid scenery. It felt a great privilege to be able to make the first ascent of a mountain like this. We loitered for thirty minutes taking photographs, experimenting with video techniques, generally revelling in the experience and contemplating that it’s a wonderful feeling to dream of something for many months and then achieve that dream.
But we still had to get down. And if I needed any reminding that descents can be challenging I only had to look across the valley to Cerro Kishtwar, where I could vividly recall breaking the head off my ice hammer on the summit while placing the very first abseil peg, twenty-one years earlier.
Our preference is always to descend by a different line than that followed in ascent but here our reconnaissance had shown that the one possibility we had identified was out of the question and there was little alternative but to go down the way we had come up. And that would involve an awful lot of abseiling.
‘Abalakov threads,’ smiled Paul.
It is unfortunate though that whenever Abalakov is mentioned I always think of his brother, who met an unfortunate end when his Soviet-era electric bathroom heater fell into his bath and electrocuted him. Relaxed and happy one moment and no longer with us the next; what a way to go. I tried not to think about that as we focused on the descent.
All went well until midway through a very steep section. I was shifting around on a hanging belay when I dislodged my sleeping mat from the outside of my rucksack. Paul was abseiling just below me and was able to catch it but could do little else but hold it. It was an ancient piece of closed-cell foam mat that meant absolutely nothing to me. Nevertheless the right thing to do seemed to be to make a ridiculously trying stretch to retrieve it. In so doing I stretched a muscle in my neck that proved to be the most serious injury of the whole trip.
Down at base camp life was good. Mike and Rob had enjoyed their exploratory trip to the upper glacier, Pritam had prepared a Kishtwar Kailash success cake and the enduring retrospective pleasure that goes with Himalayan success was beginning to flow. The next day our perfectly timed weather window ended and snow came to base camp. The Hindu mules arrived as planned and it was time to go home.
Weeks later I was still grimacing with my pulled neck muscle and the piece of sleeping mat that I had strained so much to keep was abandoned, gathering dust in a corner of my garage.