The Hagshu experience made me and Paul more determined than ever to find objectives that were remote, exploratory and adventurous. And, rather sadly, we also felt it necessary to be less forthcoming about exactly where we were going.
East Tibet was out again and my mind turned to the vast territory of north-west Nepal that I touched the surface of with Dave Turnbull on our 2011 trip to Mugu Chuli. The remoteness of the area and the very limited amount of exploration by Westerners appealed to me and I was particularly keen to visit the district of Humla in the extreme north-west. There were some indications that the odd mountaineering gem might be lurking there and by early 2015 my research channels were focusing on one particular peak: Gave Ding.
It was Julian Freeman-Attwood, a friend from Shropshire, who first mentioned it to me. Julian is the technical mountaineer’s perfect friend. He loves exploring remote mountainous places and understands exactly the kind of objectives that inspire me. But he is not interested in such technical climbing himself. Perfect. Our paths cross frequently and we share enthusiastic thoughts without fear of overlap.
Julian’s explorations had taken him to Humla and in 2011 he, together with Nick Colton and Ed Douglas, attempted Gave Ding via the relatively non-technical south side. Despite being unsuccessful he spoke with great enthusiasm about the scenery and ethnic pleasures of the area and I registered it as one of those places I would love to visit. But how would I find a suitably inspiring mountaineering objective? From my initial background reading on Humla, the Changla Himal, a subrange straddling the border with Tibet, sounded the most promising area. The history of mountaineering there was decidedly sparse and my research uncovered little beyond the Japanese climbing Lachama Chuli (6,721 metres) in 2007 from the Tibetan side and Changla (6,563 metres) in 2010 from the Nepali side. In 1983 a Japanese ladies’ expedition had attempted Lachama Chuli from the Nepali side but failed to reach the summit despite using fixed ropes and high-altitude porters. That seemed to be about it. None of the reports I read suggested any eye-catching technical lines of the kind about which I dream.
And then in 2013 a British team inspired by Julian’s trip visited the peaks of the Chandi Himal further to the north-west. Neil Warren from that team kindly supplied me with a very distant photograph looking south. It was impossible to pick out detail but it appeared to show a steep face on a prominent mountain and was enough to stir me to do some detailed Google Earth research. Sure enough, by setting Google Earth at the right time of day, the shadow of one peak’s north face was longer than any other shadow in the area. That had to mean it was steeper and bigger than anything else around. I shared this with Julian.
‘That’s Gave Ding.’
Paul and I looked at the evidence: a new area for us, ethnically interesting, remote, adventurous, eye-catching, unclimbed, a valley never previously visited by Westerners … the search was over and the appropriately vaguely named British Far West Nepal Expedition came into being.
Steve Burns and Ian Cartwright were keen to join us and we could but keep our fingers crossed that our gut feeling was right and we had made a good decision. If we had got it wrong we would be opening the door to a huge amount of effort for nothing. The far north-west of Nepal is not the easiest of spots to get to, which is great for keeping the crowds away but does add a whole raft of uncertainties to any trip.
In 2015 those uncertainties were to start rather earlier than we had expected. In April Nepal experienced its worst earthquake for many years, with over 8,500 people killed and terrible devastation in some areas. Many remote settlements were particularly badly affected and the village of Langtang was completely wiped out by a landslide triggered by the earthquake. Even five months later, as we left the UK, the foreign office was still advising travellers to be very cautious. That said, Mahesh, the agent we had employed to help us overcome bureaucracy in Kathmandu, was keen for us to stick with our plans and we understood that north-west Nepal had been little affected.
Paul had started the month-on, month-off job in Saudi Arabia and the plan was for him to fly direct from there while the other three of us came from London. Unknown to us we both had long changeovers at Delhi at the same time and were simultaneously trying to sleep behind rows of seats perhaps 100 metres apart at the airport. And we both took an intense dislike to Radio Delhi Airport, which blasted loudly through the speakers and seemed to exist for no other purpose than to disturb snoozing travellers. Ironically the broadcast was interrupted every now and then by an announcement about how Delhi was now a ‘quiet’ airport as flight departure announcements had been discontinued.
Although it made sense, I was not very comfortable about having to rely on our flights arriving in Kathmandu at more or less the same time. I couldn’t help but recall the last time we tried this in 2001, on our first Himalayan trip together. Our plan had been to climb a mountain called Kyashar in the Khumbu area of Nepal and, with me being short of leave, we decided that Paul would fly out a day early and sort out the bureaucracy in Kathmandu. I would then arrive and we would transfer seamlessly on to a flight to Lukla. All went well until my flight was approaching Kathmandu. New in those days was a nice little LCD screen charting the flight. ‘Five minutes to arrival,’ it announced.
Seat belts clunked and a general atmosphere of getting ready to land prevailed. After ten minutes we were still airborne. Without any announcement the time to landing indicator now read over two hours. All very mystifying. Some time later the crew clearly felt they ought to give an explanation.
‘Due to bad weather we are returning to Dhaka.’
The announcement had been a long time coming, was brief and to the point, and was not welcome. But I remembered when a Pakistani plane crashed trying to make a bad-weather landing at Kathmandu in 1992. Several mountaineers that I knew had been killed, and in comparison to that, a return to Dhaka didn’t seem too much of a problem. But it did mean that Paul was in Kathmandu, ready to board our pre-booked flight to Lukla, and I was in Bangladesh.
Two days later we finally met at Lukla airstrip and another problem had arisen.
‘Your bag is not here sir.’ And indeed it wasn’t.
‘We think it is in Namche Bazaar. Perhaps it will be here later. It will catch you up.’
Our porters were ready and waiting. What to do? It didn’t help that the bag was a black holdall almost identical to so many other bags on the baggage carousels at Kathmandu. Waiting risked wasting precious days. And if it didn’t turn up, or the wrong bag arrived, there wasn’t a lot we could do about it whether we were in Lukla or further on. We decided to start the walk and cross our fingers.
It was cold and snowing heavily and I was very aware that my sleeping bag was in the missing bag. Accommodation for the night was an unheated building where we all slept together and Paul and I tried to share a sleeping bag. The night passed uncomfortably with much fidgeting. By morning Paul had declared me a bad bedfellow and the porters were staring at us intently.
The bag eventually arrived some days after we got to base camp, but by then we had dismissed our intended route as too dangerous. We made a half-hearted attempt at an inferior objective but gave up and went home early. It was not a great start to our Himalayan partnership.
All of this was very much in my mind as Steve, Ian and I arrived at Kathmandu airport. All being well Paul’s flight should have arrived ten minutes before ours.
‘There he is!’ Relief flowed over me, prematurely.
‘My bags are missing. Still in Delhi I’m told.’
The memories came flooding back. It was 9 a.m. and the next flights from Delhi were due at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. With luck the missing bags would be on one of them, after which we had a fourteen-hour drive to the town of Nepalgunj, where we were booked on an 8 a.m. flight to Simikot. If the bags arrived at 1 p.m. we should have plenty of time; 4 p.m. would be tight, and after that we would miss the plane and possibly never see the bags again. Best not to think about that.
First though, we needed to go into town, see Mahesh and sort out various permits. After the disastrous earthquake scenes shown on television we wondered how Kathmandu would be faring five months on.
‘Kathmandu is 100 per cent open for business. Here, look at our earthquake damage.’
Mahesh pointed to an inconsequential crack in a garden wall. He went on to explain that reports of ongoing disruption in Nepal had resulted in bookings being eighty per cent down on the previous year. Wandering around the tourist area of Thamel we were surprised to find that the tottery-looking buildings that hang over the narrow streets were virtually all intact. The earthquake killed over 8,500 people and was an appalling disaster, but the impression we formed from news reports was completely false. It seemed clear that what our agent had told us was correct: Kathmandu was open for business and suffering badly from foreign office warnings and Western news reporting. What with earthquake damage and the huge drop in tourist numbers Nepal was suffering a double whammy.
‘Please tell your friends to come,’ was the clear message as we tackled the necessary formalities.
Back at our agent’s office we met with Prem, the cook we had used on Mugu Chuli in 2011, and his son Lapkha who was to be our kitchen boy. To my surprise Julian Freeman-Attwood was also there. He was about to embark on an exploratory trek in Humla and, as much as we had been in touch before leaving the UK and knew that we might meet in Simikot, I had not expected to see him in Kathmandu. He was in the buoyant mood that tends to take him over when remote exploration is on the agenda.
He inspected our papers with a gleeful and critical eye.
‘Ah yes – trekking permits. Wonderful documents.’
Aside from satisfying officials at remote checkpoints, I have never been clear what purpose a trekking permit serves. They were very formal looking and stated that we were Irish, presumably taken from our ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland passports’ and permitted us to trek in ‘Simikot, Yari, Limi, Muchu, Tange Khola and Hilsa’.
‘Those are not the areas that you will be trekking in,’ laughed Julian.
I felt a pang of concern. Why was he laughing? This didn’t seem very funny.
‘But it’s not a problem because all trekking permits for north-west Nepal say the same thing.’
Mahesh arrived at this point and confirmed this. Sometimes it seems best not to ask too many questions.
‘Just your TIMS permit to go. These are for your safety.’
TIMS, it transpired, stands for Trekking Information Management System and is a relatively new permit introduced after a storm in 2014 in which over twenty trekkers died of hypothermia. Again it seemed a formality: hand over $10 each and receive a stamped permit form. The TIMS appeared not to come with any information about trekking, but did divide trekkers into two categories. Green category: ‘Trekkers carrying own luggage and bearing all the liabilities and all the responsibilities individually.’ Blue category: ‘Trekkers using local facilities/expertise such as trekking guide/support staff and all the pre-booked facilities.’
‘You are in the blue category,’ advised Mahesh. ‘I hope you enjoy the pre-booked facilities at your unvisited base camp.’
Having learned from my experience in 2011, we had decided to spare ourselves the long head-crunching public bus journey and hire a minibus for the trip to Nepalgunj. This would also save us a day as the vehicle would be faster than the bus, leave exactly when we wanted it to and, all being well, get us to Nepalgunj in time for the flight to Simikot. The vehicle was waiting outside the airport, and aside from the small matter of Paul’s bags, our driver was ready to go.
The scene at the airport was one of controlled confusion. It seemed that about a hundred passengers on Paul’s flight were in the same situation. Rumours abounded as to how the problem had arisen and how it might be sorted out. No one seemed to know for sure, but the most widely accepted explanation was that there was no fuel at Kathmandu airport, which meant that planes had to carry enough for the return flight meaning there wasn’t enough weight allowance for all the baggage. We knew there was a fuel problem in Nepal, but we didn’t fully buy this. But if it was true, it was difficult to imagine how an increasing backlog of baggage could be avoided. As the others waited outside the terminal, Paul and I somehow bypassed security and joined the throng of agitated passengers at the baggage carousels. Optimism levels were not high.
‘YAYYY!’
At 4.30 p.m., after several hours of stressful waiting, the missing bags miraculously arrived. We piled them into the vehicle and were ready to go. Everyone was clearly relieved. Except for our driver.
‘I’ve never driven through the night before,’ he explained.
I couldn’t recall ever having a Himalayan driver that spoke good English and contemplated that easy communication is not always a bonus.
‘But I think we have enough fuel to get there,’ he added in an appropriately reassuring tone.
It transpired that it had taken him seventeen hours to gather enough fuel to fill the tank. Nearly all fuel in Nepal is imported from India and a dispute had resulted in India halting deliveries. News reports indicated that over 300 fuel deliveries normally cross into Nepal each day, but as a result of the dispute fewer than five were getting through. The effects were obvious and queues for fuel were truly outrageous. I could readily believe that our driver was not exaggerating. He seemed a very likeable chap and I felt rather guilty that he was clearly stressed at the prospect of a full night of driving. Initially I thought he was refusing to do so, but it became clear that he just felt the need to make preparations.
‘Is it OK for my lorry driver friend to come with us and sit in the passenger seat?’ he asked. This sounded a very good idea, so much so that I wondered whether we should ask the lorry driver to drive.
By the time we had met the chap and got going time was tight for the Simikot flight. On the plus side, the fuel problems meant there was very little traffic on the road. Yet a few hours later we were stuck in a queue. We were in a small town and initially I thought nothing of it. Soon though, I became aware of a large number of people running past us on both sides.
‘A serious accident,’ our driver reported after walking up to find out the reason for the delay. Eventually, curiosity and a desire to assess how long we might be held up for led me to get out and see for myself what the problem was.
Crowds develop around accidents in the UK but this was on a different scale. A severely damaged minibus and an overturned dumper truck were completely blocking the road. I watched, fascinated, as a JCB hooked its bucket prongs into the lorry’s wheel arch and started to tip it back on to its wheels. The force of the crowd pushing forward on the other side of the lorry was such that those at the front couldn’t easily move back. As it crashed upright and threatened to roll, tragedy was only narrowly averted, but I could now see that two bodies had been under the lorry. I just had time to register that they wore police uniforms and looked very dead when the crowd surged forward and the night filled with the flash of mobile phone cameras. Soon an emergency vehicle arrived but, despite flashing lights and sirens, the crowds would not part. Meanwhile the JCB driver totally ignored the human throng and made fast and erratic efforts to push the lorry to the side of the road. From somewhere riot police arrived and with much shouting and baton waving some semblance of order was restored. It transpired that the two policemen had been directing traffic around an earlier accident when the lorry lost control and overturned on top of them. As the traffic began to flow again Ian looked out of the window and could see the two bodies now lay spread-eagled on a bank with a weeping young lady next to them. The atmosphere in our vehicle was decidedly subdued as we continued our journey.
We rolled into the car park at Nepalgunj airport with a few minutes to spare. As we parted company our driver said he was pleased not to have dozed off ‘too badly’ on the drive. It also became clear that he didn’t know Nepalgunj and had no idea whatsoever how he might find enough fuel to return to Kathmandu. His lorry driver friend had clearly contributed absolutely nothing to the journey.
There were only eight people on board the Twin Otter flight to Simikot so it seemed an unnecessary luxury to have an air hostess on board. Mind you, she was delightfully friendly and offered us boiled sweets and earplugs served on the same tray. Simikot is the administrative centre of Humla region, but there are no roads and, although the straight-line distance from Nepalgunj is only just over 200 kilometres, the journey takes just under a week without flying. Driving hereabouts is so tortuously slow that I guess flying will always be the only realistic access option for most mountaineers and trekkers, but flights are totally weather dependant and there is always a risk of being stuck for days.
Simikot may be small and a long way from the road but it has plenty of traditional little shops and we were easily able to purchase lighters for our stoves. Ours had been spotted and confiscated by the eagle-eyed baggage handlers at Nepalgunj. This had not gone down well. The replacements looked identical to the ones I had bought at Heathrow. Ten lighters there had cost me £15, whereas here the cost translated into about £1.30. Understandably I was roundly abused and accused of wasting expedition funds.
Lighters are of course not the only items banned from planes. It was a bit frustrating that the carriage of gas cylinders for our stoves was prohibited. Being as the plane only flies at a little over 4,000 metres, there seemed to be a good reason to apply common sense – after all, some commercial airports in China are at over 4,300 metres. But then, as us civil servants know only too well, ‘rules are rules’ and common sense cannot be guaranteed to change anything. Luckily, we had clarified the situation in advance and paid for cylinders to be portered in from the roadhead before we arrived.
‘How long did it take to get them here?’ we asked our Mr Fixit man in Simikot.
‘Oh, not long. They came on the plane,’ he explained. Knowing the right people there was clearly very important.
While still in the village Steve was knocked off the track by a mule. He fell five metres through a bush and some brutal Himalayan stinging nettles and landed flat on sun-baked earth. Local people rushed to help, hoist him back on the track, apply mustard oil to his stings and generally pamper the poor old Westerner. Uncertainty prevailed. It had been a nasty fall and there was some question over whether he had been knocked unconscious for a short period. For a few minutes it looked as if it might all be over for him before we had even left Simikot. That would have been difficult to live down on the Peak District Wednesday evening scene.
The joys of the internet are such that we had been able to pre-order mules at an agreed price. We also employed a porter to carry kerosene and ferry kit to base camp in case our mules couldn’t make it all the way. Somehow we ended up with far more mules than we needed but the muleteers did an admirable job of spreading the load in such a way that it was not immediately obvious how lightly loaded they were.
Mule tracks are the main roads of this part of the world and if one doesn’t fall off them they allow relatively fast movement. We followed them through pleasing villages on day one; occasional shepherd huts, delightful old forests and precariously suspended solid wood beehives on day two, and by day three we were above the tree line and saw no more humans until the walk out.
It was on day four that the real adventure started. This was the day we left the main valley and turned into the left fork of a side valley, the Lacham Khola. Julian Freeman-Attwood, Nick Colton and Ed Douglas had been up the right branch on their Gave Ding attempt, but we had no real idea how far we might be able to make it up the left-hand branch. The plan was to have a base camp at 5,000 metres by a prominent lake that we had spotted on Google Earth. From what we had seen it looked as if an easy ablation valley could be followed to reach this point.
Sadly, Google Earth is not yet perfect.
‘The mules can go no further.’
Prem was interpreting for the muleteers who were acting in a way that left little room for doubt. We were at about 4,500 metres and a long way horizontally from our intended base camp site. The distance was such that our plan to use a porter to ferry loads to the lake was out of the question. Prem and Lapkha offered to help but, although it was a setback, we concluded it would be easiest to have our base camp where we were.
For every meal on the walk-in Prem had laid a plastic sheet outside as a sort of table cloth. I had assumed this al fresco dining was something of an ad hoc arrangement to help him cope with all the unpacking and repacking hassle of the walk-in. It was something of a surprise when, in sub-zero temperatures, our first base camp meal was served outside. For reasons I cannot explain we allowed this to carry on and, even when the nearby stream froze over, nearly every meal at base camp was eaten outside on a bright blue plastic sheet.
The day after arriving, nine days after leaving the UK, the four of us ventured up the moraine that had stopped the mules and into the hidden ablation valley. It was time to find out whether our research and gut feeling was right – that exciting objectives were to be found here. After all the planning, preparation and anticipation it was a tense day.
We need not have feared. The north face of Gave Ding reared up in a complex line of Eiger-like walls crowned by a snow ridge that snaked up to a short but sharp headwall. Ice cliffs threatened both sides but there looked to be a single safe line in the centre going straight to the summit. We had struck gold. All we had to do now was climb it.
First though, some acclimatising was necessary and that became problematic. Directly opposite the north face of Gave Ding was a side valley ringed by unclimbed 6,000-metre peaks. On Google Earth this looked like an excellent spot to explore while acclimatising. Steve and Ian had hoped to find an inspiring objective here but as we gained a better sense of the area it became clear that much of the ground in this valley was tortuous rubble where water was a real problem. In fact, above the lake where we had originally planned to have our base camp we could find no fresh water at all. The glacier was completely covered in sun-baked moraine and no streams came down the mountainside. The valley was one of the most dry and desolate glacial basins we had ever seen. We managed to spend three nights camped on rocks at 5,300 metres or so, during which we punctured two sleeping mats. It was not our most successful acclimatisation outing. The end result was that Steve and Ian decided to try a 6,035-metre peak closer to camp while Paul and I consoled ourselves by noting that the face on Gave Ding looked hard, so we would gain height slowly and thereby acclimatise on the route. Positive thinking is important in Himalayan climbing.
After waiting out a couple of days of indifferent weather a full day of walking saw us camped under the face with seven days’ food and four gas cylinders for the stove.
Our planned day one was to move together up a snow couloir and then traverse easily to a possible bivouac on a col between a pinnacle and the face. The traverse line turned out to be powder snow on slabs and very tricky in places, but even so by early afternoon we were at our planned sleeping place. The sharp crest sported no good spots for our little tent so for the first time ever we used Paul’s snow hammock, basically a piece of fabric which could be secured at both ends and filled with as much snow as possible. The idea was to create an area of snow wide enough to pitch the tent on but the powder seemed reluctant to consolidate. We tried urinating on it in the vague hope that this would help freeze everything together. It sort of worked and we ended up with the tent floor draped over a fifty-centimetre-wide crest of snow. Boots and other heavy stuff hanging in the fabric on either side vaguely stabilised matters but the ever-possible chance of the whole show slipping off to one side did not make for the most relaxing of nights.
But before settling down there was work to be done. Since 2008 I have worked with Berghaus to help develop and market their Extrem range. As part of that work I promise to return from trips with video clips of prototypes being tested in earnest. This particular year two key products were being tested: a new ever-lighter, ever-warmer down jacket and a new ever-more-breathable, ever-better-designed shell jacket. How those technical and design people keep coming up with new and demonstrably better products is beyond me. But they do. Anyway, before leaving I had tested prototypes in the ice box at the King Kong climbing wall in Keswick in the Lake District. There, festooned in heat sensor technology, my job had been to climb up and down the ice wall and be thermally imaged at various points throughout the day. A cameraman had been employed to capture shots of the intrepid mountaineer grappling with the challenge of ten metres of steep ice.
‘How long do you think you can go up and down this?’
‘All day,’ I heard myself say. It seemed the right answer from someone about to perform on a Himalayan face. By mid-afternoon though, the repetitive movement was such that my wrist had begun to hurt quite a lot – but I was too proud to say so. Fortunately, a recovery period presented itself when the cameraman decided that he would like to shoot a video clip from above. That involved him climbing up and hanging in a position where he could look down on top of me. A couple of top ropes were already rigged and he was tied into one and kitted out with crampons and axes. He was quite a large chap compared to the belayer, who I chatted with as he took the rope in. Soon all was not well. I suppose it could be said that my chatting was distracting the belayer, but the unexpected fall, complete with a loud clattering of expensive camera equipment, was more spectacular than is usual at a climbing wall. The second attempt ended in much the same way, but at the third attempt, the cameraman ended up hanging in a curious nearhorizontal position at the top of the wall. It looked excruciatingly uncomfortable but videos were taken, all present declared themselves satisfied and my wrist was relieved of any further strain without me ever having to admit that anything was wrong.
I recalled all of this as I readied myself at the bivouac spot, hoping that our on-the-route video clip would proceed rather more smoothly. Action shots were not really practical and a short summary of my on-the-route feelings seemed the best way to approach things.
‘OK. Go,’ announced Paul.
The trouble with new products is that every item and every feature has a unique name which is difficult for the exhausted and altitude-fatigued mountaineer to remember. Consequently my gasping commentary was regularly punctuated by peering in a not-too-blatant way at a piece of paper reminding me of the names of the garments and the features. But I’m not complaining. The risk of wrist injuries was non-existent. Much safer than the Keswick ice wall.
Above us the face reared up in a series of blank walls broken by discontinuous white streaks. We had devised a plan and various fallback plans for this section. Plan A was a curling line of weakness leading to a distressingly steep section. If we failed on this, plan B was to abseil diagonally out of the steep section to a parallel line further right. And plan C was to traverse a long way back left to a line that, now we could see it clearly, looked harder – so plan C wasn’t much of a fallback at all really.
A morning of awkward work on powdery mixed ground and delicate traversing put us above a huge drop below the main difficulties of plan A. As I arrived at the stance Paul was hanging out from the belay, craning his neck to get a good view of the tenuous line of weakness above.
‘Looks hard. Might just go.’
The position had become outrageously exposed. The ground below overhung for several hundred feet, such that abseiling into plan B was clearly a non-starter. That meant we really had to get up the near-vertical mixed ground above – and it was my lead. Oh dear.
As much as I derive enormous amounts of retrospective pleasure from technical Himalayan climbing it is not often that the Fowler body yelps with delight at the time. Here though the situation was exceptional. The conditions were perfect, the protection reasonable and the climbing just within my limit.
‘Absolutely brilliant!’ I heard myself shouting to no one in particular.
It soon became apparent that the now-perfect conditions were possibly due to the consolidating effect of the large quantities of spindrift that intermittently poured down this part of the face. But nothing was going to detract from my enjoyment. Three fantastic pitches, including a memorable descent from a disturbingly unexpected cul-de-sac, led to an easing of the angle and a snow crest on top of a buttress which, almost uniquely in my experience of such steep faces, was soft and deep enough for us to quickly fashion into a platform that was only a little short of the size of our tent. It did collapse a bit in the night and bend a pole, but we had expected a sitting bivouac and a bent pole seemed a small price to pay for the relative luxury of tented accommodation.
Steep mixed ground led to another rock band cleaved by a difficult-looking line of weakness. By now we fully appreciated that we were very truly climbing a north face. We had had no sun whatsoever since crossing the bergschrund three days earlier and the temperature was stubbornly low.
Out of sight, Paul persevered as I shivered. Soon he reported that he was leaving his rucksack hanging on a runner. Never a good sign, that. We both like to avoid the faff of hauling sacks if at all possible. The problem was ice – too thin for secure protection – that stretched a long way up a near-vertical groove. Seconding on a single seven-millimetre rope I couldn’t help but be aware that a) the rope looked very thin, and b) the sack being hauled on the other rope was making much smoother progress than me. It was a pity I couldn’t get any photos of Paul leading such a spectacular pitch, but I did manage to snap a shot of his sack.
We were now well up the face with excitement levels growing. We seemed to have been correct in our judgement that the line was safe from objective dangers and the climbing was turning out to be even better than we had expected. In addition, the face had looked to be so devoid of good bivouac spots that I was expecting a whole series of semi-hanging nights. Indeed, the ground we were on led us to believe that we would end up spending the night in a sitting bivouac or, at best, on a nose-to-tail ledge cut out of the ice. It was then a cause for great celebration when, at just the right time of day, we discovered a flat ledge where we could easily pitch the tent. Here we were on our third night and thus far we had managed to get the tent up every night.
Not far above us was the start of the snow ridge section which we likened to the upper Peuterey ridge on Mont Blanc. Not only would gaining the ridge mark the point where we would escape the steepness of the face, it would also be the first point on the route where, weather permitting, the sun would reach us. But reality fell short of expectation. The higher we climbed, the more the wind got up and its chill all but cancelled the warming effect of the sun. Already we were commenting that the conditions were the coldest we had experienced on our climbs together.
At the end of the ridge a twenty-metre ice wall gave access to a small hanging glacier below a 150-metre headwall of cornice-fringed, hard blue ice. But with the weather now looking to be on the turn, our priority was to get the tent up. Thus far we had had the odd evening snow shower but now, as darkness fell, the sky was grey and snow was falling heavily.
We had with us a walkie-talkie for evening chats with Steve and Ian, and with some reluctance I had bowed to pressure from insurance companies and borrowed an emergency beacon satellite device from the Alpine Club. I find this whole communication business and the fine line between adventure and foolhardiness is becoming an increasingly difficult one to tread. Nicki and I have always worked along the lines that ‘no news is good news’ and I have no desire to contact the family until I am off the mountain and safely on the way home. But I cannot deny that satellite phones are an extra safety tool. In 2008 for example, the Slovenian climbers Dejan Miškovič and Pavle Kozjek were climbing on the Muztagh Tower in Pakistan when Kozjek fell through a cornice and was killed. Miškovič was carrying a satellite phone and, after concluding that he was unable to descend alone, made a call back to Slovenia. A helicopter rescue was mounted – involving climbers who flew out from Slovenia! – and he was rescued. We are now at the stage where many insurance companies will not offer cover unless one is carried.
All this might make the man in the street think that it is irresponsible not to carry one. But then the other side of the coin is the spirit of adventure itself. What are we actually seeking when we climb in remote places? For many, the complete escape from everyday life is one of the attractions of greater-range mountaineering. There are those that argue that ‘adventure’ Antarctic crossings are rather missing the point when they can summon a plane to collect them immediately if something goes wrong. I suppose it all comes down to the degree of risk we are prepared to accept and how that balances with the desire to fully experience the atmosphere of self-reliance in a mountain environment. At the moment I use excuses such as weight, cost and ‘too much communication’ to justify not carrying a satellite device on the route. Taking an emergency beacon to base camp is as far as I am prepared to go. What the future holds I don’t know but I will always feel uncomfortable about the subject. I fear that the mindset that quashes adventurous spirits by trying to cater for every imaginable risk might creep into mountaineering. And to an extent I already see that happening. As a trustee of the annual Nick Estcourt Award, I recently reviewed a grant application arranged by students from two of Britain’s leading universities. I quote verbatim from their ‘risk register’, which detailed the risks that they felt their expedition might face and the preventative measures they would put in place.
| Risk | Consequence | Preventative Measure |
| Exhaustion | Lowered core temperature. Irritability. Possible stumbling. | Frequent and adequate rests. |
| Sunburn | Blisters. Open wounds. Snow blindness. | Wear sun cream, lip balm, sunglasses and sun hat. |
| Hypothermia | Uncontrollable shivering. Possible death. | Wear sufficient, warm, waterproof and windproof clothing. |
| Swept into river | Loss/damage to equipment. Drowning. | Take great care crossing rivers. Use poles. Cross in a group. |
| Slipping or falling on ice | Grazes or cuts or worse. | Always wear gloves on snow/ice. Use crampons/ice axes. |
| Falling in a crevasse | Cold, shock, possible death. | Careful route choice, rope up. Be competent in crevasse rescue techniques. |
| Road crossing in towns | Injury or death. | Take extra precaution while crossing roads. |
There were another twenty-one risks listed. I found it sobering that these top undergraduates – the leaders and influencers of the future – were clearly being conditioned to approach adventurous projects in this manner, although I did find it slightly refreshing that the use of communication channels such as satellite phones was not mentioned at all in addressing any of the twenty-eight risks listed. And I couldn’t help but smile to note that the risk of a serious accident in a remote and inaccessible spot was not even on the list.
But I digress. On Gave Ding our regular evening contact time was 6 p.m. As we battened down the hatches below the headwall Steve and Ian reported that the weather down at base camp was looking grim. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that. It didn’t take long for the wind to pick up and the snow to accumulate such that the walls of the tent pushed heavily against us. I lay awake listening to the sound of the wind and snow; I didn’t sleep well.
It was a relief when morning dawned clear and calm but bitterly cold. Around seventy-five centimetres of new snow had fallen and we could see that the snow line was way below base camp. We guessed the temperature could be as low as –30 °C.
‘Nearly 80 °C colder than Saudi,’ I pointed out.
We had been talking about Paul’s time in Saudi, which sounded tough if lucrative. With summer temperatures exceeding 50 °C the main challenge outdoors appeared to involve identifying a line of shady spots ahead and hurrying between them. With security being a big issue, he was not allowed to leave the living compound for any reason other than to be taken to the site he worked on. There was a gym on the compound, but it was not very well stocked and his main activity over the last month had been on a step machine. As an outdoor man he was clearly unhappy about being reduced to stepping up and down in a gym. Conversely I found the thought rather amusing and enthused at length about a great rock climbing week that Steve and I had recently enjoyed in Scotland and the fell races that I had been running in my own effort to keep my body in condition.
‘I’ll come into my own if we have any steps to climb,’ he assured me, grumpily.
With a good frozen surface it would have been a fifteen-minute stroll to reach the bergschrund at the foot of the final slope. As it was I have no idea how long it took, but it was certainly a long and very cold time. At times the powder was chest deep and as Paul took the lead I shuffled along in the trench behind him shouting the occasional supportive comment.
‘Lucky you did all that step training.’
At one point I offered to go in front but Paul has seen how much that slows things down and assured me he would prefer to continue. Nicki would say that this incompetence technique is one I use to great effect at home in the kitchen. My take is that, despite all my fell racing efforts, I am still rubbish at walking. I shall not comment on my skills in the kitchen.
Meanwhile it seemed clear that a month of sweaty action on the step machine had not had an adverse effect on Paul’s fitness and his was a fine, energy-sapping lead that pushed the trench all the way to the headwall.
‘You should write one of those books about training for the Himalaya and peaking at the right time,’ I suggested. I was left in no doubt that the first pitch on the headwall was mine.
The sheer effort required to climb blue Himalayan ice is almost impossible to describe. It is not that it is incredibly difficult technically, but that the ice is so hard that even with the most vigorous swings of the axes and the hardest kicks of the crampons it is only the extreme tips that bite into the ice. At one point the enormous force required to get a secure placement with my now-blunt axe ended with me reduced to clipping into it and hanging, sack-like, against the ice. Exhausting stuff, this Himalayan climbing. In addition, the temperature was such that this turned into the only climbing day ever where Paul, who seems largely immune to the cold, had worn a down jacket all day. The cold was becoming a slight worry. The expensive heated gloves I had purchased for the trip had performed so badly on our acclimatisation outing that I had rejected them and was relying on mittens with handwarmers. Now I was down to my last pair of handwarmers and, with a keen wind blowing and the temperature as low as I have ever experienced, I was very aware that my glove arrangement was at its limit and that I needed to take care to avoid cold injuries.
The summit crest came suddenly. After five days of hard climbing on the steep and inhospitable north side it felt like something of a release to pull into the sun and have a whole new panorama open up. To walk about freely on the relatively amenable southern slopes felt very strange, but the summit was easily reached and a firm summit hug seemed to be in order.
We pitched our tent in a good spot just below the top and enjoyed the last few hours of daylight soaking in the wonderful view of unexplored terrain and relishing the feeling of having completed the climb that we had dreamed of for the last year. We wondered how close the nearest other climbers were, and concluded that, other than Steve and Ian, it was a very, very long way away.
All we had to do now was get down. That took a further two days of complex glacier travel, twenty-five abseils from Abalakov threads and four absolutely exhausting hours crossing the glacier and descending to base camp.
Steve and Ian were lying in their sleeping bags wrapped in down jackets. Conditions on their climb had defeated them, but they seemed not in the least bit downhearted. Paul and I agreed it had been one of the very best climbs that we had done together. Prem set to work cooking a fine soup and it wasn’t long before I had fallen asleep mid-mouthful and spilled it into my lap.
As we walked down through the changing seasons of old deciduous forests, I knew already that the retrospective pleasure of such a fine trip would stay with me for many years. Adventures in the remote Himalaya are difficult to beat.