I sat at my desk pondering the future: 2016 was my sixtieth year and it was going to be a seriously busy one. A raft of forthcoming litigation cases promised a busy time at the tax office. My father was becoming increasingly frail and his bungalow and our family home were to go on the market, meaning a new place to live had to be found. My diary bulged with commitments, and somehow, within all this, I was determined to fit in more climbing, running and, most importantly, the annual greater-range trip.
I also needed to find a new Himalayan partner. It was approaching fifteen years since our first Himalayan trip together and Paul was increasingly keen to try some higher objectives, which I was less enthusiastic about. With a thirteen-year age gap between us it was obvious that we could not remain compatible climbing partners forever. After all, when I am seventy-two he will be the same age as I was on Gave Ding. And if he is still climbing at the same standard then he can count me out as a climbing partner. We had first discussed all this during the Hagshu trip, and although we had readily agreed to go to Gave Ding together, it was also amicably agreed that we should try going our separate ways in 2016.
As good fortune would have it, 2015 had seen a reunion with Victor Saunders. I first met Victor back in the mid 1970s when I recall commenting that I found him an irritating little squirt. But familiarity brought respect, our contrasting personalities fitted well, and we did lots of memorable climbs together throughout the 1980s. In 1987 we climbed together on my first Himalayan success, the Golden Pillar of Spantik in Pakistan. After that we largely went our separate ways until Eric Vola, a mutual friend in France, was so intrigued by our different writing styles that he decided that it would be a good idea to translate and merge sections of our books and publish them in France under the title of Les Tribulations de Mick et Vic en Himalaya. Knowing that the subject matter was over twenty-five years old and dubious about the exploits of two Englishmen being of interest to a French-speaking readership I thought this was a rubbish idea and was not exactly over-optimistic about a successful publishing experience. But Eric is a confident and persuasive man. He persevered with the translation and proved me woefully wrong when the book won the Grand Prix at the Passy Book Festival in France.
As Victor was resident in Chamonix and I was in the UK, the build-up to publication brought the two of us back in contact and prompted conversations about climbing together. And so, when Paul and I decided to go our separate ways, the search for a climbing partner didn’t go very far.
Over the twenty-nine years since Spantik our lives had followed very different paths. Back then we were both based in London with ‘proper’ jobs. Victor was trying to convince himself that the work of an architect with Lambeth Council was to his liking while I was doing my best to summon enthusiasm for managing the tax collection and audit office in Balham. Ultimately Victor left to become a mountain guide and moved to Chamonix while I decided to stick with the office job and stay in the UK.
Both of us kept on climbing, me primarily through my greater-range trips and Victor through non-stop climbing activity of one kind or another. It was not until we got together in the run-up to publication of Les Tribulations that I fully appreciated that he had guided clients to the summit of Everest six times, sport climbed at F7a and spent much of his time guiding in far-flung spots such as Antarctica. Speaking to him made me feel that my work life of sitting in an office with occasional outings to tax meetings was not exactly adventurous. Mind you, if climbing had been my job I don’t think I would have kept as motivated to enjoy my own climbing as Victor has.
When we last climbed together Victor was forever struggling to strike a balance between climbing, his first family, his second family, work and everything else that seemed to go on in his life. Maybe it was inevitable that getting him to commit to something was particularly challenging, and his well-used nickname of ‘Slippery Vic,’ or ‘Slipper’ or ‘Slip’ for short, seemed very apt.
One incident I particularly recall before Vic left for Chamonix was our boxing match in a seedy east London pub. The reason for this was to settle a disagreement we had over climbing partners but in reality that was an excuse for some memorable out-of-comfort-zone action. It was a mutual friend, Simon Fenwick, who had first alerted us to the existence of this unusual establishment. Simon is a bank robber’s son from Essex and the fact that he described the pub as ‘quite shifty’ somehow conveyed the atmosphere admirably. The Kings at Ilford was a no-holds-barred kind of place where anything was acceptable. On a Sunday lunchtime a boxing ring would be erected in the dark and cavernous public bar and the place would be absolutely packed. The boxing alternated with strippers, with the atmosphere livened up by a commentator who appeared intent on being as racist and insulting as possible. For a time, the outrageous antics made it an interesting venue for our climbing group on those rare Sundays when the weather was judged too bad for climbing.
Despite the extreme racist language of the commentator, the resident boxer was black. The idea was that those keen for a box could either fight him or go in for a bout with friends or others. Any white person fighting the resident boxer could guarantee being supported by a stream of racist commentary blasted through the sound system. Usually the bouts with the resident boxer were tame and involved little more than him fending off overenthusiastic young men trying to hit him. Boxing between ‘friends’ was sometimes more action packed and female boxing, a rarity in those pre-Nicola Adams days, was always popular. On one occasion Nigel Benn turned up. Benn was known as ‘The Dark Destroyer’ for his formidable punching power and aggressive fighting style. He went on to win numerous titles and is now ranked by BoxRec as the fourth best British super-middleweight boxer of all time. Benn’s entourage was large, black, short-necked and strong looking. Remarkably though the commentator stepped up his racist rhetoric and continuously expressed glee at the sight of two black men hitting each other. It was some surprise that no riot ensued and no surprise that the resident boxer ended up being carried into the car park to be revived. He returned some time later demanding a rematch but by that time the strippers had come on and no one was very interested. I later read that one boxer suffered a permanent brain injury after a fight with Benn so perhaps everyone got off lightly that day.
Anyway, The Kings seemed a fine spot for Slippery Vic and me to indulge in some rainy Sunday activity in pretence of settling our differences. Somehow the commentator had been told that I was a taxman and, with Victor’s skin being darker than average, he had ample ammunition to rev up the crowd with abusive commentary.
A ringing bell indicated that we should start trying to hit each other. Vic later claimed that he had never hit anyone before, whereas I had at least tried occasionally at school and once threw a wayward punch at someone who tried to take a guitar jack plug from me after I caught it when it was thrown into the audience at a David Bowie concert. It was one of the first times that Vic had worn contact lenses, and as huge boxing gloves were strapped on to his hands I could see that he was having trouble seeing clearly. This was to give me a distinct advantage. The canvas ring was stretched inexpertly over the floor and having not noticed an obvious fold Vic stumbled badly. Taking the opportunity I hit him with my enormous gloves. He looked really surprised, tripped over and stumbled back on to the ropes. The baying crowd immediately pushed him back into the ring.
‘I didn’t expect you to hit me,’ he commented later.
Once he was back in position I tried to get him again but Vic now held his huge glove-covered fists in front of his face, which made it difficult to hit him properly. Soon I began to tire and Vic emerged to throw some punches in my direction. The commentator hurled abuse, the crowd jeered and we gradually ground to a halt. The crowd’s shouts changed from inciting action to calling for us to get off. All in all I sensed that our performance was not providing the best entertainment value.
‘Get them off. Bring on the stripper.’
And so Vic and I were bundled to one side and the stripper came on until after a few minutes the commentator decided that another change was called for.
‘Get her off. Any more boxers?’
But there weren’t and the lunchtime was drawing to a close. An old man entered the ring and sort of danced and did his best to pick up all the coins that were being thrown at him. It was an unusual and seedily memorable place, The Kings.
By the time Les Tribulations was published many years had passed and us two sexagenarians (probably about the age of that Kings dancer) were keen to devote our attention to climbing objectives rather than boxing matches. Victor was sixty-six which, it struck me, was ten per cent older than I was. It somehow sounded much older than sixty. I couldn’t imagine myself planning to climb a technical multi-day Himalayan climb with any other sixty-six-year-old.
An objective was needed. My box file came out, Victor shared his secrets and endless hours of deliberation began. We dithered and ultimately it was the British mountaineer Martin Moran who came to our rescue.
In 2011 he led a trek across the rarely crossed Sersank La pass between Pangi valley and Kishtwar in the Indian Himalaya and became one of the few mountaineers to see the north face of Sersank, the south side of which had dominated the head of our base camp valley on the Shiva trip. Subsequently he wrote that the face presented ‘a mighty north wall’ and a ‘tremendous face of linked white spiders’. Victor and I knew Martin well enough to read between the lines. We contacted him, confirmed our suspicions and found our 2016 objective. It was time to grapple with bureaucracy and let the excitement build.
It seems a regular thing that I hurt myself in the run up to a trip. On this occasion just three months before departure an incompetent plummet from a climb at Matlock called Darius resulted in one of my ribs parting company with the cartilage. This left me with the curious sensation that my internal organs were floating around in an unsupported manner. The prognosis was that I should recover in time for Sersank but an unfortunate stretch while putting on my socks re-activated the problem just before we left. Add to this a seized back, a badly cut finger in a sandwich-making accident, and a cleanly cut nerve and artery after falling on to a bottle, and the list of ailments was uncomfortably long.
Naturally I never revealed any of these little difficulties to Victor and our pre-trip conversations always ended with positive confirmation that all was proceeding well. Later Vic admitted that he too had been having his fair share of pre-trip difficulties with a painful hip, memory loss concerns and the development of cataracts. With all this going on the Indian Embassy issuing X-mountaineering visas that expired the day before our return flights felt nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
With logistics all arranged through Kaushal, our ever-reliable agent in Manali, our first job was a quick drop in to the Indian Mountaineering Foundation in Delhi. Here we met Sanju, our liaison officer, and were subject to a mandatory briefing exercise. Mainly this involved officials staring intently at Victor and asking if we had a satellite phone. Victor squirmed uncomfortably. Denials complete, an air-conditioned sixteen-hour bus ride to the honeymoon town of Manali followed. This mode of transport sounds very organised but in fact catching the bus can be quite challenging. The problem is that the whereabouts of the pick-up point is an ever-moving feast. It seems that the official bus station charges a significant fee and so the bus owners arrange pick-up points elsewhere. This is all very nice but the authorities don’t approve and so the pick-up point is likely to change at a moment’s notice. How everyone manages to catch the bus remains a mystery. Anyway, after waiting for a long time at the side of a Delhi road, word of the new pick-up point somehow reached Sanju and after a short taxi ride we were on the way.
In Manali we met Kaushal and Devraj, by now promoted from kitchen boy to cook, before boarding the usual Force Traveller for crossing the Rohtang Pass into the heart of the Himalaya. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I noted that the tunnel under the Rohtang, due for completion in 2015, still appeared nowhere near finished.
Enjoying a ‘snow experience’ on the pass had become outrageously popular for Indian tourists. Even out of season the traffic queues were memorable. In spring, Sanju told us, there was now a restriction of 800 taxis per day ferrying people to the snow line. Before this limit was introduced the numbers reached as high as 6,000 per day. Judging by the level of congestion with a lot fewer than 800, we could hardly imagine what 6,000 would look like.
Signs urged us to Keep Nerves on Sharp Curves and pointed out that Safety on Road (leads to) Safe Tea at Home until, on the far side of the Rohtang, the atmosphere changed abruptly. A sign saying Last Fuel for 365 Kilometres captured the new remote feel. Downstream from here, in the Chenab gorge, the tarmac ran out and the road deteriorated fast. It took twelve hours or so from Manali before we turned off the route we had followed to Kishtwar Kailash and entered the Sural valley where, in line with so many of the valleys hereabouts, the roadhead had been extended to the last village, Sural Bhatori.
Mules were hired and never turned up, porters were engaged and after a halting two days of slow walking and negotiation, base camp was established in sight of the Sersank La pass and at an altitude of about 4,400 metres. Then, after a day of rest and sorting, two days of getting heavy sacks up the energy-sapping screes to the col and a further day of descending and traversing to a high vantage point, Victor and I were able to lie in our tent staring at the face we had come to climb. Actually, the stares were very intermittent glimpses through thick cloud. Most of the time we lay reading and sucking in the thin air.
All of a sudden Vic was searching around our very small tent with an increasing sense of urgency.
‘It’s my memory loss tablets,’ he explained. ‘I can’t remember where I’ve put them.’
He had told me about these tablets earlier, but his reasons for having them were delightfully unspecific and I was never quite sure whether they were to stave off memory loss or treat asthma. Either way, he was delighted when they were eventually found.
Each tablet came in a separate compartment with the day written on it.
‘What day is it?’ asked Vic.
‘Saturday.’
‘Oh shit. I still have tablets for Thursday and Friday. I must have forgotten to take them.’
Arriving at the Sersank La pass was a crucial moment. Before leaving home our research had uncovered a photograph that made the face look very dry and dangerous. We didn’t know at what time of the year the photo was taken, but it was a great relief for us to see that the face was coated with snow and ice. It looked safe and well frozen, but also distressingly steep. Acclimatisation could proceed in a more relaxed frame of mind.
‘Blurghhh!’
It was the middle of the night and Victor awoke with a start. He knew immediately what was wrong.
‘I’m so sorry …’ he began, but it was too late. The liquid in our water bottle was most definitely not the refreshing water that I had expected.
Up until this point I had been snoozing contentedly in our little tent. Now I was very much awake and seized with a sense of spluttering unpleasantness. Victor was clearly dehydrated and, although I am no expert, my guess was that his urine tasted worse than average.
‘I can feel the need for another bout in The Kings …’
Vic chose not to respond. Perhaps his hearing was failing as well as his memory.
There was no water to flush the taste away so I fumbled outside to gather enough snow to melt. An hour or two earlier the weather had been grim, with snow falling steadily. Now the stars were out and an improvement looked to be on the cards. That made me feel a little bit better.
Our initial plan of accessing the face via a very steep chute was soon dismissed as too exposed to anything falling from above. But like-minds spied a single safe route accessing the face via a buttress to the left. It would add a few hundred metres to the climbing and no doubt increase the time it would take, but the fact that we both homed in on it was refreshing. Like-minded thinking in the mountains is important and we had both wondered whether we would still feel the same way after twenty-nine years apart. Our personalities have always been very different, but by the time we were settled into our acclimatisation routine the banter was flowing as freely as it had done in the 1980s – albeit with old man subject matter. Now our mountain judgement looked as if it was in tune too. Already we were agreeing that it was great to be back in the mountains together.
What’s more, I was being reminded of Victor’s wiry strength and enviable ability to plod through deep snow and carry huge loads at great speed. I had hoped that my fell racing efforts might have levelled us out in this respect, but that appeared not to be the case. Interestingly we had by now discussed our pre-expedition ailments and realised that they weren’t really causing us any problems at all. We concluded that Himalayan mountaineering is good for mind and body. We couldn’t wait to get going, albeit with some trepidation.
The buttress was steep, with powdery snow stuck to all but the very steepest rock. What looked to be straightforward from a distance was terribly precarious and painfully slow climbing that involved clearing perhaps fifteen centimetres of snow, hooking crampon points over rugosities in the rock and teetering upwards. It was not until early on our second day of climbing that the ground changed as we reached the knife-edge crest of the buttress. The pitch that Victor led to get us to this point was a heroic performance that left me in no doubt that years of commercial expeditions have not dented the Saunders ability.
The way forward now was to traverse a sharp crest that sported intermittent overhanging walls on either side. It wasn’t the kind of ground that could be abseiled and if we should fail higher on the face it was clear that our descent would involve reversing these time-consuming pitches. I very much hoped we were good enough to get up.
‘My stomach is not feeling too good,’ said Vic at the end of our second day.
We had found a lovely little spot to pitch the tent, but as I took photographs of a fantastic sunrise the following morning it was clear that all was not well. And by the end of that day, as we were buffeted by spindrift in a much more precariously positioned tent, the situation had obviously worsened.
‘Got to get out!’ came urgently from the far end.
Being of slight build and with minimal blubber Victor likes to wear a lot of clothes both in his sleeping bag and while climbing. We were testing various items of clothing for Berghaus and Victor was wearing them all: five layers and a harness. Sadly there was not enough time.
‘Agh! Agh! Agh! Oh no! Oh no!’ came from above my head as he scrabbled for the door. A full assessment revealed that Vic’s favourite Calvin Klein pants had taken the brunt of the force.
‘What shall I do?’ he asked no one in particular.
With his harness and so many layers of clothing, taking them off was not possible without major spillage. Meanwhile I was keen to both stem the flow of spindrift into the tent and see a quick resolution to the odorous problem that was playing out above my head.
‘Cut them off,’ I announced unhelpfully.
To my surprise Vic produced an Opinel knife of the kind that I thought were only used for peeling vegetables.
‘Great idea,’ he announced, cutting away at his underpants.
For the rest of the night we lay with our own thoughts. The accumulation of spindrift was pushing the tent off the ledge but Vic’s predicament was a more serious problem for us both. Four days out from base camp and three days into the face it was not the best position to have this kind of difficulty.
Come the morning there was no improvement, but Victor was irrepressibly positive.
‘Looks brilliant ahead,’ he enthused, ‘but can you lead the first pitch while I get myself sorted out?’
One of the great things about Himalayan north faces is that the temperature is always below freezing. The accident of the previous night was well frozen but the ropes had suffered and I did not envy Vic as he fought to feed them through his belay plate.
The climbing was becoming brilliant. The conditions on this upper part of the face were much better than lower down. Every pitch looked uncertain but turned out to be just about within our limits. The ice was a bit soft which meant our ice screws were less secure than we would have liked, but progress was slow and steady. On this difficult ground it was interesting to note that I readily recognised Victor’s distinctive way of moving from twenty-nine years before. He too commented that he instantly recalled my habit of resting my head against the slope when tired. The front of my lightweight helmet was becoming very dented, which perhaps said a lot.
A fantastic day ended with us at a little snow crest where we were able to cut two small ledges, one above the other. At my request Victor took the lower one. He was still not feeling well and the day had been punctuated with numerous stops, or ‘natural breaks’ as they like to refer to them in tax office conferences.
‘I think perhaps it is the dehydrated food,’ announced Vic, leaving most of his portion.
This was unfortunate, as aside from boiled sweets we didn’t have anything else. It also struck me that Victor had told me that his usual weight was fifty-nine kilograms (compared to my seventy) and our pre-climb blubber comparison had suggested that I had more reserves. So, as I happily boosted my calorific intake by polishing off Vic’s food, I couldn’t help but mention that even he wouldn’t be able to run on empty forever.
The man himself appeared not to be concerned. ‘Not a problem. Perhaps it’s just the evening meals, and the porridge for breakfast will stay down.’
Whatever the situation, it was becoming increasingly clear that finishing the climb and descending the far side would be considerably easier than retreating down the face and recrossing the Sersank La.
The porridge only partially stayed down, the ‘natural breaks’ continued and day five on the face proved both challenging and fine. By the time we had solved the difficulties of the headwall and had the cornice in sight, the Saunders body was surging forward. Where he found the energy from I do not know. Not once did he complain about a situation that would have ended the climb for lesser beings. At the age of sixty-six he was a truly remarkable man.
At 6.30 p.m. on our fifth day on the face some acrobatic heavy breathing in the last rays of the day saw us over the cornice and flopped out before a new panorama on the relatively amenable slopes of the south-west side of the mountain.
Hopes of being able to pitch the tent were quashed by hard ice, but a clear and cold night on thirty-centimetre-wide nose-to-tail ledges saw us through to a perfect dawn and a lazy 10 a.m. start. Unknown to us, Sanju and Devraj had their binoculars trained on us and were concerned at the lack of morning movement. But there was no need to rush; it was a beautiful cloudless day and ahead lay just the 150-metre summit pyramid and what we hoped would be a leisurely descent.
The summit pyramid itself had not been climbed. In 2008 a team of Japanese climbers and high-altitude porters had reached the foot via the glacier systems to the south-west but did not proceed further as local people had apparently asked them to leave the summit untouched. Knowing this, we had quizzed locals at Sural Bhatori who assured us that they had no objection to us climbing to the highest point.
From photographs we had seen, it looked as though the Japanese had approached the summit pyramid from a difficult side, but we faced no great problems and by 12.30 p.m. we stood on the top. Satisfying a childhood urge of mine, I built a little cairn to mark our passing. The panorama of the Kishtwar, Pangi valley and Lahaul peaks was inspirational. Every time I stand on a summit in this area I see exciting new objectives. It was a first for Victor in this area and he was like a playful puppy faced with an array of new chews. I took a little video clip:
‘Those were six of the best days of my life.’
Moving words from a poo-covered man. I wondered what six of the worst days in his life would be like.
All that was left was to descend the glacier systems of the south-west side. Martin Moran had suggested the descent might prove easy. Let’s just say he was wrong. After a day and a half of complex glacier travel and forced abseils through icefalls, we eventually escaped on to rocky ground. Vic removed his shell suit, four days of pent-up odour was released and we descended to a welcome tea meeting with Sanju and Devraj.
Two days later, on 6 October, I was able to upset Vic by telling him that I’d had my first crap since 30 September. By the end of the next day, Victor had fallen into two streams, our porters had ferried our kit down to Sural Bhatori and, three days later, we were ensconced in a local house watching satellite television. Bear Grylls was on the screen, eating a variety of insects and drinking his own urine.
‘Appears to be more refreshing than mine,’ concluded Victor as Bear licked his lips enthusiastically.
All we have to do now is agree a follow-up reunion climb – there’s a lot to be said for them.
‘I’ll arrange the food next time,’ said Vic.