On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude.
Lionel Terray
BY THE END of 1996, I’d been on six 8000-metre expeditions in five years but had only succeeded in reaching the summit of K2 in 1993. While I’d developed a lot of experience, I’d not had the success I craved. As the 1997 climbing season approached, I forced myself to consider whether I should continue in the game or do something else altogether. I loved climbing at high altitude, but it was costing me a huge amount—financially, professionally and personally.
Genuine introspection was not one of my strong points, but it seemed that on my last few expeditions, while there had been a good reason to turn around below each summit, I could have pushed harder, really stretched myself. I had either allowed myself to become distracted or agreed for the sake of team harmony with decisions that I didn’t support. I’d lost my focus.
I reminded myself that summitting Everest was my main aim. In order to gain the experience to do that, I needed to succeed in my shorter-term goals on other mountains. I made a conscious decision that I would start succeeding—start summitting—or else give up high-altitude climbing. To be clear, I wasn’t advocating ‘summit fever’—going for the summit at all costs—but rather that I would not give up unless I had no possible alternative. I knew I could push myself harder while still staying within my limits, especially as I gained more and more high-altitude experience.
With that newfound focus, I joined another Australian Army Alpine Association expedition in March 1997 to Mount Dhaulagiri in Nepal, the seventh-highest peak on Earth at 8167 metres. The AAA had attempted Dhaulagiri in 1993 without success, and by 1997 the mountain still hadn’t seen an Australian ascent.
Like all 8000ers, Dhaulagiri has a fascinating history. Its Sanskrit name means ‘White Mountain’, but it is more frequently referred to as ‘Mountain of Storms’, due to the ferocious weather that constantly lashes its slopes. In the early 1800s it was believed to be the highest mountain in the world, probably because it stands isolated from the rest of the Himalaya and rises a full 7000 metres above the Kali Gandaki gorge. Reconnoitred in 1950 by a French expedition, the mountain was deemed to be impossible to summit. A few weeks later, that same team famously achieved the first ascent of any 8000er by climbing Annapurna. Dhaulagiri would wait another ten years for its first ascent.
Four members of a Swiss–Austrian team, together with two Sherpas, reached its summit on 12 May 1960. One of the team, Kurt Diemberger, had already completed the first ascent of another 8000-metre mountain, Broad Peak. Diemberger said after the expedition, ‘It was technically challenging, it was difficult, but the main challenge was the weather. Storm after storm came in.’ The expedition differed from all other first ascents of the 8000ers in that it used a lightweight ski-equipped aircraft, nicknamed the ‘Yeti’, to ferry supplies up the lower parts of the mountain. Ultimately, the Yeti crashed during the expedition. There were no injuries, but its wreckage remains on the mountain, buried by snow.
In 1969 a US expedition attempted Dhaulagiri’s unclimbed south-east ridge. While the climbers were still very low on the mountain, a massive avalanche swept down, killing seven of the team. At that time, it was the worst disaster in Nepalese climbing history.
After several months of intense military-style planning, and the packing of several tonnes of food and equipment, our team flew to Kathmandu. We had ten members and were led by a longtime member of the AAA, Major Zac Zaharias, whom I’d known for some years. Since the expedition was being partly funded by the Australian Defence Force as an adventurous training exercise, we were required to include members with little Himalayan or no high-altitude experience. Adventurous training is a well-proven concept for teaching leaders to manage stressful situations in unfamiliar environments, but the risk of failure was certainly increased by the mixed experience of the team. The benefit of being an army team, however, was that we were well catered for. We had better rations on that expedition than any other I have ever been on.
Dhaulagiri lived up to its nickname of Mountain of Storms throughout our expedition and the tranquillity of our beautiful ten-day approach trek through numerous rhododendron forests in the Myagdi Kola Valley was quickly dispelled. Our final day to Base Camp consisted of a dash through a gorge on the flank of the mountain, whose snow-laden slopes teetered menacingly a couple of thousand metres above us. When we reached Base Camp, we could hear a deep, vibrating rumble coming from above. A permanent torrent of windblown snow arched across the sky from the mountaintop, signalling the gale-force winds that pounded the mountain’s upper reaches. Those winds and the regular avalanches that swept Dhaulagiri’s steep slopes had claimed many climbers’ lives and been the cause of the failure of the previous Australian attempt.
To succeed we would need grit, while to survive we’d need careful risk management and a good degree of luck. We also needed the blessing of the mountain gods. A puja ceremony was conducted at Base Camp to ask the gods for permission and safe passage on the mountain. Having now spent six years climbing in the Himalaya, I looked forward to these rituals; indeed, I became uncomfortable if we didn’t conduct them.
With the ceremonials completed, we started the climb and spent the first couple of weeks carrying loads on the lower slopes of the mountain to stock camps 1 and 2. During rest periods at Base Camp, we practised first aid and attended to our sponsorship obligations. One of those was to send a photograph of the team to the office staff at Thai Airways, who had kindly given us a discounted rate for our thousands of kilograms of baggage. For most sponsors’ photos, we formed a ragged rabble while the cameras clicked. For the Thai Airways office ladies, however, we went the extra step. At 4000 metres and in a temperature around zero degrees, we stripped off completely, retaining only our ice axes to protect our modesty—it was very cold! The photo was duly delivered to Thai Airways and, I believe, mounted on the office wall.
We also introduced the less-experienced members of our team to the use of our Gammow bags. These are designed as a temporary and portable treatment for altitude sickness. The victim lies inside the bag, which is then inflated and pressurised by an external foot pump. The increasing internal air pressure effectively lowers the patient’s altitude. To test the bag, one of the team jumped inside and the bag was zipped up and pressurised. The bags have a clear plastic window, so we could see the victim and he us. As luck would have it, he was quite the coffee addict, so naturally we opened a fresh packet next to the air intake on the pump, taunting him with the aroma for the next hour or so, while the rest of us stood around drinking fresh brews.
Another brew we had on hand was a homemade beer mix. Using one of our 200-litre equipment drums, we mixed up the ingredients and for the next two months waited with great hopes for a few lagers when we returned victorious from the top of Dhaulagiri.
The initial climbing was less fun, though, as constant storms forced us to move through deep snow and the team became very tired. To safeguard ourselves in the constant whiteout, we placed bamboo wands in the snow with compass bearings written on them, directing us to the next wand just 50 metres away. The huge precipices on both sides of the ridge we were climbing meant that keeping to the ‘path’ was essential.
Each time we returned to a camp, we would have to dig fresh snow away, and on occasion we had to dig down just to find the tops of the tents. In some storms the snowfall was so heavy that during the night we’d take turns to get out and shovel the snow off the tents to save us from burial and asphyxiation, which had killed many climbers on this mountain. Our expedition was becoming a war of attrition and we all lost significant amounts of weight.
My focus to succeed was not diminished by all these obstacles. In fact, it nearly caused me to have a blow-up with the leader. Zac’s plan for the climb was more tentative than I’d have preferred. We spent a lot of time at Base Camp, whereas I knew I needed to spend time at higher altitude in order to acclimatise well. He was in a difficult position, having to safely manage a team with such disparate experience.
At one point, as we established the higher camps in preparation for a summit attempt, Zac wanted us to carry a load to Camp 3 at 7200 metres but then to return on the same day to a lower camp. That was to be the highest point we would reach before our subsequent summit push, and would complete our acclimatisation phase. While that was a safe approach, I knew that simply climbing to that height would not sufficiently acclimatise me for the summit. When I told Zac that I planned to stay at Camp 3 overnight, he wasn’t in favour of it. While he didn’t say it outright, I could tell he was concerned that I might just keep going and attempt to reach the summit by myself.
I knew that Zac was keen to be a part of the team’s first summit attempt. Having been leader of the unsuccessful 1993 Australian expedition, he was doubly motivated to lead this expedition to success. I understood his concerns, but I also knew what I needed to do to acclimatise safely and sufficiently. I told him that I was going to spend the night at Camp 3 no matter what, but I gave him my word that I would not make an independent summit attempt. The mood was more than a little tense, but I was determined to give myself the best preparation for reaching the top.
Four of us, including Zac, did the load carry to Camp 3, then Zac and one of the other guys descended. Another teammate, Matt Rogerson, stayed on to acclimatise as well, which probably put Zac’s mind at ease. I wondered if he’d ordered Matt to shoot me if I headed uphill the next morning! It was a difficult night, particularly for Matt, as we struggled with headaches in the high altitude. Matt proved the point by throwing up the cordon bleu dehydrated meal I’d cooked, straight into the spare cooking pot.
The next morning, in clear weather, we looked up at the summit, so close and beckoning, put on our crampons and descended to Base Camp. I had given my word.
With camps and fixed rope in place, the team was now ready to have a crack at the top. Major Zac announced who’d be in the first and second summit teams—it was a military expedition, after all. I was in the first team, as was he. All had been forgiven.
The newfound camaraderie didn’t help much, though, as successive storms had dumped metres of snow on the mountain. Once again, we had to plough a track up to Camp 1, dig out the tents and do the same as we continued up. Camp 2 was also completely buried. The next night we experienced one of the heaviest snowfalls of the season, and by morning we had no choice but to give up the attempt and return to Base Camp to await better weather. I shall never forget the image of Matt, literally waist-deep in the fresh powder, pushing a bow wave of snow ahead of him as he forced his way down the hill.
Back at Base Camp, we sat out more storms as the days ticked by all too quickly. The pre-monsoon season in which we were climbing concluded on 31 May, and the Nepal Ministry of Tourism required us to be off the mountain by that date. It was already 19 May and the porters were scheduled to arrive in just one week to collect our equipment for the trek out to Kathmandu.
Tensions were running high, and Zac called a meeting to discuss our options. Everyone was thoroughly worn out by the constant storms, and the incessant bloody wind was driving us all nuts. Zac asked each of us what we wanted to do. Some spoke about wanting to go home, to enjoy the trek out, while others indicated that they might be interested to stay for another summit attempt. When it came my turn, I recalled my determination before the expedition not to give up until my last ounce of energy was expended.
‘I don’t care if everyone goes home,’ I said. ‘I’m staying until the last gas canister, if that’s what it takes to summit.’ I meant it. I was there to climb.
In the end, five of us decided to stay on. One man would remain at base camp, and four of us—Major Zac, Captain Matt Rogerson, Corporal Brian Laursen and the argumentative, undisciplined civilian, me—would make a final summit attempt.
When the weather improved, we set out and climbed over several days up to Camp 3. We’d set up this camp on our preparatory climb a couple of weeks earlier, digging a ledge into the face and erecting a small two-man tent. By now, however, one side of the tent had been buried by spindrift and was frozen into the side of the mountain. That meant there was only room for one person inside. I volunteered to sleep there, while the other three swapped war stories in a larger tent on a rocky prow about 20 metres away.
There was a howling gale that night. As I lay in my little half-collapsed tent, I listened to the storm raging outside. Suddenly, I heard the sound of an avalanche bearing down on me. The noise of the storm had hidden the usual distinctive ‘crack, whumpf’ of an avalanche releasing, and by the time I heard the snow approaching it was almost upon me.
I had only a split second to react, and quite instinctively jerked my knees up inside my sleeping bag. Doing this created an air pocket that would give me a few precious extra minutes of life—assuming I wasn’t carried down the mountain and killed, of course, which, I’m pleased to say, I wasn’t. The half of the tent that was frozen into the side of the mountain held it in place, but the avalanche crushed the tent poles and buried me inside.
Being buried in snow is like being buried in sand at the beach. I couldn’t move my arms, my chest, my legs, anything. In fact, with the heavy pressure of the snow all around me, I couldn’t even tell if I was facing up, down or sideways. But, for the moment, I could breathe. More worrying was the fact that small avalanches like this one—and it must have been small, or I would certainly have been given a free ride down the hill—are often followed by larger slides. That was definitely not on my agenda.
I was stuck until someone dug me out, but I didn’t know if the guys in the other tent had also been hit. I yelled out a couple of times and waited. I knew that the storm and the snow above me would muffle my shouts, so I had to hope that they’d survived and would come to check on me. The main thing I had to do was conserve oxygen, so it was better for me to lie still and stay calm—not a natural response, when every sense was urging me to thrash desperately to escape that suffocating tomb. But I knew that thrashing around would just end things more quickly. It was better to stare down the threat than react to it, so I lay still.
I was there for about fifteen minutes—thinking about life, as one does in those situations—by which time the air was getting quite thick. It seemed as though this was to be my chilly end and I started to make my peace with it. Finally, though, I heard some scraping, and a few minutes later Brian dug me out. The avalanche had missed their tent. That first sweet breath of fresh air was the very taste of life itself. I guess I’d paid sufficient homage at the puja ceremony before we had started climbing, since the gods definitely gave me a second chance that day.
*
We continued the next morning, pushing up to Camp 4, which sat at 7500 metres on steep and exposed ground. The vista towards the Annapurna mountain range just across the Kali Gandaki Valley was stunning. This valley descends to 1000 metres above sea level, which, with the 8000-metre-plus summits of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri on either side, creates a vertical difference of 7 kilometres. It thus stands as the deepest gorge in the world.
We had two new tents for Camp 4. Zac and Brian were sharing one, while Matt and I occupied the other. We planned to make a 4 a.m. start for the summit, and duly rose at two in the morning to light the stove and commence the arduous process of donning all the necessary high-altitude clothing. It would have been better to leave at midnight, but we needed the light of day to find a specific weakness that would give us a passage through the cliffs above.
Right on 4 a.m., however, the wind picked up to gale force and trapped us in our tents, only easing off a little before eight. With the instability of the weather, there was no telling what the future would bring, so I called out to Zac’s tent to see if they were still keen to start. They weren’t. They preferred to wait a day, and, as it was late and we were all still tired from the exertions of the previous day, Matt and I agreed.
I felt a little uneasy, though, as once the wind died away it became a brilliant day on the mountain, a perfect summit day. Days like that are rare on Dhaulagiri and I wondered if we were throwing away our only opportunity. We were out of food, too, so if we didn’t go for the summit the next day, the expedition would be over. As the day passed, I also became quite queasy. I’d eaten some tinned fish the night before and it wasn’t agreeing with me. By evening I was really out of sorts.
We prepared again for a 4 a.m. departure, but right on four the wind whipped up again. It was furious, almost cyclonic—impossible to venture out into. There was nothing for it but to wait. Around seven, it started to die off and I yelled out to the other tent that we should prepare to go for it. They weren’t too keen, but I insisted that if the weather turned out like yesterday, the wind should stop by eight and it would then be a great day. While we were likely to be caught by darkness on our return from the summit, there would be a full moon. They agreed.
At eight, the wind died away. I was out of the tents first and headed straight to the rock buttress above, which I bulldozed my way up, crampons flailing on the bare rock, and then flopped seal-like at the top of the cliff, trying to regain my breath. Walking at 7500 metres is completely debilitating, but climbing a pitch of rock brings on head spins, a heart rate above 200 beats per minute and a desperate heaving for oxygen.
The others took turns to climb the buttress, while I started up the slope above, post-holing in the nightmarishly deep snow. I managed to keep up a pretty good pace and made the track for about 200 metres—perhaps two hours of climbing—before Matt caught up with me and took over. Here the slope steepened, making the going worse. We took turns to break trail, but by 1 p.m. we were all exhausted, and we’d climbed just one-third of the face. It was going to be a long day.
Brian declared surrender and turned back for Camp 4. The rest of us pressed on. Constantly changing the lead allowed us a brief chance to recover, but we were getting weaker with every metre gained. Worse, I felt completely nauseated and dizzy from the food poisoning. I could barely stand up straight, let alone kick steps into the deep snow. At 3.30 p.m., that tinned fish finally caught up with me. I had no choice but to stop and attend to urgent business while the other two continued climbing. Everything takes time at that altitude. By the time I had undone my various layers of clothing, found the loo paper in my backpack and then redone everything, I was a full thirty minutes behind, with Zac and Matt about 50 metres above me.
That’s a long way at such altitude, and it would have been almost impossible to catch up to them under normal circumstances. I decided to offload some weight to give me an advantage. I took out my water bottle, snack bars, spare mitts and headlamp from my pockets and pushed them into the snow. That weight saving gave me the advantage I needed, and after climbing hard for the next hour I caught the guys—just in time for them to let me go ahead and break trail again!
Just on dusk, we finally hit the ridge at the top of the face and could see all the way down to the Kali Gandaki River, 7 vertical kilometres below us. With the ridge only a couple of metres wide, it was not the place to slip. Clouds swirled below us and the wind blew strongly, so we had to push on quickly.
Dhaulagiri’s summit ridge is infamous for having lots of bumps that appear to be the summit—all the more so in dying light—and it lived up to its reputation. Striking out hard for what we thought was the highest point, we ascended to its peak, only to see the ridge stretching out into the gloom, with numerous rocky outcrops above us. The gloom became night and we continued to climb along the ridge, past more buttresses of rock.
Finally, we found ourselves below the last buttress. Matt led the last steep and exposed climb to the summit. It was 9 p.m., thirteen hours after we’d set out from the tents. We snapped one quick photo before Zac provided appropriate leadership with the comment, ‘Right, let’s get the fuck out of here!’ This time, I didn’t argue.
We headed back along the knife-edge ridge as quickly as possible. Because I’d left my headlamp in the snow, I had no light as we climbed. I moved between the other two, using the light from the guy in front of me to see the general direction and the light from the headlamp behind me to see my feet. Given the sharpness of the ridge and the rather long drop to the valley floors on either side, it wasn’t great, but it was the only option I had.
It was bitterly cold, around minus 25 degrees Celsius, and pitch-black. The full moon stubbornly remained behind the clouds. We were frozen and exhausted and the climb down was slow. When at last we made it back to the spot where I’d stashed my spare gloves and other gear, I found my headlamp, but it failed to work due to the cold.
The safest thing for me would have been to continue climbing between the other two guys, but this was really slow and I could tell that they were desperate to descend as quickly as possible. I told them to go ahead, and resigned myself to a long night of careful climbing, picking my way down the massive face in the blackness.
I’d been keeping diaries for the last few expeditions and I later recorded the events of this night:
I was soon alone in the darkness but felt quite secure down-climbing. The only problem was the cold of the ice tool whipping the heat out of my hands.
As I descended, I worked my free hand constantly to rewarm it, as my fingers were freezing solid every few minutes. When it was warm, I swapped the axe into the warm hand and then worked the freshly frozen one. The shells over my down mitts was useless and frozen and not even seam-sealed, so they were full of frost.
I had lost most of the sensation in my toes also, and they felt wooden and stiff, though not lost.
Over the next couple of hours, I down-climbed the face, picking my way step by step. Eventually, I reached the top of the rocky band, where I was grateful to find Zac and Matt waiting for me:
Just as we were approaching the ridge, an unbelievable wind whipped out of nothing. From 0–100 mph instantly. Felt like it would blow us off and had to crouch to hold on. Absolutely freezing and whipped up snow crystals lashed us constantly.
I was wearing my goggles, thank heavens, but they soon iced up. I couldn’t take them off or I’d have been blinded by the stinging bite of the crystals. I had an ice beard in seconds and Matt’s eyelashes had frozen together.
Every now and then I would lift my goggles for a better view and my own lashes would freeze. I tried to peer through a window in the frost on my lens but was basically blinded. Without a headtorch it was hopeless.
Groping blindly, we forced our way down the cliff and the final snow slopes to our tents, into which we immediately dived. Inside, they were covered in frost and snow—the carnage of having been whipped by wind since we’d left—but they seemed like a tropical paradise compared with the bitter wind outside. Our water bottles were frozen, but despite our incredible thirst we hadn’t the energy to light the stove. We simply collapsed into our sleeping bags. It had taken us thirteen hours to climb to the summit and about four and a half to return. A good day on the hill
Next morning, the wind eased and we stumbled down to thicker air. Zac and Brian were too exhausted to go below Camp 3, but Matt and I kept on to Camp 2. Yet another brutal storm blew in, and we were soon climbing almost blind in the maelstrom. In our exhaustion, we moved painfully slowly and the hours ticked by. I realised that we’d became separated in the cloud, and as night approached I started to wonder if I’d passed the tent. I prepared for a bivouac, knowing it would be a life-and-death struggle in that storm. Then, out of the gloom, I spotted the faint colour of tent fabric and scrambled desperately over to it. I collapsed inside, onto a pile of rope, climbing equipment and other detritus, but it felt like a feathered bed. I was asleep in seconds. Matt found another tent and he too escaped the tempest.
Zac and Brian joined us next day. It took another two days to descend to Base Camp, as we packed up our camps along the way. There we found that our porters had been waiting for us for a couple of days. One of the more entrepreneurial of them had brought in half a dozen bottles of beer, which he offered to us at an exorbitant price. We still had our 200-litre drum of homemade beer, but the freezing temperatures had prevented proper fermentation, so it had little alcohol and tasted nothing like beer. We paid the asking price for the ‘imported’ beer, and donated our own brew to the porters, who immediately hooked in and drank the lot without ill effect.
We set about packing up the camp so the porters could leave the next morning, as there wasn’t any more food for them at Base Camp. Rather than taking the long trek out with them, though, we decided to take a shortcut over two high passes that would bring us down to a village with an airstrip, from which we could fly back to Kathmandu in a light plane. It would be an extremely long day, but worth it if we made it. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a map, and the only person in the group who’d been over the passes previously was our cook, Prem. But we were simply too exhausted to face a 10-day trek out with the porters, when one big day could have us back in civilisation.
It took until midnight to finish packing the camp, after which we grabbed a couple of hours of desperately needed sleep. Up again at 3 a.m., we had a quick bite to eat and started walking. We pushed hard to cross the first pass by 8 a.m., then raced for the second pass before the inevitable afternoon cloud stymied us with a whiteout. We made it by the skin of our teeth, as cloud billowed all around, but then struggled to find our way down in the complete whiteness. Plodding on as the hours ticked by, we fought to at least get below the snowline, as we had no tents, food or stoves. Shortly before nightfall we dropped below the cloud, but with the darkness we lost the track. We searched carefully around the sodden, precipitous cliffs, but by 9 p.m. and after eighteen hours on the go, had found nothing, and admitted defeat.
Being below the snowline meant that the falling snow had turned to freezing drizzle. We crawled into our sleeping bags and sat in a circle with our backs together underneath an umbrella. I was exhausted beyond words after such an epic summit push and the long days since, but we had no food, so sat there bleary eyed, soaking and cold, trembling with fatigue but happy to be alive. Then, to our absolute amazement, Zac reached into his backpack and produced a full bottle of peach schnapps. Consuming alcohol in our utterly shattered state, half-frozen with hypothermia, probably broke all the survival rules. But we drank it and we loved it. I shall never forget the incredible morale boost it gave us—probably as much for the insanity of it, but no doubt also because it was packed full of much-needed sugar.
In the light of day, we found the track down to the village, where we dried out, warmed up and ate. And ate. Back in Kathmandu soon after, we met up with the other guys from our team. Noting how much weight we’d all lost, we held a Mr Puniverse competition. Zac and I shared the award for ‘Most Puny’.
Our ascent of Dhaulagiri was the first-ever Australian summit of that mountain, a major achievement in Australian Himalayan mountaineering. It was particularly significant for me. Before the climb, I’d made a conscious decision not to give in to fear, hardship or fatigue. The mountain had thrown numerous barriers at me, but I’d overcome them and succeeded. That was a huge boost to my confidence as a mountaineer. It was my second successful ascent of an 8000-metre peak and the first time that I’d made a first Australian ascent of an 8000er.
The team’s success was not without a price, however. Zac and Matt both suffered frostbite to the fingers of their right hands. I realised afterwards that it was probably because, after they had left me on the way down from the summit, they’d made as fast a descent as possible with the benefit of their headlamps. The route down was a long right-hand curve, and they had faced out from the slope as they descended, meaning that they held their ice axes in their right hands. In their haste, they probably hadn’t stopped to warm their fingers. They each lost minor bits of a couple of fingers, nothing too serious. Matt also lost bits of a couple of toes. I’d survived uninjured because, having been without a light, I’d been forced to face into the slope and to climb slowly, swapping the ice axe between my hands every couple of minutes.
*
In June 1996, while at my Rawalpindi hotel en route to the crazy Polish Nanga Parbat expedition, I’d bumped into the Scottish climber Rick Allen, with whom I’d climbed on the Mazeno Ridge of Nanga Parbat in 1995. He was on his way to K2. I liked Rick’s climbing style and we agreed to make an expedition to Broad Peak in 1997 to attempt the still unclimbed South Ridge, which had not seen another expedition since my brief attempt on it with the Swedes in 1994.
Back then, Pakistan’s Ministry of Tourism only issued permits for a maximum of six expeditions per mountain—a sensible limit that the Nepalese and Chinese governments would do well to adopt today—and our application for a permit to climb in 1997 was refused, as six permits had already been issued.
I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Tourism, requesting an exemption on the grounds that we’d be attempting a route well away from the rest of the expeditions. No response was forthcoming, but elections in Pakistan in February 1997 brought a change of government. I wrote a letter to the new prime minister, Nawak Sharif, graciously offering him the opportunity to exercise his new powers in the interests of a worthwhile cause—well, a charitable one at least. I’d not heard anything when I left for Dhaulagiri in April 1997, but, when I arrived home eight weeks later, the permit was waiting for me.
There followed some fast talking with my boss, and perhaps another nail in the coffin of my police career. In truth, I think he was glad to see me go again. I had no annual leave left but had racked up enough years in the job to take a little of my long-service leave at half pay. Having finalised my divorce only a short while before, and having then outlaid a chunk of money for Dhaulagiri, my bank balance was getting a little low. But after searching under the last moths in my hidden shoebox, I managed to scrape together the funds. When I flew out of Australia again, just two and a half weeks after getting home from Dhaulagiri, I had six dollars left in the bank.
*
The Pakistani climbing season is the northern summer—June to August—so the Dhaulagiri expedition during the Nepalese pre-monsoon season, March to May, was the perfect preparation for me. I still had considerable acclimatisation and fitness, although I was somewhat lighter. After completing the official necessities in Islamabad, Rick and I were soon ready to head for the mountains.
I prayed that the weather would let us fly to Skardu because the thought of another 24-hour hellride up the KKH in a bus definitely didn’t appeal. After a short delay we took off. There seemed to be a lot of cloud, and I knew that the pilot needed clear sight of the airstrip at Skardu where there wasn’t radar. The cloud increased, and halfway through the flight the intercom crackled into life to announce that we were returning to Islamabad. Clearly, we hadn’t said enough Insha’Allahs at takeoff; we certainly said a few as we came in to land, with the plane bouncing around in the increasing turbulence.
While I argued with every airport official I could find about a refund of the fees for our excess baggage, on the apparently absurd notion that the airline hadn’t actually delivered us to our destination, Rick went in search of a bus. After some hours we were both successful, and we also managed to get the driver to let us pack our gear inside the bus and lay off the hashish until at least halfway.
About eighteen hours into the drive, the road to Skardu turns off the KKH and heads north-east, towards the Karakorum Mountains. We’d only gone a few kilometres when we were stopped by a long line of traffic. The road was obstructed by large rocks put there by angry villagers, who were demonstrating against the government’s failure to build a promised mini hydroelectric power supply for their village. They had blocked the road and were telling all the vehicles’ occupants that there were snipers in the surrounding hills who’d shoot at any vehicle that tried to get past. We were about thirtieth in the queue, and they weren’t letting anyone through.
The villagers told us that they’d communicated their issue to the government, who had sent a representative the previous day, but that they still didn’t have electricity. I guessed that there was a slight misunderstanding as to the time it takes to build a hydro plant, even a small one, but the villagers were adamant that they—and we—weren’t going anywhere until the power was switched on. Amazingly, given the would-be assassins he had to negotiate with, the government official returned after a couple more hours. Unfortunately, though, he didn’t have the magic switch, and the discussion soon became a shouting match. As if to prove their intent, the villagers started to let down the tyres of the waiting vehicles to further immobilise them.
Nobody carries a tyre pump in Pakistan and I could see us sitting there for days, with the lost time potentially costing us our summit chance. As the mob approached our bus to let down the tyres, I instructed our driver to offer them our car keys instead, as we’d have no way to reinflate the tyres once the blockade was lifted. The mob’s representative accepted the proposal, but I actually gave him an old padlock key, knowing that he wouldn’t recognise the difference. I felt no guilt whatsoever at exploiting his naivety, given that Rick and I had just invested about $20,000 in his country’s economy.
We sat around on the side of the road for several more hours. Some of the vehicles ahead of us had been there for a couple of days, and the government representative was clearly struggling to reach an agreement with the locals. Late in the afternoon, a military convoy arrived at the blockade from the other direction. They took no side in the argument but instructed the villagers to allow them to pass. This was our chance. As the locals rolled back some of the boulders, I grabbed our driver and we piled into our bus. As we still had the real car keys, we used the noise of the passing military convoy to disguise the sound of our vehicle’s engine starting.
At the moment the last military truck passed us, our driver slammed the bus into gear and we charged around the queue and towards the roadblock, while the villagers raced to roll their boulders back into position. They were too slow and we tore through the gap at the last moment, with villagers shouting and throwing rocks at us. We drove like crazy in case the threat of snipers was real, but no shots came. We were the only private vehicle to get through the blockade until it was finally opened some days later.
From Skardu we jeeped to the village of Askole, purchased the mandatory goat and started the 10-day trek to Base Camp, with thirty porters to carry our fuel, food and equipment. About three-quarters of the way there we suffered a porters’ strike. These were becoming increasingly frequent in the region. Despite the contracts they had signed, they demanded additional wages or they wouldn’t continue. It wasn’t because the loads were too heavy or the track was too difficult; they simply knew they had us over a barrel. These strikes can be quite tense. If we’d refused to pay, they could have done as they threatened, which was to abandon us and all our equipment on the Baltoro Glacier, leaving us without any means of getting to Base Camp. Or they could have stolen our equipment—there’d have been nothing we could have done about it.
Most expeditions just paid the ransom. But we were running a low-budget trip and simply didn’t have the money to pay the additional wages. I decided to play them at their own game and agreed to pay the additional money they demanded. We continued the trek, arriving at Base Camp three days later. When it came time to pay them, I counted out the wages for each porter according to their signed contracts. There were shouts and threats as they demanded to know why I hadn’t paid the additional money.
‘It’s simple,’ I replied. ‘You broke your contract and demanded extra money. I broke my contract to pay you that extra money. We are even.’
It was a risk, I knew, but I preferred to take it at Base Camp rather than halfway there. They had no tents or food, so they couldn’t stay at Base Camp longer than the hour it took them to drop off their loads and get paid. After a bit more shouting, they actually saw a bit of humour in having been outplayed. They accepted the contracted wage and departed.
It was 6 July when we reached Base Camp, and we were amazed to find another expedition already there. They were the Inurrategi brothers, Felix and Alberto, of Spain. These guys were hardcore and highly accomplished climbers. They had already been on the mountain for a couple of weeks and it was incredible that a route that had only had two or three previous attempts in history was suddenly hosting two expeditions in the same season.
Rick and I were pissed off that the Ministry of Tourism in Islamabad had not advised us about the other expedition and given us the chance to change our permit to a different route. The South Ridge was so steep and razor sharp that there would be few places to site our tents and sharing the ridge with another team would only exacerbate the problem. Worse, the Inurrategis were several weeks ahead of us and could potentially achieve the first ascent of the ridge before us, thus wasting our time and money and the extreme risk that the climb would involve. As it turned out, it didn’t matter because within a week of our arrival, while we were acclimatising on the lowest parts of the mountain, the route became ours alone when the Inurrategi brothers decided to abandon their attempt due to its length and difficulty.
At Base Camp we set up our meagre facilities. Our expedition was very, very lean. We had a cook, Sher Afzal, and the obligatory liaison officer (or LO), a Pakistani Army officer, Captain Shahid. While the heavily sponsored Inurrategi brothers had brought house-sized canvas tents for their base-camp kitchen, dining and sleeping tents, and at least a couple of cooks and all possible luxuries, our expedition kitchen was a low pile of rocks on the glacier with a tarpaulin stretched over the top. It was cold, dirty and uncomfortable. Sher Afzal and Captain Shahid must have felt really ripped off.
Given that there were just four of us, and that Sher Afzal could speak just a couple of words of English—which I admit was better than my Urdu—the four of us agreed that in order to avoid long nights with no conversation, we would take turns to tell a story—one person each night. Captain Shahid would translate for Afzal. The subject was entirely up to the storyteller. It was a great idea and we enjoyed many interesting nights, with insights into each other’s lives, books we’d read, hobbies, subjects studied at university and so on.
One night, Rick related the history of the Scottish royal family. This won’t take long, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He proceeded to recite every detail of every person even remotely connected with the Scottish throne for the last two thousand years, maybe longer—I think there were even some dinosaurs thrown in. Now, I’m of Scottish heritage, but after two hours the LO and I were praying for a merciful end that neither the gods nor Rick would bestow.
On the odd occasion when someone found it difficult to think of a story, or when Rick offered to tell us a few more obscure facts about the Scottish royals, I took great delight in raising the topic of religion. The LO was a devout Muslim and Rick a devout Christian, so this would always spark some lively debate between them. Luckily, they were both quite able to discuss their faiths without getting hot under the collar.
Like most liaison officers assigned to expeditions in the Baltoro region, ours was a Pakistani Army officer. Captain Shahid’s role was to ensure that we climbed the mountain and the route we’d been assigned, and that we didn’t photograph any military bases or bridges, given the proximity of the mountains to the Indian border and the ongoing Kashmir conflict. Most LOs were majors, but ours was a captain, and one day I asked him about his career and what he saw as his future.
He was quite candid, telling us that he didn’t see any promotions for himself in the near future, because he’d been in a bit of trouble recently. He’d been in charge of a platoon of soldiers in some part of Pakistan, where he’d been tasked to capture a local bandit. His orders were to capture the bandit alive, as the authorities wanted to interrogate him. As his platoon surrounded the bandit’s house, a shot was fired from within, hitting one of his men. Shahid was so enraged that he ordered his platoon to fire on the house with all weapons. Needless to say, the bandit was not captured alive and our LO’s career prospects were curtailed, at least temporarily.
*
Rick and I decided that the best way to climb Broad Peak was alpine style. This meant climbing it in one push from Base Camp to the summit, carrying everything we’d need for all the camps, rather than the siege style of climbing up and down, establishing and stocking a series of permanent camps. The route was so steep and technical—and therefore slow—that it would take us too long to descend from any point, get a fresh load of equipment and food, and climb back to our previous high point. The only way to do it was in one long push, and so each morning, over a week or ten days, we’d pack up the tent and all our equipment and carry it up with us. The risk, however, was that if we needed to descend due to injury, altitude sickness or bad weather, we wouldn’t have fixed safety ropes in place to facilitate a quick escape. It is a more pure style of climbing but also a more dangerous one.
Climbing in this way requires you to be acclimatised before you start the ascent. To achieve that, we walked around to the easier West Face of the mountain, and over two days we climbed up to 7000 metres, where we slept a night before returning to base camp. With this done, we felt well enough acclimatised to attempt the unclimbed South Ridge.
Back at Base Camp, we rested for two days, using the time to prepare our loads for the assault. Going alpine style meant that we had to trim every luxury from our loads or they’d be too heavy. We had food and fuel for a week, tent, sleeping bags, climbing equipment, water bottles and all the little extras—it added up fast. Our packs weighed around 25 kilograms each. To save a few critical grams, I threw out my toothbrush and plastic pee bottle. Pee bottles are essential if you want to avoid struggling out of your sleeping bag into the freezing cold of night, particularly when the tent is perched on a tiny ledge over a huge abyss, with no room to stand outside. But saving weight was critical on this climb. I still wasn’t going to go out into the night, though, so if I needed to pee, I’d just have to use my cup.
While we were physically prepared, the climb presented us with a severe psychological challenge. We’d be climbing alone, on a very technical route, without communication with our Base Camp or anyone else. Any accident or prolonged storm would almost certainly be fatal. The only way to overcome our self-doubt and trepidation was to stay absolutely focused and committed to our goal. And, to get on with it.
We planned to start the climb on 21 July. After dinner the night before, I fiddled with the final adjustments to my load, and then completed an entry in my diary:
Have a small moosehead good-luck charm that Alex gave me at the airport. Mustn’t forget to take it … Just had dinner—everyone is a bit nervous, including Shahid (our LO). Have agreed to send an 8 p.m. torch signal of 3 flashes = ok; 10 flashes means coming down for some reason.
I finished the page with my last will and testament, and settled in for a few hours of sleep.
As if to test us, though, the weather the next morning steadily deteriorated. It was both a reprieve and a great frustration, as our nervousness only increased while we lay in our tents. We prepared for a start the following morning but were again stopped by rain and sleet. I was getting edgy, so I applied my nervous energy to construction, building a frame under the kitchen tarpaulin to prevent the rainwater from running inside.
On 23 July we awoke to patchy cloud. It appeared to be clearing and we could wait no longer. We called out to Sher Afzal to get the kitchen stove going, and he duly produced an inventive concoction of chocolate muesli. At least, I think that’s what it was. Shahid gave us a couple of little food bars for good luck, a genuine and heartfelt gesture that I greatly appreciated.
The route took us up a rising glacier, on which we placed Camp 1, then up a steep and exposed ice face. We soloed the first 250 metres of 60-degree ice before facing a bulge that steepened to the vertical. Rick went first and trailed a rope, but he climbed so quickly that I couldn’t catch it. I picked my way up very carefully, still solo and unroped. The face narrowed to a rock and ice gully, where the climbing was technical but fun, and we reached the ridge above at about 10 a.m.
We’d hoped to keep climbing another 500 metres higher, but it was too hot. We spent the remainder of the day resting and rehydrating and set out again at midnight, hoping for firmer snow conditions. The route led us over a jagged and exposed ridge before joining up with a long snow ramp, up which we took turns plugging steps for endless exhausting hours with our 25-kilogram rucksacks. We finally hit the South Ridge proper at 4 p.m., sixteen hours after setting out that morning. These mountains are so big that our two days of tough climbing had only brought us to the start of our intended route.
From our vantage point we could see major rock buttresses on the South Ridge, so we soloed below them, across a very steep and exposed face. The drop was a couple of thousand metres—not the place to slip. We traversed to where the rock blocked our way, and then climbed up to the massive buttress above us. With our limited equipment, continuing meant crossing the point of no return. We wouldn’t be able to down-climb back through that buttress if things went bad, but we’d known in advance that this would be the case. Our plan was to climb over the summit and then down the West Face, on which we’d previously acclimatised.
Normally, this was a risk we’d have accepted, but on this occasion we both felt apprehensive about the situation. It wasn’t that the rock buttress was impossible, although it was clearly highly committing; it was more a feeling of unease, almost dread. We decided to descend. It was a big decision to give up because it meant the end of our attempt on that route, but to me it felt like we were being given a second chance. My inner voice speaks loudly when I’m on a mountain, and I’m not inclined to ignore it.
Despite having started climbing at 7 a.m. that day, we descended well into the evening, not stopping until we reached a lower campsite at midnight. Such are the days on big hills. The descent was not without challenges. An avalanche had stretched a section of rope left by the Inurrategi brothers that we’d hoped to use, so that it was too tight to clip on to. We were forced to solo again, above the steepest sections. When we clipped to the rope a little lower, we saw that it was frayed and worn thin in places from abrasion against the rock. Thankfully, the darkness of night hid the abyss below us and we could turn our minds away from the danger.
Rick started to abseil. Suddenly the piton that anchored the rope to the cliff yanked out of the rock. With a startled yelp, he fell. He’s a goner, I immediately thought, and watched on, aghast but helpless. Incredibly, the rope snagged on a tiny knob of rock, just long enough for Rick to regain his purchase on the mountain. Our small team of two had almost become a smaller team of one.
The next day we continued our descent, however the heat of the preceding couple of days had caused considerable rockfall. The rope had been nicked in a dozen places, but, without a replacement, we were forced to rely on it. I gingerly rappelled down a steep gully, using the points of my crampons on every little edge to try to take some of the weight off the cord, but in the end I had to commit myself and swing out over a cliff.
I found myself hanging in free space, the seriously damaged rope stretched thin and taught as steel, its worn sheath rubbing vigorously on the sharp cliff edge above. Below me was a steep face that fell away for another 800 metres. My heart was pounding and, with my full body weight plus my 25-kilogram backpack pulling on that frayed thread, I fully expected it to break at any instant and send me tumbling down the face, bringing an untimely end to my high-altitude aspirations. I did everything I could not to bounce as I descended.
I thought momentarily about how I might stop my fall if the rope snapped, but in reality I knew I’d be killed within seconds. For reasons known only to the gods and that rope’s manufacturers, it didn’t break. When at last my feet touched the slope below me, even though it was still steep and exposed and I had to down-climb very carefully, it felt as flat as a football field.
We reached Base Camp in the late afternoon and collapsed gratefully into our tents. Soon afterwards, a storm blew in, and it lasted for days. Had we continued climbing through that rock buttress up on the ridge, we’d have been caught by the storm at 8000 metres. That feeling of unease, our inner voices, had saved us.
*
Rick was out of time and decided to go home, which left me in a difficult position. I was still highly motivated to climb Broad Peak, but without Rick as my partner I would have to climb without a rope. That would mean greater risk, but my determination to succeed or take up another sport meant I had to take every possible opportunity to summit. I would have to climb a route that was less technical than the South Ridge, though, so I decided to wait out the storm and attempt a solo ascent of the West Face.
Ten days of snowfall meant a heightened avalanche risk, but a basic rule is to wait at least a day for avalanches to clear before setting foot on the slopes. I passed that day walking around the mountain to the Base Camp below the West Face. A more pressing issue was how best to attempt such a big mountain without a climbing partner to share the load of breaking trail and carrying equipment. I knew that lugging a heavy load in all that fresh snow would destroy me, so I decided that my only possible method of reaching the summit was to leave everything, including my tent, sleeping bag and mattress, behind. My only climbing equipment would be the crampons on my boots, an ice axe in my hand and a stove so I could melt snow to rehydrate. I figured that with the light load, and assuming I didn’t freeze, I might just make it.
When I reached the West Face Base Camp, I found two expeditions there. One was American, whose members told me that I would have no chance of climbing through all the fresh snow. They had given up on the mountain and had called for porters. The other team was Spanish, although not the Inurrategi brothers. They felt the same way but were going to wait a week for the deep snow to settle or avalanche off, and then have a go. I was determined to try, however, so I borrowed a down suit from the Americans and a radio from the Spanish.
I set off at five the next morning and climbed quickly through Camp 1 and towards Camp 2. The snow was deep but negotiable. All signs of previous expeditions and fixed ropes were well buried. I revelled in the feeling of being alone, powering up the slopes. I was fit, acclimatised and well rested after my prolonged wait at base camp. Stopping only for an occasional snack, I continued all the way up to Camp 3, which sat at 7000 metres, a good 2000 metres’ continuous climbing above Base Camp.
Arriving there at 4 p.m., I started my stove and drank several cups of tea over the next couple of hours, and snoozed in the luxurious warmth of the bulky American down suit. Waking at 11.20 p.m., I lit the stove for one last drink. It was a clear night, but there was a mild breeze and it was bitterly cold.
I started climbing at 12.20 a.m. There was no moon, and after a couple of hours in the pitch-dark, I couldn’t tell if I was on the right heading to get to the narrow couloir that would give me access to the ridge above. At 2.30 a.m. I stopped and waited until first light, which came around four, so that I could find my way up. So bitter was the cold that my 1-litre water bottle froze solid, despite being in a pocket inside my down suit.
The light made it easier to see the way, but as the face steepened the snow became much deeper. I sometimes plunged thigh-deep, sometimes waist-deep, and other times I actually slid backwards down the slope. That wasn’t great for my motivation. Worse, I knew that there were two large crevasses to cross. Being unroped, I was at great risk of falling into them. There was no one on the mountain to rescue me if that happened, and I’d die either from the fall or from asphyxiation, crushed deep inside the icy fissure. Added to that risk was the considerable avalanche debris all around me, and my subconscious started asking the inevitable questions about the sanity of the task I’d embarked upon. I hadn’t listened to the others on this point, I decided, so there was no point in listening to myself either.
The fresh snow must have been very deep because I didn’t ever find those crevasses, but the work of clawing my way up the bottomless muck in the ever-steepening gully was desperate. Hours ticked by and I seemed to be making hardly any progress. I had hoped to be on the col, a saddle between the Main and Central Buttresses, by 8 a.m., but that hour came and went and I was still well below it. I was comfortable being alone on this massive mountain, but I could feel my legs starting to tire. My wish for company at that moment was more to do with sharing the trail breaking than for the human contact.
To counter any waning of my motivation, I reminded myself of my ultimate goal: Everest. Broad Peak was a step on the way, and exhaustion was simply not an excuse to quit. Nor was cold, self-doubt or loneliness. I pressed on and, finally, pulled up and onto the col at midday. When I’d set out from my bivouac twelve hours earlier, I’d hoped to be on the summit by this time, but there were still hours of climbing ahead of me in the rarefied air. I set my mind to yet another epic day at high altitude.
At least the ridge was more solid than the slopes below had been. It was heavily corniced—windblown snow on the edges that concealed the limits of the solid ground—so I tried to stay above where I thought the rock was. I climbed over some knobs of snow and rock and was going okay, when suddenly the ground fell out from underneath me and I plummeted downwards.
Instinctively I knew I’d strayed too far onto the cornice and had fallen through it. I threw my arms out sideways—like a crucifix—to stop myself from falling through the hole. Luckily the cornice held my plunging weight. My feet were dangling in space and when I looked through the hole my body had created in the cornice, I could see straight down the sheer vertical East Face of the mountain, thousands of metres down into China. I didn’t have a visa for that country, though, so considered it best not to keep falling.
As I looked down, I saw an old ice axe sticking out of the snow a couple of feet below me. I’ll have that, thanks, I thought, and gently reached down with one hand to retrieve it while hanging rather precariously from the other. I’m guessing the previous owner had had a similar experience to me but continued down into China, also without a visa, and liked it so much that he stayed. If, on the other hand, the Buddhists are right, then I still have that ice axe at home and he’s welcome to have it back.
I was able to get some footing and crawled back onto firm ground. The near miss had taken a toll on my confidence, though, and I felt even more alone and exposed, totally beyond any kind of help. My mind was playing games with me and I was starting to listen to it.
The ridge steepened and I was forced to climb across very exposed rock pinnacles. I picked my way gingerly around them, feeling really unprotected without the safety of a rope. Near the top of the ridge, a large pinnacle forced me further out onto the face, and I found myself delicately traversing on loose rock with enormous exposure beneath me. The Base Camp tents that I’d left at dawn the previous day were 3 vertical kilometres below the soles of my feet.
At this point my self-doubt welled up, and every sense screamed at me to turn back. I stopped, clinging to life by my mittens and crampon points. I had no rope, no friendly, encouraging voices with me, no one even to notice my passing if I slipped. I looked around. I was completely alone on the mountain, had just nearly fallen through a cornice, was mentally strung out after a day and a half of climbing solo without equipment, and had been without food or water since midnight. Above me lay danger, perhaps even death. Below me, safety, comfort and warmth. And people.
I looked again at the steep rock to which I clung. If any of my hand or footholds broke, or even slightly slipped, I was gone. The only sensible thing was to go down. I’d given it my best shot, but this was beyond acceptable risk. I started down.
Wait a minute, my inner voice reminded me. Remember: you decided to start succeeding or take up another sport. After this, it’s lawn bowls.
I stopped again. Acceptable risk. I looked once more at the rock, still feeling very, very exposed, and willing it to give me an answer. Actually, the climbing isn’t so difficult, I thought. Okay, so there’s no rope. And nobody to see me fall. But what would they do anyway? Wave goodbye? I suddenly understood that it was the environment that was intimidating me, not the climbing. The climbing was well within my capability. At sea level I’d do it with my eyes closed. Sure, if a hold broke I’d have a bad day, but that wasn’t actually likely. It was unlikely. The climbing was within acceptable risk.
With that realisation, I was able to control my fear and continue. I began moving up again. I later wrote in my expedition diary:
Decided to go for it. Did not want to fail again. This was really a psychological point in the climb! Once committed, I knew I would make the summit. I wasn’t going to stop. I knew that I would be caught by the darkness but I was no longer concerned. I would take the obstacles as they came. Moved up … all the while clinging to the rock pinnacle like a cat to a tree branch.
This was the most significant epiphany I’d had in my climbing career. The previous few years of expeditions had all failed on the summit push, and while there’d been a good reason to stop each time, in retrospect I believe I could have better assessed the risks involved and pushed harder to succeed.
This time I did push on. I overcame the rock step and continued up the ridge, climbing over ice seracs and a couple of little pinnacles before finally breaking out onto the false summit. It was 3.30 p.m. I knew that many expeditions had stopped at this point and claimed to have reached the true summit because it is still a daunting distance away along the ridge, but I wasn’t interested in claiming the summit; I wanted to achieve it. Logically, perhaps I should have turned around, since the night would be on me in a couple of hours, but I was so far past my own turn-around time that it didn’t matter any more. Either way, I would still be climbing when darkness fell. And I wanted that summit.
*
The summit ridge of Broad Peak is very long, close to a kilometre. It undulates by 15 or 20 metres but is pretty much on the same contour except for a couple of seracs along the way. I edged carefully along the crest, which dropped sharply down the West Face and absolutely vertically on its east side, then climbed over a large serac and started the long traverse to the true summit.
It took another two and a half exhausting hours, as I plodded just a few steps at a time and then bent over my ice axe and gasped for breath for several minutes. Finally, after ascending a short rise to a snowy pinnacle, I was on top. It was 6.05 p.m. on 7 August 1997.
It was a balmy and clear evening, with spectacular views across the Karakorum Mountains, over the Gasherbrum Ranges to Masherbrum and back to K2. I turned on the borrowed Spanish radio and called them at base camp. They were cheering and congratulating me and said that they’d watched me through their telescope. I took a few photos, then balanced my little camera on my ice axe to take a self-portrait.
I spent fifteen minutes on the summit and then started back, six and a half hours behind schedule. By 7 p.m. it was dark and I climbed by the light of my headlamp. It would be a long night. I was incredibly tired, and hadn’t had a drink in twenty-one hours of extreme physical effort in the dry and cold atmosphere, nor any food.
I climbed back along the ridge as fast as I could, but the hours ticked by quickly. My exhaustion must have been extreme because it took longer to climb down the ridge than up it. At 11 p.m. I found myself at the top of the rock step that had almost stopped me on the way up. By then I was so frozen and dehydrated that I didn’t have the dexterity to climb back down the rock and so I was faced with a dilemma: risk climbing down without being able to hold on properly, or bivouac at 8000 metres without tent, sleeping bag, stove or water.
Bivouac! That most fearsome of words to high-altitude climbers. I’d once watched a documentary about Mike Rheinberger’s successful but tragic ascent of Everest in 1994, in which a climber at Base Camp watched through a telescope as Mike and his guide were preparing to bivouac.
‘Bivouac,’ he’d said. ‘French for mistake.’
That comment rang loudly in my mind. This was a far more serious situation than my brief bivouac the night before, 1000 metres lower, where I’d had a stove and where the air was exponentially thicker. Bivouacking at this altitude meant prolonged exposure without the oxygen I so desperately needed, which brought a much greater likelihood of falling victim to pulmonary and/or cerebral oedema. If they got me, I’d be dead. My dehydrated state also meant that my blood was thickening dangerously, leaving me at great risk of a stroke. And, in the extreme cold, my body would try to prevent hypothermia by cutting the blood flow to my fingers and toes, so I’d also be risking serious frostbite. If that happened, I’d be stuck above the rock step for good. Bivouacking above the rock step was all bad news, but I simply couldn’t down-climb the cliff without falling. Put simply, my choice was to stay up and risk death, or to climb down and guarantee it. I chose the bivouac.
It would be the longest night of my life to that point—interminable, freezing at minus 25 degrees Celsius, a strong wind blowing and nowhere to shelter. I scraped a seat in the snow, then took off my crampons so they wouldn’t draw the heat from my feet and forced myself to stay awake so that I wouldn’t just go to sleep and die.
I worked my fingers and toes throughout the night to stave off frostbite. To kill time, I dreamed of cooking meals and eating them. I even went as far as making up a recipe, shopping for the ingredients, preparing the meal, cooking it and then eating it slowly, savouring every bite. All in my mind.
The time passed so slowly that it was depressing to look at my watch, so I’d try to estimate how much had elapsed. When I thought it was about an hour, I’d refuse to look at my watch and force myself to wait another hour, just to be sure. When finally that hour had passed in my mind, I’d allow myself to peek, only to find that just five minutes had elapsed since I last looked. Five minutes when it felt like two hours! It was soul-destroying. The night just wouldn’t end. I told myself stories, mumbled songs with chattering teeth, rolled from side to side to keep from freezing, and visualised warm things.
I forced myself to break the night into chunks and focus only on each chunk. When an hour had passed—a real hour—I told myself that I was one-sixth of the way through the night—That was an hour. Now we’ll do another one. Just another hour. After the second hour I was one-third of the way there—One-third. That wasn’t so bad. Only twice that still to go. I can do this. After three hours I was halfway there—Okay, you’re over the hump. Everything still to go is less than you’ve done already. It isn’t so bad. It isn’t so cold. Wiggle your fingers. Wiggle your toes. I can do this.
Finally, there was a faint lightening of the sky to the east, but I had to wait until the sun actually rose to feel some warmth. With the caress of those first life-giving rays, I regained some dexterity in my fingers—enough to climb with.
I picked my way down the cliffs with the greatest care, as I still had only limited feeling in my hands. I felt very clumsy, like I’d been drugged by exhaustion and the altitude. Once off the rock face, I staggered down the corniced snow ridge to the col and, from there, plunged down the deep, steep snow face to where I’d left my stove, reaching it at 10 a.m.
I called the Spanish and assured them that I was okay. They were greatly concerned that I might have been frostbitten, but I could feel my toes so I knew that any damage would be minor. It took another hour or so to boil some snow for a drink, as everything I did was in slow motion—just lighting the stove took a weight of concentration and effort. That first drink, thirty-eight hours since my last, was a weird mix of excruciating pain and pure bliss as I tried to swallow. But the pain eased and I kept the stove going until I’d drunk enough and filled my water bottle again.
I then struck down for Base Camp, pushing myself through my exhaustion. By now I was desperate to get off the hill. Yet I was so spent that I’d fall back onto the snow and sit there panting for five minutes until I regained my breath. Eventually I passed some members of the Spanish team who’d decided to make their own summit bid.
I had no desire to spend a third night in the open, so I pressed on without a rest, reaching the glacier around 7 p.m., where I wheezed and staggered in the gloom, anxious not to be caught in the maze of ice cliffs and crevasses there. My legs felt like dead weights and my almost empty rucksack like a bag of concrete. The final obstacle was a few small ridges of ice, but even the smallest rise now seemed Everest-like in size and reduced me to a crawl.
At last I arrived at the Spanish Base Camp. It was about 8 p.m. Someone handed me some food, but it was fluid that I needed, and I sat there, speechless, drinking endless cups of tea and warm juice. In the afterglow of success and safety, I slumped into a tent; however, sleep escaped me—probably due to adrenaline, caffeine and the physical pain that was racking my body.
Shahid had walked up from the South Ridge Base Camp to meet me. He’d made up a sign congratulating me and welcoming me back to base camp: ‘Welcome to Base Camp safe and sound after successful, courageous, wonderful and above all alone climb of Broad Peak.’ It was a really lovely gesture and I was very touched.
With that, the expedition was over. While my little team of three waited several days for our porters to collect us, the Spanish summitted and returned to Base Camp safely and I pondered my latest success. Broad Peak was my third ascent of an 8000-metre mountain. By reaching its summit a few months after summitting Dhaulagiri, I’d become the first Australian to successfully summit two 8000-metre peaks in one year. More importantly, though, I had turned the corner on failure and endured two very tough expeditions, both of which had tested me to the limits of my psychological and physical endurance. Both had almost killed me, but I’d persevered and succeeded. And I’d learned that risk management is more than just knowing when to turn back; it is also about knowing when not to give up. I knew then that I could, and would, cope with whatever challenges I faced in the future. More than that, I looked to them with anticipation.
That trek back to civilisation was glorious. I was on a high from my success and I was alive, fabulously warm, and safe. I luxuriated in every little experience, my senses in overdrive—a cup of tea, the first smell of vegetation, a friendly conversation. These were the real rewards for having put myself on the very edge of existence, for having risked my life on what many would see as a useless lump of rock and ice. For me, these intangible rewards were of exponentially more value than anything money could buy. I was the richest man on Earth and positively glowed with spiritual energy.
Felix Inurrategi died in an avalanche on Gasherbrum 2 in 2000. This was a real tragedy because Gasherbrum 2 is one of the easiest 8000ers and he was a very gifted and accomplished climber.