by Andrew Lock
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 an
d 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 m
y 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.