by Andrew Lock
Together with the Norwegians, I planned to fix a small amount of rope on the steep ice face below Camp 3 at 7500 metres. Having fixed the rope, and after depositing some supplies at Camp 3 for a later summit attempt, we would return to Base Camp for a rest before launching the summit bid. At Camp 2, however, the night before we started the rope fixing, the Norwegians declared that after establishing Camp 3 they would keep going for the summit, rather than descending to Base Camp to recuperate. I couldn’t join them as I didn’t have my down suit with me, but I wasn’t about to miss out on a summit chance, so as they prepared to sleep, I raced down the mountain to Base Camp to collect my summit clothing. Next morning, as the Norwegian team made its way towards Camp 3, I climbed the mountain from Base Camp to Camp 2, and then continued up, trying to catch the others.
At one point I could see Dawa and Kili on the steep ice approaching Camp 3, but when I looked up a moment later, they were several hundred metres back down the slope. Neither was moving, and it was clear that they’d fallen. I feared the worst and continued to climb towards them, but a few minutes later both figures stood up and started slowly downhill. When I reached them they told me that a strong gust of wind had literally blown them off the mountain face. They were both shaken and bruised but otherwise unhurt. This summit attempt, though, was over. They descended to Base Camp with the Norwegians.
Having just reclimbed to Camp 2, I wasn’t inclined to descend again so quickly, so I decided to enhance my acclimatisation by spending another night there. What an experience. I was the only person on the entire mountain. The sunset was fiery red, with monstrous black lenticular clouds above me. The air had such a feeling of menace that I thought I might be in for some kind of super storm, so I dressed in my summit clothing in case the tent was destroyed. But it was just a colourful show and the night passed calmly. The next day I joined the others at Base Camp, and after two rest days we were ready for the summit attempt.
*
To avoid becoming lost in Manaslu’s notorious summit clouds, I’d brought a GPS. It was the first time I’d used one on an expedition. On a bitterly cold morning, Sven, Jon, Dawa, Kili and I left Camp 3 at 7500 metres, crossed the plateau and ascended the final face to the top. As with many mountains, what looked like the top from below was a false summit. There was still a very sharp snow and rock ridge to traverse before we reached the exposed and precipitous peak. The mountain has one of the sharpest of all the 8000-metre summits, and I literally wrapped my arms around it to stop from toppling off the side.
It was very blustery, and low-pressure cloud was forming right where I was. After a couple of minutes at the top, I backtracked to the col and we climbed quickly down to the plateau. The wind was getting stronger and it looked like it would blizzard. As we crossed the plateau, Camp 3 was out of sight and the snowstorm obliterated our tracks. There was some disagreement about the direction to follow, but I placed my trust in the GPS, and after some tricky down-climbing found the camp.
The others were too tired to continue, but I’ve always adhered to a principle of getting lower than the highest camp as soon as possible, so I packed up my gear and continued on my own down the mountain. A short distance before Camp 2, the storm worsened and I lost the way in the whiteout. Here the GPS didn’t help, because although it pointed out the general direction of the tent, the unseen path zigzagged through a crevasse field. Being unroped, I had to follow the path exactly or I’d meet my demise at the bottom of a cold, dark crevasse—not my preferred ending to the expedition.
To confuse things, I had no idea what time it was, as my watch had malfunctioned. I couldn’t tell if the increasing gloom was a result of the cloud overhead or the encroaching darkness. I had no option but to stop and hope that the cloud would lift enough for me to dash through the crevasses, but it became darker and I resigned myself to yet another high-altitude bivouac.
This time it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable because I had my down suit, sleeping bag and some food, although no tent. Most of all, though, I needed a drink, having consumed less than a litre of water since starting out at twelve-thirty that morning, some fifteen hours earlier. It’s difficult to describe just how thirsty you get at high altitude after days of climbing in the cold, dry air, but you rarely have the fuel or the time to melt enough snow to satisfy your thirst. Your kidneys ache, your throat swells, your head pounds, you cannot swallow and you cough constantly. You crave liquid more than anything else.
I placed a little snow into my water bottle, which I then put inside my down suit to melt. I was getting ready to pull out my sleeping bag when the cloud lifted temporarily and I glimpsed the tent—it was just 100 metres away. Despite my exhaustion and clumsiness, I stuffed everything back into my pack and scrambled as quickly as I could around the crevasses and into the protective nylon cocoon.
It is incredible what a sense of security such a tiny, flimsy shelter as a lightweight summit tent can provide. Immediately as you enter, the biting wind is cut and the intimidating precipice below is shielded from your view. No matter the frozen ground beneath, or the congestion of stinking clothes, food scraps, climbing equipment and bodies within, it is better than being outside. I collected enough snow to fill an oil tanker and soon had the stove purring, with glorious liquid forming in the pot. Within a few minutes I was ensconced in my sleeping bag, gnawing on a muesli bar and sipping a hot brew. Five-star luxury.
*
High on adrenaline, courtesy of having reached the summit of my eighth 8000er, the next day I forced my way down through the fresh snow, accumulating a load of 35 kilograms as I cleared my camps. I wrote in my diary:
Had to cross a widening crevasse at the bottom of a steep slope, and with my heavy load I thought the snow bridge might collapse, so I sat on my bum and slid down over it. After that, no worries, except on one slope where I had to self-arrest after slipping.
I was greeted at Base Camp by several people, each of them giving me a different reception. Alex was overjoyed, of course. We’d cemented a special bond of mateship, having succeeded on the mountain in such a small and lightweight expedition. For Alex to have stayed on, despite his illness, was truly the action of a great friend. The moral support he’d provided while I climbed played a major part in giving me the confidence to continue and succeed.
Also at our base camp was Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian woman with whom we were sharing our climbing permit and base-camp infrastructure. She had arrived with an Italian climbing friend. They would summit several weeks later, and Gerlinde would go on to become one of the world’s leading 8000-metre mountaineers. She has now climbed all fourteen of the 8000ers, the second woman in the world to do so, but she did it in much finer style than the first. She is probably the strongest high-altitude female climber in the world, willing to climb very technical routes, carry her own loads and break trail. She’s also absolutely gorgeous and has a wonderful personality, so naturally I fell in love with her immediately.
Unfortunately for me, one of the other expeditions on the mountain that year was a commercial group led by the highly accomplished German mountaineer Ralf Dujmovits. Gerlinde fell in love with him, not me, and they are now married and virtually inseparable in the mountains. I console myself with the knowledge that everybody falls in love with Gerlinde, so mine is only one discarded heart on a pile of many.
The third was the Australian expedition, which had finally arrived at Base Camp on the day I summitted, as it happened. I’d intended to send a message to them before I left Australia, to let them know about our little expedition, but I simply hadn’t done it in the mad rush to organise everything. Needless to say, that didn’t win me any fans. Some were disappointed, and others were even angry that I’d stolen their summit.
I have little sympathy for that point of view. It was unfortunate that things had turned out as they had. If there hadn’t been the tension at the first planning meeting, I’d have been there with them. It took a few years to repair the relationships with some of those g
uys. At the time, however, I was exhausted and had no desire to argue with them. Alex proved to be an impenetrable barrier to their attempts to ‘discuss’ the situation. I was simply happy to enjoy the success of another summit. It had actually been the first ascent of any 8000-metre peak for that season anywhere in the Himalaya, as we’d summitted on 20 April, very early in the climbing season.
*
Alex needed medical treatment for his kidney stones, so we caught a helicopter back to Kathmandu rather than make the long trek out. After three days in the madness of Kathmandu’s tourist suburb of Thamel, where we did our best to ‘eat, drink, relax’, Alex flew back home to his family and business. I flew to the mountain airstrip of Lukla, which was looking resplendent with its new bitumen tarmac, as I had another mountain to climb.
Before going to Manaslu I’d booked a permit for Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. It sits just to the south of Mount Everest. Indeed its Tibetan name means ‘South Peak’. The Swiss pair of Ernst Reiss and Fritz Luchsinger were the first to reach its 8516-metre summit on 18 May 1956, but Lhotse has since received far less attention than its taller sibling, to which it is connected by a precipitous ridge that sits above 8000 metres for its entire length. Despite this, Lhotse has seen its share of tragedy and controversy.
Polish legend Jerzy Kukuczka had climbed all the 8000ers but Lhotse either in winter or by a new route. In 1989 he returned to Lhotse to forge a new route up its extremely technical and at the time unclimbed South Face, arguably the hardest mountain face in the Himalaya, which would give him an outstanding ascent of every peak. Near to the summit, however, he fell to his death when his rope broke. Thus the Himalayan climbing fraternity lost one of its greats.
In 1990 a Slovenian climber, Tomo Cesen, declared that he’d achieved the first ascent of the South Face, solo. His claim was disputed and he subsequently retracted it, but the inquiry led to many of his claimed ascents also being disputed.
The trek from Lukla to base camp normally takes about ten days, but being acclimatised from Manaslu, I charged into Base Camp in just three days, two porters struggling behind with my climbing equipment. My existing acclimatisation wasn’t the only advantage I had from having climbed Manaslu so recently. When booking the permit for Lhotse I knew that, in addition to being acclimatised, I’d also have the right psychological mindset for climbing hard at altitude. I would need to be in the zone, because I was planning to solo the mountain’s steep West Face. Lhotse is some 500 metres higher into the death zone, and considerably steeper and more technical, than my solo climb on Broad Peak.
Lhotse shares its Base Camp with Everest but, despite the number of expeditions there, the mood was sombre when I arrived. Just that morning a British climber had been killed in a fall on the Lhotse Face. This was the same face down which Michael Groom had been avalanched back in 1991, although he’d somehow survived.
I spent two days resting at Base Camp and then climbed quickly up the mountain to test my acclimatisation. It was good. In just six hours I climbed through Camp 1 and on to Camp 2, and the next day I continued to Camp 3 at 7300 metres in five and a half hours. After leaving a deposit there of my down suit, stove, fuel and food, I returned to Base Camp and spent another six days resting and watching the weather. When it looked good, I started back up the mountain.
My route on Lhotse followed the same path as the normal route on Everest to a point a little higher than Camp 3. A number of climbers were pushing up to the South Col on Everest, so I shared the climb with them. At one point, I looked down the slope but could see no faces, only oxygen masks. I was the only one climbing without gas.
After crossing the Yellow Band of rock a few hundred metres above Camp 3, I branched off and headed straight up the Lhotse Face, making my own Camp 4 at 7800 metres. It was perched on the side of the Lhotse Face, with a massive drop down to the Western Cwm, some 1300 metres below.
The next morning I set off alone at 1 a.m. and pushed up the face into an ever-narrowing couloir, which was the Achilles heel in the mighty rock buttress above me. It didn’t receive the morning sun until 8 a.m., so it was bitterly cold, but that kept the snow nice and firm, and I cramponed quickly up the steepening slope, using my two ice tools as fists and punching their picks straight into the snow.
The crux of the route is where the couloir narrows, and I had to bridge across a small rock step before it opened out again onto firm snow. It was absolutely fantastic climbing. I was completely alone on the world’s fourth-highest peak, and I was loving every minute of it. This was one of those climbs where everything came together. I was climbing hard on steep ground for hour after hour—fast but not so fast as to exhaust myself—overcoming all obstacles with fluid movements, having the confidence to take on each successive challenge, and watching the mountains drop away below me. I absolutely thrilled in those conditions.
I’ve experienced similar emotions, although not to the same extent, on long training runs in the Australian bush. It takes me several kilometres to warm up, but once I’ve found my pace I can run for hours on end, physically and psychologically in the zone. I doubt I’d find the same enjoyment pounding the pavement, though. I suspect it has something to do with the sustained, almost meditative intensity of concentration that’s required to keep one’s footing in the outdoors, in conjunction with the sustained intense physical activity. It’s a feeling of testing myself, stretching myself, but still being in control.
The hours ticked by quickly and soon I was approaching the top of the couloir. I knew I had to climb up a rocky buttress to the left, even though the buttress to the right actually looked higher from below. The final climb up to the summit was tricky because the rock was quite shattered and I picked my way delicately up the loose stone and snow, careful not to slip and also not to dislodge a rock that might fall and hit another climber somewhere on the lower face, with catastrophic results. I reached the top at 9.20 a.m.
I crouched on the top for fifteen minutes and gazed over to the south-east ridge of Everest, where I could see a trail of ant-like people making their way to the top. It was stunning to see Everest from another perspective. On the other side of Lhotse’s summit, the face dropped away very steeply. I checked my footing carefully before shooting some photos over towards Makalu and the more distant peaks.
As I looked down at my own route, I could see the top of the rock buttress on the right side of the couloir. There were signs there that climbers had mistakenly climbed to that point, rather than to the true summit. It must have been so frustrating to make that error, and I wondered if they’d satisfied themselves with that peak or whether they’d made the very delicate and exposed traverse over to the real summit. By this time I was getting pretty chilled, so I eased myself back into the couloir and down-climbed to Camp 4.
As the sun was now shining on the Lhotse Face, rocks began to melt out of the snow, and the couloir became a shooting gallery. I’d had a similar experience on Nanga Parbat years before. There was nowhere to hide and rocks whistled past me, but such was my exhaustion that I was forced to stop and recover my breath for minutes at a time, despite the danger. The best I could do was hold my backpack over my head as protection. Forcing myself to carry on, I reached Camp 4 around 2 p.m., quickly packed my equipment and continued down to the safety of Camp 2 that evening.
Once safe, it was down the mountain and a quick trek out to the airstrip at Lukla, where I tried to book a flight back to Kathmandu. Only one plane came that day and there weren’t any available seats. I refrained from hijacking it this time, but as I walked back to my lodge, someone called through the airport security fence to say that a helicopter was heading to Kathmandu and had four places available. Along with about ten other people, I raced to get my gear and head for the ‘gate’. Victory went to those still supercharged with acclimatisation and summit adrenaline, and I was the first on board! By evening, I was enjoying a cool beer at Sam’s Bar in Kathmandu.
The year 2002 was one of the most satisfyi
ng I’d had in the mountains. Having decided that I would enjoy the journey to summit the fourteen 8000ers, I’d climbed in my preferred style: in small teams with minimal support. When Alex had become sick on Manaslu, I’d pushed on to achieve the first Australian ascent of the mountain. My solo ascent of Lhotse had been one of the most thrilling climbs I’d ever done—unroped on steep ground on one of the highest peaks in the world, but in the perfect conditions of which every climber dreams.
With those two ascents, for the third time I had climbed two 8000-metre peaks in a year, and it was the second time that I’d climbed two in a single season. I felt that I was now a seasoned high-altitude climber at the top of my game, and I could face any challenge.
*
Christine Boskoff and I had stayed in contact after Everest in 2000. In early 2003 we decided to team up and attempt an ascent of the South Face of Kanchenjunga. At 8586 metres, Kanchenjunga is a monstrous five-headed beast, although its name means ‘Five Treasures of Snow’—obviously named by a dreamer, not a climber. It sits in the far east of Nepal, overlooking the Indian city of Darjeeling, and it so dominates the surrounding landscape that it dictates its own weather patterns. Four of Kanchenjunga’s five summits reach above 8000 metres. Until 1852 it was thought to be the highest mountain in the world.
While a number of early expeditions trekked and climbed around Kanchenjunga, the first climbing on the actual mountain was done in 1905 by the British explorer Aleister Crowley. A number of valiant but unsuccessful attempts by Norwegians, Germans and Austrians followed, until the British returned to achieve the first successful ascent in 1955. Kanchenjunga has been the scene of many major epics since then, including an extraordinary traverse in 1989 of all four 8000-metre summits by a Russian expedition, which included the late, guitar-playing Anatoli Bukreev.
A highly spiritual peak, Kanchenjunga is worshipped by the inhabitants of the Sikkim region in which it sits, who believe that gods reside on its summit. At the request of the locals, it is traditional for climbers to stop just a few metres short of the very summit, so as not to disturb the inhabitants.