by Sandy Allan
Much progress had been made in the thirty-three years since that first attempt on the Mazeno. Clothing and equipment were much better, as were attitudes and knowledge. In addition, weather forecasting was much more reliable. Yet this great beast was still unclimbed. Now, almost twenty years after my first attempt, I was on my way back for another try.
Stepping through the aircraft door at Islamabad airport, a blast of hot air rising off the tarmac hit me in the face. It was 10 June 2012. I had flown in from London with Cathy O’Dowd, and we were through customs in no time, spilling out on to the concourse where Muhammad Ali, our agent and the director of Adventure Pakistan, was waiting to collect us. He led the way with an entourage of airport porters to a four-wheel-drive truck.
I love the early days of an expedition, arriving in South Asia, plunging back into the frenetic pace of city life there. Expeditions are really organised chaos, an exact reflection of life – or at least my life. The noise and chaos of the city were familiar to me, but rush hour hadn’t started yet, so the streets were relatively quiet. At the hotel where Rick and the three Sherpas were waiting for us, barriers across the entrance at the top of the drive blocked anyone from getting too close too soon, a protective measure against the terrorist attacks and suicide bombers that have made life in Pakistan so difficult. Police and hotel security guards pored over our passports and glanced over our baggage in the back of the pick-up. Only then were we permitted to drive into the hotel grounds.
Immediately, I spotted a bus parked in a corner of the compound loaded with expedition kitbags. As we’d arranged, Rick had got everything organised for a rapid departure. Inside the hotel Lhakpa Rangdu Sherpa, Lhakpa Nuru Sherpa, Lakpa Zarok Sherpa – the ‘three Lhakpas’ – and Rick were tucking into breakfast. We hugged and shook hands, and I grabbed a mango juice. It was so great to see them again. The otherwise empty restaurant was suddenly full of the energy of a great new adventure. It felt like years of planning were finally coming together.
Once I had introduced Cathy to the Sherpas, Rick explained everything was ready and we could start our drive up the Karakoram Highway straight away. I told him I wasn’t going anywhere without a shower. Cathy disappeared into Rick’s room and I used the Sherpas’, stepping over the chaos of an abandoned hotel room. An extra mattress lay on the floor, like Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, but without the backstory. I found some soap, a used towel and a disposable razor and luxuriated in the feel of warm, clean water on my skin. I knew that in a few days I would be dreaming of a hot shower in a half-decent bathroom and I wasn’t about to waste the chance now.
Changing into trekking pants and a T-shirt, I filled my wash kit with the remaining soaps and shampoos and rushed downstairs to where the bags holding all my important high-altitude climbing clothing and equipment were stacked on the lobby floor. Working quickly, I began to rearrange my gear and pulled out my ice tools. My heart sank. They were not at all what I wanted; certainly not the sort of axes you’d want on the climb of a lifetime.
This was largely my own fault. For the last few weeks I’d been working in Australia, helping to set up an industrial rope access division for a Scottish and Australian joint venture. I had been set up in offices in the trendiest part of Perth, with a personal assistant who seemed to know every secret detail of every important business in Western Australia. But the Scottish businessmen I was working for had kept me hanging on in Perth till the last minute. I had planned a week in Chamonix to acclimatise and recover my usual gear, but there had no longer been time for that. Rick reassured me there were adequate ice tools in our Pakistani stash, but, as I now discovered, they were cheap and low-quality knock-offs made in Eastern Europe.
Rick and I have different attitudes to money. I often crack a joke that the British fifty-pence coin has heptagonal edges so you can use a wrench to extract it from Rick’s hand. Then again, his sound approach to cash flow has bailed out our expeditions on more than one occasion. My life as an itinerant mountain guide means that I have quite a small income and, while I do also get some interesting work in the rope access industry, the money is soon gone on climbing and helping out my daughters.
My father often warned me about fast women and slow horses but I can’t have listened too well; a balanced bank account is not something I manage easily, nor, for that matter, is a lasting marriage. While I love being in the mountains, with all their austerity, when I’m in the Chamonix valley I have a tendency towards the luxurious, with a taste for expensive restaurants and vintage wines. I was reminded by one of my pals that my motto used to be that to die in credit was to die in disgrace.
In the 1980s, I went on expeditions with the poet and novelist Andrew Greig, including one to Lhotse Shar near Everest, where he wrote a poem about it in his book Getting Higher, called ‘Three Above Namche Bazaar’:
‘Sandy, feeling somewhat queasy,/squatted above Namche,/shat a five-foot worm. My life’s/like that, he said as we/laughed and took our photographs,/a thread of consistency/through unconsolidated crap.’ [1]
Much of what happens in life can be put down to chance, but even though I think I’ve had more than my share of good luck, when it comes to the basic rules of mountaineering, I am blessed with a very strong sense of discipline; to do things properly when required, and that includes having the right ice axes for the job.
Still, when we at last loaded my bags on to the bus, I felt a burst of optimism. After years of planning, thinking and dreaming, we were moments away from finally setting off. Cathy had sorted herself out much more quickly and was impatient with me for being so slow. I excused myself for being a man, unable to do several things at once. We said our goodbyes to Ali and climbed aboard to be driven away into the madness of Islamabad’s streets. Pakistani music blared from the vehicle’s radio, and I helped myself to the drinks from the cooler Ali’s people had filled for us. After just an hour and a half in Islamabad, we had, thanks to Ali, Rick and the Sherpas, already started the twenty-four-hour drive along the Karakoram Highway – one of the most amazing roads in the world – bound for the small village of Chilas, an important staging post on the highway.
Known in Pakistan as the KKH, the road is excellent at first, and we sped out of the city. True, we sometimes shrieked in fear as drivers yo-yoed between lanes at high speed without warning, braking dramatically and swerving to avoid overloaded trucks that wallowed like whales, or the three-wheel taxis and donkey carts. But after a few hours of this, the KKH narrowed to two lanes and we were out in the country, dodging massive potholes.
Every time we paused in the road, a horde of adults and kids tried to sell us drinks, snacks, cheap plastic necklaces and pretty much anything else, shouting loudly and holding their goods high up above their heads so we could see them through the bus windows. None of them got run over but I expected it constantly. A passing thought worried me: that my life could turn out this way, that at some unexpected moment some unpredictable event might occur to make me so poor that I would be forced by circumstance to try and earn my living selling wares to passing traffic. Constantly, when in Pakistan, I am reminded how much easier – and safer – our lives back home in Europe or North America can be.
As a mountain guide, my self-employed way of life does feel pretty fragile; there is no sick pay or affordable insurance cover so if I damage myself, or if clients do something unpredictable and I sustain an injury, I could be out of a job. On the other hand, here I was, squeezed in with my friends among all this gear and travelling to the start of a great adventure. I knew how lucky I was. I felt paradoxically excited and relaxed. Exhausted from the journey, I expected sleep to come but, watching the disorganised splendour of the Pakistani countryside, the hustle and bustle of towns and villages, I found myself captivated and happy to stay in the flow.
The rest of the team seemed equally lost in their thoughts. From my seat at the back of the bus I could see them all. Now that we were together, sharing a ride to the mountains,
I felt content with how I’d put the team together. Seeing Rick on the bus, a couple of seats in front of me, explained a good part of my confidence: Rick wasn’t really chosen, he was simply the person I could trust most to be with on such a big climb.
Although in the valley we aren’t the closest of buddies, we have known each other for decades, cutting our teeth on hard winter climbs in Scotland and meeting in the Alps as young apprentices. We shared an incredible adventure on the south face of Pumori almost thirty years ago. Two days into that climb, we were hauling our rucksacks up steep ground late in the day when the tent, which was tied to the outside of Rick’s sack, got caught on a rock and came free, disappearing like a torpedo into the abyss. After a cold bivouac, the weather wasn’t promising. The sky was overcast and cloud was blasting across the face. Clinging to our ice tools, we were strafed by falling ice and spindrift, but it never occurred to us to turn back. We spent the next night in a tiny snow cave and two days later reached the summit as the weather improved and conditions on the face became easier.
Rick had endured an even longer first ascent on the south face of Ganesh II with Nick Kekus, a guide like me. That was a twelve-day epic of tough and often dangerous technical climbing on a peak that is, like Pumori, over 7,000 metres. Nick and Rick endured some desperate bivouacs and towards the end, the weather turned bad and they ran low on food and gas. It was, until Nanga Parbat, the longest Rick had spent on a single push on a mountain, and it gave him a lot of confidence in how far he could take things. He also had plenty of experience on 8,000-metre peaks; Rick had been part of an otherwise Russian team that made the first ascent of Dhaulagiri’s north face in 1993.
There have been very few new routes on 8,000-metre peaks by British climbers since the deaths of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker on Everest in 1982. Their loss, attempting an alpine-style first ascent of the mountain’s north-east ridge, cast a long shadow. To our generation, coming hot on their heels, there was a realisation that pushing big new routes on big mountains in the best style could be very dangerous. In 1985, Rick and I were part of an expedition led by Mal Duff that attempted the same ridge. We understood perfectly well what would be involved on Nanga Parbat. We had spent a lifetime preparing for it.
In recent years, during the summer of 2009, Rick and I had reached the summit of Nanga Parbat via the Kinshofer route on the Diamir side. This was first climbed in 1962, on one of the many expeditions to the mountain led by Karl Herrligkoffer. (It’s known as the Kinshofer after one of the lead climbers, Toni Kinshofer. Herrligkoffer was an expedition organiser, not a climber. That could and did lead to tension.) Conditions had been very windy near the top, but our climb had been a happy experience. Even so, both on the way up and down, my eyes and mind were often on the Mazeno. I must admit that while it looked corniced and convoluted, and was without doubt a very long ridge indeed, I felt sure in my mind that if any team could climb it, Rick and I could. Indeed I was not alone in thinking this. At one point, when Rick and I had spent several nights at Camp 3 acclimatising, we came back to Base Camp for a rest and seriously considered abandoning our Diamir climb in favour of the Mazeno.
Fortunately, better sense prevailed; as we discussed it Rick and I realised we weren’t ready. I knew we hadn’t sussed out a sound plan that would give us a chance beyond the Mazeno Gap. Rick was happy to go and try; he would have gone on the Mazeno at any cost, knocking his head against any obstacle, but some of the world’s best had reached the gap exhausted and had needed to fight hard to escape the ridge and get back down alive. After careful consideration we decided to continue with our climb of the Diamir. It turned out to be a grand summit and the knowledge gained was well worth the time it took; having first-hand knowledge of the descent would come in handy for any future attempts on the Mazeno. Quite by chance, my sister Eunice also thought that with our ascent I became the first Scotsman to climb Nanga Parbat.
Even though Rick and I have a high level of trust in each other, we often have what Rick once described as ‘lively discussions’. Rick is tough – a hard, steely nut. In comparison, I am Mr Softy, too emotional and sensitive for my own good. Rick believes that if you hit a problem over the head often enough it eventually breaks. He uses phrases like ‘our efforts were vindicated’, as though climbing is a war against the elements. I have learned, sometimes through bitter experience, that pushing hard does not always work out well, in life as well as the mountains. I knew we had to come up with an alternative strategy. I wanted to get to know and understand every aspect of the mountain and work with it, to understand it and perhaps be lucky enough to co-exist with it long enough to reach the summit. Whether it would let you get down from the summit was a different matter, but that was a bridge we would only need to cross if we got to the top.
Rick and I had spent almost twenty years talking about the Mazeno, starting with that first attempt in the mid-1990s. That’s when the obsession began. It was a problem we couldn’t let go. It took many years for a plan of how we should climb the ridge to evolve. For a long time I argued we could do it on our own; Rick believed we should have a bigger team. He knew my cash flow was always tricky and I might have to pull out for financial reasons. Getting time off from his job in the oil industry took a lot of advance planning with his employer. If we went with a bigger team, then he’d have reserves if I pulled out.
I couldn’t see that bringing more climbers added anything, especially if they weren’t as experienced. Like a chain, the expedition would only be as strong as its weakest link. But, as the years passed, I began to see things differently. It became clear how physically and mentally exhausting reaching the summit from the Mazeno would be. Swenson and Chabot had arrived at the Mazeno Gap too depleted to continue. The fact that they had been able to reach the Mazeno Gap at all was inspiring enough, but there seemed little point in repeating the exercise. I did not want to be involved in yet another attempt that climbed the ridge but failed to reach the summit.
So I found myself conflicted about how to proceed. I knew I wanted to go back with Rick. But I also knew there was little prospect that we would have the energy to climb the ridge, carrying all the necessary gear and food, breaking trail for all those kilometres, over all those summits over 7,000 metres, and then continue up to the summit of Nanga Parbat at over 8,000 metres. Given the scale of the challenge and the cost of the enterprise, I asked myself again and again if we weren’t crazy just to contemplate such an adventure. It began to make sense to take more people.
Having decided to enlarge the team, we looked around for climbers to join it. This is always a lot harder than people might imagine. There aren’t so many people around who have the depth of experience, talent and ambition to take on a challenge like this. I spend a lot of time in the Alps among kindred spirits and great friends who are constantly climbing magnificent routes there and around the world. They are amazingly competent and ambitious mountain climbers. But when I asked them to come with me to the Mazeno Ridge, none of them seemed that interested. One young pal, a guide, showed some real interest but his mate and regular climbing partner wasn’t so sure. His wife had just had a baby and the Mazeno was no place to think about your duties as a new father.
Rick also mentioned Andrew Lock, an Australian he had climbed with a lot. Andrew had also been with us in 1995 when we first tried the ridge with Doug Scott and so he knew the challenge of the Mazeno well. I’d run into Andrew since then, and discovered just how reliable he could be. I had been guiding a private client up Everest when I discovered some-one had wandered off with my ice axe, which I’d stashed at Camp 3 on the Lhotse Face. Fortunately for me I met Andrew, on his way down from the South Col. I asked him if he would lend me his axe, and he didn’t think twice about it. Only a true friend does something like that. So I was tempted to go along with Rick’s suggestion, but I was still having doubts about the tactics we should be using on the mountain. I wondered again whether someone else, even another strong climber, could con
tribute enough, knowing they would simply add weight with the extra food and gas. Our dreams drifted along, half-formed and uncertain.
Then a friend and fellow mountain guide called Ewen Todd said he wanted to come. Ewen is a great guy, a wild card indeed. He and his older brother Willie, who is also a guide, grew up in the village of Braemar, a place almost as remote as my home village of Dalwhinnie. Ewen had climbed the north face of Les Droites above Chamonix at the age of sixteen. At that time, a fair few years ago, the Droites’ north face was a testpiece and Ewen had climbed it with ease. Both of us work in the world of industrial rope access and I have known him for years. Even though we had never really climbed together, I just knew it would be great fun to be on the mountain with him.
Ewen’s wife Carrie invited me to their house in Aviemore, where their fantastically energetic children were climbing over the furniture. I took with me a large framed print of a photograph that had hung on my wall at home for a number of years. Taken by Doug Scott and gifted to me by my former wife, it showed the Mazeno Ridge in all its complex splendour. Drinking tea at Ewen’s house I explained the objective, tried my best to point out the main features and my simple plan for climbing it. I could see the immensity of the ridge quickly made an impression, and then the extra bit, the 8,000-metre summit at the end … Ewen already knew all about Nanga Parbat and its famous tales of death and destruction. We talked a great deal and I felt at home with them and left with a positive feeling. But a few days later Ewen called to say that he wouldn’t be joining us.
We weren’t having much luck, but, despite these setbacks, the idea of having a couple more strong climbers with us on the ridge had become a concrete plan. I thought of my good friend Lhakpa Rangdu, who I had met guiding in Nepal. I first hired Rangdu – and Zarok too – through my agent Chowang Sherpa who runs Arun Treks and Expedition in Kathmandu. He worked a lot for my old pal Mal Duff and it was through climbing with Mal that I began to get to know Chowang. When Mal died on Everest I decided to use Chowang’s company as my Nepali and Tibetan agent for my guiding company Team Ascent.