by Sandy Allan
Money was tight but we had a great time. Magic mushrooms, readily acquired in the Peak District if you knew where to look, were part of our staple diet, with pasta and tomato sauce and sometimes an onion. I remember being in Hathersage one sunny spring day, being so affected by whatever concoction of drugs Mark had given me that I could actually see the veins in the leaves of a sycamore pulsating with the liquids they sucked up from the earth. That night we dossed out in the hills above Sheffield and awoke to a vision of golden pools floating over the city’s industrial landscape. We stood there, in a trance, shouting: ‘Pools of gold, pools of gold!’ We realised later it must have been the rising sun reflecting off the conical roofs of some big gas storage tanks near the motorway. That’s about as romantic as Sheffield got.
Mark would get his girlfriend to paint his eyes and we would climb in whatever clothes we woke up next to in the morning. Black tights and tank-top T-shirts, often tie-dyed, was a favourite combination. God knows how we must have appeared and fortunately there are no pictures. Geoff Birtles was the editor at High magazine and seemed convinced Mark, myself and perhaps some of the others who dossed in St Ronan’s Road were gay. We have no idea why he started such a rumour, but we just laughed about it. Such tight climbing attire was actually very practical, being warm but light, and became the fashion at that time. Still, it makes me cringe a little, thinking of us wearing old woolly jumpers from charity shops and thick, girls’ tights.
Living in Sheffield, I came across some of the big stars of British alpinism at the time. Alan Rouse, who died in 1986 on K2 after making the first British ascent, was an influence on our lives. Al, Roger Baxter-Jones and Rab Carrington had done an impressive new route on Jannu in the Himalaya which massively impressed us. I had known Roger for many years through a mutual friend; he would stay at my rented house – in reality two big caravans welded together at Aultcharn in a remote glen by Grantown-on-Spey. Roger was doing his British Mountain Guides winter test and we did some routes on the Shelter Stone as practice.
At first, I wasn’t sure about Al; I thought him a bit of an ego-head. But without the cash to drink in pubs, we’d often end up at Al’s house smoking dope through a World War Two gas mask and having a wild time. Rab, a Scotsman who had the misfortune of being born in England, was also really helpful to me. He and his wife Sue, one of the kindest women I ever met, were often in The Moon Inn in Stoney Middleton and were working hard at a new small business making down sleeping bags. Paul Nunn, a central figure in British mountaineering at that time, also became a mentor, perhaps because I’d climbed with his old mate Richard McHardy and by that time a little with Doug Scott.
Sooner or later the wild times had to end. I had to call a stop to it all. The drugs thing was too much for me. Having had a strict upbringing, I had such a guilt-trip about it all and didn’t like the flashbacks that were becoming more common. Things came to a head on a particularly bad trip: it was grey and wet and we couldn’t climb, even on the gritstone walls around the city. I must have been in a really bad way as Mark and the others decided the best thing for my own safety was to lock me in a room with just a bed in it at the top of the house.
I woke up in the small hours with no idea where I was. I had just one thought: I have to end this and get away from here. So I tied my climbing rope, my most prized possession, to the bed post and abseiled out of the window, leaving it behind. Then I hitched north and caught a train to the village of Kiltarlity where I had a room at my parents’ house. I arrived in the wee small hours after my parents had locked the doors. Dad found me in my sleeping bag by the doorstep with the milk bottles when he came out in the morning.
Mark and I stayed close but we didn’t climb together much after that. Although the colours in my brain were wonderful, my body knew I had to leave that stuff behind. These days my sensible and wonderful daughters Hannah and Cara look at me in dismay when I tell them about those few months in my past life. I was lucky to get out of it without any lasting consequences. Mark went on to fall in love with a wonderful woman and set up an adventure climbing company called OTT with one of our friends, Andy Broom. Flying to Kathmandu in 1992 to lead one of their adventures, Mark’s Pakistan International Airlines flight smashed into a mountain on final approach. There were no survivors. Several other good British climbers were on the aircraft, including instructors and guides from Plas y Brenin, the national mountaineering centre in Snowdonia. There is a memorial plaque to them there and I think of these guys often. But there is no mention on the plaque of my closest ever friend Mark Miller, who could have become one of Britain’s most amazing alpinists.
After abseiling out of Mark’s window I didn’t go back to Sheffield until I had to get my rock climbing standard up when I started training for my guide’s exam. In my early youth I seemed to have trouble with places like Plas y Brenin and its Scottish equivalent, Glenmore Lodge. I have no idea why, but I suspect it was down to being young and not liking any notion of boundaries or rules or institutions. All the people I met at such places were always incredibly kind to me and I know full well that their work is invaluable. Still as Groucho Marx said, marriage is an institution and who wants to live in an institution?
Fred Harper was the principal at Glenmore Lodge and was not only a competent mountaineer and guide but a true gentleman. Over the years he became a good friend who supported me as I qualified as a guide and when I was going through my divorce. I made some good friends at Glenmore Lodge, well-known climbers like Allen Fyffe, Bob Barton and Martin Burrows-Smith. I also got to know some great guys at Plas y Brenin, especially Rob Collister, Dave Walsh and Nigel Shepherd, but I never felt comfortable there, as though I was being judged for living on my wits. I know that assumption was wrong and I have a great regard for these institutions nowadays. Climbing would be a lot more dangerous without them.
As I grow older I realise how precious the world is and how wonderfully fortunate we are to still be alive. Mal Duff and Mark Miller are both gone, so are Al Rouse, Roger Baxter-Jones, Alex MacIntyre, Rob Milne and Paul Nunn. Apart from Mark, they all died in the mountains. I often reflect on how much Mark has missed in life. I think of him most days. I have no idea what our lives would be like if Mark was here now. I guess it would be like the TV programme Last of the Summer Wine, except on a crag, with all those ageing faces that still remain. I am no longer strong or daft enough to think I am invincible but I still get a huge feeling of self-confidence when I strap on my crampons and have good ice tools in my hands.
When I set off on a huge adventure like Nanga Parbat, all those climbers who helped me along the way come with me.
– Chapter 3 –
The Road to Nanga Parbat
The drive along the Karakoram Highway is an astonishing journey through one of the most inspiring and wild regions of the world. Its construction transformed access to Pakistan’s mountains. When Mummery and his friends travelled to Nanga Parbat in 1895, they were two weeks at sea to Bombay on the P&O steamship Caledonia and then spent two days travelling by train to Rawalpindi, the largest military cantonment in what was then British India and a hub of colonial rule in the north-western sub-continent.
From Rawalpindi they travelled first to Murree, where Henry Whymper, brother of the Matterhorn climber Edward Whymper, established a brewery in the 1860s. But then, instead of heading north as we did, they turned east into the Vale of Kashmir. The Ghurka officer Charles Granville Bruce, who later led the first Everest expeditions, also travelled east from his posting in Abbottabad to meet Mummery at Baramulla, north of Srinagar, and help him organise ponies and porters to carry their equipment. From Baramulla they travelled by punt up the Jhelum river to Wular Lake, thick with water lilies, marvelling at the beauty of Kashmir, before reaching Bandipur and the road to the mountains. They approached Nanga Parbat over the Kamri Pass, from where they got their first sight of the mountain, still forty miles away. It rose, Collie wrote, ‘in dazzling whiteness far above a
ll the intervening range. There is nothing in the Alps that can at all compare with it in grandeur, and although often one is unable to tell whether a mountain is really big, or only appears so, this was not the case with Nanga Parbat as seen from the Kamri. It was huge, immense; and instinctively we took off our hats in order to show that we approached in a proper spirit.’
The road ahead proved hard for Mummery and his team; at one stage they had to build a bridge to get their mules across a river. But finally they reached Tarshing, a prosperous trading village under Nanga Parbat’s immense Rupal Face on the south side of the mountain. We were also headed for Tarshing, but by a different route.
The Karakoram Highway, the ‘KKH’, begun in 1959 and still under construction in the 1970s, starts in Abbottabad and meets the Indus at Thakot seventy miles to the north. The road’s construction from here to the Chinese border was mythically difficult. The death toll among workers has been estimated on the Pakistani side at around eight hundred – one person for every kilometre of road between Abbottabad and the Khunjerab Pass into China. Two hundred Chinese died on the other side of the border as the highway continued to Kashgar, on the ancient Silk Road.
Three of the world’s greatest mountain ranges, the Karakoram, the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush, meet at Gilgit, a major staging-post on the drive north, so it’s hardly surprising that this area sees frequent earthquakes. In 2005, an earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter Scale struck north-western Kashmir near the city of Muzaffarabad. Official estimates suggest 75,000 Pakistanis died, although international aid agencies put the death toll at more than 100,000. Thousands more were forced to abandon destroyed farms and villages and take shelter in refugee camps, having lost everything.
From Thakot, we followed the churning brown waters of the Indus, reaching Komila after forty miles, joined to the village of Dasu on the far bank by the KKH bridge. Here the road plunged into the Indus gorge proper for the eighty-mile drive to Chilas. The landscape was desolate, barren, rocky wastes punctuated by occasional terraces of green where irrigation had brought the mountains to life. The highway wound through a tangle of side ravines, often spanned by improbable bridges and threatened by huge piles of rubble; it seemed you would need only to touch them to send millions of tons of rock into the river.
Further north at Shishkat, much closer to the Chinese border, the KKH had been flooded by a lake that formed in January 2010 when a massive landslide blocked the valley. Goods and people were being ferried by boat to get past the blockage. When the dam created by the landslide gave way in June 2010, a wall of water up to sixteen metres high hurtled down the valley, destroying villages and killing thousands. Hundreds of Sikh soldiers at Attock were swept away as the flood caused damage hundreds of kilometres downstream. This sort of event is not new in the area – Collie described how he walked through the Indus gorge north of Nanga Parbat where an earthquake had blocked the river in 1841, creating a lake in six months that covered thirty-five square miles.
Every year the monsoon brings flooding and rockfalls and the KKH is under constant repair. The husks of crashed buses and trucks were a constant reminder of the road’s formidable reputation for danger. Luckily for us, we were going only as far as Chilas, where there was an important police post. I’d travelled this way several times before, but on this journey we had a police escort all the way to Chilas. The security situation in Pakistan is often tense, but Pakistani Army operations against the Taliban in the nearby Swat valley were rumoured to have pushed Taliban fighters out of their bases to seek refuge beyond Swat’s borders. Further north in Hunza, Western tourists could be sure of a warm welcome, but the situation in Chilas, with its more Wahhabi-influenced brand of Islam, was edgier.
A year after our expedition, ten foreign climbers and a local expedition worker were murdered at Nanga Parbat’s Diamir Face Base Camp. Among the dead was Sona Sherpa, a good friend of Doug Scott’s, who had worked on Doug’s fundraising treks in Nepal. He left behind a young family. A few weeks after the massacre, militants killed three members of the army and police team who were investigating the crime. The Taliban claimed responsibility, but the reasons for the attack – and the identities of the perpetrators – are still a matter of controversy. The murder not long before of Shia bus passengers in the Nanga Parbat region suggests sectarianism is rife in the district. Tourism has since suffered very badly, with local operators losing business. The road sign at Juglot featuring Nanga Parbat, the ‘killer mountain’, was covered up. The connotations were no longer worth people’s attention.
The wild country around Nanga Parbat has always had a reputation for wild behaviour. The war correspondent Edward Knight came this way just before Mummery, researching his book Where Three Empires Meet. The heights of Nanga Parbat were, for Knight, a warning: ‘That white horizon so near me was the limit of the British Empire, the slopes beyond descending into the unexplored valleys of the Indus where dwell the Shinaka tribesmen. Had I crossed the ridge with my followers, the first human beings we met would in all probability have cut our heads off.’
How the people keep smiling is hard to understand, but they do, like poor folks everywhere I suppose, making the best of what they have even though it is incredibly little. Wealthy people like us drive by in big four-wheel-drives and the poor people who watch still smile and joke around. Beyond the headlines, there are millions of friendly people in Pakistan. Edward Knight might have feared instant decapitation, but Norman Collie was more open-minded. The people of Chilas might have appeared, ‘wild and unkempt, but throughout our expedition we found them to be friendly enough, and never experienced any difficulty with them.’ He even admired their mountaineering skill.
Our bus driver drove and drove with only the briefest of stops at roadside restaurants. The boys serving smiled as they dished up rice, lentils and freshly baked paratha, but the toilets were filthy and so we balanced our hunger with the fear that we might get sick before the climb. The parathas were irresistibly tasty but with each bite I wondered if this was the mouthful that would leave me running for the loo for a day, three days or even a month and send me home before the expedition had even begun. Illness at this stage of an expedition is common and can play havoc with the best-laid plans. I’ve known some climbers take antibiotics prophylactically in anticipation of getting ill, but our group didn’t entertain the idea. We knew any drugs could affect our performance. Our bodies would soon be at altitude and from long experience we knew that while acclimatising naturally may not be the fastest way to adapt, it is usually the best. If we took strong drugs now what would work when we got something we couldn’t shake off?
Twelve hours after leaving Islamabad, at around 10 p.m., we spilled out of the bus in Chilas, a district town to the north of Nanga Parbat. Our trekking clothes, fresh on that morning, now stuck to our dusty bodies. The Shangrila Midway House Hotel was a home from home for Rick and me, having stayed there on previous expeditions, and our host greeted us warmly. The Sherpas were fascinated by the hotel’s immaculately carved fretwork, both similar and different to the sort of carving so commonly seen in Nepal. Delighted to be off the bus, we made a vague plan for the morning before shouldering our rucksacks and drifting up to our rooms. Our main cargo was left strapped to the roof of the bus. I stood under the shower in our room, watching rivulets of water wash the dust from my body before climbing into bed.
As I lay in bed waiting for sleep I thought about how easy our journey had been along the KKH. The road still featured big potholes and tight bends, but had improved dramatically over the years. There were now trees and shrubs colonising the thin dirt at the side of the road, stabilising slopes that had been blasted apart during construction. Landslides on this stretch had once been common, but not now. I thought of the plaque I spotted by the side of the road that said: ‘Some time in the future when others will ply the KKH, little will they realise the amount of sweat, courage, dedication, endurance and human sacrifice that has gone int
o making this road, but as you drive along, tarry a while to say a short prayer for the silent brave men of the Pakistan army who gave their lives to realise a dream now known as the Karakoram Highway.’
In 2012 we travelled comfortably in an air-conditioned bus, but I recalled my first journey along this road almost thirty years before, aboard an old converted truck with clunky suspension and clouds of diesel smoke. With wearying regularity we’d come across landslides where bulldozers and gangs of men with shovels were working to clear rubble. It used to be a continuous twenty-hour journey to Chilas, with the real fear of meeting robbers through the hours of darkness. Now it takes about ten to twelve hours to the North-West Frontier, gateway to our mountain and a relatively easy drive.
On that first trip, in 1984, I’d been on my way to Muztagh Tower. With my pals Jon Tinker, Tony Brindle and Mal Duff, who had gone from being elusive unqualified mountain guide to firm friend, we made the third ascent of the mountain and the second ascent of the north-west ridge. That was almost thirty years ago now – a lifetime of climbing.[1] When we came home from Nanga Parbat in 2012, people often remarked on our ages, as though what we were doing was somehow more remarkable because we were past fifty. I didn’t really understand it then, and I still don’t. In my head I still feel as enthusiastic and excited as ever, and while I’m not as strong as I used to be in my twenties and thirties, I’ve gained in other ways and don’t see any reason to stop climbing until my body says ‘enough’. I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Steve Swenson, who reached the Mazeno Gap with Doug Chabot in 2004, was in his late forties when he did it, and is still climbing hard in the Karakoram. The Spanish climber Carlos Soria Fontán didn’t do his first eight-thousander until he was in his fifties, and is still going strong in his mid-seventies, climbing Kangchenjunga aged seventy-five. Climbing is part of who I am. I still love doing it, so why should I quit?