by Sandy Allan
Cathy told me that she and Nuru had got back to camp around 9 a.m. and had been brewing all day. She told me they were all going down. I had very little to eat – there was little food left now, just drinks. Changing into my dry socks, I snuggled into my sleeping bag and wished Cathy good night. I said the Lord’s Prayer in my mind and thought of Hannah and Cara back home. The expedition is over, I thought to myself. They are all for descending the Schell route tomorrow. I wondered if they realised how dangerous it was. I didn’t know what I would do, but I felt our summit attempt had burned us up. Sleep came easily.
I woke next morning feeling refreshed. It was 13 July and it felt like we’d been on this mountain forever. After such a hard day yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to feel so good. Cathy was rustling around in her sleeping bag beside me and the stove was on and melting snow in the little pot. Rangdu’s voice interrupted my thoughts and our tent got a rattling as he shook the overnight build-up of frost. I sensed that he was really making sure we were both awake.
‘Sandy, it’s time to go down. We are leaving soon!’
Sitting up in bed, I felt surprisingly buoyant and relaxed, even positive – the kind of positivity I often wake up with back home in my comfortable bed at sea level. It’s the kind of wide-awake alertness that can be incredibly annoying to others who take longer to come around in the morning.
Was it too late? The others were obviously still resolute in their decision to go down and the Sherpas were keen to make a start as soon as possible. The cumulative effect of so much time at altitude had made them assume that since we hadn’t reached the summit yesterday we should now abandon our climb. There had been a dramatic shift of balance. The team seemed to be unravelling, unable to consider other alternatives. Their need to rush disturbed my calm mood; why couldn’t they just be at peace?
Yesterday’s summit bid had been arduous and the Sherpas’ fall dramatic. It’s normal to be exhausted after a summit bid on an 8,000-metre peak and a natural instinct to get swept up in the idea that you have to descend. The fact that I was feeling so good was exceptional and caught me off guard. I wanted to take the time to chat, to shoot the breeze and drink tea, to reflect on where we were. I did not want to get up or rush around. I did not want them heading down just because of one failed attempt.
The Lhakpas were already busy striking tents, packing their equipment ready to descend to the safety of Latabo Camp and then on to Tarshing and a lift to the Shangrila in Chilas. I supposed they had in their minds the oasis of a big hotel room with warm showers, wide beds and well-prepared meals. Me, I was not thinking in these terms at all. I was in no hurry to go anywhere. I knew the summit was there for the taking and I felt I had the energy to try again. In my youth I had soloed some quite big winter climbs in the Alps but I didn’t wish do to the same on this incredible summit. Still, it was worth considering. At the very least, I wanted to have the time to consider my options. I needed to think about this.
I wondered if the others realised they were pressurising themselves – as well as me – with all their rushing around. I understood they were exhausted. I thought perhaps that after spending all these days traversing the ridge and sleeping so high, they would be superbly acclimatised. Could they not see that if they could get past this state of mind and relax and rehydrate they might feel differently? I felt certain we could make some sort of recovery even at this altitude – but we had to take a rest day and let that happen. I hoped that time might help them adjust to the disappointment of our abortive summit attempt.
I wondered why I had a different set of priorities inside my head. I saw no real hurry to rush a decision. The descent had been there for years; it wasn’t going anywhere. And it was far from an easy option. I understood it might be safer to descend the big snow slopes before the sun reached its zenith. But the snow was unconsolidated anyway. To me it seemed too emotional, this rush to strike the tents and pack up. I hoped to encourage the others to slow down, like holding my crying daughters when they got themselves worked up, holding them in my arms against my chest, breathing deep, hoping that my peace and the security of being held against their father’s body would calm them.
Again, I heard Rangdu’s voice: ‘Come on Sandy, we have to go soon.’ I’m not sure what really happened next. I do remember calling out: ‘Hey Rick, do you want to come over here and discuss our options.’ He called back to me that he would and soon appeared at the tent dressed and ready to chat. He looked serious but relaxed, a little tired perhaps but then I suppose we all were. When I saw him, I wondered if my own thoughts were realistic or whether I was being influenced by the desire to summit at all costs. Was my ego just trying to hang on to an eighteen-year-old ambition to complete this unclimbed ridge? Maybe I was the one with the deranged thoughts.
Rick was himself: skinny and a bit grey, my reliable buddy, especially at extreme altitude. I told him I didn’t want to rush, that I would like to take my time and stay for a while, and that I had no idea what I planned to do, but that I saw no need to rush down. ‘Let’s simply take the day off and rest up.’ I suggested. He agreed, with the briefest of camouflaged smiles. He knows me so well, I thought, and I felt reassured that I was being sensible, that I was not trying to achieve an impossible dream.
Cathy got up out of her sleeping bag and packed up her gear. She seemed to share the Sherpas’ sense of urgency, wanting to keep moving and start down. I suggested we stayed, but none of them liked that idea at all. Cathy finished packing; Nuru and Zarok had their tent down and rolled up and were starting to pull the pegs and boulders from our tent. I asked them to slow it down. They were adamant that they were going to go down. I sat at the unzipped door of my tent and said: ‘Hey Rangdu, come here for a chat.’
He came closer, seemingly exhausted, his face swollen with altitude. He seemed worse than Rick looked and I felt. The Sherpas had worked harder than any of us. I could see that their fall yesterday had scared them and Rangdu showed the emotion of that today. He is a tough man, I thought. Rangdu was no high-altitude virgin. I explained that while I knew we had suggested yesterday that we should go down, now I felt strong after a good night’s sleep. I thought they should not rush and we could maybe do a bit more.
He told me he had made up his mind. We should all go down. I was in the doorway of my tent, sitting on my sleeping bag. My bare feet stuck out of the door while I pulled on my socks. I said again that I would really like it if he would consider staying up here with Rick and me. ‘I know Cathy, Nuru and Zarok definitely want to go down. Are you willing to stay?’
He looked at me. ‘No.’ He said it nicely but he meant it. He turned to Nuru and Zarok, spoke long sentences in Sherpa, some of which I semi-understood. I assumed he wished to make it really clear to the other Sherpas what I was saying, but the three men were all in agreement. They would go down. I said I was sorry. He said in his broken English: ‘I am very tired. Very hard yesterday. There is no food left. We will die if we stay here. Too much danger.’ He was adamant that we should all descend together.
All mountain guides are used to clients saying that they want to turn back. With experience you understand when it’s appropriate to encourage them to go on and when it’s obvious that they’ve had enough. It’s a really fine judgment but over the years I think I’ve become reasonably good at making it. So often, when I’ve persuaded someone to keep going, they’ve reached the summit and been gloriously happy. Back in the valley they’ve thanked me for pushing them. They say things like: ‘There was no way I thought I could do that!’ It’s a truly rewarding feeling to see people achieve things beyond their imagination. Humans can far exceed their own expectations most of the time. The situation here, at 7,160 metres on Nanga Parbat, was not the place to encourage people to keep going. These four wonderful climbing partners had truly had enough. They knew they were sailing in dangerous waters and that they must escape soon. The summit was no longer an option.
Cathy wro
te afterwards in her blog that she thought Rick and I were crazy with summit fever. (I did ask her to help write this account but she declined: ‘The only time I agreed to write a book with someone else I had to do all the work, so no thanks.’) She thought at the time that Rick and I were stepping across the line from acceptable risk to something altogether more dangerous. At that point, I don’t think either Rick or I had a plan. We just wanted to rest, hang out for the day and then make the decision.
The conversation had been matter-of-fact but not hostile. There was no resentment. But for me, sadly, the utopia of our collective solidarity was over. The team was splitting. Cathy, Rangdu, Zarok and Nuru would leave as soon as they were ready.
We did not allocate things; to all intents and purposes all our food had been eaten anyway. The others helped themselves to what they thought they needed and what was reasonable to take, but there were only left-overs. Rick and I would keep one tent, a rope and a stove so that we could be our independent selves. We had both been here before. A couple of days without food were acceptable so there was no point in discussing it; it was pointless burning mental energy on something we couldn’t change. There were lots of gas cylinders left so there was no need to think too carefully – our most fundamental requirement, to stay hydrated, could be met.
By now we were all dressed and had our boots on. Rick seemed tired but pleased we did not have to rush down. We both helped organise things. Cathy took her gear out of our tent and Rick moved in. Soon all was tidy. I took the phone from Cathy and she explained how it worked. She had been using it to receive weather forecasts and update our social media. Occasionally we’d had a message back; it was great for us all to know our families and friends back home were getting good news about us. About three-quarters of the battery power remained and we felt confident that was enough. There was a second satellite phone with Samandar at Base Camp. It was likely he would have struck our base camp at the foot of the Mazeno and moved everything down to Latabo, the herder’s camp at the foot of the Schell route by now.
Although we hadn’t discussed the plan in fine detail, I had every confidence in Samandar and his team. The broad outlines of the expedition had been sorted out long before we arrived in Pakistan. They knew what to do and there was no need at this stage for me to get tangled up in arrangements in the valley. My dad taught me years ago that it was pointless to buy a guard dog and then start barking yourself. Rick, Cathy and I debated whether we even needed the phone. I really don’t like carrying phones or radios. When I was younger we had no such communication devices and life was simple and grand and we got by well enough. While I see and do appreciate the many advantages of phones and radios, they are reliant on battery power and these batteries can be incredibly unreliable in the intense cold of high altitude. And the heavy apparatus and the battery itself weigh almost the same whether they are empty or full. When one has to carry everything on one’s back, devices with flat batteries are useless items that you can’t eat.
Communications can also bring news that can really affect the spirit of a team. I remember feeling robbed when I guided Everest for the first time after I came down from the summit with my client and went to phone my mother. It was a delight to hear her voice on the phone and I said I was calling to say hello and tell her that we had made it to the top and were safely back at camp. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I heard that several days ago. It’s all over the internet.’ How could other people steal my life from me like that? Of course, none of this has stopped me having the latest iPhone.
There seemed to be three reasons we might want to make a call. First, to let the others know our general plan, whether we were descending or not. Second, we might want to let them know we’d reached the summit and, third, tell them our descent route so they could send lighter shoes and clothing and a jeep to the roadhead. Three-quarters of a battery should be sufficient for that as long as we kept the calls short and treated the batteries with respect by keeping the phone as warm as possible.
Cathy also gave me a ‘spot meter’, essentially a personal locator device. Through my work with the Scottish Avalanche Information Service back at home I had already gained some experience of something similar. She said it would transmit the user’s coordinates and their progress could then be tracked on a computer. I could not really imagine why I should carry it and why I would want to go home and spend even more of my time on a computer to see where I knew I had already been. Again I thought I would have preferred to carry the equivalent weight in chocolate or scones, jam and cream. But she was quite insistent. I suppose it would tell people where our dead bodies were located. She also reassured me I needn’t touch it at all: it was all set up to continue doing its thing. I tossed it into my sack and totally forgot about it.
It wasn’t long before our descent team were packed up and ready to go. I tried to explain to the Sherpas where the Schell route went and remind them of what I’d pointed out when we camped at Latabo. I was worried for them. The Mazeno Ridge is quite inescapable, so the Schell route is the first easier-angled topographical feature available from the Mazeno Gap and that was the only reason it was chosen. It was far from safe and straightforward. Most people who had tried the Schell since its first ascent in 1976 had suffered accidents on it. We had first-hand knowledge of this from Doug Scott. In 1992, during one of his attempts on the Mazeno, his team had suffered some horrendous rockfall and Valeri Pershin had been badly hurt. Doug told me that most people would have gone home to hospital after such a bad accident, but the Russian just stayed at Base Camp and waited for his injuries to heal. On top of that, no one had tried to climb it for years, so there would be no tracks, old fixed ropes or man-made landmarks to follow.
So although we had always thought of the Schell as one of our planned descent routes, we all knew it was a very serious climb and that to descend it in these snow conditions was very committing. I warned Rangdu that they had to be incredibly careful of the snow. As expedition leader I was letting two-thirds of our team descend without their leader; as a mountain guide I felt incredibly responsible for them. This wasn’t a professional situation and I was not legally burdened with the responsibilities associated with working with clients as a mountain guide, but I was worried. Would we ever see them again? What if they got avalanched, or experienced rockfall? Would they find the way? If they went missing, what would the climbing world think of me as a leader? How would I live the rest of my life? How might such guilt mentally affect me?
The world had been quick to judge Reinhold Messner after he lost his brother Günther when descending from the first ascent of the Rupal Face. It seemed that we had been following almost in their footsteps, pushing a hard route on Nanga Parbat. Would I face the same criticism as Reinhold? I would hate to be in Reinhold’s shoes, to have people continually wondering what really had happened up there.
It’s hard for climbers to understand what happens on a large and complex expedition on such a big peak, let alone the general public or a court of law. And the 1970 expedition did end up in court, with Reinhold and the expedition’s leader Herrligkoffer suing and counter-suing each other over a number of years. Conditions are wild on 8,000-metre peaks. Climbing them without oxygen and surviving unplanned bivouacs takes its toll. Hypoxia and exhaustion mess with your mind – with your decision-making as well as your memory of those decisions. People who have not climbed in such conditions and experienced what it is truly like to be pushing the limits of what is humanly possible can’t fully understand.
Those writing books about other people’s efforts sometimes over-analyse or criticise a climber’s choices in extreme circumstances. I sometimes wonder how writers even begin to understand what it is like. I have spent enjoyable periods of time with mountaineering historians and they are always kind and seem very nice. I remember being in a supermarket with one very nice fellow as he tried to choose a bottle of wine. It took him ages. Making decisions in retrospect in the comfort of one’s own study
is an easier proposition than the decision an exhausted high-altitude climber has to make spontaneously, high on a mountain.
Imagine for a moment how dreadful it must have been for Reinhold Messner to experience his sibling falling to his death? As an older brother it must have been desperate. They had just made the first ascent of what is considered to be the highest vertical drop in the world. Making fine moral distinctions when your brain is failing isn’t easy.
Still, German, Austrian and Tyrolean climbers spent years pursuing each other through the courts after Hermann Buhl’s amazing first ascent and after Messner’s ascent of the Rupal. The arguments were bitter and personal. It’s sometimes said that each member of a team goes on their own expedition which is distinct from that of their teammates. Rick, Cathy, the three Lhakpas and I had no official contract among us, about climbing or writing, or the use of each other’s photographs. We simply went climbing and trusted each other to be respectful, honest and kind.
There were no complaints when the team split, and no criticism when Rick and I decided to stay. I was reassured by the respect I had for the skill and experience of Cathy and the three Lhakpas; they were all experienced mountaineers and had made their own choices. We had been together on this mountain for a long time and had endured eleven nights at altitude. In the last few days we’d been reduced to the barest rations and, in this wilting state, their desire to descend was urgent. They must have felt within themselves that they were almost out of energy and had to go before it was all gone.
I was semi-confident they would do the right thing, and I hoped they had the energy and self-discipline to hold it together and make sensible decisions. I was also well aware that once they had committed to the descent, even if they ran into the most horrible and dangerous snow conditions, they would be hard pressed to find the energy to come back up. Anyway, there would have been little point in climbing back up to the Mazeno Gap to descend the Diamir Face. That would have been an even riskier proposition. Their options were few; we had got ourselves into that position and, having abandoned their summit hopes, their choice was simple. They had to go down. None of this was unforeseen, but now it was happening, it felt momentous.