by Sandy Allan
We said our goodbyes, and hugged briefly. I think they were wondering about us, what the two of us were up to, staying where we were. I felt an extraordinary compassion and empathy as I leaned against a big boulder and watched them go, in two ropes of two, Cathy with Rangdu, behind Zarok and Nuru who were blasting a trail downhill. There was a light mist and the four figures became blurred and indistinct and then were gone.
We said nothing. Rick and I simply watched until our friends had disappeared into the grey mist. I felt very subdued but also calm. In my head I was humming Spirit of God, Unseen as the Wind, a traditional Scottish hymn set to the music of the Skye Boat Song. As a kid I had gone to church and to Sunday school. My mother was a Free Presbyterian and, with my twin brother Greg and sister Eunice, I had to endure Sundays indoors. Often we’d go to church more than once on the same Sunday. Despite the years of wild living, taking acid in the Alps and climbing with Mark Miller, the spiritual life never left me. Friends from the old days find it hard to understand that underneath it all I have a deep spiritual commitment, that I go to church, and say my prayers under my breath several times throughout the day.
I don’t know whether this is the result of a Calvinist upbringing or an outstandingly charmed life, but I have a strong sense of being guided and cared for. I remember working on a training course in Rio de Janeiro, assessing rope-access technicians. I was overworked and jetlagged, and decided to delay my flight in order to take a day to catch up. Early next morning I went to the training centre to catch up on paperwork before the next batch of technicians arrived. As I sat focused on the keyboard of my laptop, the secretary who had been organising everything for me came in and put her hand on my shoulder.
‘Hey, Sandy, you are luckiest man in the world.’ I looked up, surprised. ‘That Air France flight you were supposed to be on this morning went missing with no survivors.’
The hairs on my neck stood on end and my whole body shivered. My heart went out to all the people on that aircraft, their families, relatives and friends. Why was I being so well looked after? I have many good reasons for my strong Christian faith – even though the pomp, ceremony and especially the long-winded prayers in my own Church of Scotland drive me nuts. Rick, I should say, is much more religiously disciplined than I am. But right then, sitting on that rock and watching Cathy and the three Lhakpas heading off down the west shoulder of Nanga Parbat, I felt at peace.
There was a brilliant light within me and that light stays with me and I hope never to lose it. I was thinking of how these ace team players had abandoned all hope of the summit. Their ambition to climb the mountain had died. I understood that a different set of priorities prevailed. They wished to retreat, while Rick and I had other plans. I had no concern at all for myself and Rick. I just knew, most certainly, that whatever we did, as long as we maintained our self-discipline, continued to play by the rules and maintained good, sensible decision-making, we would be fine. I felt strong and full of a spiritual grace.
I could not work out why I had had such a great night’s sleep. Yes, I had been tired, but it was more than that. I felt reinvigorated psychologically. I just needed to have a day off and then I would make good decisions based on facts rather than emotion. I wondered if it was my decision or if I was being guided.
Yep, I thought, and wandered back to the tent. Rick put on some snow to melt and at that moment I realised my lighter was in Cathy’s pocket, heading away from us down the Schell route.
Rick and I only had one lighter between us.
– Chapter 7 –
Pushing On
Rick and I sorted out our tent and made some drinks; then we went through the food. There wasn’t much left but, as Doug Scott always said, ‘it’s better in than out, Sandy,’ so we decided we should simply eat it and get our bodies ready for the next phase of the climb. With the others gone, Rick and I were left with the princely riches of about half a packet of digestive biscuits, and some scraps of peanut butter and crackers. We decided to keep the digestives for our summit attempt and consumed every other remaining scrap. It was still very little, not even the equivalent of one small meal between the two of us. At least we still had three or four gas cylinders. We would not run out of water.
We talked about going for a walk but when we started out we felt listless, so wandered to the beginning of the steeper ground, only a few hundred metres or so from the bivouac site, and agreed that we didn’t need to bother. So we went back and sat around the tent, temporarily but contentedly directionless. At some point we got talking about what to do but I can’t really remember much of that discussion. We knew that we were going to have another go at the summit. We didn’t work this out, Rick and I just felt we could try again. It was twelve days since we’d left Base Camp. Morale had collapsed a little on the previous day, but now the negativity had lifted.
I was pleased to find that I’d got the amount of gas right during the planning stage. Running out of water isn’t an option, not for long anyway. As for the food, people at lectures often ask me why we didn’t carry more. The simple answer is that we carried as much as we could. There’s a limit to these things. Anything more than eight or ten days’ worth means you can’t lift your rucksack. Alpine-style is sometimes called lightweight style, but there’s nothing light about it. For those who are critical of the approach, I can only recommend they try mixed climbing at 7,000 metres on a knife-edge ridge. It’s hard enough to carry a sack with four or five days’ food. But twice that?
Perched in our high camp, I was still a bit shocked that Lhakpa Rangdu was gone. He’s among the strongest Sherpas I’ve ever met, and they’re an amazingly strong bunch at altitude. The fact that Rick and I were still here was not a total surprise, but I’d hoped Rangdu would be with us. It had certainly been part of my plan and his absence was disconcerting. He is so strong and wise at altitude. All the Sherpas had made an incredible contribution. We would never be on this springboard without their effort. Trail-breaking along the ridge had been desperate at times and their efforts had been immense. Their role had been the crucial ingredient in our success.
Rick and I discussed when to wake up; we both felt that we shouldn’t make a midnight start again. Climbing in the coldest and darkest hours is debilitating and we felt we needed to sleep and restore our bodies more. We also wanted daylight to help us surmount the steep rock section we had abseiled previously. It was obvious that we should not try the line I had insisted on for our first summit attempt. Considering our position, the lack of food and our general exhaustion, it would have been very audacious, not to say foolhardy. But traversing the Diamir flank seemed the easy option – too easy – even though it was the route Rick and Cathy had suggested from the outset. I still felt unhappy about it.
We decided that initially we would follow the line we had taken on our descent with Rangdu and Zarok the day before, and then see if we could traverse across to join the Kinshofer route. I could in my mind’s eye calculate the distance involved and picture the undulating snow surface – the way it reflected the light indicating deep unconsolidated snow. I was not concerned about navigation but my brain ached at the idea of breaking trail at high altitude in such deep snow.
It would be soul-crushing work. I wished we were taking a steeper route; I simply hate walking and would much prefer to climb. Once again, I wished Rangdu were still with us to help. I hoped the weather would stay reasonably good, so that our tracks would not get covered; any kind of wind would fill them with drifting snow. I wondered at the amount of time we’d been up here; it’s not something humans are made to do, live this long at altitude. We shouldn’t really be here. Would slogging up those tracks again wring us out? Would it take the last of our life energy? Were we setting ourselves up for failure?
Rick and I had a final brew lying in our sleeping bags, and then I tucked my head into my hood and tried to sleep. Despite the anticipation of the next day’s climb, the nerves and doubts,
I felt at peace. I felt a wave of optimism. I imagined walking through the pine trees in Rothiemurchus near my home in the Cairngorms, sun filtering through the branches. I felt a spiritual energy that lifted me. I prayed that Cathy, the Sherpas, and my daughters and brothers and sister back home were safe and well. I was looking forward to getting back into the wild. It’s where I feel at home. I was happy that with my pal Rick I was going to climb to the summit. Then, even though we’d be tired, we would drop down the Kinshofer route of the Diamir Face and join all the tourists climbing there. In no time at all we’d be at Base Camp.
Cocooned in my sleeping bag, I lay my head down to sleep. I felt secure; there was no point in worrying. We had stepped through a door into another world, one far beyond normality. Cathy may well think we are crazy old men, pushing too hard. But I knew it was where Rick and I expected to be at some point in our climbing lives. There had been other experiences, similar circumstances that had led us here. I had been in such places before.
I thought of Everest’s north-east ridge, so high and remote, of turning my back on Doug Scott and Rick just below the pinnacles. The wind tore at us, icy crystals as sharp as sand blasting our outer clothing, spindrift filling my hood. I waved them good wishes as I went, a feral, inner voice telling me to go to ground, to escape the storm. At that point I thought Doug and Rick, my best friends, were crazy to even dream about continuing in those conditions. These were the pinnacles of the unclimbed Everest ridge, where Pete and Joe lay entombed, frozen in space and time. But a day later they came down to Advance Base Camp, exhausted but safe.
Now I felt we were experienced enough to be up here. I was confident that we had earned those stripes of endurance and determination. We had suffered before, and that suffering had fostered perseverance and resilience, what some people call character. Perhaps we really were climbing beyond ourselves, yet I felt brimful of hope, suffused with a quiet dignity. Of course there was a chance that we could die. That exists on all our days. But I was prepared, ready to climb above and beyond myself.
I wondered where these feelings came from. Are hope and love so different? These treasures we cannot see, measure or touch, save or accumulate? Yet, inexplicably, hope had accumulated in me. With this thought, without a care in the world, wrapped in grace and love for my family, friends and the mountains, I drifted easily into sleep. Tomorrow would take care of itself. Rick and I were on a road to somewhere special. There was no need to set an alarm.
When I woke, the tent was lined with frost and we carefully began the morning ritual of melting snow for tea. It was 14 July, an important day in my imagination, and not just for the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789. On the exact same day Sir Alexander Mackenzie, born in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, finally reached the mouth of the Canadian river that spills out into the Arctic Ocean and now bears his name. He had hoped it would bring him to the Pacific, but his dream of a north-west passage was broken. Several years later he did get there, carrying canoes, food and other equipment, with portages along turbulent rivers.
Men like Mackenzie have always inspired me. As a child, my mother supervised bedtime reading, handing me stories of explorers and Hudson Bay trappers that inspired my imagination. White Fang and The Call of the Wild were my favourite tales growing up. Here I was, in my fifties, still living those dreams, shoving my sleeping bag into my rucksack inside a frosty tent. We packed the stove and a gas cylinder and the remains of our food supplies, essentially the half packet of digestives. I remember that we paused to study each other’s faces – checking our earlier decision not to take the bivouac tent and insulated sleeping mats. I would come to regret the absence of a mat.
Writing this now I don’t really understand why we thought it, but at the time it seemed obvious to us that we would need just one long day to reach the summit, after which we would find traces of other climbers and join their well-trodden path, whizzing down fixed ropes to Base Camp laughing our heads off. The first time we had reached the summit, in July 2009, the winds were terrifying and we were glad to make it back to our high camp. The following day we had woken early and made a hasty exit before others were stirring; I had managed to shoot all the way down to Base Camp in a single day. Even though that effort left me exhausted, the experience showed me that we could get down the mountain quickly. We must therefore have felt that overloading our rucksacks with heavy bivouac equipment was a luxury we could do without at this stage. We would have one bivouac and be back in Base Camp late in the evening of the 16 July.
Memory can sometimes prove a little fickle. In 2009 the route had indeed been fixed with ropes, but it was still quite serious. Serious enough, in fact, for Go Mi-Sun, a well-known Korean climber, to fall to her death and for another climber to be blown clean off the summit, never to be found. Our experience told us that we could get off Nanga Parbat in about a day and a half if the Diamir was fixed and the normal route well trodden by other climbers. Go Mi-Sun’s death was a shocking reminder that it does not matter how many 8,000-metre peaks one climbs, each step you take has to be done with care and attention.
I wondered briefly how the Lhakpas and Cathy were getting on with their descent down the Rupal flank. (It turned out they had a tough time. They got avalanched and Cathy lost the memory card from her camera with all her images. Rangdu suffered a sprained ankle that turned out to be broken when it was X-rayed back in Kathmandu. But they still managed to reach Latabo the day after they left us.) Then I shouldered my pack, feeling quite confident for Rick and myself. If we failed to reach the top, we could keep traversing and descend the Diamir Face by the Kinshofer route, which we knew, or return part way along the ridge and descend via the route Reinhold Messner soloed in 1978. I knew Luis Stitzinger and Josef Lunger had descended Messner’s route through the steep and jumbled séracs of the Diamir flank. It looked like suicide on first inspection, but if luck was on your side, you were moving fast and none of the séracs moved, it could be safe enough. Those three climbers had got down without incident so perhaps it was not such a game of Russian roulette as I initially suspected. It was at least another potential exit strategy. To be forced by circumstance to retreat back to this camp would have been difficult; the thought of following our own team’s descent line down the Schell route was not an option. We didn’t consider it. In fact, to be quite honest, descending to escape was not an option we considered seriously, although I only understood that in retrospect. Maybe us mountaineers do analyse all our options, if only subconsciously.
The critical thing was to get down as fast as we could. That’s pretty much obligatory for those reaching the summit of an 8,000-metre peak without oxygen. It’s nice to linger, to take some photos and absorb the intense fulfilment I usually feel. But at altitude, our bodies need just as much oxygen as normal, and at 8,000 metres the air pressure is a third of that at sea level. There’s less oxygen available and we are constantly gasping for breath, like patients in intensive care, fighting for life, our blood saturation at critical levels. Even with my high-altitude discipline of taking time to fully inhale and fill my lungs with the greatest volume of air possible, I can only just breathe enough to keep standing still. My blood was thickening as we gained altitude, risking stroke and heart attack. Above 8,000 metres, even if you have access to abundant fluids, the body is dying fast. You have a few days at most up there.
The lack of oxygen also has a detrimental effect on mental processes. Rick and I had been climbing at high altitudes for two weeks now; our food intake had been scanty and it was just a matter of time before our bodies simply refused to do more and we would become incapable of movement. We were running out of time.
Still, packing our sacks, we were very sure that if we had indeed been the ones chosen to stay at this camp, it was surely ordained that we must get to the summit. I felt strong and confident and had no doubts that what we were doing was still reasonable. Our patience was paying off and pushing the boundaries of endurance seemed very
possible.
It never occurred to us that once we reached the summit, finishing off our route, the descent would present anything more than the usual hurdles one can expect from a descent. We had not imagined we would have to struggle for our lives. I was just thinking positively. I even had the half-formed idea we could do an even bigger traverse and descend by Hermann Buhl’s 1953 route. It wasn’t remotely realistic with just half a packet of digestive biscuits, but I felt ebullient and full of confidence.
With a unity of purpose we zipped up the tent door and started our climb; it was around 8.30 a.m. Rick went first initially and we regularly swapped leads. The rope was properly adjusted with maybe twenty metres between us; the rest either wrapped around our shoulders in coils or packed away in the rucksack. The trail of our retreat from the first summit attempt had all but disappeared, covered by wind-blown snow. It was not going to be an easy traverse. We came to the old food cache Rick had rummaged through, and then we went on, ploughing up the deep snow. We tackled the rocky traverse that had so nearly led to disaster. It was technically much easier in ascent and the step where I fell and tore my down trousers seemed quite easy. I looked down at the sticking plasters holding my trousers together.
We now had to leave the familiar route and take a rising line to a blind summit where we hoped we would pass an apparently insurmountable rock wall. This is always the best part of a new climb – the anticipation of new ground. Discovering and climbing the unknown gave me an incentive to keep moving forward through the desperate struggle for breath. Fortunately, the line we took brought us neatly below the steep cliff and with relative ease we moved up a snow ramp. This led to a small rock rib, which was quite blank and free of cracks. With careful placement of crampon points I led out over to its crest and an arête from where I could belay Rick safely.