Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  I was at Camp 5 for a week. Nick, exhausted by his long stint in a support role, was finally forced to drop back down to Base. I had two lonely days by myself before Ian Clough came up to join me; exhausting carries in the teeth of the driving wind and swirling spindrift; moments of hope and elation, moments of utter despair. I still had dreams of reaching the summit, was warmed by Dougal’s invitation to join them after they had forced a way up a long snow gully that led to the top of the Rock Band. I even set out from Camp 5 with my personal gear plus the tent, rope, spare food and cine camera that we needed to make the summit push, and got only a few metres above the camp before realising that there was no way I could manage such a heavy load. In addition, I was using oxygen to reach them, while Don and Dougal were doing without. I could not possibly do it and so dropped back to the empty camp to dump my personal gear. In my despair I sat down and cried and then, ashamed at my weakness, shouted at the walls around me, ‘Get a grip on yourself, you bloody idiot,’ repacked the sack and set out once again.

  In a way, it was much easier for me to suppress my own personal ambition to reach the top; after all, having conceived the idea of the expedition, having co-ordinated it and, for most of the time, held it together it was possible to sublimate my own desires in the success of the team as a whole. This was very different for the other team members. Nick Estcourt summed it up when he got back to Base Camp, saying: ‘It’s all very well talking about the satisfaction of contributing to the success of the team, but it’s a hell of a sight better if you manage to kick the winning goal.’

  Don and Dougal stuck it out at Camp 6, surviving on the trickle of food and gear we were able to funnel up to them. The monsoon now seemed to be upon us – day after day of cloud and storm, of fierce winds and billowing spindrift. Don and Dougal had one abortive attempt at establishing Camp 7, but were unable to find anywhere to pitch a tent, very nearly failed to find the way back to the top of the fixed ropes and finally struggled down to Camp 6, where Ian Clough and I had moved up in support, hoping to have a go for the summit ourselves. The four of us spent a hideously uncomfortable night crammed into one small, two-man tent, pitched precariously on a tiny spur of snow. Next morning, there was no discussion about who should stay and who should go down – Don and Dougal were so much more fit than Ian and I. Tom Frost and Mick Burke were on their way back up, eager to have a go for the summit and prepared to support Don and Dougal up at the front, so Ian and I dropped back down to Camp 4. We knew that we had used up most of our reserves, but were determined to hang on until Don and Dougal had either made their bid for the summit, or had given up. Until that happened, somehow we all had to keep them supplied with just enough food to keep going.

  On 27 May we were stormbound at Camp 4, the snow hammering at the box tent throughout the day. That evening I called Camp 5 and asked Dougal if they had managed to get out at all.

  He replied: ‘Aye, we’ve just climbed Annapurna.’

  Don and Dougal had set out that morning, hoping to establish a top camp. Higher up on the mountain it wasn’t quite so bad as it was on the lower slopes. They made fast progress on the fixed ropes up the gully, reached the top of the Rock Band where they had left the tent but, with hardly a word between them, they set out up the crest of the long ridge leading up towards the summit. They had reached a level of communication over the weeks on the mountain that hardly needed words. They were going for the top, Don out in front breaking trail and picking the route, Dougal behind carrying the rope and cine camera. They were both going superbly well; Dougal wrote: ‘The wonderful thing was that there was no breathing trouble. I had imagined great lung-gasping efforts at 26,000 feet [7,925 metres], but I was moving with no more difficulty than I had experienced 4,000 feet lower down.’

  There was a steep wall of snow-plastered rock at the top but they climbed it unroped, and then Dougal filmed Don as he plodded those final metres to the summit of Annapurna, to stand where Herzog and Lachenal had been twenty years before. Their descent in a storm could easily have been more disastrous than that of their predecessors, but so superbly attuned were they to their environment that they picked their way back down the mountain, still unroped, through the gusting spindrift, down over icy steps and snow-plastered rocks to the haven of the top of the fixed ropes.

  There was a moment of sheer, unrestrained joy throughout the expedition; there was no more recrimination, no envy for their achievement; but for me the euphoria was very short-lived, for the expedition was not yet over. Tom and Mick, up at Camp 5, naturally wanted a go at the summit and, the following day, moved up to the top camp. I was filled with foreboding. The pair in front were very much on their own. If anything were to happen to them none of us had the strength to go back up the face to help them. I listened to the radio all day; at midday Mick Burke came on the air. His feet had lost all feeling and he had dropped back to the tent, but Tom was going on by himself for the summit. I was even more worried. Then, at last, the radio came to life again. Tom, also, had returned.

  Although sorry for their sakes that they had not made it to the top, I was even more relieved that they were down in one piece. I must confess here that the feeling was not entirely humanitarian. I was guilty of a feeling that I suspect is common to almost every leader of any enterprise – of wanting the expedition as a whole, as a projection of the leader’s ego, to be successful both in terms of achieving its objective and reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

  Next morning it was with a profound sense of relief that I raced down to Base Camp to start the heady job of writing the expedition reports and co-ordinating our return to civilisation. I was sitting inside the tent, typewriter on an upturned box, when I heard someone rush up to the tent calling, ‘Chris, Chris!’ The rest of what he said was incomprehensible. I ran out and found Mike Thompson sitting on the grass, head between knees, sucking in the air in great hacking gasps. He looked up, face contorted with shock, grief and exhaustion.

  ‘It’s Ian. He’s dead. Killed in an ice avalanche below Camp 2.’

  Everyone had run out of their tents on hearing Mike’s arrival; they just stood numbed in shocked, unbelieving silence as Mike gasped out his story.

  Mike, Ian and Dave Lambert had decided not to wait for Mick Burke and Tom Frost, who were on their way down from the top camp, but set out from Camp 3 early that morning, hauling down as much gear as they could manage. They passed Camp 2, and carried on down the side of the glacier, on to a narrow shelf below an ice wall. This was a spot that we had always realised was dangerous, but the most obvious threat, an overhanging ice cliff, had collapsed earlier on. There was still an element of risk from some ice towers further up the glacier, but their threat was not so obvious and it seemed unlikely that these would collapse in the space of the few minutes it took to cross the danger zone. Even so, we all tended to hurry across this part of the glacier.

  Ian was in front, Mike immediately behind. Dave Lambert was about five minutes behind them. There was practically no warning, just a thunderous roar and the impression of a huge, dark mass filling the sky above. Mike ducked back into the side of an ice wall, where a small trough was formed. He thought that Ian, slightly further out than he, had tried to run away from the avalanche, down the slope. But Ian hadn’t a hope and was engulfed by the fall.

  ‘It went completely dark,’ said Mike. ‘I thought I’d had it; just lay there and swore at the top of my voice. It seemed such a stupid way to die.’

  When the cloud of ice particles had settled and the last grating rumble had died away into the silence of the glacier, Mike picked himself up and, with some Sherpas who had been on their way up to meet them, started searching through the debris, finding Ian’s body part-buried by blocks of ice. They carried Ian down and we buried him just above our Base Camp, on a grassy slope looking across at the face on which we had striven all those weeks. Shortly after the climb, I wrote:

  ‘I can’t attempt to evaluate the worth of our ascent balanced against its cost in terms of t
he loss of a man’s life, of the time devoted to it or the money spent on it. Climbing and the risks involved are part of my life and, I think, of those of most of the team – it was certainly a very large part of Ian’s life. It is difficult to justify the risks once one is married with a family and I think most of us have stopped trying. We love climbing, have let a large part of our lives be dominated by this passion, and this eventually led us to Annapurna.’

  Although I had been climbing for nearly twenty years, Ian was the first close friend I had lost in the mountains, but the next ten years between 1970 and 1980 were to see a terrible toll. Mick Burke was killed on Everest in 1975 when he went for the summit on his own. Dougal Haston died in an avalanche near his home in Leysin, Switzerland, the day before I was due to meet him to go winter climbing. Nick Estcourt, the closest of all my friends, died on the West Ridge of K2, swept away by an avalanche, during our attempt on the mountain in 1978. Mike Thompson has compared the sadness of lost friends to being prematurely old; so many of one’s contemporaries have died that one knows the loneliness of an older generation. Of the eight lead climbers on the South Face of Annapurna, four have died in the mountains, a frightening statistic that is mirrored among almost any other group undertaking extreme climbing over a long period of time, particularly at high altitude.

  The mountaineer is exposed to some level of risk at almost all times he is on the mountain, but it is fairly rare for a good climber to be killed because the climb is too hard, or even when caught out by bad weather or some other kind of emergency. Then, his concentration is complete, with every nerve stretched towards survival. It is on easy ground that accidents occur; that momentary lack of concentration, a slip where there happens to be a long drop; a hidden crevasse and, most dangerous of all, the risk of avalanche.

  And yet we go on; it has certainly never occurred to me to give up climbing – I love it too much; the challenge and stimulus of playing a danger game, the beauty of the mountains in which there is so much peace alongside the lurking threat are all tied in with the gratification of ego, the enjoyment of success, of being good at something. I do worry about the responsibility I have to a family I love, but then the pull of the mountains is so great that perhaps selfishly, I could never give up climbing – I will always want to go back to the mountains.

  – Chapter 10 –

  Diamir: Messner on Nanga Parbat

  The first complete solo ascent of an 8,000-metre peak

  Only the gentle roar of the gas stove disturbed the silence. The tent, with its chill moss of hoar frost festooning the walls, was sepulchral in the dim, grey light of the dawn. Yet it had a reassuring, womb-like quality, for those thin walls protected him from the lonely immensity of the sky and mountains outside. And then another noise intruded; an insistent, rushing, hissing rumble that came from all around him. It sounded like a gigantic flood about to engulf his shelter. Panic stricken, he tore at the iced-up fastenings of the entrance to see what was happening. The whole mountain seemed to be on the move, torrents of ice pouring down on either side, while below him the entire slope, which he had climbed the previous day, had now broken away and was plunging in a great, tumbling, boiling wave to the glacier far below, reaching out and down towards the little camp at its foot where he had left his two companions.

  And then the sound died away. A cloud of snow particles, looking no more substantial than Huffy cumulus on a summer’s day, settled gently, and it was as if the avalanche had never happened, the icy debris merging into the existing snow and ice. Once again, the only sound was the purr of the gas stove. Somehow it emphasised his smallness, inconsequence, the ephemeral nature of his own existence.

  Reinhold Messner was at a height of around 6,400 metres on the Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat. Having set out the previous morning from a bivouac at the foot of the face, he was attempting the first solo ascent of a major Himalayan peak, all the way from its foot to the summit. It meant complete self-sufficiency, carrying all his food and equipment with him, facing the physical and mental stresses of high-altitude climbing on his own, also facing the risk of accident, of falling down a hidden crevasse, with no one to help him.

  Although he could see the site of his Base Camp, some 2,000 metres below and eight kilometres away, he was as much alone as a solitary sailor in the Southern Ocean or as isolated as an astronaut in orbit on the other side of the moon. That sense of isolation was now even more extreme; his line of descent having been swept away by the avalanche, he would have to find another way back down the mountain.

  Others had, of course, reached Himalayan summits on their own. Hermann Buhl had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in a solitary push – an incredible achievement, but he had been part of a large expedition which had worked together to reach the top camp. It was just the final, if most challenging, step that he had to make on his own – a very different concept from that of starting at the foot by oneself. Some had tried. In 1934 Maurice Wilson had slipped into Tibet and attempted to climb Everest from the north, leaving his porters behind at Camp 3. Comparatively inexperienced, he had wanted to climb the mountain for the mystic experience, but perished fairly low down. Earl Denman, a Canadian climber, got no further than the North Col before accepting the futility of his attempt in 1947, while four years later the Dane, Klaus Becker Larson, did not get as high. Both these climbers had employed Sherpas. Messner himself had attempted Nanga Parbat solo on two previous occasions, but on the first barely started the climb before the immensity of the challenge overcame him, and on the second did not even reach the foot of the mountain.

  But unlike Wilson, Denman and Larson, most of Messner’s life had been devoted to the mountains, to stretching himself to the extreme, forever striving to discover new ground, new experience. Attempting an 8,000-metre peak solo was a logical step in his own personal evolution.

  Born in 1944 in the village of Vilnoss, which nestles among the Dolomite peaks of South Tyrol, he was the second of eight children, seven boys and a girl. His father, the village schoolmaster, was from the same peasant stock as the children he taught. There was not much money, but it was a secure and happy, if disciplined, upbringing within the tight circle of his large family. Joseph Messner loved the mountains and each summer they moved up to a hut among the high pastures where they could wander and climb. Reinhold Messner was taken on his first climb, up Sass Rigais, the highest peak of the Geisler Alps, at the age of five.

  As he grew older he began climbing with his younger brother, Günther, exploring the Geisler peaks around his home and steadily expanding his own climbing ability. By the time he went to the University of Padua he was already an extremely capable and forceful climber and quickly developed his prowess, spurning the use of artificial aids, particularly the indiscriminate use of expansion bolts. He made a series of very fast ascents of the most difficult routes and also some outstanding solo ascents, among them the North Face of the Droites, long considered the most difficult mixed ice and rock route of the Western Alps, and the Philipp/Flamm route on the North Face of the Civetta, one of the hardest free rock routes in the Dolomites. By 1969 Messner was established as one of the boldest and most innovative climbers in Europe, with a stature very similar to that of Hermann Buhl in the early 1950s.

  It was Karl Herrligkoffer who was going to offer the opportunity of going to the Himalaya. This Munich doctor had an obsession with Nanga Parbat ever since his idolised half-brother Willy Merkl had died on the mountain during a disastrous 1934 expedition. Herrligkoffer was to organise and lead no less than eight expeditions to Nanga Parbat. In 1961 he attempted the mountain from the west, by its Diamir Face. This is the side from which Mummery, the British pioneer who was swept away in an avalanche, made the first attempt in 1895. Herrligkoffer failed in 1961 but returned the following year, when Toni Kinshofer, Siegi Löw and Anderl Mannhardt reached the top by a difficult route skirting round the huge ice cliffs in the centre of the face.

  Herrligkoffer turned next to the forbidding south aspect, th
e Rupal Face, at 4,500 metres one of the highest mountain walls in the world. He had made three attempts on this face between 1963 and 1968, each time getting a little higher. The year 1970, however, seemed destined to be the year of the big walls in the Himalaya. It was the year our British party climbed the South Face of Annapurna and the Japanese were attempting the South-West Face of Everest. Messner had reservations about joining a large expedition, very few of whose members he knew personally, but the opportunity was too good to miss.

  He approached the climb with characteristic seriousness, very different from the attitude of British climbers of this period. In Britain there was undoubtedly an ethic against formal training outside the process of climbing itself; it was a tradition of climbing by day and boozing in the pub at night. Messner, on the other hand, approached his climbing with the dedication of a competitive athlete. He trained on the walls of an old sawmill near his home, traversing along the wall, back and forth until his arms and fingers gave out. This is very similar to the climbing training undertaken by leading British rock climbers today, but in Britain this approach was only developed in the mid-1970s. Messner’s training went a lot further. It encompassed a regime of cold showers in the morning, a careful diet in which he ate only fruit for one day of the week to accustom his body to deprivation, and a routine of four hours’ distance running each day as well as exercises designed to build up his stamina.