Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  She was now very tired, realised that she had used up almost all her energy, but was determined to have just one more try, summoning what reserves she had, this time pushing beyond her previous high point, reaching for the very last hold, when her foot slid off what was no more than a smear. Miraculously, her head touched the roof just at the right moment to enable her to maintain equilibrium and she propelled herself on. She extended her arm as far as she could and reached her fingers into a small undercling lock. A few relatively straightforward moves and she was on the ledge to join some Croatian climbers who were tackling the route by conventional means.

  Next morning she and Simon shared their last morsels of food, half an energy bar and a date each, and then set out on their fourth day with some hard climbing ahead. Simon led the notorious pitch round the Glowering Spot, so named by Warren Harding because he had broken his hammer therein a particularly awkward bit of aid climbing and there is a lump of rock that looks like a grumpy face.

  Lynn was hoping to conserve her diminishing stock of energy for the final extreme section just above Camp 6 where others had tried and failed. It was reputed to be very blank, needing a long reach, something that Lynn most certainly did not have. A brief investigation was enough to show there were no intermediate holds. The way Harding had originally gone was up a sheer groove to the right with a hairline crack in its back. Just getting into it was desperate. At least, at its base was a pocket where she might have got a finger lock, but it was filled by the stub of an old broken-off piton. She tried everything, trying to brace herself in the smooth flared holdless corner, but she could make no upward progress and eventually admitted defeat, using aid to complete the climb and reach the top.

  But she could not let it go and constantly thought of ways and means of solving this seemingly impossible problem. Sponsorship crept into the equation, but in an indirect kind of way. One of her sponsors was so impressed by her free ascent of the Great Roof, a major achievement in its own right, they wanted her to repeat it in front of a professional photographer in order to get some really good advertising shots. She could do this and try to complete the section that had defeated her as well.

  She invited Brooke Sandahl, who had been exploring free climbing possibilities on the upper part of the Nose the previous year, to join her. They started by abseiling in from the top to investigate and, to a degree, prepare the critical pitch above Camp 6. Lynn removed the broken-off piton, to free up a hold to start with and then spent three days trying out various permutations of moves to climb the pitch. ‘As I became engrossed in exploring unusual techniques and body positions on this pitch, I was increasingly appreciative of its extraordinary nature. Climbing it free would involve an ingenuity and technical finesse that I rarely, if ever, encountered on any other route.’ She eventually managed to complete the pitch with only one fall, but felt that to claim the entire climb as a free ascent, she had to start at the bottom and go all the way to the top. This time they had more food, slipped into a better rhythm, enabling Lynn to lead the Great Roof in a single push. They pressed on past Camp 5, up the pitch round the Glowering Spot, which this tune she led to reach Camp 6 and get a good night’s sleep before the final challenge. She dreamt of the moves that night and the following morning it all came together as if in the dream. The final pitch casting to left and right for tenuous holds to either side of Harding’s bolt ladder, led them to the top and the completion of a climb that established Lynn Hill’s position as one of the most extraordinary rock climbers of all time.

  But it still wasn’t quite enough for her. Could she complete the climb in a day? It wasn’t so much to make a speed record as to climb it in as elegant a way as possible, to travel light without the need of hauling food and water. ‘It not only represented a kind of marathon linkage of this monumental route but provided a new focus and evolution in my life.’

  Her climbing partner was to be Steve Sutton, who was happy to take on the role of belayer, jumaring all the way up the route. His role was similar to that of a caddy to a top professional golfer. He was even being paid. Lynn welcomed the encouragement he gave her. On her first attempt she made the mistake of co-producing a documentary film of her ascent and, not surprisingly, found she was losing that very focus she sought. By the time she reached the Great Roof after twenty-two pitches of climbing, she had run out of chalk, nearly run out of water, was tired and flustered, and after five attempts and five and half hours’ struggle, they completed the climb using aid.

  She was back again a fortnight later, this time without filming commitments and fully focused on the climb ahead. They started at 10 p.m. climbing in the ethereal light of a full moon and were at the Great Roof by 8.30 in the morning. She took a rest, dozed for what seemed no time at all but suddenly realised that the sun was creeping round the corner. It was vital to climb the Great Roof while it was still cool. This time she made the daunting pitch in a single push, laybacking the open corner to the roof with an easy rhythmic movement, placing the occasional nut and clipping into in-situ pitons. Then as she came to the overhang with its tiny undercut holds, she had a moment of self-doubt. To save on energy, she hadn’t bothered to clip a piton just below, suddenly realised that if she did fall, she’d swing hard into the corner. She thrust away the moment of doubt, focused on the rock in front of her, taking each move steadily, to pull out on to the ledge at 10.25.

  It was getting ever hotter. Pitch followed pitch. The next major challenge was the Glowering Spot, which she reached at midday. She was beginning to tire and her hands were sweaty. She’d reached the hard moves, placed a Stopper (small metal wedge) in the crack, but before she had time to seat it, it slipped out. She didn’t have another of the right size. Had she fallen she would have hit the ledge some thirty feet below. She kept cool, found another placement for one of her two remaining pieces of gear, and pulled up and over the crux to easier ground.

  It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when she reached Camp 6 but the hardest pitch of all was ahead. The holds in the open groove were so tenuous she needed the rock to be as cool as possible for better friction for her climbing shoes and the complex pressure holds she would be using. She tried to doze through the afternoon, waiting for the groove to go into the shade. She waited four and a half hours but, impatient to get going, started before the rock had had time to cool and, as a result, had her first fall. The moves were so complex, convoluted, and tenuous, requiring precise body balance and muscular pressure. She got it wrong and once again went hurtling down. She rested on the belay, refocusing and trying to keep the doubt from sliding into her mind, but she was getting tired. This third attempt could be her last chance. She started up the complex opening moves again but had not even got as high as on her previous attempt before her foot slipped and she was off once more. It wasn’t life threatening; she could afford to fall, but she had put in so much effort.

  She went into the fourth attempt. She concentrated everything she had on those next moves. This was the concentration of the Olympic athlete going for gold but there was no audience, just the huge void below and a smooth sheer rounded arête in front which she was pinching with her fingers as she frictioned her feet precariously up its edge. This time she made it, reached a positive hold and pulled up to the belay ledge.

  She still had four pitches to climb. The last two were difficult and strenuous, although nothing like as hard as the one she had just completed. The top pitch, the section on which Harding had hammered a bolt ladder, gave a last challenge with the final overhang. She knew her reserves of strength were very nearly finished. She made one last dynamic irreversible lunge for the final hold on the final roof, caught it, heaved and swung up on to the easy slabs that led to the top of the Nose. She had achieved her objective, thirty-three rope-lengths, more than 3,000 feet of supremely hard climbing in just twenty-three hours.

  There have been similar free ascents on other routes on El Capitan. The Wyoming climbers Paul Piana and Todd Skinner climbed the Salathé Wall fre
e in 1988. It was repeated by the Huber brothers from Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, who then went on in 1997 to make a remarkable new route completely free up the line of the North America Wall to the right of the Nose. This was repeated some days later by two young British climbers, Leo Houlding and Patrick Hammond on their first visit to Yosemite and their first big wall. But no one has repeated Lynn Hill’s achievement. The closest has been a local climber, Scott Burke who in 261 days of actual climbing over a three-year period , managed to lead all but the Great Overhang, which he top-roped.¹

  Lynn Hill’s free ascent was nearly thirty-six years after that of Warren Harding’s first ascent. Both were extraordinary achievements in their different ways from such very different people. Warren, an anarchic individualist and free-wheeling maverick, not remotely bothered by the Puritan mores of his peers, defied ethical stances and yet was very much the climbers’ climber, the stuff of legends. Perhaps it needed all of that to get the seemingly impossible climbed in the first place. In contrast, Lynn Hill, with her finely tuned self-discipline perfected the climb, in effect making a new and fresh route, arguably the longest and most difficult free rock climb in the world.

  1 Editor’s note: the Nose was free-climbed in full by Beth Rodden and Tommy Caldwell in 2005, and later the same year by Caldwell in a day. [Back]

  – Chapter 12 –

  Changabang

  Triumph and tragedy on Changabang’s North Face

  Although all the 8,000-metre peaks and most 7,000-metre peaks have long since been climbed, and mountains like Everest or K2 now have as many different routes up them as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, there are still literally hundreds of faces and ridges in the greater ranges that remain unexplored. It is a tiny group of mountaineers from around the world that are attracted to these technically challenging lines on unclimbed routes. By and large, their achievements are ignored by the media who are still obsessed with Everest and the 8,000-metre peaks, even though most ascents on these mountains are by what have now become trade routes.

  Today the world is more accessible than ever before with roads penetrating ever deeper into wild regions and travel by helicopter available to many places. Mountains remain one of the areas where the individual can truly explore and where helicopters cannot reach (their ceiling is around 6,000 metres). The story of the first ascent of the North Face of Changabang is an outstanding example of this style of climbing. The history of the mountain reflects the way climbing has evolved on the smaller peaks of the Himalaya. It also features some of the leading British climbers of the last sixty years. The first attempt to climb it was by a joint Indian-British expedition which I co-led in 1974.

  Changabang forms part of the northern ramparts of the legendary Sanctuary of Nanda Devi, which, at 7,816 metres, is the highest peak entirely within India and the highest to be climbed before the Second World War – by Bill Tilman and Noel Odell. Just finding a way to the foot of Nanda Devi proved a major challenge, and Eric Shipton, that great exploratory mountaineer who found the way into the sanctuary with Bill Tilman in 1934, described how he sat for an hour fascinated by the gigantic white cliffs of Changabang. He also was the first person to set foot on the mountain when he climbed a gully out of the sanctuary leading on to the col to the immediate south of Changabang, only to find there was a precipitous drop down to the Rhamani Glacier on the other side.

  The following year Frank Smythe, who made the first ascent of Kamet, gazed up at Changabang from the Dunagiri Col and wondered at, ‘The terrible precipices of Changabang, a peak that falls from crest to glacier in a wall that might have been sliced in a single cut of a knife.’

  W.H. Murray, leader of the Scottish Himalayan Expedition of 1950 which made an impressive series of first ascents in the Garhwal and Kumoan ranges, was the most lyrical of all:

  ‘By day like a vast eye-tooth fang, both in shape and colour – for its rock was a milk-white granite – Changabang in the moonlight shone tenderly as though veiled in bridal lace; at ten miles distant seemingly as fragile as an icicle; – a product of earth and sky rare and fantastic, and of liveliness unparalleled so that unaware one’s pulse leapt and the heart gave thanks – that this mountain should be as it is.’

  It was these descriptions that inspired me to apply for permission to attempt the mountain in 1974. There were ten of us, five from Britain and five from India.

  Reaching our mountain proved almost as much of a challenge as the area had been for Shipton and Tilman, as we turned off up the Rhamani Glacier to approach Changabang from the west, its steepest and most spectacular side. It proved a trifle too spectacular for a team that had a wide range of experience and ability. We therefore decided to find an easier way to the top by crossing Shipton’s Col from the opposite side to Shipton, and then climbing the huge, but comparatively easy snow face and glacier of Kalanka to reach the col between it and the South-East Ridge of Changabang. It was a long and committing route but one with little technical difficulty that six of us, Martin Boysen, Dougal Haston, Balwant Sandhu, Doug Scott, Tachei and I completed successfully.

  The following year a remarkable expedition took place, comprising two young British climbers, Joe Tasker and Dick Renshaw, who had an impressive alpine record that included a winter ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger. They decided to go to the Himalaya, bought a second-hand clapped-out Ford van, packed their expedition gear into it and set out for Dunagiri, a 7,066-metre peak to the immediate west of Changabang. Their liaison officer, unused to such small and frugal expeditions, turned back before they even reached Base Camp. They treated the mountain as they would have done an Alpine climb, set out up its long unclimbed South-East Ridge with six days’ food, took seven days to reach the top and a further four, very hungry and thirsty days, to get down.

  They had plenty of opportunity to examine the massive West Face of Changabang, and Renshaw, on their precarious descent, to Tasker’s horror, even suggested they had a go at it after they had had a short rest. But there was no question of that. Tasker was exhausted and Renshaw had frostbitten fingers and a sprained ankle. On returning to Britain, however, Joe could not stop thinking of that huge West Face. Dick could not join him the following year since he was still having treatment for his fingers. Joe therefore invited Peter Boardman, who had just got back from my own expedition to the South-West Face of Everest. At twenty-three he was the youngest member of the group but proved to be a very strong, focused climber and reached the summit with our team’s sirdar, Sherpa Pertemba, on the second ascent. After that huge expedition, the thought of a two-man trip against such an obstacle was irresistible and he accepted Tasker’s invitation.

  Their trip was only a little less frugal than the previous year’s. They set out in mid-August to climb in the post-monsoon period, took more climbing gear and food and had a slightly more comfortable Base Camp, although their liaison officer once again decided to stay in the valley. There were just the two of them confronting what was arguably the most formidable rock wall ever to be attempted at that altitude. It soars from the col at the head of the Rhamani Glacier for nearly 1,500 metres of pale grey granite, broken only by scanty ice smears up steep grooves and gangways. They started to fix-rope the route, encountering ferociously hard climbing on rock and ice, returning each night to a camp on the col, but the higher they got, the longer and more laborious became the chore of reaching the high point. Temperatures were bitterly cold, –25 °C at night and the wind rarely ceased blowing.

  They tried to break loose from the fixed ropes but, after three extremely uncomfortable bivouacs in hammocks, they were forced to retreat to Base Camp with only half the face climbed. Time was running out. Many would have been tempted at this stage to give up, but they reassessed their plans, even climbed to Shipton’s Col to salvage some of the rope we had left in place two years earlier, and returned to the fray, establishing a second camp at around 6,100 metres. They pulled most of the fixed rope up behind them and, from this marginally more secure base, fixed some further rope
and made their push for the summit, reaching it on 15 October 1976.

  The South Face, a sweep of rock with ice slicks soaring up into a steep head wall, was climbed in 1978 by a powerful Polish-British team comprising Voytek Kurtyka, Krzysztof Zurek, Alex MacIntyre and John Porter. Technically the climb was as hard, if not harder, than the West Face but it had the great benefit of being in the sun. They climbed it in elegant, if painful, Alpine-style in a single push from bottom to top over eight days, running out of food on the fifth. Alex MacIntyre went on to make a very impressive Alpine-style new route on the East Face of Dhaulagiri, this time with Kurtyka, Ludwick Wilczyczynski and René Ghilini from France. In the spring of 1982 he made yet another bold first ascent with Doug Scott and Roger Baxter-Jones on the South-West Face of Shisha Pangma, and then tragically was killed by a single falling stone near the foot of the South Face of Annapurna that same autumn.

  Changabang still held challenges. The North Face is the biggest and possibly the most formidable of all its facets but until very recently it was unattainable, being too close to the Chinese frontier and within the Inner Line and therefore forbidden to foreigners.

  It took the political skills of Roger Payne to get permission for 1996. He has that quality, rare among talented climbers, of not only being a first-class administrator but actually enjoying the process. His love of climbing led him to train as a mountain guide but he then changed course to become National Officer of the British Mountaineering Council, a role that both Peter Boardman and Alex MacIntyre had held before him. He was so good at his job that he became General Secretary – senior civil servant of British Mountaineering.