The Everest Years

by Chris Bonington

  It was on the evening of 17 January, when we were drinking in Le Chamoniard, that Titi Tresamini, the proprietor, called me over. There was a phone call for me from England. Slightly apprehensive – could it be some kind of emergency at home? – I took the call. It was Wendy.

  ‘Have you heard about Dougal?’

  ‘No.’

  She was crying. ‘He’s dead. He was killed in an avalanche while skiing this afternoon.’

  When she heard the news that Dougal had been killed in an avalanche, she had assumed I was with him and inevitably feared that I might have been caught in it too and that my body had not yet been found. She had gone through hell all that day until at last she traced me to Titi’s chalet. She didn’t know any of the details but I told her that I’d get over to Leysin the next day. There was that mixture of shock and grief, all the more acute for being totally unexpected. Dougal, like all of us, had had plenty of near-misses, a fall on the Jorasses just one of them, but to die skiing a few minutes from his home. I went back and told the others; we drank through the night, talked about Dougal, becoming maudlin as one tends to in the aftermath of tragedy. Next morning I drove over to Leysin to learn what had happened and to try to help console the bereaved. He and his wife, Annie, had split up quite recently and Dougal was living with Ariane, a local girl who was also a very good skier. I found Annie with Dave, Dougal’s partner in the International School of Mountaineering, and learnt what had happened.

  Dougal had had his eye on a gully for some time. It needed plenty of snow in it to make it feasible. The heavy falls of the past few days were certainly sufficient. He had gone off that morning on his own, mentioning to Ariane that he might try to ski it if it was in condition. When he didn’t return she sounded the alarm and they went straight to the foot of the gully. There was fresh avalanche debris and only a metre or so under the snow they found Dougal’s body.

  And so died one of the most charismatic British climbers of the post-war era. I felt his loss acutely, both as a good friend and as a climbing partner. I don’t think I ever got really close to him. I’m not sure that anyone did. We didn’t talk much, either on a climb or back on the ground, and yet we had a very real understanding and a similar approach to climbing.

  Dougal had a first-class mind and was always a realist, be it about the immediate problem or the planning of an expedition as a whole. He had always given me his quiet support on the expeditions I had led and organised. In a way, he was getting it all on a plate, having little to do with the organisation and then, on the climb, fitting in with my plans, confident that I would use him as my trump card in making the final summit bid. At the same time he was accepted by his fellow team members, partly for his combination of drive and competence out in front, but also because of his personality and his capacity to avoid confrontation. At the end of the International Expedition in 1971 he was one of the few members of the team who had made no enemies. He had pursued the same policy as Don Whillans, had favoured concentration on the South-West Face and had stayed out in front throughout the expedition, as indeed he had done on the South Face of Annapurna, and yet he received none of the criticism that had been directed at Don who had done most of the talking.

  Quite apart from my sorrow, I had also lost my climbing partner for the Ogre. I had to find someone whom I was totally happy to climb with and who would fit into the expedition. I didn’t have to think hard, for Nick Estcourt was an obvious choice. Doug also was quick to utilise Nick’s organisational ability, handing him the job of getting together all our food. Tut Braithwaite, who had recently opened a climbing shop in Oldham, got together what gear we needed. He combined a forceful drive whilst actually climbing with an easy-going disposition and was adept at avoiding confrontation or argument.

  I had practically nothing to do, a delightful change from the expeditions of the last few years. It was just a question of getting together my personal gear before catching the sleeper down to London and meeting the others at Heathrow. Clive Rowland met us in Islamabad on 23 May, having driven most of our gear out overland in Mo’s Ford Transit.

  We were staying with Caroline Weaver, one of the secretaries from the British Embassy. Mo had made the contact the previous year on the Trango Tower expedition. They had been rescued from a hot, flea-ridden, and, of course, ‘dry’ guest house in Rawalpindi by a member of the British Embassy and had been brought over to this oasis of cleanliness, comfort, and air conditioning. This generous tradition of expedition hospitality by Embassy personnel has continued ever since.

  The next few days alternated between visits to the Ministry of Tourism, the hot dusty colourful bazaar in Rawalpindi to buy sacks of flour, rice and dahl to feed our porters, and the British Club, which had a swimming pool, badminton courts and a well-stocked bar. The Karakoram Highway, the road from Islamabad through to Gilgit and then into China, had not yet been completed and so the only way to Skardu was by plane. The flight was notorious for its unreliability. There were tales of people being stuck in Skardu for weeks at a time, fighting to board planes when they eventually arrived, but we were lucky and were only delayed for a day.

  The Fokker Friendship aircraft lifted over the foothills that crowd on to the wide plain of Islamabad and headed up the Indus valley. Distant snow peaks appeared through the cloud. Doug and I beat Tut to the windows and blazed away with our cameras, ignoring the hesitant remonstrances of Captain Aleem, our Liaison Officer. You are not allowed to take pictures from the air. We dodged through the clouds, banked down over a rocky ridge and dropped into the Skardu valley, a wide flat expanse of desert with the river Indus, as brown as the sands, winding through it. The airport was no more than a dirt strip and a shed. Nick and Clive had flown in a couple of days earlier but there was no sign of them, so we took a jeep for the drive down an incongruously broad and metalled dual carriageway into Skardu.

  For me, it was all a fresh experience. I had not been to Pakistan before. Mo had been there the two previous years and Doug had been up the Biafo Glacier with Clive to attempt some of the Ogre’s sister peaks in 1975, so they were making the decisions. Up to this moment I had enjoyed my non-role, just absorbing the sights and sounds around me. A rocky hill crowned with a ruined fortress dominated the town of Skardu. Jeeps and trucks, dressed with chrome and ornate paintwork, honked and spluttered up the wide street, flanked by the shops of the bazaar, open-ended boxes bright with bales of cloth, vegetables and dried chillies or high-piled billies and kitchen utensils. It felt good to be in this small mountain town away from the comfortable diplomatic suburbs of Islamabad.

  We stopped at the government rest house, a bungalow with a veranda and stark but clean rooms opening onto it. There was a note from Nick and Clive warning us that the road bridge was about to be closed for repairs and that they had seized the opportunity to cross with all our supplies, so that they could get them by jeep to the roadhead at Dasso, about forty miles up the valley. They had left us the job of selecting and bringing along the porters who would carry the loads to Base Camp.

  Doug and Mo were impatient to be off, discovered that there was a ferry over the Indus and wanted to catch it that same afternoon. This would mean leaving the selection of our porters to Captain Aleem who would have had to catch us up the following day. I couldn’t see the need for the hurry. Surely it would be better to ensure we had a really good team of porters and all stick together. But I didn’t push the point; I was the new boy this time, no longer the leader, and felt Doug and Mo particularly might resent anything that had looked like a takeover bid by me.

  So we packed our sacks, left the gear that would have to follow with the porters, and walked down to the banks of the Indus. The river is about a hundred metres wide at Skardu, an opaque soup of fast smooth-flowing, glacier dust-laden water. The ferry was beached on the other side, a lonely white blob on a desert sandbank, with no sign of boatman, habitation or any kind of life. We shouted and waved but to no avail. There was no choice, we would have to wait for the following
day. At least we could now choose our own porters and travel with all our baggage. I was secretly pleased, but was careful to hide my satisfaction.

  The Baltis had come in from the surrounding hill villages, some of them several days’ walk away. Physically they reflected the harsh mountain desert they came from with sun and wind-beaten faces, fierce hooked noses and deep-set eyes hidden by bushy brows. They are lean and stunted by toil and the harshness of their lives. This even seems reflected in the language, which is sharp, staccato and insistent. They are very different from the Nepali people who are so much quieter and gentler, who have a tranquillity which is mirrored in the carefully terraced green lines of their foothills.

  Half a dozen policemen, who towered over the porters wielding batons, pushed and shouted them into some kind of order. Mo, as the oldest hand, appointed himself the chief porter selector, walking down the straggling rows, picking ones that seemed strong and then asking through Aleem, which village they came from.

  ‘The ones from Kaphelu are by far the best,’ he told us.

  The lucky few would be paid the equivalent of five pounds a day for carrying a load of twenty kilos a distance little more than eight miles. This was very good pay by Pakistani standards, considerably better than a teacher or even a police inspector would receive. It was one of the few means by which villagers could earn cash since their farming was still at subsistence level. The Pakistan Government had introduced the pay scale and regulations in 1976, the year after they reopened the Karakoram to climbing. In 1975 it had been a question of free-market bargaining with a series of strikes and constant trouble between porters and expeditions. This had now settled down to a degree but, even so, there is an excitable volatile quality in the Balti and trouble can erupt at any time.

  We set out early the next morning. The boat was waiting for us and we piled in, loads and all, until the gunwales were almost level with the water. Our porters helped paddle the boat across and as they rowed they began to sing. It was curiously melodious, enhancing the sense of romantic adventure, the beauty of the water lit by the early morning sun and the arid grandeur of the desert valley through which lay the start of our journey.

  We walked through the day, each at his own pace, sometimes joining up to talk, or to climb the big mulberry trees to pick succulent little bunches of white berries. The occasional oasis of cultivated land, irrigated from the river, was like a brilliant emerald set in the drab brown of the desert. We rejoined the road at Shigar and assembled at the K2 Cafe, the only transport cafe in the entire valley. You could get cups of tea and chupatties but not much else. Nick and Clive had sent a jeep back from the road head at Dasso to pick us up and that evening the expedition was together once again.

  The porters straggled in the following morning, having walked all the way. Nick and Clive had brought in most of the gear by road so the next morning was spent allocating loads to porters. Mo once again emerged as the driving force. He has a practical dynamism and a quick wit that makes him a natural leader.

  This expedition couldn’t have been more different from Everest, just seven of us, including Aleem. We were doing our own cooking, but Doug didn’t believe in any kind of duty roster for the chores. The jobs just got done. Tut and Nick had cooked supper the previous evening and Doug made breakfast that morning. Loads were packed, allocated with a lot of shouting, and by midday we were ready to start walking up the valley.

  The route into the mountains follows the Braldu River, which drains some of the greatest glaciers of the Karakoram, along a tenuous footpath that takes a switchback ride over high rocky bluffs and clings to the very edge of the swirling brown waters. It is a landscape of reds, browns and greys, of crumbling sun-baked rocks in jagged towers and great scree slopes. Lizards skitter off the path and the occasional dog rose with its clusters of delicate pink flowers gives some relief to the harshness of this land. There are glimpses of brilliant cultivated green where the irrigation ditches from the glacier torrents form a necklace, strung across cliffs and steep scree slopes, to the shelf of flattish land nestling in a curve of the river valley or high on the sides of the gorge. Poplars with long fingers reach up to the sun while the apricot trees spread their boughs untidily in bushy clusters. The green is the more welcoming and intense for the aridness of the desert rock that dominates the landscape.

  Most improbable of all, deep in the gorge, close by the icy brown torrent of glacier waters, there was a pool of steaming water. The rock around the spring was encrusted with sulphurous yellow deposits and the algae streaming from the pool were a particularly brilliant green. It provided the most luxurious of hot tubs.

  It was three days’ walk to Askole, the last village in the valley, at an altitude of 3,048 metres. It is typical of all the Balti villages, a collection of flat-roofed, single-storeyed, windowless houses of stone rendered in mud. Entry is through a small wooden door, opening on to a tiny courtyard, from which open the storerooms, byres and living quarters. These are usually windowless, but lit by a big square gap in the ceiling which serves both as a flue and a stairwell to the roof. On the roof are piled stocks of firewood and often there is a small wooden penthouse in which to sleep during the summer. Chillies or apricots must be spread out on an old blanket to dry in the sun. The women don’t wear the bhurka, the shapeless garment that totally covers the women of the lowlands, but have an attractive decorated cap-like headdress over their plaited dark hair, which is often interwoven with beads and ribbon. You can see them working in the fields or sitting chatting outside their homes. They object to being photographed and who can blame them? There are no shops in the hill villages, none of the teashops that have sprung up throughout Nepal.

  Hadji Medi was the headman of Askole, a small plump man with shrewd eyes, in a homespun jacket and woollen cap. You could tell his status by looking at his hands, which were soft and clean, unused to any kind of manual work. He owned much of the land, had a surplus of flour and made money by selling it to expeditions at a handsome profit. We bought several loads from him, both to feed our porters now that we were going beyond the last village, and to supplement our own supplies at Base Camp.

  Next morning heavy clouds clung to the rocky flanks of the Braldu valley, concealing the snow peaks beyond and weeping with a thin cold rain that formed muddy puddles on the sandy path. We reached the snout of the Biafo Glacier after a couple of hours’ walk from Askole.

  Doug had already gone striding ahead into the glacier maze, but Mo suggested the rest of us wait for the porters to ensure that we all ended up at the same campsite that night. It was late afternoon before we started up the glacier, first stumbling over an assault course of crazily piled rocks, but then finding a motorway of smooth ice that stretched up into the distance. At last we had a feeling of being on the threshold of the real mountains, with snow peaks on either side and the hint of bigger mountains ahead. It gave a sense of boundless space, a sensation I had never had in the more crowded piled-up peaks of Nepal, where the glaciers tumble into deep forest-clad valleys.

  That night we camped in a grassy hollow sprinkled with delicate alpine flowers beneath the lateral moraine of the glacier. Doug roamed off to search for wild rhubarb, while Mo supervised the issue of rations to our porters. I looked for wood for our cooking fire and ended up sitting on a boulder high on the slope above the camp gazing over the great sweep of the glacier, its wrinkled surface accentuated by the evening shadows, content that I was amongst the mountains.

  The person I knew least, and with whom I had never really felt at ease, was Clive Rowland. An old friend of Doug’s, he had worked in a steel foundry before moving up to the Black Isle, north of Inverness, to make a living as a builder. A good rock-climber, he had been on several of Doug’s expeditions, including the trip up the Biafo Glacier in 1975. He has a sharp tongue and I had sensed an underlying resentment perhaps of my background and reputation as the big expedition organiser. The following day he, Aleem and I got too far ahead of the others, missed the camp-site and
shared an emergency bivvie huddled under a wet boulder. It was exactly the right sort of little misadventure to bring us closer together.

  The next morning we made our way back about three miles to where Clive thought he remembered camping the previous time in 1975. The others had indeed been there. The ashes of several cooking fires were still warm, but they had already left. Even though we had kept our eyes open we must have passed each other on the glacier. We only caught up again six hours later at the next stopping place at the foot of the Baintha Brakk Glacier, where we had a fairly caustic greeting from Mo.

  ‘Didn’t you see Doug?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re going to get an earful when he gets back. He’ll be really fed up. He and Nick have gone all the way back to Namla to try to find you.’

  ‘What the hell’s he fussing about for goodness’ sake? There are three of us. We couldn’t possibly have come to any harm, and even if someone had broken a leg, there would have been one of us to stay with whoever was injured and the other could have come here.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, but he was still dead worried about you.’

  Nick and Doug got back a couple of hours later, just as it was getting dark. They were very annoyed.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you get back to our campsite really early? We only left it at about nine. Surely you realised we’d be worried?’

  We were defensive in our reply, because we realised that we were in the wrong. But I was touched by Doug’s concern, his essential warmth of character masked by sharp words.

  I was happy that night as I settled down under the stars, using my new Gore-Tex sleeping-bag cover for the first time. This was the material that had just come out and was to help revolutionise lightweight climbing in the Himalaya. It is a porous membrane, laminated between protective fabrics, that allows the water molecules from condensation to escape, while keeping out external drops of water from rain or wet snow. I had bought some of the material in Colorado and had had it made up into a windproof suit and sleeping bag cover. That night was hardly a test but at least I confirmed that it allowed condensation to escape. My sleeping bag and the inside of the Gore-Tex cover were bone dry.