He found a job as a neuropsychologist at the Sacred Heart. Scott Earl Bently, a former patient who had suffered a severe head injury and paralysis in a car accident, was in awe of him: ‘Don was the catalyst that moved my life away from institutionalised health care to a life of happiness and freedom by integrating me back into society and by remaining my friend, talking with me about hiking, camping, climbing, and other things we were both interested in. I’ll never forget him for that, and I thought then he would remain my friend for my entire life’. Such was Don’s enthusiasm for this esoteric field that the hospital was persuaded to open a dedicated head injuries unit, the first in the region. Soon other local hospitals did the same, bringing Don on board as an advisor.
But the mountains remained his passion. After returning from Pennsylvania he had joined the Spokane Mountaineers, finding a release at high altitude. Soon he was signing up to ice-climbing seminars, instructors’ workshops and winter-camping seminars, and learning Telemark skiing. At five feet eight he had been too short to fulfil his dream of becoming a professional basketball player or footballer, but here was something he could do. Within a few months he was elected to the club’s climbing committee, soon becoming its chairman. One climbing friend described his ‘unbeatable combination of moral fibre that is absolute high-carbon steel’.
Don had not been looking for romance, but through the club he met Jane Schelly. Born and brought up in Orefield, a small town in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Jane had left the flat landscape of the east as soon as she got out of college in 1976, and headed for the wilderness of the Pacific north-west. She had earned a reputation for fearlessness, and could outpace many of the men in the club. Luck ran in her favour too, said climbing friends: ‘Jane is the type who always lands on her feet.’ She and Don had their first tête-à-tête waist-deep in the Jerry Johnson Hot Springs near Lolo Pass, during a club trip to Idaho in October 1984. ‘Don and I sat in the hot pool and chitchatted,’ Jane remembered. ‘He didn’t tell me for many years that he thought, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”’ Afterwards, Don signed up to a country ski class Jane was running out of Spokane Falls Community College. They dated ‘a bit’, but Don was wary of messing things up again, and they did not come together until the following October. ‘We took the same hot springs trip, and clicked,’ says Jane.
Behind Don’s practical façade Jane discovered a romantic, who took her away from school on Friday nights: bed and breakfast on the bay at San Francisco; Point No Point on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula; an inn in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River. ‘I just couldn’t imagine finding someone as good as Don,’ says Jane. ‘He was a very gentle and sensitive person.’
Don soon became a leader, arranging ‘crazy weekends’, pitching himself and other club members into ‘endurance stunts’, like the time he bivouacked up the East Ridge of Wyoming’s 13,775-foot Grand Teton to watch the Northern Lights. ‘Don got me so fired up about ice climbing,’ recalled Bill Erler, a close friend. ‘We’d just motor up stuff.’ He also gained a reputation as a man who could operate under extreme pressure. Don ‘always tried to do more than his share’, and was ‘a talented and stable force’, according to club member and friend George Neal. Inevitably there were knocks and scrapes, like the winter’s day at Montana’s Rainbow Falls when Don fell and sprained his ankle. Telling the rest of his group to go on without him, he had dragged himself down across a rockslide and to his car, risking permanent injury.
Jane bided her time, waiting for the right moment to widen their horizons. It came in 1988, when they spent four weeks trekking on the arduous Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, in the shadow of Mount Everest. It was Don’s first big foreign trip, and only the second time he had left the US. He could not get enough of the Himalayas, which sparked a fascination in him with all things Asian. Soon his upstairs office in Northwood was crammed with books about climbing in the subcontinent, Tibetan Buddhism and Indian philosophy, yoga and meditation. Most evenings he could be found sprawled across the living-room floor, surrounded by books and maps, Indian music tinkling out of the speakers, plotting the next foray to the East.
The only problem was synchronising their lives. While Jane had the long summer school holidays, Don could never take more than two weeks off. For a while they turned this into part of the adventure, Jane going on ahead and rendezvousing with Don at some distant destination, like the time she toured alone around Thailand and India, having arranged to meet him outside a post office in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. When Don quit his job at the Sacred Heart to set up Spokane’s first independent neuropsychology practice, he did it mainly so he and Jane could spend more time travelling together.
They got round to marrying in 1991, a home-made affair in their back garden, literally tying themselves together with climbing ropes looped into a double fisherman’s knot. It could have been corny, but that was Don and Jane, bound to each other by the things they loved. The act, for Jane, ‘symbolised the dependence of each of us upon the other’. Afterwards, Don gave a set of Tibetan bells to the chaplain in thanks. For their honeymoon they returned to the Himalayas, this time visiting Ladakh, a solemn, arid mountain landscape dotted with prayer flags and Buddhist monasteries in India’s far northern Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state. Don came home mesmerised by what they had seen, and also by what they had heard of another nearby destination, the Kashmir Valley, that lay three hundred miles to the west, a place of ancient gods with a landscape shaped by hunters and poets.
Four summers later, Jane was packing for the Kashmir Valley. This trip would be a culmination of many things: ten years of climbing, ten years being together, almost a decade of foreign exploration. They had decided there was no better location in which to celebrate.
The journey was well within their physical capabilities. Jane had worked it out. The twelve-day trek would, they hoped, fill their heads and hearts. If the maps were accurate – Don had struggled to find anything half decent – they hoped to cover over a hundred miles, which seemed about right for the kind of weather and the severity of the inclines they expected to encounter.
Don read how the wilderness of glacial chutes and iridescent mountain lakes had a way of punishing trekkers, while serving as home to hard-pressed nomadic gujjars, dards and bakarwals, the native herders, hunters and cowboys who wore kohl round their eyes to ward off evil spirits, their children bound to the backs of their ponies with rope. Through a silent landscape they moved in slender single-file convoys to summer pastures of lush, flower-filled valleys and on to the high Himalayas, a medieval caravan of maroon robes and scarves. Up high, the temperatures careened from the seriously sub-zero to the high forties. There was a dry heat that cracked skin, and a wet cold that blistered everything. Sometimes the wind dropped, only to slam into you like a pantechnicon.
But then, many times before Don and Jane had started off from somewhere beneath a cobalt sky, only to end up in a white-out. Jane had read that it was not exceptional for the highest passes in Kashmir to become blocked by snow even in summer. At times they might need to double back. She knew that, warming and cooling, dehydrating and freezing, the mountains would be punishing, but their years of experience should get them through the worst of it. In Kashmir, where the rich pastureland typically remained frost-free from May to September, they would probably walk for ten hours a day. In the upper reaches, where they would have to negotiate fields of scree that would punish their ankles and knees, they might go down to eight hours. But they had time.
Their destination was a high-altitude ice cave called Amarnath that was dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and transformation. A giant, gaping hole, it looked as if a meteorite had slammed into the side of a mountain. While Amarnath was virtually unknown in the West, it was revered across India as an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site, to which hundreds of thousands of devotees flocked annually. Some came by foot, others by pony, a few on their hands and knees, the least able piggybacking on local guides, everyone scrabbling to scale the mountains so as to demonstrate the depth of their faith.
Don was drawn by the collective act of devotion, and loved the idea of going on Shiva’s trail, but he and Jane intended to arrive at the end of June, before the main pilgrimage season began the following month. That way they would have the route to